There was nothing Estelle or I could do for Reuben Fuentes at Posadas General Hospital. Dr. Francis Guzman settled into an endless round of conferences with the medical staff. What there was to talk about, I didn’t know. Reuben’s condition seemed simple enough to me.
The old man was comatose, drifting up to consciousness only fleetingly and never lucid. I was no medical expert, but I could see that he was simply worn out.
We had been at the hospital for an hour when Francis walked back into Reuben’s room. He touched Estelle on the elbow and she stepped away from the bed. I was sitting in one of those extraordinarily uncomfortable vinyl lounge chairs in the corner, reading the “Humor in Uniform” section from a three month old
Reader’s Digest
. I held the magazine in my right hand while cradling the little bundle that was a snoozing Francis Carlos with my left. I didn’t get up.
“Why don’t you two go get some dinner,” he said.
“Us three, you mean,” I said and laid the magazine down. The infant stirred, yawned, and wrinkled his nose and eyebrows…an expression I’d seen a hundred times on his mother’s face. He fixed huge, luminous brown eyes on my old, wrinkled mug.
Francis thrust his hands in his trouser pockets in that characteristic gesture he used when he knew he had to be patient with other people perhaps not as efficient as himself.
Estelle raised an eyebrow and Francis continued, “I’ve arranged a meeting with Dr. Perrone and Fred Tierney for about five-thirty…it’s the only time I could get the two of them together. I’ll join you as soon as I can.” Fred Tierney was the hospital administrator. It was easy to imagine that he was a little nervous about having the law hanging out in his facility.
“Is there anything we can do?” Estelle asked.
Francis shook his head. “Go eat.” Estelle smiled at her husband and kissed him lightly on the cheek as she stepped past him.
“I thought maybe they’d make you wait,” she said. He shrugged and shook his head. I didn’t know what she was talking about and didn’t pry. Estelle reached for her son and I gave him up so I could struggle out of the low chair. We left the hospital, planning to return after dinner.
We ate at the Juan de Oñate Cantina on 12th Street, one of Estelle’s favorite haunts in Posadas. The place was dark and ornate, a miniature version of what someone thought a palace in Mexico City might have looked like in 1600. Little Francis Carlos fussed a bit at the darkness and strange smells until his mother let him put a stranglehold on a bottle.
We could have eaten the dinner, generous though it was, in fifteen minutes. But we first waited for Francis and then after he arrived, shortly after six, the three of us spent more than two hours dawdling over the food and catching up on gossip.
Finally, I pushed away the half-full basket of
sopaipillas
and my empty coffee cup. If I had eaten any more, I’d have been comatose and under the good doctor’s care myself.
“You want to go out to the field tomorrow?”
Estelle frowned. It was the first time in more than an hour that I’d brought up the incident that had summoned her to Posadas. “Yes, sir.”
“Pretty bleak place,” Francis said. He reached across and pulled the
sopaipillas
within reach. He’d eaten more than I had, which was an accomplishment…especially since he didn’t have the stretched belly capacity.
“You saw most of what there was to see this afternoon, when we took Reuben there,” I said. “A hole in the ground, a few bloodstains.” I held up my hands. “No nifty tire tracks pressed into the ground, no cartridge casings, no nothing.”
“None of it makes sense,” Estelle said.
“No. But there’s a lot of that going around here lately.” She didn’t ask me what I meant by that and I didn’t elaborate.
We left the restaurant and swung by the hospital for a few minutes. Reuben was sleeping quietly, looking tiny and defenseless under the white sheets. They’d given him a bath, probably more out of self-defense than anything else. The monitor over his bed ticked its record of his diminishing vital signs.
After a few minutes we headed for my adobe house on Guadalupe Terrace, deep in the old section of Posadas south of the interstate. The place was huge, sprawling, dark, and comfortable. And it was private, nestled almost in the geographic center of five acres.
Estelle paused a minute with her hand caressing the carved oak of the front door. Francis stood behind her, his son nestled in the crook of his arm.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m thinking…I’m thinking that this feels like coming home.”
I nudged the door open. “Someday you’ll be able to talk some sense into your husband’s thick skull. You and Francis need to get out of those gloomy mountains and come back south, where you belong.”
Estelle laughed and shot an amused look at the young physician. They followed me inside. The old hacienda sprawled all over the lot with a myriad alcoves, nooks, and patios. Every member of a big family would have been able to find a quiet, private corner.
It was all of those rooms that prompted my two sons and two daughters to harass me about being lonely and “rattling around in that old barn,” as my eldest daughter Camille was fond of saying.
I gave Estelle and Francis their choice of five bedrooms. She chose the one in the west wing, the bedroom with the dark, looming, mahogany
armario
. Camille had fallen in love with that old free-standing Mexican clothes closet when she was only thirteen. Two other deputies and I had nearly busted guts moving it in. It was never going to be moved again—not in my lifetime, anyway.
Estelle tossed her small overnight bag on Camille’s bed. “You want the shutter open?” I asked.
“No. Leave it closed,” she said. “I like the fortress effect.” She smiled a little ruefully and slipped an arm around Francis. “I’m feeling small right now, sir. It’s one of those times when a warm burrow is tempting.”
“That’s why I like this place. The rest of the world doesn’t exist when you close the doors and windows.” I started to swing the bedroom door closed behind me. “I’ll fix us a brandy when you’re ready.”
They settled the kid and then found me out in the kitchen. Estelle stepped down onto the brick floor of the living room and wandered around the room like a little kid, poking into this and that. She stopped at the VCR and examined the single tape, the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes deepening. She knew me pretty well.
I handed Francis a brandy and he flopped down in one of the leather chairs, one leg thrown across the arm. Estelle sat down on the other arm of the same chair, hands folded primly on her knees. “Francis and I would like a place like this someday,” she said.
“You won’t find them up north,” I chided her, and she grinned again. Anyone but Estelle would have told me to shut up and mind my own business.
We talked until nearly midnight, and after a while it seemed to me that she had never been gone.
***
The next morning, we drove to the hospital and found no change in Reuben’s condition. He was still unconscious and it seemed to me, looking at the composed, peaceful expression on his pale face, that he had already made up his mind and was simply waiting for his body to follow suit.
Doctor Allen Perrone stuck his head in, beckoned to Francis, and nodded curtly at me. I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. “So what do you think?” I asked, keeping my voice in a hoarse whisper. He glanced at Francis, shrugged, and summed up his medical prognostication in two vague, unhelpful words: “No telling.”
He took Francis by the elbow and said to Estelle, “I need to borrow him for a bit.”
“We were going to go out to Reuben’s place for a little while,” she said. “We should be back in a couple of hours.”
We drove out to the field in my Blazer. Francis Carlos was blabby all the way, gurgling and cooing and twisting his rubbery little face into a wide range of expressions, each one sillier than the last.
Deputy Tom Mears, a part-time officer we had hired away from Bernalillo County after he’d stopped a 9 mm slug in the gut, was parked in Reuben’s driveway. He lifted a finger in salute as we pulled beyond the driveway and parked along the road.
In daylight, the field looked considerably smaller than it had during the raw, unsettled night.
“You don’t want to leave him in the truck?” I asked, as Estelle bundled the infant into a convenient package.
“No.”
“You want me to carry him?”
“He’s fine,” she said. And he was. Once fitted into a gadget that looked like a high-tech cross between a hiker’s backpack and a backboard for a papoose, the kid rode along in style. Estelle Reyes-Guzman shoved her hands in her pockets and followed me across the rough ground.
We stopped at the spot where Stuart Torkelson had fallen for the last time, and from there I pointed out where the small marker flags had been set by each site of evidence.
“Would you characterize the argument between my great-uncle and Stuart Torkelson as violent, sir?”
“When they met that first time? No. The way Torkelson told it, Reuben waited for him to walk to the fence. They exchanged a few words, and Torkelson backed off.”
“And he admitted to you that he’d been in the wrong?”
“Absolutely. He was apologetic.” I pulled my coat a little tighter. The wind hadn’t given up. Another day of overcast would bring the total to three in a row…about all I could stand.
“It’s hard to believe he would poison Reuben’s dogs.”
“Impossible for me to believe it,” I said.
Estelle walked to the edge of the shallow pit and knelt down. I did the same, at considerable expense.
She looked up at the trees that surrounded us on three sides. “A pretty spot.”
“Yes.”
She reached down and picked up a handful of loose dirt from the edge of the hole, rolling it between her fingers. “How much deeper down did you dig…I mean after you reached the bodies?”
“Bob Torrez did most of the digging. He stopped when all three dogs were exhumed and when he was sure that that’s all there was in the pit.”
For a long minute she didn’t respond, then she nodded once, as if what I had said was somehow suspect. “It’s interesting, isn’t it, sir.” She pointed by moving just her index finger while the other fingers held onto the ball of soil.
“What is?”
“The way soil makes layers as it’s formed.”
Goddamned fascinating
, I almost said, but a loud bark of radio squelch interrupted me. I grunted upright and turned around in time to see another county car pull to a halt behind my Blazer. I reached around and pressed the mike button on my handheld to let Torrez know we’d seen him.
“Can you come to the car a minute, sir?” Torrez’s voice was restrained. I clicked the handheld again as acknowledgment. Scanner nuts around the county would wonder what the hell kind of conversation we were having.
“Let’s go see what he wants,” I said. As we walked back toward the road, Tom Mears got out of his unit to join us.
Deputy Torrez opened his briefcase on the hood of the car and had a handful of show-and-tell by the time Estelle and I negotiated the fence.
“What’s up, Robert?”
“Some interesting findings came in from preliminary tests, sir.” He handed me a single piece of paper with the letterhead of the office of the medical examiner.
“Huh,” I said after reading the first paragraph. “Huh.” I handed the paper to Estelle.
“Human blood was found on the fur of one of the dogs,” Torrez said.
“So I read.” I waited until Estelle had finished.
“And it’s type B positive.”
“The same as Stuart Torkelson’s,” Estelle added.
“Shit,” I said and turned to lean against the fender of the county car. “They got that information back to us in record time, I’ll say that. We might wait a month for the rest.”
“There wasn’t very much blood found,” Estelle said. She reread the brief report for the fifth time. I didn’t need to see it again.
“One molecule is all it takes,” I said. I looked at Estelle as she handed the paper back to Torrez. “So tell me,” I said.
“If the lab report is correct,” Estelle said slowly, “and if the final analysis—the DNA fingerprint and all—agrees, then it places Torkelson with the dogs.”
“Uh-huh.” I reached over and took the report. “And you read the rest?”
“Yes, sir.”
I held the paper at arm’s length, not bothering to take the time to fish my glasses out of my pocket. “Item 93-1216PC10…blood sample recovered from collar fur of deceased black and tan female collie-cross canine.” I glanced up. “That’s a bit redundant, isn’t it?”
Estelle raised an eyebrow.
I continued reading. “Blood sample typed as B Rhesus positive, preliminary match with Item 93-1216PC06, sample taken from victim identified as Stuart Torkelson.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And,” I said, holding the paper another inch farther away, “blood sample obtained from splash pattern measuring approximately two point seven centimeters by eight point eight centimeters on left rib cage of canine. Blood sample contaminated by soil and soil debris located between sample and animal fur.”
Estelle thrust her hands back in her pockets.
“What’s that tell us?” I prompted when I saw the line of her jaw set.
“It’s hard to tell, sir.”
“No, it isn’t, Estelle.”
“Somehow Torkelson’s blood got sprayed on the dog when its fur was already covered with dirt,” Bob Torrez offered.
“Somehow,” I said and handed him the paper. “Estelle, your great-uncle loved his dogs. He buried them here, and the effort will probably end up killing him. The dogs were already covered with dirt when Torkelson was shot. That doesn’t leave many choices.”
“Like they were just in the process of being buried,” Bob Torrez offered.
“Or being exhumed. That’s the opposite possibility.”
“Maybe, sir,” Estelle said.
“Then you tell me.”
“I can’t, sir.”
“There’s one thing that can’t be changed. Torkelson’s blood type is on one of the dogs. That’s a link we didn’t have before.”
“A link?”
“Yes. Until now, it was just supposition that tied Torkelson’s death to your uncle. This makes the connection more tangible.”