Come Dark (29 page)

Chapter Thirty-five

The jet screamed a fast approach over Cat Mesa, dropping like a graceful rock to swing east and approach the west end of runway nine-zero. Nose high, the Cessna cleared the boundary fence and touched down on the numbers, braking hard.

As the sleek jet sighed to a stop by the fuel island, Estelle rose and beckoned to Miles Waddell. He listened carefully, eyes riveted on hers, as she explained what she knew.

“And they're in the theater?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head in distress. “I've only met the brother once, I think, a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't impressed. Why Efrin idolizes him, I couldn't guess.”

“Strange chemistry,” Estelle said. “Right now, I'd like you to follow me up there in your own vehicle. I'll go on ahead and talk with Bobby.”

“Okay.” He reached out a hand toward Marion Banks. “You're all set?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “One of the company trucks is parked in the hangar. I'll take that up the hill.”

Estelle shook hands with the girl gratefully. “Thanks so much. You can't imagine what this means to us.”

The Charger was an oven. But after the frigid air conditioning of the executive jet, even the hot air off the airport's tarmac felt good through the open windows. Turning west on the old state highway, she punched on the embedded phone.

“Hey,” Bob Torrez said as he connected.

“I'm just leaving the airport. Is he still holding Christina?”

“Yup. He's got that revolver dug into her skull with the hammer cocked. Even if I had a clear shot, I wouldn't take it.”

Estelle's heart hammered. “Listen, Waddell is coming right behind me. I don't know what Garcia wants from him, but I'm not sending him into that room, Bobby. So everyone just sits still until I get there.”

Southbound from State 17, the county road was pounded hard after two years of heavy construction traffic, and the over-powered sedan was able to make good time. Only two oncoming belly-dump haulers took to the ditch to give her room, and she arrived at the
NightZone
entrance with fingers aching from clamping the steering wheel.

Bruce Cooper, the young man at the gate, opened it without being prompted, and under other conditions, Estelle might have enjoyed the dramatic, glass-smooth drive up the macadam access road to the mesa-top. As she rounded the first curve, she caught sight of Miles Waddell's hulking diesel pickup behind her, just turning into the park entrance.

“Where are you at?” The sheriff's quiet voice bloomed out of the car's stereo.

“Just coming out on top. Miles is a half-mile behind me.”

“Okay.”

What was
okay
? Estelle wondered. Ignoring the arrows on the roadway, she took the narrow road against traffic, cutting off a large section of loop.

In a moment, she entered the circle drive that fronted the restaurant, theater, and planetarium complex, and it looked as if the first soiree for the facility was a police convention. Estelle swung in hard to clear the curb and the front bumper of Torrez' Expedition.

The sheriff appeared at the bank of six doorways.

“Nothing's changed,” he said. “He'll talk to Jackie, and she's settled him down some, but he ain't lettin' go of the gun.”

“How's Christina?”

“Hangin' in there. She's a tough gal.”

The clatter of a diesel pickup announced the developer's arrival. “Miles can come into the common foyer, but that's as close as he goes,” Estelle said. “So let me find out what this creep has to say for himself.”

The right-hand side of the double doors to the theater/planetarium opened on silky hinges, and forty yards away Estelle saw Christina Prescott sitting in the farthest chair in the first row. Directly behind her, the gun resting against her skull, sat Arthur Garcia. Estelle stopped and let the door close softly behind her. She held out both hands, spread wide.

“Arthur, were you able to call your brother?” He looked like a fat version of his younger brother—same inky black hair, thick on his wide skull, too much fat on his face for his dark, expressive eyes to do justice. He jerked the gun against Christina's skull, and she winced.

“I tried to. They said he was asleep. They're just jerkin' my chains.” He tried for a tough-guy sneer.

“Hang on.” Estelle pulled out her own phone, holding it up so he could see that it wasn't a weapon of any sort. She scrolled down a list and touched auto-dial. As she did so, she asked, “Christina, are you all right?”

“Yes.”

Estelle nodded and spoke into the phone, her eyes fixed on Arthur Garcia. Sure enough, the revolver's hammer was cocked, and Arthur's fat index finger was in the trigger guard. Estelle held the phone in her left hand, her right resting on the butt of her own automatic. Because she had already made her final decision, her mind was calm and clear.

A hospital staffer came on the line. “This is Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman. I need to speak with Nurse Sturges.” She waited for a couple of heartbeats. “I don't care what she's doing. Get her on this phone. This is a police emergency.” She frowned hard and then relaxed. Lowering it away from her face, she said to Garcia, “They'll find her. Just be patient.”

“Get rid of that gun you're carryin'.”

“No. I'm not going to harm you, Arthur. And you're not going to harm Christina.” She said it so matter-of-factly that Garcia appeared flustered.

“Ah, Nurse Sturges? This is Undersheriff Guzman. We met not long ago in Efrin Garcia's room. It's imperative that we get Efrin on the phone.”

She listened for a moment. “Sure. Do that, please.” Estelle had been walking toward the narrow elevated stage below the screen, moving obliquely away from Garcia. She watched him, and saw that his hand was steady. And why not? What sort of challenge was this, after blasting four rounds through a naked man, defenseless in a shower?

“Efrin? Can you hear me clearly? All right, I want you to listen very carefully. Your brother Arthur is here with me. We're in the theater with your mural. Will you talk with him? He needs to know that you're going to be all right. Hold on.”

She bent down, laid the phone on the polished oak of the stage, and shot it across toward Garcia. It stopped six feet from him.

“Put your hands up on your head,” Garcia said. “I mean it. Do it now.”

Estelle did so, and was surprised at the agility of the heavyset young man. He kept the revolver pointed at Christina, an easy shot.

“Christina, just hold still,” Estelle said, and then thought,
Cheap gun, we hope it has a hard trigger.

Arthur grasped the phone. “
Hermano?”
He immediately crossed back to the protection of his hostage.

Apparently Efrin Garcia had a lot to say, because his brother stood head down, frowning at the floor.

“You shouldn't a' ratted me out,” he said finally, and glared at Estelle as if she were in charge of what his brother said, lying two hundred and fifty miles north in the Albuquerque hospital. “Yeah, well now there's nothing I can do. They got me here. They ain't going to let me walk away.”

He listened for another minute, and it seemed to Estelle that his posture relaxed just a bit.

“Yeah. I'm going to do that. No. I don't want to talk to her now.” He lowered the phone. “I gotta talk to Waddell. He's outside, ain't he?”

“I won't bring him in here as long as you're holding the gun on Christina.” Estelle, hands still on her head, walked across to the first row of seats, and sat down ten spaces from Christina. “There. You have me now. Let her go.”

“You'll bring Waddell in if I do that?”

“No. Not as long as you have that gun. Nobody comes into this room. Let Christina go, and you can talk with him on the phone. He's not coming in here.” She heard a faint knock from the back of the hall, a small, singular sound that the perfect acoustics delivered clearly. She knew what it was. It would be inconceivable for Robert Torrez, he of the single-minded hostage negotiating technique, to stand patiently out in the foyer, waiting for something to happen. He would think in terms of contingencies. Was he now in one of the three projection booths? Or snuggled up against the mid-floor planetarium projector? From any of those vantage points, his shot would be clear and easy.

“Okay. She can go,” Arthur Garcia said, as if he'd come to the same conclusion as Estelle.

“Just a minute.” She pointed at the phone. “Slide that over to me.”

He did so. One burly arm hugged Christina close. Estelle cleared the phone and appeared to select another number, the hall remained silent of ringtones. She knew where the sheriff was, and she knew that he could hear her without the alert of the phone.

“Bobby, let this one go. He's going to let Christina out, and I need for him to talk to Waddell.” She wasn't sure if the sheriff had heard her, or was ignoring her, or was already gently squeezing the trigger on his .308. She immediately pushed the auto-dial, and out in the foyer, Miles Waddell answered instantly.

“Mr. Waddell, Arthur needs to talk with you for a minute. And Christina is coming out. Just stand near the first set of doors.”

“I need to come in there?” Waddell asked.

“Absolutely not. You stay out in the foyer. Arthur will be on the phone.” She held it out toward Arthur, and he pushed Christina away with the muzzle of the revolver. Holding the gun now on Estelle, he slid into a seat two paces down from her.

“Waddell?”

“He's out in the foyer. That's as close as he's going to get.”

Garcia reached for the phone.

“I'm on the line,” Waddell said. “She's done you a favor, my friend. Now it's your turn to do something smart.”

“Hey, man, look…my brother wouldn't a' done any of that taggin' if I hadn't talked him into it.” Arthur turned and gazed at the partial space mural.

“I don't care about the vandalism,” Miles said. “That's not what all this is about, is it?”

“If I give myself up peaceful, you got to let him finish this mural.”

“I
got
to?”

“Yeah. I mean, he needs to. You don't know how proud he is of all this, man.”

“That's the only reason you came up here?”

“Yeah. That's it. Look, Efrin didn't have nothin' to do with that coach gettin' himself killed down at school. Efrin didn't even know I went back to settle things up. I had to get my gun back, man. And then Coach charged me like that, and there wasn't nothing I could do.”

“You could have turned and run,” Waddell said. “How far is a naked man going to get, pursuing you through the neighborhood?”

“Yeah,” Arthur said bitterly. “That's going to happen.” He snuffled and dragged a finger across his nose. “Look, man, I ain't got nothin' left now. That guy messed with my brother, and I settled things. I screwed this up so there's no comin' back. I know all that. But Efrin—he's different. He's going to be a famous artist someday. You gotta let him have that chance.”

“He already
is
famous, my friend,” Waddell said. “Look…I'll cut
you
a deal. You give that gun to the undersheriff. You can trust her. You do that, and you'll come out of there in one piece. If we find out you're not lying to us…that your brother had absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Scott's murder…then maybe we'll have something to talk about. That's the deal. ”

Garcia lowered the phone. “You heard him?”

Estelle nodded. “It's recorded, Arthur.”

He nodded and lowered the revolver, then reached out to place it in her lap like a little kid sharing a favorite toy. The ends of the revolver's cylinder were clearly visible, and she could see that the gun was not loaded. “Okay,” Arthur Garcia said. “If that's what I got to do.” He slid out of the seat to his knees, bowed his head, and laced his fingers together on top of his skull. Only when Estelle snapped the cuffs on his wrists, bringing his hands down behind his back, did the little red dot of light that had hovered on his skull wink out.

Chapter Thirty-six

District Attorney Dan Schroeder took the gamble. A defense attorney might argue that Art Garcia, chubby and uncoordinated and not much of a fighter, had to defend himself against the tough and quick-thinking Clint Scott, whether the coach was naked or not. The four carefully placed shots told a different story, and that's the version that made sense to the district attorney. There had been no risk for the assailant. The young man had returned to the school, had sought out Scott, and then basically executed him in the shower. That pointed to a first-degree murder charge. Arthur Garcia would never have to pay rent again.

Arthur, perhaps with the notion of avoiding lethal injection—which New Mexico was usually loath to administer anyway—turned into a fund of information. The idea for the graffiti design he had appropriated from a passing BNSF freight train whose boxcars were rolling billboards for spray art. And it made sense to him that his tagging kudos would benefit from spraying targets that had recently garnered lots of publicity—Waddell's locomotive, impressive venue of Waddell's telescope, and even the gym where the Posadas Jaguarettes had scored yet another romp and stomp, much-ballyhooed victory.

The only catch, he told them, was that he didn't have an artistic bone in his body. That's what younger brothers were for.

One thing Arthur Garcia did not know—and Estelle quizzed him relentlessly. The “chick” he had seen approaching as they worked on the school wall was nothing but a shadow to him. She could have been four feet or six feet tall. She might have been blond, or brunette or bald. He maintained that the approaching figure was a woman because of the sashay of her hips. “Man don't walk like that,” he insisted.

The vague description of what might have turned into an important material witness did not coalesce. Had the woman been fearful for her safety? If so, why choose to walk around
behind
a darkened school building so late at night? And when she saw taggers working so diligently on the wall, she had vanished like a puff of smoke.

Had she witnessed Coach Scott's confrontation with the two young men? Did their raised voices scare her off? Did she see one of them draw a pistol? If so, she had not lingered. The Garcias had not seen her again—not that they had had leisure time to look. And she hadn't called police.

Sheriff Robert Torrez sat down in one of the cushioned chairs in Estelle's office, crossed one leg over the other and regarded his undersheriff.

“This is the issue.” Estelle patted the pile of depositions that was growing on her desk. “The back door was unlocked when Clint Scott burst out and confronted the two Garcia boys. They didn't hear the rattling of a chain, or the turn of a lock. Bam! The door flies open, and there he is. He must have heard the boys talking, or the thunk of the ladder on the wall…something. He gets up, takes the stairs two or three at a time, and looks out that little side window in the foyer. He sees their flashlights. He bursts out and confronts them.”

“Yep.”

“So why was the door
already
open? Why was the coach so primed that he heard what had to be comparatively faint noises coming from outside? When he went up to check, was he expecting to see someone else, and blew his stack when he saw what was going on?”

“I'd guess.”

“He was waiting for someone.”

“Coulda been. And it coulda been the
chick
, right?”

“That would explain a lot. It would explain why she was there in the first place, going around to the back door. It explains why he made sure that those heavy doors were
open.
Maybe even a pebble on the threshold to catch the door. He was waiting for her. So what she sees as an altercation, maybe even one involving a gun, does she stay? No. She flees the scene.”

The sheriff regarded Estelle with amusement, a rare expression for him.

“Coach Avila said that she saw one of the girls on the team walking back toward the school the next day—Ginny Trimble? She said she was attracted by all the cops converging at the scene. But there's no evidence that says
she
was at the school after the game.”

“You already asked Todd Stewart about what time his wife got home after the game?”

“I did. Stacie Stewart told her husband that she went out for a bit with Dana Gabaldon. Dana says that she didn't. Maybe she was headed to talk with Scott, and spooked when she saw the taggers, and then the fight.”

Torrez sighed mightily. “It don't matter a whole lot, anyways. Garcia confessed, and he ain't protecting nobody. If Stewart witnessed anything, that's just a little loose end to tighten up.”

Estelle smiled. “Yes.”