?You think somebody plowed into the back of Junior and put him through the rail?? Hackberry said.
?Junior was a master at passive-aggressive behavior,? she replied. ?Two weeks after he was put in charge of the picnic committee at his church, half the congregation was ready to convert to Islam.?
?The ignition key is turned off,? Hackberry said. He had stepped back from the cab but was still holding the handkerchief to his mouth.
?It looks to me like he probably died of a broken neck,? Pam said. ?He could have stayed conscious long enough to turn off the key to prevent a fire. I would if I was in his situation.?
?No, this one is hinky,? Hackberry said. He took a breath of clean air, then opened the door. ?There?re glass splinters all over his shirtfront but almost none on the seat belt.? He used his index finger to feel inside the mechanism that automatically rolled up the safety belt when the driver released the latch on the buckle. ?There?s glass inside the slit. This belt was released, then pulled back out again.?
?Somebody took Junior out of the truck and put him back in it??
Hackberry went to the rear of the pickup and looked at the damaged bumper. He cleared his throat, spat to one side, and waited for the breeze to clear the air around him. ?We thought Junior might know where Vikki Gaddis is,? he said. ?Maybe somebody else came to the same conclusion.?
?Somebody ran him off the road and beat it out of him and then broke his neck?? Pam said.
?Maybe that?s why Junior went by his house without turning off. He didn?t want to put his wife in danger.?
A skein of small rocks trickled down the arroyo. Pam looked up at the empty space in the guardrail. ?There?s R.C. and Felix and the coroner. What do you want to do??
?We treat it as a homicide.?
Hackberry walked to the far side of the pickup, opened the passenger door, looked inside, and searched behind the seat. The glove box hung open, but nothing inside it seemed disturbed. Then he saw the bright rectangular wedge mark where a screwdriver had been inserted to snap the tongue on the lock.
Why would someone need a screwdriver to open a glove box if the key was hanging in the ignition?
Hackberry tried the ignition key on the
glove box, but it wouldn?t turn in the lock.
He walked farther up the arroyo and mounted a flat rock that gave him an overview of the truck and the path of its descent from the guardrail. The two deputies who had just arrived, R. C. Bevins and Felix Chavez, were helping the coroner climb down the incline. Hackberry squatted on his haunches and pushed his hat back on his head, his knees popping, the butt of his holstered .45 revolver cutting into his rib cage. A breeze puffed through the bottom of the arroyo, and a cloud of black butterflies lifted off the wash bed. The sun was already a red ball rising over the hills, but the arroyo was still in shadow, the stone cool to the touch, the riparian desert ambience almost beautiful.
Maybe that was the history of the earth, he thought. Its surface was traversed by pain, inhumanity, and mass murder, but the scars were as transient and meaningless to the eye as blowing sand. The most poignant expression of our suffering?the voices of the dying?had no more longevity than an echo disappearing over the edge of an infinite plain. How could millions of years trail off into both silence and invisibility?
He stood up and thumbed his shirt tight inside his trousers. Down below, not twenty feet away, a beige envelope lay in a tangle of driftwood that reminded him of elk horns piled on the edge of a hunter?s camp. He climbed down from the rock he was standing on and picked up the envelope. It had a cellophane window in it and had been torn open raggedly on one side, destroying most of the return address. It was empty, but enough of the printing remained in the upper-left-hand corner to identify its origins.
?What?d you find?? Pam asked.
?An envelope from the Department of Veterans Affairs.?
?You think it?s from Junior?s glove box??
?That?s my guess. The valet key was in the ignition, but the key to the glove box wasn?t.?
Pam inserted her thumbs in her gun belt, her elbows sticking straight out from her sides. Then she scratched her forearm, her eyes gazing back at the wrecked pickup. ?Junior went out to Pete and Vikki?s place and got Pete?s disability check for him. But he didn?t forward it,? she said, more to herself than the sheriff. ?Why not??
?Probably cold feet.?
?Or the fact he could be a mean-spirited, self-righteous bastard when he wanted to,? she said.
?How about it, Sheriff?? one of the paramedics shouted from above.
?Come on down,? he replied, just as the sun broke above the rim of the arroyo and lit its sharp surfaces with a glare that burned the shade away within seconds.
FIVE HOURS LATER, Darl Wingate, the coroner, came into Hackberry?s office. He had been a career forensic pathologist with the army before retiring. Regardless of the skill or knowledge he had acquired in his own field, he seemed to apply none of it to his own life. He smoked, ate poorly, drank too much, had terrible relationships with women, and appeared to make a religion out of cynicism and callousness. Hackberry often wondered if Darl?s profligate attitude toward both morality and his own health was manufactured, or if indeed he wasn?t one of those whose experience in the world had caused him to believe in nothing.
?Did y?all find a tooth in the vehicle?? Darl said.
?No, we didn?t.?