Free Before She Dies by Steven F. Havill Page A

looked expectant. “Sergeant Torrez has a plaster cast of some tire prints. He’s got about eighty-five million other things to do. It’d be a hell of a deal if you’d take them and find out what kind of tire we’re dealing with.”
    For a second or two, Holman looked as if he wanted to say,
“How do I do that?”
But he thought better of it. “Where are they?”
    “The deputy has them with him. He’s over at the county maintenance yard, in the old shop building.”
    He nodded. “I’ll pick them up. I’ll be in my office until five, and then I’ll be at the hospital.”
    After Sheriff Martin Holman left, I retrieved a stack of patrol logs along with the radio and telephone logs for the previous week. I spread the paperwork out on my desk, closed my office door, and got to work. I had no illusions that I would find anything of importance in that mass of documentation.
    The logs would show, in terse, repetitive jargon, exactly what I told every new deputy who ever joined our tiny department—and what I told the others on a regular basis. The threat of rural law enforcement lay not in the constant dangers of hoodlum patrol. Leave that to the big cities. We might go weeks, months, even years with nothing but yawns, and then be smashed in the face with fifteen seconds of panic.
    After living in the doldrums, it was easy to be caught off guard.
    Paul Enciños had been caught off guard and it had killed him. His handgun had been found still snapped in its holster. The electric lock on the dashboard of his patrol car that held the shotgun had not been tripped. The deputy never had time to recognize his moment of panic.

Chapter 10
    Sergeant Robert Torrez was bent over the fender of 308, his brows knit tightly together in concentration as he peeled the backing off a one-inch bright-blue circular sticker.
    “Estelle’s better at this than I am,” he muttered.
    I surveyed his handiwork, impressed. Centered over each mark of pellet damage was a colored sticker. He had used yellow dots for the first shot pattern, blue for the second, and red for the third. In place of the atomized driver’s side window, he had stretched a piece of clear plastic and then, by carefully extrapolating where the pellets had struck other surfaces of the car’s interior, he had dotted the probable locations of the pellets’ entry through the window.
    I turned and looked at the dozen yard-square pieces of brown butcher paper that were laid on the garage floor. Each one had been blasted once with a shotgun. Each was carefully labeled.
    The top six targets had been shot using one of the department’s 12 gauge riot guns, a pump action weapon with a twenty-inch barrel. The shots had been fired at distances beginning at five feet and then extending out in five-foot increments to thirty feet. The diameter of the pattern was clearly labeled.
    The second set of targets had been riddled using the same type three-inch magnum number four buck ammunition, but this time fired from a shotgun with a standard length barrel.
    “You can see a pretty significant difference in spread between the two guns,” I mused, kneeling down with a grunt and a loud cracking of the knees. “What was the choke on the field gun?”
    “Modified,” Torrez said. “There’s a bunch of other combinations I could have tried, but this gives us a pretty clear picture.”
    He picked up the last target in the riot gun series, the one fired at thirty feet, and walked to the car. “If you compare the size of the yellow pattern, the one we think was fired from the opposite shoulder of the highway, you’ll see that it’d be pretty easy to imagine a close match.”
    “You sound overwhelmed with confidence,” I said. “None of the other series are that large.”
    “Right,” Torrez nodded. “In order to get a spread like this with a regular field gun, you’d have to be backed off fifty or sixty feet.”
    “You don’t really have very many definite pellet marks on the car to