Before She Dies by Steven F. Havill

leaving only the bullet-pocked patrol car parked on the north shoulder of the road. Then we would put a half mile of state highway under a microscope if we had to.
    Maybe one of the rubberneckers had seen something. Maybe one of them had overheard someone say something at the Broken Spur Saloon. Maybe.
    I left Bob Torrez and Bing Burkett, one of the first state troopers to arrive, to work the witnesses. Estelle was setting up her camera gear on the pavement beside Enciños’s patrol car.
    “Do you need any help?”
    “You could hold the flashlight for me, sir.”
    I swung the beam over the patrol car and counted seven holes in the driver’s door, doorpost, and roof.
    “I’ll take close-ups of those in the morning when it’s light,” Estelle said. “I want the side of the car and the macadam beside it right away.”
    By the time we finished two hours later, the list of evidence was painfully short. Paul Enciños had been driving county patrol car 308. The tire tracks showed that he had pulled his patrol car off the pavement in a normal fashion. Another set of tracks was printed clearly in the sand several feet in front of 308. The origin of the tracks was obscured by both the patrol car and dozens of bootprints. Whether the tracks belonged to the killer’s car was anyone’s guess.
    The driver’s door of 308 was open, and that’s the way Francisco Peña had found it when he’d happened by sometime after eleven that night. Peña worked for rancher Herb Torrance. He traveled from his line shack the nine miles down County Road 14 to the state highway and the Broken Spur Saloon often.
    It had been Peña who’d raced to the Broken Spur and called Posadas. Peña said that when he’d driven by the scene, the car door was open. The engine was idling, the four-way flashers were blinking, and Deputy Enciños was on the ground by the back tire. Another person was inside the car.
    The first pool of Paul Enciños’s blood began four inches in front of the back tire and extended east for seventeen inches, part of the pool smeared by the deputy’s upper left arm.
    Another larger pool of blood actually touched the tread of the back tire where the tire rested on the macadam, extending around and under the car in a crescent. What appeared to be a blood smear on the bodywork of the patrol car began just to the rear of the wheel-well opening, extending down to the chrome strip above the rock guard.
    The deputy had managed to exit the patrol car, but Linda Real never moved from her seat. “The killer fired at Linda through the driver’s side window,” Estelle said.
    “I don’t understand why Paul didn’t call in, Estelle. I mean we harp and harp on that.” I’m sure Estelle heard the helplessness in my voice, but there were no easy answers.
    “I don’t know, sir.”
    “Somebody does,” I said.

Chapter 8
    Sunday slipped into Monday morning. Roadblocks on State 56 just north of the border at Regal produced nothing. Throughout most of the morning, deputies and troopers stopped just about everything with wheels in an area whose radius grew with the day. Our best efforts produced nothing. We had no idea what we were looking for.
    At ten that morning, I sat morosely at my desk, staring across my small office at the chalkboard in the corner. I’d just left the hospital, where any extra people were just a nuisance. In an effort to clear my weary brain, I’d holed up in my office for a few minutes, trying to think of anything we’d missed.
    On the chalkboard I had drawn a representation of the shooting scene. It was simple enough…a child could have drawn it. One section of empty two-lane highway and a patrol car—and two victims. That was all.
    We didn’t have a single set of tracks that we could conclusively link to the crime, although Bob Torrez had made a plaster of paris cast of the tracks in the sand in front of the county car. We had another set from across the highway, imprints no more than three feet long before