“These are the four women whose bodies were discovered at the Crawford Ranch,” Romero said. “Do you know anything about them?”
“Did you get me a lawyer? I don’t have anything to say,” she said.
Romero looked at Detective Chacon.
“This is going nowhere, Brenda,” Romero said. “It would be in your best interest to cooperate. Tell us what happened and I’ll see if we can cut some kind of a deal with the DA.”
“You mean in your best interest, don’t you?” Brenda was belligerent. “I don’t know anything about those women; I don’t know anything about Charlie. Last time I saw him he was fine. Look, I know I’m entitled to a lawyer, so quit screwing me around.”
The questioning continued for two hours. Brenda continued to throw up an invisible shield between her and the detectives. Jemimah Hodge had discussed Brenda’s mental condition with him at length. He was beginning to believe it. Romero pulled some papers from his briefcase and began to read out loud:
“I snuck into the house through the downstairs sunroom, which was never locked. Charlie and the blonde were passed out on the bed. I lifted her off the bed and placed her in the little red wagon and wheeled it over to the barn. It wasn’t hard to kill her. She wasn’t moving anyway. I left the body on the tarp and dragged it down the ramp into the tunnel.”
Brenda looked at the detective. She was stunned that he had her personal journal. Where had she left it? That fucking Sonja.
Right before their eyes Brenda went from calm and composed to agitated and combative. She ran to the door, screaming. The deputies tried to subdue her as she scratched and kicked, arms and legs flailing. They managed to pin her to the floor.
Brenda let out a blood-curdling scream that could be heard all the way down to the end of the corridor.
“Momma!”
Chapter 54
Because the bodies had been discovered on prehistoric Indian ruins, Tim McCabe felt compelled to meet with the elders of nearby pueblos in order to facilitate a cleansing. On the first of August, he traveled to each of the pueblos to arrange for a time they could gather at the ruins. Elders at Cochiti, San Felipe, Santa Ana and Sandia pueblos agreed to a mutual time to visit San Lazaro for the ceremony.
Although the murders had occurred on the ranch and not on the ruins, who was to say that the ranch at one time hadn’t been part of the original sacred pueblo ground? The murders were a spiritual contaminant and although no members of the Tano tribes existed at the present time, some area tribes probably originated from these early inhabitants. Saint Lazarus, the namesake of the pueblo, was a man who had been raised from the dead during biblical times. It was fitting that the ruins should be returned to their original state.
For the cleansing ceremony, McCabe saw the need to choose the feast day of another saint, because St. Lazarus was not one whose feast was celebrated by the Native American pueblos. He chose August 10, a feast day celebrated by the Picuris Pueblo to honor their patron saint, San Lorenzo, or Saint Lawrence. San Lorenzo was a deacon who had been sentenced to die on a metal grate over a roaring fire. While being grilled to death, he had exhibited great strength and courage. In addition, on the evening of his feast day, a meteor shower known as the burning tears of St. Lawrence had been seen in the sky.
At sundown, McCabe and the four elders stood in the center of the property holding bowls of white cornmeal and small bundles of freshly picked sage. The shaman offered a pinch of pollen to the setting sun and then walked to the four corners of the ruins, chanting a prayer at each. On that day the sky had been a deep cerulean blue, with fragments of swollen white clouds drifting above them. The sun was spreading the last of its light. The natural spring below Medicine Rock erupted through the ground, its crystal waters forming a deep pool. It was a good day for a cleansing ceremony; a good day for a new beginning.
EPILOGUE
United Airlines flight 782 departed from Albuquerque International Airport at 7:23 a.m. on the morning of December 23. It arrived at Brasilia, the capitol of Brazil, at 4:30 the next afternoon. It was Christmas Eve, the middle of winter in New Mexico, but here it was the middle of summer. The woman could see the beach from her window seat as the plane taxied in to park. Bikini-clad females and muscle-bound men pursued their tans on bright beach towels.
It had been an uneventful flight. The passengers reached for their belongings and prepared to disembark from the A-380 jumbo airliner. Sonja Swentzel smoothed the slight wrinkles on her Anna Sui silk suit and leaned down to adjust the strap on her Christian Louboutin platform pumps. As she neared the exit ramp, she placed the Gucci sunglasses square on her face and held on tight to her shoulder bag.
Shadows among the Ruins Page 16
