Santana was familiar with the movie but not the restaurant. “Were you working when you got the call about your father?”
“Yes,” she said hesitantly, as if he had implied she wasn’t.
“Do either of you know a man named Rafael Mendoza?”
Both women shook their heads.
“Why?” Gabriela asked.
“Your father’s Rolodex was open to Mendoza’s name and number.”
“My father never spoke of him,” she said with a slight edge in her voice. “I do not know why he would call him.”
Santana wondered if Gabriela Pérez had a reason for reacting angrily when Mendoza’s name was mentioned or if she was just edgy by nature. Either way, he knew he would have to tread softly if he wanted her cooperation. He turned his attention to Sandra Pérez.
“Did your husband have any enemies, señora? Perhaps someone who worked for him at the newspaper?”
She shook her head vigorously. “Julio was a friend to many in this community.”
“Did your husband own a gun?”
“No.”
“Forgive me for asking, señora, but were you and your husband having any marital difficulties?”
“Difficulties? I do not understand?”
“My parents were very happy,” Gabriela said. Her dark eyes burned right through Santana.
Asking personal questions, particularly to a grieving widow, always bothered him. Still, most murders weren’t random acts of violence, but were committed by someone the victim knew. Santana considered explaining this fact to Gabriela Pérez before he concluded that she was not the least bit interested in hearing his reasoning behind the question.
“When you feel up to it, señora,” he said, “I would like you to look carefully around your house to see if anything has been taken.”
“You suspect robbery as a motive?” Gabriela said.
“We can’t rule it out. Señora, we’ll need to see your financial statements, bank accounts, credit cards.”
“I do not know about these things,” she said with a small shrug.
“I can help,” Gabriela said.
“Would you mind if I borrowed a photograph of your husband, señora? I might need it during the course of the investigation.”
“Gabriela will get one from the albums.”
Gabriela put her arms around her mother and stroked the back of her head, as if she were consoling a child.
Santana took a card out of a pocket and placed it on the coffee table. “There’s a name and number of a victim advocate, the medical examiner’s number, and the Ramsey County Attorney’s number on this card. Once we’re finished here, your husband’s body will be taken to the medical examiner’s office at Regions’ Hospital where an autopsy will be performed.”
He stood and closed his notebook. Behind him he heard the front door opening and closing and the sound of footsteps in the hallway. The evidence techs and ME had arrived.
“If you think of anything else or have any questions, please call me.” He gave them both a business card with his direct number at the station. “Is there someplace your mother could stay tonight?”
Gabriela looked at the card in her hand and then at Santana. “She will stay with me.”
“That’s a good idea.”
He started to leave when Gabriela said, “My mother is right, Detective. No one who knew my father would want to kill him.”
Her dark eyes had softened. An indication, perhaps, that she realized she would never see her father again.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said.
“Por favor,” Sandra Pérez said with trembling lips. She pulled away from her daughter and stifled a sob. “Encuentre al asesino de mi esposo.”
The desperation in her voice imploring him to find the person who murdered her husband triggered the sudden rush of adrenaline Santana always felt when he began a homicide investigation. He had no idea yet who had murdered Sandra Pérez’s husband. But he had no problem promising her he would find out who did it.
“Si, se lo prometo, señora,” he said and returned to the study.
Tony Novak, the crime scene investigator, and his usual contingent of forensic techs were measuring distances and collecting evidence. A police photographer used a Minolta 35-mm single-lens reflex camera to shoot black and white photos of the crime scene, the physical evidence and the body. Behind him, a sketch artist made detailed drawings. On the ground next to the .22 shell casing stood a small, yellow evidence marker with the number 1.
“Hey, John,” Novak said. “I just got a couple of tickets for the Chandler fight on the twenty-seventh. This kid is the best lightweight I’ve seen in a long time. You interested?”
“I might be.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Santana smiled and said, “What do you have, Reiko?”
Reiko Tanabe, the medical examiner, leaned over the body. A strand of her dark hair fell across her face. She brushed it away with a latex gloved hand and touched the birthmark just below her right ear. The café au lait mark was small and light brown in color. Santana figured Tanabe wore her hair long so that it covered the mark when she was off the clock. At crime scenes she wore her hair in a ponytail and had a habit of unconsciously touching the blemish.
“Well, I’d say he’s been shot dead.” Tanabe looked up at Santana with a wry smile.
Santana had worked with her many times before and knew that she was as competent as they come, despite the lame humor. “What about the time of death?”
Tanabe felt Pérez’s jaw and neck and then proceeded down the trunk to his legs and feet. “Rigor’s just beginning in the lower jaw. Have to pop a thermometer in the liver and get the body temperature. But you know that can be unreliable.”
She looked at the body now and not at Santana, as though talking to herself. “It’s warm in the room. He’s wearing clothes. Could keep the body temperature up. I’d say maybe between two-thirty and four-thirty p.m.” She lifted Pérez’s head off the desk. “Right side of the victim’s face doesn’t show any lividity.”
Santana noted it was different on the left side of Pérez’s face. It had turned the familiar maroon color of death. Postmortem lividity only formed on parts of the body exposed to pressure. More evidence that Julio Pérez’s body had not been moved.
“Give me until tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “I got a couple ahead of this one.”
“Bobby,” Santana said to one of the techs. “Hand me a pair of latex.”
The evidence tech gave Santana a fresh pair of latex gloves and he put them on.
Santana hit the redial button on the phone on the desk. He picked up the receiver and held it close to his ear. A message machine answered after the fourth ring. The voice was unfamiliar, but he recognized the name. He hung up, took out his notebook and copied Rafael Mendoza’s phone number and address from the card in Pérez’s Rolodex. Then he began his search of the remainder of the house.
The bathroom towels were free of bloodstains and dampness indicating the perp had not bled at the scene and attempted to clean up. Santana found nothing hidden in or around the toilet tank and no illegal drugs in the medicine cabinet.
He left the bathroom and went to the small kitchen. A backdoor opened into a chain-link fenced yard adjacent to a park and playground. The door was unlocked. Neither the bolt nor the doorjamb showed evidence of forced entry.
Three paper bags full of groceries sat on a kitchen counter. Santana found the sales receipt with a stamped time of 4:42 p.m. in one of the bags. If the ME’s estimate of the time of death was accurate, then Sandra Pérez couldn’t have shot her husband when she returned from the store. It was possible that she murdered him before she left, but Santana didn’t read her as a cold-blooded killer.
He peeled off the latex gloves and pulled the used ones out of his coat pockets and tossed both pairs in a container brought to the scene by the techs.
Gabriela Pérez came up to him as he headed for the fro
nt door and gave him a picture of her father. Standing this close to her, Santana realized how petite she was. Even in this time of grief she exuded a sexual quality that clung to her like a tight-fitting dress.
The recent photograph of Julio Pérez looked posed and professionally done. He wore a red tie, blue shirt, and black pinstriped suit. He appeared fit and was smiling broadly.
“I’ll return the photo to you,” Santana said.
Her dark eyes held his for a time. Then her gaze shifted to the long, jagged scar on the back of his right hand and then to the picture of her father. “Make sure that you do.”
She turned and walked back into the living room, her slim hips swaying like a rope in a gentle breeze.
The scene outside the house reminded Santana of Lautréamont’s description of surrealism as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. TV vans from the local NBC, CBS, and ABC news outlets were parked at the curb along with the mobile crime lab van, medical examiner’s van and six white St. Paul squad cars with gold shields on the front doors. Flood lights illuminated reporters who waved microphones in front of anyone who wanted to speak and those who didn’t. Yellow crime scene tape had been strung from oak to oak, cordoning off the house and yard. Neighbors had gathered behind the tape in the cold night air. A uniformed officer stood in the driveway recording the names of anyone who entered the house.
In his teens Santana had been fascinated by the paintings of Salvador Dali and the writings of André Breton. Now, he often filtered the dark and violent world of homicide through a surrealistic lens of both intention and chance. It was a world in which the real and the imaginary became one. A world in which bodies that could not speak were spoken for. Bodies beaten with bats and bricks and tire irons until their skulls looked more like smashed pumpkins than human heads; bodies and parts of bodies carved and sliced and sawed; bodies shot and suffocated and dragged bloated and blue from the Mississippi; bodies in bags and on gurneys and on cold slabs in the morgue with tags attached to their toes.
Only one would forever haunt him.
He gave a quick shake of his head to chase away that memory and focused on the current case. The most important hours in murder investigations were the first forty-eight hours after the discovery of the body. The longer the investigation went on, the less chance he had of finding the murderer.
Santana stood on the front walk and felt the cold, still air against his skin. The sudden absence of wind left him feeling as if the earth, like Julio Pérez, had quit breathing.
Rick Anderson walked across the brown grass toward Santana. “I gotta start hittin’ the gym again,” he said, rubbing his ample belly.
An unmarked car pulled up in front of the house and parked next to the ME’s van. The driver’s side door swung open and James Kehoe, special investigator from the mayor’s office, stepped out. He appeared disoriented for a moment until he spotted Santana and Anderson and headed toward them.
Santana said, “What the hell is Asshoe doing here?”
He used the nickname given to Kehoe by certain detectives within the department.
Anderson leaned closer to Santana and said quietly, “Take it easy, John.”
“Santana … Anderson,” Kehoe said, acknowledging each of them with a nod.
Tanning beds had leathered Kehoe’s once handsome face, and he wore his blond hair very short and an SPPD baseball cap to hide the fact that he was losing it.
“You got a homicide?” Kehoe said.
“Appears to be,” Santana said, unwilling to give him anything to work with.
“I understand the vic is Julio Pérez?”
Santana said nothing.
Kehoe waited a moment for a response and then looked at Anderson. “How’d he die?”
“Gunshot to the head.”
“Any idea who whacked him?”
“Nothing concrete.”
Kehoe pulled on the brim of his cap and glanced behind him. “You talk to the inkslingers?”
“Not yet,” Santana said. He could hear the reporters in the background yelling at them for a statement.
“What does the mayor’s office have to do with this?” Anderson asked.
Kehoe shot him a look. “Julio Pérez was known and respected by a lot of people in this city. Including the mayor. Santana should know that since he’s …”
“Hispanic?” Santana said.
“If the shoe fits. You a friend of Pérez’s?”
“We don’t all know each other.”
“Forget the sarcasm, Santana, and concentrate on results.”
“We will. Soon as you get out of the way and let us do our job.”
“Look,” Kehoe said, stepping close enough to Santana that he could smell the coffee on his breath. “If you want to play hardball, let’s take it downtown.”
“Come on, Jim,” Anderson said, raising his hands in a calming gesture. “Give it a rest.”
Kehoe’s jaw muscles clenched. His eyes flicked back and forth before settling on Anderson. “You got any wits?”
“We’re working on it.”
“So what’s the next step?”
“We start questioning the employees at El Día,” Santana said.
“All right. But keep me in the loop. The mayor wants to know exactly how this investigation is proceeding.”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
Kehoe stared at Santana for a long moment. Then he turned and headed for his car.
“Christ,” Anderson said. “What’s with him?”
“Se cree la vaca que mas caga. He thinks he’s the cow that shits the most.”
“Maybe. But you better not rub his nose in it, John. Especially if he’s in the mayor’s pocket.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Let’s talk with the reporters, and then we’ll go see Rafael Mendoza.”
“Who?”
“The last call Julio Pérez made on the phone in his study was to Rafael Mendoza.”
“But that’s not what you told Kehoe.”
“I lied.”
Santana could tell by Anderson’s wary expression that he felt uncomfortable with the lie.
“You know anything about Mendoza?” Santana said, quickly changing the subject.
“No. You?”
“I met him a couple of times when I was in uniform and worked off-duty security at parties for the mayor.”
“He a criminal attorney?”
“Immigration, mostly. Green Cards, visas.”
“Think he’s capable of murder?”
“I haven’t met many who aren’t.”
Chapter 2
* * *
SANTANA CHECKED HIS REARVIEW MIRROR and saw Anderson cruising in the lane behind him as they drove over the Wabasha Bridge into downtown St. Paul. Mendoza lived in the Lowertown District, a block from the Farmer’s Market in the Riverview Lofts, an eight-story Romanesque building overlooking the Mississippi River. Lofts were the latest marketing tool designed to lure upscale singles and couples into the city. They were being built as fast as developers could acquire enough capital and historic, abandoned buildings could be gutted.
Ice crystals pinged off his car as Santana parked the Crown Vic in a NO PARKING zone along Kellogg Boulevard across the street from the lofts. Anderson parked behind him. He got out of his Crown Vic and into the passenger side of Santana’s car. Even in the dim light Santana could see his partner’s pockmarked complexion.
The digital clock on the dashboard changed to 7:15 as Santana listened to the bursts of chatter from the police radio. The Crown Vic’s heater was pushing out as much heat as a candle.
Cold weather had its advantages. Most gangbangers never ventured outside after dark when below zero wind chills could freeze bare flesh in minutes and hypothermia could mean a slow, silent death. Rape, robbery, burglary, arson, assault, theft and motor vehicle theft, seven of the eight crimes the SPPD classified as Part I crimes according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting guidelines, all f
ell with frigid temperatures. Only homicide was unaffected.
“I’m freezing my ass off,” Anderson said.
Santana detected a hint of alcohol in the tiny clouds of carbon dioxide vapor forming as Anderson exhaled.
“Get yourself some breath mints,” he said.
Anderson looked quickly at Santana and then out the passenger side window.
Santana said, “Have you been going to your AA meetings?”
“Don’t worry. I’m fine.”
Santana hadn’t detected any alcohol on Anderson’s breath at Pérez’s house. He considered pressing Anderson but decided now wasn’t the time. Instead, he recounted his conversation with Sandra Pérez and her daughter, Gabriela.
“You think either of them are good for it?” Anderson said.
“Not the wife. We’ll have to check out the Casa Blanca restaurant. Make sure the daughter was there all afternoon.”
Anderson looked out the windshield at the city and the lights in the buildings that were burning like embers in the charcoal sky. “How long have we been together, John?”
“Nearly three years.”
“How many murder investigations?”
“I’m not keeping count.”
Anderson sat quietly, staring out the windshield.
“Something on your mind, partner?”
Anderson waited a couple of beats. Then he said, “Kehoe wasn’t a bad guy when I partnered with him in the Narcotic’s Division.”
“He ever work homicide?”
“No. But we were pretty close once. I remember he took the great divide pretty hard.”
“Maybe if he had spent more time pumping his wife rather than iron,” Santana said, “he would still be married to her.”
A large orange snowplow rumbled by with its plow up. The ground underneath the Crown Vic shook from the plow’s weight as the spinning rotor attached to the rear end spread a special mixture of salt and sand over the ice that coated the street. A sign across the back of the cab read: STAY BACK, STAY ALIVE.
Santana checked his watch. It was 7:29. He turned off the car, got out and headed toward the Riverview Lofts. The cold night air smelled of diesel from a Metro Transit bus stopped at a corner. A slippery film underneath his feet slowed him down, made him feel like a child just learning to walk. Behind him, he could hear Anderson cursing the treacherous footing.
White Tombs Page 2
