by Joseph Badal
Barbara turned into the strip joint’s lot and circled twice. Even at midnight, there were two dozen vehicles parked there. But not Navarro’s vintage Lincoln Continental. She was surprised at how disappointed she felt. She had to ask herself why a great-looking guy like Navarro, someone she barely knew, would be interested in an overweight, depressed cop with a drinking problem who was still trying to get over the loss of her husband. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she grumbled. Barbara sped out of the parking lot, skidded on the wet pavement, but brought her car under control.
She arrived home ten minutes later. The rain had stopped and the “after rain” smell filled the air. She parked in the driveway, entered the house, and dumped her gear on the kitchen table. Then she went to the liquor cabinet and, bottle by bottle, emptied the booze into the kitchen sink.
THURSDAY
JULY 1
CHAPTER 37
“Whose idea was this?” Susan groaned. “It’s barely light out.”
Barbara laughed and passed over a Starbucks coffee as Susan slid onto the front seat. “Get a grip, partner. We’re on a mission. We’re the good guys, and we’re out to solve a murder.”
Susan groaned again and crossed her eyes at Barbara. “I can’t stand it when you’re so cheerful.” She sipped her coffee, sighed an “Aah,” and told Barbara to head for Sandia Heights. “I called my cousin who works for the medical association. She keeps a directory of all her members’ home addresses and telephone numbers. Doctor Stein lives up by the tram, right in the foothills.”
“How do you know he’ll be home?” Barbara asked.
“I don’t. But one thing I learned from Manny and me going to a counselor is that psychiatrist, psychologist, and counselor types usually see patients into the evening, after the patient’s work day, so they tend to get into the office around 10:00 a.m. Start late, end late.”
“He’s not going to be happy about us showing up unannounced.”
“You’ve got me confused with someone who gives a damn.”
The drive east to Sandia Heights took them from about 5,500 feet elevation to more than six thousand feet. The foothills of the Sandia Mountains, strewn with tractor trailer-sized boulders, loomed above them. Nathan Stein’s home was a modernistic, two-story steel-and-concrete structure that seemed out of place among its adobe and Spanish tile-roofed neighbors. It sat at the end of a dead end street where backyards edged against the boundary of National Forest land. The entire city of Albuquerque spread out to the west, nearly filling the wide Rio Grande Valley. Sandia Pueblo lands bordered the city on the north. Miles of rooftops and green swaths of trees filled the sloping vista as the land dropped toward the river and then, beyond, rose toward the west. On the far side of the river, new rooftops covered land that had been brown mesa until just a few years ago. Now the rooftops spread westward until they stopped abruptly at the foot of long-dead volcanoes that topped the ridgeline of Nine Mile Hill.
Barbara pressed the doorbell at Stein’s house. It played a tune—If I was a rich man—that went on for ten seconds. “What is it with the rich?” asked Susan.
“I don’t have a clue,” Barbara said. “But I sure would like to find out from personal experience.”
No one answered the bell. There was an enormous metal knocker shaped like a horseshoe on the door. Barbara lifted it and let it drop. It made a surprisingly loud sound that seemed to reverberate throughout the house. Susan shaded her eyes with her hand and stared through the sidelight window next to the door.
“No one could sleep through—Jesus!” Susan yelled and jumped back as a German shepherd hurled itself at the window. Its fangs were bared and it snarled as though it wanted to bust through the window to get at them.
Once Barbara was confident the glass was strong enough to withstand the animal’s assaults, she looked closely at the dog. “Is that blood on its muzzle?”
Susan bent forward and stared through the glass, which made the dog even more agitated. “Yeah,” she said as she pulled her pistol from her purse.
Barbara pulled out her weapon, too. “Call dispatch. Tell them we need backup and an Animal Control Officer. I’d rather not have to shoot that dog.”
“I left my phone in the car,” Susan said.
Barbara pulled her own phone out of a pocket and handed it to Susan.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll check for another entrance. You try to keep the dog up here.”
Susan frowned. “How do you propose I do that?”
“Use your feminine charms.”
Barbara moved to the right of the house, squeezed between boulders in the side yard, and slid down a steep cement retaining wall to a patio. A sliding glass door with floor-length curtains blocked her view into the house. She tried the door. Locked. Barbara moved around the corner of the house to the rear. There was another patio, beneath a second-floor balcony. The curtains on this patio’s door were partially open revealing an exercise area with half a dozen weight machines, a treadmill, and a stationary bicycle.
Barbara decided she couldn’t wait for backup or animal control. Someone could be injured inside. She looked around the backyard and spotted a line of grapefruit-sized rocks bordering an herb garden. She grabbed one of the rocks and threw it as hard as she could at the patio door. The rock crashed through the glass, bounced on the carpet, and landed on the treadmill. The glass spider-webbed away from the hole, held for a moment, then crashed down on the floor. She stepped gingerly through the shattered door, her pistol thrust out in a two-handed grip. Nothing suspicious caught her attention in the exercise room. She went through an open doorway in the room’s far wall.
This was a larger space furnished with a king-size bed, a dresser, two bedside tables with lamps, and a sitting area that included two plush chairs, a coffee table, and a big screen television. She detected a cesspool-like odor. Butterflies erupted in her stomach as she recognized the smell of blood and the stench of human waste. Beyond another door, slightly ajar, she heard a rapid clicking noise that got louder by the second. Claws on tile! She charged for the door, pushed her shoulder against it, just as the German shepherd launched itself. The dog hit the door with a tremendous jolt, but Barbara’s momentum won out. She shoved until the latch clicked, then leaned against the door as the dog raked its claws against the wood. Barbara could feel her heart beat against her rib cage.
She waited for her pulse to subside, then holstered her pistol. She noticed a telephone on the end table beyond the bed and moved toward it to call Susan on the cell phone to let her know she was safely inside. Relatively safe, she amended the thought as the dog snarled and scratched on the other side of the door. She rounded the bed and came to a dead stop. A body, clothed in only a white towel, sprawled face up on the floor next to the bed. Nathan Stein. Blood soaked the carpet around his head like a dark-red halo. It appeared the blood had come from the back of his head. She would have to wait for a field investigator from OMI to verify that. A bloodied, three-foot tall brass candlestick holder was stuck in the center of Stein’s chest. Barbara looked more closely at the candlestick holder. The spike on its end, normally used to hold a very large candle, was the instrument of impalement. There was a saucer-sized stain of blood around the point of penetration.
Barbara snatched several tissues from a box by the bed, covered her mouth and nose, did a slow 360-degree turn, and scanned the room. There was a bloody smudge on the corner of the bedside table and faint impressions of bloody paw prints on the light-brown carpet. She knew Stein was dead—his eyes were open in a death stare and his skin was bluish-white. But she checked for a pulse anyway. He hadn’t been dead long. Long enough for rigor mortis to have set in, but not for it to pass.
The bedding was in disarray—the top sheet and blanket were bunched at the bottom of the bed; the depressions in the pillows indicated more than one person might have used them. There was a stain on the bottom sheet. The lab would have to test it, but she thought it might be semen.
She again carefully inspected every inch of the bedroom. Everything seemed to be in order, other than the bed, the body, and the bloodstains. Then she looked at the big-screen television mounted on the wall. Someone had busted the screen. A hardback book rested on the TV’s innards. Barbara approached the TV and looked at the book’s spine. The title was Sexual Games Every Man Should Know. A satellite receiver occupied the top shelf of an open cabinet beside the TV. A DVD player was on a second shelf. A red light glowed on its face. She’d have to check it out later.
Susan entered the room from the exercise area at that moment. “You break the glass door, or was it already . . . oh, my Lord, what’s that smell?”
“I broke the glass, and that smell is what’s left of Dr. Nathan Stein.”
The dog continued to scratch maniacally at the other side of the door, and he began whining in a loud, high-pitched way that reminded Barbara of Lieutenant Salas.
“What’s with Thor?” Susan asked.
“Who?”
“The dog. Thor sounds right for an animal with that much aggression. He left me all alone at the front.”
Then the dog suddenly went quiet.
Susan asked, “What’s he up to now?”
“He’s waiting in ambush,” Barbara said.
A sly look crossed Susan’s face. She took Barbara’s cell phone from her jacket pocket, walked to the door to the exercise room, and dialed a number.
“This is Detective Martinez. I need to speak with Detective Gabelli.”
Barbara watched Susan tap her high-heeled foot on the carpeted floor. “What are you up to?” she asked.
Susan held up a finger in a “give me a minute” gesture.
“Ah, Gabelli, it’s Martinez. The Comstock case just got more complicated.”
Barbara could hear Gabelli’s voice as Susan held the phone away from her ear.
“I know, I know, Vinnie. It’s your case now. We just found Victoria Comstock’s shrink dead on his bedroom floor. Thought you’d want to know.”
Susan listened and then said, “Yeah, he’s dead. Since this is your case now, maybe you should get out here right away.” She gave him the address and directions to the house and told him they’d meet him on the street.
“You sure?” Barbara asked Susan when she’d terminated the call.
Susan shrugged. “Didn’t the Lieutenant tell us this was now Gabelli’s case?” Then she flashed a smile and said, “I’ve never been surer about anything in my entire life.”
CHAPTER 38
Susan avoided the body and the dried blood around it and skirted the side of the bed.
“Susan, come in here,” Barbara shouted. “You’re not going to believe this.”
Susan moved into the bathroom, where Barbara knelt in front of an open cabinet. Six foot-high stacks of DVDs were inside, all with white hand-printed labels along the spines.
“It appears he was partial to home movies,” Barbara said.
Barbara put on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled a handful of disks from the first stack. She held them up so Susan could see the labels—each had a name and a date, the earliest from three years ago; the latest dated a month ago.
Susan read the names aloud: “ELIZABETH, KATRINA, CONNIE, CONNIE, CONNIE, VICTORIA, VICTORIA, CECELIA, PAULA, CONNIE & HECTOR.”
Barbara placed the DVDs on the floor and extracted more from the cabinet. More first names and dates. Some of the names were the same as those in the first stack. “Gee, I wonder if these Connies and Victorias are our Connie and Victoria.”
“Golly,” Susan said, “you think so?”
Barbara turned and looked at Susan. “Maybe you could find something around here big enough to hold all these DVDs?”
Susan wagged a finger at Barbara. “Remember, we’re not on the Comstock case anymore.”
“Of course,” Barbara said, “I remember. But this is evidence in the Stein murder case.”
Susan walked from the bathroom to a closet in the bedroom that had shelves stacked with linens and towels. She grabbed two pillowcases and went back to the bathroom.
Susan held one of the pillowcases open while Barbara carefully placed half the disks inside it. She knotted the pillowcase at the top and set it aside. Then they packed as many of the remaining disks as possible in the second pillowcase. Susan shoved the last two into her purse. One was labeled PAULA, the other ESTHER. Both had dates from several months ago. Susan picked up the pillowcases and told Barbara she would take them to the car. She was about to leave the house through the exercise area, when Barbara called out to her, “You might want to check the DVD player. The POWER light is on. There might be a disk in it.”
Susan leaned the pillowcases against the wall by the television and pressed the EJECT button on the player. A disk slid out. Susan, still wearing rubber gloves, took it from the machine. The label read: CONNIE. The date on it was just about two weeks ago. She slipped it into her purse, too.
Barbara caught up with Susan as she placed the pillowcases in the trunk of the unmarked. Susan opened the back door of the car, removed the three disks from her purse and tossed them on the backseat.
It was now nearly 8:30. The summer sun was already high enough to make standing in the street uncomfortable. Barbara pointed toward a bench shaded by a large elm tree in Stein’s front courtyard. They settled in to wait for Gabelli, serenaded by the snarling dog which had moved back upstairs to the entrance and resumed crashing against the sidelight window. But after a few minutes, the dog apparently tired and lay down.
“You notice that my call for backup got all kinds of quick results?” Susan said.
“Thank God we weren’t in a gunfight. We could be dead by now. I do believe our days are numbered with the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department.”
Susan wasn’t sure she agreed. It wasn’t her nature to give up something she valued without a fight. But she did recognize that if they got no support from their fellow officers in a dangerous situation, then their days could be numbered in a literal sense. She was still chewing on that thought when Gabelli drove up.
“Oh shit!” Susan exclaimed. “He’s got the lieutenant with him.”
“Look who else has arrived,” Barbara said, as an Animal Control vehicle pulled into the cul-de-sac right behind Gabelli.
Barbara and Susan left the bench and walked to meet Gabelli and Salas halfway to Stein’s front door.
Gabelli yelled, “What the hell’s going on here? You’re not supposed to be involved with this case anymore.”
“Relax, Gordo,” Susan said. “We called you as soon as we found the body.”
Salas asked, “Whatya got?”
Barbara hitched a thumb back toward the house. “Nathan Stein’s dead. In the bedroom. Someone busted his skull open and stabbed him in the chest with a candle stick.”
“Like in the game of Clue,” Susan said.
Gabelli grimaced. “What d’ya mean?” he asked.
Barbara coughed to cover a laugh. She saw Salas smile and then suppress it and shoot Susan an angry look. “Looks like he’s been dead for a couple hours,” she said. “We entered the house from the back, through a sliding glass door.”
Salas glared at Barbara. He didn’t need to say he was pissed about Susan and her being here. They had obviously ignored his orders. “I’ll deal with you two later. I want you to go back to the office. Now!”
Barbara was about to tell Salas about the disks when Gabelli announced, “I’ll go in and secure the scene.”
“I wouldn’t do that just yet,” Barbara said. “There’s—”
Gabelli gave her the middle finger salute behind Salas’s back and marched around the corner of the house.
Salas seemed to notice the Animal Control officer for the first time. “What are you doing here?” he snapped at him.
“Got a call about a vicious dog at 12156,” the man said. He was short, Hispanic, with small rips in one leg of his uniform pants. He looked at a clipboard in his hand and then looked b
ack at Salas. “Called in by a Detective Martinez.”
Salas turned to Susan. “Is that right?”
She nodded.
Salas seemed momentarily confused. He looked at Barbara, then at the Animal Control guy, then at Susan again. A light seemed to go on behind his eyes. He groaned and yelled, “Dammit!” Then he sprinted around the house.
Susan looked at the Animal Control guy. “I think you’d better get your equipment and go into that house. There’s an officer in real trouble in there.”
“How do you know that?” he asked.
Susan smiled. “Female intuition.”
CHAPTER 39
“Your place is ten minutes from here,” Susan said, as they drove away from Nathan Stein’s home. “I assume you have a DVD player.”
Barbara felt a spurt of acid hit her stomach. “You heard Salas. He told us to go down to headquarters.”
“He’ll be tied up at Stein’s place for a couple hours,” Susan said. “We can look at some of the DVDs and be downtown by noon.”
Barbara exhaled an impatient breath and shook her head. “You may not care about your job, but I don’t want to get fired.”
“What makes you think I don’t care about my job? You got me all wrong, partner. It’s just that I’m not about to roll over and play dead.”
“Why take a chance on pissing off Salas even more?”
“We walk away from this damned case, we’ll be tainted—the two gals who couldn’t get the job done and had to let the boys come to the rescue. We need to take some chances if we hope to solve this crime and save our careers.”
Barbara knew Susan was a risk-taker by nature. She envied her partner and sometimes wished she could be more like her. But she did not envy Susan’s foolhardiness. “What do you plan to tell Salas about the DVDs?”
“Hell, I don’t know. You’ll think of something.”
