She crawled forward again, her hand on Gerald’s ankle—until she hit something with the axe handle. She pulled back on Gerald’s ankle to make him stop. She reached across to the other side of the hallway and felt along the baseboard. There was a finger-wide vertical gap in the wall—then something metallic. It took her a second to realize it was a hinge sticking less than an inch out into the hallway. That was what her axe had hit. A hinge meant a door. She pulled back on Gerald’s ankle again. His face appeared in front of her, their masks almost touching.
“A door,” she yelled and pointed. Probably a closet. Maybe a door to the outside. Maybe a door to where the fire was. He nodded and put his gloved hand on the door to feel if it was hot. She could barely see him, yet they were shoulder to shoulder. She felt him shake his head “no” instead of seeing it or hearing him saying the word. She crouched down and flattened herself up against the wall as Gerald did the same against the wall on the other side of the door. If the fire was in the closet and they opened it, they could have flashover, which would instantly ignite everything in the room, including them. But they still had to check. Children often hid in closets to escape fires. Gerald cracked the door slowly. Nothing happened.
She pulled the door open enough so she could squeeze her upper body through it, then grabbed Gerald’s ankle again and, with her other arm, reached into the closet as far as she could. She pushed through long hanging pieces of clothing—maybe dresses or coats—until she touched the back wall, then swept her hand along the sides. There was no one in there. She edged back out and tugged on Gerald’s ankle to let him know they could keep searching.
They crawled out of the hallway and into a bigger room, where Lucy’s axe once again reached out into blackness. But here, instead of a smooth and uninterrupted wall, there were things in their way, pushed up against the wall: furniture. They had to stop and feel everything as they tried to keep the wall to their left. A chair. A couch. A table. It was like a Halloween game Lucy had played when she was six. Her friend had told her to stick her hand into a box and figure out what was inside by touching it. Cooked spaghetti noodles were supposed to feel like intestines, and peeled grapes like eyeballs. Here it was much the same, but she had to figure out what the secret something was through heavy work gloves. She groped over a chair. A bookshelf. She crawled along, feeling a table. A desk. A lamp. A sofa. She was getting better at this. Another lamp. A chair leg. And something else. A shoe.
Her hand crawled around the shoe. It was next to something—no, attached to something—a leg. The skin felt soft under her glove, like a half-deflated water balloon. Her hand tightened on Gerald’s ankle. She tried yelling to him, but she sounded like she was talking through a tin can on a string. His face appeared in front of hers. He put a hand on her arm to quiet her.
She breathed and said slowly, “There’s someone in the chair.”
He nodded. She felt for Gerald’s foot and hooked her own ankle over his. She put her hands back on the shoe and felt her way up the leg. Just below the knee, something caught on her glove. It was sticky. She felt a smooth strap that wrapped its way around the leg. She thought at first it was a belt, but it wasn’t thick enough. And it was sticky: tape. It was tape. The person was taped to the chair. She felt her way to the thigh, then to the torso. She felt Gerald reach forward to feel for himself and then edge his way slightly to the right. A moment later she heard Gerald yell, “There’s something else over here.” She stopped and listened, trying to hear Gerald through her hood. Then his face was in front of her: “Another body—in a chair.”
She could hear him, but not see him, talking on the radio to Command.
She reached out to touch the person in front of her again, and felt her way up their chest, kneeling up as much as she dared, trying to keep her head low so as to not disturb the upper gas layers in the room. The smoke here was even thicker. She couldn’t make out a damn thing. She should pull off her mask so she could see better. Maybe pull off her gloves to feel for the person’s pulse. She eased her panic back down and breathed slowly. No one could have lived through this smoke. No one. Whoever it was, they were dead.
* * *
Gil, Susan, and the girls stood in the courtyard of the Palace of the Governors museum, which had served as the governor’s mansion for more than three hundred years. The play had ended when Mary and Joseph knocked on the museum door and, after no devil appeared to bar their way, they were allowed inside. The crowd was now gathered drinking hot cocoa and eating bizcochito cookies. Therese and Joy weren’t on their cell phones for the moment, and were warming their hands against the sides of the paper cups full of hot chocolate they held. It was only 7:15 P.M. but already almost freezing. A group of carolers stood near an old stagecoach that was on permanent display in the museum’s open inner courtyard and sang “Silent Night.” A few small bonfires and even more farolitos circled the space. Gil looked up at the huge cottonwoods laced with snow.
“Daddy, how old do you think these trees are?” Joy asked.
“At least a hundred years,” Gil said. “Maybe they were even here when Lew Wallace was governor.” Wallace had lived in the palace in the 1870s, while he was writing Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, with all the windows shuttered because he thought Billy the Kid was coming to gun him down.
Next to Gil, Susan scrunched up her face as she took another bite of a bizcochito, making him laugh. “They aren’t that bad,” Gil said, taking a bite of his own cookie.
“It tastes like they used maple flavoring and butter,” she said, shaking her head. “Why can’t anyone ever make it right? It’s just a sugar cookie with a little anise.” She took another bite before saying, “Did you remember to invite Joe over to your mom’s for Christmas Day dinner?”
“He’s actually going out of town,” Gil said.
“Is he going back east to visit his family?” she said, making a face before taking another bite.
“No. To Las Vegas,” Gil said.
“Who goes to Las Vegas for Christmas?” Therese asked.
“Someone who likes to get drunk and gamble,” Joy said.
“Mom, can we go to Las Vegas for Christmas?” Therese asked.
“A la,” Joy said, in response to her sister. “No way.”
“Watch your language, young lady,” Susan said.
“A la is not a bad word,” Joy said.
“But it’s part of a la verga, and that’s bad…” Therese said.
“Girls…” Susan said in warning.
“That just means a male body part,” Joy said. “It’s not worse than hell or damn…”
“And we do not use any of those words,” Susan said.
“It’s not like I said chingadera,” Joy said, teasing her mother.
“Okay, enough,” Gil said as Joy and Therese started laughing at their mom’s frustration. “Let’s talk about something else. What did you get Grandma Montoya for Christmas?”
The girls started talking about what they’d bought for his mother as he saw his mother’s cousin coming through the crowd. Robert was still wearing red face paint with black around the eyes but had changed into his street clothes. As the two men shook hands, Gil said, “I didn’t know you could act.”
“I don’t think what I did could be called acting,” Robert said. “They handed me a piece of paper with some words on it and said, ‘Yell this really loud in Spanish.’ So I did.”
“I thought you did great,” Susan said, giving him a hug.
“I guess it wasn’t too bad for a last-second thing,” he said. “I had to fill in. Remember that guy who does it every year and always puts on the red body paint and the real ram horns? He didn’t show up.”
Gil felt the phone buzz again on his hip. He pulled it off his belt and looked at the caller ID. This time it was work.
* * *
The sound of the warning alarm on Lucy’s air tank made her jump and swear. It sounded like a car horn on steroids. Her emergency beacon went off a second later, sending bri
ght white flashes through the smoke. Their fifteen minutes were up. If there was anyone left alive in the house, they weren’t going to get rescued.
“Time to go,” she heard Gerald yell through his face mask.
She could feel him moving around, trying to get himself and the hose resituated. She waited until his hand grabbed at hers and placed it back on his ankle. She reached out to the wall with her right hand and put her axe in her left. She tugged on Gerald’s ankle to let him know she was ready, and they started to crawl back out. The strobe light from her beacon made the house look like a disco party gone wrong. She closed her eyes against the flashes and tried to slow down her breathing. She concentrated on her knees and hands making contact with the floor as she moved. She had about five minutes of emergency air left in the tank. She tried to think of something soothing, like getting a warm shower or breathing fresh air. Then Gerald’s alarm went off. He had probably been breathing slower than Lucy, giving him a few minutes longer. They were both on reserve air now. The sound of both alarms was almost painful, but Gerald didn’t crawl faster. They couldn’t afford any mistakes, which was what happened when people rushed. Instead, he kept the same pace for the next three minutes, which seemed to stretch on for hours, until they saw the lights from the fire trucks streaming through the open front door. Only then did Lucy let go of his ankle and take a full breath, pulling a last gasp out of her air tank.
CHAPTER TWO
December 20
The first thing Gil heard as he walked up to the fire scene was the loud East Coast accent of his partner, Joe Phillips.
“We are clearly in the county,” Joe was saying to a Santa Fe County sheriff’s deputy as both men pointed flashlights at a map held between them. They stood partway down a long driveway crowded with fire engines and emergency vehicles. They were about twenty feet off the road, but Gil couldn’t see the house at the other end of the driveway. The homes in the Montaña Verde neighborhood were purposely not visible from the street, their heavily forested two- to three-acre lots offering a natural screen from anyone driving by.
“Look right here,” the deputy said, poking at the map. “This is where we are, within the city limits.”
“You are either insane or blind,” Joe said. The jurisdictional fight was an old one. The lines that divided Santa Fe city from Santa Fe County always became an issue when both sides were called to a crime scene. It became a game of “Not It,” where the loser was left doing the investigation. Gil stopped and looked to the west, south, and north to get his bearings from the mountains in each direction. He could still make out the dark outlines of the Ortiz, Sangre de Cristo, and Jemez ranges. Joe was right. They were outside the city limits.
“Will you tell this guy that we are in the county?” Joe said to Gil as he saw him walking toward them.
“Hey, Paul,” Gil said, shaking the hand of Deputy Paul Gutierrez.
“Of course, you guys know each other,” Joe said. “I should have guessed. You’re probably cousins. Everybody’s a cousin.”
“What’s going on?” Gil asked the deputy, ignoring Joe.
For a moment, Gutierrez was quiet, then said, “Listen, Gil. My daughter is coming home tomorrow from her third tour in Afghanistan…”
“We are clearly in the city,” Joe said, folding up the map and switching off his flashlight. “We couldn’t be more in the city if we tried. Whoever said we were in the county was a complete idiot.” Joe walked off toward the fire scene without another word.
“Thanks, Gil,” Deputy Gutierrez, said. “And thank your partner for me. He seems like a good guy.”
“Sometimes,” Gil said.
“Listen, the least I can do is help you out before I leave,” Gutierrez said. “How about I go interview some neighbors. Maybe I can find someone who saw the home owners.”
They both turned to look as they heard the noise of car tires crunching from the direction of the street. A gray car, with MONTAÑA VERDE NEIGHBORHOOD SECURITY written on the side, came to a stop near the end of the long driveway. A man dressed in a security guard’s uniform got out and adjusted his belt.
“I’ve got this,” Gutierrez said before trotting down the driveway and shaking hands with the guard. Gil went in search of Joe. He found him farther up the driveway, near the front of the house, watching the firefighters work. Much of the scene was in shadow, but other parts were lit with bright lights mounted on the backs of the fire trucks. One group of firefighters was guiding a truck as it backed toward a large, red rubber holding tank full of water. Others carried saws and ladders toward the back of the home. From this vantage point the house looked mostly intact. It was a single-story with a three-car garage. In this neighborhood, the houses, with their easy access to the ski area only seven miles down the road and views of the valley, started at around $5 million.
Gil glanced over at Joe, whose coat collar didn’t quite hide the chain around his neck that held his dog tags, which he still wore even though his time in Iraq was long over.
“Paul wanted me to tell you thank you,” Gil said. Joe didn’t respond. “He said that you are a really good guy,” he added. Still Joe said nothing. “He said it’s like your heart is filled with happiness and butterflies and a beautiful light…”
“Shut the hell up, detective sergeant, sir,” Joe said.
Gil smiled. They had been partners for only four months but they seemed to be easing into something resembling a routine, based mostly on Joe constantly harassing Gil about his crisp haircut or precise driving, and Gil occasionally harassing Joe back, mostly about his inability to take a compliment.
“You know taking this case means you might not make it to Las Vegas,” Gil said.
“My flight doesn’t leave until Christmas Eve, so we have”—Joe looked at his watch—“three days and twenty-one hours to find this guy.”
“What do we know?” Gil asked.
“They found two adult males inside who didn’t burn up,” Joe said. “Maybe they were overtaken by the smoke or something. I don’t have a report on the condition of the bodies or where they were found.”
“Do we have names?” Gil asked.
“Not yet,” Joe said. “Dispatch is trying to do a reverse search on the address to see who owned the house. I figure we can just run the plates on the cars when we get a look in the garage.”
“Who called the fire in? A neighbor?”
“Nah. Just some trucker driving by who saw the flames from the main road,” Joe said. “I don’t think there are any neighbors around this time of year. Most of the houses here are second or third homes.”
“I guess we should go find out when we can get inside.”
Gil asked a passing firefighter the location of Incident Command and was pointed to the fire engine closest to the scene. Inside the cab was a man holding a radio microphone in each hand and saying into one of them, “Make sure and check for any exposures. We have a lot of trees on the west and east sides of the house.” “Copy that,” someone on the other end of the radio answered.
“Charlie, how are you?” Gil asked the man in the front seat as they shook hands. Charlie Solano was an EMS commander who had retired from the Albuquerque Fire Department only to become a full-time volunteer with Santa Fe County.
“Not too bad, Gil,” Solano said. “Better than the folks inside. Hold on a second.” Solano listened to the radio as someone said, “Command, this is Team A. Can we get an ETA on the next tanker at the second drop tank?” Solano answered, “Copy that. Stand by.” He clicked the mike in his right hand, saying, “Shuttle Five, this is Command. We need that water ASAP. Our second drop tank is getting low. What’s your location?” The answer came back, “Just passing the county dump.” Solano answered, “Copy that. Command out.” He clicked the mike in his left hand, saying, “Team A, this is Command. Your water is five minutes out.”
“What can you tell me?” Gil asked once the radios had calmed down.
“Two bodies. In pretty good shape, according to my guy
s,” Solano said. “It looks like they weren’t touched by the fire. Don’t know what killed them. We haven’t had a good look at them, since we were busy putting out the fire.” The bodies would stay where they were until a field investigator from the Medical Examiner arrived to take charge of them. Dead bodies were not the fire department’s problem.
“I would assume that would be your priority,” Joe said.
“Pretty much,” Solano said. They cared only about the living.
“Are you thinking accidental fire or arson?” Gil asked.
“We have no idea,” Solano said. “I guess you’re wondering when you can go in. We got knockdown of the main fire about twenty minutes ago, so there is no more active flame. We have a few hot spots to still mop up. Let me make sure the structure is intact enough for you to go in. Say about another ten minutes.”
“Can we start limiting personnel in the house?”
“No problem,” Solano said. “We’re about done. I’ll release everyone except me and my engine. The water on the ground from the hoses is all turning to ice anyway. It’s getting too dangerous.”
“Can we talk to the firefighters who found the bodies before they go?” Gil asked.
“Sure,” Solano said. “One of them is out doing a tanker shuttle…”
“A tanker what?” Joe asked.
“He’s from back east,” Gil explained to Solano, “where every corner has a fire hydrant.”
“Well, out here we don’t really have hydrants,” Solano said to Joe. “What we do have are tanker trucks that go get water and dump it into big portable tubs at the fire scene. Then we pump the water from the tubs into the hoses.”
“A tub, like the red rubber thing in the driveway, that looks like an above-ground swimming pool?” Joe asked.
“Yeah,” Solano said. “That’s our water supply. We have to go get more when we run out. Tonight the nearest place for the trucks to get water is five miles away.”
“Sounds like a lot of work,” Joe said.
“Your guy will be back in about five minutes,” Solano said. “But his partner is still on scene. You can’t miss her. Just look for the tiniest firefighter out there.”
When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery Page 2
