When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery

by Christine Barber

  “Can we talk about it later? I need sleep.”

  “Sure,” he said, standing up to give her a hug. “But why do you smell like a campfire?”

  * * *

  The light path made by Gil’s flashlight reflected off the water in the hallway as he followed the sound of voices to the back bedroom. He stopped in the doorway but went unnoticed by the trio inside. Liz had arrived while Gil had been outside getting the names of the homeowners from Dispatch. The operator had sent two driver’s license photos to his cell phone. The photos matched the men in the living room, but the person hanging in the bedroom was still unidentified. Now Gil watched as Adam and Liz moved carefully about the room, hampered by the ice and their heavy winter coats, while Joe stood in the corner, out of the way. Liz and Adam had cleared away some burned debris and set up lights on tripods aimed at the hanging body. The white light hit the man’s blackened skin, which was cracked in places, showing pink tissue underneath and gleaming patches where ice had started to crystallize. The burns had been concentrated on the man’s upper body and face, which had sustained the most damage. His hands were black ash, and his facial features were burned down to bone and teeth.

  Gil heard a laugh. As usual, Joe was harassing someone. This time it was Liz.

  “I think having kids is the ultimate form of feminism,” Joe was saying.

  “What do you know about feminism?” Adam asked. “Or having kids?”

  “I think being a lesbian is the ultimate form of feminism,” Liz said as she crouched down under the charred body.

  “That would mean a man can’t be a feminist,” Joe said. “Can I at least be a lesbian? I have my own power tools.”

  Liz glared up at Joe while Adam said, “Why do you bug her like this?”

  “I can’t help it,” Joe said. “She reminds me of my sister.”

  “Your sister must hate you,” Gil said from the doorway.

  “Hey, Gil, can you help us settle an argument?” Joe asked. “What’s the definition of a feminist?”

  “It sounds like you’re about to tell a joke,” Adam said.

  “I’m being serious,” Joe said before Gil interrupted, saying, “How’s it coming?”

  Liz answered. “Adam and I are almost done in here. Then we’ll get started on the other two.”

  “We have an ID on the men in the living room,” Gil said.

  “What are the names?” Liz asked, as she found her clipboard and a pen to take the names down for her report.

  “James Price and Alexander Jacobson.”

  “Really?” she said, looking up. “I know them. I don’t know them well. I just met them through friends.”

  “I’m sorry, Liz,” Adam said. “I can handle processing their bodies, if you want…”

  But Liz said quickly, “No. Thanks. It’s okay, really. I barely knew them.”

  “Do you know what they did for a living?” Gil asked.

  “I know Alexander was in the theater; I think he was a makeup artist for the opera during the summer,” she said. “Jim works up on the Hill.”

  “What’s the Hill?” Joe asked.

  “God, I always forget that you’re not from here,” Liz said. “The Hill is Los Alamos National Laboratory.”

  “Is that because it’s up on a hill?” Joe asked.

  “It’s what locals called it during World War II,” Gil said. “Everyone knew the government was building a laboratory, but they had to pretend it didn’t exist, so they just called it the Hill.”

  “Why the big secret?” Joe asked.

  “Los Alamos National Laboratory,” Liz said, annoyed. “That doesn’t ring any bells for you? Do you know anything about history? It’s where the first nuclear bomb was built. The one they dropped on Hiroshima.”

  Gil could tell Liz was getting close to kicking them off the scene, something she did with regularity, so he jumped in, saying, “Why don’t we go out into the other room and make sure it’s Price and Jacobson before we get too off track.”

  “Fine,” Liz said. “Adam can you finish up in here? We’ll go take a look.”

  As they walked to the living room, the carpet no longer squished with water; it crunched with ice. Liz stopped momentarily before the bodies, shining her pen light at their faces. She said, “It’s them,” then got down to work. While she took some pictures of the overall scene, Joe and Gil set up construction floor lights. She made notes on her clipboard and then took out a measuring tape. Not knowing how else to help, Gil and Joe stood back and let her do her job.

  After a few more notes, Liz approached the bodies. She looked them over, taking more pictures.

  “They each have a bullet wound to the head,” she said, more matter-of-fact than usual. “They have multiple cuts to their arms.”

  She knelt down in front of the man with the beard and the dark stain on his trousers, who matched the picture of Alexander Jacobson, and pulled back the front of his unbuttoned dark blue dress shirt. The color of his shirt had been hiding bloodstains. What looked to be the letter T was carved into his chest. Gil had half expected Joe to make a comment, but he was silent, his face tight. Liz took another half dozen pictures then carefully used the tip of her pen to pull out the front of Jacobson’s pants so she could aim her flashlight down the length of his abdomen to his groin.

  “His genitals are cut,” she said, making a note on her clipboard. Her effect was flat. “The penis is sliced completely off.” Without a word, Joe turned away, heading off into the dark dining room, where he could hear what was being said without having to look at the bodies.

  Liz moved to the next body: James Price. She noted a similar gunshot wound to the head, then moved her flashlight down to inspect the face. She used her pen to pull the duct tape off Price’s mouth. It was wet, so it gave way easily. Liz started to say something else, then stopped. Instead, she stuck her gloved hand in between Price’s teeth and forced his jaw open. Using her fingers, she pulled out something. It was Jacobson’s severed penis. She sat back on her heels and looked at the mass of tissue in her hand. A minute passed. Then another. Gil wondered if seeing firsthand this level of violence against people she knew was starting to take its toll. It certainly had for Joe, who was now pacing nearby. Liz stood up silently and placed the penis into an evidence bag. Only after she had written all the proper information on the bag, did she finally speak, “I’ve only ever seen this level of torture once before,” she said. “And that ended up being a hate crime.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  December 21

  Mateo Garcia stood watching his quarter horse, Baby, play in the new snow, her cold breath forming wisps around her muzzle. As she galloped down the field, the horse’s gray coat flashed past dark tree trunks, barren of leaves. The white snow that Baby kicked up as she played flashed out like glitter being sprinkled over the ground. Mateo was watching to see if Baby was still favoring her front right leg. Yesterday, he thought he had seen her wince after they got home from their evening ride, but today she seemed fine.

  Phantom, as usual, stood near the fence closest to Mateo. Her Appaloosa coat—a solid bay color in the front with white leopard spots in the back—made it look like someone had thrown snow over her hindquarters. He patted Phantom on her side while the cold snapped at his ears, making him pull his cowboy hat tighter on his head. He went into the barn to flake a bale and a half of hay into the trough, then cracked the ice that had formed overnight on the watering station. He had brought hot water down in a bucket and stirred in the wheat bran to make warm mash as a treat for the horses. His two goats had stayed in the barn, not liking the new fallen snow quite as much as Baby.

  But then she always seemed happy, even when he’d first found her. Back then, she’d weighed only six hundred pounds yet was more than fifteen hands high. Mateo had been on a training maneuver with the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s posse. He was riding Phantom, whom his two daughters had trained to be a barrel racer. But when the girls went off to college, Mateo trained her to be a sear
ch-and-rescue horse. Mateo had been in the posse since he was sixteen, joining his father and other members on rides deep into the rough desert or up into the heavily wooded mountains, looking for lost hikers or hunters. The posse no longer did searches for runaway inmates or dangerous criminals. That had stopped twenty years ago, but the members each still wore a gold star badge with SANTA FE COUNTY SHERRIFF’S POSSE written across it.

  The day Mateo found Baby, he was following a steep path between yucca plants and cholla cactus when Phantom hesitated and then veered off the path. Mateo’s first instinct had been to rein her in and pull her back to the trail, but he didn’t. Phantom was a dependable horse who did what she was told and was eager to please. She wouldn’t go off trail unless she had a reason. After a few minutes of riding through the brush, Mateo saw something move beyond the piñon trees. He sat perfectly still as Phantom made her way over to a white-and-gray quarter horse. Her ribs were sticking out of her matted coat and she was almost too weak to support her own weight. Mateo had decided then and there to take the horse home and lie about having looked for her owners. He sat with Baby through much of the first night, with an anxious Phantom in the next stall stomping her feet, whinnying, and swishing her tail. That first week, Mateo fed Baby six times a day, only tiny portions at first. By the seventh day, Phantom was nuzzling Baby, pushing her to move her legs. It was another three months before Mateo attempted to saddle Baby.

  He finished with the hay and scratched the two goats behind the ears, then went out into the cold, taking the dirt path up toward the house. He needed to get to work. The store wouldn’t open itself.

  * * *

  Gil drove his unmarked Crown Victoria down a slight hill, leaving the white-coated desert south of Santa Fe and dropping into the river bosque, where huge cottonwood trees edged in snow stood over salt cedar and chamisa bushes. He slowed as he came into the village of Galisteo and crossed himself as he passed the church. He followed the road past the old Montoya general store, owned by a relative back in the 1930s, and down Avenida de Montoya, a dirt road of frozen mud. He passed his cousin’s house and then his uncle’s before arriving at his parents’ circular driveway. The Pueblo Revival–style house had been built in the 1920s by his grandparents. Even though it was ninety years old, his family considered it the “new” house. He got out of the car, but instead of going inside, he crossed a small field through the knee-deep snow and went to stand near what looked to be an adobe fence but was actually the south edge of the old Montoya hacienda. The house, built in the 1700s with a grant from the king of Spain, had once been home to probably close to thirty people—family members, servants, and Indian slaves. The last person to call it home was Gil’s grandfather and namesake: First District Court Judge Gilbert Nazario Estevan Montoya. Gil’s father had grown up in the new house, which had been built as a wedding present to Gil’s grandmother. It was where his mom still lived.

  The walls of the hacienda had been made of adobe almost two feet thick, but even thick adobe must be replastered every year, or it will crumble. During World War II, when his grandfather was in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, there wasn’t the manpower to do the replastering. That left erosion free to whittle the house down to ruin. The rooms were mostly left to the prairie dogs and mice, except a few where the roof remained; those were still used for storage. But this winter might be the last even for that. The snow that had been piling up for the past two months had taken its toll on what was left of the roof. Gil would have to check everything over in the spring to see if any part of the building might be salvaged.

  He looked across the field toward the north edge of the property, trying to catch sight of one of the flame orange survey flags that marked the spot where Gil and Susan were going to build their house. Before the weather got bad in October, a driveway had been cut through the scrub, up to a hundred-year-old cottonwood that would be in their front yard. Now everything except the tree lay under a foot of snow.

  He walked back over to his mom’s house and stomped the snow off his feet before going inside. He could hear his mom on the phone somewhere. Going into the kitchen, he took the cover off a pot simmering on the stove. He knew it was green chile stew before he was hit with the smell of garlic, pork, and potatoes. According to the timer, it would be done in seven minutes. He could easily distract himself for that long. He got his mother’s blood glucose machine out of the kitchen drawer and sat down. He scrolled through the digital display, making sure her levels were normal so as to keep her diabetes in check.

  “Hi, hito,” his mom said as she came into the kitchen. “Do you want something hot to eat? The stew is almost done.”

  “That sounds great, Mom,” he said. “I can just stay a minute, though.” He waited a moment before asking, “Did you check your blood sugar today? I don’t see the results on the machine.”

  “I’ll do it later,” she said, sounding dismissive, but she was notorious for forgetting to take the blood test every day. “My sugar has been fine.”

  The buzzer went off, and Gil watched his mom spoon some of the stew into a bowl before setting it in front of him. “Do you want to take a bowl to your partner?” she asked.

  “I’m sure he’d like that. Thanks, Mom.” The first bite of stew set off a slow burn on his tongue. Since he was a kid, his mom had spent her winters making green chile stew, making sure it was ready as soon as he and his sister, Elena, came home from school. Joe always talked about how mac and cheese was his comfort food. If Gil had one, it would be green chile stew. He finished the rest in four mouthfuls before getting up and putting his dishes in the sink. “I’m going to go shovel.”

  “Make sure and invite your partner over for Christmas,” his mother said.

  “All right, thanks,” he said, not wanting to have to explain about Joe and Las Vegas. Putting his hat and coat back on, he took the shovel that was propped up near the backdoor and went outside into the cold.

  * * *

  Kristen Valdez looked out the kitchen window of the mobile home she shared with her mother as she kneaded dough. She punched it and turned it, sprinkling flour on the countertop when the dough stuck to it in places. She stopped long enough to stir the red chile and elk stew simmering on the stove next to her, then got back to pounding the dough and looking out the window again. Across the stream on the icy dirt road leading to Nambé Pueblo, her mother had stopped to talk with Josephine Gonzales. Growing up, Kristen and her brother had been warned to stay away from the Gonzales’s house after Kristen’s mother saw Josephine peeping in a neighbor’s window. Kristen’s mother told them, “There is only one reason to look through someone’s window in the dark.” She didn’t say it aloud, but Kristen and her brother knew what their mother meant. Nighttime peeping was a sure sign someone was a witch. That was why you didn’t leave your curtains open; otherwise the witches who prowled the night could see inside and cause harm. It was also why you didn’t take food from a stranger, or you might feel an animal clawing inside your stomach. But Kristen wondered if her mother’s warning about the Gonzaleses had less to do with witchcraft and more to do with the family being multigenerational heroin users. That wasn’t unusual in this part of the state. Josephine’s two sons, George and Luke, hadn’t escaped the family’s addiction of choice. The boys had been hooked on it since they were teenagers, just like their mother, father, aunt, and grandmother. Tribal police visited the Gonzaleses house often, usually after lots of yelling or gunfire.

  Kristen watched her mother hug Josephine Gonzales good-bye, then start back to the mobile home. Kristen wasn’t surprised to see her mother acting so friendly with a supposed witch. You had to be especially nice to witches so they wouldn’t curse you. Kristen punched the dough again, trying to knead out all the lumps. She wasn’t sure witches existed, but she respected how her mother felt about them.

  Plus, Kristen had seen things that made her wonder. One time, she was playing up in the hills when she saw a bundle of shredded rattlesnakes and coyote hair hanging
in a tree. Another time, just after her twentieth birthday three years ago, she’d seen witch lights dancing in the forest, the balls of fire seeming to float above the tree line. But then, Nambé Pueblo had a long history with witches. Among the nineteen pueblos, Nambé believed in them the most, and that belief tended to lead to executions. In the 1800s, Nambé Pueblo had more than five hundred members, but by the turn of the twentieth century, the high number of witch executions had made that number dip to eighty-eight. A local priest predicted at the time that Nambé Pueblo would be extinct in fifty years because of the killings. The pueblo arrested their last witch in 1940. Kristen wasn’t sure what had happened to that final witch. He or she might have been executed. The pueblo now had about two thousand members. But as Kristen’s mother would say, just because witches were no longer arrested, it didn’t mean they weren’t still around.

  The trailer door opened and a blast of cold air came in along with a swirl of snow. Her mother stomped her feet, saying, “Hita, are you done yet?”

  “Mom, were you talking to Josephine Gonzales?” Kristen asked instead of answering.

  “Yes,” her mother said as she unwrapped her scarf and took off her boots. “Her son George is missing.” Kristen didn’t respond. George probably had just been arrested—or had overdosed.

  Kristen gave the dough one last punch before letting it rest under a towel so it could rise. She would finish the dough today, but she wouldn’t bake the bread until tomorrow. Proper bread baking took two days. It would be done in plenty of time for the Christmas dances, when a crowd of people would come to their house for food. Christmas was one of the few times during the year when the pueblo tribes allowed the public to watch their dances. Picuris and San Juan put on the Los Matachine dances, while San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Taos performed their versions of the buffalo, basket, or turtle dances. Nambé Pueblo did the deer dance, which was given as an apology for taking the life of a deer and in thanksgiving. Intermeshed with the dances were the traditional Christmas events—waiting for Santa, going to Mass, opening presents. For as much as they were pueblo people, they were also Catholic. It was the way it had been for four hundred years.