When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery

by Christine Barber

  “Any chance for an ID off his teeth?” Joe asked.

  “Not unless we get something to match them to,” she said. “We won’t get any DNA results for at least a week, but I have one last thing. Gil, I know you’re a New Mexico history buff, so here’s a little fun fact for you: the burned victim was a crypto-Jew.”

  “He was a what?” Joe asked.

  “A crypto-Jew,” Gil said. “They were a group of colonists that came over with the conquistadors in the sixteen hundreds who pretended to be Catholic but were actually Jewish. Liz, how in the world did you figure that out?”

  “One of the grad students at the university has a grant to study genetic defects in Northern New Mexico. Hispanics, like cerebral cavernous malformation,” she said. Gil nodded. He knew a family who had the CCM mutation. A person would seem fine until, one day—when they were in their twenties or thirties—they would start having seizures. Some might respond to antiepileptic medication. Some might die of a brain hemorrhage. Most everyone with the disease was descended from a single Spanish colonist who came over in 1598.

  Liz continued, “She got special permission to run the DNA of any John Doe that comes in to get autopsied. The whole process should be secret, but she was so excited that she’d finally found a crypto-Jew that she just had to tell someone.”

  “What genetic disease affects the crypto-Jews?” Gil asked.

  “There is a breast cancer mutation that is found only in Middle Eastern Jewish populations,” she said, “but some Hispanic families from the San Luis Valley in Northern New Mexico have their own unique version of it in spades. The defect has been in their families for almost twenty generations. It had to come from a crypto-Jew, since no actual Jews would have been around here back then.”

  “Thank you, Liz,” Gil said. “We’ll talk to you later.” And she hung up.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “That is pretty cool. I mean, we don’t have an ID on the guy, but we at least know he’s a local Hispanic—all from his genes. Is there, like, a crypto-Jew organization in town or something we can talk to?”

  “Most of the crypto-Jews don’t even know they’re Jewish,” Gil said. “When they first came here, they had to practice their religion in secret, otherwise they’d be killed. But some people kept it such a good secret that now no one in the family even knows they’re Jewish. When I was a kid a friend of mine, Bobby Lucero, would come over for dinner, and if we had pork, he wouldn’t eat it. His grandmother said it was dirty meat.” Gil had heard similar stories about families who covered up mirrors after someone died or lit candles on Friday. Even though the descendants didn’t know why they did such things, they kept the practices going because it was family tradition.

  “So, why did the crypto-Jews come here?”

  “They were trying to escape the Spanish Inquisition,” Gil said.

  “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Joe said.

  “That’s from Monty Python?” Gil asked.

  “Yeah. I have to admit I never thought I’d use it in a conversation about the actual Inquisition.”

  * * *

  The Garcia Hardware building had been both a store and a house for the Garcia family until the 1980s, when the last of Mateo Garcia’s great-uncles moved to a nursing home in Santa Fe. Now it was just a store. With little hardware, it was more of a general store, with groceries, cleaning supplies, and firewood. It was tucked into the curve of a county road that ran through the mountain town of Chupadero, five miles north of Santa Fe. Chupadero, which literally translated to “the place that sucks,” was named for either a sinkhole or a sucking insect such as a tick. Mateo liked to joke that the literal translation was the correct one: Chupadero sucked. But he didn’t mean it. Chupadero was home.

  The afternoon sun shone through icicles hanging off the pitched tin roof of the store, throwing light onto the floor next to the cash register, where Mateo stood. No one had come in for a while, so he was checking his e-mail on his laptop. Someone had sent him a link to a video on YouTube of Sapo Trujillo, one of the last of the mountain men, who lived up north near the Truchas Peaks. Mateo clicked on the link and up popped a video of a man in red long johns, wearing a Santa hat and strumming a guitar while walking through a Northern New Mexico field of snow. Sapo sang in Spanish about Christmas and Pancho Claus, while being followed by a baying donkey, who was possibly the better singer.

  Sapo wasn’t like the traditional mountain men—who forged trails to the frontier in the West and trapped fur. He more closely resembled a free-range hippy. Both types lived off the land as best they could, hunting elk and cooking over fires. But the newer generation was, by necessity, squatters. There was no truly unowned land left in America, so the mountain men set up temporary shelters or built full-blown cabins on public or private land. They would wander the extensive million-acre Pecos wilderness around the Sangre de Cristo peaks and go where no trails went, harvesting wild herbs in the summer and hunkering down in the winter.

  Because Garcia Hardware was located at the edge of the wilderness, Mateo had more customers than most who lived in the mountains. He tried to stock basic camping gear for them, such as axes, tarps, flints, and cans of Sterno. He also kept a selection of socks, sunscreen, and ChapStick, which were not so much necessities for the mountain men as comforts that hermit life didn’t provide.

  Mateo clicked on the video of Sapo again, noticing the handmade shelter in the background, white with snow. Mateo knew that not all the mountain men would make it through the winter. Many were in their sixties or older and hadn’t seen a doctor in years. Come every spring, a rock climber or hiker would find an unidentified body in the wilderness, leading Mateo to do a mental head count, trying to remember when he had last seen each of the half dozen or so mountain men who visited his store. A few years ago, he decided to start a list of their names, and would note every time one came in the store. He glanced over at the clipboard hanging on the wall near the cash register. It wasn’t a long list. About half the names were now crossed out. With the winter as cold as it had been so far, he would likely be crossing out more in a few months.

  * * *

  Gil and Joe sat in the conference room at the police station both working on their laptops writing up interview and incident reports from the day. In front of Gil were the pictures of Dr. Price that Chip Davis had given them, plus crime scene photos e-mailed to them from Liz. Joe stopped typing and stood up to stretch. Gil decided he needed a break from staring at the computer. He leaned back in his chair and said, “Okay, let’s go over it. We both think this is a home invasion.”

  “Correct,” Joe said.

  “Our two victims Price and Jacobson were killed during a burglary.”

  “Right.”

  “Then we have Mr. Burns, who is local and, as far as we can tell, doesn’t know our victims.”

  “Yeah and, no offense, Gil, but rich white people in Santa Fe hang out with other rich white people. They don’t pal around with the locals.”

  “Agreed,” Gil said. “So who is Mr. Burns?”

  “I think the better question is how does he end up at the victims’ house?”

  “He had to either be invited or a stranger. We can’t find any evidence that he was invited, so that…”

  “… makes him a stranger who just happens to show up on the one night Price and Jacobson are getting killed? He’s either the unluckiest bastard…”

  “… or was there on purpose. That means he came with the suspects. He was one of them.”

  “So Mr. Burns was one of the home invaders,” Gil said. He went up to the white Dry Erase board that covered most of one wall of the conference room. On it he wrote: “forced entry; three to four suspects; strong leader, weak followers; strangers to the victims; use extreme force; use weapons; often kill; target more than one home.” Detailed demographic information about group dynamics in home invasions was sparse; most states didn’t even recognize home invasion as a crime different from regular burglary, so data from one-pers
on robberies mucked up the statistics on home invaders. “Okay,” Gil said. “This is the typical profile of home invaders. They work as a group and there is usually one dominant leader.”

  “And we know two more things about them: at least one of the suspects was local, and they will kill one of their own,” Joe said.

  “That brings us back to Mr. Burns,” Gil said. “If we find out who he is, we find his accomplices.”

  “That’s the good thing about this town,” Joe said, “You have family members up in your business all the time. There is nowhere to hide from your relatives. Someone is going to notice that Mr. Burns is missing.”

  Joe went to his computer and pulled up the missing-persons database. They had already searched for any local missing-person reports, but they decided to expand it nationwide, thinking that Mr. Burns might have been living elsewhere but had come home to commit this crime, as unlikely as that might be. There were a couple of possible matches, but without more identifying information, they might never know who Mr. Burns was.

  “His family probably doesn’t even know he’s gone yet,” Joe said.

  “The most likely scenario is that Mr. Burns lived in Santa Fe,” Gil said. “Our best bet would probably be to put a notice in the newspaper.”

  “Well, it just so happens we know someone at the newspaper.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  December 21

  Natalie Martin closed the bedroom door behind her quietly. She’d finally gotten the boys down for the night, after three rounds of reading Green Eggs and Ham.

  She sighed as she walked into the kitchen, where Nick was cleaning up the dinner dishes. His back was to her as he washed a pan in the sink. She pulled him close from behind in a little hug.

  “Hey,” he said, turning around and kissing the top of her head. “How’d it go?”

  She said in a singsong voice, “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam-I-Am.” Her husband laughed and hugged her tight before turning back to the dishes. She started spooning mashed potatoes into a plastic container while her husband moved on to load the dishwasher.

  “Don’t forget we have that thing the day after tomorrow,” Natalie said as she tried to squish the last of the potatoes into the container.

  “What thing?” he asked.

  “That thing,” she said. “You know, the thing…”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” she said, sighing. “Hang on. It’ll come to me…”

  “You mean go get your sister at the airport?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I just could not get that to come out of my mouth—wait, honey, what are you doing?” She walked over to the dishwasher, which he’d opened and was loading utensils into.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How many times have we talked about the knives?” she said as she picked up a large butcher knife that was sticking, blade out, of the lower basket of the dishwasher.

  “What about them?”

  “Honey, the knives go point side down,” she said, putting the knife back in the basket, tip first. “Remember that man I told you about who died after tripping and falling on the knives sticking out of the dishwasher? That could be one of us—or the kids.”

  “All right,” Nick said. “Whatever.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know you’re serious,” he said. “Just like you were serious about the childproof lock on the toilet in case one of them fell in and drowned.”

  “That reminds me, I got that alarm for the boys’ bedroom door,” she said. “We need to put that up tonight.”

  “Let me guess, there was some accident where a kid got out of his room at night and died.”

  “It’s not funny,” she said. “That really happened. There was a little girl in Florida who was able to open her bedroom door and walk outside and they never found her…”

  “The boys just figured out how to turn a doorknob last week.”

  “And Devon just learned how to get out of his crib. During his nap today, he got up three times, opened their bedroom door and came running out. If I’d been asleep, I would have never heard him get up, and he could have gotten into who knows what.”

  “That’s why we have the baby monitor in their room,” he said.

  “That only works when they cry,” she said, replacing the last of the knives. “Otherwise, I can’t hear what they’re doing. If we’d had an alarm on their door, it would just tell us when they opened it.”

  Nick sighed and kept loading the dishwasher.

  “Listen,” she said. “Let’s just get it done tonight. It should only take a few minutes. Then we can watch a movie. I’ll even sit through Fight Club.”

  * * *

  After clearing it with their boss, Police Chief Bill Kline, Gil called Lucy’s cell phone. When she answered on the second ring, he said, “Hello, this is Santa Fe Police Detective Gil Montoya.”

  “Hello, Santa Fe Police Detective Gil Montoya. This is journalist and firefighter extraordinaire Lucy Newroe.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “For the record, let’s just assume I’m always making fun of you,” she said. “And by the way, you can just say, ‘Hi, this is Gil,’ from now on. I feel we have moved past using titles, don’t you?”

  “I need some advice,” he said.

  “What kind of advice? Financial? Career?”

  “The media kind,” Gil said. “We have a missing person that we’d like the public’s help in finding.”

  “How big of a deal do you want to make out of it? A full story or something small?”

  “Something small for now.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So, what you want is a news brief. For that, you need to wait until just after ten o’clock tonight and then fax over a short press release with the information about the person.”

  “Why wait until ten o’clock?”

  “Because, my young padawan, by ten o’clock, every section of the newspaper has been cleared except the local section. They hold that section until eleven o’clock, in case some other news comes in, like a brief from the police. If you call before ten o’clock they might make a big splashy article about it on page one. After ten o’clock, you are guaranteed it will be only a news brief in the local section. If you call after eleven o’clock, the newspaper will already be on the press, and it’ll be too late.”

  “Should I call you at the city desk after I fax the press release?”

  “Um…” she said. “Let’s just say I’m not working in the newsroom tonight.”

  “That sounds ominous,” Gil said. “Is everything okay at work?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It doesn’t sound fine.”

  “I’ve just moved to a different department.”

  “Was it voluntary?”

  “Yeah … so we’re not going to talk about this. Let’s get back to your press release.”

  “Will you be working in the newsroom again?” he asked.

  “You’re messing with me, aren’t you?”

  “For the record, let’s just assume I’m always messing with you,” he said. “So, why did you change jobs?”

  “What? I can’t … hear … reception … bad,” she said, while making staticlike noises.

  “Lucy, you just sound like a washing machine.”

  “In that case, I’ll just hang up on you.” And she did.

  * * *

  A half hour later, Lucy sat “in the rooms,” as they say, listening. They had gone around the circle of chairs, each person saying their name. She’d said, “Tina,” however, and she didn’t add the usual “and I’m an alcoholic,” because she didn’t consider herself one. She was an alcohol abuser, sure. But an alcoholic? She hadn’t ended up on the street or in the gutter. She hadn’t lost her friends or her job. Well, she’d sort of lost her job, but that hadn’t been her fault.

  She’d stopped drinking two weeks ago and had b
een coming to AA since then. She had yet to speak at any meeting, not sure what to say. She listened as a man across from her told his “getting sober” story. He had been a pastor at a local church, a respected member of the community. His life was perfect—except he drank. Secretly. Every night. That part sounded familiar to her, but while she was a beer-drinking girl, he was a vodka man. Lucy knew where this story was going. She’d heard it often over the last two weeks. The man would say that, one day, his wife left him or he lost his job and that’s when he realized he needed help. Instead, the pastor talked about his kids, especially his bright, gifted, funny seven-year-old son. Lucy wasn’t expecting the next part—when a drunk driver hit the wife and son. The wife lived. The son didn’t. The pastor fell apart. His secret drinking became less secret. He drove drunk one afternoon and almost hit a school bus. He tried to kill himself, but one of his other children found him. That’s when he decided to go to Mexico. He rented a casita on the beach. He called it his suicide shack. He locked the doors, turned off the lights, and sat on the couch—gun in his hand. But he didn’t do it. Instead, he stayed locked in the casita, thinking he’d kill himself the next day. But he didn’t do it. By the third day, the alcohol withdrawal was giving him seizures. He repeatedly woke up on the floor. Ten days later, he left the casita. Sober.

  Lucy listened to him speak and thought about her own “getting sober” story. It was nothing dramatic. She had just stopped. She wondered if that made her a failure at being an alcoholic. Not that she was one.

  * * *

  Gil stared at the string of Christmas lights he was holding, which had somehow knotted into a ball, and wondered how they had gotten so tangled up. The lights had been sitting in a box since last Christmas, after he carefully wrapped them with twist ties to keep them neat.

  Joy, hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree, looked over at Gil and started laughing. “Daddy, we should just buy new ones. I think those are too messed up.”

  Susan called them to the kitchen, allowing Gil to put the lights back into the box and worry about them later. Therese was already there, standing at the counter.