“Okay,” Susan said. “Time for the tamale assembly line.”
On the counter was a bowlful of masa dough next to one of cooked pork. Susan stood at the sink, where the cornhusks had been soaking for the last few hours. She took a husk out of the water and dried it on a paper towel, then handed the husk to Gil, who spread a thick layer of masa on it. He gave the husk to Joy, who added the pork, and then Therese rolled and wrapped the husk tight around the filler. Lastly, Therese stacked them in the steamer pot. Within a few minutes, they had a dozen tamales steaming over the stove. Gil’s grandmother used to say that the reason tamales were cooked during Christmas was because it made the family work together. But Gil thought it might be for a simpler reason—tamales were hard to make, so making them once a year was enough.
“Okay, girls,” Susan said, drying her hands. “Go get ready for bed.”
Gil’s phone vibrated. It was a grave-shift officer calling to confirm that he had sent the fax to the newspaper as Lucy had instructed. Gil grabbed a beer and sat down to watch the NBA highlights. Within an hour, he decided to call it a night. He was still catching up on sleep from the night before. He stopped to check on the girls on his way to the bedroom. Therese, who was already asleep, had kicked her blankets off. Gil pulled them back over her and put his hand on her head. He whispered the same prayer that his own father had said over him each night—“Angel de mi guardia; dulce companía; vélame de noche; cuídame de dia.” He kissed her forehead and went over to Joy’s bed. She was still awake and watching him.
“Daddy, can you say my blessing in English?” she whispered. “I want to hear what you are saying.”
Gil closed his eyes, put his hand on her head, and said softly, “My guardian angel; sweet companion; watch over me by night; care for me by day.”
CHAPTER NINE
December 22
The plastic of Lucy’s alarm clock was etched with white lines, which were burns left over from the oven cleaner she had used to try to kill a spider a month ago. She found out the hard way, at the expense of her clock and a large swath of paint on her bedroom wall, that oven cleaner didn’t kill spiders. The alarm went off again, and she hit the Snooze button.
“Nathan,” she said, pushing him as he slept next to her. “Get up. You need to leave so I can pack.”
She got into the shower. When she got out, wrapped in a towel, he was waiting outside the bathroom door with a cup of coffee in his hand. He handed it to her, saying, “Have a good trip. We’ll have that talk when you get back.” After a kiss on her cheek, he left, and she got down to the business of packing. Her flight was at six that evening, so she’d have to leave the house by 4:00 P.M. Even though her flight was in the afternoon, she had taken the whole day off work. She knew from experience that her packing wouldn’t go well. She started the hunt for clothes. She would need her dressy red shirt to wear on Christmas Day, but she couldn’t find it on her chair, under her bed, or thrown in the back of the closet. She finally remembered it was in the laundry. She pawed through the basket until she found it, close to the bottom. She took it out and shook out the wrinkles. She had worn it three times before it went in the basket. It had no obvious stains or crusty residue, so it was only sort of dirty, not truly dirty. She looked at it again, considering, then folded the shirt and put it on her bed. She decided that since she’d left it in the laundry basket for more than a week, it was clean again.
Next she searched for her flip-flops. She was looking forward to going home to Florida. She missed the white beaches and palm trees, even though New Mexico was just one big beach, without the water. But she missed her mom and her brothers more. Although as much as she missed them, she knew she’d be ready to come home after the three days. True, she was trying to get along better with her mother, but that didn’t mean going insane herself. Her mom could be a bit much, which was a side effect of her schizophrenia. Even on her medication, she was a strange combination of relaxed and intense.
Her brother seemed much less so on his medication. He had inherited the family disease, but had somehow managed to have a fairly normal life. She knew that as a child and sister of a schizophrenic, she had a 30 percent chance of developing the disease. Schizophrenia usually showed up before age thirty, meaning she might still get it. She felt as if she had spent the last ten years waiting to hit thirty so she could finally breathe, knowing for certain she wouldn’t become like her mother and brother.
Lucy went to look for her suitcase, which was in the storage closet in the kitchen. She opened the step stool and took the suitcase off the top shelf. As she was stepping down, her foot hit something glass. She looked down. There was a collection of empty beer bottles in the bottom of the closet, where she had put them months ago, intending to recycle them. She picked up the bottles and went out into the cold. She threw them into her neighbors’ recycling bin, feeling some satisfaction when she heard each one clink at the bottom. They were a reminder of who she was two weeks ago, not who she was today. It made her feel like maybe she could be sober.
* * *
Waiting on Gil’s desk the next morning was a copy of the Capital Tribune. It was turned to the local section, where one brief was circled in black ink. The newspaper had put in the missing-person information exactly like Lucy said.
As he dialed the office receptionist to see if they had gotten any calls yet about Mr. Burns, Gil flipped to the front page to read the story under the headline THREE DIE IN HOUSE FIRE. The secretary on duty said no one had called. Gil had just hung up when his desk phone rang. Half expecting it to be his mother, whom he usually talked to this time every morning, Gil only answered with “hello,” instead of giving his full name and title. But it was Deputy Paul Gutierrez.
“Paul,” Gil said. “I thought you were taking time off to spend with your daughter.”
“At this very moment, I am sitting at the kitchen table in my bathrobe eating the pancakes she’s made me,” Gutierrez said. “But I wanted to let you know about a case my cousin with the state police is working on. A call came into nine-one-one a few hours ago, about shots fired out in the county. My cousin was the responding officer and found a busted-in front door and a victim duct taped to a chair and shot in the head.”
* * *
“Devon, stay still,” Natalie Martin said. She was trying to change his diaper while he was trying to roll off the changing table. “Honey, stop moving,” she said again as she pulled him back down and fastened the last plastic tab. She put him back on the floor, saying, “All done.” Devon toddled off to the living room to find Deacon. She followed after him. The boys began playing near the Christmas tree, which took up a quarter of the room. She had decided to use a red-and-white theme this year. The tree was decked out in a garland of pearl white beads, with red bows holding it in place on the branches. She went to go straighten one of the red bows and, out of the corner of her eye, saw Deacon take Baby Jesus out of the Nativity scene under the tree and lick it. The phone rang. She picked it up as she was still saying, “Honey, please don’t lick Baby Jesus. Put him back in his crib.” She watched Deacon use one of his pudgy hands to put Baby Jesus back in the manger.
“Did you just say, ‘Don’t lick baby Jesus’?” her sister asked, laughing.
“Yes. The boys are at that age where everything goes in their mouths,” Natalie said, as Deacon again picked up the ceramic Baby Jesus out of his manger. “Deacon, put Baby Jesus down.” But he didn’t listen. She heard her sister say something, but Natalie was busy grabbing for a nearby plastic dump truck. “Deacon, look at this truck. Isn’t it pretty?” Deacon dropped Baby Jesus and came toddling over. He took the truck and put the edge of it in his mouth.
“Is the Holy Family crisis averted?” her sister asked.
“Yes. Baby Jesus is safe.”
“It’s a Christmas miracle.”
“So, when does your plane get here tomorrow?” Natalie asked. “I have to figure out their nap and feeding schedule.”
“Ooh,” her sis
ter said. “Can you make me a nap and feeding schedule?”
* * *
Gil and Joe pulled up in front of a house in La Cieneguilla, a few miles outside the city limits. The walls were old adobe. The house probably had been replastered every year for hundreds of years, as the humans tried to keep up with Mother Nature cracking and crumbling the straw-and-mud walls. The home was built as most of the old haciendas were—in a large square with a hollow center, where there was an open plaza with a flagstone courtyard and huge cottonwood trees. Gil got out of the Crown Victoria and stretched his shoulder for a moment, trying to get the stiffness out of an old basketball injury. Through the pencil-thin tree branches up on a nearby hill he could see a one-room capilla with a cross on the top. The chapel, one of many scattered throughout Northern New Mexico, likely had been built by the family who owned the hacienda, so they could have a place to worship without traveling into town on horseback.
Gil and Joe walked down a mud-and-ice driveway to join three state police officers standing in front of the house. One of the officers, who had a goatee and shaved head, came over and introduced himself.
“You must be Detective Montoya. I’m Herman Sandoval, Paul’s cousin. He called to tell me you’d be stopping by.”
They shook hands, and Gil asked, “Can we see the crime scene?”
As they walked toward the house, Sandoval said, “My family has some Montoyas on my mother’s side; they are from Mora.”
“My family is from Galisteo,” Gil said. “But my grandfather had an uncle from up there.” This was part of the usual conversation between Hispanics from Northern New Mexico when they met for the first time. Gil’s sister called it “proving your ties.” It was an interrogation of sorts, with each person expected to prove their family had been there for hundreds of years. Gil thought it was a way for two strangers to find a connection. Or maybe it had evolved as a way to avoid marriages among people who had too many relatives in common. His sister thought of it as a form of elitism, a way for a stranger to surreptitiously confirm that the other person was of the correct Spanish descent. Gil most often had the conversation with grocery cashiers or bank tellers after they saw his last name on a credit card or check. But he’d also had it after introducing himself to senators and judges. Gil knew he was expected to ask next about the officer’s family.
“Are you related to the Sandovals who live near Pecos?” he asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Those are my great-uncle’s people.”
The three of them had reached the front door, and Gil stopped to look at the damage. The door was of polished aluminum—a very modern door for a very old house—but had given way easily with whatever the suspects had used to ram it in.
Inside the foyer, the house opened up into a large living room with viga-lined ceilings. The walls were a stark white and hung with bright modern artwork painted with wide brushstrokes. The furniture, which included a couch and winged side chairs, was also white, and matched the area rug covering the dark Mexican tile floor.
“What did the victim do for a living?” Gil asked.
“He was retired, but he worked from home finding props for movies and TV shows,” Sandoval said. Over a glass desk, a wall held a dozen framed pictures of film sets and famous people. One was of the Coen brothers, who had shot No Country for Old Men in New Mexico, and another was of John Travolta, who had signed a photo of himself while in town filming Wild Hogs.
“You should see the extra bedroom,” Sandoval said. He walked down a small hallway and opened the door. Gil followed. Inside, it looked like a cross between a hoarder’s house and an antique shop, with furniture and household items overflowing the room. In one corner was an old-looking wooden chair with very straight angles. As Gil got closer, he realized it was an executioner’s electric chair. Next to it, on the ground, were a typewriter, a trumpet covered in gold glitter, and a foot-tall statue of Lady Justice. In another corner was an old-fashioned metal hospital bed with a clutter of junk on top. Gil could see a World War II army helmet, a pair of red cowboy boots, a knight’s shield, and what looked to be a stuffed housecat.
Gil went back out to the living room to hear Joe, who seemed not have realized that Gil had been out of the room, talking to no one in particular.
“He clearly had money,” Joe said, looking over the desk. “His computer setup is amazing. Look at that monitor.”
Gil moved toward the center of the room, where one of the white wing chairs had been placed. The state police had already taken the body away, but a large pool of blood remained behind and had worked its way into the upholstery.
“What about the condition of the body?” Gil asked.
“He was shot,” Sandoval said. “It looked like a small caliber, maybe a .22. There were lots of shallow cuts on his arms and a few burns; we don’t know what was used to make those.”
“Was there anything carved in his chest?” Joe asked.
“Yeah, the letter L,” Sandoval said. “That was messed up.”
“Any cuts to his genitals?” Gil asked.
“Nothing that I saw.”
“You were the first on scene?” Gil asked.
“Yeah,” Sandoval said. He looked more than tired. It was the same look Joe and Gil had had for two days. These cases were taking a toll. “I came to make contact with the homeowner, to check about a shots-fired call, but when I approached, the front door was standing open. I removed my gun from my holster and called it in on my handheld radio. The lights in the living room were on. I saw the victim, Stanley Ivanov, right away. I cleared the house then I checked for a pulse on the victim. When the backup got here, we searched the house and the grounds again.”
“What evidence was collected?” Gil asked.
“I’m not sure,” Sandoval said. “I know we got fingerprints, at least one off the duct tape used to tie up the victim, but I haven’t heard from the investigating detective where they are with that.”
“Who’s in charge of the case?” Gil asked.
“Gil Montoya?” someone behind them said. Gil turned. It took him a minute to recognize State Police Lieutenant Tim Pollack.
“How the hell are you?” Pollack said with a smile. “It’s been, what, like forever?” Gil had first met Pollack a year ago, when they were both working the homicide of a schoolteacher. At the time, there had been rumors that Pollack was leaking information to the press, even though, as the temporary public information officer for the state police, he was supposed to be the one controlling it. Nothing had ever come of the rumors, but Pollack was no longer the PIO. He still had the same intense blue eyes, shaved head, and fast speech.
As they shook hands, Gil introduced Pollack to Joe.
“You finally committed to a partner? Last time I saw you, you were going stag,” Pollack said, shaking Joe’s hand. “He’s like a lone wolf, this guy.”
“I guess that would make me part of his pack,” Joe said.
“So what’s up? What’s the deal? Why ya here?” Pollack asked, snapping his gum. “I heard about your victims who got popped in that house fire. You think the same suspect killed my guy?”
“Could be,” Gil said. “What can you tell me about your case?”
“I’m sure Sandoval gave you the lowdown,” Pollack said. “Pretty much what you see is what you get. Busted-down front door. Dead guy named Ivanov with cuts all over him. Shot in the head. We don’t know if anything was taken. We got a bunch of partial prints that we couldn’t use, but the rest led back to a guy named Tyler James Hoffman, who’s barely eighteen. And Gil, you are going to love him.”
“Why’s that?”
“He’s an escaped inmate from Texas,” Pollack said. “Why does every escaped convict in the United States come here? They know we’re New Mexico and not the actual Mexico, right?”
Pollack was not exaggerating. Every week, inmates and wanted felons from all over the United States were caught in New Mexico. It was a mecca for those running from the law. They came to hide in the hundre
ds of miles of open desert and forested mountains. Maybe they thought they’d be like the Old West outlaws—Butch Cassidy or Billy the Kid—who’d hid from the law for years, using the deep canyons for their escapes. Most of the captures nowadays were just a footnote in police reports, since the suspects were apprehended without incident, but there were some exceptions. Back in the 1990s a trio of men robbed the Ute casino just over the Colorado border, then headed into Navajo Country, where they ditched their car and went off on foot. It was June, and they had no food or water. With nothing for a hundred miles, law enforcement officers didn’t bother to chase them; the men weren’t going to come out alive.
“So, why would I love the escaped inmate from this case?” Gil asked.
“Because that automatically makes him a problem for the federal marshals,” Pollack said. “Now I just sit on my thumbs until the boys from Phoenix get here. Then you and I get to go home and wait for Santa Claus with all the other good little boys and girls. Like I always say, don’t you love it when a plan comes together?“
“Okay,” Gil said, hesitantly.
“Tell me about your case,” Pollack said.
“It’s pretty much the same…” Joe started to say, before Gil interrupted.
“I don’t think they’re related. There are some fairly substantial differences.”
“That sucks for you,” Pollack said. “If it had been the same guy, you could be sipping on cocoa at home in your pj’s by this time tomorrow. Oh well, life is like a rodeo. Sometimes you get the bull by the horns, sometimes the bull gets you.”
CHAPTER TEN
December 22
Kristen Valdez tried to stack the cedar wood in the horno oven, but she had a hard time gripping the logs through her thick gloves. She managed to push the last log through the small opening of the beehive-shaped oven and then lit a match. The tinder caught easily, and soon a few of the logs started to turn black as the flames reached them. Inside the mobile home, her mother had a modern oven, but the dome-shaped horno in the backyard had to be used for the ceremonial baking. Now Kristen just needed to watch the fire for the next hour or so until it burned down to coals.
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