When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery

by Christine Barber

  “What did she say?”

  “She said it’s a mom thing.”

  Gil tried not to smile, and said, “If Natalie Martin is right about the baby’s age, that might help us. If we can track down all the babies born in the last two weeks, it could lead us to the mother.”

  “And then what?” Joe asked.

  “The person with the baby was either the baby’s mom or a babysitter,” Gil said. “I actually think our female suspect is the mom.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “I can see that. Only a mother would call home to check on her baby while committing a home invasion.”

  “Plus, Mr. Burns had pads and tampons on the list,” Gil said. “After a woman has a baby, she needs those things for a couple weeks. He could have been buying those for his accomplice.”

  “Then we just need a list of babies born in the last couple of weeks,” Joe said.

  But an hour later, they were nowhere. The spokesperson for the hospital said she would need a signed release-of-information form from all the patients before she could give out any names. Gil and Joe were about to call the district attorney to see about any legal way to get the names when Gil had an idea. “Maybe there’s another way to do this,” Gil said. “My mom still reads the newspaper every day. When we go over there on Sundays for dinner, she keeps the obituaries so she can tell Susan and me about who died. But she also reads the weekly baby announcements with Joy and Therese. The girls think some of the names the parents choose are funny.”

  “If only we knew someone at the newspaper,” Joe said, picking up his cell phone. He put it on speaker as Lucy answered her cell phone saying, “Hi Joe.”

  “Hey, what do you know about baby announcements?”

  “When a woman and a man love each other very much they can express that love by having a baby, and sometimes they like to share the news with the entire readership of the newspaper…”

  “Lucy,” Gil said. “Who handles the announcements at the paper?”

  “At the moment, I guess I do. What do you need?”

  “A list of babies born in the last two weeks,” Joe said. They heard her yawn. “Are you still in bed?”

  “I know I’m a slacker, but some people don’t get up at seven o’clock, especially when they have the day off.”

  “It’s only seven o’clock?” Joe said. “How long have we been up?”

  “Sorry,” Gil said to Lucy. “We didn’t look at the time.”

  “No problem,” she said, with another yawn. “Let me get some clothes on, and I’ll call you as soon as I get into work.”

  “Wait. You’re naked right now?” Joe said.

  “Thank you,” Gil said to Lucy, interrupting Joe and hanging up the phone.

  * * *

  Gil’s call hadn’t actually woken Lucy up. She had been awake since 6:30 A.M. and just lying in bed, having gone to sleep at 10:00 P.M. the night before. Her early bedtime wasn’t because of some new dedication to getting enough sleep. Rather, it was the result of two tablets of Benadryl, which she took at 9:00 P.M., after she became scared she might leave the house to go get beer.

  She got dressed and took a step out of her front door and into a pile of snow. She’d forgotten about the storm. She waded her way over to her car and got in. She drove slowly to work, but not as slowly as some of the other drivers who were white-knuckling it down the streets. Every time there was a winter storm, it was like a surprise party had been thrown for the entire city, with lots of white confetti covering everything. No one seemed to ever expect it, even when the meteorologist predicted it. Even when it was all anyone would talk about. It didn’t matter. Snow always sent Santa Fe into shock. Not that she was one to talk. There were many things about the snow she couldn’t get used to. One was snow fog. The other was snow thunder. Lucy had only seen fog a couple of times in New Mexico, always just after it had snowed. The sky would be clear and cold, yet fog would come from the ground, giving the snow a ghostlike quality. Snow thunder was something Lucy thought she’d made up one night while sleeping. There’d been a snowstorm as she slept, and she thought she’d heard a rumble of thunder. She dismissed it as impossible, until the next day, when Gerald asked her, “Did you hear that thunder?”

  Lucy got to work and, with a swipe of her key card, went into the newsroom. She fumbled for the switch on the wall, and the overhead lights strobed on. Some kept winking, deciding if they wanted to work today. She made her way back to her new office and turned her computer on. Her desk was still barren. She hadn’t had time to add any little touches, not that she had many touches to add. She’d never been a picture-of-pet-on-desk person. The computer finished its start-up, and she sat down. Time to work.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  December 23

  Lucy called Joe’s cell phone about an hour later, saying, “We only publish the baby names once a week, in the Sunday paper. I have the babies from last week, but the hospital hasn’t sent me anything from this week yet.”

  “How many names are on the list?” Joe asked over the speaker.

  “About twenty,” she said. “By the way, just to be clear, this is public record. These people all signed waivers that allow us to publish their information. I am not breaking any journalistic ethics by doing this.”

  “Journalists have ethics?” Joe said.

  “If you want, I could make you go find last week’s paper yourself,” she said.

  “Thank you, Lucy,” Gil said. “Let us know when you get the information from this week.”

  The list Lucy sent to them actually contained the names and parental information for nineteen babies. Gil and Joe looked it over for a few minutes. They narrowed it down to female infants only, based on the suspect saying mija and not mijo. That left nine babies. Gil knew they’d eventually run the names of all the parents through the police database, checking for warrants and former arrests, but for now they’d start with people whose last names were probably Mexican. The assumption that the female accomplice was not from the area was based on two things Natalie Martin had said—that the woman spoke fast Spanish and that she used the phrase mija. If the woman had been from Northern New Mexico, she would have said hita. Of the nine baby girls born in the last week, only two had last names that were almost definitely Mexican.

  “Explain to me how you know Godinez and Escobar are Mexican last names and not New Mexico ones?” Joe asked.

  “I only said they were more likely to be Mexican,” Gil said. “That’s because those aren’t really traditional local names.”

  “You mean, none of the conquistadors who founded Santa Fe were called Escobar or Godinez,” Joe said.

  “Pretty much.”

  “What about a last name like Garcia or Lopez?” Joe asked.

  “Those could be either Mexican or New Mexican,” Gil said. “If Godinez and Escobar don’t pan out, we’ll look at Garcia and Lopez.”

  Gil looked over the information. Both Godinez and Escobar didn’t have fathers listed, only mothers. He typed the mothers’ names into the police database, but only one came back with a record. Guadalupe Escobar, mother to Georgina Rose Escobar, born nine days ago. Escobar, who was eighteen, was awaiting trial for drug possession and resisting arrest. The drug enforcement task force had raided a known drug dealer’s house three weeks ago and found Escobar smoking pot in a bathroom. The arresting officer had written in the report, “Suspect is nine months pregnant; ask DA about possible child endangerment charges.” Gil doubted the district attorney would file abuse charges in regard to a fetus, but it had been good thinking on the officer’s part. Gil next checked if Escobar had a car registered in her name. The search came back saying NO INFORMATION FOUND, but there was a recent address.

  “And look at this, under aliases,” Joe said. “She uses the nickname Lupe. Remember that L on Ivanov’s chest? Maybe she’s the one who carved it.”

  * * *

  Lucy knew she could go home. There was really nothing for her to do at work, yet she stayed at her desk. She c
leaned the computer monitor and keyboard and was now trying to hunt down a mouse pad. She was considering stealing one. She went into the newsroom, which was still empty, and started looking in drawers to find a mouse pad and any other office supplies she might need. The police scanner on top of her old desk jumped on and Dispatch called Pecos ambulance out to an Echo call, which meant it was bad. The dispatch system used codes to let the responding EMS crews know how serious the call was. Alpha meant it was minor. Delta meant it was major. Echo meant the patient was dead. She listened to the Pecos crew call into service. She wished there was a way for her to do a column about being an EMT. It would be a great excuse for her to constantly be out in the field. But that would never happen. Strict federal law would prohibit her from revealing anything about a medical call—except maybe in the case of a dead patient. Lucy wondered about that. Maybe there was a way for her to combine both funeral announcements and a column. She could do an obituary on a dead person then interview the EMT or police officer who’d responded. It could show how interconnected everyone was, even in death, that when a community member fell, there was someone there to catch him. And how a person who died impacted the person who found him without the two people ever knowing each other.

  The more Lucy thought about the idea, the more she liked it. But she knew it would be a hard sell, both to her editor and to the Santa Fe County Fire Department. She would be walking a fine line, but it was a line she had been walking since she joined the fire department. She didn’t walk the line well—in fact, she stumbled often—but she always tried to do what was right by both sides. Maybe, just maybe, this column would be a way for her to finally merge both parts of her life. She might have to make some journalistic concessions that could be potentially problematic, such as keeping the name of the EMT or victim anonymous. She wasn’t sure it could be done, but if it worked, she might finally be free of the constant moral dilemma that was her life. As the saying went, a person cannot serve two masters. But she had been doing just that since she joined the department almost a year ago.

  She would have to have a sample column to show both Lopez and the Santa Fe County fire chief. Luckily she had just run a call where she’d found a dead patient. For her sample column, she could do an obituary on Dr. Price and write about her own experience in the fire. Her sample column would never go in the paper, mainly because it was a conflict of interest, but it would show Lopez and the fire department what she was hoping to do.

  That was enough to make her pick up the phone and call Los Alamos National Laboratory, hoping to talk to Dr. Price’s co-workers. She talked with two public information officers, explaining what she wanted. They both told her the same thing: she needed permission for an interview. There had to be forms signed and approvals made. One of the PIOs said he would get back to her.

  She waited by the phone for a half hour. The longer she waited, the more convinced she became that the PIO would use the excuse of tomorrow being Christmas Eve to stonewall her. She was getting anxious. She called the hospital to check on her mom, but the charge nurse wouldn’t put her call through, saying her mother needed rest. She tried to call her brother, but it went to voice mail. What Lucy needed was to get out of the office. She could go over to the hospital to pick up the birth announcements from this week and e-mail the names to Gil. At the same time, she could introduce herself to the maternity ward staff, maybe bring them doughnuts. She needed to be in their good graces since she’d have to rely on them to pass out the baby notice forms to the new parents. The parents were not required to fill out the forms that gave the newspaper permission to print the names, but the vast majority did. In the past, it had been known to happen that if the nurses didn’t like the reporter doing the birth announcements, the forms didn’t get passed out. She was out the door a minute later.

  * * *

  Gil and Joe sat in their white marked SUV in the snow outside a two-story brown apartment building with a blanket hanging from one of the bottom windows in an effort to keep out the cold. They had already gone to knock on the Escobars’ door and that of the neighbors, but no one had answered. They now were waiting for a call back from the district attorney to see if they could enter the premises. Their evidence was no slam dunk, based as it was on Natalie Martin’s account of hearing a baby cry and some fairly loose ties to a birth announcement, but it might be enough for a warrant, given the severity of the crimes. In the meantime, Joe called Kristen Valdez, asking her to check on the whereabouts of the drug dealer whom Lupe Escobar had been arrested with. With that done, he used his phone to look through the e-mail they had been sent by the film’s assistant preproduction manager. He was checking a list of names of extras, cameramen, and work crew members against the police database, while keeping up a running commentary on the pictures the manager had attached. He nicknamed one man with a thick mustache “70s porno movie guy” and a tough-looking bald man “Mr. Clean Goes Ghetto.” Joe let out a yell when he found Alexander Jacobson’s last name.

  “It looks like Jacobson was hired to do makeup,” Joe said. “Specifically, he was going to do the fake prison tattoos on the extras. Hey, it looks like there’s a link to photos of some of his practice work.” Up popped pictures of arms, backs, and necks etched with intricate fake prison tattoos.

  “Jacobson really knows his stuff,” Joe said. “Some of these tattoos look totally real.” He handed his phone to Gil, who flipped through the pictures.

  Gil stopped on one photo of a man’s arm. The predominant tattoo was a circle in blue ink, drawn like the Zia sun. Inside the circle was a large S with a smaller n and m nestled in its hooks. Something about it was bothering him.

  “You staring so hard at…?” Joe asked.

  “This tattoo,” Gil said. “It’s from the New Mexico Syndicate.”

  The New Mexico Syndicate was the biggest and most violent prison gang in the state. It was a Hispanic and Native American group. The most respected inmates in the gang formed the “Panel,” who handed down orders to generals and lieutenants on the outside about what actions to take and whom to kill. They were mostly into the drug trade. When a gang member was released, he was expected to go back into his district to make sure the local drug dealer gave the gang a percentage of the cut. The syndicate was currently at war with the Barrio Azteca gang in southern New Mexico over the methamphetamine trade.

  “But why is the tattoo making your face constipated?” Joe asked, looking at Gil’s expression.

  “The inmates started the syndicate as a result of the state pen riot,” Gil said. “They said the riot proved that the only true protection in prison was to be part of a gang.”

  Joe seemed to get his meaning. “So if the movie is trying to be true to life, then that tattoo needs to go,” he said. “What about—hold on. You think this tattoo is real?”

  “It could be,” Gil said. “And it makes me wonder why a member of the New Mexico Syndicate would be working on a movie set.”

  * * *

  When Joe called, Kristen Valdez had been on her way back to the station, already looking forward to getting out of her uniform and off to the dances. She listened while he told her about their suspect, Guadalupe Escobar, and that they needed someone to check out a drug dealer’s house where she had been arrested smoking pot. For a change, Kristen had started to say no. She was just coming off her overnight shift, and there was no foreseeable sleep in her future. She was simply too tired. But before she could object, Joe said, “Just drive by and see if the drug dealer or, even better, Escobar is there. If he is, call us and we’ll do the heavy lifting.” She hesitated, which Joe heard, so he added, “I am bored out of my skull just sitting here in front of Escobar’s house waiting for her to show up. I would so much rather be shaking down her drug dealer. Please, please, please.”

  He gave her the address, 1241 Camino Dulce, and said she was looking for Johnny Rivera, which Joe said sounded like a 1950s gangster name. Kristen got the impression she was supposed to laugh, but she didn’t. She was j
ust too tired.

  Now she was driving out toward the city limits, where the map book indicated she would find Camino Dulce. She pulled off Old Pecos Trail and onto a dirt road that curved toward the mesas to the north. The road itself didn’t have any signs giving its name, and there were no mailboxes or house numbers—or even any houses to see, for that matter. She passed two more nameless dirt turnoffs that could have been either roads or long driveways. She guessed by the map book that she needed to turn down the third dirt road on the left. She drove her patrol car over the washboard ruts, bouncing and jarring with every turn of her tires.

  Two dogs—both medium-sized Labradors combined with at least two other breeds—came running out from some bushes, barking and chasing her car. She took the dogs as a sign that there was a house ahead.

  She pulled up in front of an old mobile home and called into Dispatch, telling them her location, as was procedure. She got out of the car and pushed her gun belt down, which always rode up as she sat in the car. The two dogs had stopped barking and, instead, came up to her, tails wagging and tongues hanging out. She let them sniff her hand before they went trotting off toward an old flat-topped adobe house about sixty yards away. She went up three metal steps to the front door of the trailer and knocked.

  As she waited for someone to answer, she looked around. From her perch slightly above the ground, she could see there was no car in either the driveway for the trailer or the dirt area nearer the house. Between the trailer and the house, she could see a few family graves, the tombstones sticking out of the snow.

  She knocked again, but it was quiet. She could hear the wind but nothing else. She tried to look in the window next to her, but all she could see was the reflection of the sky behind her. She went down the steps and headed over to the house, and the dogs appeared again, to escort her. She looked off toward the mesas, which served as a backdrop for the family cemetery, just off the road. She noticed that some of the burial plots had foot-tall wrought-iron fences around them with plastic flowers intertwined between the bars. On other grave markers were placed a few egg-sized rocks.