When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery

by Christine Barber

  “I kind of feel like I don’t have the right to ask,” he said. “Not after everything. Plus, I kind of think you’ll claim some journalist ethics crap and not tell me.”

  “That was the plan, but you had to go and ruin it.”

  “Let me know if you need anything.”

  “What does Gil have to say about my being in here?”

  Joe hesitated. “Not much.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. “Dad’s too busy to worry about the screwed-up kid in jail. Does he even know you’re calling me?” Joe didn’t say anything. She said, “So, he doesn’t. That must mean you’d think he’d get mad if he knew we were talking.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, thank you for checking on me, Joe. I really appreciate it.”

  “Okay,” he said, reluctantly about to hang up.

  “Hey, Joe,” she said, catching him before she heard the click ending the call. “Merry Christmas.”

  * * *

  Gil sat in the passenger seat of the marked SUV parked illegally outside the hospital. Since Joe was driving today, he had been taking full advantage of the perks of having a marked police vehicle—the main one being they could park where they wanted; Gil was trying not to complain about it. Joe had stepped outside to make a phone call, shivering in the morning cold. Gil assumed the secret call was to a woman, maybe someone Joe was supposed to meet in Las Vegas before the case got out of control. Now Joe was back in the driver’s seat with the car idling, typing in the names of the employees who worked in Primary Structural Biosystems from a list given to them by Natalie Martin. The list was two years out of date, but it was a place to start. Joe ran the names through the DMV database to get home addresses. There were six who lived in Los Alamos, three to the north, in Rio Arriba County, and seven in Santa Fe County, two of whom had been Dr. Price and Dr. Ivanov. Natalie Martin was the only one who lived in the city of Santa Fe. All in all, there were fourteen people who needed to be notified about Hoffman.

  Joe called the Rio Arriba and Santa Fe county sheriff’s departments, asking them to put patrol cars in front of the workers’ houses in their jurisdiction, while Gil called Chip Davis up in Los Alamos to let him know. Davis said he would send security officers to the employees on the list who lived up on the Hill, and offered to make sure the list Natalie Martin had provided contained the most recent information. Before Davis could hang up, Gil told him what Natalie Martin had said about the sabotage at the lab.

  “Did you ever find out who was behind it?” Gil asked.

  “It was an internal matter,” Davis said.

  “Whom did you suspect?” Gil said.

  Davis hesitated before saying, “We only conducted a minimal investigation.”

  “Why was that?”

  “What happened to Dr. Martin was unfortunate but not unusual. It wasn’t a priority.”

  “Is it normal for employees to be given a lie detector test when they complain they are being harassed by a co-worker?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss our security policies,” Davis said. That was the sound of the famous Los Alamos wall of silence going up. Gil knew he wasn’t going to get any more answers, so he hung up. As he waited for Joe to finish his call, he watched in the side mirror as the exhaust from their SUV swirled around the bumper. Something about it seemed peaceful.

  “What are we thinking here?” Joe asked after he hung his phone. “Where did Tyler James Hoffman get this employee list from?”

  “Dr. Price’s house was the first one they robbed, so it makes the most sense they got the list from him,” Gil said.

  “Except Natalie Martin says she didn’t know Dr. Price, so he wouldn’t have had her address.”

  “Maybe they went to Dr. Price’s house and he gave them Dr. Ivanov’s address,” Gil said. “Then they went to Dr. Ivanov’s house, and he gave them Natalie Martin’s address.”

  “But according to Natalie Martin, Dr. Price didn’t know Dr. Ivanov,” Joe said. “The simplest answer would be that lab employees are given the names and addresses of all their co-workers, and Dr. Price had the newest list, with Dr. Ivanov’s information on it, and gave that list to the killers.”

  “Even creating a list like that would be a huge breach of security.” Gil said.

  “I’m sure their boss knew them all,” Joe said. “What was her name? Dr. Goodwin? And she would have their addresses. We should talk with her again.”

  Joe’s phone rang, and he answered it with a “Yo.” The person on the other end of the phone spoke, and as he listened, something in Joe’s demeanor changed. He said a final, “Okay, thanks,” then hung up.

  “That was Dispatch,” he said. “There’s been another one.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  December 24

  Kristen Valdez had followed Mary Gonzales out of Nambé Pueblo and toward Santa Fe. She had an easy time blending in with traffic on the highway with her little car. She wondered why she was following Mary. The governor had basically asked Kristen to do a welfare check—which police officers often do—on George Gonzales. If she had been doing it in an official capacity, she would have had a commanding officer tell her how to proceed now that the family said they no longer needed help. Instead, she wasn’t sure what to do. According to the family, George Gonzales was fine. She could just take them at their word and head back home in time for breakfast. But she kept following the truck.

  At the first traffic light, Kristen was two cars behind the truck when Mary turned left, down a dirt service road. Kristen slowed and watched the bumper of Mary’s truck bounce over the ruts frozen into the mud. Kristen waited to turn onto the road, knowing that as soon as she did, Mary might catch sight of her. The truck drove another twenty feet, then stopped next to a mesh fence. Kristen knew exactly what that fence protected—the now-closed St. Catherine Indian School. It had been built in the 1890s by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to serve as a private Catholic school, one of dozens of government and religious facilities created to “assimilate” native children into mainstream society. The students had to cut off their braids, take new English names, and stop speaking their tribal languages. There were horror stories from those schools: forced removal of children from homes, widespread beatings by teachers, and worse. But Kristen had never heard any such stories about St. Catherine’s. Maybe it had always been a progressive school or maybe it had only been so since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, but St. Catherine’s let its students not only keep their traditions, but celebrate them—as long as they still participated in the Catholic rituals. It became a place where kids wanted to go. In 1998, a hundred years after it opened, the Sisters found the school just too expensive to maintain. The last class graduated that year.

  Kristen turned her car down the dirt road and drove until she pulled up behind the truck. Mary, who had been getting a baby’s car seat out of the extended cab, turned to watch with a hand on her hip as Kristen got out of her car.

  “What are you doing here?” Mary asked, clearly annoyed. The baby in the car seat blew bubbles and made smacking noises.

  “I’m just trying to find George,” Kristen asked.

  “I told you we don’t need your help,” Mary said, as she set the car seat down and started pulling the sleeping bag and camp stove out of the bed of the truck.

  “I am only doing what the governor asked me,” she said.

  “It’s not your business,” Mary said, closing the doors.

  “Is George in some kind of trouble?”

  Mary didn’t answer as she struggled to hold on to the camp stove and the sleeping bag while picking up the car seat.

  “Listen, Mary,” Kristen said. “If George is in trouble, do you really want to be taking your baby in there?”

  Mary still didn’t answer, but she had stopped trying to gather everything into her arms.

  “As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything wrong,” Kristen said. “I can just go in there and get him, while you and the baby can stay
in the warm car.” Mary didn’t respond, but she was listening, considering. Kristen continued, “We’ll be back out in two seconds. Then he can go home so you can all celebrate Christmas together.”

  Mary finally nodded. Kristen helped her put the car seat back in the truck and tossed the camping gear in the truck bed. Kristen went back to her car and fastened her gun belt around her waist, under her coat, thinking she might need the flashlight hanging off it but not thinking about the gun. She had been able to get Mary to promise that she wouldn’t call George to tell him Kristen was coming, since it would likely make him run.

  Kristen walked down the dirt road, looking for a place either to scale the fence or crawl under it. The school itself consisted of dozens of abandoned buildings—some made of low cement brick, others of actual brick, and still others of stucco painted a burnt orange. As she walked, she took a long look at the cemetery across the road. It struck her as odd that the Indian school was built next to a graveyard. The Navajo kids, with their strict prohibition against being near anything dead, must’ve had a hard time convincing their parents to let them attend. She once had a Navajo friend who tried out for a local modeling job. When her friend didn’t get the part, a medicine man said it was because she had driven past a cemetery on the way to the audition. Her friend had to have a four-hour long ceremony to take the curse off her. It made Kristen glad that pueblo tribes didn’t share the same belief.

  Kristen found a small gate that made it easy for her to squeeze past the fence. The snow crunched under her feet, as did some shell casings. After the school had been abandoned, the city’s SWAT team got permission to use some of the old buildings for urban rescue practice. They would set up training scenarios for rookies, recreating hostage situations and riot conditions, sometimes even using live ammunition. Kristen had heard that the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament had hoped to sell the school to developers, which made her wonder how much the value would be depreciated due to the hundreds of bullet holes pockmarking the walls.

  She walked up a slight hill, scaring a dark red cardinal, which flew out from a chamisa bush. The only things that still lived on campus were the animals. She could see their tracks in the snow—jackrabbits, sparrows, and raccoons—weaving in and out of the brush. On top of the hill, she stopped in front of a native-themed mural whose colors were still bright. In it, a young man with flowing hair reached up toward a bird. She turned the corner and found another mural, this time in a more geometric, petroglyph style, lining an archway. The nuns clearly had encouraged the students to express their world in art.

  Through the arch, she noticed a path that had been beaten down in the snow by someone. She followed it toward what looked to be an old-fashioned schoolhouse with a small belfry on the roof. She climbed the steep stairs up to the school and tried the door, expecting it to be locked, but it opened silently. The inside hallway had drifts of snow in it as well as a continuation of the tracks from outside. Someone had walked through here.

  She went in slowly, not wanting to surprise anyone who was making the building his home. She turned into the first doorway on her right. It was a classroom with the chalkboard still on the wall and a few basketball jerseys thrown across some long wooden tables. A gust of wind made the windows rattle in their wooden frames. She went back out into the hallway and into the next room, where dozens of old desks were pushed up against the chalkboards lining the walls. She was turning to leave when she noticed someone sitting in a dark corner, away from the light of the windows. She unzipped her coat and thought about pulling out her flashlight, but instead unsnapped the leather latch holding her gun in its holster and put her hand on the butt. “Hello?” she called. The person didn’t move. She called “hello” again. She thought she saw movement, and took a step back, tightening her grip on the gun. The person had shifted out of the shadows, but kept his face in the dark. She could tell it was a man, crouched down. He shifted position again, and she thought she saw a long dark braid of hair going down his back.

  “George?” she called out.

  “George Gonzales,” she said. Still no movement. “George Gonzales. It’s Kristen Valdez. I live down the street from you. Your wife, Mary, sent me here to find you. She’s worried.”

  He raised his hand against the wall and stood up from his crouching position. He was mostly in shadow again, but Kristen could clearly see him. It was definitely Gonzales. She also could see his hands; neither held anything. She released her grip from her gun; her hand felt cramped from holding on to it so tightly.

  “I need you to come out of the dark so we can talk.”

  He moved slowly into the sunlight falling through the crisscrossed windows. He wore jeans, wet up to the knees from the snow, and a green parka.

  “George,” she said, intentionally saying his name again to keep him centered—and to keep him mindful of their connection. “Can you do me a favor and unzip your jacket?” He wordlessly did as he was told. Kristen noticed a wide streak of something dark across the front.

  “Is that blood on your shirt?” she asked, her hand automatically going back to her gun. Before he could answer, she said, “I need you to put your hands on your head.” He lifted his arms up. As he did so, his T-shirt rose up as well, showing the top of his underwear peeking out from beneath the waistband of his jeans—and something else.

  “Get down on your knees,” Kristen yelled. Almost before she knew what she was doing, her Smith & Wesson was out of its holster and leveled at him. “Keep your hands on your head and get down on your knees, now!”

  With his hands laced behind his head, he awkwardly got on one knee and then the other, as she kept her gun pointed at him, watching for the slightest movement he might make for the pistol tucked in his waistband.

  * * *

  Gil and Joe walked back into the hospital and asked the triage nurse where they could find the gunshot victim. They were sent back into the ER and found the right room. The door was closed. The commotion inside told them things weren’t going well. Gil asked one of the passing nurses if the paramedics who’d brought the man in were still around. She pointed toward the break room where two men in dark blue uniforms and military-straight haircuts sat sipping coffee. Gil introduced himself and asked the paramedics to describe what had happened.

  “We were dispatched to a heart attack call out in Tesuque,” one said. “We got to this big-ass house, and the front door was wide open. We could see this guy laying in the living room. He was unconscious, with a bullet wound in his upper arm, so it was a load and go, and we hauled ass out of there and called police while we were en route here.”

  “Was he duct-taped to a chair or anything?” Joe asked.

  “Not that we saw,” he said. “He does have bruises on him.”

  “Did he wake up during the ride in?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Just some moaning.”

  “Do you know who made the nine-one-one call?” Gil asked.

  “You’d have to ask Dispatch,” he said. “But as far as we could tell, he was alone in the house.”

  “Did you get a name?”

  “His driver’s license said it was Brian Mazer.”

  Joe pulled out his notebook and flipped through some pages before saying, “He’s on the list.”

  * * *

  Lucy stood in line, waiting her turn to talk to the judge via video. She didn’t quite know what to expect. New Mexico didn’t mess around with drunk driving; it had learned its lesson. The state used to have more alcohol-related deaths than anywhere in the country. In 1982, 65 percent of all crashes involved alcohol. In 2009 that number had been reduced to 36 percent, thanks in part to tough new laws that required every person convicted of DWI to install something called an ignition interlock on his car. Lucy would have to get one put in and then blow into it, proving she was sober, before her car would start. And she’d have to do that for the next year. But she wasn’t sure what else getting a DWI entailed. She had told Joe not to get her out because she didn’t wa
nt to circumvent the system; she wanted to be treated like everyone else. And like everyone else, she’d plead not guilty when it was her turn to face the judge and he would set bail. After that, who knew?

  * * *

  Gil sent a city patrol officer to go secure Mazer’s house as a crime scene and to back up the Santa Fe County deputy who had already been dispatched to the address. He and Joe stood outside Mazer’s hospital room. Gil watched hospital staff members scuttle in and out, carrying gauze, bottles of medication, and IVs, while Joe was busy texting on his phone.

  “What are you doing?” Gil asked.

  “I’m asking that assistant preproduction manager, Melody, from the movie, if she knows Natalie Martin, her husband, or Mazer.”

  “That’s a good thought,” Gil said.

  “Why do you sound so surprised?” Joe asked.

  After another half hour a tall, dark-haired doctor came out pulling a pair of latex gloves off.

  “The trauma surgeon is coming in for a consult. Most likely they’ll do surgery to get the bullet out,” she said.

  “How’s he doing?” Joe asked.

  “Not too bad, considering,” she said. “He sustained a gunshot wound to the upper arm and was beaten pretty badly. He’s lost a fair amount of blood, but we pumped him full of fluids and he’s stable now. I’m waiting for some test results to see if he’ll need a blood transfusion.”

  “Has he said anything?” Gil asked.

  “He was unconscious from the blood loss until just a few minutes ago,” she said. “He’s still pretty out of it, but you’re welcome to talk to him until the surgeon gets here.”

  Gil and Joe went into the room, where a medical aide was picking up medical trash that had been thrown on the floor by staff as they worked. Mazer, who looked to be in his late forties, with a dark beard and a balding head, lay on the bed with his eyes closed. He was hooked up to an IV and heart monitor, with tubing winding its way to his body and back. His right arm was immobilized, and the upper part was wrapped in layers of gauze and tape. He had a black eye and heavy bruising on one side of his face, with a large cut on his temple that had been stitched up.