Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

  “We were drinking. Things got out of hand. Marcy was acting strange.”

  Aragon gave Montclaire paper and pen.

  “You billed your time when you worked for Thornton, right? I want you to fill out time sheets for the last week. From when you woke to when you went to bed. Where you went to bed. Who was in it. We’ll be back after the three of us talk.”

  Outside in the hall, Lewis shook his head. “Everything out of her mouth is bent.”

  Aragon said, “I know this is frustrating but we’re getting there. Thornton and Diaz alone are worth it. Thinking of nailing them fills me with patience.”

  “For me to consider witness protection,” Rivera said, “I have to be convinced she’s absolutely truthful. Just two minutes in there, and I know I can’t take this to the U.S. Attorney yet. She’s the center of the case against the Chief Judge, but a nebulous center at best.”

  “Nebulous,” Lewis said.

  “Hazy. Vague. Cloudlike.”

  “As in nebula,” Lewis said. “I’ll try it in one of my reports, see if my sergeant says anything.”

  “I repeat,” Aragon said, “if I hadn’t seen her bringing the girl to the judge’s door, I wouldn’t believe any of her story.”

  “I’m fed up dragging it out of her in pieces.” Lewis cupped a hand on the glass and looked through the little window into the room where Montclaire sat. “Either she unloads now, one hundred present true and verifiable, or we charge her to the hilt. No more nebulous bullshit.”

  Aragon gave him a look, then said, “She’s not scared enough about being charged. Hanging around Thornton, maybe she learned never to take a prosecution too seriously. I think there’s another way to go at her.”

  Back inside, Aragon pulled a chair next to Montclaire and showed her own phone, the photo she’d taken of Andrea in the bottom of the dumpster off Jaguar Road.

  “Let’s end the games, Lily. We could have protected Andrea if you hadn’t wasted our time. We can still protect you. Play by our rules once and for all. Or play hide-and-seek with the person who did this.”

  “There’s one way to stay alive, Ms. Montclaire,” Rivera said. “The federal government can provide a new life, in safety, all of this behind you. The price to you is small. It’s called the truth.”

  Montclaire stared at the image on Thornton’s phone.

  “The bed of roses,” she said. “They were beginning to stage shots like this when I was getting out of the business. I helped with one session, in abandoned buildings in Detroit. Powdering skinny girls, darkening their eyes, posing them like they were dead. Then spreading flowers around them. We did rose petals instead of whole blooms. Dead girls were in.”

  “Roses,” Aragon said. “That’s what you see?”

  “Girls worked hard to get that pallor. You got it right, it stayed, and cost you all kinds of other jobs.” Montclaire uncrossed and crossed her legs, hooking one ankle behind another. Aragon was impressed with how long they were, like vines. “Backpage dot com. That’s how I found her. ‘Dreams al instante,’ that was her ad. I guessed she was Latina. Didn’t know if she did women. Her price went up when I told her, kept going up each time, but I think that had more to do with seeing Marcy’s Aston and Judy’s house. She was trying to see how high she could go.”

  “How many times?”

  “Six, the last one when I told you. And it was Marcy doing the biting then. It kept getting weirder. But Andrea was okay with it. She said this was the best money she’d ever made. It made me wonder about the cheap men she’d been with. You’d think they’d want to show off, throw money at a pretty girl.” Montclaire lifted several pages of paper. “Here’s my time sheets. I didn’t kill her. I can account for every minute. Now how are you going to protect me? You know how many clients owe Marcy money? Maybe one got to Andrea as payment.”

  “This better check out, Lily. This is now about a lot more than a dirty judge and her lawyer friend.”

  “Last thing she said to me … ” Montclaire shivered inside Rivera’s jacket. “She thought it would be safer only doing women. Easier than men. Our rough was nothing like their rough.”

  Montclaire asked for the sweater that had been promised and Aragon hit up a female officer changing in the locker room. She came back with a sweatshirt Montclaire refused to wear.

  Rivera had called in Agent Evan Tucker, who had worked with them on the Geronimo case. He’d helped pry Fager off Thornton’s throat when Fager attacked her at the press conference where she’d accused him of killing his wife. Tucker would be working this full time now.

  Aragon told Rivera to run with it. Let someone who hadn’t heard Montclaire’s story several times give it a fresh take. She sat back with her meal, some green stuff in seedy bread Lewis had called in to Whole Foods, a delivery service bringing it to the front desk of police HQ.

  Whole Foods. They needed to look into the bag on Andrea’s head.

  Rivera asked Lily to go over how each night began and ended.

  She chewed a nail, said Andrea waited at the Pizza Hut outside Santa Fe Place, the old Villa Linda Mall. Andrea would be in a booth, usually a tall soda and empty plate in front of her. She’d walk outside with Montclaire to Thornton’s red Aston Martin, always by itself across the lot so it didn’t come back scratched. Once, they used the Durango Marcy had for work. Montclaire had been using it to serve subpoenas outside Taos and was running late. They always drove straight to Diaz’s home in the Acequia Madre neighborhood. Andrea joined in the drinking, but Diaz didn’t let her have much until after her job was done. Montclaire drove her back to the Pizza Hut, always closed, Andrea always refusing offers to take her home. She worried about the girl alone on the streets at night.

  “Nice of you to be concerned,” Rivera said. “Did you learn where she lived?”

  “No, and I got the feeling Andrea wanted it that way.”

  “And no idea about her last name?”

  “Hispanic, I’d guess,” Montclaire was saying. “A couple times she spoke Spanish with Judy.”

  “I’ll check store cameras,” Tucker said. “They should cover the entrance, maybe the booths. The mall’s exterior cameras probably take in the Pizza Hut, definitely the parking. We can see Andrea coming and going. You, too, Lily, smiling for the cameras once again, after all these years.”

  Aragon wished Tucker hadn’t said that. She would rather let Montclaire unload it all, check video, then hit her with inconsistencies. Let Lily talk without thinking there was any way to check what she said.

  “Rolling up in a big expensive car nobody else drives,” Tucker continued. “Your walk across the parking lot, not exactly the cat walk, but the show’s all you this time.”

  She wondered why Tucker was laying it on. She watched Montclaire, couldn’t tell if he was making her angry mocking her lost modeling career. He didn’t stop.

  “Coming through the doors, scanning the room, there she is, against the window. Do heads turn as you walk to her booth?”

  But Montclaire was in it, the scene. Aragon saw her going somewhere else, her eyes not really focused on Tucker, looking past him. Seeing Andrea, in that booth, watching her approach. No, seeing herself just as Tucker painted it. The camera following her again after all these years. There, her hand went up to her neck, long fingers flat against her skin, her favorite pose.

  Rivera brought her out of it. “Tell me what she said during the drives back and forth.”

  Montclaire drank coffee, took a moment to think. “She’d laugh at boys cruising in Honda Civics. She really liked Marcy’s car. Touched everything, opened all the compartments, played with the stereo, always looking for rap music.”

  Aragon knew everyone was thinking about recovering fingerprints if they could get inside Thornton’s Aston.

  “She had a friend.” Montclaire finished her coffee, folded the plastic lid, pushed it into the Sty
rofoam. “Maybe we wanted to include her. I said sure, until she introduced us.”

  This was the first time they’d heard about a friend. Maybe Tucker’s mistake was no mistake at all. Montclaire was giving something new.

  Rivera caught Aragon’s eye. She nodded for him to keep going.

  “Where did this happen?” he asked.

  “At the Pizza Hut.”

  “This friend. Did she have a name? Describe her.”

  “Skanky. Stringy hair, pinched face. I didn’t understand why Andrea thought we’d be interested.”

  “Age, race, eyes, hair, something for us to go on.”

  “Older than Andrea, but still a teenager. Hispanic. Brown eyes, brown hair. And metal in her face. That did it for me. I hate girls hanging hardware off their nose.”

  “A nose ring?”

  “The worst.”

  “Name.”

  “One of those romantic names you know’s a put-on. Like names strippers give themselves. I didn’t catch it.”

  “We’ll find her on the video.” Tucker stepping in; you could see he knew mentioning video got Montclaire talking. “Was she there each time?”

  “I got the feeling she was always there before I arrived. It looked like two people had been eating pizza. Two sodas. I met her only the once, though.”

  After going through each of the six encounters, Montclaire reconstructing as best she could dates and times, she asked for time out. They let her stretch her legs in the hallway. Cops stopped to watch, this tall, elegant woman so different from the usual cast. Then they brought her back.

  “That brings us to where you sleep,” Aragon said, speaking for the first time in the past hour. “It’s too early in the process for Agent Rivera to get you into the program. We’re not comfortable letting you return home alone. Whoever killed Andrea might come after you. We don’t have personnel for a guard on your house.”

  “So I’m screwed.” Montclaire bit her lip. “I’m not exactly impressed with this arrangement.”

  “We could charge you. You’d have a place to sleep.”

  “What’s my alternative?”

  “How are you around animals?”

  “I love cats and dogs, when they belong to someone else.”

  “I’m thinking a lot bigger.”

  “Rick and I will take Lily by her house for clothes,” Aragon told Rivera outside the interrogation room. “We really need the U.S. Attorney to get cracking. Will she have to plead to federal charges to qualify for the program?”

  “No way around it. I must say she bothers me. You show her Andrea dead and she talks about roses. That woman walks in a very dark light. What if she turns out to be Andrea’s killer?”

  “Lily couldn’t have put the body in the dumpster. Those skinny arms.

  Lewis said, “A man wouldn’t have any problem getting Andrea into the dumpster. It could be a john who found her ad. Or one of Thornton’s clients, like Lily said, trading services.”

  “Maybe another woman we don’t know about,” Tucker said. “What is it we call women who use prostitutes? Junes? Joans? Shit. I’d keep seeing Joan Rivers rolling down a window, calling to a high-assed girl in hot pants, ‘Can we talk?’ There’s got to be a word for women who do this but it’s not coming to me.”

  Aragon pushed away from the wall. She was ready to get moving. “Listen to Montclaire talking about what they did with Andrea. Spend a minute with photos of her in the dumpster. Some words will come real quick, and you already know them. You don’t need to make anything up.”

  “Monster?”

  “That works.”

  Aragon called Moss at OMI before they broke up. He’d been able to raise Andrea from her bed of garbage. Cause of death was obvious once he turned her over. Two small caliber bullet holes, contact wounds, behind her ear. He estimated she’d been dead thirty hours, but it was tough with the heat building in the dumpster. For now he put time of death in the pre-dawn hours the day before. He’d move the autopsy up his list and give them a definite time for the cut.

  Aragon called her brother to see if he had room for a guest at his hunting lodge. Elk season was months away. The kids were at grandmom’s, just Javier and Serena right now at the place in the pines. The round trip would take two hours. Back in town, they’d visit the dumpster company. Regarding the bag covering Andrea’s head, they’d hit Whole Foods. A meeting to coordinate the new joint task force would end the day.

  “Who’s the flaca?” Javier Aragon nodded at Montclaire as she leaned against the department sedan. Above them, ravens cawed in ponderosa pines. This side of the mountains the air was clear and cool, the last hint of the Los Alamos fire disappearing when they’d come through the pass at Glorieta. As they’d rolled along the dirt road to Javier’s house, a plume of dust from their car had coated trees that looked as dry as match sticks. Aragon hoped the flames stayed far from the city and mountains she loved.

  Her brother brushed a dun mule while Aragon explained her need to park Montclaire.

  “I don’t have a place for her in town. Your trailers are empty,” she said. Javier and his wife ran Lobo Loco Outfitters, taking hunters into the Pecos Wilderness for elk and a rare bighorn sheep or antelope on ranches they leased on the eastern plains. Summertime, after fire season, they did drop camps for people wanting to experience wilderness, ice and beer, fresh eggs and bacon replenished every two days, Serena cooking if you wanted her to stay around for an extra charge. “Your kids are with Serena’s mom,” Aragon went on. “You have tons of room. The city will cover your expenses. Maybe pay some rent.”

  “I’ll put her up for free if you’ll scout,” Javier said. “When was the last time you got out of the city?”

  “Fifty minutes ago, and I’m headed back as soon as we’re done here. She’s got clothes, toiletries. She’ll need bedding.”

  “She in danger?”

  “Maybe. No one will look for her out here. Without a car, I don’t have to worry she’ll take off.”

  “She’ll be safe. Not even a mountain lion can come close without my dogs letting loose. Serena made killer stew out of the last cat to bother my mules.”

  “You want a hand?” Lewis stepped up and patted another mule in the corral. Lewis was linebacker big but Javier was taller and wider, a head of wild black hair to match the beard, triceps like sycamore limbs growing out of his sleeveless jean jacket, open in the front and showing a carpet of black hair across his chest.

  “Run it by Serena,” he said and shoved one of his big fists into a bucket of soapy water. He came up with a wire brush and tossed it to Lewis.

  “I’d like to borrow your truck for the night,” Aragon said. “I know I’m being a mooch.”

  “Anything for little sister.” Javier tossed her the keys to the Ford SuperCab 4x4 parked by the barn. “Finally moving out of that shoebox you call an apartment?”

  “I wouldn’t need your truck for that. I can fit everything I own in my trunk.”

  “You need a hot ride for a hot date. Tell me that’s it.”

  “I’ll have it back tomorrow.”

  Serena, Aragon’s height without the muscle but a lot more hair, was under trees on the other side of the homestead’s clearing. She had a Broncos sweatshirt pushed above her elbows as she scraped an animal hide stretched on a rack. Behind her stood their house, two double-wides welded together, where they were raising five kids. Aragon motioned for Montclaire to join her. She needed to pass Serena’s inspection.

  The hide had belonged to a coyote. Serena dragged a blade across the wet inner side, then wiped membrane and blood on her pant leg.

  “Hola, stranger. Who’s your friend?” Serena pointed the knife in Montclaire’s direction. Montclaire had dropped behind to watch Javier.

  “Lily,” Aragon called. Montclaire looked her way, then back at Javier. “Come here. Someone you need
to meet.”

  Montclaire’s feet turned in Aragon’s direction, her eyes coming around last like she had to work to take them off Javier. Serena watched her approach as she scraped the hide. Aragon made introductions.

  “Lily’s an important witness for us. We need to keep her out of the city until the Feds take her. I thought you might let her stay in your bunkhouse.”

  The knife left a band of gore on Serena’s pants as she wiped it clean and then felt the edge with her thumb.

  “I’m not running a homeless shelter.”

  “Keep your receipts. I’ll take care of it.”

  Serena sheathed the knife, never taking her eyes off Montclaire. She reached into a Tupperware tub and came out with something mushy and white that she rubbed into the hide.

  “Coyote brains. The old fashioned way to tan a hide. Want to try?” She held a dripping hand toward Montclaire. “No? If you stay, you have to work. Everybody works here. Denise, too, if she hangs around another five minutes.”

  “She’ll work,” Aragon said. “But find something else for her to do.”

  “You need this?”

  “I do. It’s important and we’re stuck.”

  “And she’s an angel?”

  “Not exactly. Lily’s got her own problems we have to work out. I don’t think you have anything to worry about from her.”

  “Five days. Then we start scouting. She can’t be here alone.” Serena took a step toward Montclaire. “My husband. He’s a good looking guy.”

  “He is.”

  “You go anywhere near him, I’ll be rubbing your brains into animal skins.” She emptied her hand in the Tupperware tub, wiped it across her Broncos shirt. “She can put her suitcase in Upper Pecos.”

  “Which bunkhouse is that?” Aragon asked.

  “As far as you can get from our house.”

  Lewis led the way back to Santa Fe, Aragon in her brother’s truck, talking about Montclaire on their phones. They were sure Montclaire wasn’t going anywhere. She’d taken only the Pikolinos she’d been wearing—woven sandals with a four-inch heel, all wrong for hiking nearly twenty miles through forest and rocky canyons. Besides, on the way out, she’d said she was scared of staying in Santa Fe. Hanging out in mountains would give her a break from all the stress of doing what Marcy wanted done, destroying evidence, buying off witnesses to keep a serial killer in business. Now the stress of selling her out.