Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

  He listened at other windows and heard nothing inside. A view into the kitchen showed piles of trash and dirty dishes. In the back a cracked garden hose snaked across dry ground to a dead crab-apple. The cell tower in the next lot cast a weak shadow across the yard. He lifted the lid on the garbage can. It was crammed to the top edge. Aragon came into the back yard from her side of the house.

  He showed her the full can.

  “Dolores hasn’t been taking her garbage to the curb. For weeks, it looks.”

  “At least she moved some of it out of the house. We can try the back door.” Aragon put her hand on the knob. “No prying eyes back here.”

  The door was unlocked.

  “Good thing the windows are open,” Lewis said as they entered. “Imagine the smell.”

  “But not that kind of smell. Nobody’s dead.”

  The living room where they’d found a collapsed Dolores Baca yesterday looked exactly the same. It would have been hard to notice any changes unless it had been completely cleaned up. The rest of the house was empty. Cassandra’s room still had the rifled gym bag on the floor.

  “She gave us permission to search her daughter’s room, take whatever we needed,” Aragon said. “Remember? You were in another room and missed her thirty seconds of coherence.”

  “Glad you reminded me.” Lewis filled the gym bag with the few items scattered on the floor, an island of order after what they’d just passed through. They left by the back door.

  Putting the gym bag in the trunk, he saw Perla Gallegos still watching.

  “Let’s talk to her. She doesn’t miss anything.”

  Perla Gallegos had the door open before they knocked.

  “I haven’t seen Cassandra,” she said. “It’s been days. Is she alright?”

  “No, Mrs. Gallegos.” Aragon took the lead. “She’s not. Did you see when her mother went out? We really need to speak with her.”

  “No.” Gallegos looked past them at the Baca house. “I thought she was home.”

  “Has anybody been by to see her?”

  “No. Nobody. I been watching since you were here. Where’s Cassandra?”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Gallegos. Here’s my card. If Dolores returns, please give me a call right away.”

  “Could you do me a favor? This smoke in the air. With my asthma, it’s no good.”

  “What can we do for you?’

  “Would you check I got a new garbage can, too?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dolores got one last night. I saw the garbage men. I was up and heard their truck. They pushed a new can around back of her place and took the old one away. Mine’s cracked. I been calling the city for months. They don’t do anything. Old ladies living alone, what do they care? My husband would have gone to City Hall and raised hell. Why do they need two men to deliver a garbage can? And a whole big truck. I can’t get even one person to return my calls.”

  “How could you tell the can was new?” Aragon asked, thinking about the overflowing, faded black can behind the Baca house.

  “It shined under the street light. Mine’s all faded and cracked from the sun. And bounced. I could see it was empty.”

  “This truck, was it from the city?”

  “Must have been, they do the garbage. But it didn’t say Santa Fe. It had a name. I forget. Benjie’s, maybe.”

  “Could it have been Benny?”

  “That’s it. Benny.”

  Aragon caught Lewis staring at her, eyebrows crawling up his forehead.

  “Holy crap.”

  “No, maybe Bobby,” Perla Gallegos said. “Or Bernard something. Why did she get a new can and not me?”

  “The can they rolled back to the truck, how do you know it was a different can, the old one from around back?”

  She scrunched her face. “I thought that, too, maybe it was the same can. Because it was shiny. I was getting mad, they’re pushing new cans around in the middle of the night, what, they don’t have anything better to do? But this one didn’t bounce. It was full. Took both those men to lift it into the truck.”

  They called their sergeant to meet them. They wanted to declare Baca’s house a crime scene, take control, treat every inch like evidence. But what did they have? An old lady with cat hair on her robe and a garbage truck in the night.

  Perez arrived. They walked around back, showed him the old garbage can still there, almost spilling over, and explained what they thought was in the shiny new can it took two men to lift. In the front they pointed through the window to where they’d found Dolores Baca zonked, not knowing when she last saw her daughter. They told him of the money found in Cassandra’s locker, how Lily Montclaire had hooked up with her through Backpage, how she’d used the same name Mom had used when she was tricking. How Mom had been bailed out of her prostitution arrests by Rigo Silva, vice president of E. Benny Silva Enterprises that owned the dumpster where Cassandra was found. How two witnesses in that old investigation had simply disappeared. How a company with a truck that said Benny Something came to Dolores Baca’s house in the middle of the night and how she now seemed to be missing.

  “We mentioned Dolores’s bail to Silva when we were looking for Rigo,” Aragon said. “A day later, Dolores is missing.”

  “We don’t know for certain,” Perez said.

  “Her car’s here. There’s no place near to walk to.”

  “She’s watching us,” Perez said, and nodded behind Aragon at Perla Gallegos’s house.

  “That’s what she does.” Aragon sat on the hood of one of the dead Impalas in Baca’s driveway.

  “If we seize this as a crime scene, then Dolores Baca comes walking up because you were wrong about what you think happened to her, it gets dicey.” Perez looked through the window into the front room. “Any other place, I’d say there was evidence of a struggle. But you say the place was a mess when you were here yesterday.”

  “Maybe it’s more a mess today.”

  “Not good enough.”

  They went silent, the three of them burning in the sun, knowing they should do this but not seeing a way.

  “Something Perla Gallegos saw,” Lewis said. “Cassandra was always working on these heaps, learning a skill.”

  “These things are never going to run,” Aragon said.

  “If she was that interested in learning about cars, there’s auto repair classes. But her school file shows nothing for shop. And we haven’t seen any kind of tools she’d use for working on cars.” He looked at the house, just a yard or so from the closest Chevy’s front bumper, a window above the hood. “That’s Cassandra’s bedroom right there, isn’t it?”

  Aragon asked, “Can we search these cars, Sarge?”

  “You know you need a warrant for what you can’t see from the outside.”

  Aragon scooted off the hood and peered into the car’s windows. Then she squatted low, trying to see under the Impala. She stuck her head in the wheel well, flipped on her back, and pulled herself under the chassis. In a second she pulled herself free, moved to the other side, and got down, again on her back and sliding under.

  When she wiggled out she had Ziploc bags on her chest.

  “We found Cassandra’s bank. There must be thousands under there.”

  “They make appointments through me,” Yago said, shirt off today, showing his life story in tattoos and scars. The Santa Fe riot on his chest, men up to their knees in water, cell gates swung open, guards lined up, hands tied, flames above the prison walls. “These guys, they’d fuck you up you didn’t do only their cases. Then you wouldn’t be doing mine. I’d have to mess you up to get you back on track.”

  “They’ll listen to you?” Fager asked, but knew the answer. He’d seen the way the men in the pod cleared a space at the table when Yago arrived with his food tray. His skin told stories no one could top.


  “You need to ask, shows you’re fresh meat in here. This one.” Yago turned to show his back. “An inch from my kidney. Brother of a snitch we shortened in the riot. Killing him got me back in here. I got facing manslaughter instead of walking on self-defense.”

  “That’s a wound in your back. You were attacked. That should have been easy.”

  “What I thought. But stabbing him thirty times changed things a little. That’s what Thornton told me. I told her, you ever been stabbed? Try counting when you’re fighting back. What number you think would have worked?”

  Fager sat at the stainless steel round table in the center of the pod. Like the table, the metal bench was welded to the floor. To sit down you had to park your butt first, then swing your legs over. Fager pulled closer one of the legal pads Detective Lewis had sent. On the top page he’d written the questions he needed to cover in every interview.

  “I only want to see ones who had Marcy Thornton as their lawyer.”

  “What you call this job I’m doing for you?” Yago scratched a blue tattoo of bones on his forearm, right where his own ulna and radius lay under the skin. “I may want it on my resume when I look for work. You’re getting me out of here, I need to be thinking ahead.”

  “Put down ‘executive assistant, law office intake and screening, client interview and case establishment.’ That’s how we billed it.”

  “Get a slot at the car wash. Instead of emptying ashtrays, pulling snotty tissues from the seats, I can be the guy outside with the clipboard, handling client intake and screening. I recommend our heavy duty wash and wax, sir, and the undercarriage spray. Appears you been tearing up those country roads. Might I interest you in our deluxe detailing service? This is a sweet ride. You should treat it right. How’s that sound?”

  “I buy the deluxe package if you’re the one selling.”

  Yago brought in the first Thornton client, the devil’s mustache, square-head guy, black eyes crossed a little. “Ineffective assistance of counsel,” he said after he covered his experience with Thornton. “Res ipsa loquitor, thing speaks for itself. I’m in here for a crime I didn’t do. What’s more ineffective than that?”

  “You’ve been using the law library.”

  “I say that right, the Latin words?”

  “The first one, don’t say it like rez. The rest you nailed. Now for the reality check.” Fager explained how they had to prove ineffective assistance of counsel. Wrongly convicted wasn’t enough. Innocence wasn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. “Even if the trial lawyer checked off all the boxes adding up to zealous representation, you could still be doing someone else’s time.”

  “I’ll get those years back, you get me out.”

  “But not staying in contact with you, not keeping you informed, ignoring your questions—that gets us started.”

  “She called today. Well, I got a message from a guard to call her. For once she’d take collect. She wanted to know if I’d heard of a guy named Benny Silva. What’s that got to do with how I been fucked?”

  Before Yago brought the next Thornton client, Fager had a question for him. Seeing Yago’s tattoos, he remembered something that had stuck in his mind since he’d first heard details about what happened when the guards lost control of Santa Fe’s prison. Yago had mentioned it before.

  “What was that about heads on shovels, in the riot?”

  “The other time I was an executive assistant, I got the names in cell block 4, protective custody. I came back with proof they were done snitching. These ISIS motherfuckers, showing off, shiny big knives. Man, we had to make our tools. You learn the square shovels are best. The pointed ones can go sideways they hit bone.”

  “Right. Who’s my next appointment?”

  Three Thornton clients later, Fager decided he needed to make a call. Yago told the inmate on the phone to hang up and step out of the way. Fager dialed, called Detective Rick Lewis collect, careful to use a first name only, other men standing too close.

  “Rick. Me, Walt. I don’t know if you can use this. Marcy Thornton’s been calling her old clients, asking if they know a Benny Silva. I remember that name. He had a civil case being tried ahead of one of mine, back in the day. You’re on it? Nine million dollars? Shit.”

  He shouldn’t have said that number out loud. Yago was rubbing the tat of the burning prison on his chest, beating out a slow rhythm, his eyes telling Fager he’d heard.

  Fager lowered his voice and listened to Lewis explaining where that case now stood with Judge Diaz. When he hung up, he told Yago, “My paralegal. He’s been with me for years. I’ll mail him my drafts of pleadings in your case. He’ll type them, make them look professional, hand-deliver them to the court. That should send a message you’re more than a run of the mill pro se litigant wasting the court’s time because you don’t have anything better to do with your own.”

  Yago said, “Tell me about nine million dollars.”

  Benny Silva brought Rigo and Abel to Thornton’s parking lot under old elms. He stopped his Olds next to a car he wanted them to see.

  “I never seen one like that,” Rigo said and whistled at the sight of Thornton’s red Aston.

  Abel, in the back seat, leaned forward for a better look. “Be something, cruising St. Francis, racing lowriders. Are we going to take it?”

  “We’re after the one that drives it.”

  Benny drove them back to the office. Abel had the movie in a thumb drive and brought it up on his computer. They watched, again, Marcy Thornton, Judge Judy Diaz, and the woman they didn’t know, the one all arms and legs, tying down Cassandra Baca.

  “Does Millie like biting?” Rigo asked Benny.

  “Enchiladas and Frito pies. Why are you asking such a thing?”

  “They all like it,” Abel said, watching the screen. “Cassandra’s the only one who doesn’t.”

  Benny focused on Marcy Thornton holding Cassandra Baca’s ankles, fire in her eyes. Holding her for Judge Diaz. “That lady can keep her fat English car. She’s giving us a judge.”

  Abel made still shots from the movie, he knew how to do that. He printed them in color, wearing plastic gloves, and folded them in an envelope that would go under the wiper on the Aston with a number to call.

  Twelve

  “We’re a large caliber killing ground,” OMI’s Nate Moss was saying. “I haven’t seen this in New Mexico, two peas behind the ear.”

  Standing there in running shorts and tank top, Moss was doing ten miles before tonight’s autopsies. He had a drive after his run, almost an hour to OMI’s facility on the University of New Mexico’s campus down in Albuquerque. He did this, beating pavement and dirt trails for miles, before his all-night cuts. Get the adrenaline going, some people said. Aragon always thought he ran to remind himself how alive he was before sharing the company of the dead while the rest of the world slept.

  He’d been stretching while others talked and spoke up when someone commented on the small caliber bullets that killed Cassandra Baca.

  Moss was in the FBI’s basement conference room with Rivera, Tucker, Elaine Salas, and Phil Barone, an FBI forensic analyst who had worked the Geronimo case. And Lewis and Aragon, their clothes damp from sweat after working Dolores Baca’s house. They’d brought something with them: news of finding twenty thousand dollars under the Impalas in the driveway.

  Aragon sat at the end of the table away from Rivera. After the stunt with the roses in her office, she didn’t want him sitting next to her, maybe touching as he reached for this or that, giving the others in the room something to wonder about.

  Moss dropped the foot in his hand and passed around copies of a report limited to external observations. The full autopsy would take place tonight. His lean thighs were pale under the fluorescent lights.

  “Two small entrance wounds behind the right ear. Small caliber weapon. Contact burns.”

  “Peas b
ehind the ear,” Lewis said. “I heard that in Pennsylvania. Mafia talk. You’re saying this is a Mob hit?”

  “It’s unusual for New Mexico. We have sloppy macho killers.” Moss bent a leg behind him, stretching his quad. “This is delicate, precise. Minute blood loss. No exit wound. The killer gives up the slugs and we can identify the make of gun. But they get a very neat, manageable kill in the bargain.”

  He shook enlarged black and whites out of a manila envelope. “I hate teeth mark analysis. It’s a scientific quagmire and not worth my time. On the other hand, the bite on the inner thigh broke the skin. I examined the case of a girl pulled from a river after a week submerged. Buccal cells were recovered in deep bite wounds. DNA led back to her stepfather. There’s a shot, even if Cassandra Baca had washed since, what do I call it, her last outing with Judge Diaz and friends?”

  “I’ve got Montclaire covered,” Aragon said. “We’ll have to be creative on getting spit from Thornton and Diaz.”

  Moss stretched the other leg as he talked, palm flat on the wall, pulling a heel to his glutes.

  “There’s a fantastic quantity of biological material on all surfaces of her body. Odd, because she’d been washed recently. There’s shampoo caked in her hair, like she didn’t rinse thoroughly. Her hair may have dried in the dumpster. I think her killer got her good and dirty so it would be harder to make sense of anything on her skin.”

  “They tried washing her,” Aragon said. “Then thought of something better.”

  “They always miss something,” Moss said. “It’s as though they compensated by overloading the biological information, burying us with it. She’s got everything on her but semen, which would have given us a definite focus. Instead we have this curiosity.”

  He brought out more photos, close-ups of skin. “She has wood splinters in her back and buttocks. There’s a uniform angle of penetration, as though she were dragged headfirst across a rough wood table, or sheet of plywood. I’m having a hard time seeing how it happened.”

  Lewis and Tucker had ideas: she’d been kept in an attic, then dragged out; she’d been abused with wooden paddles—Tucker’s twisted thought; she’d been loaded in a pickup on a plywood liner, then pulled out before she was thrown in the dumpster—the most plausible but still a flyer.