Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

Tucker had seen something in the video. He passed it to Lewis to ask Montclaire: What did you leave on the seat in the Pizza Hut?

  Montclaire had pretended the question puzzled her, came back with Nothing. Why do you think I left something?

  Serena told Montclaire to clear the table. They’d eaten outside under the trees. Montclaire carried dishes into the house, not having talked during the meal, by herself on the end of a bench.

  “We’re going to lay in the dirt in the dark all night long for that woman,” Aragon said to Lewis when Montclaire was out of earshot.

  “I’m laying in the dirt in the dark all night long for Cassandra Baca.”

  Serena reached into the cooler by her chair and cracked another beer for herself. “Javier has a pair of night-vision goggles,” she said. “They’re fun.”

  “That’s how he’s able to shoot mountain lions in the dark.” Aragon wanted one of those beers to chase the red chile taste in her mouth. Instead, she’d be drinking coffee at midnight. “And here I thought it was his mountain man skills.”

  “Isn’t that illegal,” Lewis asked, “using night-vision goggles to hunt?”

  “Who’s hunting?” Serena took a long drink and wiped her lips on the back of her hand. “He’s protecting his family and property.”

  A little after one a.m., headlights showed the underside of trees across a little valley from where they’d set up. Aragon removed the night-vision goggles. She’d been getting a kick out of seeing deer, then a bear moving under the trees, coming straight at their position, pausing, sniffing the air, then swinging wide around them.

  The light reappeared, topping out on the opposite hill, then angling down the dirt road.

  They heard the engine as it climbed toward them. Headlights. A car stopped at the tree they’d dragged across the road.

  They came out of the woods on opposite sides of a Crown Victoria. Dashboard glow showed two people inside.

  “Police! Get out of the car and turn around, hands on the roof.” Lewis taking charge on the driver’s side, a big flashlight lined along the barrel of his Glock.

  Aragon did the same, holding her flashlight along the barrel of her gun, and saw the face behind the window on her side. “It’s Pork and Sauerkraut.”

  The doors opened. A foot came out. A man stood.

  “What the fuck? Is this how you welcome fellow officers come to your aid and assistance?” Albert Fenstermacher unfolded himself from the passenger side, his hand shielding his eyes from the flashlight’s beam. Darrel Park came out the driver’s door.

  “Sergeant Perez told us you might need help protecting your witness,” Fenstermacher said. “We needed to talk with you anyway. We’ve been calling for hours.”

  “There’s no signal out here.”

  “Would you put that down, for Christ’s sake?”

  Aragon lowered her flashlight and holstered her weapon.

  “We brought sleeping bags.” Fenstermacher nodded over his shoulder at the rear seat. “We can spell you guys. Maybe all of us can get a little shuteye.”

  “Much appreciated. Help us move this tree out of the way. We’ll walk ahead. My sister-in-law was going to bed, but she’s probably on the porch with a rifle across her knees. You drive up alone, she’ll be wondering what happened to us. You don’t want to learn what an Annie Oakley she is.”

  As they dragged the tree back into the forest, Fenstermacher talked about their investigation of the dead Indian without a foot.

  “You’d given us the name E. Benny Silva, that photo of the copper cable in his scrap yard. We asked him about it. He pulled out this book from under the counter. ‘Sorry, no copper cable this week.’ He held it open for us to see. ‘I got rainspouts, pipes from a hotel downtown they’re renovating. No cable.”’

  “You show him the photo I sent you?” Aragon asked.

  “He said that wasn’t copper, that’s why it’s not in his book. But it looks just like the copper cable round our Indian. PNM matched it with their stock, some alloy so they can trace anything that gets ripped off.”

  They got the tree into the bushes, Fenstermacher having a hard time with it. “How did the two of you get that thing into the road?” He was bent over, hands on his knees.

  Park took over while they waited for him to catch his breath. “Guess what? Silva lives in that neighborhood that lost power the night before the Indian turned up dead. We went to his street, talked to this old guy with a walker putting out a soaker on what’s left of his lawn. You know, the air’s getting pretty bad in the city? The wind shifted. He had a handkerchief over his face. We asked him about the power outage, what he’d heard. He’d heard Mr. E. Benny Silva saying it would never happen again.”

  “El Patron,” Aragon said. “Defending the pueblo.”

  “So what we wanted to run by you, your thing with the girl in the dumpster. Sarge let us see the photos. Don’t want to step on toes, but maybe because we have the footless Indian on the brain, it looks staged. Like ours. Why go to all that trouble, severing a foot, wrapping him in wire yanked out of the transformer that cut the neighborhood’s AC, unless a message is being sent? Nobody’s gonna touch that transformer again except the PNM crew supposed to work on it. Your thing, you think maybe a message, too, in Mr. Benny’s dumpster? Yo. What’s that?”

  Headlights lit up the underside of branches across the valley, then disappeared.

  “Someone’s coming,” Lewis said, already moving. “Let’s get this tree back in place.”

  They dragged it out of the bushes and again blocked the road. The headlights lit trees on the opposite hill, then swung into the little valley.

  Aragon said, “Guys, act like you were coming in here and this tree stopped you. Try to see who’s driving. We’ll be in the woods. Don’t let them know you’re cops. You’re lost, looking for the Interstate.”

  She and Lewis melted into the darkness. They watched a vehicle approach, a pickup truck. No, it was a cargo van sitting as high as a truck, full size, headlights on high beam. Fenstermacher and Park stood at the back of their car, Fenstermacher waving, friendly, fully lit in the van’s headlights. The van stopped twenty feet away.

  The driver’s window came down. Fenstermacher stepped closer. The taillights on his car showed his shirt lifted in the back above his pistol, riding in a holster inside his pants. Park stepped left for the angle on the passenger. He had his gun behind his thigh.

  “Tree fell down,” Fenstermacher said.

  A voice spoke inside the van. Aragon couldn’t make out words.

  “We have to turn around anyway.” Fenstermacher looked behind him briefly as though he was trying to get a fix on Aragon and Lewis in the darkness. “This isn’t the way to the Interstate, is it?”

  Park had begun walking down the side of the van toward the rear. The van began backing up, slowly, keeping pace with him.

  “Hold on.” Fenstermacher said. “Can you help us out? There’s no signal for our GPS in here.”

  Park lengthened his stride. The van picked up speed. Now it began to pull away. Park gave up hiding his gun and ran. The van swerved as it accelerated, then straightened and moved faster down the hill and disappeared in the dip. When they saw it again, the van had turned around and was moving up the far slope and out of sight.

  Aragon and Lewis met the other two cops in the road, flashlights on, no need to hide any more.

  “I might have done that, too,” Fenstermacher said. “On a dark road, middle of nowhere, a car blocking the way, two guys walking toward me. I got a look inside. Driver: Hispanic, thirties, clean-cut. A boy, teenager, in the middle. In the passenger seat, an older Hispanic guy, heavy-set.”

  “I could almost read something on the side of the van,” Park said. “Before it moved off I got ‘enterprises.’”

  They left the tree in the road for the rest of the night. One team grabbed slee
p in the Crown Vic while the other kept watch from the woods. No other vehicles appeared out of the night. Shortly before dawn, Aragon stiffened at the sound of branches snapping. Something large moving through the woods. She unholstered her gun and racked the slide.

  “Elk,” Lewis said. It was his turn with the goggles. “A big bull, a beaut, leading his harem. He’s veering off.” An eerie, stressed bugle split the night, followed by a bizarre huffing. “Listen to that. He’s pissed we’re here.”

  At dawn they cleared the road. Aragon walked ahead of the car carrying the three men. Serena was in the corral, a rifle slung over a fence post. She reached for it when she saw Aragon stepping into the clearing. Aragon realized how it looked, like she was being marched ahead of the car.

  “Good guys,” she called out. “Cops.”

  She introduced Fenstermacher and Park and handed back Javier’s goggles. “Man, these things are awesome. Rick saw a bull and cows this morning. I saw a bear.”

  Serena said, “There’s carne adovada and scrambled eggs on the stove. I’ll be right in to make some more.”

  The four of them split what was ready and brought their plates onto the porch. Serena was backing a pickup to the corral. She climbed out of the cab and into the bed and heaved bales of hay over the corral’s top rail.

  Aragon stopped eating and watched. “Look at that,” she said to Lewis. “You see it?”

  “Look at what?”

  “How you can get a body into a dumpster. Serena couldn’t throw a hay bale into the corral if she was standing on the ground. From the back of a pickup, it’s just another chore.”

  Twenty-one

  That was it for hiding Lily in the woods.

  Aragon borrowed Javier’s truck, leaving Lewis with the department car. He arranged for a buddy with State Police to patrol the road into Loco Lobo ranch several times a day. Last night’s visitors might return with Serena out there alone. They might not be quick to accept Serena’s word that Montclaire was not there.

  Lewis was now heading to District Court for the latest filings in Silva’s case while she took Lily by her house to grab clean clothes. At the door, Montclaire stumbled through her security code.

  A laugh, the first Aragon had heard. “Only a couple days and already I forgot,” Montclaire said.

  When she got the door open she headed to the bedroom. Aragon walked through the low-slung adobe, checking the location of windows and doors. There was a sliding glass door at the back overlooking a hill that could be climbed in the dark. The walls along the sides of the house would let someone get within a couple feet of a window before being seen. And three separate doors into the house, not including the one from the garage.

  She called Rivera to prod him on getting Montclaire into witness protection. As she was waiting for him to answer she wondered why he’d given Lewis, not her, developments in Tucker’s work. Now that she thought about it, he hadn’t been calling her directly for two days, since before the visit to Sun-Hi Breskin. She got his voicemail and left another message.

  “I’m ready.”

  Montclaire emerged from a bedroom with an overnight bag and roll-on suitcase. Framed in the doorway, she was an older version of the young woman in the poster under glass on the wall, in a yellow bikini, the bottom riding below hip bones, a parasol tilted over her shoulder, not doing any good, not the slightest shade on her face.

  “That’s you,” Aragon said.

  “Seventeen years old. The Bahamas. I was right on the edge of making some big money, the next Evangelista. Where are you taking me?”

  “Lewis wants to charge you and let the detention center take you off our hands. Screw this headache getting you into witness protection. Maybe I’ll agree with him before the end of the day. I want to hear what you have to say after we watch a little movie.”

  She’d been focused on doors and windows and hadn’t noticed the large black portfolio taking up the coffee table in front of a low couch. It probably had Montclaire’s career in there, all her different phases, things Lily hadn’t shared with them.

  She wished Montclaire had taken longer getting her stuff together.

  She called ahead for Tucker, not bothering to go through Rivera. She drove to the FBI’s offices. Rivera’s car was not in its spot. Tucker was waiting in the media room. She skipped introductions and told Montclaire to take a seat.

  He ran the Pizza Hut video of Montclaire coming to the booth where Cassandra Baca and Star Salazar were sitting, the flash of an envelope in her hand, reaching for the back of the booth, her hand coming back empty. Then Cassandra Baca leaving and Star Salazar going around to where Montclaire had been. Sliding out with an envelope pressed against her thigh.

  Tucker froze the image.

  “What was in the envelope, Lily?”

  “Money.”

  “You paid Star Salazar for the time with Andrea. Up front.”

  “That was the arrangement.”

  “It tells me something else,” Aragon said. “The way you left the envelope, Star not counting. There was some trust between you and her. More than I’m feeling between us right now.”

  Montclaire did that thing with her hands, laying them flat along her neck, fingertips on the line of her jaw.

  “I call bullshit,” Tucker said.

  “You call it right,” Aragon said. “Lily, you didn’t want us knowing about Star Salazar. Explain that for us.”

  “That’s how Marcy does it. She said if you give the cops everything right away, they’ll still want more. So instead of making stuff up that they’ll find out was a lie, you hold things back and play it out a little at a time. Always keep something in the bank, Marcy said.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be playing lawyer,” Aragon said.

  “There’s not a lawyer in this town I would trust. Marcy’s screwed half of them. The rest won’t cross Judge Diaz. I’m doing the best I can.”

  “I’d say your best is coming up way short.”

  “I paid Star Salazar fifteen hundred dollars the last time.” Montclaire put her hands under her thighs. “I’d started at four hundred. Marcy gave me the money. I put it in an envelope from Judy’s office, it was all I had in the car. Star kept it. That’s how she knew Andrea was seeing the Chief Judge.”

  “Why did you have an envelope from Judge Diaz’s office?”

  “Marcy had been helping her send out invitations for a fundraiser.”

  “What else are you holding back?” Tucker said. “The federal government doesn’t play hide and seek with people who want our protection.”

  Aragon was on her feet.

  “It’s more than holding back, Lily. It’s lying. You denied passing anything to Star Salazar until you saw we had it on film.”

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  “Save ‘sorry’ for sentencing. Come on.”

  “Star probably still has the envelope. That’s something else you can use.”

  “Star’s missing. No help for you there.”

  She marched Montclaire to the truck and drove in silence out of town, under I-25 onto south 14. Montclaire could see where they were going from miles away. Aragon turned into the parking lot of the Santa Fe Detention Center and parked at the sign pointing visitors one way, prisoner deliveries the other.

  “I’m thinking Rick Lewis is right. Not babysitting you, I could get real work done.”

  She circled around so the jail’s walls and fences were on Montclaire’s side of the truck and stopped at the gate for prisoner transports. A van was coming through, heads above red jumpsuits in every window.

  “It was Marcy who put me onto Star Salazar,” Montclaire said. “She’d handled her brother’s case.”

  Aragon called Lewis.

  “Meet me at the office. Grab an interrogation room. We’re starting over.”

  Star Salazar’s brother had
a different last name. Griego. Victor Griego had been charged with second-degree murder. A party in an apartment gone wrong, shots fired, young men who’d been friends before the PCP kicked in trying to kill each other.

  Montclaire had interviewed Star, then brought her to Thornton. Star said her brother had been sitting across from a boy named Stalker, she didn’t know his real name. Two kitchen chairs facing each other, pulled close so their knees almost touched. Each tranked, each wearing a Kevlar vest. Each with a mouse gun in the hand dangling at the end of an arm. Mad-dogging in silence, other kids around them choosing sides, passing bottles and joints. Some loud rap music shaking the walls.

  The joint in Griego’s hand without the gun had been dipped in liquid amp.

  He took a hit, staring at Stalker through the smoke. He held out the joint, Stalker reaching to take it, making sure to keep his gun arm limp.

  “What was the game, Lily?” Aragon asked, back with Lewis in the same cold interrogation room where Montclaire had first started talking.

  “To see who could be the coolest,” Montclaire said. “They had to control their nerves, looking into the eyes of someone with a gun in their hand, the PCP kicking in, the kids urging them on. If a muscle twitched, that was it. Fair game. Quick draw with no chance of missing.”

  “And so the small guns. It wouldn’t be fatal unless a lucky head shot. The vests would stop the small slug.”

  “But when Stalker was taking a hit, Griego shot him point blank in the eye. He killed Stalker right there in front of all those kids.”

  They left Montclaire to find the file on the shooting. After reading it together Aragon said, “Thornton pulled it off. Witnesses tripping over each other, changing their stories, saying they were hallucinating. Some key witnesses refusing to testify.”

  “And no weapon. That killed the case. They couldn’t even put a gun in Griego’s hand.”

  The DA sought sanctions, claiming Thornton was obstructing justice by withholding the gun that had killed Stalker. She claimed attorney-client privilege. Not saying her client had given her anything, but if he had, just revealing the weapon had come from him would divulge confidential information.