Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

“Flowers wilt, their petals drop because the stems get clogged, they can’t take up water and nutrients. You keep them fresh by cutting the stems an inch a day, misting them, using a preservative.”

  “So these could be six days older than what comes out of a store, not one day like we thought.”

  “You thought that. I never said.”

  “I don’t know shit about flowers. I only ever bought them for my mom. Never grew them. Don’t keep any around. Coming home late at night, alone, to dead flowers in beer bottles, I don’t need that.”

  “Takes being splashed with flesh-eating soup to keep you home.”

  “Didn’t keep me from climbing Baldy today.”

  “Why am I not surprised to hear that? Back to what you said. With the high level of sucrose in the stems, definitely, they could have been out of the store for a week.”

  “Explain that.”

  “Plants need food. When you cut stems from the mother plant, trim the leaves, you deprive them of nutrition. The sucrose level drops. But we found good sucrose levels in these roses. Somebody was using a flower preservative. There’s also a biocide for fighting bacteria.”

  “You never looked away from the flowers, did you?”

  “They bugged me.”

  “Bugged me, too. I just got distracted with little things, like people trying to kill our witness.”

  She was out of the house as soon as she’d changed bandages and found clean clothes in the back of her closet. She took Javier’s truck to Home Depot and had a clerk cut a sheet of plywood, three-quarter-inch thickness, the same as the plywood recovered from the crime scene. With the board in the back of the truck, she drove around until she found an E. Silva Enterprises dumpster the size of Cassandra Baca’s tomb.

  She hadn’t forgotten watching Serena using the truck as a work platform.

  She backed in and laid the board against the edge of the tailgate, making a ramp to the dumpster’s edge. That didn’t look right. Too unsteady. Then she tried it with the tailgate down.

  That could work. The board took care of wrestling with a dead body, always harder to lift than the weight alone. Still, it was the same as a hundred-pound clean and jerk, getting your fingers under the board, legs bent, pushing up from your heels and lifting the board above your head so a body would slide off.

  But she knew she was close.

  She played with the board, pushing down on the end extending over the dumpster. The board came up an inch off the truck bed.

  A counterbalance. She pushed the board out farther. The same pressure brought the back end up higher. A counterweight on the end of the board would make it even easier.

  Okay, a counterweight? What was it and where did it go?

  Probably into the dumpster. It would be on the end, the first thing to fall off, Cassandra Baca coming next, sliding along the board head first.

  She called Lewis. He wouldn’t talk to her, she’d broken her promise to stay home. He must have heard sounds suggesting she wasn’t in an apartment. Maybe all the traffic from the streets around here and the dogs barking in the mobile home park. She said she was on the balcony getting air.

  She told him, e-mail me what the academy cadets found in the dumpster.

  “You want to read about Q-tips and dog food cans and pizza boxes? Soiled diapers, how many, what brands? Nineteen banana peels, various states of decomposition, sixteen lime halves, nine empty jars of salsa. Cat litter, the clumping kind, collected and weighed. Denise, enjoy the time off. There’s cage fighting on the tube tonight, the girls coming up after Ronda Rousey and Holly Holm.”

  “You find that cleaning lady? It’s been two hours.”

  Rivera asked how she was feeling, but that wasn’t why he’d called.

  “One side of the equation for wit sec is the witness’s cooperation, how valuable and critical their information. Montclaire meets the grade. The other side, the threat evaluation, just fell out from under her.”

  “No Silvas, no threat,” Aragon said. “And Thornton and Diaz are out of action.”

  She was on her sofa bed, the mattress pulled out, pages from the inventory of the dumpster on her chest. She’d printed out the attachment Lewis sent, pulled together a plate of what food she had in the fridge. The stale, leftover fries were hard like nails. She’d settled on plastic cheese, crackers, and a mushy apple. Somewhere down the list, in the middle of a tally of broken dishes, a busted microwave, a cardboard box containing ninety-one hangers, ripped sneakers, shoes without mates, a tube of furniture polish, and a dented frying pan, she stopped reading to pace her efficiency apartment, stare out the window at the parking lot, the street beyond the dead landscaping.

  She’d been told something to her face, what was it? Why had she let it slip?

  Because she’d wanted to hear something else.

  “The bean counters,” Rivera was saying, “won’t let me keep her in the hotel if she’s not in the program.”

  Sergeant Perez had told them he needed the interrogation room. The FBI had helped out by putting Montclaire in the Days Inn. She’d have to go home now or pay her own hotel bills.

  She was surprised how easy it was talking with Rivera, as long as they kept it on the job. She said, “Funny how her play with Fager holding the video backfired. She thought he was helping her. Instead, he played her ace for himself. Benny, he still in the bath?”

  “We tried fishing him out with nets. Just soup bones.”

  “Nice way to remember the old guy. Look, I don’t want her taking off. Lily’s figured out where she stands if she’s been watching the television in her room. One more day, Tomas.”

  “I can do one more day. Outstanding work, by the way. I haven’t had a chance to say that. I get the feeling the Silvas were a lot worse than we knew. We’ve got a lock on the surviving members of the cast.”

  “Do we?” Aragon picked up the pages listing each individual item of trash in the dumpster. She needed to get back to this.

  “Diaz is through as a judge forever. We’ll get conspiracy to obstruct, bribery, maybe more. And on Cassandra Baca, Thornton’s going to take a very hard fall.”

  “No doubt. Thanks for calling. Really.”

  Krav Maga was out of the question. Aragon hit the gym and pushed herself to failure on every major muscle group. She needed to do this more often, destroy her body, get it out of the way so her mind could work.

  She was on the calf machine, a stack of forty-five pound plates on the fulcrum, thinking about counterweights. She dropped the bar with a clang and got her phone from her pants in the locker. She stepped into the gym’s lobby to call Lewis.

  “I thought you were taking it easy,” his voice said. “I know that headbanger music. You’re at the gym.”

  “Can you meet me at Thornton’s office? Bring Fager’s lawsuit.”

  “Give me an hour. My turn to clean up after dinner.”

  “Did you find the maid?”

  “I know where she’ll be tomorrow. When you’re home recuperating.”

  Then she called Elaine Salas.

  “Can you meet me at Thornton’s office, bring your field kit?”

  “This suspension of yours, it’s kind of rough on the rest of us. Hang on.” She heard Salas yelling something, someone yelling back, the phone being put down, a television playing. Kids whining. Footsteps getting louder. Salas’s voice returned. “On my way.”

  Aragon angled her headlights to cover the walk from Thornton’s parking lot to the office door. The work had been finished, the sawhorses and string with flags removed. The crew had done a nice job fitting flagstones into the missing spots, getting everything tight and level.

  Salas arrived first and Aragon showed where she wanted soil samples. Lewis rolled up next. Together they read Fager’s lawsuit against Aragon and studied the exhibits, photographs of the missing flagstones.

&
nbsp; “Seven stones, it looks like,” Lewis said. “Good sized. What, about ten, fifteen pounds each?”

  “We can weigh them and know for sure.” Aragon pulled out the detailed inventory of the contents of the dumpster. “I had to get to the end before I picked up on what I was reading.” She’d circled seven items, scattered throughout the inventory, listed by different cadets sorting the trash on different shifts. Only one was identified as flagstone. The others were two pieces of rock, slate, granite slabs 2x, and stone shelf.

  “I have a feeling they’re the ones that were missing from here. Look at Fager’s photos. See how the shapes of the missing flagstones are marked where grass had grown between them?”

  “Thornton’s flagstones thrown in the dumpster way out on Jaguar Road?”

  “It’s how a person without much arm and leg strength could have raised Cassandra Baca high enough to put her in the dumpster. Elaine, did you ever build that dummy we asked, to resemble a body the size and weight of Cassandra Baca?”

  “It’s been waiting,” Salas said, “for you to get done shooting people and bathing in alkaline hydrolysis solution.”

  “That’s what splashed on me?”

  “Be glad you didn’t get it in your eyes. Meet me around the back of the evidence locker so no one sees you, you being on suspension and all.”

  It worked. The seven stones came to a total weight of eighty-one pounds. They did it on a wall outside the evidence locker, not sure the height matched the tailgate of a 2015 Dodge Durango backed to a Silva Enterprises dumpster. But with the counterweight in place, Elaine Salas, who said she couldn’t do a single chin-up, was able to lift the end of the board with the dummy’s dead weight equaling that of Cassandra Baca.

  “It wasn’t a bed of roses,” Lewis said. “It was a bed of stone.”

  “It makes me wonder,” Aragon said, “if Cassandra Baca was killed inside Thornton’s office.”

  “In a hurry, grab what’s close at hand. So where did the board come from?”

  “It could have been taken off a construction site. All around there, houses are being remodeled constantly.”

  Salas said, “We should go back and look for blood evidence. The warrant didn’t cover that.”

  Aragon looked to Lewis. “You always say, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’”

  “Right,” he said, “I’m on it. I’ll get started on the application. Most is already done. What are you doing?”

  “Finally remembering I’m on suspension. ’Night, all.”

  She didn’t go home.

  She stood again in the night where the dumpster had been, Cassandra Baca’s last resting place above ground. She was trying to see Marcy Thornton here, bringing a body in the Durango, sliding the board from the back over the edge of the dumpster, getting Cassandra Baca on, weighting the other end with the stones.

  How high would the end be in the air, how far would Thornton have to reach, arms extended straight out from her shoulders, to stack flagstones on the end of the board?

  Short legs.

  Maybe she stood on something to make it easier, or balanced the flagstones on the edge of the dumpster, slid them up the board, nudged them out to the end.

  Was it Thornton who’d thrown it in her face, the key to all this? That would be like her, convinced she was smarter, enjoying the risk, the challenge. Aragon tried to replay every conversation she’d had with Thornton, searching for what it was she’d said.

  Her mind was still doing reruns when she got to her apartment. She brought the last beer in the fridge to the bathroom while she examined her face in the mirror. Her skin was red right to the corner of her eye. She’d been lucky.

  She drained the beer and flopped on the sofa bed. Enough thinking about Marcy Thornton. She called up the dream that always made it easy to sleep and never want to wake. A gun in her hands, killing the gangsters aiming at Miguel, blowing them off their feet, exploding their heads, more and more coming, emptying from lowriders pulling to the curb, her gun never running out of bullets, her aim never failing.

  But what she saw was Cassandra Baca lying naked, dead, on the plywood board, minutes from being thrown out like trash.

  Forget sleep.

  Thirty-four

  She sat with the street people in the main library on Washington Avenue, smelling them, a man next to her with his head in a skullie bloodstained above the ear. A fresh gash peeked through greasy hair. He nodded like he knew her, this nearly bald, brown woman, face in gauze and tape, huddled over old magazines staring at pictures of girls.

  She’d asked for decades-old Cosmo magazines. The reference librarian brought boxes from the basement. Aragon was lucky they had them, the librarian told her, so much of the library’s collection had been scanned and digitized to save storage space. In another couple years, there would be no paper under this roof.

  Aragon took a quick look and came to the counter with something she’d found just under the top layer of magazines. Old Hustler issues. Somebody had kept the boxes for reasons other than a backlog in digitizing.

  She had twenty years to look through, knowing this was a long shot and there had to be a better way. Certainly not every issue would be here. Rivera could probably get a rookie agent in DC to go to the Library of Congress and make sure they weren’t missing anything.

  Was Cosmo in the Library of Congress?

  The street people around her changed. The odor did not. She dragged the boxes to a carrel and used them to wall herself off.

  This wasn’t her world in these pages. “Look sexy now: make them obsessed with you.” And “What he’s really thinking when you talk dirty.”

  The magazines on the floor by her toilet had articles like “Boobs: A Girl’s Best Friend for Concealed Carry.” Or “Mother’s Day for Moms Who Love Guns.”

  Aragon searched the Cosmo back issues for the photos Lily said she did when her modeling career was hot. She found lots of tall, thin blondes with almost-uniform face, eyes, and cheekbones. No Lily yet.

  “You done with these?”

  It was the street guy with the head wound, squinting at the boxes.

  “You wondering what are the ten secrets to every woman’s wildest fantasy?”

  “The boxes,” he said. “I could use them. I already know the secret to every woman’s fantasy. It’s only two.”

  “Tell me, two what?”

  “Love. It’s that simple. And respect. The hardest things to give, the hardest to get. Who needs a magazine subscription to learn that?”

  “I like the way you think.” She peeled off a twenty and handed it to him. “Buy yourself some Neosporin for that head,” she said and hoped she wouldn’t see him drunk later on the Plaza.

  She got a text from Lewis to call. She went outside and found a spot away from the tourists moving between the Plaza and Marcy Street.

  He’d just spoken with Thornton’s cleaning woman. Caught up with her at the last job for the day. You need to hear what she says. And don’t worry how you look. Just get over here.

  Ermelina Garza waited with Lewis inside the front door of a place called Great Adventures Family Dentistry. Garza wore a flowered smock tied in the back, a purple clip holding white hair, hands as red as Aragon’s burns.

  “Some name,” Aragon said before she saw the African safari motifs, the life-size plastic animals kids could climb, a fort of plastic logs under fake palm trees. The receptionist wore a safari shirt with epaulets and a pith helmet. “I get it.”

  “Mrs. Garza, I want to show you a photograph,” Lewis said. “Denise, your phone? I don’t have the photos on mine. Step over here in the shade so you can see better.”

  They moved from the front door to stand under a sign listing the dentists’ names.

  “Yes, that’s Miss Thornton.” Garza settled glasses on a chain on the bridge of her nose. She reminded Aragon so much of
her grandmother, around sixty years old, wide hips from bringing children into this world, wide shoulders from carrying a family on her back. “And that’s Miss Lily.”

  “Which one of these women would take flowers from the office?”

  “Miss Lily. But now she’s gone, Miss Thornton lets me.”

  Aragon said, “That’s what she meant by ‘I take the flowers home now.’”

  “Always the roses,” Garza said. “She likes roses.”

  “Flowers in five places in Thornton’s office,” Lewis said, “twice a week. Reception, Thornton’s credenza, the conference room, Montclaire’s desk, and the main hallway. Mrs. Garza doesn’t know how many in each vase, but says there were a lot. We can get the quantities from the florist.”

  “When was the last time there were roses?” Aragon asked.

  Garza squinted an eye, furrowed her brow.

  “Last week? Miss Thornton won a case. Roses when she won.”

  “We didn’t go back far enough,” Lewis said.

  Aragon felt momentum building. “How do you know when she’d win a case?”

  “Oh, the mess in the morning. Bottles, clothes, spills. They’d call, because I usually came evenings. Come now, what’s her name up front, Maria Nicole. She’d say, clean up before we open. Hurry. I work all night, so I’m up. But I double my hours. Missus Thornton tells me do that.”

  “And was there a mess last week?”

  “Like it was Cinco de Mayo.”

  Aragon showed another photo, of Judith Diaz. “Did you ever see her?”

  “I clean her house. And Miss Lily.”

  “How do you get in to Miss Lily’s house?”

  “I have a key, and the codes.”

  Aragon stepped closer to Garza. She added a serious tone to her voice.

  “Miss Lily is with the police. She’s helping us on something very important.”

  “She’s very nice.”

  “Yes, she is. She needs clothes from her house.”

  “Denise.” Lewis was giving her a look. She ignored him.