Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

  “She asked us to get the clothes, but her keys are in the house. We were going to call a locksmith. You could save Miss Lily some money.”

  Lewis, stress in his voice this time. “Denise.”

  “Why were you in Miss Thornton’s office making a mess? All the police. That black powder everywhere, I don’t know how to clean it up.” Garza pulling back a little, a hand shielding her eyes from the sun. “Why is Miss Lily working with you? I don’t know.”

  “Why is Miss Lily working with us?” Aragon opened her palm to take her phone back from Lewis. She scrolled through files, searching for another picture. “She’s helping us find the person who killed this girl.” She turned the phone so Garza saw a photo of Cassandra Baca, the one of her dead, in the dumpster. “We have to stop that person. They could hurt another child. They need help themselves.”

  “Roses.” Garza extended a finger to touch the image. “So many roses. Dios mio.” She chewed a knuckle. Aragon kept the screen in front of her face. “That poor child. Let me get my purse.”

  “When was the last time you solved a crime without breaking the law?”

  Lewis stood behind Aragon at Montclaire’s front door as she punched in the code Garza had written for them.

  “You don’t have to come in.” She used the key and the door popped open, swollen in the frame from heat blasting the wood, stale air rushing out.

  “I’m as good as in already.” Lewis checked the street on the other side of a low wall made to look like adobe. The houses in the hills here, north of downtown, were on larger lots, most with elm or pine trees blocking their view of each other. “I don’t stop you or run straight to Sergeant Perez … You’re doing this to me again.”

  Aragon left the door open for Lewis. She heard him close it behind her, saw the light from outside shut out.

  “All right, what are we looking for?” Lewis asked.

  She tapped a wall switch with the back of her hand. Track lighting under thick, rough-cut timbers showed a Mexican tile floor, a Navajo-style rug, low leather furniture. Dust on everything. It was cool in here, the thick walls doing the job of air conditioning. A bookshelf ran along the wall opposite the couch, photos of a much younger Montclaire in frames on the shelves. No books. Just dozens of framed photos of young Lily.

  “Are we digging through panty drawers?” Lewis hadn’t come very far from the door.

  “We’re looking for pictures.”

  “There’s pictures.” Lewis swept his hand toward the bookshelves. “Lily likes to look at herself, doesn’t she? She hasn’t aged too bad.”

  “Models have portfolios. At Santa Fe University, you see girls with the big black folders walking around, the ones who want to break into movies. Lily’s always going on about her glory days in front of cameras, marching down catwalks. Pedaling a bike through sand and posing on a seesaw. I want to see if she’s been lying to us, or not telling us everything. So much of what she’s told us, we can’t take to the bank.”

  “That check would bounce. What’s a model’s portfolio look like?”

  “Like this.”

  On the coffee table, alone, lay the black, oversized folder she’d seen before when she brought Lily to collect clothes. It was closed with a string wound around a black leather tab. Aragon sat on the couch and brought the portfolio onto her lap. Lewis joined her, his weight on the cushion leaning her toward him. Under the cover were loose photographs of Montclaire holding an umbrella in rain, sprawled on cascading marble stairs, and a sheet of proofs, close-ups of her face from different angles.

  The first mounted photograph showed Montclaire on a stool, hands under her thighs, stretching her long arms, heels on the highest rung, bony knees wide. It was the only photo, centered on the page of stiff, heavy paper.

  “Look how young she is,” Aragon said. “Barely a teenager.”

  “The camera’s looking straight up her dress. It’s almost kiddie porn.”

  “This is.”

  The next page, black-and-whites mounted on the corners, Montclaire in the exact same pose as the first shot. But naked.

  Aragon felt something right then. Montclaire had been abused like herself, by a camera instead of a gang pinning her to a hot sidewalk. She concentrated on Montclaire’s eyes. In the early photos there was a spark, a girl setting out on the rest of her life, excited, having fun. Even in the early nude photos there was life, a challenge to the camera, determination overcoming fear.

  More nude shots, getting more graphic, the look of determination fading, then Lily in a fur, a dead animal around her shoulders, ice and snow in the background. Older, more cleavage than the first shots. The dead eyes showed up for the first time. At a distance, the clothes, the colors, the setting made her. Up close, it was all the eyes and the dark light inside.

  Aragon felt Lewis tense on the couch next to her, their thighs touching as they looked through the portfolio. His breathing grew shallow. The hand on his knee balled into a fist.

  “Rick?”

  “They killed her.” He’d seen it, too. “This is a dead woman in designer clothes, all these glamorous locations. Look, her arms and legs, you start seeing the bones, more and more every year. This one of her and the ravens, she’s in black. This one, on her back, just bones under the skirt, laying back, like, come on in.”

  “Her face in that one, pasty. Like ash.”

  “Those eyes aren’t seeing anything.”

  “‘When dead girls were in,’ Montclaire said once.”

  The next shot showed Montclaire clearly posed as a corpse, the skeleton under her skin so close to the surface, shadows making it jump out. Eyes painted black, lips, fingernails, hair. The tip of her tongue, too, between white teeth.

  “On a bed of roses.” Aragon exhaled it more than said it. Surrounding a dead Lily Montclaire: red, red roses, the only color in the shot matching a drop of liquid in the corner of black lips.

  The house was quiet, cool, in shadows except for the light they’d turned on. They sat in silence. They’d seen so much together. They were sharing something else they knew would be with them the rest of their lives. Something no one would ever feel the way they were feeling it now.

  Aragon was the first to move. She turned the page. More dead Lily shots. That was Notre Dame in Paris behind her in this one, on her spine, the back of her hands splayed on the ground, legs hooked over the stone wall, her pelvis thrust toward the thousands of statues and faces on the church front. This was Times Square, dead Lily in a gutter, tourists snapping photos. Nobody on a cell calling for help. Was that staged, the tourists actors, or did the photographer stand back to catch the crowd’s reaction? Maybe disguised as another fascinated passerby?

  Dead Lily in a folding seat in a football stadium, a beer in the holder on the back of the seat in front, half-eaten hot dog by stiletto heels, other trash around her feet, a team practicing on the green rectangle below.

  Dead Lily in an airport waiting area.

  Dead Lily at Mardi Gras, a string of beads, a naked pale chest, nipples—shit, painted black—poking at fat men with mouths gaping, drinks in plastic cups spilling on polo shirts.

  “What were these photos advertising?” Lewis’s hand was shaking. He’d seen a girl die in the past minutes as they turned pages. He was probably thinking of his own girls, how they could go from the pure, happy child in the first photos—a really pretty girl—to this. Like that.

  “Nothing I’d want to buy.”

  The last page had the cover from an old Cosmo issue. The stupid headers: “Twelve ways to enjoy dangerous sex and laugh afterwards.” Jesus. “Eat your way to power orgasms.”

  “You could write that one,” Lewis said, pointing. “The hidden power of Lotaburgers. The green chile G spot.”

  He was trying for something to lift the shadows. It was okay.

  Two small photos were taped to the bottom
corners of the magazine cover, the ones Lily had told them about: her in a sundress pedaling a bike across a sand dune, and her on a seesaw. Her face in Cosmo. The high point in her career.

  Or the end of it.

  The one of her on a seesaw was not the way Lily had described it. It was two Lilys: on the low end, a dead weight, the ashen skin and black makeup; a living, breathing Lily in a yellow sundress and hat suspended in the air at the other end of the board.

  “I found this magazine at the library. I remember the stupid advice columns. There were no photos of Lily Montclaire. That was her fantasy.”

  “These photos are all of a sudden different.” Lewis turned back to the one right before, dead Lily in the passenger seat of a convertible, an expensive car, a bottle of Champagne in a lifeless hand. “She’s alive again.” He returned to the sunny photos.

  “Except for her double on the seesaw.”

  “These are taken from a distance. You can’t see her eyes. On the bike she’s looking away. On the seesaw, she’s looking toward the sky.”

  “Dead Lily’s looking straight at the camera.” Lewis returned to the nude photos at the beginning, then closed the book, rewound the string around the leather tab, and settled it in the dust-free square on the coffee table. “This what you wanted to find?”

  “More than I expected. But something else I want to check.”

  She pushed herself off his leg to stand and entered the hallway to the back of the house. Bedrooms on the right, the bath across the hall. Dark in here, only clerestory windows up high above a modern, European-style shower stall of slick stone. A showerhead as big as a sunflower.

  Lewis, behind her, said, “I don’t understand these designs, no shower curtain, no door. They remind me of outdoor showers at the Jersey shore. With my girls, we’d have a flood every night. I guess that’s why there’s a drain outside the shower on the floor, too.”

  “Lily did it here.”

  Aragon saw it: Cassandra Baca showering after a rough party with older women. Facing the wall and showerhead, her back to the bathroom.

  “Cassandra never finished rinsing,” Aragon said. “Lily killed her where the body wouldn’t gather trace evidence and clean-up was easy.”

  “Shit. The caked shampoo in her hair. She threw her wet into the dumpster.”

  “Those movies, they don’t show every second, I know, but they don’t ever show Lily biting Cassandra. She brought her here afterward, driving the Durango that night. Maybe she paid Cassandra for an extended one-on-one, suggested the shower before she headed home to that filthy bathroom her mother trashed. Freshen up, let me give you some tips on makeup and hair. I was a fashion model by your age, you know, with my own agent, flying all over the world, limousines from the airport. New York, Paris, Rome. It’s something you might want to try. With your looks and body, you could make a lot of money. And then she shot a girl washing her hair and dreaming.”

  “Let’s get out of here.” Lewis was already moving into the hallway. “I want to stand in the sun.”

  They walked streets, letting their minds work, keeping thoughts to themselves. Lewis’s phone rang. It was Elaine Salas. She wanted to see them. They returned to their car and drove to Salas’s office.

  “You found something,” Salas said. “I see it in your faces. I did, too. But it confuses the hell out of me.”

  She’d found blood in Thornton’s office, under the sofa. She showed them a fleck of dried blood on a microscope slide, held down with another slide on top. But something wasn’t right. It was drops of blood, hard to see on the Persian carpet. Distinct drops of blood. No spatter. No spray. No blood anywhere else in the office, including the sofa above.

  It looked like it had coagulated before it hit the carpet fibers. It hadn’t been absorbed. In other words, it hadn’t come straight out of a body.

  She ran the samples fast against Cassandra Baca’s blood type and DNA and got a nearly perfect match.

  How’d it get there?

  Aragon said, “I think I know. But we’ll never prove it.”

  Thirty-five

  They needed Rivera.

  “That’s history, you and him?” Lewis asked while they waited for an answer to Aragon’s call. “You said the Silvas weren’t the only thing dead last time the two of you came up.”

  Rivera came on. She said, “Tomas, we want to work something with you. I’d say trust me, but that word between us, it’s not what it was.” She met Lewis’s eyes, telling him, there’s your answer. “All we share now is a case. And it’s going sideways. You file charges against Thornton for killing a federal witness, you’ll be sorry you didn’t go with this.”

  To Lewis she said, “Someone with him. He’ll call back.”

  They had transcripts of their sessions with Montclaire on their laps, cold drinks in cups on the floor between their feet. They’d parked in a piece of shade by the Basilica of St. Francis.

  “What was it that made you see?” Lewis asked.

  “Everything pointed straight at Thornton. Everything. We were swept along. I wanted her to be good for killing Cassandra Baca.”

  “Nailing Marcy Thornton for murder. Yeah, I was running straight at it just as hard.”

  “It was Thornton. Hanging there, a foot gone, Benny floating below her, her boob bleeding from his sword. Not ‘get me out of here.’ Not even ‘help.’ What she tells me is ‘short legs.’ Then the gun. I replayed finding it.”

  “The Beretta under the driver’s seat.”

  “Thornton was telling me it wasn’t her who put the gun there. Not someone with short legs who pulls the seat close to reach the pedals. I had to push the seat all the way back to get to the gun.” Aragon lifted the transcript. “Working the rez, running up to the villages in the mountains for Thornton. The Durango was Lily’s ride for work. She only used the Aston to taxi Cassandra.”

  “But Thornton’s prints are on the Dodge.”

  “Lily would have known that. It was Thornton’s property. You’re going to say something about the prints on the gun next. Lily gave it to Thornton, watched her handle it. We were eventually going to learn how Montclaire could have got to it and planted it for us to find. Thornton gave us that one thing, the short legs. The rest she’d hit us with at trial.”

  “We’d tie the roses to Thornton. More evidence piling up against her. But Lily didn’t think about the cleaning lady seeing her take the roses home.”

  “The invisible woman. Nobody sees the Mexican with the vacuum cleaner.”

  Lewis reached down for his drink and stirred ice with the straw. “What we don’t have is a motive for Montclaire to kill Cassandra Baca.”

  “Lily already told us. She saw things going south and knew Thornton was hanging her out to dry. The way she killed her, the staging, that was about something else. She was going to plant blood evidence in Thornton’s office. But she saw how the blood had started to dry and didn’t soak into the carpet. She moved the couch over what she’d started planting, Cassandra outside in the Durango. She remembered the seesaw, something never far from her mind.”

  “The bag on Cassandra’s head?”

  “Maybe Lily couldn’t handle seeing her face. She did shoot her from behind, those little bullets like pressing a button and making a dead girl, as neat as you can get.”

  Lewis shifted his weight in the seat, wanting to cross his legs but the steering wheel was in the way. He pushed the seat all the way back, caught what he was doing, and shook his head.

  “You want to psychoanalyze,” he said, “maybe Lily was seeing herself on the seesaw, and covered Cassandra’s face to help along the fantasy. Maybe this is all about Lily’s revulsion for herself.”

  “I hate wasting time on that kind of crap. Lily killed her. If it doesn’t help us nail her, I don’t care about it.”

  “You think we’re ready to take a run at her?”
<
br />   “We’re almost out of time when she’ll talk without a lawyer. After she’s charged, she’ll be arraigned, the judge will lean on her to get representation, assign a PD for the meantime.”

  “What really creeped me … ” Lewis rolled down the window and emptied the dregs of his cup. “That portfolio front and center on the coffee table. She brings a guy home, or a woman, take a seat, I’ll fix us drinks. Hey, what’s this, they ask, and open the thing. Page one, gee you were a cute kid. Page two, Lily fourteen years old with her legs spread. And Lily calling from the kitchen, I’ve got white wine, I could open a red. There’s a beer in here somewhere.”

  “I see Marcy Thornton sitting there, Lily’s book open on her lap, a glass of wine in her hand.”

  Aragon’s phone rang, Rivera calling back.

  She told him, “Time to bring Lily home. You know the address?”

  They waited for Montclaire to punch in her security code. Rivera stood behind with her suitcase, Aragon and Lewis to the side, knowing it was a six-code number, not helping Montclaire when she got it wrong the first time.

  “Numbers,” Montclaire said. “I don’t know why I have trouble.”

  She got the door open and took her suitcase from Rivera. “Make yourself at home.”

  Lewis followed her in, leaving Rivera and Aragon on the doorstep.

  “Where’s Tucker?” Aragon asked. “You look smaller without him.”

  “Contrary to popular belief, FBI agents don’t always do things in pairs. He’s at Diaz’s office, talking to her secretary about the private meetings with Thornton.”

  “And you’re playing chauffeur for a washed-up model and child molester. The worst you don’t know about yet.”

  “What are you up to, Denise?”

  “Taking our only shot at getting this right.”

  She stepped inside. Montclaire was opening shades, the level of light coming up with each uncovered window. They watched her move around the furniture, then get her suitcase and head for the bedroom.