The Drum Within

by James R. Scarantino

  “Miguel Martinez. He was beautiful. He sang. He boxed. He could take a ball up the middle against any high school in the state. Only sixteen and nobody could stop him. I thought of him last night, by the car with the dead girl when Rivera turned around. He reminded me of Miguel, the way the wind moved his hair like Miguel’s when he ran.”

  “You don’t have to say any more, Denise.”

  “Miguel came from one of the families where every night the father sat his children down and asked what they had learned in school. No dinner ’til they told him something new. He vaulted that fence right over there and slammed into the boys holding me down. He missed the one with the thirty-eight. He shot Miguel in the spine. Then they passed the gun around, each putting a bullet into him. The cops who came later convinced me that was what I wanted to do with my life.”

  “They impressed you.”

  “Complete fuck-ups. Every one of the shooters got off. I was never going to let that happen again.”

  Lewis noticed she called them “shooters,” ignoring what they had done to her.

  “You didn’t fuck up, Denise. Geronimo was a solid arrest. Fucking up would have been not recording him telling it to Thornton.”

  “A very bad guy walked out of jail today. But my cousin Joey and I have a crazy idea on how to stop that from being the end of the story. You and I and everyone else who heard that tape may be benched. We lost everything we seized in the arrest. Dewey’s scared. Thornton’s gloating. Looks grim.”

  “I hate it.”

  “And Marcy Thornton is standing in our way no matter which way we go at this.”

  “Joe Mascarenas is a good guy. But he’s no match for Thornton.”

  “He’s a bulldog wearing a choke collar, who’s had his teeth filed down, fighting Rottweilers that chewed through their leash.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “Our own Rottweiler.”

  Lewis now understood the phone call that brought them here. “Fager.”

  “Joe knows how he ticks. Says he and Fager are like a married couple that fights every day.”

  “What’s the part you said I’m not going to like?”

  “Sam Goff.”

  “You’re right. I don’t like it. I didn’t like Goff when he was a cop. Why should I like working with him now?”

  Aragon’s phone rang and they broke off the conversation. It was FBI Special Agent Tomas Rivera.

  “The girl in the trunk was Cynthia Fremont,” she relayed, then put the call on speaker so Lewis could hear Rivera directly.

  Aragon had nailed it with her suggestion to search the lake. Rivera’s team found a tent on the shoreline four and a half miles from the parking lot. The murder scene had also been found, a rock ledge a hundred feet above the lake at the head of a rough scree slope. A ranger had climbed up to find out what had attracted a cloud of ravens. Blood collected in cracks was feeding birds and a million ants.

  “Was she naked inside the sleeping bag?” Aragon asked Rivera.

  “Except for boots. And exsanguinated. Slashed wrists, deep gashes on her thighs. A cut across her belly, not deep like the cuts that killed her.”

  “What about the boots?”

  “Laced up and tied. We’re working on it to see if she did it or possibly someone else.”

  Rivera said he was damn glad she got the call for SFPD and wanted her at a meeting tomorrow morning to discuss what they had learned so far.

  She was saying if you want me you want Rick Lewis, too, when Rivera asked, “How did you get the lake right?”

  “My family camped there, when there were fish in that lake.”

  “Camping’s prohibited in that area.”

  “So’s homicide.”

  “Why’d you guess she was killed so far from the car?”

  “We didn’t guess.” She caught Lewis’ eye, signaling him to jump in. “The lividity told us.”

  “Confused lividity,” Lewis said. “The blood didn’t pool in one place.”

  “We,” Aragon said, “deduced she had been face down long enough for blood to pool near her hairline. She didn’t bleed out completely.”

  “Exsanguinate,” Lewis said.

  Aragon said, “I think that hands gripping her arms acted like tourniquets and kept some blood in her. A guess to run by a pathologist. What you’re telling us about the wounds, they’re not the kind that would drain her without a lot of help from gravity. There should have been lividity in her back, especially buttocks.”

  Lewis nodded agreement and she asked Rivera, “You find that?”

  “Negative.”

  She went on. “And maybe they carried her face down so she wouldn’t be looking at them while they got her off the mountain.”

  “Where did you guys take forensic training?” Rivera’s voice asked over the speaker, like a third person in the car with them. “You’re spot on.”

  Aragon said, “You’re the only cop I know who uses a four-syllable word for ‘bled out’ and now it’s ‘spot on’ a minute later.”

  “The cops you know, what do they say?”

  “Great fucking job.”

  “Okay,” Rivera said, “great fucking job. Where’d you learn forensics?”

  “Rick,” Aragon asked, “what’s that fancy school we attend every day at taxpayers’ expense?”

  “The Santa Fe Academy for the Advancement of Police Science and All-Around Street Smarts.”

  “What about that call you took last night?” Rivera now had a different tone in his voice, no longer FBI talking to small-town cops. “A case like that, sensational murder, celebrity suspect, all the racial stuff, it can eat you alive. I hope you can spare us some of your time.”

  Lewis mouthed, He doesn’t know, then said, “I think we can fit you in.”

  Aragon said, “We haven’t forgotten Cynthia Fremont. Glad you haven’t forgotten us.”

  “I need your report,” Rivera said and ended the call.

  Lewis had finished eating, was wiping his mouth with the delicate little napkins Blake’s had been using since the Sixties.

  “Hey,” Aragon said, her voice gentle. “Before, at the office, I was going on about that Native stuff. I didn’t mean anything. Just pissed about No-Balls. And that thing about the kind of people passing out menus.”

  “The pre-op tranny.”

  “I got nothing against anybody, whichever way they go.”

  “You were just describing the restaurant the way it is today, remembering when it had belonged to a different Santa Fe. I heard your words, but I knew you were talking about something else.”

  “You did?”

  “Comes from being married and raising kids. Sometimes, words don’t mean anything and you have to wait for the talking to end to figure it out in the silence that follows.”

  “You need me to shut up to know what I mean?”

  “What I heard you saying is sometimes you don’t recognize this city you’ve lived in all your life. It angers you, and scares you just a little since you can’t do anything about it. The pre-op tranny passing out menus on fucking parchment, your words, that was about you being overwhelmed with all the change and things not the way they were when the world was familiar and you thought you understood it.”

  “You heard all that?”

  “And you really do miss that old place with the great Mexican food.”

  “You don’t know how much. Places like that never come back.”

  They were quiet for a moment, then Aragon spoke. “You good with this? The Fager thing?”

  “I’m worried about Goff.” Lewis turned away while he thought it over. When he came back to her he said, “We’ve got work before we meet Fager. You weren’t the only one with wheels turning last night. I made calls between flipping pancakes for the kids.”

  “Yeah
?” Aragon said with a mouthful of burger and fixings.

  “Reached out to Matt Kennicott at OMI. I didn’t want Linda Fager forgotten in a drawer. He’s putting her on the table at noon.”

  Aragon checked her watch.

  “Fifteen minutes. Shit.”

  She heaved her unfinished burger out the window, threw the car into drive, and floored the gas. Lewis capped his hand over his cup before coffee jumped into his lap.

  Seven

  “Really, Mr. Fager. We have what we need,” said the voice on the phone, some assistant pathologist in the Office of Medical Investigator.

  He did not explain why he was sparing Fager the ritual society demanded from next of kin, no matter the condition of their loved one’s remains. But Fager understood why they didn’t need him at the morgue. He had already identified Linda’s body three times. First, his 911 call. He said, “I found my wife murdered in her store.” He gave his name, her name, the address, and a description of her condition. The 911 operator made him repeat the last part.

  Maybe because there was no face, it had been easier to handle. Just another body. He had seen lots of bodies. He did not hold them in his mind. None had been wearing Linda’s clothes, though, or her shoes and the jewelry he had bought her.

  The second time he identified Linda was for the officers who arrived at the bookstore. Third time was for detectives Aragon and Lewis. They had questions and put him in a patrol car. There he sat until he learned Linda’s murderer had been apprehended. Until then, he believed they considered him their lead suspect.

  He tried again to call up memories of Linda’s face. He concentrated on their honeymoon in Mexico. On the inside of his eyelids he saw tanned legs, red toenails, hands holding a drink with an umbrella. But when he ordered his mind to show her face, his memory clicked off like it had been unplugged to keep from blowing a fuse.

  On the sidewalk, after calling 911, he had reached out to his only friend. Leon Bronkowski doubled as Fager’s investigator. They had been together since the Balkan War, when Bronk carried the squad’s M-249, a powerful guy back then who could pull field artillery into position without dropping his pack. Fager reached him in Pinedale, Wyoming, four days into a vacation, his Harley on the sidewalk outside his motel door. He was eating pizza in bed and watching black-and-white Westerns on the little TV that came with the forty-dollar room. Since the call, Bronkowski had been riding all night. He last checked in from Denver. He would hit Santa Fe this afternoon.

  Fager had been facing a morning of arraignments and afternoon hearings in three courtrooms. His secretary phoned judges and rearranged his calendar. As for Linda’s shop, there was nothing to do. He would sell the building and inventory—after he found a cleaning service willing to step in. Without thinking what else she would see in the building, his secretary had offered to corner Linda’s terrified store cat and take it home. They would do it together when the police were finished. He’d ask them to put out food and water until then. They’d find the bin of dry food under the front counter.

  His decks were clear to hunt Cody Geronimo. Mascarenas may have folded. The cops may have botched another case. Marcy Thornton may be standing on a mountain of technical Fourth Amendment issues and evidentiary privilege.

  But a case never finished the way it started.

  For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. That’s a law of physics. What went on in courthouses was theater and negotiation, a work of storytelling, no scientifically predictable forces determining what The Law should be. The rules were man-made, enforced by man, ignored by man. Broken by man.

  In theory, a fair fight legitimized whatever result an imperfect court system produced.

  But prosecutors were often baby lawyers who couldn’t sense a freight train coming if they were tied to the tracks. That cop on the stand with a high school education, or maybe a piece of paper from the community college, she’d been on duty thirty-six hours before confronting a trial lawyer primed for that exact moment. Prosecutors had fifty cases to the defense lawyer’s one. The District Attorney’s office couldn’t neutralize every scripted expert rolled out to bolster the narrative the defense lawyer wanted told. The crime lab was understaffed and underfunded. That judge on the bench depended on lawyers with the spare change to fund campaigns. Assistant DAs could barely cover car payments.

  Forget fair fights. The law was what you made of it. So make as much as you can.

  In his home office Fager had a framed pencil-drawing Bronk did after their close call in Bosnia: A stork with the outline of a frog lodged in its gullet. Hands reaching out of the stork’s beak and wrapping around its throat. The stork’s eyes crossed and bulged in alarm. Bronk had scrawled Never give up at the bottom.

  Fager’s phone rang. It was his secretary, Roberta Weldon, distraught, calling again to ask about his welfare, but now also wanting to know if she should make funeral arrangements.

  “No, Robbie,” Fager said, using a level voice to reassure her. “I don’t know when OMI will release Linda’s body.”

  He told her to go home. He knew how much she had liked Linda. She gobbled up romance novels Linda sold for fifty cents off a rack on the sidewalk outside the store. Linda’s store cat had been her gift.

  Fager spent the next two hours researching Geronimo and printing out everything he could find, regardless of source or relevance. A search of tax records turned up a house near the Santa Fe Opera. He found galleries on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, and Old Town in Albuquerque, and a warehouse in Espanola. All the properties were heavily mortgaged and subject to judgment liens. Marcy Thornton held the mortgages.

  Geronimo’s Wikipedia and gallery website bio said he was born in Alamo, the remote Navajo reservation in west central New Mexico. But a story in the Magdalena Mountain Mail said he had been born in that village, thirty miles south of the rez, the son of a Basque rancher. An obituary in the defunct Catron County News quoted a hand on the Adobe Acres Ranch, another hundred miles south, saying that Geronimo had been born there, to Mexican parents working the national forest round up. The ranch bordered the abandoned Warm Springs Apache reservation, where the warrior Geronimo had once spent the winter. The paper later retracted the story, with an apology to settle a suit filed by Thornton. Some money was paid. Fager found the reports not in an online edition of the newspaper—there was none—but a blog written by a ranch wife from that empty part of the state.

  Geronimo was forty-two years old by one account. Fifty in another. Never married. Attended Albuquerque’s Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute. The earliest record of the artist had him in Madrid, a former coal-mining town south of Santa Fe on the Turquoise Trail. He turned a crumbling mercantile into a fashionable gallery. His success drew other artists fleeing Santa Fe’s rents and rapacious gallery owners. He went the other direction. He moved into a compound on pricey Canyon Road and branded himself the Native American Picasso.

  Fager noted that over the years Geronimo had gone from being Indian, to Native American, to simply Native. Geronimo never specified whether he was Apache, Navajo, or something else. Fager presumed Geronimo had claimed a tribal affiliation when he sought admission to SIPI, but his school records were not publicly available.

  In Google images he found photos of Geronimo with celebrities and politicians. The former governor had used a Geronimo watercolor, a cartoonish vista of a New Mexico landscape, as background in his campaign logo.

  Despite the millions flowing in, more millions flowed out. Geronimo had been through bankruptcy twice. Fager found a photo of Geronimo’s mansion near the Opera. He threw lavish parties, jetted off to Europe and Asia to hawk his wares, rented an apartment in San Francisco, and once owned a 100,000-acre ranch of checkerboarded public and private land in the wilds of New Mexico.

  A telephone call interrupted his reading.

  “I’m still doing okay, Robbie. Yes, I’m fine alone. Go home, please.”


  Fager checked his watch. Half an hour until his meeting with detective Aragon. He organized what he had printed off the Internet and headed for the door.

  Eight

  Aragon and Lewis watched through the restaurant’s front window as Fager parked his black Mercedes next to their tan Crown Vic. Sam Goff was at the table with them eating a bowl of menudo and scanning the preliminary report on Linda Fager’s autopsy. The rest of Juanita’s was empty, except a janitor cleaning up between the lunch and dinner traffic, and waitresses at a table rolling napkins around silverware.

  Fager bent low to enter the door and waited while his eyes adjusted to the dim light. He saw them and came across the room. Nobody stood or reached to shake his hand. He hesitated opposite Goff.

  “I’m not sure I want this conversation if he’s part of it.”

  “Sit down,” Goff said, red sauce coloring his teeth and lips. “My career’s finished, but don’t give yourself all the credit.”

  “We know what you pulled on Sam,” Aragon said. Fager’s cross-examination had been the last time Goff ever testified as arresting officer. He was forced into early retirement a week later. Goff hated Fager. Fager despised Goff. But her plan required them both. “You want this conversation, and we want you in it.”

  “Best menudo in town,” Goff said, and returned to reading.

  Fager pulled out a chair across from Aragon and sat, rigid, ready to get up anytime.

  “You want something? A cup of coffee?” Aragon asked. “I’m sure you didn’t get any sleep.”

  Fager nodded. “Thanks, black.” Lewis went to the kitchen.

  “We’re here for your wife,” Aragon said. “Understand up front that none of us likes what you do.”

  On the way to his mouth, Goff’s spoon dripped broth on the pages of the autopsy report. “You deserve what you’re feeling right now,” he said.

  “Sam, cut it out,” Aragon snapped, then turned back to Fager. “I don’t think anyone deserves what you’re going through.”

  Lewis returned with coffee for Fager and sat next to Aragon.