“We believe it started with a superficial incision, left to right across her abdomen.” He held up another photo, Fremont’s right thigh. “Here the cutting began in earnest. This wound track shows repeated slashing, expanding the cavity, butchering muscle. There is only a single slash on the left leg.”
Rivera spoke. “At some point she might have passed out. That possibly explains why there’s no evidence of a struggle. The lacerations on the thighs are fairly straight. They were antemortem.”
“She was restrained,” Barone said, “after sedation with sizable doses of painkillers and alcohol. There’s bruising on her collarbone consistent with strong hands gripping her very tightly. The wrists.” He raised another photo. “The incision targeted the radial artery. Excuse me, arteries. They succeeded on both wrists. Death came slowly.”
“I’ve got questions.”
The room turned to Aragon. Barone nodded for her to speak.
“One, was there other evidence of scarring on Fremont’s arms? Two, how cold was it up there? Three, do we have the knife?”
Barone said, “No other scarring. We haven’t found a knife. And the temps for the previous week swung wildly. Almost single digits at night, up to sixty during the day. Warmer in the sun. I presume you’re wondering how that impacts determining time of death?”
Aragon caught motion from the corner of her eye. Two women in robes had entered the back of the room. One was robed in black, the other in orange. Their hair was cut as close to the scalp as Aragon’s.
Aragon turned back to Barone. “More like how long it took her to die.” She nodded toward Lewis. “We’ve seen I don’t know how many suicide attempts where a slashed wrist clots up or the artery collapses before blood loss goes fatal. Cold weather slows blood flow, muscles constrict. Less chance a slashed wrist means death.”
Barone studied her, then answered. “Death by cutting the radial artery is rare, but not impossible. Here we have both arteries sliced lengthwise. Somebody knew what they were doing. That made closure significantly more unlikely and, in fact, resulted in eventual death. As for ambient temperature, yes, we don’t have a Roman in a hot tub—”
Rivera cut him off.
“Let me introduce Roshi Larson from the Koyasan Buddhist Temple. I promised not to take much of her time.”
The woman in the black robe looked familiar. Aragon had done a few cases involving Santa Fe’s Buddhist community. When word hit the street they did not report property crimes, Buddhist temples and meditation centers drew burglars like metal filings to a magnet. SFPD at least persuaded a temple representative to identify items recovered from a stolen property operation at the Flea Market, though the Buddhists
refused return of anything that had been theirs. Aragon wondered if she had met the woman in the black robe back then.
“Roshi Larson has graciously agreed to interpret the prayer flags found above the lake,” Rivera said.
The woman approached the table where the flags had been laid out. She examined them then faced Rivera.
“This is not Tibetan. I doubt it’s Asian at all.”
Aragon recognized the voice but couldn’t place it.
Rivera’s face showed disappointment. “I’m sorry to take your time for no reason.”
“Nothing is without meaning. You have now learned these are unusual prayer flags.”
Rivera thanked her and nodded for Barone to resume. Aragon noticed the Roshi’s assistant staring at photographs on the wall. Roshi Larson joined her and also stared. She had worn a pleasant expression to that point. Something dark crossed her face and she ushered her assistant out of the room.
Aragon listened to Barone as she rose to inspect the photos that had held the women’s attention. She slipped out after the Buddhists and caught up to them in the parking lot.
Aragon was surprised to see the Roshi unlocking a white Audi roadster with red leather seats and chrome wheels. She’d been expecting something more along the lines of a VW bus, or a wagon so old it said Datsun.
Something about the way sunlight played on her face tickled Aragon’s memory.
“Buff?”
The Roshi turned. Her eyes met Aragon’s and widened.
“Jeep?”
Aragon grinned. “Nobody’s called me that in years.”
“Last time I heard Buff was eighth grade.”
The old friends clasped hands and leaned back to study each other. Their eyes traveled to their heads and they broke out in laughter.
“You had beautiful black hair,” said Roshi Buff.
“I don’t want anybody grabbing it in a fight.”
“We sure have traveled different paths since De Vargas Middle School. Miguel’s death started me on Buddhism. Well, my parents sending me away from here did it. But I’ve never forgotten him, and how you were hurt.”
“Thanks for remembering.”
“You took another path, straight at the pain. You always were brave. Like taking your brother’s Jeep four-wheeling in the mountains. That was a truly great day. How old were we?”
“Twelve. I needed your help with the shifter.”
“How’s Javier?”
“Won’t come into Santa Fe. He sticks to the woods. He still has that Jeep.”
“He has established his own monastery.”
“I wouldn’t call a double-wide with two gun lockers and dead animals on the walls a monastery. He’ll get a kick out of what you said. Listen, Buff. I mean Roshi. I want to catch up, but I need to ask something else.”
“Buff’s fine.”
“I saw you and your friend staring at photographs back there. They seemed to upset you. Can you tell me what you saw?”
The Roshi’s calm, joyful smile disappeared. “Who was buried there?”
Was buried? The photographs did not show an excavated grave.
“Why do you put it that way?
“The deceased ascends from there. It was the site of a celestial burial. Everything matched what I’ve seen in Tibet except for the writing on the prayer flags. Someone has taken a ceremony of the most profound generosity and turned it into a ritual of evil.”
“Tell me.”
Fifteen minutes later Aragon brought Roshi Larson into the meeting room.
“Something you need to hear,” Aragon told Rivera, then turned to the Buddhist priestess to explain about birds as undertakers.
Twelve
Lewis talked as they climbed stairs to their office. Aragon went first, taking them two at a time, holding up for him at the landings.
“Celestial burial, the deceased giving their body to feed life in the sky. New Agey,” he said. “Very Santa Fe.”
“Worms go in, worms go out. Same difference. Nothing groovy about it, you don’t make up fairy tales about what’s really going on.”
“Tibetans with butcher knives—I guess you’d call them morticians—chop up the body and toss pieces to condors and vultures? Come on. That’s different.”
They reached their floor, pushed through fire doors and entered the hall to their office.
“Showing up in bird shit,” she said. “What a way to go.”
“Detective Aragon, you need some solid sensitivity training, get your mind right, this hostility towards other cultures. Bird shit to you. Enlightenment to someone else.”
Her comeback, telling him to suck a crystal and take a flying leap at a power vortex, never made it to words.
Joe Donnelly from Professional Standards was rifling a drawer in her desk. He had handled the investigation that almost drove her off the force ten years ago. He had dug deeper into her life than her bullet had traveled into the Lokos enforcer whose lawyer filed the complaint. When Donnelly was short on evidence, he tried to provoke her into making mistakes so he could riff off them and loop back into the excessive force charge. Only at the very end, when he h
ad exhausted every false trail and run out of low-rent tricks did Donnelly morph from black-hooded persecutor to impartial judge.
Aragon wondered which Donnelly had showed up today.
“Glad to see you’ve started your investigation of Dewey Nobles’ interference in the Geronimo case,” she said. “You won’t find what you need in that drawer.”
Donnelly closed the drawer with his foot. He used the phone on her desk, dialed, spoke. “They’re here.”
Aragon had an idea who he had just called. But she had Donnelly’s ear until that person arrived.
“We have a brutally murdered woman, the killer observed fleeing the scene, two officers overhearing him detail his crime. He left evidence under the body, and in his pocket he had tiny bones from the victim’s head. And Dewey let him go.”
“You don’t know what those bones were,” Donnelly said. “Could have been chicken bones.”
Aragon pried a pencil from her desk organizer and rolled it across the blotter at him.
“Draw the incus.”
“What, like Machu Picchu?”
“In-cus. That stumps you, I’ll settle for stapes and malleus. Or the cochlea. Hint: a snail.”
“What’s she talking about Lewis?”
Lewis said, “We all thought they were bird bones. Until OMI found them missing. Then we put it together. Geronimo had bones from Linda Fager’s inner ear.”
Aragon pointed a finger at Donnelly. “What can we do to assist your investigation of gross misconduct that turned loose a killer who’ll probably kill again?”
“Knock it off,” Donnelly said. “Judge Diaz delivered a formal complaint to the Mayor. Shit rolls downhill. Nobles is on his way to suspend you while we feed the judge a tranquilizer. You didn’t help yourself last night.”
“What?” She took her chair to move Donnelly away from her desk.
“You checked in evidence after you had been taken off the Geronimo case.”
“It was biological material that would degrade. You wanted it hauled to the dump?”
“Showing off, playing the tape for everyone to hear, was a really stupid move,” Donnelly said, looking down at her in her chair. “Celebrating before you cross the finish line is never a good idea. Any dumbass who watches TV knows two sacred rules of criminal procedure cops can never, ever break: Miranda and attorney-client privilege.”
“I don’t watch TV.”
“Well, now you can start. You’ll have plenty of free time.” Dewey Nobles stood in the doorway. Aragon smelled his aftershave across the room. Christ. Clove and cinnamon shit. Salt and pepper hair, thick with gel. Skin tightened from his last bad investment in plastic surgery made him look like he was squinting into the sun. He stepped forward, the only guy in the building who wore wingtips, and dropped two envelopes on her desk. “Lieutenant Donnelly will contact you about a formal interview. Starting now, you’re both suspended. Be glad it’s with pay.”
Lewis swept the envelopes into his hand. “We’re not saying anything until formal notification of the Professional Standards charge and we have union representation.”
“Sounds like something you heard watching TV,” Nobles said.
“I only watch SpongeBob SquarePants. You remind me of Plankton.”
Nobles squinted harder at Lewis. “Well, you can now enjoy cartoons all day. I thought a family had made you just a little smarter. But only hours after I took you off the case, you’re leaning on OMI to prioritize the Fager autopsy.” He turned to Donnelly. “We need to maintain good relations with Judge Diaz. I expect your best with these two.”
“Good relations for what?” Aragon said. “Why kiss ass if it won’t get us someone like Geronimo?”
“Denise,” Donnelly said. “The suspension’s with pay. Don’t push it.”
He had only used her first name when he came around to her side at the end of his first investigation. It made her wonder again which Donnelly was in her office this morning.
“Detective Aragon,” Nobles said, lifting his chin, “Cody Geronimo is on the street not because of what my job requires of me. All you know is frontal assault. Scorched earth, nothing left standing when you’re in action. That style of police work does not produce desirable results in Santa Fe, New Mexico.”
Nobles left. Aragon wished he had taken his aftershave with him.
“Stay away from Geronimo.” Donnelly looked back and forth between the detectives.
“It’s not us you should be investigating,” Aragon said, not letting it go.
“Denise.” Donnelly opened his hands and tamped down air. “Just pack up and get out of here.” He lingered in the door to point his finger at her before he left.
Lewis hunched his shoulders and let them drop. He reached for the phone.
“I better let my wife know.”
Aragon eyed her partner. The Glock 19 high on his hip in a black leather holster, a sap inside his belt. The bulge of the five-shot revolver on his ankle. The shirt stretched across his powerful back.
“Yo, Lewis. SpongeBob?”
Lewis called his wife, Sandy, with the news. She told him he’d be getting a text of the shopping he could do with his suddenly free time. Aragon had not said a word since Donnelly left.
“How about joining us for dinner?” Lewis offered to get her talking. “You can relax. Get your mind off the job.”
“Cartoons and plates on our laps?”
“We eat at the table.”
“Glad we moved the Geronimo files to the car,” she said as she inspected her desk to see if Donnelly had taken anything. Then she read the notice of suspension. “I’m going to make the Honorable Judy A. Diaz a project. She goes on my to-do list.”
“Now as long as your arm.”
Lewis’s cell chirped. His wife’s text. He texted back to inquire if the soy milk should be nonfat and unflavored and where was he supposed to find something called Ezekiel bread. He and his wife went back and forth finalizing the shopping list as he watched Aragon unlocking the big drawer in her steel desk. She removed the black plastic case for her pistol and a stack of ammo boxes. She got busy loading extra magazines.
“I take it you won’t be joining us?” Lewis asked between negotiations with his wife.
Aragon didn’t answer until she had five loaded magazines on her blotter.
“Thanks for the offer. But talking sponges don’t do it for me.”
Thirteen
The gun felt right. She loved the sound of jacketed lead pinging off the target twenty-five yards down range. She loved even more each tear in the photo of Dewey Nobles taped over the steel disc held steady in her sights.
Jimmy Arenas stood behind her with a spotting scope, grunting as each shot rang against the target. He ran the Law Enforcement Academy’s shooting range, partial retirement from his career as firearms instructor. She had wanted the end of the firing line, preferably three stations from the next person. He always put her dead center. He stuck to his routine again today, with one exception. When she told him about the suspension he slipped Nobles’ photo out of its frame on the wall for former members of the Academy’s staff and taped it to a steel disc.
Arenas checked his watch and called cease-fire. The line quieted. He announced they were free to check targets. Aragon kept her place. Arenas would have let her know if she had missed.
She ejected the empty clip and laid out the five magazines she’d loaded at the office.
On her left a young cop wearing an Albuquerque Police Department uniform rested a Glock on his table. To her right, a guy bigger than Lewis from the State Police tactical unit opened a box of .45s. Farther down the line she saw AR-15s and a shotgun mixed in with semi-auto side arms. She saw only one revolver, a Ruger Blackhawk, in the hands of a man whose active duty was decades in the past.
“The range is hot and live. You are cleared to fire.�
��
The metallic chime of bullets striking her steel disc rang above the staccato of pistol shots and the boom of the shotgun. She squeezed off the remaining cartridges in the Springfield’s magazine without a miss. Each hit came with the exclamation point of metal striking metal. She ejected the spent clip combat style, letting it fall to the ground and slammed another home. Next to her the young APD cop fired as fast as his finger could jerk the trigger. His gun bounced with the front sight rarely reacquiring the target set at a mere ten yards. The State Police SWAT officer fired patiently, sighting down the four-inch barrel of his Colt, trying to maintain the tight group that admitted sunlight through the center of his target. Down the line, the shotgun exploded.
She slapped in another clip and fired off double taps.
Starting into her last clip she noticed that the range had gone silent. She worried she’d missed the cease-fire order. She looked left and right. The line was empty except for the two guys on either side. They were watching her. Keeping her weapon pointed down range, she turned her head. The rest of the men had gathered a few yards behind her.
“You got nine more in that clip,” Arenas said.
She showed the kid from Albuquerque how fast the Springfield could fire without bouncing around. The metallic target never stopped reverberating. When she was done she removed her ear protection and faced her audience. Arenas was smiling and spinning an empty picture frame on his index finger.
“Dang,” someone said. “Ninety-six shots without a miss.”
“Ninety-seven,” Arenas said. “She started with one in the pipe.”
“How’s she do it?”
Arenas glassed Aragon’s target. The Dewey Nobles photograph had disintegrated.
“Motivation.”
She drove to her efficiency apartment on the city’s west side and brought dirty clothes downstairs to the laundry in the basement. Her .40 holstered on her hip, she separated colors and whites, watching a Holly Holm fight on her phone. Holm went almost a full five rounds at the Route 66 Casino before a TKO gave her the win over a bloodied Juliana Werner. Somewhere in the fight Holm’s left ulna snapped in two. Aragon had watched the video a dozen times, trying to see where Holm protected the arm. At the end she’s pummeling Werner with both hands. The ref raises her right glove in victory. A second later there’s Holm, pumping her left fist in the air.
The Drum Within Page 8
