While her clothes dried, she cleaned her weapon and defrosted some of the green-chile stew Javier’s wife, Serena, had sent home with her last time she visited their home in the mountains. The stew lit her up, but then she felt empty and ragged. The calm from blasting Dewey’s face was a fraud. She needed to be working her cases.
Aragon drove to Fager’s Finds and parked in the back alley. She imagined Geronimo opening the door to dump the paper towels he had used to wipe off Linda Fager’s blood. He had stood here, naked in the moonlight. She could still feel the Springfield alive and fierce in her hand, spitting fire a couple hours ago at the range. She sighted with her finger and cocked her thumb.
She drove around the front and parked, retracing her steps upon arriving at the scene. She couldn’t see where she had gone wrong. They had done it by the book. Even the rookie cops had toed the line and held puke in their cheeks until they rushed outside. She grilled herself about the chase and remained convinced she had sufficient reason to pursue Geronimo from the second the key fob found under Linda Fager’s body triggered the Range Rover’s alarm.
She mentally rewound the recording of him speaking from inside the hedge. His voice could be plainly heard on the sidewalk. Up until he said the name “Marcy,” she had no clue about the identity of the person on the other end of the call. Even then, it was only a first name and the DA could argue insufficient notice that he was consulting his attorney. She supposed she could research how many Marcys lived in the Santa Fe area to reinforce the argument.
She remembered something Mascarenas frequently muttered after getting slammed by one of Santa Fe’s judges. An ounce of the judge is worth a pound of the law, he’d say. In this case, the good guys had the law on their side. They had a ton of evidence. But Thornton had every ounce of Judge Diaz.
Her stomach ached. Breakfast and lunch were gone, vaporized by anger and stress. She felt as thin as cellophane. She drove out to the Cerrillos strip and swung into a Blake’s for a Lotaburger and fries. With the paper bag warm on her lap, she drove to Killer Park. She needed a place to work through an idea that had come to her at the range, when her mind was calm.
She was surprised to find Lewis in his Chrysler minivan eating an apple and reading a file. She drove past and turned around to park. He waved for her to come to him.
“Your phone is off. I knew I could find you here,” he said when she slipped into the passenger seat.
“I thought you would be deep into your honey-do list.”
He jerked a thumb at shopping bags in the back.
“I’m standing in check-out at Costco, screaming kids, old people not starting to write their check until all their bags are filled, you know? Instead of worrying whether I’ve got the right soy milk, all I could think about was Tasha Gonzalez.”
She unwrapped her burger.
“I’ve been thinking about her, too.”
“Damn, that smells good.”
“Have some fries. They won’t kill you.”
Lewis alternated bites of apple with fries as Aragon tore chunks from her burger.
Lewis said, “Senior officer first.”
“So Thornton has a lock on the judge,” she said with a mouthful of beef. “We’ve got Fager flying wing. I think he’ll keep things stirred up. If we can get another agency to take up Tasha Gonzalez, focus on Cody Geronimo, we’ve found a route around Thornton’s roadblocks.”
“Tasha was found outside Belen. Valencia County Sheriff’s jurisdiction. Not Keystone Cops, but not the Untouchables, either.”
“Imagine the Feds jumping in. I’m liking what I see in Rivera.”
“He’s liking what he sees in you.”
She blinked. That caught her off guard. “We find a federal connection,” she said, regaining her train of thought. “Maybe a hook to federal land like with Cynthia Fremont.”
“That place out by Ladron Peak. The one asset Geronimo has tried to keep whenever his finances tanked. It’s mostly leased federal land with scattered private inholdings.”
“Super Dad strikes again.” She gave Lewis’s shoulder a friendly punch. “Show me.”
She wiped greasy fingers on her thighs and took up the map on the console.
“Private inholdings are colored orange. The rest is public,” Lewis said. “I think these parcels go with the ranch.” He pointed out orange rectangles. “No roads. You’d need a four-wheel drive.”
“Like a Range Rover.”
They peered more closely at the map.
“I just figured out what I’m doing with my suspension,” Aragon said. “I was going to check every bar in Santa Fe until I found where Geronimo drank beer after killing Linda Fager.” A smile spread across her face. “Instead, I’m going hunting.”
“The season’s not open yet. Or it just closed.”
“Always open season on varmints. No bag limit, no restrictions. Any kind of ammo, any weapon is legal.”
“Do I want to know what you’re talking about? Don’t answer.”
Fourteen
What’s he going to be like without Linda?
Fager heard his secretary outside his door talking to the only other employee of Walter Fager and Associates, P.C. His associate lawyer, Kate Morrow, and Roberta Weldon thinking he didn’t hear everything that went on in his law office.
Weldon: Linda made him human.
Morrow: A work in progress, never to be completed.
Weldon: Now I have to go in and give him a message about Linda’s body. And something else he’s going to hate.
Morrow: Tell him to go home. He doesn’t need to sign motions for postponement. We know his scrawl.
Weldon: I don’t think he’s eaten in two days. Since Linda, he’s living on coffee and hatred.
Morrow: What else is new?
Since Linda.
Since Linda, he’d been glued to a computer screen, using up printer cartridges. He finished the one in the printer in his home office as light through the curtains told him it was morning. Dumped everything in an empty box for printer paper, e-mailed research to himself, and came down to his law office, the first one there in the morning, hours before anyone else, turning on lights to make coffee, not bothering to turn up the heat before he got back to work and closed his door on the rest of building, still dark and cold.
He heard a knock, then the creak of hinges, a footstep on the old plank floor.
“OMI called,” Roberta Weldon said to his back. “They’re ready to release Linda for burial.”
“Call that Italian place, Berar-something.”
“Berardinelli.”
“I want a cremation. As soon as they can. A small service in their chapel. Nothing elaborate. We can play some of her music.”
He focused on his computer screen. He was reading an interview in San Francisco Arts Monthly, Geronimo on how his use of found objects reflects the story of the American Indian. How the way he obtained supplies isn’t scavenging, but a twenty-first-century version of hunting-gathering. Some of his work used what others discarded or overlooked. Or he accepted what nature had to offer, from polished stones in a stream bed to dried cactus—so many textures and forms that he could never exhaust the resource. His more serious work engaged the hunting side of traditional Native cultures, harvesting what he needed to add vital spirit and individual voice, the way a shaman would hunt eagles for feathers. But it was too hard to get eagle feathers these days. You had to be a tribe working within limits set by the federal government. To infuse his work with similar power he had to be creative, resourceful, “tapping into the ancient knowledge that helped my people survive in the harsh Southwest desert. I express their struggle and spirituality in art that speaks to us in this modern world, in a contemporary idiom.”
“There’s something else,” Roberta said.
Fager had forgotten she was in the room.
; “What else?” Impatience in his voice. He needed to read this. He turned to face her, get it over with.
She held an obsolete appointment book from a time when the office ran on paper.
“Cody Geronimo called here.”
He came out of his chair, his legs stiff from sitting so long.
“When?”
“February 4, 2004. He called for an appointment. I sent him through to Marcy. She handled intake then.”
“This office has never represented Cody Geronimo. That date again?”
She repeated the date of Geronimo’s call, her face telling him it meant something more.
“Marcy left the firm that month,” he said, understanding the expression on her face. “Went out on her own. And she’s never looked back.”
Through his window he could see the mansion Thornton used as her law office. The high-gloss hood of her red Aston-Martin threw sunlight into his eyes.
Marcy Thornton hurled the New Mexico Criminal Code against
the wall.
“The autopsy’s completed? I wanted this slow-walked, forgotten. I wanted Linda Fager to be that hamburger in the bottom of a freezer nobody remembers.”
“I thought you liked her,” Lily Montclaire said. “Weren’t you friends?”
“I have a client. What else do you need to know?”
Montclaire picked up the heavy legal tome and replaced it on Thornton’s desk.
“It was Aragon and her partner. They got someone in OMI to move Linda Fager to the top of the list.”
Thornton fell back in the oversized chair behind her mahogany desk. Montclaire kicked off her pumps and stretched out on the leather sofa.
“When’s Cody returning from New York?” Montclaire asked as her eyes fell on a sock under the coffee table. The boy she had picked up at the mall for Thornton’s office party had been given a wad of cash and hustled out when Geronimo called in a panic. Blue eyes, narrow hips, smooth, almost hairless legs. She wondered if he shaved or was just that young. She could see the starburst tattoo around his navel but his name escaped her.
“He’s with some filthy rich collector,” Thornton said. “Said he’d be gone a couple days.”
“Can we reach him by fax? I want to send him that drawing of the bar.”
“Why didn’t you photograph it, send it to his phone? A fax? You’re wasting time.”
Montclaire wanted to tell Thornton a photo wouldn’t have done the job, you couldn’t get the whole bar in one shot, all the tables, the doors. She had done it right her way. But she said, “Give me his e-mail. I’ll scan it and send an attachment.”
Thornton exhaled. “And Fager’s in motion. Cody said he was at his gallery for the opening of his new show.”
Montclaire wasn’t interested in Fager or Cody’s new works. At that moment, her mind drifted across town, back to the two men she had taken to a room at the Eldorado to make up for the interrupted party with the hairless boy from the mall. Instead of a slow night for them watching a game in a bar, a woman who had once been in Cosmo had taken them to a fancy hotel. The Cosmo job had been a photo to go with a short article about getting ready for summer. She was riding a classic fat tire bike along a beach, flowers and shells in the basket on the handle bars, a sheer beach robe over a bikini. Barefoot, toenails painted ten different colors. It had been hard as hell to pedal in the sand.
“Fager was there with a big slob pretending to be a dude from Malibu,” Thornton was saying, pulling Montclaire out of her thoughts. “Wanted paintings to hang over his couch. Leather vest, about three hundred pounds, biker’s boots. Uncomfortable in a starched shirt. Something-ski, Cody said. Something Polish. We know who that is.”
Montclaire sat up, interested, her mind back on the job.
Thornton said, “Get Cody to identify the table at the bar where he was sitting before Bronkowski finds it. Or Aragon.” She reached for the criminal code. “After I finish this brief, I’ll work on getting Walter off our tail. You watch, he’s going to pull some patented Fager street-fighting move. But we’re killer drones, high in the sky where he can’t see us, where he won’t even look, waiting for a clear shot to put him down.”
“Sometimes I worry about you.”
“You love it. Speaking of which, you free tonight?”
“Depends.” She was thinking of trolling the mall to find the boy with the starburst tattoo, kicking herself for not getting his number, not writing down his name.
“Judge Diaz wants me at eight.”
“Kind of late.”
Thornton let a smile spread across her face. “At her house. Bench-bar relations working group. Tonight’s agenda: whatever the Chief Judge wants.”
Montclaire bit her lip and thought it over. Judy Diaz was older than Marcy, doing something else before law school. Not the kind of woman she would lock on when other choices were available. But Diaz had a good figure under that robe.
She’d done judges, of a different sort. It was how she got her start modeling, throwing something at the men and women whose ribbons determined whether she would be wearing bras and panties in a warm studio, or outside, freezing on a winter shoot while the photographer flipped out because his cocoa was gloppy. But it was hot, while the girls were told to chew ice so you couldn’t see their breath in the air.
She let Thornton know she was interested. “Will this be one of those forbidden ex parte conferences?” she asked, a playful tone in her voice.
“Party, yes.” Thornton winked. “X, you bet. We’ll be conferring about trying something new. Our Judge Judy likes what she knows. But she’s open to creative interpretations of existing precedent.”
Fifteen
Bronkowski saw Lewis’s name on the sign-out sheet at the clerk’s desk when he asked for the Geronimo bankruptcy files. Lewis was a good cop. He had handled Fager’s cross-examination in the Gallardo trial a couple years back because he did his homework. Lewis was doing his homework on Cody Geronimo.
Bronkowski signed for files Lewis had just returned and took a seat at a table among paralegals he recognized from the big firms in town. Bankruptcy law was the world of the insane to him. He never understood how debts of hard money could vaporize like morning mist hit by the sun. He opened the stiff folders and found the creditor claims and asset lists. A two-hour review of that basic information told a story he could understand.
Fager was right. A lot of money going into Geronimo’s businesses was disappearing. Geronimo had lost second homes to creditors, and held onto his principal residence only by giving Thornton a first mortgage. Several investment properties were obvious tax shelters. He relinquished them without a fight. The files showed Geronimo struggling to retain ranch land in Valencia County. Eventually he accepted the surrender of the property to a white knight corporation with a string of letters for a name: SCR, LLC.
Bronkowski used his iPad to access data at the Public Regulation Commission. He did not recognize any of the corporation’s directors. The designated agent for service of process was a woman unfamiliar to him, though he thought he knew all the shops that provided this service in Santa Fe. But the address stood out. It was next to Fager’s law office. Thornton’s office was the only other building on that block.
Two possibilities spoke to him from the court files. Thornton was shielding Geronimo’s assets, putting herself between him and his creditors, playing straw man for a fee. Or she was cleaning him out.
He made a note to get a map of the ranch land and check tax and utility records. He returned the file to the clerk and went outside to his Harley parked at a meter under elm trees surrounding the old courthouse.
Fager had given him a long list of assignments, and he had come up with as many inquiries on his own. Two items moved to the top of his list. He sensed the Tasha Gonzalez case might hold secrets worth exploring. And he wanted to determine what Geronimo did between leaving Lin
da’s store and being run down by detectives Aragon and Lewis. Since the cops didn’t know either, it was an area of possible leads not tainted by Aragon’s breach of attorney-client privilege.
He called Goff and set a breakfast meeting for tomorrow. He wasn’t looking forward to that. You could never trust Goff’s work as a cop. They were supposed to trust him now?
At least Goff’s file held an address for Tasha Gonzalez’s family. Their last known address was a mobile-home park near the abandoned race track south of town. He swung by his house and switched to the Camry he used for fieldwork.
Enchanted Acres Estates sat on a barren mesa exposed to a steady wind. The ruins of the old race track were visible to the north. Cars and trucks moved in the distance along Interstate 25. This was a commuter satellite for hotel maids, gardeners, busboys, and burger flippers, deserted in the middle of the work day.
A woman in a red tank top answered the door matching the address for the Gonzalez family. A child clung to her leg as she leaned out. Bronkowski smelled boiling beans. A television blared Spanish voices. She spoke very little English. She repeated “no conosco” and “lo siento, no se.” He understood enough to gather she had never heard of the Gonzalez family. She had been at this address for a year and didn’t know who had lived in the tin can before her. She closed the door and left him on the stoop.
He tried four more single-wides before anyone answered. The thin Hispanic man who opened the door at the fifth reeked of beer and cigarettes and clothes that needed washing. On the hand holding the doorknob, age spots covered faded tattoos. Stained pant legs were worn thin over his bony thighs. The frayed cap on his head said, “The Chosin Few.”
“Were you there? Chosin Reservoir,” Bronkowski said.
The Drum Within Page 9
