“Deal. Five kids and a husband with opinions about everything,” Serena said and passed a bowl of chips. “After the dishes, I’ll shave your head, make you a hooded robe.”
Driving Javier’s truck back to town, Aragon decided never to mention this dinner around cops. Mountain lion was surprisingly damn good eating, especially the way Serena did it with red chile, onions, oregano, and cumin. On the side, frijoles and papas under melted jack and more of the red. Homemade tortillas. Flan at the end with coffee. That was a meal to beat Lotaburgers.
But if Omar Serrano heard about it:
Yo, Butch. Which way you like your pussy—excuse me—your cat, best of all?
She’d have to break his nose to shut him up.
Seventeen
One hundred ninety-seven names of officers killed in the line of duty are etched in the charcoal-colored Wall of Honor at the Law Enforcement Academy. The wall says “No Greater Love Hath Man,” but four of the names belong to women.
Bernalillo County Deputy Sheriff Angelica Garcia crashed her patrol car rushing to a bar fight where a gun was pulled.
Navajo tribal police officer Esther Todecheene died speeding to answer a fellow officer’s call for assistance.
Victoria Louise Chavez of the Farmington Police Department was conducting a routine check when a man who had been avoiding a competency hearing emerged from a house that was supposed to be empty. He fired four shotgun shells into her head at close range.
Sierra County Deputy Sheriff Kelly Fay Clark was transporting a prisoner from Truth or Consequences to the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility in Grants, a distance of two hundred and two miles. With only seven miles to go, the prisoner reached from the back seat through a gap in the Plexiglas barrier and grabbed her gun. He shot her twice in the head. The car veered across the interstate into a semi. The prisoner car-jacked a Presbyterian minister who stopped at the accident scene to help. He was caught making a call at a gas station with officer Clark’s gun still in his hand and cuffs on his wrist.
The list of officers killed in the line of duty goes back to when New Mexico was a territory and Billy the Kid shot lawmen in Lincoln County. The list grew every year, and there was plenty of blank space for new names.
As a cadet, Aragon spent hours reading names on the memorial in the garden at the Academy. She knew the stories of the female officers by heart. They must have confronted a lot worse than Omar Serrano, especially in the rural departments where female officers still were rare.
Only a handful of men like Serrano remained in the SFPD. The women who had gone before her would have welcomed those odds. So why was she spinning a dialogue in her head from one asshole cop she hadn’t talked to for days? Make it two asshole cops. No way to overlook the Deputy Chief who cared more about “preserving a valued relationship” with a bent judge than protecting and serving. And maybe Fenstermacher, Serrano’s partner, quietly going along with Omar’s crap. And Joe Donnelly, after her again for no reason except she tried damn hard and cared so much about what really mattered.
Okay, so things hadn’t really changed.
Lewis wanted her to report Serrano. She only wanted to do her job. Why let Serrano know it even bothered her?
Twenty miles of driving and she convinced herself Serrano wasn’t worth thinking about.
Mascarenas called her as she neared the Old Pecos Trail exit.
“My new friend wants us to know Judge Diaz is meeting with counsel on the Geronimo case tonight.”
Aragon steered Javier’s truck onto the exit ramp.
“Must be important, opening the courthouse this late.”
“Not a meeting in chambers. At Diaz’s house, and the prosecution’s not invited.”
Aragon knew where Diaz lived. She had once responded to a burglary in an east-side neighborhood. The Chief Judge came from her house across the street to complain about a patrol car blocking her driveway. Diaz’s place was in the Acequia Madre neighborhood, not far from Geronimo’s gallery. Old Pecos Trail was the fastest route.
“You still at work?” she asked.
“The defense is pushing nonstandard instructions. I have to research other jurisdictions. I should be out of here by midnight.”
“Get some rest, Joe.”
She headed into the maze of narrow streets built by Spanish conquistadors. The neighborhood association had fought installation of street lights on grounds they would make it harder to see the stars. Aragon had to get out to peer at a street sign in the dark. She didn’t realize she was coming upon Diaz’s place until her headlights picked out Thornton’s Aston, a car she had seen outside the courthouse, the kind of car you didn’t forget.
Aragon squeezed into a turnout that served as a space for garbage cans on collection day. She killed the engine and lights and removed Javier’s camera from the console. He used it for wildlife shots for gun-show brochures and the website that Serena had built for their outfitting business. She was tanning the hide of the mountain lion they had eaten for dinner. Serena could repair ATVs, run hounds on a cold trail, negotiate leases for hunting rights on sprawling ranches, and still manage five kids.
Rick Lewis, Super Dad. Serena Aragon, Super Mom. She was in the company of giants.
After half an hour of staring at Diaz’s front door, Aragon opened the Tasha Gonzalez file. She needed to catch up to Lewis. She’d moved their files from the trunk of her car, now at Javier’s place, to the pickup’s back seat. In the glove compartment she found a Maglite. When she turned it on the pages glowed red. Javier had covered the lens with tinted plastic so he could use the light without ruining his night vision.
Lewis’s handwritten notes were clipped inside the folder. She would add her own notes to the free-flowing stream of thoughts, impressions, and theories. They had discovered they obtained fresh insights into a case if they jotted down where they were at each step along the trail to catching a killer, even if the thoughts made no sense and never proved more than random speculation. The scratch sheet would not go into the official file. They never wanted to give the defense a road map to alternate explanations they had considered and rejected before settling on the defendant.
Right now, she had nothing to contribute. Her only information had come from Goff and what Lewis had shared in passing. He had already filled two pages of notes, raising questions likely answered deeper in the file, perhaps putting his finger on something the prior investigation had missed. His handwriting was as careful as his thought process. She saw his mind probing the case from different approaches. He drew arrows connecting two questions: “How did she get in the irrigation ditch?” and “Roads from the west?”
Every investigator who had touched the file had asked the first question. Lewis raised the second because he had located Geronimo’s ranch, twenty-five miles west of where Gonzalez’s remains had clogged an irrigation gate. Aragon unfolded the map in the file and examined it in dim red light. The location where she was found had been circled. A tiny blue line across alfalfa fields indicated an irrigation ditch paralleling the Rio Grande. Aragon didn’t see any route to the site from the west. Either Tasha had floated downstream or somehow her killer had found another way to the water.
Tasha’s larger bones, the skull, femur, hips, and shoulder blades, were recovered from the ditch. Smaller bones had been found in the field. Much of her skeleton was missing. Hair matched by DNA was found snagged at the base of a barbed wire fence two hundred yards from the irrigation gate. In his notes Lewis speculated that maybe an animal had dragged her scalp from the rest of the body.
OMI identified her through records from the emergency room at Christus St. Vincent Hospital. Several years before her death, Tasha had bought a round-trip ticket to take advantage of cheap dental work in Juarez. She came home with an infection that nearly killed her. X-rays taken in the ER matched the upper palate of the skull in the irrigation ditch.
; A forensic anthropologist Goff brought into the case noted that strands of her hair were caked with a white substance. Testing revealed it to be sodium chloride with traces of calcium, arsenic, and magnesium. The investigators had been encouraged by the arsenic as a possible means of death. But a consulting geologist said arsenic was a common element in the New Mexico water table. The geologist concluded that salt, the sodium-chloride base, had been deposited on the hair by naturally occurring water containing the other elements.
Farmers frequently complained about high levels of salt in irrigation water. Deposits could be seen on the ditch banks, like the ring in a bath tub. Lewis’s notes pondered whether Tasha’s hair had soaked up the salt while she decomposed in the irrigation ditch.
Aragon added a new question to the scratch sheets: “Flooding schedule?”
Goff had come to Santa Fe to escape the humidity of St. Louis. He probably didn’t know how alfalfa farmers flooded their fields when the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District released precious water from Cochiti dam. It would have been impossible to drive across those fields while they were under water.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the door to Diaz’s house open. She killed the light. When she reached for the camera she knocked it into the foot well. By the time she came up, the Aston was backing out of the driveway. The silhouette of the driver—long neck, too much hair for the lawyer’s bob—ruled out Thornton.
She debated leaving. She concluded that Thornton was still inside the house. Whoever was driving had gone out on an errand and would return.
Aragon turned back to the file. Tasha had modeled for Cody Geronimo. But “model” was not the job description Aragon would have attached to the woman in the photographs. She was soft edges everywhere. The corners of her mouth indicated neither a smile nor frown. Her cheeks were heavy but not jowly, neck and shoulders thick but not muscular. Overall her looks were too indefinite to be either pretty or unattractive.
Aragon wondered what Geronimo had seen that he wanted to incorporate into his art. The file did not reveal how much he paid. Tasha had ignored taxes. In Goff’s single brief interview, Geronimo said he paid cash but could not recall the amount.
Tasha’s only other employment was with a home-cleaning service called Mujeres Bravas that kept very sketchy records. That’s how Geronimo met her. Mujeres Bravas had cleaned his gallery after a party.
She had shared a trailer south of town with her brother Estevan and his family. The brother dropped her off at a park where she was picked up for the modeling sessions. He had never met Geronimo, nor had he seen the vehicle that came for Tasha.
She had not returned from one of those sessions. Her brother waited a week to report her missing. Geronimo told Goff she was not at the park when he went to meet her. He had not tried to track her down since she did not have a telephone or know where she lived.
Then Thornton stepped in and Geronimo stopped talking.
A pair of headlights appeared at the end of the lane. Aragon recognized the shape of the British car. She took up the camera and unrolled the window to avoid glare.
The Aston pulled into Diaz’s drive. Now two heads were silhouetted inside. The headlights went out. Thornton’s investigator—a real looker, what was her name?—left the driver’s door, went around to the passenger side, and pulled out a thin young woman. Something was wrong with her arms. The light came on over the house’s front door and lit the driveway.
Her hands were cuffed behind her back. Montclaire—that was it—led her toward the front door.
Aragon dropped the camera and reached for her pistol. Heedless of the dome light, she got out and moved quickly to the corner of the wall at the entrance to the long drive. She needed an angle so the young woman would not be in the line of fire. She put the front sight on Montclaire’s back and calculated how she might react when ordered to halt.
The front door opened. Judge Diaz stepped out holding a wine glass. The fabric of her judicial robe shimmered in the light from inside the house. With her free hand she pulled at the zipper. The robe fell open. She was naked underneath.
“May it please the court,” Montclaire shouted.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Diaz shouted back and the three of them, including the girl in cuffs, broke down in laughter. Montclaire prodded the young woman into the house. Judge Diaz followed and closed the door behind her.
Eighteen
By the time she reached her apartment Aragon was done beating herself up. A photograph of the young woman in handcuffs, walking up the driveway, Montclaire at her back with a handgun, Judge Diaz exposing herself in the porch light—she needed it all, in one view, just the way she had seen it. But she would have needed to zoom in on the cuffs so they would be recognizable. Same for the gun in Montclaire’s hand, hard to see in the dark. Diaz opening her robe would have been good for passing around the office, but on its own proved nothing.
At least she had confirmed Mascarenas’s suspicions about why the Geronimo case was chucked out the back door of the Santa Fe County courthouse. The Honorable Judith A. Diaz was rising fast up her to-do list.
She climbed the stairs to her efficiency apartment in a garden complex occupied by city workers and retirees. She was as far from the tourist district as she could get and stay within city limits. Inside, milk crates of files and law-enforcement manuals strained a hollow core door laid across cinder blocks. Her sofa was still pulled out into a bed, unmade, photographs and loose pages of unfinished reports scattered on the sheets.
She brought a sleeping bag and inflatable pad up from her locked storage space in the basement. The cross-trainers she wore during the day were replaced by hiking boots. One of the oranges in her fridge had not grown mold. It went into a shopping bag with peanuts and energy bars. She filled plastic jugs with tap water and crammed extra clothes into a day pack. With her gear behind her inside the truck’s cab, she headed south on I-25.
Ninety miles to Ladron Peak and Geronimo’s ranch.
Traffic was light and moved fast. She joined the stream but cut back a mile from La Bajada hill where state police maintained a speed trap. Ten miles later she caught herself breaking a hundred, the pickup’s V-8 letting her know it could go as fast as she wanted.
Congestion slowed her at the Sandia Pueblo Casino on Albuquerque’s northern edge. Rio Rancho sprawled to the western horizon. Tall office buildings missing from Santa Fe’s skyline pushed against the highway here. City lights wiped out stars. Not until she passed the exit for the airport on the other side of city, where empty desert reclaimed the landscape, did she feel she was back in New Mexico.
She pulled off at the Los Lunas exit to grab a late snack. Next to the railroad tracks she found one of the oldest Blake’s she had ever seen, everything about it frozen in the Sixties. She bought a large coffee and two Lotaburgers. The coffee would get her through the rest of the drive. The second burger would be tomorrow’s breakfast.
Back on the road, she could now see Ladron Peak rising against the Milky Way. New Mexico’s other tall peaks were part of larger mountain ranges. Ladron stood alone. She drove south of Belen, close to where Tasha Gonzalez had festered in an irrigation ditch, and took the Bernardo exit. Years ago a bar in the middle of nowhere had justified this interchange. After the Legislature outlawed drive-up liquor, the alcohol license had been sold and the building turned over to tumbleweeds hugging its walls.
A dismal RV park had sprung up since she last passed this way. Smack against the interstate right-of-way, fifth wheels and motor homes shook as heavy semis thundered by. No trees, no shade, no grass. Nothing but hookups for water and liquid waste, and a hand-painted sign saying, “Cash only. No credit. Kids and dogs free but don’t let them run loose.”
Despite that rule, a pack of dogs chased the truck until it crossed a rusting bridge over the Rio Puerco, a muddy thread between tamarisk trees crowding its banks. The pavement ended
and a dirt road forced tires into ruts dried hard as concrete.
Yellow clay reflected headlights, but darkness yawned at the top of every hill. She sensed vast emptiness surrounding her. From nowhere the reflective green and white of a street sign appeared in her headlights. It said, “Menaul Boulevard,” a busy thoroughfare in Albuquerque, and she wondered how it got here.
Several bumpy miles past the street sign she turned off onto a rough two-track running toward the mountain. She engaged the four-wheel drive and plowed through soft sand and loose rock. Soon she was in a canyon barely wider than the truck. A half mile later she found a level spot to park and called it a night.
She used Javier’s red lens flashlight to set up camp. In the bed of the truck she rolled out the inflatable pad, then the sleeping bag. She made a pillow of extra clothes. She hesitated before crawling inside the bag, thinking of Cynthia Fremont. She wondered how Rivera was coming along, able to run his own investigation and do the job the way it needed to be done, no idiot like Dewey Nobles getting in the way. She thought of Buff, now Roshi Larson. She was glad she had followed her outside the meeting in Rivera’s office. She’d provided the break about celestial burial, and pinpointed the campsite by the lake, without an army of FBI experts.
They needed to do something together, reach back to happy times. She wanted to know where Buff had been all these years, what brought her back to Santa Fe. Instead of abusing Javier’s old Jeep, they could tool around Santa Fe in Buff’s convertible. A Buddhist beemer. Pull up next to bangers on Cerrillos and blast them with Tibetan chants, or whatever Roshis had on their stereo.
Maybe Spice Girls. Buff had loved “Wannabe.” It would drive the bangers nuts.
She kept the rifle and handgun within reach, but not so close that she might roll over them. She snapped off the flashlight. No man-made light reached her in the slot between sandstone cliffs. The night air had grown cold. The sky shimmered. That crazy bright moon Lewis had noted the night they found Fremont still lit the land. She could make out cracks in the cliffs above her. She could see the teeth in the zipper running down the side of her sleeping bag, and read the label sewn into the canvas. Javier had given her a Walmart special, heavy as a child, lined with flannel, nothing like the expensive goose down in Fremont’s high-end Big Agnes bag.
The Drum Within Page 11
