Pitcairn met him at the door. He was dressed in a bowtie and short-sleeved, button-down shirt with a pocket protector holding pens and pencils, and a phone and calculator in cases on his belt. Bronkowski always wanted to tell Pitcairn it was okay to stop dressing for the job at Los Alamos lab he had left long ago. Classical music played as Pitcairn led him to a living room converted to his central workspace. An office chair was surrounded by three connected desks with large monitors. File cabinets ran along the walls, behind a white greaseboard full of arrows and columns of names and numbers. A mobile sculpture with the wingspan of a small plane hung from the high ceiling, spinning above Pitcairn as he handed Bronkowski a manila folder.
“Coffee while you read?”
Bronkowski waved him off. Pitcairn was in the middle of his work day, Bronkowski was looking forward to bed.
“I’ll have more tomorrow,” Pitcairn said as he worked an elaborate brass Italian espresso machine squeezed between scrapped motherboards and vinyl binders. “I found activity ten years ago, the day after you said they disappeared from Santa Fe. A credit card issued to Estevan Gonzalez was used at locations along I-25 as far north as Cheyenne, then several times in Pinedale, Wyoming. The twenty-thousand and change balance on that card was paid off in one bite and all use ceased. Years of silence. No financial activity at all until Estevan started buying property recently.”
“Where?”
“Jackson Hole.” Pitcairn dropped a sugar cube into a demitasse and waited for the espresso machine to stop hissing and shaking. “A gutter-cleaning and yard-care company. Then a tire store. This year he bought a cute little cottage in Teton Village. There’s a view in the folder.”
Bronkowski paged through the report until he found the photograph. He whistled at the multi-story stone mansion against the backdrop of the Teton Range.
“It has a sixteen-seat movie theater,” Pitcairn said.
The Gonzalez family, minus Tasha, had come a long way from the single-wide on Santa Fe’s dusty south side.
“What does the guy do for this kind of money?”
“Nothing I can see. He was dormant, then his Spring arrived. Time to blossom.”
“Thanks, John. It’s a great start.”
“I’ll eyeball tax records tomorrow. Lovely thing about those police files you gave me. They’ve got DOBs, Social Security, INS and passport numbers, everything a fellow needs for a very good time.”
Outside, before getting on his bike, Bronkowski called Fager, knowing he’d be up, pounding at his computer, drinking cold coffee.
“That waitress was a nervous wreck just telling me she brought Geronimo a beer at the bar. She waits tables. That’s when I knew she was holding back. I’m going to be at her house tomorrow morning, get her out of bed before Montclaire shows up with her bag of money.”
“Marcy’s cleaning up after her sloppy client,” Fager said. “Taking a breather to grab a beer was a mistake. That blood in his hair was Linda’s and I’m betting he left some on that table. Tell that woman I’ll beat any offer from Montclaire.”
“My night’s done. Why don’t you shut it down? Mascarenas is not going to read any of those briefs you’re spitting out.”
“I’m going to petition to empanel a grand jury to investigate Linda’s murder. Press conference tomorrow. I’m hiring temporary staff to collect signatures, those enviros who go door-to-door on everything from whales to wolves. They’re in between rants right now, hungry for something to piss them off. We need two-thousand two-hundred and forty-one signatures to meet the statute’s threshold. The DA will have to act. This will force a special prosecutor. That’s going to be me.”
“Who’s this on our team?”
“And I’m filing that replevin action. To force Geronimo to turn over those bones he took from Linda. He’ll have to answer. I’ll get his deposition. Marcy will instruct her client to assert the Fifth. Fireworks ensue. That little civil suit will generate publicity for the petition drive. The media can’t slam me for chasing his money. I’m just trying to put all of my wife to rest, see justice done. That will be the story line. Sympathetic, something new for me.”
“Walt, get some sleep.”
Whales and wolves. For the first time he wondered if Fager knew what the hell he was doing.
Twenty-Five
Fermin Bustamante told Aragon how to find the dirt road to Geronimo’s ranch. But she wanted to get in without leaving tire tracks alerting Geronimo that he had had a visitor. Even worse, Geronimo might come up behind her while she was in there. She could run, but Javier’s pickup would be trapped, traced back to him, then her.
The rancher led Aragon to a dry arroyo the Ford could handle in four-wheel drive. The swath of sand and gravel ended two miles later at a sheer wall of rock. She left the truck and clambered through cactus and busted granite to look down on a shallow stream sliding between black basalt cliffs. Even at a distance she could make out salt encrusted on the banks. The Rio Salado. A salmon-colored house with a large wing under a new metal roof had been built next to the stream.
In a road passing under a closed gate, only old tire tracks filling with sand. No smoke rising from the chimney. No light from inside. Curtains pulled across all the windows.
She climbed over barbed wire and approached the building. A bleached elk skull and antlers hung over a front door of weathered oak with two deadbolts above an antique latch. She pulled on thin leather gloves from the bottom of her pack and tried it, then the door to the modern wing at the back of the house. It also had twin deadbolts. Both doors were locked.
Lewis could pick locks. She never had the patience. A rock took care of the lowest window. She snapped out glass shards and pushed herself up and in.
She landed on a cold concrete floor. When her eyes adjusted, she made out shelves against walls, a work bench, specimen cabinets
like those in a natural history museum and a metal table centered in the room. The table was from another age.
It was coated in porcelain and mounted on a steel base. An indented channel led to a hole under which sat a galvanized tub. Unlike its modern counterparts, it lacked wheels and a hook-up for water. This was an embalming table. An antique, a collector’s item, but it looked ready to use.
Aragon pulled out her phone to take photographs but held back. She did not want any permanent record, even on her private phone, of her illegal entry. She checked to see if she could call out. On this side of the mountain nothing should obstruct the signal from the cell towers along the interstate. She’d be leaving a record of her call on those towers, but it would show only that she may have been traveling the interstate when her call was made. She dialed Lewis and he answered immediately.
Aragon heard excitement in his voice.
“When you get to Geronimo’s ranch house … ”
“I’m in.”
Silence. She knew he was weighing what she had just told him, his partner admitting to breaking and entering, him on the edge of being complicit.
“When you leave,” he said, “head up the canyon, upstream about a quarter to a third of a mile. I found something on the aerial survey. Flyovers taken in the late afternoon caught shadows in at least a dozen depressions. They’re not random. They’re set out in rows. Like graves. I don’t know what else it could be.”
She felt that lovely electrical current rippling across her back.
“You’re not going to believe what I’m looking at.” She described the embalming table, the specimen cabinets, the room’s layout. On the shelves, bits of bone, twisted metal, feathers, dried cactus husks, smooth river stones, a chipped brick, rusted coils of wire, a railroad stake, swatches of animal hide, wasp nests. The items in Geronimo’s odd collection ran into the hundreds.
“Object trouvé,” Lewis said. “Found art. Objects from everyday life considered junk turned into creative works by, I’m quoting here, the spirit, i
magination, and talent of the artist. I’ve been reading the book Geronimo bought from Linda Fager. You’re seeing his art supplies.”
“You found time to read a book?”
“Skimmed it during my daughter’s soccer practice.”
Geronimo had taken the small bones in Linda Fager’s inner ear. Aragon wondered if any of these bones were human. Not all of Tasha Gonzalez’s bones had been recovered. They might be here.
“I’m going to check the main house, then I’m going up the canyon.” Lewis didn’t respond. She had lost the weak signal.
She made another sweep around the room. A storyteller figurine in the corner of the top shelf seemed out of place among the busted, faded, decaying junk everywhere else in the room. Storyteller dolls were favorites of Indian art collectors. The basic design was a rotund woman, not unlike the women in Geronimo’s drawings, dressed in leggings, a blanket around her shoulders, with tiny children sprouting from hips and thighs.
Maybe it was Geronimo’s muse, inspiring his work, watching over his creative activity.
She turned her attention to the specimen cabinets and studied the bones. She and Lewis had already made the mistake of misidentifying the small bones seized from Geronimo as avian. She considered taking some of these bones to the medical inspector. But what she learned could never be used as the basis for a search warrant or an arrest. She needed to return here, legally.
She saw Japanese paper, silk scarves, flattened chicken wire, glues, brushes, tacks, string. Other drawers held sketch books. She found bird feathers, shells, and more polished stones. In a bottom drawer she found rulers, stencils, pencils, pens, and markers. Surgical knives in a velvet pouch, rolled up and tied around the middle. And a remote control.
She stared at four fine, precise blades. The electrical current across her back turned into a chilling cold. She put the knives carefully back into the exact spot where she had found them.
The remote control puzzled her. The room did not have a television or stereo. She had seen no antenna or satellite dish.
That would be pure luck, Lewis had said right before she played with what turned out to be the key fob to Geronimo’s Range Rover. She pressed the remote’s power button. Nothing happened. No lottery hit this time. She was about to replace the remote when she noticed a faint glow in the mouth of the storyteller figurine.
A step ladder, tiptoes, and a full extension of her arms brought the figurine down to eye level.
The figurine concealed a security camera. And it was running.
On her belly she looked under everything in the room. She double-
checked the shelves and drawers. She entered the main house through a connecting door and opened cupboards, peered under furniture, tapped walls, felt on top of closet shelves. She found no device that could be receiving a signal from the camera.
She leaned out the broken window for a better phone signal than the thick adobe walls allowed.
“I could be fucked,” she said when Lewis answered, then calmed down and asked him to research what she was holding. She described it in detail. Embossed lettering said it was manufactured by an outfit called SleuthCon. She read the model number and waited while he found it on the Internet.
“It’s inside the camera. An SD card, just like in a digital camera. Motion-activated. Runs off a lithium battery. Any bets what’s on there besides you poking around?”
“We’ll see.” She put the entire camera in her day pack. “I’m going up the canyon after I make sure he doesn’t have other cameras watching me.”
She searched the house and workroom once more. With her pen knife she removed electrical face plates, inspected the wall clock in the kitchen, shook tissue boxes, poked fingers into the dry soil of potted plants. She found no other camera. She hoped she was right.
In her search she noticed that the house needed dusting. Dead insects lined window sills. Cobwebs hung in corners. But the workroom with the embalming table was immaculate. Geronimo was a neatnik where it was important to him. He had washed the boxcutter and staple gun he used on Linda Fager and placed them neatly on a folded paper towel to dry. Photos Goff had taken inside his Santa Fe studio also showed an immaculate work space.
She found only one thing of interest in the main house. The bedroom held an ancient green steel bed that looked incredibly uncomfortable. It appeared to be the same vintage as the embalming table. The rest of the house was furnished with worn upholstered or rough wood furniture. The dresser in the bedroom contained nothing more than spare clothes. The refrigerator ran on propane and held champagne and bottled water. Food was stored in plastic bins as protection against mice. Stacks of magazines about the art business were scattered on the coffee table in the living room. If she had missed anything, it would take a more intensive search than she could make today.
Aragon went out the window she had used to enter and dropped down to the streambed. A white line ran unevenly along the banks. She wet a fingertip, touched white crust, and tasted salt. She scooped up a handful and sealed it in a plastic bag. She wanted the chemical composition of this salt deposit matched against the salt in Tasha Gonzalez’s hair. Trace elements might work the same way as a DNA signature.
She passed under a three-strand, barbed-wire fence hung with a sign notifying her she was entering a Bureau of Land Management Wilderness Study Area. She followed the stream until she saw it churning ahead between black cliffs. There at the foot of the cliffs was a smoothed rectangle of sand, free of rocks and brush.
Lewis was right. Repetitive depressions of equal size and shape were arranged in straight, neat rows.
Last night, between talking about his children and the fading of the ranching industry, Fermin Bustamante had thrown in history lessons about Ladron Peak. In addition to being a hideout for robbers who attacked Spanish wagons on the Camino Real from Mexico, it was the site of battles between Apaches and Buffalo Soldiers of the U.S. Cavalry. A large engagement had been fought on the Rio Salado. Many men fell on both sides.
She doubted these were Apache graves. Indians either carried away their dead or the soldiers left them to rot if they were not burned. They could be the graves of Buffalo Soldiers, buried anonymously, in precise military order.
Or someone who was precise and orderly in the work most important to him.
She could be looking at the graves of women Geronimo did not dump into a drainage ditch or butcher in the bathroom of a used bookstore. Women who had been on the embalming table less than half a mile away, in the same room with the surgical knives. Under the camera in the mouth of the storyteller.
The figurine had stories to tell, and they weren’t Navajo creation myths.
Aragon plotted her location on the GPS unit then inspected the open area. She counted fourteen distinct depressions. She shoved a stick into the soil of one to see if it was a shallow grave. She struck nothing.
This time she took photographs on her phone. This was public land. She had every right to be here without a warrant. She took a wider shot, then scaled the nearest black cliff to get a higher perspective that would show the entire plot.
From here she could see the rooftop of Geronimo’s compound and vague tire tracks, eroded by weather, between the house and graveyard. She followed the tracks back to Geronimo’s property and found where the barbed wire was only loosely connected with hooks so it could be folded back to allow a motor vehicle through.
It was time to hike over the mountain and back to her truck before she lost daylight. She turned around and faced whoever was buried in the sandy clearing.
“I’m sorry, I’ve got to go now.”
Twenty-Six
Aragon drove from Geronimo’s ranch listening to the country stations programmed into Javier’s radio. At Albuquerque she left the interstate and headed to a Radio Shack she knew by the university. A young woman in a wrinkled white shirt and thin black tie greeted her. The plas
tic tag pinned to her breast pocket said her name was Donna. Aragon showed her the surveillance camera she had taken from Geronimo’s ranch.
“I found this in my bathroom after I kicked my boyfriend out.”
Donna said, “Men are such bastards.”
“I need to see what’s on it so I can tell the police. Or maybe not, depending. I wouldn’t want them seeing, well, you know.”
“Here.” Donna took the camera and slipped out a plastic chip the size of a postage stamp and nearly as thin. “You just push this into an SD reader and plug that into a USB port.”
Aragon’s computer was in her apartment in Santa Fe. She wanted to know right now what the camera had recorded.
“He took my laptop. And my credit cards.”
“Bastard.” Donna motioned Aragon to a counter near the register. “I won’t look,” she said, and slipped the SD card into the side of a new Lenovo. “Just go to ‘computer’ and open the F file.”
“That simple?”
“Simpler than boyfriends.”
Aragon followed her instructions. She saw three files. The first showed Geronimo entering the workroom carrying a narrow silver box. He walked across the room and opened the drawer where Aragon had found the remote control and surgical knives. He pointed the remote at the camera and the screen went dead. The next time the screen lit up it showed Geronimo pointing the remote again at the camera, replacing it in the drawer and leaving the room. The screen went dark after a few minutes of inactivity in the empty workroom.
The most recent file showed breaking glass skidding across the floor, Aragon squeezing through a broken window, moving around the room, and finally her face growing large as she looked directly into the camera lens. The images continued to roll until the flap of her day pack blocked the light.
The Drum Within Page 15
