The Drum Within

by James R. Scarantino

  An armful of tranquilizers quieted the big guy. The wiry one watched Aragon like a terrified cat. One of the EMTs held out a box of sterilized hand wipes so she could clean blood from her face and shoulders.

  She put the wipes aside, leaving her face as it was and crawled close to the wiry guy.

  “You’re going to tell me what happened, or what I pull off they won’t be able to sew back on. How did the girl die, the one left out for birds?”

  “Raven.”

  “Yeah, ravens were eating her.”

  “She was Raven. That was her name.”

  Thirty-Five

  Lewis found it on the back of the Santa Fe Reporter, the city’s alternative weekly. It ran in a column with ads for a paranormal investigator, Chinese massage, colonics, something called “human patterning,” a medical-marijuana doc, and Diana’s Sacred Fire Reiki. Lewis had been at Whole Foods, at checkout, and picked up the weekly for something to read while he waited.

  He brought the paper with him to the Christus St. Vincent ER. Rivera had arrived ahead of him. Through Aragon they learned that the smaller man identified himself as Timothy Osborn, and his big friend as Scott Rutmann. After leaving Fremont’s body in the Volvo’s trunk, they had hiked east through the wilderness, avoiding trails and finding their way to the store in Pecos. Osborn said they met Fremont through the ad.

  “She did interviews,” Aragon said. “Osborn and Rutmann got

  the job.”

  “The sleeping bag,” Lewis asked. “Did I have it right?”

  “They carried her in the bag in case someone came along. They would sit on it, pretend they were resting. But there was no one else on the trail at night.”

  Lewis showed them the classified.

  It had run for a month. He had called the publisher and learned the ad had been purchased with cash. It read: Change me from am to BE. Needing two male apprentices. Must be worthy of my body and fit my soul. I am twenty-two in this life, ageless in others. Hurry, my wings must spread. I must fly. The ad gave a telephone number for someone named Raven.

  “They didn’t think anyone would believe them,” Aragon said. “They thought it was all about sex. Spreading wings, spreading legs. Nothing to do with what they saw under the prayer flags.”

  Rivera said, “The Ogham translation we got today contains the word raven. Doesn’t make any of this more believable.”

  “We can prove they carried her off the mountain,” Aragon said, “put her in the trunk. Had a three-way. That’s where our direct evidence ends. Osborn says they didn’t hurt her. They woke up. She was out of the tent. They boiled water for tea, got stoned. Ate corn cold out of the can. Then went to see why a cloud of dark birds was on the hilltop.”

  Lewis shook his head. “Bullshit. She did that to herself? Next it’s some psycho in a cave wearing wolf skins slices her up, but they were too zonked to hear anything. That’s how it was, officer. A wood troll. Honest.”

  “No latents on the knife,” Aragon said. “Osborn says he threw it into the lake. Out of disgust. But why the lake unless he was trying to destroy evidence?” She turned to Rivera. “What kind of knife is it? Osborn said it creeped him.”

  “We’re still waiting on that. But we’ve got this.” Rivera cleared magazines off a table and laid out nine index cards. “One word on each flag. Each index card represents a flag. Unfortunately, when the site was dismantled, no one recorded the placement of flags in relation to each other.”

  One of the cards had Cynthia Fremont’s assumed name, Raven.

  “They say something about her.” Aragon moved the cards into different orders, willing a meaning to emerge. “I wonder if there’s anything to there being nine flags.”

  “I wondered, too,” said Rivera. “There’s a Nine Flags Christmas festival in Nacogdoches, Texas. It’s the name of an album of Cuban music. A concept for a theme park that was never built. And the name of a race horse.”

  “I don’t think that word watch is about a timepiece.” Lewis tapped one of the cards. “I think she’s telling us, whoever reads the flags, to watch her.”

  “You think Fremont had these flags made,” Rivera said.

  “When did they meet her?” Lewis asked. “How long before the trio went up the mountain?”

  “Five days,” Aragon answered. She tapped two other cards. “Fly, and wings. Two more words from the ad. Another reason to believe the flags were Fremont’s.”

  Rivera said, “I’m going to have to talk to Osborn and Rutmann. I don’t buy their story, that they went into the woods for sex and dope, and Fremont—Raven—freaked out on them.”

  Aragon said, “The birds eating her freaked them out. Osborn says that’s why they carried her all the way down the mountain to the only secure place they could think of, the trunk of her car.”

  “You had that part right,” Rivera said. “Are we going to believe that Raven/Fremont climbed to the celestial burial site while her semen donors were passed out, and mutilated herself? No way. I’m with Lewis.”

  “Wheel of Fortune,” Lewis said, and they waited for him to explain.

  “Vanna and Pat come on before SpongeBob SquarePants. I bet my kids and I can figure this out. For starters.” He separated several cards from the others. “We have the pronoun I three times, the only pronoun here. So this is about whoever—I’m betting Fremont—had these flags made. Start matching up verbs with nouns, trial and error. We can do this. See.” He arranged four cards to read, I have raven wings.

  “But how do we know what’s right?” Aragon asked. “What if we can use all the cards to say more than one thing? Which is it?”

  Rivera jumped in. “We need to look more closely at the photos taken of the site before it was dismantled. Even if we only get some of them right, the rest will fall into place.”

  “The FBI probably has an entire department for word games,” Aragon said. “Like shoelaces.”

  Rivera nodded. “Cryptologists. They’re primarily counter-espionage, but are tasked to domestic crime as needed. They broke the Aryan Brotherhood’s code. I’ll send this over. And we’ll try to find out who made these flags.”

  “Game on,” Aragon said. “Super Dad and his girls versus the G-men codebreakers.”

  Rivera’s cell rang and he stepped out of the waiting room. Aragon and Lewis played with the cards, stringing together phrases, rearranging the same cards to say different things, but never using all the cards in one statement.

  When Rivera returned, Aragon could see he wasn’t thinking about words on prayer flags.

  “That was Fager. Now I know what you meant about needing mules.”

  Thirty-Six

  Thornton reserved a rental Ford Expedition at the Albuquerque Sunport. Montclaire picked it up and was met by a courier with keys to Geronimo’s ranch. She bought clothes, an inflatable mattress and pillow, fleece blankets, and hiking sandals at REI, food and bottled water at Whole Foods, and the most expensive camera at Best Buy, all on the client’s tab. She spent the night at Hotel Andaluz, ordered room service for breakfast, and drove back to the house on the Rio Salado.

  First thing she did after unloading the Expedition was walk up the valley. Marcy wanted to know what she had to deal with. When she could get a signal on her cell, Montclaire called to report Cody hadn’t told them the half of it.

  She set up on the flat roof. In the afternoon she saw the convoy approaching and felt like she was in an old Western, an Indian watching wagon trains crossing the desert, or cavalry charging to the rescue. But they were too late this time around.

  Marcy said this day would come, Cody wouldn’t always follow

  her advice. Clients never did, thank god. You didn’t want brilliant,

  meticulous clients. You wanted careless, reckless clients with lots of money. That made Cody almost perfect. He had only two shortcomings. He thought he was brilliant and meticulous.
And he whined.

  Sunlight bounced off the windshield of the lead SUV, the others in a bank of dust stretching for half a mile. They stopped where Montclaire had parked her rented Ford Expedition to block the gate. Dust settled. Doors opened.

  A Hispanic guy wearing mirrored sunglasses, looking good in his FBI windbreaker, got out of a white Suburban.

  “You’re trespassing,” Montclaire shouted from the roof. “Get off this land.”

  He walked behind her rental and recorded its license. She aimed a camera at him, then swung it to the vehicles lined in the dirt road.

  Men and women, most with FBI vests or jackets, piled out of SUVs. Aragon and Lewis got out of the lead vehicle and walked to a horse trailer towed by a supercab pickup last in line. A large man and a woman in camo unloaded six mules and cinched saddles around the animals. Aragon, Lewis, the handsome Hispanic guy, and three other men in FBI jackets mounted up and rode into the hills at the base of Ladron Peak. They dropped behind rocks then emerged upriver, beyond Geronimo’s property line. They headed downhill to join tire tracks that crossed Geronimo’s yard and moved up the canyon through a cut fence. Montclaire was sure Fager and Bronkowski had made those tracks and cut that fence.

  Back at the front of the house a black motor home and cargo truck joined the SUVs. FBI personnel unloaded equipment, set out tables and chairs, and erected tarps over everything. Then more mules shuffled out of the trailer and more people rode around Geronimo’s property line. A helicopter appeared overhead, probably government, no reason yet for a news chopper to fly sixty miles from Albuquerque.

  She filmed while updating Marcy on her prepaid cell. Montclaire said she should have just torched Cody’s place, got rid of whatever was in the house the way she got rid of the table from the bar. Marcy kidded her about becoming a pyro, then said it might have been a good idea. There was another table that had her worried, something Cody had her buy through a dummy corporation. It wasn’t the kind you eat at. You’d never think of eating at that table once you realized what it was. For now it was safe. Whatever cops find up the canyon, they have to tie it to Geronimo and the house to give them probable cause to enter. That wouldn’t be easy.

  “I love the law,” Marcy said. “It keeps us civilized.”

  A gunshot echoed off the cliffs. The man and woman in camos were rising from a crouch. The man held a rifle. The woman pointed. Montclaire picked up binoculars. A dead coyote lay a hundred yards out. Marcy rattled on about her love affair with the Fourth Amendment while the man and woman closed on the carcass. The woman knelt, unsheathed a long knife, and started cutting.

  “There’s people skinning a coyote.”

  “That’s not whose hide they’re after. Stay focused, Lily.”

  Montclaire saw it: Thornton in her office, shoes off, feet on her desk, sipping wine, while she was out here roasting on the roof, surrounded, under siege. Crazy people butchering coyotes. Up the canyon, police unearthing Cody’s toys. Cops watching her through binoculars. Somebody with a telephoto lens now photographing her atop the house. She gave them a pose, hand behind her head, cupping her neck, face tilted to catch sunlight, lips pouted. Giving them the finger with her other hand.

  I’m not out here for my health, she wanted to tell her boss. Not my idea of a good time.

  She asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Very important work.” She heard Marcy swallow. Yup. She was doing the feet-on-the-desk, wine-in-hand routine. “I’m waiting for Cody’s wire to come through. I took your advice. It’s the biggest retainer he can afford.” Another pause for another sip of wine. “Hang in there, kiddo. That fifty-K bonus you just got, it won’t be the last.”

  She climbed down from the roof. Inside Geronimo’s workroom she saw the table, a strange antique thing, porcelain and metal with a hole in the middle, some kind of drain, and an aluminum tub underneath. It seemed clean, but with all its cracks and joints, no way Cody could have washed it perfectly. She studied how it could be dismantled. She had room in the Expedition. Back it to the door, take the table out piece by piece under sheets to hide what she was carrying. On the trip back to Santa Fe, heave castors out of the window, the legs in irrigation ditches, the rest over fences at junkyards on the south side of Albuquerque. Scatter the thing across ninety miles of New Mexico, not enough in one place anyone could guess what they had found.

  When the second team of riders arrived, Aragon understood why Rivera had not packed shovels. They carried vapor probes, tubes smaller than straws that were shoved into the soil and detected ninhydrin-reactive nitrogen. More reliable than cadaver dogs, and you didn’t have to feed them or bag their waste from a controlled crime scene. Rivera showed the technicians where to start, though the rectangular depressions could not be missed.

  It took only minutes to announce the first body under three feet of soil. An hour later they had a total of fourteen. Rivera returned to the main gate and made calls. More black motor homes arrived. Javier found a direct route to the graves. He led technicians, two to a mule, in the river between towering rocks. The animals clambered out of the freezing water onto the bank next to the graves. The techs stepped into white suits and began excavating bodies.

  Forensic anthropologists from the University of New Mexico. State police. Valencia County sheriff’s deputies. BLM law enforcement. More FBI. The black motor home with antennas, a mobile crime lab. Another motor home, the mess hall. A camp grew at the main gate, a half mile from the graves, using Javier’s route.

  Aragon called Goff, told him to get word to Fager about what he had set in motion.

  “I knew Tasha Gonzalez wasn’t his first,” Goff said. “I don’t want to think how many we could have stopped if we’d brought him down then.”

  Aragon asked, “Why wasn’t Tasha here?”

  Thirty-Seven

  The phone tree went from Goff to Bronkowski to Fager. Fager knew discovery of the graves would blast Linda’s case away from Judge Diaz into a federal investigation of a serial killer. Fourteen other women—he was sure those were women in the graves—plus Tasha Gonzalez and Linda. The news would help his petition drive, swing the media against Geronimo and anyone who stood with him. Now prosecuting Geronimo would benefit the DA’s reelection. Thornton would be issuing on-the-fly no-comments before escaping in her Aston.

  Fager thought about that number. Fourteen. He called Bronkowski back.

  “Did you keep that folio from Geronimo’s gallery? How many of those weird statues was he selling?”

  Fager stood under the bleached skull of the monster elk and peered into the windows of the Secret Canyon Gallery. Hours after closing, the store, the street dark and quiet. Inside, pools of light on an empty floor. Only one statue, if you could call it that, stood in a spotlight’s white circle.

  “We reopen at ten tomorrow.”

  Cody Geronimo stood behind Fager in his silver-tipped boots, the ponytail over a shoulder, taller than he remembered. Right there, alone, no one else around, the man who had killed his wife.

  No, he was here for information. How would Bronk get this guy talking?

  “I was hoping to see those statues I read about in the paper. Something new for you. I’m a fan. I follow your work.”

  “You’re hardly a fan, Mr. Fager.” Geronimo stepped past him to unlock the door. “I recognize you from your first visit, trying to be inconspicuous, the only person in the room in a suit and tie. Your fat investigator playing with me. Please come in.”

  Nobody knew he was here. No witnesses on the street. He could have Geronimo behind closed doors. A chop to the artery on the side of his neck. A knee on his chest to hold him down.

  “Mr. Fager, please. This may interest you.”

  Shoot him, Bronk had said.

  Geronimo adjusted a dimmer. The pool of light around the single statue intensified. Fager stepped inside and reminded himself, again, he was here for informati
on.

  “No reason to lurk at the back of the crowd. No need for pretense. You have the privilege of a private showing. Does any particular piece speak to you?”

  “There’s only one.” Fager rolled his shoulders, trying to relieve the tension locking his spine. Geronimo stepped closer and Fager found himself backing away. Bronk was right, this wasn’t easy.

  Geronimo smiled. “The other fourteen sold quickly. I put together, as your man put it, this one with material I was fortunate to have on hand. Here’s your opportunity to be the first to see it, buy it. Make it yours.”

  Fager read the plaque mounted on the statue’s base: “The Drum Within.” Feathers, sticks, wire, stones, dried grass. A piece of coral. Frayed rope. A broken cinder block. No sign of anything like a drum.

  “Does this particular work speak, call out to you in a familiar voice?”

  He couldn’t take it. How had Bronk been able to shake this guy’s hand?

  “You won’t be wearing that smirk much longer.”

  Geronimo’s smile grew wider.

  “The drum is alive, with a heartbeat. I see that drum beating behind the eyes of every person. Sometimes, I can see the stick striking a stretched skin, the beat pulsing, the air dancing. That is a special moment.”

  They were circling the statue, their toes at the edge of the spotlight’s circle.

  “Airwaves,” Geronimo said, “strike the eardrum. The hammer strikes the anvil. The beat vibrates the stirrup in the inner ear, then our nerves, our entire being. So the spirit of the drum lives within each of us.”

  “I see something ugly.”

  “Not ugly. Very beautiful. Muy linda. Certainly you know linda is Spanish for beautiful.”

  Fourteen statues for fourteen bodies. Now one for Linda. The missing bones from her inner ear. The drum within.

  Geronimo was watching him work it out.

  “Is this where you tell me I won’t get away with it? I will be brought to justice, made to pay for my crimes?”