“This is where I get my gun and shoot you in the face.”
In his Mercedes, keys in the ignition but engine off, Fager wished he had his Beretta. He called Bronkowski to talk himself down. Bronk wasn’t answering. But someone was calling him.
“Shoot him.”
Marcy Thornton saying it. He checked the caller ID, not believing it was her voice.
“But you can’t hire the best criminal defense lawyer in the state,” she said. “I’ll have a conflict as the first witness against you.”
Geronimo watched him from his gallery’s window.
Thornton went on, chirping, giddy.
“I got paid up front. Nobody’s going to ask for a refund if my client suddenly stops breathing. I’d start a vacation, then rush back to pick up the business you lose after the Supremes yank your license.”
“Why are you calling me, Marcy?” Trying to figure out what she was saying had calmed him down as good as talking to Bronkowski. It gave his mind something to work on, take him away from what he was feeling next to a statue holding pieces of his wife, three feet from her killer, now forty, Geronimo still in the gallery’s window, watching.
“I can’t remember if it’s whiskey or bourbon.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What you drink. You used to have a bottle in your desk. Pour two fingers when you kicked ass in court. You’d smoke cigars, buy dinner, steaks for everybody. We’d take dessert to the office and work until daybreak so you could do it over again the next day. I kept clean dresses in the closet for the all-nighters. I can’t remember sleeping much, but I remember what you’d say when you lifted a glass: ‘The law is what you make of it. So make the most you can.’ I liked that.”
“It’s bourbon. Why’d you really call?”
“Then it’s a case of Kentucky’s finest as a way of saying thanks.” He heard what sounded like a bottle being uncorked. “I’ve been sitting here, drinking too much wine, not seeing how I deal with what’s coming Cody’s way. Then you give it to me. Damn.” He heard a glass break. Thornton’s voice away from the phone, cursing, then she was back. “So I want to say thanks. It’s not all there yet. But you pointed me in the right direction.”
“Marcy, you’re drunk.”
“You had that black and white of Winston Churchill behind your desk. Growling, the way you’d stare at an ADA telling you the ship’s leaving the dock so your client better get on board. You’d tell us about Churchill smacking down some stuck-up Parliament bitch telling him, You, sir, are drunk. And Churchill, coming back, Madam, I may be drunk now, but in the morning I’ll be sober and you’ll still be ugly. I liked that, too.”
“Call it a night, Marcy.”
“I may be drunk now, Walt. But in the morning you’ll still be the man who killed your wife.”
Fager’s eyes went up to his rearview. The flashing lights of a police cruiser were behind him. Officers were getting out, approaching along both sides of his car.
“Are the cops there yet?” Thornton’s voice, slurring words, spoke from the cell in his hand.
At the gallery’s window, Cody Geronimo pulled a curtain across the glass.
Thirty-Eight
Bronkowski met Fager outside the Santa Fe County Detention Center. He had stood there many times waiting for Fager’s clients to walk out with shoes missing laces, their wallet, watch, phone, and loose change in a paper bag. Now it was Fager stepping outside at dawn, no tie, wingtips loose on his feet, and his suit marked by chalky dust. Bronkowski had seen similar smudges on clients who tried sleeping on benches in their cells. A guard told him it was roach powder.
Fager should have wanted a shower and a change of clothes.
He wanted to go to his office. No hello, good morning. No thanks for showing, Bronk, old pal, always there when I need you.
“I have to amend my replevin action.”
“The lawsuit,” Bronkowski said, “to make Geronimo give up pieces of Linda.”
“He’s got her in one of those statues. Joked about it. That’s when I said I was going to shoot him.”
“Finally, words I want to hear.”
“Where’s my car?”
“Impound. I’m parked across the street. We keep the windows down.”
Driving through morning traffic, bumper to bumper with state workers heading to their desks, Fager said, “Marcy’s enjoying this. Called me, shitfaced, to gloat. She’s nervous she can’t handle what’s coming her way.”
“What are your charges?” Bronkowski asked, but was thinking, Marcy nervous?
“Stalking. A misdemeanor. It’s not going anywhere. Marcy won’t provide discovery. No way she’ll let me interview Geronimo.”
“You? You warn people against being their own lawyer.”
“I want them to hire me.”
“I think Marcy kept you talking until the cops arrived. Not drunk. Not nervous. She made it a better case than if they caught you miles away. After business hours, you’re right outside Geronimo’s gallery. Explain that.”
Fager silently watched the city roll by. Bronkowski could smell him, even with cold air from open windows rushing around them.
A guard checked them into the impound lot. They cruised aisles searching for a black Mercedes among vehicles seized from drivers on their second DWI and beyond. Fager talked about how he once represented a man with nineteen drunk-at-the-wheel busts. Thanks to a drinking buddy in a black robe, the case was repeatedly postponed until the arresting officer missed a trial date. The judge dismissed and tried to look better for the record by telling Fager the court never wanted to see his client again.
“And you assured the court,” Bronkowski said—he’d heard the story as many times as Fager had represented the famous drunk—“that this will be the last time Mr. Hamlin stands before your Honor. You were right. A week later Hamlin flattened his Kia on a semi hauling pipe.”
He thought about Goff grilling them on the Shelby family and wondered what became of the client who had killed them. He wondered why that case gnawed at Goff. Fager was still on his war story, but sounding different, the boasting not there this time.
“That judge,” Fager was saying, “I never told you who it was. Judy Diaz. We weren’t drinking buddies. She was new on the bench, I gave lots of money to get her there. Now she’s forgotten. I can’t give what Marcy gives her.”
“There’s public financing for judges.”
“Not then. You maxed-out reported donations. More went into envelopes. I don’t know, twenty grand I gave her, maybe more. That was her street money. I put the judge on the bench who freed Linda’s killer.”
“You’ll drive yourself nuts connecting dots like that.”
“Eight hours in that cell, I began to see it. Listen, first time Marcy ran interference for Geronimo, she was fresh out of my office. She copied my pleadings. She used my playbook. If I hadn’t written a good one, Linda would be alive.”
“Walt, don’t.”
“Linda encouraged me to become a lawyer. How do I thank her? I help get her killed.”
“Oh, bullshit.” Bronkowski wanted to get Fager outside, slap him. He was glad to see a Mercedes at the end of an aisle up ahead. “There’s your car,” he said.
“Not just Diaz.” Fager, still with the dots. “I got other judges elected because they’d be good for defendants. I didn’t care if they were ignorant or dirty, as long as they did what I wanted. They’re in for life. Retention elections are a joke.”
“Think of the innocent people you helped.”
“I only wanted to know what could get into evidence. I never once asked a client, ‘Did you do it?’”
“I did. Didn’t always like what they told me. What the hell?”
Bronkowski aimed his headlights at Fager’s Mercedes. Scumbag had been keyed in the black paint.
�
�You’re not driving that home. Your fans in the police department might have set you up. Stay here.”
He got out and approached the Mercedes. He wondered how he could effectively search the car. Cops knew how to find stuff; they would know how to hide it. He couldn’t strip quarter panels, disassemble doors, drain the gas tank to find drugs that may have been planted. He was probably being watched. Any of these cars and vans could hide surveillance.
He opened the driver’s door. Just a crack and the stench of a dog run met him. The seat was covered.
“Fuck you very much,” Bronkowski said. He pulled his cell to call for a tow truck and heard laughter in the shadows.
Thirty-Nine
Rivera led the way to Fat Sat’s Bar and Grill, not far from Belen’s Holiday Inn Express, thirty miles from the gravesites, but the closest motel to Ladron Peak. The FBI rented nearly half the place for the next week. Rivera provided rooms for Aragon and Lewis so they would not have to drive back to Santa Fe tonight. He was also buying drinks. Beer for the detectives, scotch for himself.
Six of Rivera’s people remained behind to guard the graves, grabbing sleep and meals in the black motor home. The mobile crime lab was still out there, lights burning, anthropologists working on identification of fourteen skeletons. To Aragon’s amazement, Rivera expected to know age, ancestry, and gender by morning. That resource thing again.
On the bar top she was pushing around the nine index cards with words from the flags at the Fremont scene.
Rivera said, “Our cryptologists think they’ve got it. Let me.”
She backed off and as he arranged the cards.
I am raven. I give so I may fly.
“The G-men codebreakers beat Super Dad and his girls,” he said. “Lucky photos of the prayer flags in place made it easy.”
Lewis touched his phone and showed them a text message.
“My research team had it three hours ago. Without photographs.”
“You’re research team? Right, your daughters. Bravo.” Rivera raised his glass. “And we now know the knife’s an athame, a ritual blade in Wiccan ceremonies. That fact might shed light on your question, Denise, about any significance in there being nine flags.”
“I was only brainstorming,” she said.
“You might have hit something. The number is a potent Wiccan symbol. Three signifies the triple goddess, or triple moon. On the athame is a carving of a full moon between two quarter moons facing opposite directions, the symbol for the triple moon. Nine is three times three, making it that much more powerful.”
“Your man in the Smithsonian,” Lewis said, “he came up with this?”
“It was referred to an expert in Britain.”
“All very fascinating,” Aragon said. “Good stuff for a TV show. CSI: The Witch’s Blade. But does it get us anywhere?”
She remembered Roshi Buff sensed some similarity between Fremont’s case and another in Albuquerque involving Wiccan rituals. A woman sacrificing her lover under a full moon. Lewis had remarked on the moonlight the night they found Fremont in the trunk, so bright he read Fremont’s registration without a flashlight.
Osborn and Rutmann, were they copying a ritual? Could men be witches?
“Closer, maybe,” she answered herself, “to asking the right questions. Did your Dr. Shoelace come up with anything?”
“A left-handed person likely tied the laces,” Rivera said. “Fremont, we learned from her parents, was right-handed. She pitched softball in junior high.”
“I heard ‘likely.’ How can you be certain?”
“It’s not definitive. But if either Osborn or Rutmann are lefties, with their prints on the boots we’re closer to concluding they put them on her.”
“Why?” Aragon asked. “To march her up the hill to be killed?”
“I thought I’d be able to sleep tonight,” Lewis said. “Now thinking of Cynthia Fremont, a teenager playing softball, it starts me worrying how my girls can get mixed up no matter how much I love them. I don’t want to think about those women we found today, Geronimo enjoying his millions, his sleazy lawyer, the idiot boss we have to face back in Santa Fe. I just want my brain to shut down so I don’t think about anything for a while.”
“Why God gave us scotch,” Rivera said.
Aragon went outside for air. Ladron Peak spiked against the western horizon, pushing its darkness into the glowing Milky Way. The exhilaration of being right about what was buried out there was gone, replaced by sadness like an icy stone in her chest.
Javier had his monastery in the woods to escape a world he hated. Roshi Buff had her refuge of incense and meditation amid the razor wire and war wagons. Scotch would provide a hiding place tonight for Rivera, maybe Lewis, too. The drinking done, there would be the late-night knock, Rivera in the hallway, whispering her name through the door. In each other’s arms they’d drive off skeletons rising from desert sands.
None of that worked for her.
She drove to Santa Fe, not waiting for morning to get back to work.
Montclaire couldn’t sleep inside Geronimo’s ranch house. She had seen the beds in his Santa Fe home, each about a quarter acre of mattress and down. One was done as a raft, the mattress moored across logs lashed with jute rope and totem poles for the corner posts. Here the only bed was the creaky steel thing, a relic from a bunkhouse, as creepy as the embalming table in his workshop. Camped on the roof, she smelled roasting meat from the FBI barbecue at the motor homes and SUVs at the gate. She thought of climbing down to join them, fit, handsome men and women. But they would be all business. They’d probably search the house while she was away.
She wondered what had happened to the coyote that had been shot. The couple in camos was down there in their own camp, close to the river, where the mules were hobbled for the night. They had something on a spit over a wood fire.
She was miserable until Thornton called, drunk, giggling about Fager. That reminded her about Thornton’s interest in Fager’s military service. She called John Pitcairn and explained what she needed. A pack of coyotes broke out in manic yelps. Pitcairn asked where she was calling from. She told him to put a rush on it.
A shot in the darkness startled her. The big guy in camos was moving through the sagebrush. She saw his shadow in the starlight. A flashlight with a red beam came on. He lifted a dead coyote by the tail.
Marcy had better be right about more bonuses on the way.
Lewis went outside when Aragon did not return to the bar. Her car was gone. His call reached her twenty miles into her drive home. He urged her to drive carefully, she didn’t want to give Dewey Nobles the gift of a call from the state police.
He had one scotch, then left as Rivera was ordering another round. On the extra bed in his hotel room Lewis spread photos of Santa Fe’s missing women. He organized them by physical attributes for a quicker response to whatever the anthropologists would tell them in the morning. He checked e-mails and saw a message from the crime lab. The soil sample Aragon had collected from the Rio Salado matched the mineral profile of the salt in Tasha Gonzalez’s hair. That put her at Geronimo’s place. But it did not answer why her body was dumped miles away in an irrigation ditch instead of buried among the other graves.
For the next hour he learned what he could discover online about the Mujeres Bravas Cleaning Service. He started with the Public Regulatory Commission and found nothing. Mujeres Bravas was not a New Mexico corporation or incorporated elsewhere and licensed to do business in the state. A Lexis search turned up a company using that name in Massachusetts. They were not house cleaners, but a dance troupe—strippers for bachelor parties.
The City of Santa Fe had no record of a business license. DMV had no vehicles registered to the company. The Department of Labor database held nothing. Archives of The Santa Fe New Mexican and The Reporter did not help. Possibly the newspapers had run Mujeres Bravas ads, but
he did not know how to make that kind of search without skimming every edition.
He remembered how his wife checked out contractors and rug cleaners. He searched Yelp and Angie’s List and found a phone number and address that Bing revealed to be a UPS store. Mujeres Bravas operated out of a rented mailbox. He would call the phone number in the morning.
He made a pot of motel-room coffee, then read customer reviews. Mujeres Bravas customers were generally satisfied except for complaints about high turnover within the crews and a lack of training displayed by their replacements. Several reviewers applauded the cash discounts. Others complained about the company’s refusal to accept credit cards. One complaint was posted by a woman using the name Roberta, who said having to meet the team leader to hand over cash was inconvenient for an executive secretary to a busy lawyer.
Lewis opened her profile. She did not provide a photo. She had no online friends. But she had posted reviews of the Santa Fe locations of Staples, Lowe’s, Office Depot, and several courier services, process servers, and an exterminator. “Roberta” rated two law firms. The Law Offices of Walter Fager and Associates got five stars on Yelp and an A on Angie’s List. Marcy Thornton got trashed.
He knew many lawyers had secretaries doubling as notaries public. The Secretary of State’s website listed all licensed notaries. He had to search by first names. After another cup of coffee he found Roberta Weldon. Her address was Fager’s office on Paseo de Peralta.
Tasha Gonzalez worked for Mujeres Bravas, as did a number of the women in his missing-women file, middle-aged Mexicans who reported to work at an Allsup’s, who were picked up and paid in cash by a guy named Steve, maybe short for Estevan. Goff had learned Mujeres Bravas cleaned Geronimo’s gallery.
That Fager used the same cleaning service didn’t prove anything, directly. But the questions it raised did the job of keeping him from thinking about a girl who might have fed herself to birds.
The Drum Within Page 22
