The Drum Within

by James R. Scarantino

  Forty

  Again Joe Donnelly was at her door in the morning. Aragon let him in and returned to the third cup of coffee she was forcing into herself. She was wearing only the tank top and boxers she’d slept in, and didn’t care what he thought or saw.

  Donnelly spoke to her back.

  “How am I supposed to keep you off the radar when you’re setting off fireworks?”

  She didn’t ask if he wanted coffee. She wanted the whole pot for herself.

  “You catch the men who murdered Cynthia Fremont. Tearing off the guy’s ears. We’ve got TV and newspapers screaming for your story. Dewey wants you in his office now.”

  “Since when were you his messenger boy?”

  She drained her cup and poured another. She’d been up all night rereading everything, jotting notes, staring at maps, studying crime scenes from different angles. Staring at photos of Cynthia Fremont’s boots.

  “I came to give you this.” Donnelly dropped a manila envelope on her dinette table. “Forensics on Linda Fager.”

  “Tell Dewey I’m enjoying my suspension.”

  “That’s over. You’re back on duty. Lewis, too.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” she said, a little too quickly. She didn’t want Lewis pulled away from what he was doing. Donnelly caught it and cocked his head. She recovered fast. “I think he headed to the mountains for a personal time-out. With him it’s always work, family, work. Never a moment for himself. Maybe he’s fishing.”

  “So he’ll show up sunburned like you?”

  Aragon looked past Donnelly to the entryway mirror. Her bruised eyes were healing. She had turned a deep bronze from her time in the Ladron backcountry. Lewis would be cooked to a crisp, with his pale skin.

  Donnelly probably knew exactly where they’d been.

  “He fishes. I hunt,” she tried, then changed her mind about continuing the stonewall. When she was done telling it, holding back only her breaking and entering into Geronimo’s ranch, he asked to shake her hand.

  “You remind me why I became a cop. Now let’s go see Dewey and why he makes that hard to remember.”

  They were admitted to the Deputy Chief’s office by a female cadet with hips and a flip in her auburn hair. She stared hard at Aragon’s buzzed scalp.

  Noel Carpenter came running behind them before the door closed. He was PIO for the Santa Fe Police Department. A year ago he’d been the TV catastrophe reporter at gas-line explosions, flash floods, and sinkholes. He doubled his salary switching to government work. The cadet’s face said she liked the thick curls and dimpled cheeks that made him a good one to stand in front of cameras.

  Deputy Chief Nobles waited at his desk, centered against a window reflecting sun off the gravel roof outside. It was hard to see his face. Aragon smelled him before she could make out all his features. That spicy aftershave. The thick gel in hair he was so proud of.

  She blinked in the glare, thinking of Nobles’ constant squint from the skin tightened by surgery. He turned his head, giving them a profile, a reconstructed nose half the size it had been when he drove a patrol car. He pressed a remote that pulled blinds across the light.

  “Detective Denise Aragon comes in from the cold. Sit down.”

  She followed Donnelly’s cue and pulled a chair to a spot in front of the desk. Carpenter leaned against a file cabinet.

  “Congratulations on the Fremont case. Your apprehension of the murderers, followed by your compassionate efforts to save that man’s ears, have generated a ton of positive media for this department.”

  “Good stuff,” Carpenter said. “The public was riveted by the story of a girl found in a trunk at a place so special to Santa Feans. In a matter of days you solved what might have been a hopeless homicide.”

  “I’m not sure it was murder,” Aragon said. “I’m less sure than yesterday.”

  “We want you to join the Deputy Chief and the DA’s press conference,” Carpenter continued. “Mid-afternoon to catch the evening news. We’re taking this case off the feds’ hands. We want you to explain how you brought these murderers to justice.”

  “Did you hear me? I have questions.”

  “Let’s not muddy the lede. The focus should be on solving the murder and your courageous action.”

  “Hello,” Aragon said. “It might not be murder.”

  “Of course it was murder,” Nobles said. “No other plausible explanation. Cynthia Fremont didn’t fall and skin a knee. She was sliced open the way you open a package of hamburger. Those men assaulted you in the course of your duties.”

  “She left a message. It might be a suicide note.”

  “Not in the file.”

  “In flags for the celestial burial ceremony.”

  “A satanic ritual,” Nobles said. “Those men used her for sex, then offered a sacrifice to the devil.”

  Where’d you get that shit? Instead she said, “I spoke with Osborn in the ambulance. He’s not a killer.”

  “The file contains no interview of the suspect.”

  “I’ve been on suspension. Civilians don’t enter reports in police files.” She sensed the Deputy Chief’s displeasure but leaned forward to press her point. “Sir, I ripped the ears off a young man who maybe did nothing wrong but put a dead girl in a trunk so animals couldn’t eat her. I didn’t look anything like a police officer when Rutmann grabbed me. He could say he was trying to protect his friend from a crazy woman who had just busted his knee. Osborn was between us, so I can’t swear Rutmann saw my badge. We have a potential agg assault on Osborn, swinging at me with cans in a bag. But nothing on Rutmann that gets past reasonable doubt.”

  “Are you telling me you won’t cooperate?”

  “I’m telling you my investigation has not eliminated the possibility that Cynthia Fremont committed suicide.”

  “The DA sees it different,” Nobles said, his hands flat on his desk. “I’m assigning Serrano and Fenstermacher. You will provide them everything before stepping aside. You will not enter into the file any statements from Osborn obtained while you were on suspension and operating without authority from this department. Your replacements will conduct their own interview. You will join us in the main conference room at two o’clock p.m.”

  “I’m not going to say anything.”

  “That’s right. You just stand there. Where’s Lewis?”

  “Fishing,” Donnelly said.

  “You’re making a bad move, Dewey,” Aragon said. “You should be putting everything on Geronimo. Your little show to grab headlines is going to blow up on you.”

  “It’s ‘sir,’ Detective Aragon. I ordered you off the Geronimo case. What have you been up to?”

  “Hunting,” Donnelly said, which earned a raised eyebrow from the Deputy Chief.

  “Two o’clock, detective,” Nobles said, and the meeting was over. Aragon and Donnelly rose and moved toward the door. “Wear your wig, the one you use for court. Pulling off a guy’s ears, you’re scary enough.”

  “We need to soften your image,” Carpenter said. “A little make-up, too. Please.”

  On the way to their cars Aragon told Donnelly, “Dewey could make me appreciate criminal-defense lawyers.”

  “I hope those boys hire Walter Fager or Marcy Thornton.”

  “Thornton’s going to be very busy. Fager, he’s got his own problems.”

  Forty-One

  This time Marcy Thornton served her ethics complaints using her law office’s runner. The envelope delivered to Fager’s office contained a copy of a complaint with the Disciplinary Board about Fager trespassing on Geronimo’s private property and causing criminal damage in the form of a cut lock on the front gate, a broken window, and a purloined security camera. She hit him with the catch-all rule, the cleanup batter at the end of the Code of Professional Conduct. Rule 16-804 was entitled, simply, “Misconduct.”
It could cover anything a lawyer could stretch words to fit.

  Thornton’s second ethics complaint walked the facts through several definitions of misconduct: paragraph (a), committing a criminal act that reflects adversely on the lawyer’s honesty and trustworthiness; paragraph (b), engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation; paragraph (c) engaging in conduct prejudicial to the conduct of law; and, if that didn’t cover it, paragraph (d), engaging in any conduct that adversely reflects an attorney’s fitness to practice law.

  She wanted the Supreme Court to disbar Fager and prohibit him from ever again practicing law in the state of New Mexico.

  She asked the Disciplinary Board to order Fager to replace the busted lock and window, at nineteen dollars and ninety-eight cents for the lock and one hundred fifty-seven dollars for a window she suspected was actually broken by Aragon days before Fager went out there.

  When Bronkowski entered his office, Fager ranted about the window for a solid ten minutes before mentioning anything about maybe losing his law license.

  What he noticed was the smell. Fager had not gone home, showered, or changed out of the clothes he wore in jail. He needed a shave. He was living on coffee and sugar.

  Fager was falling apart.

  Bronkowski stepped away to tell Roberta Weldon to get breakfast for their boss, then made Fager shut up about Marcy Thornton and the fucking window already.

  “Good news from down south. The U.S. Attorney has an announcement this afternoon. Geronimo’s their new most wanted.”

  “I want him in the state pen, max wing, not a federal country club.”

  “Walt, he could end up on the feds’ death row, which we don’t have any more.”

  “He’ll live with hope that Congress will abolish capital punishment, or the president will commute his death sentence. I should have shot him when I had the chance.”

  Fager dragged his hands across his face, stretching his cheeks, making his bloodshot eyes bulge. He sighed and downed half a cup of cold coffee.

  “I might need to go to Texas,” Bronkowski said. “See a guy named Grady.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Maybe somebody who’ll let me take apart a Cody Geronimo original.”

  The night before, after he had seen Fager’s Mercedes towed from the impound lot to a detailing shop, Bronkowski took a cab to Fager’s to get his own car back. Then he swung past Geronimo’s gallery. He parked two blocks away. He didn’t want the car driven by Fager’s investigator identified and added to the evidence in Walt’s stalking case.

  Walking back in the darkness he thought about Fager telling him Geronimo had Linda in one of those weird statues.

  The gallery was completely dark. Peering through the windows he saw an empty floor. The statue Fager had seen had been moved out.

  What was that crap Geronimo was feeding that lady dripping turquoise at the gallery opening, about a spirit within each of his statues? Her husband had smelled bullshit. But he still wrote the check. For the wife, insisting she sensed what the great Cody Geronimo sensed.

  Fourteen graves. Fourteen statues.

  Grady Fallon, oil man, enough money he’d burn three-hundred grand on something he’d just as soon throw out back with the trash. A guy like that should be easy to find.

  He went home and searched the Internet for oil and gas producers in Texas and Oklahoma, throwing in the last state because he couldn’t be sure about placing the oil man’s accent. Good thing. Under the membership tab for the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association he found Grady Fallon, CEO of Tomahawk Pipe and Casing, Oklahoma City.

  He’d made that drive across two panhandles plenty of times. He could do it in six hours. By the time he knocked on Grady Fallon’s door, the whole country would have heard about bodies coming out of the ground next to the house in the desert.

  Forty-Two

  Aragon stood under her black wig next to Omar Serrano, her head hot, wanting to scratch her scalp. She saw a room of empty chairs. One cameraman from an Albuquerque station. A reporter from the Santa Fe New Mexican so young he could be an intern. It was like the night with Cynthia Fremont in the trunk—the expected media mob somewhere else with a bigger story.

  The cameraman shut down before Nobles finished talking. The young reporter asked for a spelling on a name, no other questions, clicked his pen, closed his notebook.

  Aragon felt something brush her thigh. She looked down. Serrano’s hand, fingertips against her dress. His palm had been there a second before.

  “You look good with hair,” he whispered, leaning in, now his tricep against her breast.

  She stepped in front of him and scraped the stiff edge of her shoe down his shin bone, another move she had picked up in the Krav Maga class.

  “Cunt,” Serrano said, hopping backwards, lifting his knee to his hands.

  Nobles and Carpenter looked across the room at Serrano standing on one leg. The reporter flipped open his notebook. The cameraman hesitated in snapping shut his equipment case.

  She swept the wig off her head and pushed through swinging doors into the hallway. She called Lewis and got voicemail. A second later he texted back. He was in Albuquerque at the press conference being held by the U.S. Attorney. SRO. He’d call when it ended.

  U.S. Attorney Reuben Ortiz had big plans for himself. Paper-sharp collars, gold-and-blue tie knotted perfectly. Onyx cufflinks above his wrists, a hundred-dollar haircut that emphasized his widow’s peak. He was from Las Cruces, where he’d run the violent crimes unit in the DA’s office. He was intensely partisan, opportunistic, and set on running for U.S. Senator when one of the white boys representing New Mexico stepped aside or stumbled.

  Lewis could overlook all that. Here was a man who put bad guys in jail.

  Tomas Rivera stood at his side. Two photogenic Hispanic men. Confident. Precise. What they had to say would open every broadcast and grab headlines in all the state’s newspapers.

  Ortiz opened with an overview, identifying the participating agencies, thanking the University of New Mexico for pitching in with grad students willing to pull an all-nighter to expedite the forensic work. At Lewis’s request, any mention of himself and Aragon was avoided. Ortiz credited the find to Walter Fager and Leon Bronkowski, who were conducting a private investigation into Linda Fager’s murder. Ortiz said his office would sweep up her killing as part of a larger investigation into what clearly appeared to be the work of a serial killer.

  Usually, law enforcement was reluctant to use those two words. But with so many bodies it was going to be in the stories anyway. Ortiz simply set the terms for how it would be discussed.

  Ortiz passed it over to Rivera, who provided the finer details. The recovered skeletons were all female, all about middle age. Using 3D-ID technology, the anthropologists identified their ancestry as Hispanic-Mesoamerican. No clothing or jewelry was found in the graves. All skeletons bore marks of scouring and cutting from a sharp instrument. Manner of death could not be determined due to advanced decomposition.

  Left out of the briefing were observations that each of the bodies was missing bones. Rivera also held back that the bodies were laid out with heads facing west, on their backs, arms at their sides, feet hip-width apart. An aerial view of the gravesite was provided, but unnecessary. News choppers had gathered their own images for tonight’s broadcasts and B-roll for stories to follow over coming years.

  Rivera said efforts were underway to identify the victims. Lewis had convinced him to focus on the missing Hispanic women he had culled from SFPD’s records. Rivera did not mention that the FBI office in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had assigned two agents to start working on Estevan Gonzalez and his unexplained, sudden wealth.

  A reporter asked if they knew who owned the building downstream from the gravesites. Ortiz stepped to the mike and said, “SCG, Ltd., a New Mexico corporation controlled by Santa Fe
attorney Marcy Thornton. The property had previously been owned by Cody Geronimo, also of Santa Fe. We believe he still has unrestricted use of the property. He is a person of interest to our investigation.”

  As reporters shouted questions, a woman entered the back of the room and carried a single sheet of paper to Ortiz. He read it, then handed it to Rivera. From somewhere, a stack of papers made its way among the reporters, each taking one then passing it along. The last sheet made its way to Lewis.

  Marcy Thornton would hold her own press conference at four o’clock this afternoon. What she had to say would greatly assist the federal government in its investigation of the bodies found on federal land near Cody Geronimo’s ranch. She would also reveal new information solving the murder of Linda Fager.

  Forty-Three

  Joe Mascarenas wasn’t in court or his office. He was in room 416 at the Heart and Vascular Center of Christus St. Vincent Regional Hospital. His feet were elevated, pale white and delicate above plump brown ankles and calves. Aragon averted her eyes to avoid seeing up his surgery gown. He had a tube in his arm, monitors above his head, and work papers piled on his chest. Three boxes of files on a handcart had been rolled to his bedside.

  The tubing from an oxygen tank on the wall lifted from his cheek as he smiled at her.

  She took his hand, which was oddly small, like his feet. “You’re doomed, cuz.”

  He raised reading glasses from his nose. “It’s a bad case. My co-counsel can’t handle qualifying the kid to testify. The girl keeps going off into another personality when we get to the rough stuff.”

  “You’re the bad case. What happened to diet and exercise?”

  He lifted his shoulders inside his hospital gown and let them sag.

  “I hear you’ve been enjoying your time off. Take a seat and tell me about your staycation.”

  “I need advice, Joe. I feel like I’m in a dead-end alley, walls falling on me from all sides. Are you up to talking?”