The Drum Within

by James R. Scarantino

  “I can use a break. Child-abuse cases,” he exhaled, but didn’t finish. “Sit. Tell me.”

  She started with discoveries at Geronimo’s ranch.

  “Are we okay with Fager being the source to trigger the search?” she asked.

  “He’ll testify he acted on his own, an independent agent. Walt won’t open any doors he doesn’t want opened.”

  “Fager.” She frowned. “Was I wrong in getting him involved? Maybe I should have been more sensitive to what he was going through. You know, I’m not sure I hate him anymore.”

  “Both of us got him involved. And yeah, maybe we didn’t see the grieving man underneath. He is a mess. That stalking charge is not going away, and he’s making it easy to prove.”

  “Could he be convicted?”

  “In a bench trial, for sure. None of our judges tolerate victims taking matters into their own hands. That’s worse than the underlying crime, insinuating the system can’t be trusted to work, that citizens should not simply swallow what gets dished out. I don’t know any victim’s family that accepts a not-guilty verdict, that agrees with the defendant that justice was done because the prosecution couldn’t meet its burden of proof.”

  “Fager can demand a jury, not leave it to a judge.”

  “That’s a trial I would avoid,” Mascarenas said without hesitation. “Jurors aren’t protecting their power and privilege. They’d see it Fager’s way. He’s going to face disciplinary action whether he’s acquitted or the charges dropped. Easier standard of proof, and all the members of the Disciplinary Board are insiders, like judges, invested in the game the way it is.”

  His mouth was dry. She handed him a cup of water. He sipped and inhaled deeply, out of breath just from talking.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “I’m back on the clock.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s not.” She filled him in on Nobles hijacking the Fremont case. “I can’t be part of the team out to put two guys in jail for life when I’m not sure they’re killers. I can’t be part of that police department. Joe, you know if I was convinced those guys did kill Fremont … ”

  “You’d pull their ears off?”

  “Funny.”

  “Give me the facts.” He sank into his pillow and held his cup out. She poured water and walked him through everything she knew about how Cynthia Fremont came to be in the trunk of her Volvo.

  “Is your report of the statement you got from Osborn in the file?”

  “I’ve been told not to write it up.”

  “We’ll come back to that. Thing is, this is a two-headed case. I hate them. Fager was a genius at it. When we had him nailed on facts, he would manufacture a completely different reality. He’d take what we had worked our asses off to put together and use it to build his own story. He turned into a prosecutor against an alternate defendant of his own creation. Took only one confused juror to make it work.”

  Mascarenas paused for air then continued.

  “The evidence doesn’t prove either theory, murder or suicide, conclusively. Every piece of evidence that might back those guys’ claim they didn’t kill Fremont can also be used to argue they did. Hanging over everything, could she mutilate herself like that? I say they go down. Unless the prosecution steps on dynamite.”

  “What dynamite?”

  “Back to you. Being ordered not to enter a defendant’s statement in the file. No matter what Osborn said, true or not, they gold-plated it by trying to keep it out of the case. The jury will hate them for it. A judge could drop the hammer, hard. Disbarment for the prosecutor, if he knew, and the end for Dewey. It could come to perjury if defense counsel asked the right questions.”

  “Yeah, but, dynamite explodes, there’s nothing left nearby. That’s what I’m telling you. I’m done as a cop. I can’t be a traitor and I can’t be a team player. Detective Denise Aragon, blown to bits, shreds hanging off trees.”

  “Let me think how to play this.” But his eyes said he was already done thinking.

  “What?”

  “Plant your own land mine. Get Dewey to step on it. Soon. The longer the case goes, the harder it is to kill. Down the road it becomes all about defending the decision to prosecute rather than the truth of what happened.”

  “Land mine? Help me out here.”

  “I have these anxiety dreams, cases blowing up on me, things lying hidden that took my head off, cut me below the knees. I don’t forget them when I wake up, sweaty, my heart going like crazy. Maybe I’ve been carrying those dreams in my head all these years for something like this.”

  Forty-Four

  Aragon sat next to Mascarenas’s bed listening to his ideas on how to deal with Dewey Nobles. He would be glad to see a different Deputy Chief. The entire DA’s office would celebrate. God forbid Dewey ever moved up.

  She checked messages before going to her car and saw a text from Lewis. Meet U No Where.

  Lewis was at Killer Park before her, in his minivan reading a file. Maybe he was getting charged from this place too, tapping into the boost she got coming here. Or seeing it as the truth always there behind Santa Fe’s style and charm. You had to know where to find it, go out of your way a bit, take streets tourists only used if they were lost.

  A good spot to put you in the right frame of mind for the work they did.

  She parked nose-to-nose and got in next to him.

  “We’ve got less than twenty minutes.” He handed her a copy of Thornton’s media alert.

  “Nobles wants you. I told him you were fishing.”

  She brought Lewis up to speed, then it was his turn.

  “Montclaire’s back in Santa Fe. A van from Taj Security pulled up at Geronimo’s ranch, two Sikhs, big white guys with heads wrapped in towels, relieved her. Rivera had a three-car team trailing her on I-25. She was throwing things out the window, castors, metal table legs. She pulled off at the Broadway exit, drove into a junkyard. They couldn’t follow, but the owner showed them what she left. A galvanized washtub and the top to some kind of porcelain antique table, with a hole in the middle. They’re putting the pieces back together, and should have it identified soon. Another Washington expert.”

  “It’s the embalming table I saw at Geronimo’s place. But they’ve got to figure it out themselves.”

  “There’ll be plenty more experts. Fourteen bodies, we got bumped into the serial-killer category. The FBI still considers that a priority.”

  “Linda Fager?”

  “Rivera’s meeting with Nobles after we learn what card Thornton’s going to play. But the U.S. Attorney is letting Santa Fe have Fremont. One girl doesn’t justify pulling resources from their serial-killer case. What are we going to do about Fremont?”

  “Am I crazy for thinking it may be suicide?”

  “You’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been trying not to. Here’s something you haven’t seen.” He reached for a briefcase on the middle seat, pulled out a document stapled in one corner, folded a few pages back and handed it to Aragon. “The full autopsy on Cynthia Fremont. We’ve been operating off briefings from Rivera’s people. Read about the leg wounds.”

  As Rivera had told her, the incisions started above the knees and extended toward Fremont’s groin. But there was much more detail here.

  “Nothing like hard facts to get you thinking,” Lewis said. “Same keen-edged instrument for all wound tracks. One of the guys could have been holding her while the other cut. Rutmann’s big enough that Fremont wouldn’t move if he sat on her. So maybe we can explain why no ligature marks from restraints. But look at the right thigh wound. Multiple passes of the blade going deeper. And a parallel superficial incision.”

  “We’ve seen this before. On teenagers who cut themselves.”

  “They test the knife against their skin. It doesn’t hurt as much as they thought. They make anot
her pass, pressing harder, see how much they can take. They leave trailing wounds where the blade comes out of each progressively deeper cut. Fremont’s got trailing wounds.”

  “I need to be certain. I’m almost there. What about the superficial cuts on the left leg and across her abdomen?”

  “You could argue more evidence of torture. I can see how the FBI saw it that way, before we knew the Raven backstory and what the flags said. I think she was experimenting, then got serious on her right leg. She was right handed. The shallow cut on her left leg is angled. Maybe she was reaching across her body. The deep channel on the right leg goes straight up the thigh. She would only have to pull her elbow back. Makes things more manageable when the pain takes over. Back to my question, what do we do?”

  “Watch how I tie my boots.”

  Aragon didn’t wait for Lewis to ask why. She went to her car and came back with her hiking boots and a photograph. She slipped off her cross trainers, then laced up her boots and dropped her heels on the console, her back pressed against the door, so Lewis could see.

  “Notice how I skip some eyelets, lace the boots my own special way?” She put the photograph next to her boots. “Fremont did her own thing. Where the ankle starts she twists the laces together across the tongue, cinching the boots to hold her heel in, then finishes regularly.”

  “Somebody else wouldn’t know.” He thought a little more. “Osborn’s and Rutmann’s latents are on the boots only because they carried her. She put her boots on after stripping off her clothes, after the sex.”

  “How are the kids?”

  “You have this habit of radically changing the topic of conversation.”

  “Too young to have a daddy without a job,” she said. “I’m not going to do anything that can blow back on you. I’d rather pack my desk and forget I ever shined a flashlight on Cynthia Fremont. I’m not too old to join the army. Or be the village cop somewhere in the boonies, dealing with cattle on the road and people stealing firewood.”

  “So you’re not going to tell me what you’re thinking of doing?”

  “Not yet. Sorry.” She held his eyes then broke off.

  He pursed his lips and nodded. She wasn’t sure if he resented her keeping him in the dark. He could take it as a lack of trust, when what she meant was to protect him.

  “The dreaded legs tomorrow, six a.m.,” he said after a few moments, not giving her a clue how he felt. “We still on?”

  “You hate squats.”

  “Not like you hate dead lifts.”

  “I’d miss working with you—if this doesn’t go right.”

  He checked his watch. “Time to catch Thornton’s show.”

  “Sit up front and make faces?”

  “Burp and fart, pick our nose. Hiss when Thornton says she only wants truth and justice.”

  Aragon said, “So what are we doing here?” and knew it was still good between them.

  Forty-Five

  “Lesson one I got from Walter in my first trial,” Marcy Thornton said, facing the mirror. She picked a blond hair off the lapel of her black silk jacket. “When you look a jury in the face, they have to see you believe your own words. Helps to have a little truth in the mix, he’d say, like false movie buildings in westerns held up by a few solid timbers. He liked talking like that. We got these speeches after he’d win a case, a little bourbon in him, helping us baby lawyers along the path to being badass lawyers. He said something I really like, Walter at his most eloquent: With a single pillar of truth to lean on, you could build a city of lies. He was some builder, that Walter Fager.”

  “Pants are right for this,” Montclaire said, on Thornton’s office couch touching up chips on toenails with a toothpick dipped in polish. “You need them paying attention, not leering at your legs.”

  “Then you wear pants, too.”

  “Damn,” Montclaire found another chip. “Sandals were all wrong for Cody’s ranch. You have remover? This isn’t working.”

  “In the bathroom, under the sink. Keep up with me on the visuals,” Thornton said, and tugged her cuffs through the sleeves of her jacket. “I want my jurors knowing our facts before they’re selected. We can’t do this once Cody’s arraigned.”

  Montclaire spoke from the bathroom off Thornton’s office, her head in the cabinet under the sink.

  “Pitcairn came through. He was inspired.”

  “His bill is inspired. But we’ve got Fager’s military records.”

  Montclaire returned with a little bottle in her hand. “Forget it, this is taking too long. Closed toes.”

  “We both do pants.”

  “Both of us in black, we’ll kill. Back in a sec. I haven’t forgotten how to change in a flash.”

  “I can’t believe I actually get paid to do this,” Thornton said.

  Lewis hung at the back of Thornton’s conference room, where he could see everyone. Aragon sat up front with reporters. Nobody questioned her as she claimed a chair directly in front of the podium, set up with a microphone and single white rose and easel to the side. Behind that, a secretary was extending a projection screen along the length of a pole with a clip on top. In the aisle between chairs Aragon saw a PowerPoint projector.

  Montclaire entered first, long legs under black pants, a little flare above her high heels, a folded leather bow over closed toes. She propped on the easel an enlarged photo of an aluminum ranch gate and a lock hanging by a snapped hasp. Then came Marcy Thornton.

  Short, energetic steps carried her to the podium, the cut of her black suit making her seem taller. She looked out over a room full of reporters and cameramen. Her gaze settled on Aragon.

  “Detective. Glad you’re getting this first hand. My journalist friends don’t always quote me accurately.”

  Aragon leaned back, crossed her legs and aimed her belt recorder at Thornton like a weapon.

  Thornton addressed the room. “We provide these facts to assist the authorities in discovering the truth, and bringing the real murderer to justice.”

  Aragon leaned into the reporter next to her.

  “Did she say something about truth?” She didn’t whisper.

  Thornton gave Aragon a bitter smile.

  “This broken lock.” Thornton pointed to the photo on the easel. “For years my client has observed signs that someone has been trespassing on his ranch land. He thought they were souvenir hunters, searching for arrowheads, bullets and such at the site up the river where Apaches fought the U.S. Calvary over a hundred years ago. So that he could substantiate a complaint to the appropriate agencies, he installed a surveillance camera. That camera was recently stolen and its theft reported to the county sheriff.”

  Never mind the camera was in Geronimo’s workroom, aimed at the embalming table. Aragon kept that to herself.

  “Before the camera was stolen, it recorded a middle-aged man driving across my client’s property, clearly with a destination in mind. My client eventually identified that person as Walter Fager.”

  Aragon texted Lewis: Film at ten. Not. Only G’s word. Video card was wiped.

  “My client is understandably leery of the police, after he was wrongly accused some years ago of murdering a woman named Tasha Gonzalez. Then came his latest wrongful arrest at the hands of the same law-enforcement authority. But I digress. My client followed Mr. Fager’s tire tracks. What he found disturbed him greatly. My client found a graveyard beyond his fence line. We believe Mr. Fager began visiting this site before my client bought the property, at a time when Mr. Fager wandered New Mexico in a drunken haze, having gone AWOL from the Army after the Balkan War. I will return to that.”

  The reporters leaned forward. Aragon checked that her recorder was working.

  “Cody Geronimo noticed something else even more troubling.” Thornton paused for effect. “Each time after fresh tire tracks crossed his land there would be news reports
of police searching for another missing Santa Fe woman. Cody Geronimo uses a cleaning service called Mujeres Bravas. He got to know some of the women who cleaned his gallery. Some of them were among those reported missing. With that information in mind, he came to see me. As he was turning into the parking lot, the one you all used today, there outside Mr. Fager’s office he saw a Mujeres Bravas station wagon. Mr. Fager uses the same cleaning service that employed the missing women.”

  Lewis texted Aragon: True. Fager uses MB.

  “Cody Geronimo was scared. Of Mr. Fager. Of the police. He reached out to someone close to Mr. Fager, for more information and also to warn her. Linda Fager. He went to her store on the pretext of buying a book, but really to introduce himself and tell her he had very troubling information about her husband. She might be in danger. He said enough for her to get upset. Not angry at him making accusations against her husband. Upset that it had the ring of truth. She asked him to leave, but to return when she had time to compose herself. Cody Geronimo was seen in the bookstore talking with Linda Fager by two people, whose physical descriptions we will provide to the police.”

  And who we will never find, Aragon thought. A risk-free throwaway that makes you look like a good guy.

  “Cody Geronimo was also upset, and had a beer to calm himself. What he found on his return was utterly horrible. I need not describe the details, but assure you Mrs. Fager was so brutalized it threw my client into shock. He mindlessly dropped his car keys. He was terrified the killer might still be in the store and ran outside. He wandered, trying to stop hyperventilating. When he returned to his vehicle, the police were there. He was about to tell them what he knew and what he had seen. But they rushed him. Due to his prior bad experience with Santa Fe police, and unsettled by the horror he had seen up close, he panicked and fled, and was wrongly arrested shortly afterwards.”

  Aragon threw a question at Thornton. It might be her only chance. The way it worked from here on out was lawyers asked questions of cops.

  “All the women found behind your client’s ranch were Hispanic. Linda Fager was Anglo and fair skinned. Can you explain that inconsistency?”