The Drum Within

by James R. Scarantino

  “Take two. Take three. No need to build up Walter as a decoy anymore. The feds won’t worry about him if I don’t make them. And since my client has no further need of my services … ” Thornton winked again. Montclaire hoped that wasn’t becoming a habit. “I’ll take some time myself.”

  “What about Fager’s state charges?”

  “The stalking charge died with Cody. I could insist Walt be prosecuted for assaulting me. But, no. You don’t get paid for time spent playing the victim, wasting hours waiting to testify. I’ll settle for getting him disbarred. He is competition, after all.”

  “So Fager’s running for no reason?”

  “Is he running? Maybe he’s just gone. Like when he disappeared after the Army.”

  Thornton leaned back in her big chair. She kicked off her shoes and rested her feet on her desk.

  “We should celebrate.”

  “Celebrate Cody’s murder?”

  “Celebrate that I still haven’t lost a case at trial.”

  “Maybe I’ll go to Helsinki. Great party scene. What else can you do but get drunk and screw when it’s always dark?”

  “I’d go to a warm, sunny beach.”

  “Too much sand. You get to hate sand doing three-day shoots on the beach, getting rubbed down with oil then rolling around so it sticks on your skin, or leaning back on your elbows, legs open out to sea, waves washing sand up every crack. A week later you’re still finding it.”

  “Something just occurred to me.” Thornton sat up straight, energized. “Would you hold off on your vacation? I think I see how Geronimo’s estate can sue. Goff’s got no money, just a lousy cop pension. But I have the feeling he was working behind the scenes with Aragon. You run that down. We allege he was acting as an agent of the Santa Fe PD and reach those deep pockets. She was negligent. She knew his history as a rogue cop.”

  “He used Fager’s gun.”

  “We sue him, too. And Bronkowski, acting as his employee, respondeat superior, trying to dispose of the gun that killed Cody. Bronk crashed before he could finish the job. He won’t be available to testify otherwise. Goff will take the Fifth. We draw every inference we want from his silence. This is a civil suit, no prohibition against adverse comment on a defendant’s refusal to testify. And who’s going to believe Walter didn’t want Geronimo dead? He stays gone, he defaults and we execute on his property. You could have his office. We’ll hire assistants to handle the drudge work, the subpoenas, research. You concentrate on what turns cases around. You’re becoming very good at getting rid of big problems.”

  Thornton’s mind was turning fast. Montclaire saw the excitement in her tight little body. “As executor of Cody’s estate, fifty percent plus costs sounds fair for this hardworking, brilliant lawyer. After the litigation, the estate will be paying me to manage settlement funds. The gift named Cody Geronimo lives on.”

  Montclaire sighed. “Before we got distracted by Cody’s drama, we were having a bitching time with a cute boy with a sunburst tattoo around his sexy outie.”

  “It was an innie.”

  “You can’t bite an innie.”

  “Anthony.”

  “It was Andrew. My compensation for hanging around is we pick up where we left off. No interruptions. We party like we’re twenty and perfect again.”

  “This is the party.” Thornton threw open her arms. “Aren’t we having fun?”

  Fifty-Two

  Aragon and Lewis opened a separate file on Goff. The first and last entries came easily. The crime scene, Geronimo on the floor of his gallery, then fast forward to Goff’s arrest. Filling everything in between had them cross-referencing reports in the Linda Fager and Ladron bodies files they had not yet written. They owed Rivera updates on the Fremont case. The Tasha Gonzalez file needed to be updated with results of testing on the Rio Salado soil samples and information about her brother’s financial miracle.

  Lewis was having an easier time with his share of the paperwork. He was diligent about entering notes into his laptop at day’s end. Aragon scribbled on scraps of paper and empty Lotaburger bags. Some notes made their way into a spiral ring notebook that fit into the back pocket of her jeans.

  Getting ready to start writing, she came across the name Sylvia Bukar.

  It took her a minute to remember Roshi Buff talking about the ritual Wiccan murder in Albuquerque. She’d spent a few minutes looking into the case. Bukar had used the promise of sex to lure a middle-aged man to the foothills of the Sandia Mountains and drove a knife through his heart while she straddled him. Aragon had jotted the information in her notebook and forgot about it.

  Timothy Osborn referred to Fremont as a witch. Albuquerque cops had said the same thing about Bukar.

  Her notes contained the name of the Albuquerque detective who worked the case. Enrique Brito. She called his office and learned he was at the Bernalillo County courthouse in a drive-by shooting trial. She called the mobile number she was given.

  “Was wondering if you would ever call back. I’m on break. We’ve got five minutes.”

  “You called me?” She heard a match striking and him sucking air, firing a cigarette.

  “Left a message with a Detective Serrano. Asked for you but got him.”

  Aragon’s kick drove an open drawer into her desk.

  “I saw the news about that girl in the sleeping bag,” he said. “The part about the ceremony in the woods made me think of my witch.”

  Traffic sounds and him breathing heavier. She guessed he was climbing stairs on the side of the courthouse to find a quieter spot to talk.

  Brito continued. “I understand you’re off the case.”

  “I’ve still got a finger in it.”

  “You want to look at her cell phone real hard.”

  After Osborn and Rutmann were arrested, the FBI had gone through Fremont’s cell-phone records to verify and date calls between her and the two men. The first call fit the time frame of the ad she ran to attract them. A series of calls back and forth ended on what turned out to be the day they all drove to the ski basin parking lot and hiked into the woods. That was as far as their analysis had gone before Santa Fe took the case. Now Serrano had Fremont’s cell with the other evidence.

  “Bukar gave us this story,” Brito said. “The guy picking her up at a bar, forcing her to the mountains and raping her. She stuck him to defend herself. But her cell had his number in her directory. Get this. His name was Juan Valdez, like the coffee guy. She had his number under ‘Sacrifice.’”

  “The two with Fremont, her cell had their real names.”

  “What I was getting at is you should see when Fremont and Bukar talked.”

  She leaned forward as though Brito were sitting across the desk instead of standing outside a courthouse in another county.

  “How do you know they talked?”

  “Bukar’s out in Grants, but I keep an eye on my witch.” Grants was the New Mexico Women’s Correctional Facility west of Albuquerque. “I want to know who visits her. Intelligence if more guys turn up dead inside circles drawn in the dirt. The Wiccans were pissed she was claiming her ritual was part of their spring celebration. She used a Wiccan knife, did it under some special phase of the moon. But theirs is a religion of peace. Where have we heard that before?”

  Aragon wanted to hear about Bukar and Fremont. “Get to it.”

  “Mostly family visitors making the drive. No one of the Wiccan persuasion. No witches, warlocks, or wizards dropping by. Every week women from this Christian thing Bukar’s into now. And Cynthia Fremont.”

  “When?”

  “About three times. My notes are in my desk. I’m pretty sure all this year.”

  “Will Bukar talk to me?”

  “Take a Bible. She won’t shut up.”

  “This knife, I’d like to see it.”

  “We never found it. Bu
kar claims she threw it away in disgust,” Brito said. “Look. I’ve got to get going. I’m up next for an ADA in diapers. Had to tell her how to get in my expert opinion on street lingo. A ‘cap’ is not something you wear on your head. ‘Send it’ has nothing to do with texting.”

  “You said it was Wiccan. The knife.”

  “Bukar bought it on eBay. I’ll send you a photo.”

  He e-mailed the photo after court was done for the day. The knife Bukar used for a human sacrifice was the same black-handled serpentine knife that killed Cynthia Fremont.

  Fifty-Three

  The New Mexico Women’s Correctional Facility sat on old Route 66, now a frontage road to the interstate, a three-hour drive from Santa Fe. Same concertina wire, heavy metal doors, thick Plexiglas as a men’s prison. Same smells and sounds. Same grim gray everywhere, in the paint, the concrete, the bars, the crushed-gravel exercise area inside grey fencing. But here and there, on the metal scanner, the back of a computer terminal, a locked door: decals of pink ribbons showing staff support for breast cancer research.

  Aragon displayed her badge and a guard called for Sylvia Bukar to be brought to a windowless room separate from the visiting area. The woman who entered stood about six feet tall. Dark hair, sunken cheeks. The orange jumpsuit hung off a bony frame. She carried a Bible. Around her neck she wore a wooden cross likely made in the prison’s work shop, glued together, no nails or staples.

  “I don’t know you,” Bukar said.

  Aragon again showed her badge. Bukar took her time to read the ID card under plastic.

  “I like Santa Fe,” Bukar finally said. “There’s a church there, like Notre Dame, but small. They never finished it.”

  “The Basilica of St. Francis.” She pointed to Bukar’s open collar where a blue Virgin Mary was drawn in her skin. “You get that in here?”

  “One of the Catholic girls did it. I’m into the Virgin. I didn’t grow up knowing about holy women.”

  “I’d like to talk about Cynthia Fremont.”

  “She wanted to be a holy woman.” Bukar had a worn and distant prison look. A wave of sadness passed over her face. “That girl needed to let God just reach down and find her. She was such a Lone Ranger.”

  “She came to see you.”

  “Couple times.” Bukar fingered her wooden cross. “She always had questions.”

  “About?”

  “Why it didn’t work.”

  Bukar’s dead prison eyes returned.

  “She wanted to know about your ritual.”

  “It was mine. I made it up. God, I was crazy back then.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “I tell it in Bible study. Some of these girls were way crazier than me. It was supposed to change me, give me power, make me strong, lift me off the ground. Look what it did for me.” She tugged at her orange shirt. “And I stopped a man from being loved and giving love. He had three children.”

  “What did Cynthia Fremont want?”

  “Same thing. To be something better, stronger, something so different she wouldn’t recognize herself. She was trying to learn from my mistakes.”

  “She killed herself, you know,” Aragon said. “Didn’t kill anyone else.”

  “I had it wrong, she told me last time she was here. It didn’t work for me because I was taking instead of giving. She used some Chinese or something for the bad energy I turned loose by hurting another person. Said it had to be energy of profound generosity. Those were her words. Profound generosity. Something I read really clicked for her.”

  Bukar opened her Bible. Aragon checked her watch. She was not going to sit for a lesson on Biblical genealogy, fifteen minutes of begats, or the hidden code in unrelated passages strung together by a woman who once thought human sacrifice was the path to personal improvement.

  “No man has any greater gift to give than his life for his brother,” Bukar said without looking to the page she opened.

  “Friend.”

  “Who?”

  “At the memorial for officers killed in the line of duty at the Academy, it says that. The Wall of Honor. But ‘friend’ instead of ‘brother.’ Greater love hath no man than to give his life for his friend.”

  “Cynthia liked that a lot. Especially when she changed man to person and brother to mother.”

  “No person has any greater gift to give than his life for his mother? I don’t get it.”

  “Mother Earth. Cynthia decided that by giving her life to Mother Earth she would be transformed. She wouldn’t really die. She’d live as something different. She asked me once what I want to be. Girl? Out of here, I told her.”

  Aragon thought about the site of Fremont’s personal ceremony deep in an untamed wilderness, the offering of her body to birds, leaving what was left for other animals. Even the sex beforehand with two men, another act of giving.

  Bukar’s information did not come any closer to making sense of what Cynthia Fremont did to herself.

  “I’ve been praying for forgiveness,” Bukar said. “But God tells me he has nothing to forgive. That girl was going to kill herself no matter what I gave her. Or what I said or didn’t say when I had the chance. She left happy last time. Like she had figured something out. Maybe she’s better off now, not in pain anymore.”

  That sounded like a throwaway line, but Aragon sensed Bukar meant it. “What pain?”

  “That girl was eating aspirin like candy. I never asked, but I figured something was hurting her bad.”

  The autopsy showed Fremont had no health issues except minor liver damage possibly due to substance abuse. A detail she had forgotten from the very beginning of the case came back to Aragon. The tox screen showed elevated levels of acetylsalicylate in Fremont’s blood stream. Aspirin. A cheap blood thinner. Fremont had anticipated the blood clotting that made wrist slashing a poor choice for suicide.

  “Just now you said she would kill herself no matter what you gave her. You gave her your knife. Sylvia, that’s what she used.”

  Bukar wrapped her arms around her Bible and squeezed it to her chest.

  “I told her where to find it. That was when I was still crazy, before God reached down for me. I’ll ask the girls to pray for her tonight. And me.”

  Back in her car, she reread the tox screen. There it was, an extraordinary amount of aspirin in her system. Also a high blood-alcohol content. Alcohol acted as a blood thinner, something you learned as a beat cop. Street drunks could bleed like crazy.

  And high levels of acetaminophen, working in tandem with the other neurodepressants. Fremont had dosed herself to make it easier to take the pain.

  The sun was setting on the mountains above Santa Fe on her long drive back. The fading light turned them deep red. The Sangre de Cristo mountains. Blood of Christ. She wondered if Fremont had seen this and decided that was the place to let her own blood flow. Adding something from Christianity to her cocktail of Buddhism and Wicca and whatever else she threw into the mix.

  Covering the bases, throwing it all against the wall, hoping something would stick. One lucky number or a winning combination—whatever worked—on a lotto ticket looking like those “co-exist” bumper stickers with symbols from all the world’s religions smashed together.

  Or maybe Fremont was just an unhappy, sad, screwed-up kid leaving others to deal with the mess she left behind, thinking nothing of the two young men she’d tricked into helping her.

  She should feel sorry for a girl who killed herself. She wasn’t feeling it.

  The planning and determination it took, the will power to fight through the pain—Fremont wanted this. And would have had it except the two guys she selected were so horrified they didn’t let the birds finish. Instead of a raven—Hurry, my wings must spread. I must fly—Cynthia Fremont became a body found in a trunk, not the first, not the last.

  She caught hers
elf doing what she told Roshi Buff she never did, meditating on the why behind the violence and ugliness she faced in her job. But she let her thoughts run loose as the road took her home.

  Fifty-Four

  Mascarenas called on her way back from interviewing Bukar. He was still in the hospital. She should stop by. Somebody was there who wanted to talk with her.

  Walter Fager stood up from the chair by the bed when Aragon entered her cousin’s room. His pin-striped suit was a mess, pants caked with mud, a tear in the knee.

  “Where the hell have you been?” She looked him up and down, ruined wingtips to stubbled cheeks and greasy hair. “Do you know about Bronkowski?”

  “Bronk. If I’d listened, he wouldn’t be in a coma.” Fager blew air through his lips then set his jaw. “I’m going to take care of him. If he makes it out of the hospital, a nurse will be living with us.”

  Mascarenas said, “Tell her where you went.”

  “I took Linda back to where we met, when she saved my life.”

  “In the Gila Wilderness,” Mascarenas said. “Rangers noticed his Mercedes at a campground. Kind of out of place.”

  “I poured her ashes in the water where we swam together.”

  “There’s a warrant,” Aragon said, “for failing to appear at your bond hearing. I heard Judge Diaz had a smile when she signed it. Kept the rest of her cases on hold while her secretary made copies.”

  “Thornton dropped charges but the FTA’s still in the system,” Mascarenas said. “We’ll get it cleared. Bigger news is Walt’s coming to work for us. The docs won’t release me and the judge won’t delay opening arguments again. Walt will second-chair my young prosecutor.”

  “Long time since I filled out a W-4,” Fager said.

  “Don’t you have something hanging over your head?” Aragon asked. “A little issue about your law license?”