“If Marcy’s disciplinary complaints get me suspended, I’ll stay on as a paralegal.”
“Walt wants to start a new career, as an underpaid, overworked, unappreciated, bruised and battered good guy,” Mascarenas said.
Fager’s suit was something Italian, maybe Armani. His shirt a mess, probably beyond being cleaned, maybe it cost as much as her monthly car payment. She’d never noticed his belt. You don’t stare at a defense lawyer’s stomach when you’re on the stand. You go eye to eye, not seeing anything below his chest. Maybe his backside when he finishes with you and returns to his table.
Fager’s belt buckle looked like a gold scales of justice set in hammered silver.
Sticking out of those Italian sleeves, French cuffs. Man wears gold and onyx cufflinks for his sojourn thing in the wilderness. Steps out of the woods a different person because he ripped his pants. Drives to Santa Fe—four, five hours in his Mercedes—thinking what to do next with his life. Bingo! Show the good guys what they’ve been doing wrong. That’s the ticket.
“Bullshit,” she said, and it was her turn to show her back.
She made a show of it, too, the way she spun around, pushed through the door, letting it swing back into the room, banging against the waste can on the floor.
“Talk to her,” Mascarenas said. “While she’s still loco.”
Fager caught up with Aragon in the hallway, just past the nurse’s station.
“Listen.”
She stopped, looked back over her shoulder, the rest of her still heading away.
“I’m serious. I want to switch sides. Look what I’ve been through. My wife, my best friend.”
“You feel responsible.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t let me stop you. Talk about people who didn’t mean anything to you, how you’re responsible for what happened to them, too. That I’d like to hear.”
He forgot how short she was. She carried so much strength in her arms and shoulders, had a way about her that made you think she stood taller. Maybe he’d forgotten because she’d always been sitting, on the stand, more recently across a table at Juanita’s.
“You’re not talking, Fager.”
From this angle he saw the scar in her scalp. He’d never noticed that before.
“I’ve watched you for years,” she said, “wondering how you can do what you do. For some of the suits, it’s the money. Cash up front, no results guaranteed. Others, they have this problem. They’d like to be one of the outlaws, but don’t have the balls. So they get close enough for a thrill, rub elbows with stone-cold killers. Some are just twisted. You, you’re angry at the world. Maybe lately you decided you maybe hate yourself a little. Maybe a lot. You need more than that for what we do. More than that to feel responsible.”
“Let’s step in here.” Fager nodded toward an area away from open doors to patient rooms.
He waited for her to move first, not sure she’d follow him. She shook her head and walked to where molded plastic chairs were bolted to the wall under a television playing without sound. He didn’t recognize what was on the screen, some cartoon with a square yellow character and marine life.
“Shit,” Aragon said. “SpongeBob. Talk. My cousin believes you. Sell me.”
“There’s not likely anything I can say to convince you. Joe believes he can use me. Judge me on what I do for him.”
“His child-abuse case.”
“For starters. I hope Goff’s next.”
“Then you go back to your side of the line.”
“No.”
“You feed your anger. Get a lot of attention sitting at the DA’s table. I see the interviews, the big stories. Advertising you can’t buy. Walter Fager, he can do it all. Let him do it all for you. Don’t let those bastards hang a bum rap around your neck. Call now.”
“No.”
“You can’t change the pinstripes on a shark,” she said. “Show me a reason to trust you with the kind of calls we have to make when we’re fighting scumbags like you.”
“I’ve got Joe on my side. I don’t need this.”
“You can’t do Joe’s job unless you’ve got me and every other cop who’s gonna make or break your case.”
“So what do you want?”
“Help me take down a dirty judge.”
“Judy Diaz.”
“Roger. Then there’s no going back. Old friends won’t trust you, the way I don’t right now. You’re in on busting the Chief Judge, I don’t see bad guys thinking you’ve got an inside track at the courthouse. They’re taking their business down the street.”
Fager took one of the molded plastic chairs. When he sat, the tear across his knee showed pale skin. Above his head, SpongeBob danced with a starfish.
He said, “You forget I may not have a law license much longer.”
“Means nothing to me. I don’t believe that would shut you down. That lawyer in Taos, the one for the planning department. Shaking down developers. He lost his license but opened an office next to the county building. Realized he didn’t need a law license to walk developers around, introduce them to old friends, arrange lunch with his cousin, the county commissioner. He took a hit, but never jumped ship. Doors stayed open. Be on the team that takes the robes off Diaz, takes the gavel out of her hand, all those familiar doors will be locked tight.”
“No more hustling for clients, no more referrals. No co-counsel gigs.”
“Our side has a different business model.”
Sitting next to her on the molded plastic chairs, he was taller again, but not by much.
“Something you said back in Joe’s room,” Aragon said. “If you’d listened, Bronk wouldn’t be in a coma. What did you mean?”
“No harm telling you now. Bronk wanted to shoot Geronimo, not wait for you to play it out, then trust the courts to put him away.”
“He’d done that, we wouldn’t have found the bodies. I would have been hunting him.”
“It would have been me.”
“I’d get you.”
“And I wouldn’t be able to hire the best criminal defense attorney in Santa Fe. That’s what Marcy told me. She’d be the first witness against me.”
“You don’t talk like that again, ever, if you cross over. Not even joking around. But speaking of Thornton.”
Fager waited for her to finish her thought.
“Find a way to tie her to Diaz, one that sticks, I might start to forget you’re Walter Fager.”
“You know about them?”
“There’s know, and there’s prove. Something else I want to run by you. Keep your defense lawyer hat on a little longer.”
Mascarenas looked up from reading a brief as the door opened. Aragon entered first, nodded, telling him it was all okay and took the only chair. Fager came next. He stood in the center of the floor, nowhere to sit. The rookie reporting for duty.
“We’ll need a background check,” Mascarenas said. “Fingerprints, all that. That thing from the Army, it can’t be hanging over your head.”
“I’ve got an AWOL on my record,” Fager said, “that’s all. I traded silence for an honorable discharge. You won’t find anything else. Except Marcy’s pending complaints.”
“I can put you on special prosecutor status. After that, you have to go through orientation. DA boot camp. Get your mind right.”
“What about Goff? I want to be on the team that puts him away.”
“Not going to happen.” Mascarenas pointed a pudgy finger. “You’re a witness. From now on you play by the rules. You don’t go near that trial except when you’re on the stand. You can submit a victim impact statement, watch when he’s sentenced.”
Aragon reached for her cousin’s hand. It seemed smaller. He’d been losing weight on a hospital diet, but had a long way to go.
“I have an idea how to handle
Dewey Nobles.”
Mascarenas squeezed her hand, surprising her with his strength.
“You figured how to plant that land mine, didn’t you?”
The Criminal Investigations floor was empty. Lewis was in a meeting about Goff at the DA’s office. Serrano and Fenstermacher were at OMI prepping the pathologist for the Fremont grand jury. A shooting at the old Villa Linda Mal—she never used its new name—had drawn out the rest of the detectives. Two carloads of kids chasing each other through the parking lot, bullet holes left behind in McDonald’s and Staples. Shoppers wounded. One of the shooters dead in a Honda Civic abandoned behind the mall. The West Side Lokos were pushing east.
She would never find a better time than now.
She walked from her little office to the coffee station that served this end of the building. Her path took her past Nobles’ door. He was at his desk on his computer. She knocked and stuck in her head.
“Sir?”
“What is it?”
“I would like to request travel funds to cover myself and Lewis going to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The Tasha Gonzalez case. We need to re-interview her brother, and talk to his wife. He could be our murderer.”
“It was Geronimo. Sixteen cases closed in one fell swoop. The fourteen women at the ranch. Linda Fager. Tasha Gonzalez. Request denied.”
“I thought you might say that.”
He looked up, directly at her, a furrow deepening across his forehead.
“Then why ask?”
“I needed to know where you stood. One more thing.” She idly rotated the doorknob while he glared at her, making it clear he wanted her gone. “On Fremont, you’re committed to moving forward with a murder-one prosecution against both men? You won’t consider evidence of suicide?”
“We’ve been over this.”
“Yes, sir. I’m getting coffee. Would you like some?”
He didn’t respond and she left his doorway.
She continued toward the odor of scorched coffee. The pot had been on the burner for hours. She turned off the heat and sat the glass carafe in the sink. She intentionally made a lot of noise preparing the next pot. She wanted Nobles very much aware of her in the building with him.
With a cup of coffee in hand, she returned to her office, again pausing at his door.
“It’s fresh if you want.”
He ignored her. But he would know she was headed back to her office.
She moved quickly. She wrote up her interviews with Brito and Bukar and pasted it into an e-mail to Nobles. She hit send. Then she pressed the speed dial on her cell for Rivera and put him on speaker. It was ringing when she put her cell down and opened a newspaper.
“Denise,” Rivera’s voice spoke from the surface of her desk.
Down the hall she heard a door open and heavy footsteps approach.
“Free for dinner tonight?” she asked. “I was thinking Lotaburgers and white wine. That was a really nice time we had.”
Salt-and-pepper hair stiff with gel appeared in her doorway. Cinnamon and cloves in the stagnant office air.
“Hold a second. My boss is here. He’s not happy.”
She laid the newspaper over the cell phone.
“Aragon, what kind of crap you trying to pull?”
“Deputy Chief Nobles.”
“I got your e-mail. One, you’re supposed to be off the Fremont case. Two, I told you not to put anything else in the file.”
“You said not to put my interview of Timothy Osborn in the file.”
“Don’t split hairs.”
“Sir, I didn’t put anything in the file. I sent you an e-mail with my interviews of APD detective Enrique Brito and convicted killer Sylvia Bukar. I thought you should have them so you could make the decision about how they impacted murder charges in the Fremont case. Bukar makes it clear it was suicide, but I didn’t want to make that call. Especially since it’s not my case anymore.”
“Did you copy anyone else?”
“No, sir. Your eyes only.”
“I deleted your e-mail. That’s my decision. Insane rambling from an insane woman. One day Bukar’s a witch, the next a Bible thumper. Tomorrow she’ll be a Martian. We’re not going to complicate a clear case with meaningless distractions. I want you to delete it from your e-mail records.”
“I don’t feel comfortable doing that.”
“Are you disrespecting my authority? Do you think I’m someone you can ignore?”
“Sir. I showed what I think of you by sending my report directly to you and no one else.”
“I don’t have time for a test of wills. Move aside.”
She let Nobles have her chair. He touched a key and the screen awakened, still on the message she had just sent him. He deleted it.
“Aragon, this conflict between us cannot continue.”
“Yes, sir. I agree. It won’t. Things are going to change. In a very big way, sir.”
“Well.” Her meekness caught him off guard. “Good.” He stood to his full height and looked down on her, the furrow between his eyebrows back in place. “You may be the girl hero today. That glow will fade soon enough.”
Heavy footsteps carried him back to his office.
She lifted the newspaper and picked up the phone.
“Tomas, you still there?”
“Did I just hear your boss instructing you to destroy evidence?”
“No comment.”
“That’s why I don’t have the Osborn interview. He told you to hold it back.”
“No comment.”
“The Bureau has not closed our file, though DOJ is signaling a pass. Your boss is obstructing an ongoing federal investigation.”
“I’m not saying anything. Call him yourself. Ask if Timothy Osborn ever talked to anyone from SFPD. Ask if there’s any evidence Fremont was contemplating suicide. Ask if she consulted a former witch named Sylvia Bukar. Ask where she got that Wiccan knife. Ask Detective Brito if he has a photo.”
“I doubt Nobles will tell me the truth.”
“Lying to a federal law-enforcement officer. I read somewhere that’s a felony.”
“I have to write this up. I can’t ignore what I just heard. And yeah, I’m going to call the guy. He lies to me, I’ll take it across the hall to the U.S. Attorney.”
“If you put something in writing, is that discoverable in a state case?”
“If we’re subpoenaed. A smart defense lawyer will knock on our door. We were there at the beginning. He’ll be curious why we didn’t file federally.”
“I would think so.”
“Denise, were you really calling me to ask me out?”
“I was. But there’s no telling what kind of crazy shit happens in
a day.”
“Can we get the pickup again? It felt like we were in a country-western song.”
They arranged a time and said goodbye as Lewis entered the room with a stack of files under his arm.
“That bone Bronkowski brought back,” he said. “Came from the woman in grave number six, Dolores Atencio, immigrated here from Hermosillo, got her green card right before she disappeared. That one was easy.”
“The other thirteen?”
“Collecting DNA from families we can find. We’ll get it done.”
“We always have things to do, don’t we?”
Lewis took his seat and stacked files on his desk. “You’ll love what we’re hearing from the Pueblos.”
“They don’t want Geronimo being Indian now that he’s a serial killer.”
“Sitting here at your desk, seeing beyond the walls. You need to teach me that trick.”
“Maybe the FBI’s army of experts can tell us what he really was, make the tribes feel better.”
“The big news is Goff’s laying down. Full confession. He gets twenty-five to li
fe. He’ll come up for parole before he’s using a walker, sooner with good time. I’m okay with that. You?”
“I hope he makes it,” she said. “Those years will be harder as an ex-cop.”
But her mind was on how Fager really knew his stuff. At the hospital, he had fleshed out her sketchy outline of a plan. Not only would his improvements keep two young men from conviction for a murder they didn’t do, they solved her Dewey problem. And none of it would come back on her. She had not gone outside the department to burn a fellow officer. She had not played snitch for internal affairs. It was going to be the FBI’s initiative and a defense lawyer’s diligence that took Dewey down.
It would stick.
Fager and Mascarenas, off the top of their heads, impressing the hell out of her, had hashed out the legal issues of letting Rivera hear Nobles through her cell phone. New Mexico law allowed eavesdropping on a conversation as long as one party consented, even if others had no idea anyone else was listening. If some judge pulled a Judy Diaz, it wouldn’t stop Joe Donnelly. There was no motion to suppress in internal disciplinary hearings.
Dewey thought he had deleted her e-mail. A defense lawyer could easily get a court order to have it resurrected from the hard drive. The FBI could retrieve it in half an hour.
She was thinking what a hell of a team Fager and Mascarenas were going to make when she realized Lewis was talking to her.
“What have you heard on Fremont? Hotdog and Sauerkraut are acting like they’ve already notched their gun barrels, murder one for each defendant. Dewey’s authorized all the overtime they want. Omar’s back to talking about a new boat.”
“Maybe he’ll take you fishing.”
“They’re doing another press conference tomorrow. He’s throwing in more people than we ever got on Geronimo. He sees Fremont paving his way to the chief’s office.”
“You’re asking what I hear?”
“Yeah. What are you hearing? What’s going to happen?”
A land mine inside her computer, Dewey’s foot on the pressure plate, no way to step off.
She propped elbows on her desk and slowly spread her fingers wide.
“Boom.”
The Drum Within Page 29
