At least he was still able to talk with them. Not through a door, in whispers. Through a drive-through window, in glances.
Once Davidson had said he’d share them with me, if I wanted. We’d been sitting outside the nursing home, the sage and oregano in a baggie in his pants, ready to smoke. I’d just shook my head no, stood from the car, into my sunglasses.
Now I had them on again. Still.
“Go away,” I said into the darkness, and then, suddenly, my father was glowing white, caught in flashlight beams coming from every direction, and then another light went on, from above, and my father was too bright to even look at anymore. All the loose paper in my garage rising.
I shielded my face, ducked under the half-raised door and out into the night.
It was a helicopter, standing on its beam of light, its blades cutting the sky to ribbons. It fell dark and heavy around us, made it hard to breathe.
Just past the ring of light, a radio crackled.
I squinted to it: Madrone.
He opened a channel, said “False alarm,” then just stared at me.
“You think he’s Lote Bravo?” I said, holding my father’s arm, my father drunk enough to be not understanding what was going on, really.
Half an hour later, because he wouldn’t shut up, he was in the back of a black and white. Public Intoxication. Liz P. standing in the road after the patrol car was gone, the wind whipping her palazzo pants around her legs.
I could have walked him out of it, probably, the arrest, but didn’t. Because he shouldn’t have been in my driveway. I didn’t need him to watch over me, didn’t need any of them.
“So this a real phone or a—a punching bag?” Madrone asked, inspecting my solder job.
We were in my living room, the helicopters and news vans gone for the moment.
I told him to go to hell.
He shrugged, said, “It was logical to stake you out, Villarreal. He’s going to make contact sooner or later.”
Richard, Richard was going to make contact.
I shook my head like I was in pain. Asked, “Why do you want him so bad?”
Madrone looked at me a long time before answering. “Sure you don’t want KVIA in here?” he said, finally. “Wouldn’t want her to miss anything.” When I wouldn’t answer, Madrone shrugged again, pushed a seed or bug or something between his teeth, winced from however it was salted. “It’s your own fault,” he said. “Put Lote Bravo in the air, Godder’ll come sniffing around.”
“You really need his help that bad?” I said.
“If it was animal cruelty,” Madrone said, “we’d call it into some special doggie detective from the SPCA. But it’s dead Mexican girls. Richard’s specialty.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You want to talk to him, you set one guy up here. You want to take him down, you bring a helicopter.”
Madrone smiled, gave me that.
“Okay then,” he said. “Look. What’s… being done. First, it’s somebody fascinated with dead Mexican girls. Richard. Second, it’s somebody comfortable enough around the dead to do it. A homicide dick. Third, it’s probably somebody with some medical background. Bam, he was a medic for Uncle Sam, one with a particularly bad history. Three strikes, Villarreal.”
I lowered my face into my hands.
“If he would just get in touch with us,” Madrone said, “we could clear him. But what he’s doing, hiding. It’s not helping him, Villarreal.”
“You don’t have anything to connect him to the scenes,” I said through my hands, then lowered them. Let him see my face.
“That may not be so true anymore,” Madrone said, as if apologetic. “That adhesive on their lips?” I nodded. “Lab got back with us on it. It’s superglue. Like CSU boils to lift prints or whatever, right?”
I closed my eyes again. Fuming glue. Yes.
What he was telling me was that when Richard had pulled away from my house Friday night, it had been to go to the house of a girl who looked just like me. To do to her what he wanted to do to me.
“We just need you to call him for us,” Madrone said, talking softer now. “We know you can.”
My eyes still closed, I said, “Nate told you about the garage doors?”
“Didn’t take a genius.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, people need to know. To protect themselves.”
When I opened my eyes, Madrone was watching me.
“What the hell,” he said. “I’ll put in an anonymous call to KVIA, right?”
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded, accepting it, then put my Frankenstein phone back on the hook, lifted it back to me. I looked past it to Richard’s caved-in TV. Wishing he had another, and another. And then I did it, called, letting Richard’s cell ring and keep ringing until his voice mail clicked on. I cut it short, sent a numeric page, all sixes.
Five minutes later, my Frankenstein phone shook. Madrone nodded for me to pick up. I set my father’s scissors down, stilled the phone, brought it to the side of my head.
“Richard?” I said.
On his end, just breathing, then a word: “Don’t.”
He didn’t hang up either.
By the time we found the phone, dawn was seeping in, pink and grey. The line was still open, just like he’d left it. I spoke into my end, just saying here over and over, and my voice rose up out of the green dumpster we’d backtracked to, over four cell towers and two providers.
We were behind the station, behind the annex, where they’d dug a side basement for the morgue last year. Because dead people belong underground.
The green dumpster was the kind they put on small concrete pads behind funeral homes, for body parts, unmentionables.
Richard was in town, had been the whole time.
I stopped saying anything.
Day 4
Tuesday 8 July 2003.
At twelve-nineteen, lunch, I woke on my couch. The time was on the VCR still wired into Richard’s shattered TV. Mine from the bedroom was on top of it now, still on Channel 7. I’d fallen asleep watching it, took it into my dream with me. Now it was on a counter down in the morgue, the rabbit ears cocked to the left, as if listening. I was on one of the autopsy tables, dead, Mitch Trevana leaning over me. His mask was on, only, instead of surgical green, a color I knew made his breath taste like mint, it was flesh tone. So that it looked more like he didn’t have a mouth.
There were dotted black chalk lines all over me, for him to follow.
“Some disassembly required,” he said to himself, but then noticed I was giving birth. I shook my head no, no. All around the room, there were nuns. Because this was going to be Immaculate. Because Richard was God plus one, like he used to say: Godder.
I reached my hand for the closest nun and all of them shuffled back on bare feet, and I saw that they were the Juarez girls, holy now in death, forever chaste, their virginity restored.
Because I was dead, Trevana just cut a Z into my belly, lifted the screaming thing out of me, only it was all hair, black Mexican-girl hair, and I started pushing off the table with the heels of my hands, but once I got the center of my weight where my head had been, the table tilted back, spilling me to the floor, and that was how I woke: on the thin carpet by my couch.
Reyna Cruz was talking to me, in Spanish.
Just sounds, not words.
And then I woke again, the blanket kicked down at my feet. The Reyna Cruz who was talking to me was Liz P, on the midday update, the blinking colon on the VCR clock the metronome her words were synched up with.
I couldn’t make sense of anything she was saying, could only track the footage over her shoulder.
It was twelve twenty-one, had been two minutes since I’d opened my eyes last.
I sat up, focused.
The footage she was showing was recycled Spanish Angel stuff from the last two days. I turned away from her, to the wall, then the kitchen, the counter be
tween it and the living room. My answering machine light not blinking.
Something was wrong.
There was no dead girl yet. No girl dressed up like—no, no girl who… worked at whatever Rosario Flores had been dressed up like. Or, had been stripped down like.
But then I stood up.
No: what was wrong was the Channel 7 segment. It should have been Liz P. standing on some stepladder in some garage, showing the women of El Paso how to unplug their overhead doors.
Madrone hadn’t told them.
I closed my eyes for control, then nodded again: he was leaving me no choice. I picked up the handset of my Frankenstein phone, opened the phonebook from under the coffee table. The girl who answered at KVIA wasn’t interested in who I was, just told me to hold for Liz P.’s voice mail. She sounded just like she did on the news. It was a strange dissonance, even—her on my set, her in my phone.
After the tone, I opened my mouth, then didn’t say anything, just set the phone back down, shaking my head: if Madrone had access to my cell log, he probably had my land line too. But, if the garage doors broke in a special report, he wouldn’t even need any of that. What he’d done with our deal was make it into a trap: I could call the news, tell El Paso how the killer was getting into these girls’ houses, but Madrone probably had a patrol car down on Hondo, waiting for me.
I wasn’t going back to jail. Not this week.
Four hours later, I finally found him, Madrone. He was down in the morgue, with Trevana. Not at Jennifer Rice’s house, not at Carrie Mena’s, Rosario Flores’s, Homicide, the break room, or on the police band. Standing at the door from the stairwell onto Trevana’s tile floor, my fingertips to the steel, for a moment I didn’t question that my bedroom TV was going to be on the counter in there. It was like walking into my dream.
Trevana and Madrone both looked over to me, their muttered conversation sucked back into their mouths.
“Marta…” somebody said then, from part of the morgue I hadn’t been able to see through the window. Nate. “They’re talking about private stuff,” he stage-whispered, explaining why he was on the other side of the room.
“Villarreal,” Madrone said, nodding to me. He knew what was coming.
“You lied,” I said to him. “You never intended to tell about the garage doors. You were just using me to get to Richard.”
Trevana’s eyes flicked from me to Madrone.
Madrone shrugged, spit something into his waiting hand and lowered that hand to his pocket. It was a place I didn’t want to have to go, ever.
“I’m what you call a homicide detective,” he said, smiling a bit, his eyes glittering. “My job is to catch murderers in as legal a fashion as I can, see. If I have to break a trust now and then… well. Ends and means, y’know?”
“Our ends, you mean,” Nate chimed in.
Madrone rubbed his mouth, refused to look at Nate. Anymore, it felt like—refused to look at him anymore. As if they’d already been through this. It was why Nate was acting so giddy, probably: to show that Madrone wasn’t getting to him.
I looked to Trevana for help but he was just pretending none of us were there. With Madrone in his morgue, he couldn’t tell me anything, show me anything.
“I guess if they—if they don’t keep dying,” I said, to Madrone, on my own now, “then your case won’t be on the news anymore, right? That it?”
Madrone smiled like I was an amateur. “In what we call police work, Villarreal, sometimes you kind of leave a door open, hoping the cat will just walk in, deliver himself.”
I chewed my gum, stared at him.
“What’ll that cat bring with it, though?” I said. “Something dead, maybe?”
“That all?” Madrone said, his eyebrows raised, egging me on, tapping a thick manila folder against his palm.
Before I could say anything, Nate stepped in, facing me, his hands to my arms, and guided me out.
Through the glass, Madrone winked at me, smiled.
Nate kept me from going back in, but just barely.
In the dead space in the hall where a vending machine used to be, Nate leaned in, made a show of looking both ways, then said, “I found something.”
I shook his hands off my arms.
“What?” I asked, suspicious.
“It’s why I was down there. The blood-tox on the first one finally came back. I was trying to check it against what I found.”
Before I could ask, he showed it to me: a color photocopy of the torn-off corner of what looked like a bag of Skittles.
“Had to log the real one into Evidence,” he said, shrugging.
“Great, Nate,” I said, guiding the photocopy down, away.
“You don’t get it, Marta. We know that this guy’s introducing some chemical or shit into these girls, right?”
I shrugged. Nate shrugged back. “But nobody’s putting it all together yet. It’s just, catch him, catch him, stop him. The way you do that, though, is you figure out how he does stuff. This”—the photocopy—“it’s like looking at his brain. Then’s the easy part. You just put a head on that brain. A face.”
“What are you saying, Nate?”
He smiled, reached into my mouth for my gum. Started chewing it himself, making me wait.
I pushed him against the wall, held him there.
“Their lips are superglued shut,” he said, finally. “It’s to keep whatever he’s introducing down, I think. But, too, there’s no burn marks on the throat or esophageal lining. Our deputy coroner in there would have found it. Meaning either it’s inert until it hits the stomach, which I doubt is all that possible, as different stomachs have different chemistries, or—or he’s sheathing it somehow. Putting it in something.”
“Like a pill?”
“Bigger,” Nate said, rattling the photocopy again. “What I wanted Trevana in there to tell me was whether or not the tox report had registered any latex residue.”
“Latex?” I said, letting him go. “Like paint?”
“More like rubber,” he said, my gum between his front teeth, and led me by the hand out of the station.
Ten minutes later we were walking to the back of a drugstore Nate had directed me to.
“You wonder why they’re so far from the register,” he said, running his finger along a shelf, moving all the price tags over one or two items. “Two reasons. One, because sex shouldn’t be last-minute, an impulse buy. ‘Oh yeah, I meant to get laid tonight.’ Two, because condoms are the highest risk item in here, besides the pharmaceuticals. But they keep pharmaceuticals in the cage. The rubbers, though, they’re out here for all the shy boys to steal. Kind of like a passive social program.”
Part of hanging around with Nate was lectures, trivia, him always showing off.
I nodded, not encouraging him, and then we were there. Nate held his photocopy up to the wall of single-serve condoms. Finally stopped at the Durex hangers. Durex Avantis. The obvious match.
Nate took one, I took the next.
“Shit,” he said, towards the end.
“What?”
“Yours says it too,” he said. “This isn’t latex, Officer Villarreal. Avantis, evidently, are for the latex-sensitive members of our great and sexually liberated society. They’re polyurethane. You know what this means, right? Our bad guy here, he’s biochemically afraid of latex.”
“He’s wearing them?”
“Even handing latex’ll do it, I think,” Nate said. “If you’re allergic. Wait, let me ask—”
Before I could stop him, he was gone, to talk to the pharmacist. I waited for him in the blood pressure chair. “Ask me,” he said five minutes later, practically jogging in place.
“Durex Avanti Superthin Lubricated Non-latex Condoms,” I read off my box. “Tell me.”
“He recommends them,” Nate said, “our friendly neighborhood gigolo pharmacist. You should see his v-neck. He says these”—the Avantis—“they transmit heat better, are more sensitive, are essentially tasteless, in spite of the l
ubrication, and, get this. They’re bigger.” He shrugged. “Too big for a lot of guys, I mean.” Now a smile, holding the box up. “Think I’ll go ahead and, y’know, stock up.”
I was somewhere else, though. In Jennifer Rice’s house.
“So—so he’s making them give him head, but he wears a condom…?”
“All the high school girls are into it,” he said, then smiled. “STDs and all. Moms telling them to ‘save themselves.’ Certain parts of themselves, anyway…”
“But—”
Nate shrugged. “He’s filling it with whatever shit he wants. Making them swallow it. His, y’know, figurative load. So, I mean, the official report is no sexual violation. That doesn’t mean he’s not getting off, though.”
I nodded, slower and slower. Stood by Nate while he bought the twelve-pack of Durex Avantis. In front of the drugstore, he asked me if I was all right.
“Just thinking,” I said.
“Cinderella, right?” he said, popping my gum.
“Cinderella?” I said.
“You want to go around El Paso,” he said, “go around with some latex gloves, get all the suspects to try them on…”
I smiled: no, I hadn’t been wanting to do that.
On a smaller scale, though, now, maybe.
I called Davidson from a payphone. He was groggy.
“Going in tonight?” I said.
“…Marta?”
“To work.”
“I don’t know. Yeah, sure.”
“Let’s eat first, cool?”
Beat, beat, then, “What?”
I laughed, told him I’d meet in a couple of hours at the station, the east doors.
“Why up there?” he said, waking up more.
“So you can bring me something from downstairs,” I said. “It just got there today. Tox report.”
I could practically hear him closing his eyes in pain.
“Marta…” he said, then, two hours later, instead of meeting me at the east doors, he pulled up to them from the parking garage, his left leg locked against the Brat’s clutch. Still, it crept forward. I looked behind me, for Madrone, then climbed in. We cut through the five o’clock traffic in the direction of Rosa’s CBT. It was the only place, for him. At the second light we caught, he pulled the manila folder from under his seat.
Seven Spanish Angels Page 10
