Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “You called?” he said.

  I wasn’t breathing, couldn’t answer.

  “I’m not her,” I said, my voice catching in my throat.

  “Jennifer Rice,” he said, easy.

  I nodded, still not looking away from him, and when he lowered his hand for mine, I took it.

  DAY 5

  Wednesday 9 July 2003.

  Richard had shaved his head. That was the thing I would remember best six hours later, after he was gone again: standing up into the dark, running my right palm over his scalp.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “I looked too much like myself,” he said, his lips close to mine.

  I turned away, eyes unfocused down the hall, my shirt barely touching me.

  “Or you got glue in it,” I said, and he just stood there. “This where you kill me?” I asked, still not looking at him, and when he didn’t answer I did the only thing I could, half-naked, smaller than him: leaned forward, touched my forehead to the hollow of the side of his chest. He picked me up like nothing, like a scared little girl, finally safe enough to close her eyes. Or past the point of caring.

  He had the couch ready for us—a painter’s dropcloth draped over it, a blanket on top of that. He wrapped me in the blanket and we sat on the plastic before the dead TV, staring at the black screen, and I shook my head no twice, trying to stay awake, but I’d fallen asleep like this so many times, too.

  I woke when it was still dark. Not yet dawn, it felt like. That kind of cool, of quiet. I wasn’t on the couch anymore either, but the bed, the mattress. It was still bare, the sheets at the lab, being hit with every kind of light.

  Richard was sitting on the floor. He’d been waiting for me.

  I pushed myself up to an elbow then pulled on my knee, rocked up to a sitting position. I was naked, just had the blanket.

  “You took my shirt,” I said.

  “I needed you not to run,” he said back.

  Nakedness as restraint. I looked down to the mattress.

  “You’re setting me up,” I said about it.

  Richard shrugged, didn’t say no.

  My epithelials would be trapped in the quilted blue top of the mattress now. Hemmed in by all those white-thread diamonds. And my hair: while I was asleep, he could have walked through the house with it, hiding it where I’d never find it.

  It was another reason he was bald, I told myself: one less thing to leave at a crime scene.

  He was wearing gloves, too. New, leather; anonymous.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “That I know who’s been killing the girls of El Paso? That I’ve solved the case a few minutes too late?”

  “About your clothes. I needed you not to run. I just needed some way to keep you here until I could—”

  “You had to control the situation,” I finished for him.

  “Robert E. Lee wouldn’t have done anything different, I don’t think.”

  “Neither would Ted Bundy.”

  Richard just stared at me. “I can’t stay long,” he said. “I just wanted to talk to you, I guess. Apologize.”

  “For her?” I said—Jennifer Rice.

  “For you,” Richard said, touching the back of his index finger to my eye.

  I turned away, up to the window.

  “When this is over…” he said.

  I laughed through my nose.

  “Pretend you’re not him,” I said, “and that it’s not over. What do you know about it all?”

  “That somebody’s setting me up.”

  I shrugged, said, “I’m supposed to ask you about nineteen ninety-nine, I think.”

  “Young Mexican girl’s found,” he said, not a beat missed, “hands tied, no blood. Little semicircle on her back, right above the kidney.” He did his fingers to show.

  “The kidney?”

  “This was when the papers were saying the girls were having their organs harvested. The circle was his way of letting us know he could read. That he didn’t care about their organs. Not for resale, anyway.”

  “He,” I repeated, my voice as flat as I could make it.

  Richard shook his head in disgust. “You really think I’d go to all this trouble, leave a crime scene you could feed a baby off of, then use the same kind of glue CSU uses?”

  “I don’t know what I think,” I told him.

  Richard shook his head, set his teeth. “You’re just like them,” he said. “Just because I have an interest in one thing—”

  “Dead girls.”

  “—that means I’ve been out there killing them this whole time.”

  “Then why are you hiding?”

  “Because I know how this looks. How it has to look.”

  “You’d think it was you too,” I said.

  He lowered his head, said, like giving up, “It’s not me, Marta. I promise.”

  “Just somebody exactly like you.”

  The veins in his neck, I could see them now.

  I went on: “I talked to Reyna.”

  He slashed his eyes up to me quick.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Saw your daughter.”

  “Marta—”

  “She’s beautiful,” I said, swinging my hair around to my other shoulder, letting the blanket slip down some, so that it caught for a moment on my right nipple, then scratched over.

  “Don’t do this,” Richard said.

  “Does she look too much like me, that it? Don’t worry. I’m like, what, six whole years older than her…”

  Before I even registered movement, Richard had his gloved hand to my throat.

  I leaned over, kissed his forearm, feathered it with my tongue just enough that he slapped me with the leather back of his other hand. It spun me around onto my stomach, the blanket slithering off the far edge of the bed, to hide.

  I shook my head, raised my face, a delicate line of spit and blood trailing from my mouth to the mattress. Smiled.

  “Reyna said you liked it like this,” I said. “Should have told me, Detective Godder. We could have saved a lot of lives this week.”

  “It’s not me,” he said again, from somewhere above, behind.

  “But what if it was?” I said back, my hair hiding my face now. “This—Lote Bravo guy. You wanted to catch him worse than anybody, right? For those four weeks, I mean. But then, when he quit, hit his serial killer quota or whatever, you couldn’t let him die, could you?”

  “Marta.”

  “Disagree with me, Richard.”

  “You don’t—”

  “Tell me I’m wrong,” I said, laying over on my side for him, “tell me I don’t look like them to you,” and then my hand was on his shoulder, pulling my mouth up to his, his down to me. He pulled back at first, his teeth red with my blood, but I climbed into his lap, straddling him.

  “This is what you want, isn’t it?” I said into his ear, reaching down for him with my hand, my hair falling between us.

  He was hard in the time it took me to open his pants, and then he lifted me onto him, his teeth set, but I stopped him at the first taste, shook my head no in a way that I knew my hair was silk over his chest, against the fabric of his shirt.

  He tried to push in anyway but I rose with him, stepped off, and started unbuttoning his shirt, kissing the skin where each button had been, never taking my eyes from his. Working my way down, his right glove in my hair, and then, instead of taking him in my mouth, just let him graze my cheek, the side of my face, my other hand at Jennifer Rice’s nightstand drawer.

  Because I was still looking at him, I saw him follow my hand, tense himself for the gun or knife or taser, the magazine I was going to papercut him with—anything was a weapon when he was that exposed—but then all I came back with was what I knew was going to be there: a handful of Trojans. One hundred percent FDA-approved latex.

  “What are you—?” he said, but I shook my head no, my other hand still around him.

  “Don’
t know where you’ve been the past few days,” I said, pulling on the light blue package with my teeth, spitting the corner out then taking the pale rubber into my mouth like a big, soft Lifesaver. It tasted like at a mock crime scene, when you forget you have your glove on, reach back into your mouth to dislodge lunch.

  I shook the package off my hand, threaded the rubber from my lips to shake it open, but Richard took it before I could, put it on himself, watching me the whole time, breathing hard—angry, turned on: both—and then it was just like old times. Like last week. Richard driving into me hard enough that I had to reach out to try to stay in place, to push back, my hand pulling the lamp from the nightstand. It had been off, but still, when the bulb opened, there was blue for a flash. I quit moving against him. Richard felt it, slowed.

  “Go ahead,” I said, “finish,” then closed my eyes, went slack. When he stopped I looked back around to him, said, “This is how you like it, right? If I’m dead?”

  He didn’t hit me this time, just pulled out throbbing, slick, the rubber gone. I took him in my hand again, slid down, said, “Okay, that was mean, just let me—” but he pulled away.

  “I want you,” he said, “I want you to believe me,” then pulled me up, his glove to the back of my head, holding my hair close to the scalp, and I finished him like that, then lowered my hand, made a show of wiping it on as much of the mattress as I could.

  “Now we’ve both been here,” I said.

  On the curtains beside us, a car’s headlights, passing slow. Down the street a dog was barking.

  “You have to turn yourself in,” I said, finally. “Prove to them it’s not you, if it isn’t. Spend the night while another shows up. That’s how Hector—”

  I stopped, hadn’t meant to bring Davidson up. Richard just stared at me.

  “I just need some time,” he said finally, “un día.” The Spanish was because he was asking me for something.

  “What you want is an accomplice,” I told him.

  “A friend,” he said. “Ayudame, Felina.”

  It almost made me laugh.

  Felina was from the Marty Robbins song, where the girl goes to the cowboy who’s dying for her, cradles his head in her lap, strokes his hair.

  “Don’t call me that,” I said, but then the phone in his pants shook against my stomach. I reached in for it, was opening it when he pulled it from my hand.

  “You haven’t seen me,” he said, and turned around, took the call. His part of the conversation was mostly nods.

  Finally he hung up, turned back to me.

  “Another one,” he said.

  “From yesterday or today?” I asked.

  “From now,” Richard said back.

  “Where?”

  “They’ve been trying to call you.”

  I panned around for my cell, to check my call log, then stopped: it was dead, from last night. The only live one between the two of us his, the one he was holding.

  “Who’s been trying to call me?” I asked.

  Richard shrugged, lifted his chin to my cell. It was facedown by the nightstand. I picked it up, thumbed the call button. It was still dead.

  “You never plug it in,” Richard said before I could finish what I was trying to think, and slid the battery out of his phone, tossed it over. We’d bought them on a buy one get another half-price deal. I took the battery, handed him mine, suddenly sure he was going to grab my wrist, not let me go.

  “What about you?” I said, trying to keep his eyes with mine.

  “I’ve got the charger, now,” he said.

  I stared at him.

  “You were in the house?”

  He looked out to El Paso, the top of the mountains probably already lit up, the sun feeling down them to us.

  “When you—with this one,” he started. “When you get a TOD, remember where I was last night, okay?”

  “If you want me to believe you,” I said, “tell me who that was on the phone.”

  “Not important,” he said, all military, need-to-know, then threaded his silver pen from the collar of his shirt, turned my clean hand over, wrote down the address of the next girl. A street called Half Moon, off North Loop. He even traced a small, blue map for me, but then didn’t let my hand go when he was done. Instead, he pulled a snub-nosed revolver from the little holster at the base of his back, set it across my palm.

  “I’m not rated,” I said.

  “You can pull a trigger,” he said. “Take it. I’ve got more.”

  “Richard—”

  “Marta,” he said back, and then he held my head between his hands, kissed me between the eyebrows, and, that close, I couldn’t see whether his fingertips were having an allergic reaction or not.

  Her name was Tina, Tina Ortiz. Another Mexican girl. It took me forty-five minutes to get to North Loop: a walk from Jennifer Rice’s to the tiendita, then a call for a cab—at least we were close to the bridge—then waiting for the cab, then the two of us trying to find an ATM so I could pay him, then my car in the driveway.

  The whole way the cab driver had the radio on, the morning news.

  It was how I got Tina Ortiz’s name: the police weren’t withholding it this time because they weren’t sure she was dead yet, just that she fit the profile, and was missing.

  The map Richard had drawn on my hand led me straight to Half Moon. It was within walking distance of a whole compound of churches. Thick steel bars on the windows, a crescent of patrol cars and ambulances parked around it. The CSU van. Channel 7. Madrone’s LTD with the tired springs and painted-black steel wheels.

  I stood from my car, wished I still had that FORENSICS windbreaker, and then forgot all about it: Trevana was there, for the first time. He stepped out onto the porch. In the door, just making his way out, narrowing his eyes at the new sun, Davidson.

  “So where is she?” I said to both of them.

  Davidson shrugged. Trevana, at the railing now, just looked down the street, sucked his lip.

  “But it’s him,” I said guessing. Knowing.

  “Show her,” Trevana said to Davidson, and Davidson led me through the living room to the bathroom, not saying anything because he didn’t have to: the showerhead was cocked, the tile around it crumbling. A line of chrome rubbed off the pipe behind the head, where Tina Ortiz had been hung.

  “Shit,” I said.

  Davidson agreed, started to lean against the door. I caught him before he could leave any fibers, incriminate himself even more.

  “Crime scenes suck,” he said, flipping the door off at close range then—this was from junior high, something I thought only I knew—touching it with his extended middle finger, using that finger then to push his hand away. I looked from the door to him, almost smiling, and knocked all Tina Ortiz’s pill bottles into the sink. Trying to catch them made it worse.

  “Been doing this long?” Davidson said, lifting his eyebrows.

  I flicked my wet fingers at his face and he shied away, back into the hall.

  Madrone guided him back in, holding him by both arms. “I’m guessing one of you’s here in an official capacity,” he said, staring at me, “assisting the coroner. The other one, though…”

  “What time is it?” Davidson said to him.

  Madrone showed him his watch: seven thirty-two. Davidson reached up with both hands, pulled his hair over his ears, and said, “I’m off, man. We don’t got no pinche overtime in the morgue, yeah?”

  Because he would have ridden with Trevana, I put my keys in Davidson’s hand, closed his fingers for him, told him to just leave my car in the garage.

  “You don’t have—” he started, but it was insincere, a gesture, like with the sopapilla. I didn’t make him finish it, just said I’d ride back in the wagon.

  “In the front?” he said, smiling from the bathroom door.

  “In the front,” I promised.

  Davidson nodded, saluted Madrone, and backed away, disappeared.

  I followed Madrone to the kitchen, said, “You don
’t have to be such a dick.”

  Madrone thumbed a Rolaid into his mouth, sucked his cheeks in around it.

  “Good morning, Villarreal”—offering a chalky white tablet in play—“didn’t know you were with the M.E.’s office now. Because I know nobody subordinate to the lead homicide detective would be talking to me like that. Unless of course she was talking about my—”

  “Do we really have to do this?”

  Madrone shrugged, cracked something off the end of his index finger while it was there. A nail? The face he made wasn’t a face that went with sunflower seeds, anyway.

  “What does she do for work, then?” I said. “Just tell me that. I’ll find out anyway.”

  While he chewed whatever he was chewing I touched the slats in the door to the utility, the fine layer of dust left behind by all the air the dryer had sucked into the room.

  Madrone touched it too, smiled a true smile, an amused smile, then pulled me by the arm into the utility room, folded the door closed three times before it stayed shut, jammed at an angle in its track.

  “What’s in it for me?” he said. It made me aware of how alone we were. How cramped the utility was. What Nate had said about Madrone liking taco meat. I raised my shoulders, turned my head to the side, then, before I could come up with anything, he told me: “She worked at a blood donation center.”

  I kept looking away, nodded: the hole in Rosario Flores’s arm. And, in case that wasn’t obvious enough, all her blood in cups.

  “Shit,” I said. “So she’s yesterday’s, then?” When Madrone didn’t follow, I explained: the way the girl was dressed one day was pointing to the next day’s girl.

  “That Lote Bravo shit,” he said.

  “That Lote Bravo shit,” I said back.

  He borrowed my cell, punched in a number from his notebook, talked for maybe three sentences after giving his badge number then snapped his phone shut.

  “She was clocked in yesterday,” he said. “She’s today’s, I think. Last night’s.”

  “Then who was yesterday’s?” I said, suddenly lost. “Who was Rosario Flores pointing to for us?”

  Madrone shrugged, pulled a pack of Kools from his chest pocket, started packing them on his wrist.

  “Where do you think she is now?” I said. “This one, Tina Ortiz.”