Land of Burning Heat

by Judith Van GIeson

  “You wanted to talk to me?” he asked.

  Claire handed him her card. “Isabel came to see me about a document she discovered in the house. I did some research and found out it could be quite valuable. She left a message on my voice mail today saying she wanted to see me. I stopped by this afternoon.”

  Lieutenant Kearns turned the card over his fingers. “Do you have any ID?” he asked.

  In Claire’s experience when a middle-aged woman was noticed at all her respectability was taken for granted, but she opened her purse and produced the driver’s license and UNM card that proved her identity.

  “Do you have a copy of the document?” Kearns asked.

  “I have a copy that Isabel made in her own handwriting.” Claire handed it to him.

  “Have you seen the original?”

  “No.”

  The Lieutenant frowned at the paper, squeezing a few more wrinkles into his forehead. “What does this mean?”

  “I think it was written by a Jew about to be killed by the Inquisition.”

  “That would make it what? Three, four hundred years old?”

  “If it is from the New World. If it’s from Spain it could be even older.”

  “Could something like that survive for centuries?”

  “Under the right conditions.”

  “Is there a market for it?” The Lieutenant squinted into the sun breaking through the late afternoon clouds.

  “Yes, but I’d have to do more research to tell you exactly what that is and I’d need to see the original. Isabel told me it was inside a wooden cross she found beneath the brick floor. Did you see a wooden cross in the house or an old document?”

  “No, but we weren’t exactly looking for a cross or an old document. We’re doing a room-to-room, plain view search. It appears to be the typical crime scene of someone lookin’ for something they could use or fence quick—drugs, guns, jewelry, money, cell phones, VCRs, stuff like that. We see this kind of robbery every day in Sandoval County. It can turn tragic if the owner has the misfortune of walking in on the perp.”

  In Claire’s experience people were also capable of killing for rare and valuable objects not so easy to fence. She knew that once she got back to her office and the shock of Isabel’s death wore off, guilt that she had not gotten here sooner would fill the chasm created by the death. To stumble on the crime scene was deeply disturbing, but she would feel worse if she left here without taking advantage of the opportunity being offered.

  “The document Isabel described could be very valuable to the family and to historians,” she said. “If it is here, it needs to be preserved. I might be able to help your investigation by looking through the house. I may be able to pinpoint where she found it.”

  Lieutenant Kearns leaned against the wall and studied her. Claire supposed he wondered if she really could be useful to his investigation or if she had some other agenda for getting inside the house.

  “I am an archivist,” she added. “I work with historical documents.”

  “I need to go inside and make a few calls,” Kearns said.

  Claire waited, wondering just whom he was calling. A superior? Someone he knew at UNM? The campus police? She hoped the phone calls wouldn’t lead to Harrison, her boss. The last thing she’d want him to know was that she was at the scene of a criminal investigation.

  Kearns came back outside. “All right. You may look, but that’s it, and you’ve got to cover up your hands and feet.”

  He produced a pair of plastic booties and plastic gloves and Claire put them on. He opened the door and they stepped into darkness and chaos. Policemen in brown uniforms swarmed all over the living room. When they saw Claire the buzzing stopped. Kearns explained why she was there and they resumed their investigation. Sofa pillows had been tossed on the brick floor, drawers were emptied and the contents spilled out, an end table was tipped on its side, a lamp smashed. The wreckage struck Claire as the work of a crazed or reckless thief or someone trying to create that impression. Beside a heavy wooden table there was an outline on the floor where the body had been. The red suede bag lay within the outline. The image of a single platform shoe tipped on its side jumped out at her from the clutter, an image likely to return in the middle of the night. Claire saw no religious objects in the room: no crosses, milagros, or images of the saints.

  “Isabel told me she tripped over the brick on her way to the bathroom,” Claire said. “May I?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She followed the hallway leading to the bathroom and the bedroom. The bathroom seemed untouched but the bedroom was as chaotic as the living room. Pillow cases had been ripped from the pillows. A shawl had fallen or been tossed from the bed to the floor. The drawers and the closet had been ransacked.

  “Petty thieves follow a pattern. They go to the closets and bedside drawers first looking for guns,” Lieutenant Kearns said.

  The destructiveness of the theft made Claire despair about the condition of the document if it was ever found. Movement was one antidote to depression and she made herself start at the bed and follow the path Isabel would have taken to the bathroom. All the bricks she saw were in place, but the shawl concealed part of the path. It was a red Spanish shawl with deep fringe as vivid as Isabel herself.

  “Could we move this?” Claire asked.

  Lieutenant Kearns called in Detective Romero, who had put on plastic gloves. He gathered up the shawl with a movement as gentle as an embrace and put it on the bed. As the bricks came into view, Claire felt the thrill of discovery. The brick that Isabel had moved was obvious. The others were embedded in sand, but one was framed by the dark outline of space.

  “That must be it,” Claire cried, pointing toward the brick.

  Detective Romero knelt down, inserted the blade of his pocket knife into the crevice and began working the brick out of its space. Claire’s hopes were that the cross and document would surface beneath the brick. She wanted to pace away her anxiety while Romero worked, but she forced herself to stand still clenching her hands into fists. Eventually he wiggled the brick out of its space. The sand had settled and formed a pocket under the brick, but to Claire it was a void. The cross and the document were not there. She squeezed her fists tight and then she let go.

  Romero placed the brick on the floor, then moved his hand around the edges of the void. “This pocket goes under other bricks,” he said. “Do you want me to continue?”

  “Yes,” Kearns said.

  The adjacent bricks were packed together. Romero began digging out the sand that separated them. It was slow, painstaking work. Claire understood why Isabel hadn’t searched any further after she found the cross. She felt like sinking onto the bed, but forced herself to stand and watch. She was intrigued by Romero’s absorption in his work. Lieutenant Kearns went back into the living room. Although that room bustled with police activity, Romero created an island of quiet around him. He moved with the precision of an archaeologist and Claire wondered if he’d had any training in that area. As the bricks came out he piled them on the floor. The pocket grew until it ended in a depression about two feet wide. Romero dusted his hand across the top of the sand to feel if anything else was buried without actually disturbing it. His hand felt something and he began to gently brush the sand aside to expose it. Claire had become as focused on his search as he was, wondering if the cross had slid under here. His movements were light as a feather as he brushed the sand. She held her breath while something began to emerge. As Romero continued brushing the sand aside, she could see that it wasn’t the weathered wood of an old cross. It became a knob and then it turned into the joint of a finger. He brushed a little further and the shape of a skeletal hand, white and mournful as a pieta, appeared in the sand. For a moment he and Claire stared at each other stunned into silence. Then he stood up and called for Lieutenant Kearns.

  “You’ll wanna take a look at this,” he said.

  Kearns came back into the room holding a plastic evidence bag.


  “I’ll be damned,” he said staring into the sand.

  “You want me to continue?” Romero asked. “There could be a body attached to this.”

  “No. If those are old bones we need to call in the Office of the Medical Investigator’s forensic anthropologists.” He held up the evidence bag for Claire to see. “We found a cross.”

  It was about six inches long, weathered wood with a few specks of green paint.

  “Where was it?” Claire asked.

  “In the purse lying on the floor.”

  “The one inside the outline of the body?”

  “Yes. The strap was over her shoulder. The purse must have slipped under her as she fell.”

  “She may have been trying to protect the cross,” Claire said.

  “Maybe,” Kearns replied.

  Claire wondered if Isabel had been planning to bring the cross to her at the center. She hesitated to ask the next question. “Was the document inside the cross?”

  “No.” The Lieutenant turned the bag upside down to show her the hollow in the bottom of the cross. There was room for a document, but the space was empty.

  Her disappointment was balanced by the excitement of the hand under the floor. For the police that investigation was just beginning, but in her mind the two finds were linked. “It’s possible that the document Isabel found belonged to this body,” she said.

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Kearns replied. “We don’t have a document and we don’t have a body. All we have is the skeleton of a hand.”

  Claire knew she was about to be dismissed. The lieutenant extended his hand. “Thank you for your help,” he said. “We’ll call you.”

  “Please,” Claire said.

  Kearns asked Romero to escort Claire to her vehicle. They walked through the living room and back outside. The Santos brothers had gone to the far side of the house and were leaning against a truck talking to an elderly woman. Claire wanted to tell them about the hand beneath the floor, but that wasn’t her job.

  “Thanks for your help,” Romero said, echoing his boss. He opened the door of her truck for her.

  “Let me know what develops, please,” she said.

  “We will.”

  Chapter Five

  CLAIRE DROVE DOWN CALLE LUNA and reversed her path to Camino del Pueblo. From here she could see that the clouds on the West Mesa had darkened and thickened. Although they appeared to be heavy and pregnant with rain, she doubted it would come so soon. June was the waiting season, not the rainy season. She headed north, turned right, and got on the interstate again, relieved that the rush hour was over and traffic was relatively light. She felt too drained to deal with heavy traffic. She debated whether to go home but decided to return to her office, replay Isabel’s message, and think about all that had transpired.

  By the time she parked and went into the center, anyone who had been there during office hours had gone home. Her office was dark and, on the surface, exactly as she had left it at 11 a.m. She turned on the light and checked the caller ID screen. Isabel had called at one p.m. and the number she called from was on the screen. She compared it to the numbers she had written down and found it to be the one listed for Chuy in the phone book. Isabel had said her brother was named Jesus and Chuy could be a nickname for Jesus. Before replaying Isabel’s message, she turned off the light to sit in darkness. In Claire’s experience dimming one sense heightened the others. Listening in the dark could make hearing more acute, but she heard nothing in Isabel’s voice that she hadn’t heard earlier. Isabel sounded eager but not anxious or frightened or threatened. She didn’t mention the purse, or the document, or the cross.

  As Claire played the message over and over in the darkness, Isabel assumed the hallucinatory vividness of a dream. Claire could almost smell the fragrance of her skin and hear the rustle of her skirt. She saw the platform shoes, the red purse, the golden butterfly embroidered on the T-shirt. She had a mother’s sense that she should have kept Isabel from danger and couldn’t stand being in her office another minute. But before she left: she turned on the light and checked the drawer in her desk where she had put the original of Isabel’s note. It was still locked. The note was in place. The copy was in the hands of the police. Even so, Claire made another copy and took it home, locking the original back in the drawer.

  When she finally fell asleep that night she saw red and gray in her dreams: a red skirt, a skeletal hand, a gray cross, the dancing flames of an auto-de-fé. In the morning she found a sage stick and took it to work. She was sitting at her desk with the fragrant sage in her hand when Celia walked into the office.

  “You look exhausted,” Celia said.

  “I am.”

  Celia took the sage stick from Claire and sniffed it. “What are you planning to do with this?”

  “I’d like to burn it to exorcise the spirit of Isabel Santos from my office.”

  “I heard about her on the news this morning. The newscaster said she walked in on a robbery at her home.”

  “The house is a wreck,” Claire replied.

  Celia stopped her examination of the sage stick. “You saw it?”

  “Isabel left a message on my voice mail that she wanted to talk to me. I went to her house on my way back from Santa Fe. The Sheriff’s Department was all over the place. They let me in and I directed them to the loose brick where the cross must have been. A detective started digging and the skeleton of a hand appeared in the sand.”

  “Does that mean there’s a body connected to the document?”

  “I don’t know if there is a body. Maybe it’s only a hand. The investigation commander called in the OMI.”

  “Was the document found?”

  “It hadn’t been when I was there,” Claire said. “They found the cross but the document wasn’t inside. The house was such a wreck I hate to think about the shape it would be in if it was in the house.”

  “If,” echoed Celia.

  “If,” repeated Claire.

  Celia put the sage stick back on the desk. “If you burn this it will set off an alarm and alert Harrison. You don’t want to tell him about Isabel Santos do you?”

  “No. He’ll think everything I touch here turns to murder.”

  “Was she a positive spirit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not keep her spirit around? Maybe you’ll learn something from it.”

  “Maybe,” Claire said.

  Celia said she had to be at a meeting and left. This was the first time since they’d met that Claire hadn’t noticed what Celia wore.

  ******

  She expected Lieutenant Kearns to get in touch with her but it was Detective Romero who called that afternoon. He said he wanted to meet her in her office as soon as possible. They made an appointment for early the following morning; she didn’t want her coworkers or Harrison to see a policeman in her office.

  When the detective arrived at 7 a.m. Claire was waiting at the Information Desk to let him in. Romero’s tough looks reminded Claire that the boys who got in trouble when she was in high school often became cops later on, that there was a connection between the criminal and the cop, the suspect and the prosecutor, the hunted and the hunter.

  “Thanks for meeting me, ma’am,” he said.

  It was only recently that Claire started being called ma’am, and she was amused by it. “You’re welcome,” she replied.

  “This is such a beautiful building,” Romero said looking up at the rows of vigas in the high ceiling of the great hall. “I took a few courses here after I got out of high school, but then I got married, had a kid, got a job. I used to think I’d like to be an archaeologist.”

  “You looked like one when you were searching in the sand.”

  “I went on a few digs, and I enjoyed it. Maybe I’ll come back someday, finish up after I retire.”

  He was young to be thinking about retirement, but people with government jobs were people who were willing to put their futures on hold. The death of Isabel Sant
os made Claire doubt the wisdom of putting anything on hold. She walked Romero down the hall to her office, flipped on the light switch and chased the resident spirit away.

  “Have you established what killed Isabel?” she asked.

  “Apparently she tripped and fell—or was pushed—against a table. Her neck landed hard on the edge and ruptured an artery. That can happen if you hit it just right. The force of the fall and the state of the house indicate there was a struggle. A gang member named Tony Atencio who lives in the neighborhood and has been in trouble before was seen running down the ditch that afternoon. We brought him in for questioning. Can you tell me what time Isabel called you?”

  Claire brought up that information on her caller ID screen and showed Romero that it came in at one p.m. She accessed the message for him and said, “Isabel doesn’t sound distraught to me.”

  “She doesn’t,” Romero agreed.

  “Do you know what time she was killed?”

  “Chuy Santos called 911 at three-thirty to say he’d found the body. All we can say for sure is that she died sometime between one and three-thirty. According to the phone records you were the last person she called that day.”

  “Did you find the document anywhere?”

  “No.”

  “Isabel must have told somebody else about it. I know she talked to May Brennan at the Bernalillo Historical Society; it was May who referred her to me. It’s possible she gave Isabel some other names.”

  “We’ll check it out,” Detective Romero said. “We need the original of the words she wrote down for you.”

  Claire unlocked the drawer and handed the paper to him.

  He stared at it. “What is your interpretation of this?”

  “The language is Ladino, an ancient combination of Hebrew, Spanish and Arabic. My translation is ‘Everything is upside–down. The garrote or the fire. Give me the fire. Adonay is my God.’ I’ve shown a copy to an expert here and one in Santa Fe and the consensus is it was written by a Jew who faced the Inquisition in either the New World or the Old.”