He kept just under the fifty-five-mph speed limit as the flat road slowly made its way into the canyon of the Rio Grande. He passed the apple and apricot orchards of Velarde, Embudo, and Rinconada. The highway climbed up the canyon, the walls getting steeper. Descansos marked the roadside every few miles, the crosses showing where people had died in car accidents.
On the right side of the highway were mostly tall cliffs and a few rock piles. To the left, the wide river moved along the gorge floor, flowing past cottonwood trees and rough mesas.
Gil caught sight of a man fishing the river far below, throwing a long cast and cranking the reel, pulling the lure with the current. Fishing the Rio Grande in winter was always slow, especially in the canyon stretch. Gil and his dad had fished the Rio Grande only a few times, not liking the noise of the traffic on the highway. His dad had always wanted to be in the most out-of-the-way stretches of water.
During the drive to mountain streams, they would spend long hours debating which casting grip to use or whether bright synthetic fibers were better than natural ones for fly tying. His father, always a lawyer, would never let the argument die. Once there, they would fish in silence, usually with only the bend of the river between them. When Gil was in grade school, he would get bored within an hour or two and then would try to sneak up on his dad, who seemed to spend as much time looking at the scenery as fishing. By the time Gil was in high school, he could stand all afternoon in the water, placing cast after cast with accuracy.
His dad had taught him how to make ties, showing him how to wind and twirl the fur and feathers. But the last time he and his dad had gone fishing together, almost ten years ago, his dad had changed to using premade ties, Royal Wulffs and Humpys. Their white wings made it easier for his dad, with his bad eyesight, to see. His father, who had prided himself on his fly tying, shrugged when he pulled them out of his fly box and said, “Sometimes you do what you have to do to catch fish.” And then he smiled. He died of a heart attack a month later. Gil had been just twenty-three.
The highway popped out of the canyon and Gil took the road toward the town of Taos. The brown plains stretched toward the Truchas Range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where the creases of the peaks were lined with snow.
He parked on the Taos plaza and went into a diner to get a green-chile burrito and a Coke. He ate it outside, sitting on a bench on the plaza, watching the tourists who were there for the ski season. The ski area had only some of its runs open. The winter had started with a good snowfall of five inches in October. But now the temperature most days was about sixty degrees. The tourists who hadn’t come for the skiing loved it. The locals just wanted it to snow.
Gil finished his burrito and tossed the wrapper. He walked back to his car slowly, keeping an eye on a group of local kids as they crossed the plaza, wondering why they weren’t in school. He got into his car and drove past the turnoff for the Taos Pueblo.
One of Gil’s uncles claimed that they were related to Pablo Montoya, who was hanged by the American government after a rebellion at Taos Pueblo. Gil’s aunts said that the story wasn’t true, that Pablo was not related to them but to the Montoya family from the town of Mora. That didn’t stop Gil’s uncle from getting drunk at family parties and telling the children that Pablo Montoya would come get them if they didn’t be quiet. His uncle’s version of the story was that Pablo and his friends were mad at the Anglos who were stealing all the property from the rich Spanish, so Pablo helped lead a revolt in Santa Fe that somehow ended up in Taos. At some point, the new Anglo territorial governor was shot full of arrows and killed—which was true, according to the history books—but Gil’s uncle claimed that Pablo was the one who took the governor’s scalp through the streets of Taos. The Americans eventually hanged Pablo Montoya. Gil’s sister, Elena, had always wanted to take a trip to Taos to look for Pablo’s grave, but that was before their dad had died. Since then, she hadn’t brought it up.
Gil took the highway northwest out of Taos. The hills flattened out to a plain of grasses and sage brush. The only sign of the Taos Gorge out in the prairie two miles away was a thin line of black, invisible unless you knew where to look. One story had it that a bandit being chased by locals galloped his horse right off a cliff and into the gorge, never realizing it was there.
Gil was a quarter of a mile from the gorge before he could see it—a deep canyon in the flat plain with a single bridge over it. He slowed as he approached the Taos Bridge—officially named the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge—as it was clogged with traffic and police.
After he parked his car on the roadside, Gil wrote down the time—one hour and forty minutes, minus ten minutes for the burrito—and the mileage—81.7 miles. He stood with a group of onlookers who had gathered at the side of the road to watch the crime scene. They were going to be disappointed: Melissa’s body wouldn’t be brought up for hours. He watched from a distance as the state police set up a winch on the bridge to pull Melissa’s body up from the river. A news helicopter from one of the Albuquerque television stations flew overhead, causing dust devils in the dirt parking lot. Gil heard someone next to him say, “What a horrible way to kill yourself,” before the rest was lost in the wind from the helicopter.
Gil took out his badge and showed it to the officer directing traffic. The officer nodded and Gil walked onto the bridge. It vibrated as a truck crossed. Susan had lived in Santa Fe for most of her life, but she refused to visit the bridge. He wasn’t sure if it was its height or its reputation that scared her. There had been talk of setting up a permanent winch on the bridge because the police were tired of setting one up every time a car or a body was discarded. In the past three months, two people had committed suicide off it. A few years ago, a Taos teenager had been charged with involuntary manslaughter after pushing his drinking buddy alive into the gorge. Gil wondered if Melissa had been alive when she was thrown off.
Gil stopped to read a plaque. It was a Most Beautiful Steel Bridge Award, given by the American Institute of Steel Construction in 1966, a year after the bridge was completed.
He walked up to a group of police officers by the OMI van and introduced himself. Gil thought he recognized one of the OMI techs. The tech and Gil shook hands and spent a few minutes trying to figure out how they knew each other—whether they were related or knew each other professionally. The OMI tech had decided that they were third cousins when a state police officer, a lieutenant by the look of his uniform, approached Gil and led him away from the group.
“I’m Tim Pollack. Your chief said you were coming.”
Gil knew of Pollack. He was the temporary public information officer for the state police, which meant that he was the liaison with the media until someone was found to replace him. Pollack had intense blue eyes and his head was shaved, a style that state police officers seemed to favor.
Gil looked over the side of the bridge; the Rio Grande was more than two football fields below. Someone had tossed a large road-construction barrel over the side. It was a tiny orange dot on the rocks below.
“Was she alive when she hit?” was Gil’s first question. It was his biggest concern. It was news that he hoped he wouldn’t have to tell. He thought of Maxine Baca as she’d sat in the chief’s office.
“We don’t think so,” Pollack said. “But we haven’t seen the body yet. We do know there aren’t any bullet holes, but the body is so messed up from the fall that it’ll be hard to say what killed her, until the OMI sees her.”
“What’s she dressed like?”
Pollack, snapping his gum, gave him a sidelong glance. “If you’re asking if there was CSP, we don’t think so. All of her clothes, including her underwear, are intact.” CSP stood for criminal sexual penetration. Three big words that meant one thing—rape.
“Any evidence she was doing drugs?” Gil asked.
Pollack said carefully, “Not that we’ve seen.”
“Do we have a time on her death?”
“Nothing scientific, just my own calculation.
It snowed a little yesterday, just a dusting. It started at about ten thirty P.M. Her body still had snow on it when we found her at seven A.M., so she was here before ten thirty P.M. last night.”
“Do you know when she was last seen?”
“Her mom is a mess, but from what we could get out of her over the phone, Melissa left their house about eight P.M. last night. We plan on doing a more in-depth interview with her later today.”
“Was she brought out here in her own car?”
“We don’t think so. A woman who lives near Oñate Park saw Melissa’s car there when she came home at exactly nine ten P.M. She remembers because she was late for some TV show she watches. Anyway, the woman remembers seeing Melissa’s car. She thought maybe it belonged to a hooker or a drug dealer. You know what that park is like. Oh, and we found blood on the back bumper that we think is Melissa’s.”
Gil thought for a minute. “Her body must have been already cold when she was dumped, or the snow on top of her would have completely melted. She was probably killed in Oñate Park around eight thirty P.M. and brought up here in another car.” He watched a sedan full of gawkers slowly roll by.
She hadn’t been alive when she fell. He felt no relief.
It was only one P.M. when Lucy started back to Santa Fe from the santuario. She toyed with the idea of stopping at one of the pueblo casinos, just to see what they were like inside, but she didn’t have enough nerve to play blackjack or enough quarters to play slots. She contented herself with driving too fast and singing along with a 1980s radio station. She was well into an old Journey song when she crested the top of Opera Hill and saw the city of Santa Fe sprawled out below her. There were no high-rises to block the view, only earth-hugging houses that flowed into the curves of the hills. Not obstructing the landscape but being a part of it. None of the usual “we must dominate the world with our massive structures” city-building mentality.
Santa Fe was set up like an amphitheater, with the Plaza as its stage and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as its backdrop. Throughout the years, the city had been built in semicircles around the Plaza, with the older houses closest to it and the newest subdivisions out in the cheap seats. The Plaza, built as the center of the conquistadores’ fort, was still the center of everything Santa Fe.
Lucy drove into town and made her way through traffic. She had two hours to kill before she had to be at work. She decided to get some errands out of the way. She went to the bank to deposit her paycheck and then over to Wal-Mart.
A half hour later, she was on her way to the checkout line to pay for her merchandise—Clearasil and Lysol—when she saw Gerald Trujillo walk in. Lucy dodged into the greeting-card aisle and peeked around the corner. She watched him select a grocery cart.
Gerald was someone she liked, someone she respected. He was also someone she would rather not see. When she and Del had first broken up, she’d done the usual five stages of grief, although in her case it was twenty stages, with most being variations on anger and denial. Her mother had suggested that Lucy keep herself busy—take classes, explore Santa Fe. Like all things in Lucy’s life, she overdid it. She signed up for yoga, rock climbing, gardening, and Spanish. She also signed up for a week-long emergency-medic class. Her main reason for taking the class was purely lust driven: The man teaching it—Gerald Trujillo—was beautiful. She had met him—and ogled quite a bit—when he dropped off a press release at the newspaper announcing the class.
But she had a secondary reason for taking the class: it was held the week she and Del were supposed to have taken a fun-filled trip to L.A. She thought that spending her vacation flirting with her teacher would be better than sitting at home crying over her failed relationship.
But things didn’t go as she’d planned. Somehow, she managed to get herself signed up as a first-responder medic for the Piñon Volunteer Fire Department, where Gerald was a paramedic. Then she found out that Gerald was very married.
Gerald glanced Lucy’s way, and she ducked down the aisle, pretending to be very interested in the sympathy-card selection. She was absentmindedly reading a belated-birthday card when she noticed a boxed Barbie doll perched in the get-well-soon section.
It was a Tropical Scent Barbie, with the smell of exotic flowers built right into her skin. Lucy had the sudden urge to throw a rope around the Barbie’s neck and hang her from a rearview mirror. It could be a new marketing ploy—Tropical Scent Barbie: She’s fun to play with and makes a stylish air freshener!
Lucy picked up the Barbie, tucked it under her arm, and went off in search of the toy section.
She had started returning mis-shelved store items a few months ago. The first time, she saw a carton of milk sitting next to the feminine pads. Her only thought was that the milk would go bad if she didn’t get it back to the refrigerated section. The next time, she found a head of lettuce next to some Oreos; she reasoned that if the milk deserved to go back to its home, so did the lettuce. Last week, she had spent ten minutes trying to figure out where they shelved the lemon juice at Albertsons.
Lucy strolled around—keeping an eye out for Gerald—until she found an aisle of pink boxes from floor to ceiling. There were hundreds of Barbies—even a Pioneer Barbie next to a Native American Barbie. What were the little girls supposed to do with those—reenact the fun of Manifest Destiny?
She was about to put Tropical Scent Barbie on her shelf when she saw Gerald Trujillo turn his shopping cart down the aisle.
“Hi, I thought that was you,” he said. God, he looked great. Bright hazel eyes against dark brown hair. His wife was a lucky woman.
“Hi,” she mumbled back.
“Still playing with dolls?” he said, smiling as he looked at the Barbie box in her hand.
Lucy felt her face color. She had no explanation for what she was doing, so she lied.
“I’m thinking of getting my godchild this.”
He nodded. She steeled herself against the next question, which she knew was coming.
“We haven’t seen you around the fire station lately,” he said, without as much accusation as she would have expected. “What have you been up to?”
“Do you want the truth or a lie?” she asked.
He laughed, enough so that his eyes crinkled up. “Well, I think I already know the truth, so tell me a lie, but make it creative.”
“I think I used the abducted-by-aliens lie last time so this time I’ll go with being in jail.”
“What were the charges?” His smile got wider, showing teeth.
“I didn’t get arrested. I just really wanted a prison tattoo.”
“Look, Lucy,” he said, the smile almost gone, “I know you’re busy, we all are, but you made a commitment to the station. If you plan on volunteering with us, you really need to make time for it in your life. Make it a priority. We haven’t seen you in weeks.”
“I know, I know, I suck.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad, but if you want to keep your skills as a medic, you need to use them.”
Lucy just nodded, her eyes on the floor. God, she hated feeling guilty.
“How about this,” Gerald said. “I’ll be at the station tomorrow at about eight in the morning. Why don’t you stop by and we can go over some training?”
“If you make it ten instead, I’ll be there.” She had never been a morning person.
They murmured their good-byes and Lucy watched him turn down the aisle. She put Tropical Scent Barbie back where she belonged and started to the front of the store.
She was an aisle or two away when she heard exclamations of acknowledgment. She glanced down an aisle. Gerald was hugging a red-headed woman with a small child in her arms. Lucy felt, rather than heard, them giving each other the ritual Northern New Mexico inquiries: asking after each other’s families. Maybe they had been high school sweethearts or their fathers had bowled together. Lucy felt a pang of … something. Envy? She turned back around and headed to the checkout line, clutching her Lysol closer to her chest as it s
tarted to slip. As she stood in line, she noticed that someone had put several packs of gum back in the wrong places. She carefully placed them back where they belonged as she waited in line.
In the parking lot, she unlocked her Toyota Camry and tossed her shopping bag onto the seat. Then she drove to work, not even caring that she was an hour early.
Gil headed back from Taos to Santa Fe, but instead of again following the road that ran along the Rio Grande, he took the highway that went up into the mountains. He noted the mileage and time again, although he already knew that taking the High Road added about ten miles to the trip. Of the two roads leading from Santa Fe to Taos, the High Road is the more famous. When Gil was a uniformed officer working on the Plaza during the summer, he was always giving tourists directions to the High Road, each carload stocked up on cameras and extra film to capture the sweeping views. The road went mostly through Carson National Forest and mountain towns like Placita and Chamisal.
Gil kept a watch out for black ice as the highway climbed, quickly leaving the desert and making its way into ponderosa pine forest. Signs along the road warned drivers to put on tire chains and watch for snow plows. It hadn’t snowed for more than a month, but because of the high elevation, he could see some ice in the shadows on the forest floor. Keeping an eye out for elk, Gil thought about Melissa Baca. Why had the killer driven more than an hour away to get rid of her body? Was he trying to cover up evidence? The damage to the body from a 650-foot fall would make it hard to determine which injuries had been made postmortem and which had been made pre-mortem. But it had been cold last night, which would have helped preserve the body. He would have to check to see what the temperature had been. That would help the OMI determine what time rigor mortis and lividity had set in.
He thought about Oñate Park, where Melissa’s car had been found. The neighbors had finally gotten tired of the drug dealing there and started a high-profile neighborhood watch a few months ago, but it hadn’t stopped the problems. He thought about the drug connection. The Taos Gorge Bridge had been the site of a few drug-related killings. A few years ago two men had thrown an eighteen-year-old boy alive off the bridge because they wanted to steal his car to pay for Christmas presents and drugs. Gil knew that Ron and Melissa had a brother who had died of a heroin overdose and that addictions ran in the family. But Pollack had said that no drugs had been found on Melissa.
The Replacement Child Page 5
