“One thing I can tell you,” the investigator said. “This thing burned hot.”
“Heavy accelerants? I can’t smell anything.”
“Right, gasoline or diesel you usually can. But damned if I can prove it yet, maybe with the lab work . . . I’d say yes, though. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if it wanted to burn. There’s no sign it started in one place and spread. Everything capable of combining with oxygen just went up all at once, whoosh. The cutlery melted, and that’s a lot hotter than your typical house fire.”
The building had been a little two-story apartment house, one up and one down. This wasn’t far off Canyon Road and the strip of galleries and was close to the Acequia Madre, the ancient irrigation canal, which meant it had been fairly expensive. But not close enough to be real adobe, which in Santa Fe meant old and pricey. Brown stucco pseudo-pueblo-Spanish-style originally over frame, like nearly everything in town that stayed on the right side of the building code.
Alice had worked with him before. She was a bit older than he—midthirties—and always looked tired, her blond hair short and disorderly. He liked the way she never let a detail slip by, no matter how hard she had to work at it.
“Santa Fe, where prestige is a mud house on a dirt road,” she quoted. “So it’s not likely an insurance torch. Not enough money here.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t afford this either. When it was still there. It must have gone up like a match head.”
There wasn’t enough left to tell any more details. There was a heavy wetash smell where bits and blackened pieces rested on the scorched concrete pad of the foundation. He blinked again. That smell, and the way the bullets had chewed at the mud brick below the window, flecking bits of adobe into his face. The way his armor had chafed, the fear as he made himself jerk up over the sill and aim the M-4, laying the red dot, the instant when the mouj had stared at him wide-eyed just before the burst tracked across his body in a row of black-red dots and made him dance like a jointed doll . . .
“Eric?” Alice said, jarring him out of the memory.
“Sorry,” he said. “Deep thought.”
She spared him any offensive sympathy and he nodded to her in silent gratitude, still feeling a little shaky. Got to get over this. I can have flashbacks later.
“Let me have the workup when you can,” he said.
Of course, when I was on the rock pile I said I’d deal with it later, when it wouldn’t screw the mission. This is later, I suppose.
“I’ll zap it to your notepad,” Alice said. “I’ve got to get some more samples now.”
He turned away. Cesar Martinez was talking to the Lopez family, minus the three children who were with some neighbor or relative; the couple were sitting in one of the emergency vans, and someone had given them foam cups of coffee. His own nose twitched at the smell, though what he really wanted was a drink. Or a cigarette. He suppressed both urges and listened to his partner’s gentle voice, calm and sympathetic. He was a hotshot, and he’d go far; he was good at making people want to help him, soothing them, never stepping on what they had to say.
“I was going to go back in. They were gone, and I was going to go back in and then—”
Cesar made a sympathetic noise. “You were having dinner when the man forced you out of the house?”
“Takeout Chinese, from Chow’s,” the wife said. Her husband took up the thread:
“And this man came in. He had a gun . . . a gun like a shotgun, but smaller, like a pistol,” Anthony Lopez said. “It still looked pretty damn big. So was he.”
He chuckled, and Salvador’s opinion of him went up. It was never easy for civilians when reality crashed into what they thought had been their lives.
“How could you tell it was a shotgun?”
“Two barrels. Looked like tunnels.”
“And the man?”
“He was older than me—fifty, sixty, gray hair cut short, but he was moving fast. He had blue eyes, sort of tanned skin but you could tell he was pink?”
“Anglo, but weathered?”
“Right. And he was dressed all in black, black leather. And he shouted at us, just Go, go, go, get out, run, keep running. We did.”
“Exactly the right thing to do,” Cesar said.
“But I was going to go back. Then it burned . . .” he whispered. “If I had—”
You’d be dead, Salvador thought. On the other hand, if the guy hadn’t run you all out, you’d all be dead. There’s something screwy here. Arsonists don’t care who gets hurt and they certainly don’t risk getting made to warn people.
Mrs. Lopez spoke again. “There was a younger man outside, when we ran out. He didn’t do anything. He just stood there, with his hands in the air, almost like he was high or something. And there was a, a van or a truck over there.”
She pointed to the wall of the compound across the street from what had been her house. Salvador made a note to see if they could get tire tracks.
“When we were across the street the younger man sort of, oh, collapsed. The older man with the gun, the one in black, helped him over to the van, not carrying him but nearly, sort of dragging him and putting him in the backseat. Then they drove off.”
Cesar tapped at his notepad and called up the face-sketch program.
“The younger man looked like this?” he began, and patiently ran them through the process of adjustment.
Salvador stared, fascinated as always, watching the image shift, slowly morphing and changing and then switching into something that only an expert could tell from a photograph of a living person. He knew that in the old days you’d had to use a sketch artist for this, but now it was automatic. It would even check the final result against the databases with a face-recognition subsystem. When they’d given all the help they could, Cesar went on:
“Thank you, thank you both. We may have to talk to you again later.”
He blew out a sigh and turned and leaned back against the end of the van, looking at the notepad in his hand. Salvador prompted him:
“Their stories were consistent?”
“Yeah, jefe. Right from the start, it wasn’t just listening to each other and editing the memory.”
He touched the screen. “Okay, sequence: When Mrs. Lopez got home with the kids, around five, Ellen Tarnowski’s car, she’s the upper-floor tenant, was there. Mr. Lopez, the husband, got home a little later and noticed it too. Because she’s usually not back from work by then.”
“They friends with her?”
“They know her to talk to, just in passing. Said she was nice, but they didn’t have much in common.”
The senior detective grunted and looked at his notepad, tapping for information; Mr. and Mrs. Lopez were a midlevel state government functionary and a dental hygienist respectively. Ellen Tarnowski . . .
Works at Hans & Demarcio Galleries. Okay, artsy. God knows we’ve got enough of them around here.
There were three-hundred-odd galleries in Santa Fe, plus every other diner and taco joint had original artwork on the walls and on sale. Half the waiters and checkout clerks in town were aspiring artists of one sort or another too, like the would-be actors in L.A. She looked out at him, a picture from some website or maybe the DMV: blond, midtwenties, full red lips, short straight nose, high cheekbones, wide blue eyes. Something in those eyes too, an odd look. Kind of haunted. The figure below . . .
“Jesus.”
“Just what I said. Anyway, she comes downstairs just after Mr. Lopez arrives. Mrs. Lopez looks out the kitchen window and notices her because she’s wearing—”
He checked his notes again.
“—a white silk sheath dress and a wrap. She knew it was Tarnowski’s best fancy-occasion dress from a chat they’d had months ago. Another woman was with her. About Tarnowski’s age, but shorter, slim, olive complexion or a tan, long dark hair, dark eyes . . .”
“Really going to stand out in this town.”
“Sí, though if she’s going around with la Tarnowski s
he will! I got a composite on her too, but it’s not as definite. Mrs. Lopez said her clothes looked really expensive, and she was wearing a tanzanite necklace.”
“What the fuck’s tanzanite?”
The other thing we have hundreds of is jewelry stores.
“Like sapphire, but expensive. Here’s what she looked like.”
He showed a picture. The face was triangular, smiling slightly, framed by long straight black hair. Attractive too, but . . .
Reminds me of that mink I handled once. Pretty, and it bit like a bastard. Took three stitches and a tetanus shot.
“I don’t think she’s Latina, somehow,” he said aloud, as his fingers caressed the slight scar at the base of his right thumb.
“Yeah, me too, but I can’t put my finger on why. Incidentally, let’s do a side-by-side with the composite on the man they saw standing still outside, when the old goatsucker with the gun ran them out past him. The one he shoved into the backseat later.”
Salvador’s eyebrows went up as the pictures appeared together. “Are they sure that’s not the same person? It’s an easy mistake to make, in the dark, with the right clothes.”
His partner nodded; it was, surprisingly so under some circumstances.
“Looks a lot like Dark Mystery Woman, eh? But it was a guy, very certainly. Wearing a dark zippered jacket open with a tee underneath. Mrs. Lopez said he looked real fit. Not bulked up but someone who worked out a lot. She got a better look at him than at the woman; they went right by. Nothing from the databases on either of them, by the way, but look at this.”
His fingers moved on the screen, and the two images slid until they were superimposed. Then he tapped a function box.
“Okay, the little machine thinks they’re relatives,” Salvador said. “I could have figured that out.”
“But could you have said it was a ninety-three percent chance?”
“Sure. I just say: It’s a ninety-three percent chance. Or in old-fashioned human language, certainemente. Okay, back up to what Mystery Woman was doing earlier. She and Tarnowski get in Tarnowski’s car and drive off around five thirty, a few minutes earlier?”
“Mystery Woman was driving. Tarnowski looked shaky.” Cesar consulted his notes. “Yeah, Mrs. Lopez said Tarnowski looked like she was going to fall over, maybe sick, and the other one helped her into the car.”
“That’s two people who have to be helped into cars. This smells.”
“And then two and a half hours later someone runs in waving a sawed-off shotgun, while Mystery Woman’s brother or cousin or whatever was standing outside ignoring everything and talking to himself in a strange language—”
“Strange language?”
“They just heard a few words. Not English, not Spanish, and not anything they recognized. He talks in the strange language, falls, goatsucker-withthe-gun gives him a hand, they drive off, and then the place just happens to burn down a few minutes later.”
Salvador sighed and turned up the collar of his coat; it was dark, and cold.
“I need a drink. But get an APB out on Ellen Tarnowski and flag her name with municipal services and the hospitals statewide. Also the old gringo with the sawed-off shotgun, use the face-recognition protocol for surveillance cameras. We can get him on a reckless endangerment charge, trespassing, uttering threats, suspicion of arson, bad breath, whatever.”
“Sí, and littering. The Mystery Woman and the Mystery Man too?”
“Yeah, why not? Let them all do a perp walk and we can apologize later.”
He sat down and began doggedly prodding at the screen. First thing tomorrow he’d start tracing Tarnowski’s life. So far nobody had died, and he’d like to keep it that way. The employer was a good first place.
II
ONE OF THE JOYS OF A POLICEMAN’S LIFE, ERIC SALVADOR THOUGHT THE next day, wishing he’d taken more Tylenol with his breakfast. You meet all kinds of people. Most of them hate you. Asi es la vida. At least she’s not likely to try and blow me up with a fertilizer bomb.
Giselle Demarcio was in her fifties, with a taut, dry, ageless appearance and a slight East Coast accent, dressed in a mildly funky Santa Fe look, silver jewelry and a blouse and flounced skirt.
Sort of a fashionista version of what my great-grandmother wore around the house, Salvador thought cynically; his family, the Spanish part at least, had been in Santa Fe since the seventeenth century. Everything old gets new if you wait long enough. Rich Anglos get off the bus and live in pimped-up adobes and you end up in a double-wide on Airport Road.
She had a white mark on her finger where a wedding ring would go, and she fit in perfectly with the airy white-on-white decor of Hans & Demarcio Galleries. He was not, he noticed, being invited back to her office; this was a semipublic reception room. The art on the walls was something he could understand, at least—actual pictures of actual things. Not the cowboy-pueblo-Western art a lot of the places on Canyon Road had either, mostly older-looking stuff. There was a very faint odor of woodsmoke from a piñon fire crackling in a kiva fireplace. The whole thing screamed money. It had been a very long time since Canyon Road attracted artists because the rents were low.
Santa Fe, the town where ten thousand people can buy the State and fifty thousand can’t afford lunch, he thought.
“Would you like some coffee, Detective?” Demarcio said.
Wait a minute, Salvador thought. She’s not really hostile. She’s scared for some reason. Not of me, but scared silly and hiding it well.
“Thank you,” he said, and took the cup. “That’s nice.”
It was excellent coffee, especially compared to what he drank at home or at the station, with a rich, dark, nutty taste. He enjoyed it, and waited. Most people couldn’t stand silence. It wore on their nerves and eventually they blurted out something to fill it. Salvador had learned patience and silence in a very hard school.
“I’m worried about Ellen,” the older woman said suddenly.
The detective made a sympathetic noise. “Ms. Tarnowski worked for you?” he said.
“Works. She’s my assistant even if she didn’t show up this morning; that’s understandable with the fire and all. Not a secretary, she’s an art history graduate from NYU and I was bringing her in on our acquisitions side. I’m . . . she’s a sweet kid, but she’s gotten mixed up in something, hasn’t she?”
“You tell me, Ms. Demarcio,” Salvador said.
“I never liked that boyfriend of hers. She met him playing tennis at the country club about a year ago and they, well, it was a whirlwind thing. He gave me this creepy feeling. And then his sister showed up—”
Salvador blinked. The sister . . . the woman who was with Tarnowski? “Boyfriend?” he asked.
“Adrian Brézé.”
“Ah,” Salvador said.
As he spoke he tapped the name into his notepad’s virtual keyboard and hit the rather specialized search function. He’d long ago mastered the trick of reading a screen and paying attention to someone at the same time.
“Now, that’s interesting. Do you have a picture of him?”
It was interesting because Salvador didn’t have a picture; or much of anything else. Usually these days you drowned in data on anyone. There was nothing here but bare bones: a social security number, a passport number, and an address way, way out west of town. Just out of Santa Fe County, in fact. A quick Google Earth flick showed a big house on a low mountain or big hill, right in the foothills of the Sangres, nothing else for miles.
Not even a passport picture to go with the number. Someone likes his privacy, he thought, looking at the address. Then: Hey, could you . . . nah, nobody can evade the Web.
Demarcio hesitated, then pulled a framed picture out of a drawer. The glass was cracked, as if someone had thrown it at a wall.
“She told me she was going to break up with him. Couldn’t take the emotional distance and lies anymore. Then she didn’t show up to work yesterday.”
“So she’s missing the day before the fire
,” Salvador said, looking at the picture. “She didn’t call in? Just nothing?”
“Nothing. That’s not like her. She’s the most reliable person who’s ever worked for me.”
The photo beneath the cracked glass showed a youngish man, though on second thought perhaps Salvador’s own age. Or maybe somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Dark hair worn a little longer than was fashionable these days, a vaguely Mediterranean-looking face. Handsome, perhaps a little too much so.
Androgynous, that’s the word. But there’s something dangerous looking about him too.
“He’s . . .” Demarcio frowned. “You know, I met him a dozen times and I listened to her talk about him a lot and I really can’t tell you much. He’s wealthy . . . very wealthy, I think. Some sort of old money, but that’s an impression, not knowledge. He wouldn’t tell Ellen anything about that either, just some vague bullshit about ‘investments.’ American born, but he has a slight accent, French I think, which would fit with the name. I know he speaks French and Italian and Spanish . . . and yes, German too. I couldn’t tell you where his money comes from, or where he went to university, or, well, anything.”
Salvador looked at the photo. Unobtrusively, he brought up the composite picture on the notepad. The resemblance to the reconstruction of the man the Lopez family had seen standing motionless outside their house just before the fire was unmistakable. He scanned the picture into the notepad, and the program came up with a solid positive when it did its comparison.
“Would you say this is Adrian Brézé?” he said and showed her the screen.
“Absolutely,” she said.
“And this is his sister?” he said, changing to the composite of the woman the Lopezes had seen with Ellen Tarnowski earlier.
“Well . . .” The picture wasn’t quite as definite; they’d only glimpsed the face in passing and through a window. “Yes, I’d say so. It’s a striking resemblance, isn’t it? Like twins, only they’d have to be fraternal.”
Down These Strange Streets Page 15
