by Sarah Lovett
Sylvia turned to Matt. "I'd like to talk to the firefighter who found the body."
Matt closed his eyes, stretched, then nodded. "I'm going to be a while. If I don't catch up with you, I'll call you at noon. You know your way to the staging area?"
"I'll find it." Sylvia moved with more energy now. She cocked a finger at Gausser. "About those canned tomatoes, Hansi. . . dream on."
DAYS EARLIER, WHEN Santa Fe National Forest officials set up a staging area outside the village of La Cueva, the Dark Canyon fire had been an unknown force. During the last ten hours, the fire had peaked. Now, officials gambled it would burn itself out.
When Sylvia turned off the access road, she saw buses, trailers, and emergency vehicles parked in a meadow that was smaller than a football field. This was where dispatchers communicated with the world, journalists prowled for scoops, and the all-important firefighters slept, ate, and got themselves patched up. At the moment, a dozen people, some in yellow-and-green firefighter uniforms, waited while a helicopter touched down.
Sylvia parked her Volvo next to a school bus. Directly ahead was a trailer with a sign: U.S.F.S. COMMUNICATIONS. She knocked, then entered. Communication equipment lined one wall and maps and aerial charts covered most of another. A man wearing headphones bared one ear.
She said, "I'm looking for the firefighter who found—"
"In first aid." He replaced his headphone. "That big RV next door. You better hurry. They're gonna ship him back to Santa Fe."
Sylvia stepped through the trailer door and collided with a petite, copper-haired woman dressed in a tailored tan shirt and a trim black skirt, silver belt buckle polished to a sheen: Rosie Sanchez, lead investigator at the Penitentiary of New Mexico.
"Hey!" Sylvia's eyes opened in surprise. The helicopter had taken off again and the noise overhead was deafening.
Rosie held her arms wide, and the two friends hugged.
Sylvia mouthed, "What are you doing here?"
As the helicopter moved out of range, Rosie shouted, "I've got inmates on furlough, fighting the fire. What are you doing here?"
"I need to talk to the firefighter—"
"—who found the body." Abruptly, Rosie lowered her voice. "Benji Muñoz y Concha."
"He's an inmate?" Sylvia knew that any inquiry related to an inmate on furlough was part of the pen investigator's bailiwick.
"One of my best boys." Rosie's expression was quizzical.
"Let's go see your inmate, and I'll fill you in."
Benji Muñoz y Concha wore the vacant expression, the glassy eyes, of a zombie in a B horror movie. His wiry body seemed fragile, his normally dusky skin was pale. He was huddled on one of four cots.
Rosie said, "Benji? This is a good friend of mine."
Sylvia stood next to the cot and spoke softly. "How are you doing, Benji? Can you talk for a minute?"
No reaction. Benji stared through Sylvia. When she looked closely, she saw that the firefighter's pupils were moving, involuntarily tracking some invisible current of air or mind.
His eyes were a rich sable with a marbling of chestnut highlights. Spanish and Anglo blood had been mixed somewhere in the not-so-distant past with Pueblo. The genetic consequence was regal: high cheekbones, straight nose, chiseled chin.
Sylvia sat on the edge of the bed. "I hear it was rough out there last night."
Silence.
Sylvia snapped her fingers suddenly.
Benji blinked, and a sharp spurt of sound issued from his mouth. It wasn't English—and Sylvia didn't think it was a Pueblo language—but it had the rhythm of some exotic speech. It reminded Sylvia of a client who, in times of stress, had reverted to the frenzy of speaking in tongues.
Sylvia turned to Rosie. "How long has he been like this?"
"When I got here, he was sitting up and talking, but it was mostly that kind of speech. The E.M.T.s brought him in early this morning; they said he made sense one minute but not the next. There's an M.D. on call. He examined Benji."
"Where is everybody now?"
"They went out with the helicopter. Two firefighters were injured in Dark Canyon."
Sylvia gazed at Benji. Malingering was a common problem with inmates, and some of them were amazingly adept at faking physical and/or emotional trauma. Evaluating health professionals had to rely on corroborating or discrediting data.
She stood and tipped her head toward Rosie. "You know Benji. . . is he faking?"
Rosie shook her head vehemently. "Benji's a firefighter—it's part of his heritage, it's who he is. He takes great pride in his skills, in his ability to face fire. His father was a firefighter. And his grandfather before him." She waved a hand at the inmate. "Benji has nothing to gain by faking this—trance. In fact, when he's himself again, I believe he'll feel as if he lost face today."
Sylvia nodded. "Okay. Let's assume he's traumatized. Without a neurological exam, the doc can't completely rule out seizures or head injury, but I doubt the Department of Corrections wants to shell out four hundred bucks for a scan?"
"You guess right." Rosie handed Sylvia a long form that a Dr. Cooper had filled out; it was a report on Muñoz y Concha. Sketchy, but still interesting. According to the doctor, the firefighter had shown no sign of head or neck trauma. Dr. Cooper noted that the most disturbing symptom was Benji's amnesia: "Patient has no memory of discovering a body."
At the top of the page, someone, probably Cooper, had scribbled "?mental? B R psychosis?? dissociative amnesia?"
Sylvia stared at the report and guessed the initials "B R" stood for "brief reactive." She considered both diagnoses. Brief reactive psychosis was short-term, sudden psychosis, in which there would be severe disturbances in mental functioning, i.e., the inability to tell reality from fantasy. Brief reactive psychosis might be induced by a heavy-duty stressor—say, for instance, the discovery of a mutilated and burning body. In contrast, dissociative amnesia was contained memory loss or disturbance caused by a trauma or by traumatic events. Simply, it was a change of consciousness—a disconnection between an individual and some part of himself or his environment.
She glanced at Rosie. "Would you say Benji's been catatonic for thirty minutes? An hour?"
"A half hour or less."
"No one was with him on the hill when he found Randall?"
Rosie shook her head. "Benji was out there for hours, wandering around." She frowned and worry altered her features. "You heard him just now."
"Has he said anything you could understand?"
Rosie pursed her lips. "When I first got here, he blurted out something about an owl of death . . . and something evil stalking the city."
"What, like Godzilla?" Sylvia massaged the muscles of her neck. "Tell me about Mr. Muñoz y Concha."
The women moved to a small table in a corner of the RV and sat down. Rosie leaned back against the hard wall. Usually in her job she was dealing with inmates who overdosed on pills, crack, or heroin, or inmates who shanked other inmates, or inmates who shanked staff, or correctional officers who used excessive force. There was nothing supernatural about the system—it nurtured a very down-to-earth breed of monster. Normally she didn't have to deal with witches and death owls.
"Rosita." Sylvia interrupted her thoughts.
"Ummmm?"
"How old is Benji?"
"Twenty-two."
"And he's in for—?"
"He's in the murf."
Sylvia knew that the Minimum Restrict Facility housed a wide variety of inmates—everything from first-time nonviolent offenders to murderers awaiting parole or unconditional release.
Rosie said, "Benji got popped for working with this hot-car ring in Las Cruces. They just zip them across the border. He swears he didn't know about the ring—got suckered in."
"And you believe him?"
Rosie turned to study Benji; the inmate didn't move a muscle. She said, "No. Not a word." She ran a hand through wild curls and smiled. "But I like him, and I want him to make it. Why are you so interes
ted? You think he saw something last night? You think he saw Randall's killer?"
"I think he saw something that scared him out of his wits." Sylvia narrowed her eyes and leaned forward, chin propped on her knuckles, elbows braced on the table. "Tell me about his family background."
"He pretty much lives in his own world. His parents are dead. I think his mother was Pueblo, and his father was Spanish and Anglo. . . old-world, a healer."
"So he grew up with more than one reality?" Sylvia nodded encouragingly. So far, Benji sounded normal by New Mexico's multicultural standards.
Rosie weighed her next words. "I've known him now for more than a year. He sees things. He feels things before they happen."
Sylvia leaned forward until the edge of the table pressed against her abdomen. "You're saying he's psychic?"
Rosie shrugged. "I'm saying he thinks he's psychic."
"I'm not big on psychics." Sylvia shrugged, then smiled. With one finger she had traced a series of invisible stars on the tabletop. "They're my competition." She eased back and turned to watch the prostrate form of Benji Muñoz y Concha. She had read about susto—the frightened state that came with bewitchment. Many people had ways of expressing a similar idea. She thought of "ghost sickness." Some Southern Plains Indian tribes believed that the ghost of someone recently dead needs to haunt the living. And there was Rosie's grandmother-in-law, Abuelita Sanchez, who was clever, witty, a devout Catholic, and who believed in evil as a force of nature. Abuelita lived in a world already crowded with brujos, spirits, demons and their curses—el mal ojo, the evil eye. The woman made regular visits to a curandera—a healer whose seventeenth-century ancestors had brought their traditional practices from Spain to Nuevo Mexico. Sylvia knew Rosie wouldn't think of trying to dissuade her husband Ray's grandmother from her beliefs—Abuelita would give her the evil eye.
Rosie stood slowly and walked back to the cot where Benji lay curled in a ball. "Look at this."
When Sylvia was standing by Rosie's side, she saw what her friend had noticed: a long, deep scrape ran the length of Benji's right forearm. She said, "That wasn't on the medical report."
Rosie murmured, "It's almost like Benji's haunted."
Sylvia said, "He is."
CHAPTER SIX
BRIGHTLY COLORED FOOD booths lined Santa Fe's downtown streets, and Sylvia had to dodge tourists and locals who lined up for burritos and Indian fry-bread on their lunch hour. A summer craft show overflowed the plaza. Costumed mariachi musicians filled a makeshift plywood stage, and traditional marriage songs blared from loudspeakers. On the brick street, two clown-faced jugglers on Rollerblades tossed water balloons. When a balloon splatted on the ground, wide-eyed children in the audience shrieked with pleasure. Sylvia found herself laughing out loud, and one of the painted jugglers winked a pie-eye as she passed by. Just forty-five minutes earlier, she had left the fire staging area, Benji Muñoz y Concha, and Rosie Sanchez.
But the city felt like a completely different world.
Sylvia stepped up to a red-and-white-flagged booth that advertised lamb stew and Navajo tacos. A woman with skin the color of chestnuts and eyes as soft as brown velvet took her order. Sylvia paid two dollars for a huge taco. It was hot and spicy, and she finished it as she walked the short blocks to the office.
It was noon; time for Kevin the Terrible.
"SHEE-IT." KEVIN CHASE mouthed the profanity, and then tried to hide it behind a smile. "People don't like it when a guy like Anthony Randall gets away with rape and sodomy and whatnot." He glanced around Sylvia's office, knees jiggling. His eyes never settled: not on the white walls decorated simply with prints by local artists, not on the Taos-style couch, not on the heavy oak desk, and not—God forbid—on another human being.
Sylvia took a deep breath and tried to focus. The respite she'd gained on the plaza was gone. She was completely unsettled; her thoughts were all over the place. Fatigue threatened to overwhelm her senses. Her injured ribs ached.
She tried to ignore the fact that Matt had promised to call. She missed him. Anxiety accompanied her feelings of vulnerability. She wanted to drive straight home, fall into bed, and pull the covers over her head.
Instead, she faced her client, and reminded herself that she had ordered him to be here today or else.
A nineteen-year-old probationee. A petty thief about to graduate to hard-time. Cocksure and kid-stupid. Pissed off. Not scared enough. Not a clue. In her court-centered practice, Sylvia saw ten "Kevins" each month. Maybe one out of a hundred ended up with a real life.
Chase adjusted the 49ers cap on his head, tugged it down over his eyes. "See, that's why the dude was burned up and whatnot."
Sylvia groaned inwardly. The New Mexican wouldn't carry the story on Randall's murder until tomorrow's morning edition. But local radio and television stations had already run sound bites and footage. Kevin's feedback was just the beginning. Her thoughts were interrupted by a single sharp knock.
Sylvia stood, opened the door a crack, and found herself gazing at Kevin's legal guardian, Jackie Madden. The woman spoke softly. "I just wanted to make sure Kevin got here, so I drove him myself. Can I speak with you?"
Sylvia turned to Kevin and said, "Would you give us a minute?" When he nodded, she joined the other woman in the hall.
Jackie Madden had been appointed Kevin's guardian by California courts after his parents were killed in a commuter plane crash four years earlier. She had been the Chase family's neighbor and Kevin's church counselor. Madden was young—in her mid-twenties—but she was responsible.
Jackie kept her voice low and urgent. "Please, you can't just take away Kevin's probation when he's cooperating." The woman was plain, sandy blonde and freckled. Her rangy body projected only nonsexual energy. Her hands were big for her arms, and her fingernails were manicured. Phlegmatic and languid, she was the motor opposite of Kevin. However controlled, her passion came through. And real distress altered her coarse features. "Kevin made a mistake, we don't argue that. But he needs another chance."
Jackie Madden knew what happened to kids who took a bad turn. As a clerical employee of the Department of Public Safety's state police, she spent her days entering data into the computerized National Crime Information Center, N.C.I.C. Her computer screen was filled with details of crimes committed by known criminals in every state—serial murderers, kidnappers, rapists. And most of those offenders had started their Criminal careers when they were adolescents. Like Kevin Chase.
Sylvia said, "That's not my decision. You both know, as part of the contractual agreements Kevin made with the courts, his probation officer is notified when he misses a session. I spoke with Frankie Reyes yesterday afternoon when Kevin didn't show up. This may affect his probation. That's all I can tell you."
"But he did call—" Jackie Madden cut her protest short and nodded her resignation. "I'll wait for him in the lobby."
When Sylvia was seated across from Kevin again, he said, "What did she want?"
"Jackie's concerned that your probation will be revoked. I don't know what your probation officer will decide, but you and I may need to process that possibility."
"I got here, didn't I?"
"No bullshit, Kevin." Sylvia's dark eyes flashed. "You're facing prison time. Is that getting through to your brain?"
"Yes, ma'am."
He was a well-fed calf. Moderately intelligent, an emotional runt, passive-aggressive. When he talked, his hands moved constantly, drawing pictures in the air. When he was silent, his fingers still fluttered, drummed, or curled into fists. A scar ran from his left elbow to his wrist; he said it was a memento of a motorcycle accident. His shoulder-length reddish hair was neatly layered and framed round features. Translucent blue eyes peered restlessly from a pink face marred by adolescent acne.
For an uncomfortable moment, an inner voice warned Sylvia she was missing signals. But unless Kevin Chase was an obvious danger to himself or someone else, Sylvia's job was to present the facts to Probation and Parole.
Kevin blurted out, "I just wanted to say it, you know, I'm sorry for missing and whatnot." Although he curled his lips into a smile, he did not relax his grip on the arms of the oversize chair. "What was I supposed to do?"
"Get here."
"Oh."
Ten minutes before the hour. It was time to end the session.
In the outer office, she watched as Jackie Madden ushered Kevin Chase toward the stairs. She was struck by their odd symbiotic connection.
When Sylvia was alone, she dialed Matt at the Department of Public Safety. The phone rang six times before someone answered. She didn't recognize the voice: "Matt's out, but try his pager."
Sylvia scanned the appointment book. Her afternoon was clear; she had already canceled a three-hour evaluation session. Her five o'clock client had canceled himself the previous afternoon when he was arrested on a parole violation.
She made the only intelligent decision: get out of the office and call Matt from her house. She notified her service that she had closed shop for the day. A stack of papers—psych tests that she needed to score—went into her briefcase, along with a paperback of Patrick O'Brian's Desolation Island, the fifth volume in a series she enjoyed for its heroes—a scrungy naturalist and a lusty sea captain.
She locked the office door and took the stairs of the Forensic Evaluation Unit two at a time. The courtyard of the Diego Building was filled with apricot trees, thick green cornstalks, cosmos in rainbow colors, and petunias. Water gurgled from a stone Spanish-style fountain in the courtyard's center, then flowed through narrow acequias, water channels, that fed the garden. The soft sound was refreshing. A quick breeze stirred the residual tang of smoke, which mingled with the Russian olive tree's scent like that of fresh-cut lemons.