The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller

by Noreen Ayres

  “Leave her alone!” Dave shouted.

  Lizzaraga cranked an arm around Binky’s neck and walked her backward in the water. They rose on what must have been an underwater hump, then rapidly sank lower. She slipped and splashed down. Lizzaraga lost his grip.

  Blam-blam! A cop’s shot, a double-tap. Ray.

  Lizzaraga flew back, caving into the water.

  Madam, sprung crazy and brave with her own hoarse fear, crashed forward into the water, her leash leaping like a snake being dragged to death. Tearing out from behind the tree, Rosellen called, “Noweta! Madam, noweta!”

  David stumbled for Binky and lifted her out of the water. He dragged her to shore, glancing back to see if the hated form would rise again. Izzy did lift his face from the water, hovered there, moaning, and tried to inch forward and away from Madam, who turned sharply in her paddling then to follow Binky.

  I didn’t understand at first when I heard Ray’s voice call out, “Put the gun down, now!”

  “Que mosca te pico? What’s the matter, compadre? I got no problem with you.” It was Julio! The little guy. Now I saw them. Ray was crouched, gun leveled in the direction of the ridge. Julio glided along the ridgetop toward a stand of brush.

  “Stand up and die or lay down and live! Your choice, bud!” Ray said, moving forward now. He spoke in Spanish again, the guy who didn’t know Spanish, enough so I knew he had identified himself as an officer.

  “I’m on him too,” I said.

  Julio called out, “El pito! Lui e una merda!”

  Ray’s flashlight clicked on, the beam cutting across the void. At last Julio’s arms slowly raised. “Don’t shoot!” he cried in a high-pitched voice. We saw the gun fall to the ground.

  David and Binky sat on the porch, she with her red sweater on and he with the blue blanket thrown around his shoulders, repeating “It’s going to be all right.”

  Lizzaraga lay inside, cuffed and quaking from cold and pain and fear. Piled onto his face was a wet T-shirt from Julio. Julio had caught him with a round from a .25, a Saturday-night special like we found in the hand of the Nellie Gail victim. He fired low, and he fired twice because the first one scared him. The projectile skated on the water, losing momentum, bounced, broke bone at the supraorbital, then cut across the nasal bone. It bled like a son-of-a-gun even after Lizzaraga submerged himself in the water.

  Julio also wore cuffs, brought from Ray’s truck. He said he was sick of it all, sick of Izzy and Greg and the whole business. When he saw the struggle in the water he tried to help.

  “You had your hands around a gun, pal. You’re toast,” Ray said, and Julio began to cry. Don’t send me back, he kept saying.

  Ray was relentless. While we waited for deputies and emergency technicians he yelled in their faces, asking for me, about my Does found behind buildings, in culverts, by water tanks, under rocks. But neither one gave an answer. Several times Ray threatened to smack them, Izzy glaring and Julio pleading with his eyes but saying no more.

  THIRTY

  Three weeks after violent events at Oso Lake—that polluted body of water named for a bear though the biggest animal around for many a year had been Madam—I was in my car headed for Camp Pendleton, the marine base at Oceanside.

  Along the freeway shoulders, golden California poppies shook violently in the crosswinds. Inland, the smoky-green leaves of Peruvian pepper trees and a shrub named Texas Rangers broke the stark lines of hills. I passed the yellow signs stamped with silhouettes of a family fleeing across the lanes. In daylight they looked different, but still read PROHIBIDO.

  Don’t run. Don’t defy the lanes.

  Greg Cheng had run. Cheng took a flier all right, but not before I shot into action and raised Boyd Russell from bed and said if he wanted to get the sheriff’s “Attaboy” big-time, here was his chance: Wake a judge and get a phone warrant to confiscate Cheng’s files. Cheng didn’t try to access his funds until that next afternoon, and that’s all the time we needed. His accounts were frozen. He tried it from a remote location, having enough sense not to return to his apartment, but we had him.

  Sort of. He could not be located by either of the two case investigators. That sickened David. David kept saying, “He’s out there,” striking the heel of his hand on his leg. And we would say we knew, we knew, but he’d be brought up yet, on whatever, whenever.

  I turned into the guard gate at Pendleton and gained admittance from a peach-fuzz youth in combat boots and khaki, then took a road past signs reading TANK XING, TROOP CROSSING, and BATTLE SIMULATION CENTER. Camouflage nets hung over tents, tanks, and other military vehicles nested in pull-outs from the road.

  I drove by a sign pointing the way to Cockleburr Beach, out-pacing a cadre of bicyclists outfitted in glow-in-the-dark riding outfits and half-shell helmets. A crow in my path nearly stood on its beak in a puddle to go after something tasty.

  The low-lying hills opened then to a wide area that held a couple dozen cars, and to a plowed field beyond. I parked near a flank of circus trees, then got out my hat, shovel, and a five-gallon bucket, and slipped on my sunglasses against the glare of sun even through the overcast.

  At the sign-up table I learned a prize was offered to anyone hauling in more than three hundred pounds, six sacks, of potatoes. Ribbons would be awarded for the weirdest and biggest spud. The judging table already carried some that looked like Rocky Graziano. When a small girl ran up giggling to put another buttery yellow spud on the table, a volunteer took a crayon and wrote the child’s name on a card to set in front. Most potatoes were the size of a racquetball. One with a three-legged growth on the bottom was labeled Potatoe with an E.

  I got instructed to watch for “seed” potatoes, which would rot a whole sack, and was shown a sample with that affliction: one with numerous white eyes. Beware of wet potatoes or black ones, she said, or ones with lots of eyes and little feet too. From a hook drilled into a table edge I peeled off three red mesh sacks, then moved off to a row. The plants were about two feet high. Their dark-green leaves were wilting from withheld irrigation after the first picking was over.

  Trial and error taught me how far from the plant I could dig without cutting into starchy flesh. The soil was dry and the digging not easy. It would take some time to pick a hundred-pound sack. My method was to fill my plastic tub, then pour it in the tow sack.

  Deep in the wide field, a tractor trailed a double flank of children with bouncing buckets, who leapt to see who could be first to get at the upheaved plants with golden nuggets hanging from the roots. The tractor and plow were a queer creation made of spare parts notable by different-colored metals. As it crept nearer my line of sight, I saw it was driven by a man whose skin was the hue of weak coffee and whose hair, when he removed his straw hat to wipe a band of sweat away, showed a shade lighter than the silver sky. An old man, a Hispanic man, leading children with a plow.

  I thought of the young men for a time known as Juan Does, each lying desolate in outdoor venues and then in coroners’ rooms. Each could have been one of these children only a few years back, or one day a weathered old man doing a good day’s work for charity. For some of us now they would merely remain a cutting waste of vigor, lust, dreams, and promise gone astray.

  Without the sun breaking through, still the sky grew bright with fiercest glare. Sweat prickled my skin and ran in rivulets under my shirt. I stood to let whatever breeze there was catch me, and gazed across what seemed like miles of better rows: always, there are greener fields. I stooped again for my bucket and red sack and dragged the weight along, painting a body track. I chose a new row, then scraped away a hole to set my teetery bucket in.

  My thoughts went to Madam then, furiously pawing under an oak tree when I visited Rosellen’s home a few days after the Oso Lake affair. The hound had gone so deep only her tail and rear flanks could be seen. When she came out for a breather, her muzzle was a weighted, hanging clot of mud.

  “She does that when she’s happy,” Rosellen said. Rosellen had jus
t come back with the dogs from a training lesson. She had a friend lay trail in O’Neill Regional Park, then let it get tramped on all day and took Madam and Mitzi out that afternoon. They found her friend in thirty minutes. “Now I can’t stop this one from digging,” she said, patting Madam’s rear. I looked over at the other dog, Mitzi. She was the pale color of the inside of a clamshell and sat with her forelegs crossed, drooling over her water dish while Madam dug. Rosellen forgave me for getting her into a scary situation. Wanted to know when we could do it again.

  When we had left the lake that night, Ray filed against Julio for unlawful possession and discharge of a firearm. He filed against Lizzaraga on General Principles, he said. The watch commander, of course, would have none of that, so Ray put Lizzaraga down on trespass on county-owned land till we could come up with something better. I told the WC that two investigators from Homicide would want to be interviewing this pair.

  Investigators Boyd Russell and Will Bright kept after Julio. Julio said he suspected, even believed that Izzy had killed Nita. But Julio didn’t know how horribly he’d killed her. Not until Will Bright showed him the crime scene photos did Julio roll over on Lizzaraga. In time, Julio Hermosa fingered Hector Lizzaraga for Juan Does One, Two, Three, and Four…as well as Juanita Ramona Coresta Estevez. Now Will Bright was working on a warrant to obtain a dental impression from Lizzaraga to compare with bite marks on Nita Estevez. Lizzaraga was a conscienceless lagarto, a lizard whose blood ran cold in his veins along with regular infusions of cocaine. Julio said Lizzaraga killed another boy in Mexico who was only eleven years old, claiming it was an accident. Julio wept when he said he believed him much longer than he should have.

  Eventually the young man on the hill by the water tanks in Nellie Gail Ranch was formally identified as Carlos Sarmiento, half-brother to Victor Minor Montalvo, the San Juan Doe with the good haircut, and to Angela in the cantina. Carlos had been in love with Nita Estevez, same as Froylan Cordillo from Turtle Rock had, who brought her a rack of stolen rubbers to save her from AIDS. Hector Lizzaraga could not stand it, this fawning over a female. But why would the lizard go this far? Ask the wind. Ask the trailing moon. Maybe it was because she came to resist his efforts to prostitute her. Or maybe he despised her because she was loved by men he wanted to control.

  In a plastic bag under the seat of a car Lizzaraga boosted from the UCI campus, the detectives found another ditch gun like the one Julio fired that night at the lake. They also found a .40-caliber Sig with DNA material on it from the victim at Nellie Gail. All the guns traced back to white owners who’d had their homes burglarized. The .44 Cheng waved at us that night was found in the brush. It belonged to his uncle, who, it turned out, was a police officer in Temple City, east of L.A.

  Will and Boyd spent two weeks drawing linkages between Greg Cheng’s enterprises and the illegals placed at two garment factories, a computer chip maker, and a company manufacturing disk drives and pressed CD’s. That last was a business in Technology Park, near the building where Desi Cono Blanco, “Whitey,” was found.

  On the last Friday of the month, sleepy Investigator Russell was called into the sheriff’s office, the Big Kahuna himself. Boyd thought he was due for a commendation. What he left with was a red face and a notice of transfer. Rumor had it that he had slept late once too often, and Cliff Yaroshak, Chief Coroner, came home early from a trip one day to find Boyd’s car in the driveway and his shirttails flying out the back door.

  My sack was bulging with little faces peering out through the red mesh. I wondered how I’d get it over to the tables, heavy as it was. I looked to see who might help. In the row next to me was a black man with only one arm. Next to him was a beefy, bald man in a black T-shirt with a blue tattoo on his neck. Maybe the big guy was a prisoner on work furlough, or a biker with a big heart. Unfairly, looking at the beefer I recalled an incident two years back when a man walked down the strawberry rows, went up to one of the pickers and fired three rounds in his heart. Then he sprinted to the road to a waiting truck and was gone.

  I stood my shovel in the ground to the hilt and slipped one of my gloves over the handle for a marker, then hied slowly over the humped rows to the coordinating center. Nearby, some of the pickers now sat on overturned buckets eating lunches.

  What’ll I do, I asked, with my full sack too heavy for me to lift? A hundred pounds of dead weight was more than I imagined. The volunteer told me I could leave it in the rows, just stand it up so it could be seen. A little boy ran up with a potato that looked like a teddy bear. With great joy he placed it on the judging table, then brushed his hand over it tenderly as if it were alive.

  Back at my row, I drank from my camo jug and watched the sea of light-colored shirts move in the rows like gulls foraging on a beach.

  I bent to my task again, and found myself humming a song from the Linda Ronstadt album I’d bought for Joe.

  So long ago…Joe at home with me on the balcony, Joe nuzzling my neck.

  I let tears fall one-two, one-two onto the ripped roots of potato plant. I fingered all the harder through the clods in search of the white bulbs and imagined the spent tears giving back life.

  What’ll I do, when you…are far…away…?

  What’ll I do…? What’ll I do…?

  For Joe did not make it home that Monday following the lake incident. Joe didn’t make it home at all.

  What’ll I do-o-o when you are far away…?

  Potatoes clunked in the bottom of my blue bucket one handful at a time. I tossed thirteen spuds in from that one plant, and moved on to the next.

  I once heard that people with chronic pain don’t get stronger by it but weaker—that fewer degrees of pain brought more and more concession. I thought of my neighbor, Mrs. Langston, with her creative pummels to beat back pain brought on by muscle disease; of Trudy Kunitz and the punishing psychic pain she now endures. And of Binky Jalindo, sitting next to David in the inset for family at the chapel where the memorial service for Joe Sanders was held. How she kept crossing herself as the minister moved slowly in his white-and-purple robe to and fro.

  The week following the service, David and “Tamika” Maureen Modesto Conaty took Binky to the store, bought her two suitcases and filled them with all the clothing she wanted, then watched her get on the Metrolink at the San Juan Capistrano station, to go back to Mexico to live with her parents and small brothers. There she would return to work in one of the thousands of maquiladoras along the border, assembling goods for export to the U.S., or paging through redeemed coupons delivered for counting from America’s grocery stores. In her suitcase were ten fearsome figures from the Dinosaur Corps for the boys.

  I thought of how David seemed to grow calmer and older and stronger all at once with a grace that seemed to look on everything with new eyes. He was changing his major, he said, going into law enforcement if they’d have him, and maybe, after a stint there, medicine.

  In the days that followed, Gil Vanderman called, left messages on the machine I never answered. I do not know if one day I’ll pick up his card again. Right now it has a ragged corner where the guinea pig clipped it. But I did not throw it away. It’s under a pewter paperweight in the form of a Tasmanian carnivore.

  By my bedside is a framed photo of Joe, an outdoor shot, as he was lifting his arms, going, “Squawk!” speaking Pterodactyl.

  Going home that spud-digging day, I watched the green sea off to my left roister and jump in its little pitches as if skipping shells to the beach. I slowed at the checkpoint where the government sign said STOP HERE/U.S. OFFICERS and got waved through, safe beneath blonde hair, I guessed.

  It troubled me that it seemed that not one single thing I did professionally helped to corner a despicable creep like Hector Lizzaraga; that the solution fell into place, the answers revealed because of the tortured emotions of a twenty-year-old who made a recoverable mistake. Today there is no Joe to commend me on smaller motions I have made to add substance to other cases. No Joe to kid or tell my troubl
es to.

  By the time I reached San Clemente a thumbnail moon could be seen in the pale blue sky, that odd phenomenon that cast day-for-night in unlikely partnership, as I cast loss with gain in my heart. For I had known one of the best of men, failed one of the best, loved the best, lost the best—not just this one but one other, my Oakland Blue—and garnered the best through memories to tell my troubles to.

  I flew along I-5 at a clip that would get a CHP officer on my tail shooting his tri-lights at me, and watched the cars heading south, surf boards nosing out windows, bicycles upended and strapped on car roofs, tires wildly spinning, beating the speed of the wind.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  If you love CSI or NCIS, you’ll love the mysteries of Noreen Ayres. This Edgar Award finalist was writing memorable and compelling crime fiction with a focus on forensics long before those shows emerged on the scene. She broke new ground in the crime fiction genre with The Juan Doe Murders and her two prior suspense novels featuring Smokey Brandon, an ex-Las-Vegas-stripper-and-police-officer turned forensic criminalist. Smokey finds herself involved in cases that cut a little too close to home—and Ayres’s plucky heroine is as sunny and complex as the Southern California world where she solves crimes.

  In addition to her novels, Ayres is also an acclaimed short-story writer. Her stories have been featured in many mystery and suspense anthologies and earned her an Edgar Award nomination for “Delta Double Deal,” her contribution to the collection The Night Awakens. For gritty police procedurals with a fun and sexy twist, Noreen Ayres’s Smokey Brandon series can’t be beat.