We might have been watching a Western in which you hope the Indians will get away, but you know they won’t. Deborah had become Dextrous Horse Thief Woman and we were the cavalry. The cavalry always wins in the movies and, even in real life, they won eventually; they had superior numbers and equipment. In this case, Deborah had had the superior technical equipment. All I’d had was my intuition and brains. Deborah had challenged me to do my best, and I’d responded. What else would a lawyer do? But now Charlie and I had the opportunity to hit the Pause button and change the outcome, which was more power than two people ever ought to have. How long would it take for the wild bird to fly away? How long would we have to hesitate? In an hour or two, the first flight would be leaving ABQ for anywhere on the road to Rio.
“Have you told anyone about the kidnapping scheme yet?” I asked Charlie.
“Not yet,” he said.
Sooner or later Detective Hernandez was likely to get a warrant if Charlie didn’t volunteer Deborah’s tape. Even if she didn’t know about the kidnapping, she’d want to take a look at Deborah’s account; the first suspect in any homicide is always the victim’s spouse. We only had to stretch the law for a few hours. Who knew Deborah was on the lam but Charlie and me?
I felt as if I was carrying two large objects, one in each hand. One was a bird, and one was a stone. The stone was the murder of Terrance Lewellen, the bird was Deborah’s desire to go free. It’s not in my nature to hesitate. It is my nature to root for the birds and the Indians. Terrance had done the unforgivable by sleeping with her sister. He’d made it even worse by videotaping the act and including Sara in his will. For a moment, the objects were in perfect balance, but even if I did nothing, one of them would fly away and the other would weigh me down.
I looked at Charlie and he looked at me. I saw question marks in his blue eyes. You wouldn’t know it from inside BankWest’s security room, but somewhere out there birds were calling up the dawn and the sun was responding with rosy-fingered feelers. The jets were fueling up at Albuquerque International. If we were going to stop Deborah, we had to do it right now. It must have been why Charlie had called me here, to distribute the weight. If we hesitated, we’d be sharing a deep and incriminating secret. I’d have to answer to him, he’d have to answer to me, and we’d both have to answer to ourselves. Charlie was a banker. I was a lawyer. Deborah was a wild and brilliant bird who was used to the cage but who longed to be free. I saw her for a moment, flapping her wings high above the canopy.
But the bottom line, the place where dreams and flight end, brought me back. There always is a bottom line in law and in life, and mine was that my client was dead. I could forget about being manipulated. I could deal with being held up at gunpoint. I could admire Deborah for her brilliance in setting up Brown, but I couldn’t forget that my client had been murdered. That turned out to be the heavier object. I don’t know what the bottom line was for Charlie; it might have been that he had security people working for him or that he owned BankWest. It might have been that he’d let me make the decision. It wasn’t, as it turned out, that he loved Deborah Dumaine.
“You have to call Detective Hernandez,” I said. I knew now that Terrance had not been involved in the crime of kidnapping, but I still considered it my obligation to protect his reputation by keeping my mouth shut.
Charlie sighed and reached for the phone. In this light the highlights in his hair were more gray than gold. “You’re right,” he said.
On the drive home the sun was a ball of flame searing the back of the wind goddess, and my finger hurt. I let myself into my apartment at La Vista and into my bedroom. The Kid was still asleep. I crawled into bed behind him, laid my cheek against the soft spot on the back of his neck and pretended it had been a dream.
******
Detective Hernandez caught Deborah at the airport. She was booked on the seven A.M. flight to Dallas and from there to Rio de Janeiro traveling under the passport and ID of a Joan Kite. Most of the ransom had been wired ahead to a bank in Rio. She was carrying ten thousand dollars in cash and travelers’ checks in her money belt—all the money she could legally take out of the country without registering with the customs service. There wasn’t a single serial number that could be traced. All the ransom money had been laundered. God had been in that detail. The fact that she’d been caught fleeing the country with a phony ID and a lot of money was incriminating, but Deputy DA Anthony Saia, who ended up being the prosecutor in the murder case, had a tough job ahead of him convincing a jury that she’d murdered her husband. The saline solution could have been bought anywhere by anyone, as could the peanuts. There was approximately a twenty-four-hour envelope from breakfast to breakfast when the peanut substitution could have been made, and a much bigger envelope for the saline substitution. Any one of the suspects could have gotten into Terrance’s house. None of them had a twenty-four-hour alibi. The only fingerprints found on the vial were Terrance Lewellen’s and Sara Dumaine’s. Deborah’s fingerprints and fibers were all over the house, but so were Sara’s. The only thing the prosecutor had going for him was motive. Deborah had an abundance of that, but Sara stood to gain two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from Terrance’s death if she filed the will. Even with invincible evidence, it’s hard to get a murder conviction these days, and nearly impossible to convict a suspect on motive alone. It’s one thing to solve a puzzle, another to get a conviction from a jury of one’s peers. Runaway juries have gotten softhearted in the nineties.
There was evidence, however, that Deborah had staged her own kidnapping. Sara Dumaine knew some of the details. Charlie Register knew most of them, and he fessed up. The FBI wanted the tapes and the ransom note, and I eventually turned them over. By now I knew that the biggest offense my client had been guilty of was infidelity. I felt that my obligation was to protect that part of his reputation by putting the videotape back in the cage, which I did. When I asked myself and his mother what Terrance’s best interest would be regarding the kidnapping, the answer was to prosecute Deborah for fraud and to get the money back for the estate. Again, motive was very clear. Opportunity was there, but means was hard to prove. Deborah had covered her tracks well; God had been in most of the details. The feathers for the mask could easily have come from the lab, but the mask itself was never found. The voice on the Relationships tape was so garbled, it couldn’t be proved that it belonged to anyone. The correspondence with the Relationship line went to a post office box, and the bills were paid in cash. Wes Brown, however, was happy to turn over the faked ATM card and squeal about Deborah’s visits to Door.
Deborah was convicted of bank fraud. The estate got most of the money back, and it went to the Psittacine Research Facility. The murder charges remained unprosecutable. The only will that was probated was the one that left everything to Candace Lewellen. Sara Dumaine never filed a claim, never collected a penny. Deborah may have been in that detail. Maybe Sara feared that the will would make her a suspect in Terrance’s death. Maybe Deborah had hidden the only copy. Maybe Sara had cared more about Terrance than the money. My obligation was tricky. If the case ever went to trial, it would become even trickier. I hadn’t drawn up the will; I wasn’t supposed to know it existed, but I did. Terrance wanted Sara to get the money, but would he have wanted me to reveal my knowledge of the will if it could be used as evidence against Sara? In the end I did what a lawyer does best, kept my mouth shut. Wes Brown got the maximum sentence and the maximum fine, which he paid with smelly money. The thick-billed was sent to the Phoenix Zoo, where it waited for a flock to form that would be big enough to release it in the wild.
The day Deborah was arrested on the road to Rio, I called Vi Sommers to make arrangements for an agent to pick up Wes Brown’s .45 and bring me the blue-fronted Amazon. I turned over the gun, had the agent put the parrot in a box in the back seat of the Nissan (I didn’t want to do it myself and get bitten by another pissed-off bird) and drove to the Kid’s shop on Fourth Street. Someone was going to turn this bronco
into a pet, and it might as well be the Kid; he was good with birds. The coloring of the blue-fronted’s feathers was exquisite, rain-forest green shading subtly to yellow, then sky blue on its forehead. When I stopped at the lights on my way to Fourth Street, I looked at the bird in the box and tried to determine its sex. It had been chopped out of its nest and taken from its family and flock, but its eyes were still bright and curious and its spirit hadn’t been broken. It had to be tough to make it this far, and it had a kind of macho swagger as it stumbled across the box. “What are you, male or female?” I asked. The answer I got was a low growl. “Male,” I said.
The Kid started smiling as soon as I walked in the door of the shop and climbed around the Honda he was working on to tell him about the parrot, and he didn’t stop. When he’s not talking or smiling, his face settles into a faraway expression punctuated by frown lines that are beyond his years. He went immediately to my car and picked up the bird. To my surprise, the parrot let him.
“It’s the loro from Door,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“How did you get it?”
“It’s a gift to you from Vi Sommers for helping her catch Wes Brown.”
“Thank you, Chiquita.”
“De nada.”
He stroked the Amazon’s head. “Que guapa,” he said.
“Que guapo,” I corrected him. “It’s a male.”
“Female.” He shook his head.
“Why do you say that?”
“When I look in the eyes I see something fierce like I see in some women.”
“He’s got the walk of a macho man.”
“Women can be macho.” He laughed.
“Right,” I said.
The next issue was what to name it. Like most people, we had lists of names for future pets and offspring filed away in the backs of our brains. “Cacofonia” was always a possibility, but this bird had been unusually quiet.
“Mimosa,” said the Kid, which was his variation on the verb mimar, to pet. A feminine name.
“Mauricio,” I said. Masculine and the name of his favorite character in Cien Años de Soledad.
Someday one of us might have a DNA test done or have the bird surgically sexed to settle the issue. In the meantime we compromised on Mimo. It’s masculine, but it means petting. It also means mime or buffoon, a good name for a parrot.
“It’s your bird,” I told the Kid. I didn’t have the time or patience, and he could keep it in the shop, talk and sing to it all day. Music was, as always, blaring from his radio. They were a good match; Mimo was a survivor. So was the Kid.
THE END
Enjoy a free preview of A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #7
Hotshots
1
IT WAS BEGINNING to feel like the year it rained twice. We never have a lot of rain in Albuquerque, but last spring there was none. When May turned to June it got hot. Rattlesnakes slithered onto West Mesa terraces, bears came out of the mountains searching for food or drink, and coyotes crisscrossed the foothills trolling for pets. Most years when the heat arrives the wind dies down, but this summer it continued, blowing West Mesa dirt across town, turning wandering trash bags into flapping black ravens, swirling dust devils down back roads and driveways, scratching branches against skylights, turning your mind into a house with wide-open windows. My lover, the Kid, is sometimes known as El Greñas, the mophead, but even his hair went flat in the dry heat. My secretary, Anna, kept her hairdo’s volume up, but it took hours in the bathroom spraying and teasing.
A controlled burn in the Cibola National Forest got out of control and the smoke drifted one hundred miles east to town. The air turned as gritty as a winter night when everyone’s fireplace is cranking out smoke. It tasted like too many Marlboros and smelled like an overbooked campground. Mechanics playing with fireworks in Melloy Dodge’s paint-storage room set the place on fire and it erupted in a cumulonimbus of black smoke.
In May the fires start in the southern New Mexico forests, the Lincoln and the Gila. Ignited by dry lightning strikes and exacerbated by squirrelly winds, they follow summer north, flanking the Rockies, spotting into Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. It happens every year, a cycle as sure as life, aging, and death. But last summer’s fires became history: the Capitan, the Black Range, the Weed, the fire on Thunder Mountain. They burned bigger and hotter than ever, and they didn’t go out until snow fell in October.
In mid-June lightning ignited a blaze in the South Canyon of Thunder Mountain twenty miles from Oro, Colorado. It was too early for a Colorado fire, but winter had been mild and by Memorial Day the snowpack had melted into the San Juan River and the Rio Grande, causing class-four rapids and fire conditions that shouted watch out. A fast-moving cold front whipped a small, containable fire into a large, treacherous inferno, and nine Duke City Hotshots (a group of highly skilled wildland firefighters based in Albuquerque) were killed trying to outrun the flames. Four of the nine were young women.
In early August Eric and Nancy Barker, the parents of Joni Barker, one of the young women who were killed, came to my law office on Lead. By then rain had brought relief and the winds had moved on to Texas. My brain felt like I owned it again. A sense of order had been restored to the Duke City, but the Barkers were refugees from the city of grief. Their eyes were ragged reminders that no matter how tidy your own yard gets there’s always another place where death is as sudden and random as lightning.
Nancy strode into the office two steps ahead of her husband. She was an athletic woman about five feet four inches tall who seemed to have an engine running somewhere inside that kept her going. Her hair was blond and short, tamed by hair spray and a razor cut. Her lipstick was bright red and had been carefully applied. She wore jeans, hiking boots, and a T-shirt with a green V-shaped ribbon pinned over her heart. She’d told me she was an elementary school teacher when she’d called to make the appointment.
Her husband, she’d said, taught history at UNM. Eric was several inches taller than Nancy, about five ten. His hair was curly and slivered with gray. He had a thin face with high cheekbones and pale, intelligent eyes. He wore khakis and a rumpled white shirt, and he, too, had a green ribbon pinned over his heart. His aura of grief and despair was almost palpable. Both of them were in their late forties, I figured, barely old enough to have raised a firefighter daughter, far too young to have lost one. They were about ten years older than me, but looked twenty years fitter.
They sat down in the chairs across from my desk and I offered them a choice of drinks—water or coffee. Eric requested coffee with two sugars. Nancy had water. Then I asked why they had come to me; most of the cases that found their way to my law office involved real estate and divorce.
“We heard you were interested in environmental issues.” Nancy said.
There were plenty of those in New Mexico, but in the past the environmental cases I’d handled had involved endangered species. One thing endangered species and fire had in common was that they’d both been heavily managed by government and might have done better if left alone.
“We live in the East Mountains.” Nancy added. “We wanted a New Mexico lawyer.”
But it had been a Colorado fire. A pack of Marlboros was sitting in my desk drawer, but I picked up a pencil and rolled it around in my fingers instead. “The fire was a terrible tragedy,” I said.
“It was,” Eric said.
“The green ribbons, are they a tribute to your daughter?”
“Yes. Green is the color of the hard hats the Duke City Hotshots wear.”
“What is it you want me to do?” I asked.
Eric stared down at his shoes. Nancy leaned forward. “We want you to sue the government for negligence in Joni’s death.”
“She wants to sue,” Eric said.
“You don’t?”
My office window with its decorative burglar bars was wide open. Eric was looking out through the bars, but not at the alley or at Lead. He was focusing on some point in the distance, the vanis
hing point perhaps. “We’re already getting a settlement of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars from the Forest Service,” he said. “Suing for more won’t bring Joni back. It’ll just drag out the suffering. OSHA is investigating. I think we should let them handle it.”
“Do you think one government agency is going to find another one guilty of negligence, Neil?” Nancy snapped. Anger, I saw, was fueling her engine.
“Probably not.”
“I don’t believe anger is the way out of grief,” Eric responded.
For some people it might be, I thought. Nancy’s eyes had a spark in them. Eric’s were gray and flat. “It’s not the money,” she said. “I want someone to be held accountable for Joni’s death.”
It’s the basic issue in civil suits. Better to make the guilty party pay or to forgive and forget? Or try to forget if you can’t forgive? The answer depends on the aggrieved person and on whether a settlement will make any practical or emotional difference to that person. Both were valid points of view, but, when one couple harbored both of them, the result could be big trouble. I’d spent enough time around feuding couples in my real estate and divorce practice to know how difficult they can be, and this couple seemed evenly enough matched that the opposing points of view would stay that way. It appeared unlikely that either of them would dominate the other. Still, it wasn’t every day I was asked to sue the government for negligence. Where the government is concerned there’s usually more than enough blame to go around—and there’s always an unlimited supply of money.
“I can’t represent you in the state of Colorado, but I can in a federal court,” I said.
“It’s a federal case,” Nancy replied. “The U.S. Forest Service and the BLM were in charge.”
“Can you tell me why you think there is a case?” I asked her.
“Joni had been on a fire in the Gila for fourteen days without a break, and she was exhausted. She came home for one day, then got the call to go to Thunder Mountain. The hotshots were helicoptered into the fire in the morning with no briefing. There was a cold front moving in, but that fact was never communicated to the firefighters. The only weather information they had came from the weather channel. It’s all in the interagency report. I brought you a copy.” She handed the report to me.
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