He kept the dog at bay for few moments, but the dog was vicious and strong and when it caught Sonny’s stick in its jaws, it broke it in two. Then Sonny heard the report of a pistol. The dog yelped and fell dead. Sonny turned to see his father, the revolver he used in his night watchman’s job smoking in his hand. It was the pearl-handled pistol of the Bisabuelo.
People gathered around him; his mother gathered Armando in her arms and carried him home. His father rested his hand on Sonny’s shoulder.
“You were brave, hijo,” his father said. Proud of him.
Perhaps that’s when he knew that one day he would carry the Bisabuelo’s pistol, and he would have to help those in trouble.
That night he woke up screaming. The vicious dog had returned in a nightmare. It came growling through the mist to leap, fangs bared, at Sonny’s throat.
“It’s susto,” his mother said when she held him in her arms.
She took him to a curandera in the valley, a woman from Mexico. The old woman talked to Sonny and she prayed. She gave Sonny a candle in a glass jar, the picture of the Santo Niño painted on the glass surface, and she told Sonny’s mother to burn the candle while they prayed together. That night they lit the candle and the dark smoke rose in the shape of a dog. Both of them were sure they saw it. They prayed and the image of the dog disappeared and the smoke rose peacefully to the ceiling. After that Sonny forgot the incident and he could sleep.
That’s what he felt now as he looked at Gloria, the same fear he had felt when the dog attacked. But there was no candle to burn to dissipate the fear. There was something palpable in the room, something seeping into his blood. Something cold. Something evil.
4
Police Chief Garcia, the sheriff, and Howard entered the bedroom. “You made Mr. Dominic goddamned mad,” the sheriff said with a smile.
Sonny looked at Howard.
“Delfina’s okay,” Howard said.
“Damn her!” Garcia scowled. “Even if she is Gloria’s mother! She can’t make accusations like that! What the hell does she mean Frank’s got the police in his pocket! Damn nonsense!”
“Maybe she knows something we don’t,” the sheriff drawled.
“Fuck off, Jack. I’ve got enough trouble here without your so-called witty comments.”
“You’ve got trouble? We haven’t even settled on jurisdiction yet—”
Garcia cut him off. “Well, if Delfina gets her way we don’t need to settle. She wants Sonny here to find the murderer. Elfego Baca rides again, eh?”
“Sonny looks for missing persons, not criminals,” the sheriff replied. “So I suggest you take the case.”
Garcia raised an eyebrow.
“Sure,” the sheriff continued, “after all, Dominic’s your friend, ain’t he. He gets to be mayor and he’s your boss. So you find whoever killed his wife. I wash my hands.”
He was taunting Garcia, Sonny knew. The rivalry between city and county law enforcement had a long history.
“And, Sonny, if you want to find your cousin’s killers, be my guest,” the sheriff added, smiling. “Show Sonny around. Show him what he needs to know to solve the case.” He poked Garcia in the ribs and whispered, “And while you’re at it, tell him about the widow Glass case.” He laughed. “Me? I’m getting some fresh air. In fact, I believe I’ll just take a drive up to the Santa Fe Downs and see how the ponies are running. You want jurisdiction, Sam, you got it. I’m pulling my men out. Good luck.” He tipped his cowboy hat and walked out.
“Sheriff must not be feeling well,” Howard said.
Sam Garcia shrugged. “Just saving his skin. The case is ugly.” He shook his head and looked at Howard. “You cleaned the place?”
“With a pair of tweezers.”
“Where was Frank last night?” Sonny asked.
“Won’t say,” Garcia replied.
“Won’t say? His wife was murdered. He’s got to tell.”
“And what if he wasn’t home? Maybe he is sleeping around, but that don’t mean—” Garcia stopped short. Tía Delfina’s accusation had put him on edge.
“Sleeping around or not, he’s got to tell you where he was,” Sonny said. He knew Garcia and Dominic were old buddies. Maybe Garcia was trying to keep it from the papers. If they found Dominic was sleeping with another woman it would be on tomorrow’s front page.
“Political consequences,” Howard said.
The chief nodded. “The election’s only weeks away! This is going to blow the city wide open! I need some air.” He shook his head in frustration and turned to walk out onto the patio.
Sonny turned to Howard. “What do you think?”
“’Bout you and this case?”
Sonny nodded.
“This is not your cup of tea.…”
Yeah, he had never been on a murder case. He had chased bad credit-card debtors, trailed missing spouses, and found guys who didn’t pay child support. But murder, no. Still, Gloria’s spirit was tugging at him. She wanted revenge. She deserved it.
For a moment he wished Manuel Lopez was alive. He could go to the old investigator, get some help, get advice.
“You should be thinking of law school, not chasing the kind of people who killed Gloria,” Howard said.
“Maybe I owe it to her,” Sonny insisted. “But I need help.”
Howard’s forehead furrowed. He couldn’t refuse his friend, and within the limits of his job, he knew he could help.
“I’ll do what I can. Come here,” he said and slipped on a plastic glove, then drew away the silk bedspread, revealing Gloria’s naked body. Even frozen as she was in death, her muscles stiff with rigor mortis, she was beautiful. The contours of her curves flowed gracefully from head to long throat to perfectly shaped breasts, her flat stomach, the mound of her sex between smooth thighs, the long legs ending in perfectly shaped feet, the pomegranate-crimson nail polish on the toenails.
Both men admired the beauty of the lines for a moment, both felt the waste. Howard pointed at the puncture on the left inner thigh.
“This was not a bungled break-in job,” he said as he pressed on the cut to reveal the collapsed vein and artery. “Somebody came to kill her.”
Yeah, Sonny thought, came intent on draining her blood. He felt sick from the fragrance, the burned candle wax, the oozing heat of the day that poured through the open door. He looked and saw the faint trace of a scratch around her navel, a bruise on her right temple.
What the hell did it mean, he asked himself, a knot forming in his guts. He leaned over Gloria, trying to identify the sweet fragrance that permeated the room. If he had eaten breakfast he knew he would have chucked it up.
“They cut into the femoral,” Howard said, pointing. “They raised the artery and vein and injected water through the artery. Probably used a plain water solution with a perfume. Lilac.”
Yes, that was it, Sonny nodded. Lilac. The flower of the spring, the purple flower of the bushes that lined her driveway and her garden. When lilacs bloomed in April the people of Alburquerque knew spring had arrived.
“They drained with a small hose or catheter at the vein. They knew their job.”
“Why?”
“Ah, that’s the interesting question. They collected every drop; there’s not a splash of blood in the bathroom, nothing on the toilet, nothing in the tub. They didn’t wash the blood down the drain. They took it with them.”
Took it with them, Sonny thought. They came to kill her and took her blood. Separated soul from flesh. Why? Crazies? Vampires? The evil brujas his neighbor don Eliseo often alluded to in his stories?
“They needed a pump,” Sonny said to Howard, his gaze still fixed on the frozen body in front of him, the presence of death real to him, and its horror compounded by the images of him and Gloria dancing in her apartment long ago, she in her bare feet, her breath warm on his neck, his longing for her rising like hot, magnetic waves, a fever he had struggled to keep in check every time he touched her.
Howard nodded. “A por
table electric with a five-gallon plastic container to collect the blood would fit in the trunk of a car. Or they could have used an old-fashioned hand pump. There’s a few of those around, mostly as museum pieces. Before there were electric pumps doctors used the hand pumps. Same type of hand pump that was used to embalm the dead soldiers during the Civil War. During the early part of the war they used to ship trainloads of dead Confederates down south without embalming them. You can imagine what that was like in summer, especially if a rail line was cut and the train stalled. So they begin to embalm on the field with hand pumps.”
“So where’s her blood?”
“I suspect you won’t find the blood,” Howard said. Sonny looked up at him. “It’s just a theory, but if they took the blood my guess is they used it for whatever ritual they had in mind. Else why take it?”
“Ritual,” Sonny repeated. So Frank wasn’t far off speculating about satanic rumors. He cursed and turned to look around the room again. He had smelled wax the minute he walked into the room. He stared at the dresser, on which rested four candles in brass holders. It looked like an altar, the kind his mother had in her bedroom, but there were no statues of saints. Gloria came from a Catholic family, but she definitely wasn’t into old-fashioned altars.
Howard followed his gaze. “The chief asked Frank about that. She never set up anything like that before. But there are prints on the candle holders, and I’ll bet when I check them out, they’re hers.”
She prepared the altar herself, Sonny thought. Was that what Howard was driving at? He felt his stomach tighten as the cold and eerie presence in the room swept around him.
“Why four?”
“I’ve been saving this for last,” Howard said. “Look.” He pointed to her navel. The scratches Sonny had noticed now became the outline of a barely perceptible circle around her belly button. Four radiating lines extending from the circle, and when Sonny looked closely, he saw each line was really four lines.
Four lines up toward the middle of her breasts, four down toward her sex, and four out to either side.
“Damn,” he cursed. They had scratched the Zia sun sign around her navel.
El ombligo. There was something very special about the ombligo. It was the connection to the mother. On Gloria’s soft mound of a stomach the sign lay nascent, a red outline on her smooth, pale skin.
“The Zia sun,” Howard said.
Sonny stared at the round symbol that circled Gloria’s navel. The Zia sign was a sacred sign to the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. It was the symbol of the Grandfather Sun, the deity of life.
The circle was the sun; the four radiating lines were the four sacred directions of the Pueblo Indian world. He knew some of the history of the pueblos. He went often to the dances at the pueblos. When he was teaching he had taken his literature class on a field trip to a dance at Jemez. He made his students read The Tewa World, Ceremony, The Man Who Killed the Deer, Simon Ortiz’s poetry, and Joe Sando’s history of the pueblos. He encouraged them to learn the underpinning of the history that sustained life along the Río Grande. It was part of their history, their heritage.
He knew that on the West Mesa the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians had carved petroglyphs into the lava boulders, the escarpment of the once-fiery volcanos. On one of those monoliths he had seen the Zia sun symbol. It was now also used as the symbol for the state flag. Now Gloria’s stomach was scratched with this ancient sign for the sun. The crazies who killed Gloria had put the sacred symbol to their own perverted use.
“Just a guess, but I’m sure Garcia’s thinking the same thing. It looks like the work of a cult,” Howard said.
If Howard was right about that and this wasn’t a random murder, it could mean Gloria had a hand in her own death. Had she let them in? Was she part of the ceremony?
He didn’t want to believe that.
“Some kind of sun cult?”
“Something like that. They knew what they were doing. Sonny, there’s something else.…” Howard leaned forward and whispered. “I think she was pregnant.”
Sonny felt a new weight added to the pressure he felt in his chest. Blood upon blood, and where did it end? Surely Howard was mistaken. She was nearly forty. She and Frank had been married nearly ten years, no children, and any kind of love they might once have had was long gone.
Howard saw the look on Sonny’s face and reassured him. “It’s just a hunch. I pressed here,” he motioned to a spot between her ombligo and her sex, “and I’m no doctor, but I felt something. The autopsy will tell us.”
Pregnant, Sonny thought. It didn’t make sense. Did Dominic know? Her mother obviously didn’t.
The chief walked in from the patio. “Damn nice out there,” he said and pulled up a chair and sat down to stare at the body.
“You going to tell us about the Glass case the sheriff mentioned?” Howard asked.
The chief lit a cigarette. “Why not,” he said, in a better mood now that Simmons was off his back. “Happened a year ago.”
Sonny raised an eyebrow and thought back to recent murders reported in the papers, trying to find something that linked to Gloria. But he couldn’t remember anything that seemed connected, anything involving the Zia sign or draining blood or cults.
“Dorothy Glass was a widow of the old man who bought the Sims property,” Sonny remembered. “Architect. Left her a fortune.”
Garcia nodded. “Turned up dead one day. The rumor was she had been mixed up with spiritualists who claimed they could contact her husband. I followed the lead, but it led up a blind alley. Hell, everywhere I turned I found spiritualists. Alburquerque’s full of these people. And Santa Fe’s worse. Did you know a con artist up there offers Jeep trips to places he calls spiritual vortexes? Yeah, for a hundred bucks you can be driven out to these places and get your soul cleaned. Damn, what’s this world coming to!”
“Let me guess: the widow Glass also had the Zia sign cut into her,” Sonny said.
The chief nodded. “I didn’t report it. Hell, I didn’t want the city in a scare! Fucking papers get hold of something like this and it only makes trouble.”
“Did Dorothy Glass have her blood drained?”
The chief nodded.
“And she lived in this neighborhood?”
Garcia nodded again. “That’s why it’s scary. Two women, same area, same method. I don’t like it.”
“The Zia murders,” Howard said, “yeah, the papers will love it.”
“Hell, I get no complaints when winos and the poor die in the streets, but when the rich die, damn, that means anybody can die.” The chief grew silent, morose.
“How many people would it take to do something like this?” Sonny asked, turning to Howard.
“At least two,” Howard answered. “They must have worn cloth covers over their shoes, probably the type doctors wear in surgery. I picked up a few cloth fibers that don’t match the rug. It’s hard to tell, everything is so clean. One could have done it, but I figure at least two.” He went to the sliding-glass door and pointed to where it had been jimmied. “This is to make us think break-in.”
“But you think she let them in herself. You think she knew her murderers?”
Howard nodded. He pointed to the floor, which he had painstakingly combed for evidence. “They wore plastic gloves. Left everything spic and span. There’s not a trace of anything.”
“And the bruise?”
“I think it’s to make us think there was a struggle. But maybe she fell.”
Howard was reconstructing the murder and fixing the pattern in his mind, Sonny thought. That’s how he worked, and that’s why he was so good at what he did. Since they’d met, Sonny had hung around Howard’s lab. He was the best forensics man in the city. He took pictures and vacuumed the room for scraps, then put everything under his microscopes and made the smallest piece of evidence tell stories. Armed with only a microscope, Howard usually gathered enough evidence to help the DA get his convictions.
Howard looked at Son
ny, then glanced at the chief. “I think there was some kind of ceremony here,” he said quietly. “I think she knew the person or persons who killed her.”
“Dominic’s got dogs,” Sonny remembered. Two big Dobermans.
“They’re in the backyard, poisoned. Probably cyanide. The stuff is easy to get. A lot of ranchers use cyanide to poison coyotes. It can’t be traced.”
“They had plenty of time,” the chief sighed. “They must have known Frank wasn’t going to be home. They had time. Notice how carefully they arranged the body.”
Yeah, Frank wasn’t home, Sonny thought. That had been going through his mind. It made Dominic the prime suspect. That’s why the sheriff had cut out. Let Garcia put the squeeze on his friend. Let Garcia take the toughest man in the city downtown for questioning.
“That’s how I remember old widow Glass, lying on a bed of pine cones, peaceful. Like she was asleep.”
“Sadistic bastards,” Sonny cursed.
“It’s going to be a tough one,” the chief said, frowning. “I’d better get out there and talk to the press.” He rose, walked to the door, and turned. “Just so we understand each other, Sonny. I know she was your prima, and I know Delfina’s upset. Hell, I would be too if I found my daughter like this. But we play no favorites. My job is to find whoever did this, and I’m going to do it. But you better stay out of this. Comprendes?”
Sonny shrugged.
“You better get Delfina back home,” he said and went out.
“He’s worried,” Howard said. “It’s going to be tough. There’s so damn little evidence. If the press goes after him, it might cost him his job.”
Howard gently pulled the bedspread back over Gloria. “In the prime of life. What a waste.”
“Yeah,” Sonny agreed and felt a shiver. The dead body lay beneath the sheet, but the ghost of the woman lingered in the room. The spirit called for vengeance. Where is my blood? the ghost of Gloria Dominic cried. Sonny was sure he could hear the anguish of the dead woman’s soul.
Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, Shaman Winter, and Jemez Spring Page 4