by K C West
I expected Pup to follow me into the kitchen as he usually did when food was mentioned. He liked to curl up in the corner, his nose on his front paws, his eyes watching our every move, hoping for a tidbit. We rarely fed him people food, other than a little piece of steak now and then. This time, when he didn’t follow me into the kitchen, I grew worried and returned to the living room. Pup wanted to go out, but I wasn’t about to let him out in the wild weather. He was sniffing at the base of the side door leading to the mud room when the lights went out.
“Shit. Where did I put that lantern?” With the lightning illuminating my passage, I went back into the kitchen to look for it, but stopped at the sound of another, much closer explosion. The noise reverberated off the walls and ceiling. “What the hell!” It sounded like a gunshot and it came from inside the house. I rushed back to the living room. I could have sworn I heard Pup yelp, but I couldn’t be sure. The storm’s racket was deafening.
“Pup,” I called. “Where are you?”
“Oh my God.”
In a flash of lightning, I saw Pup lying on the floor. When I dropped to my knees beside him, someone grabbed me from behind and pulled me backward. “You want to end up like him?” the harsh voice said. “You listen to me and you listen good.”
“Let me at least help my dog. Then you can have whatever you want.”
“Lady, you got nothing I want.” The man was strong and well built, and there was little I could do. Thank the gods PJ isn’t here, I thought. Right now the farther away she was, the better. Without warning, the man turned me around to face him and rammed the muzzle of a gun between my eyes. With his other hand, he grabbed my collar, twisting the material so that it was tight against my throat. He pulled my face close to his. The stocking he wore over his head failed to mask the odor of alcohol and tobacco on his breath. He leered at me for a moment, then pushed me downward.
Oh no, not rape.
“On your belly, bitch.”
I did as he ordered.
“Jewels, you got jewels? And money?”
“I don’t have much.”
“Yeah, but the rich bitch who lives here has plenty.”
“She’s away. She has her money and jewelry with her. I have a hundred dollars in cash. In my purse over there.”
The robber, still holding the gun on me, picked up my shoulder bag, emptying the contents onto the chair. He took the cash and tossed my wallet on the floor. I saw my credit cards tumble out, untouched.
“What else? A watch?”
“Take it.” I held out my arm and he wrenched the band open.
“Shit. It’s a piece of crap. How about this?” The medallion around my neck had slipped into his view and he peered at it. “What the hell is that thing?” He let it drop back against my shirt. “What about that ring?” He snatched at my left hand and I pulled away from him.
A voice from behind us stopped any further scuffling. “Forget that, Jake. Time to go.”
So, there was someone else, an accomplice who remained in the shadows. Was Jake doing all the physical stuff and his companion giving orders? I couldn’t tell for sure if it was a young man or a boy whose voice hadn’t changed yet. From what little I could hear, he seemed to be better educated.
In all of the rough handling Jake had put me through, my medallion had fallen off its chain. I managed to slip it into my back pocket before my wrists and ankles were tied securely. They left me on my stomach near the back door. I turned my head just enough that I could see them cramming things into trash bags. Anger boiled up inside me, replacing my fear. How dare they come in here and take what was ours… what PJ and I had lovingly collected and placed in our home.
I rolled onto my side and then scooted myself onto my back. Keeping an eye on their movement, I fished the medallion out of my pocket and cupped it in my bound hands. If I got the chance to leave it behind, perhaps it would show PJ that I was trying to communicate with her. If things ended badly, at least she’d have it to remember me by.
I wriggled back onto my stomach, still listening and looking around as much as possible.
The thieves returned for the last load. I hadn’t heard a sound from Pup and was sure he was dead. Tears stung my eyes. “Please, let me tend to my dog.”
“Lady, I’m sick of your yapping.” Rough hands rolled me through the doorway and onto the verandah. They left me there while they hauled the bags they’d filled to a vehicle I could barely make out in the darkness. I ran my fingers along the hewn wood beneath me and found a crack between the planks in the deck. I poked the medallion into one with a silent prayer to PJ. “Please find this and know that I’m not going willingly. I’m alive right now, and I’ll keep trying to find my way back to you.”
“Come on. Let’s go.” He braced himself to lift me. I resisted him with all my strength.
“Son of a bitch!”
I felt an explosion of pain in my head and was only vaguely aware of someone dragging me to a truck and lifting me over the tailgate.
“Careful where you step,” said the second guy in a voice that was just above a whisper. “We don’t want to leave more tracks than necessary.”
“Think we ain’t leaving tracks in this goddamn rain?” Jake said. “Think we ain’t leaving tire tracks in this goddamn mud? It’s a royal screw-up, if you ask me. Nobody was supposed to be home. Remember?”
Jake and the other guy tossed me to the front of the truck bed. I was aware of the sides and roof of a camper top surrounding me. I landed hard on my head and left shoulder. I heard a muffled, “Shut up and do what you….”
Everything went dark after that.
Chapter 11
After my visit with Little Bird and Jasper, I waited in our kitchen until the detectives arrived. Detective Mark Nelson from the Santa Fe County Sheriffs Department and Detective Sergeant Gina Esperanza from the New Mexico State Police came within minutes of each other and we introduced ourselves. They asked me to remain in the kitchen while they met with the other police officers on the scene.
Little Bird and Jasper must have been watching for the detectives. They joined me in the kitchen, and we kept busy putting out food and coffee for the police. Little Bird loaded the coffeemaker, put on a kettle, and assembled a pile of sandwiches which she left in the middle of the kitchen table with paper plates and insulated cups.
“When I’m uneasy, I cook,” she said, giving me a wan smile. “It keeps my mind from too much worry.”
While the detectives supervised the crime scene technicians, Little Bird put a batch of brownies into the oven. The familiar aroma of baking chocolate contrasted vividly with the reality of the situation. My stomach felt queasy. Our home had been invaded. How could I ever feel the comfort of this safe haven again, when it was neither safe, nor a haven any longer?
One unexpected benefit from Little Bird’s cooking was that it brought a fairly steady stream of technicians into the kitchen for coffee or food. As each one came in, I approached them with variations of the same question.
“What have you found? What can you tell me?”
Their words differed, but the message was always the same. “We’re doing our best. Give us some time to gather evidence. We can’t tell you anything right now. Talk to the detectives in charge.” They couldn’t offer anything to reassure me that Kim was all right.
If I tried to ask the detectives for more information, they started in on me with questions of their own. Where was I last evening? When did I arrive home? Did I see anything unusual? What seems to be missing? Can you give us a list?
I survived their initial interrogation about my whereabouts during the last twenty-four hours and filled them in on the fight Kim and I’d had before I left. Since they weren’t telling me anything useful, I waited for a chance to gather more information of my own. They walked me through the house to the room Kim and I had converted to an office, or as Kim liked to call it, the study. I noted that artwork was missing from spots on the walls and someone had removed artifacts fr
om some glass cabinets in the great room. Was that enough to make the whole thing a burglary gone wrong? The acid in my stomach left the back of my throat burning, and my head pounded relentlessly.
Two technicians were still working in one corner of the office. They’d left powdered splotches during their search for prints, but they told the detectives that they had finished lifting prints and had taken digital photos of everything, so we found some unmarked, cushioned chairs and sat down.
I knew they’d want the upper hand in the conversation, so I jumped in before they could start. “Listen. My last name is Curtis,” I told them. “Maybe you’ve heard of Curtis Shipping or Curtis Enterprises? I’m not without influence, you know, and I want some answers.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Detective Nelson said. “Lieutenant Keller made us aware of that fact. We assure you we’re working all the angles, and you’ll get answers once we have them.”
Two more crime scene investigators came in. They carried Kim’s watch and purse in their gloved hands. Sergeant Esperanza donned gloves and examined the items.
“Do these belong to your colleague?” she asked me.
She held them close enough so I could see them without touching them.
“Yes, the purse looks like Kim’s and I bought the watch for her.”
Another technician showed Detective Nelson what appeared to be Kim’s wallet. It looked empty.
“Can you identify this as Ms. Blair’s?” he asked me. I remembered seeing credit cards on the floor in the living room when I first entered the house, so it was a safe guess to assume that all of it had come from her purse. At the time, I failed to understand the significance.
“It’s similar to one she owns, yes.”
My mind was still barely functioning. Life was going on in front of me, but my reality was frozen in time from the moment I had seen the blood on the floor.
While the two detectives took the watch, purse, and wallet out of the room, I confronted the remaining young technician as he slapped labels onto a handful of tubes and made notations on them. “Have you found any more blood anyplace?”
He gave me a startled look. “You’ll need to talk to the detectives.”
“Damn it! They’re doing something else. Everybody’s doing something else. Please. All I get are platitudes. I need to know. The blood in the living room must be Pup’s, but did you find blood in any other room? Can you please just tell me that?” I still felt a choking panic inside my chest, keeping me from drawing a full breath. Something bad had happened here. It was still happening, and I was powerless to do anything about it.
He cast a glance around, probably to see if he would be overheard. “This is unofficial, you understand. Without proper testing, we can’t state anything for certain.”
“Yes, yes of course. You could probably make an educated guess, though, right?”
“Okay. I’ll say this much. I haven’t seen anything else that looks like blood, but we’ll have to test all of the samples we did find to be sure.”
“Thank you.” I reached out for his hand, but he pulled his sterile-gloved hands out of my reach. “Oh, sorry. I… Thank you so much. I’ll let you get back to work now.”
I sat back down, took a deep breath, and savored this small nugget of information. No other blood spilled was a good thing, wasn’t it? Surely it had to be.
As I sat, I gave the office a closer inspection. It appeared the same to me, except for gray smudges on most of the light-colored furniture. I couldn’t tell if anyone other than Kim had been in it recently. Our desks looked like they always looked. Her briefcase was open on the floor near her desk and her papers were spread out near her computer like she’d just stepped out for a quick snack or maybe to take a shower before getting back to work.
Only, she hadn’t come back.
Shit.
The detectives returned and wanted to know more about our daily routine, specifically if I noticed anything unusual or out of place in the office. I suspected they were trying to get a picture of Kim’s last hours at home.
At their request, I opened my files, logged on to Kim’s computer and brought up her calendar with her appointments listed for the month. I also showed them photos and data of our trips during the last few weeks, both professional and private. It was obvious that while I hadn’t come right out and admitted that Kim and I were life partners, both detectives had quickly made the connection. Sergeant Esperanza seemed quite accepting of the fact, but Detective Nelson looked like he had eaten something very distasteful whenever he had to speak to me.
“Are you able to tell us what you think she might have been wearing when she got home yesterday?” he asked.
“I’ll try.”
“We won’t know for sure, if she’s still wearing the same outfit, but we’ll want to put out as accurate a description of her that we can with the BOLOs we broadcast. Her picture and personal statistics have already gone out.”
I went to our bedroom and looked through Kim’s side of the closet and then into the master bath to check the hamper. Seeing Kim’s dirty clothes brought me to the brink of tears, but I forced myself to concentrate on the task at hand.
“I think it might be fairly easy to determine what she was wearing, Detective. Kim’s a creature of habit when it comes to clothing. For one thing, she hates to shop, so she has a very small wardrobe. Her idea of a successful clothes shopping trip is to go online to a dependable source of durable clothing like L.L. Bean, order the same style of cargo pants in three different colors, and tack on a dozen pairs of white socks, if she’s feeling wild and crazy.”
I watched him write details about Kim on his three-by-five pad and realized that I could probably fill several notepads with information about Kim. In a few short years, I’d gone from recognizing the name Kim Blair as a respected archaeologist, to knowing what kind of shampoo she used, how she squeezed the toothpaste tube so carefully from the bottom up, and how she enjoyed working Sudoku puzzles early in the morning before we officially woke up. “Getting her brain in gear,” she called it. I could list so many intimate details about Kim’s life, but I didn’t know the single, most important thing: Where was she right now? When would I hold her close enough to breathe her melon and almond scented hair, or taste her minty toothpaste on my tongue when we kissed goodnight, or brush the eraser crumbs from our sheets when I woke up each morning?
“Ms. Curtis?”
I returned to my new reality. “Sorry?”
“Could you tell me what she was wearing yesterday when she returned to the ranch?”
“I think so. We know from her calendar that she was having lunch with Artie Crandell from the Indian museum in Santa Fe.”
“Yes. We’ll send someone to interview him about their meeting. Perhaps he’ll remember what she had on and can corroborate your findings.”
“If Artie can’t, check with his personal assistant, Gloria Parson. She’s a slave to the latest fashions and she’d remember.”
He wrote a few words in his notebook. “Okay, you were saying?”
“Kim has some gray slacks that she likes to wear for special trips to town, and she pairs them with either a white shirt or a black-and-white checkered one. I see all three of her white shirts, but not the checkered. Also, she has two blazers that she wears over the shirts. Her black one’s in the closet, but not her gray one, so I believe she was wearing pale gray slacks, a black-and-white checkered long-sleeved shirt, and a charcoal gray blazer. Oh, and black loafers. They’re missing, too.”
Nelson wrote furiously for several seconds. He and I then returned to the office where he gave his notebook to Sergeant Esperanza. I sat down in one of the padded chairs while she called someone on her cell phone.
As she spoke, Detective Nelson walked toward me.
“You haven’t been completely honest with us about your relationship with Ms. Blair, have you?” He clicked the tip of his pen, repeatedly, his expression particularly sour.
“I’ve answered all your que
stions.”
“But you didn’t tell us the whole story, did you? You’re more than colleagues?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“And the reason we found your clothing in Ms. Blair’s bedroom is - ”
“Mark, that’s enough. I think we have the picture.” Sergeant Esperanza exercised her authority over the investigation with quiet intensity. She wasn’t much taller than I, with a strong, compact build, chin-length, light-brown hair and a friendly, empathetic manner that masked her toughness. The combination had a calming effect on my shattered nerves. I especially liked the way she’d handled her masculine counterpart, despite her more diminutive size. She murmured a few words to Detective Nelson, and he squared his shoulders and left without argument.
“I’m sorry about that, Dr. Curtis. Mark’s a little lacking in the sensitivity department these days.” She took a seat beside me. I stared into her eyes and saw no hint of condemnation in them.
“You mean he’s homophobic.”
“A bit, maybe. But, I suspect there’s more to it than that. We’ve worked together on joint assignments in the past, and he’s a damn fine investigator.”
I rubbed my eyes, trying to shake off my fatigue and colossal headache. “He’ll just have to deal with it,” I said, finally losing my composure. “I can’t change who I am, or who Kim is. The fact is that she’s missing, and it appears she didn’t leave willingly.”
“And we plan to find her and bring her back to you.” She closed her notebook and stretched, letting her gaze wander to every part of the room.
“You have a lovely home here. I’m sorry that this has happened to you both.”
“Thanks. The weird thing is that something like this has happened before, only to me.”
“Tell me about it.”
“When we were in Wales, I was kidnapped and held for ransom.” I related the whole story, including the attempted rape and Kim’s former lover’s attack. The sergeant listened without interrupting.