The Drum Within

by James R. Scarantino

  Copyright Information

  The Drum Within: A Denise Aragon Novel © 2016 by James R. Scarantino.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2016

  E-book ISBN: 9780738748580

  Book format by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

  Cover art by iStockphoto.com/14256121/©RobertPlotz

  Editing by Ed Day

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Scarantino, James, 1956–

  Title: The drum within / James Scarantino.

  Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota: Midnight Ink, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015041936 (print) | LCCN 2015047760 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780738747743 | ISBN 9780738748580

  Subjects: LCSH: Women detectives—Fiction. | Women—Crimes

  against—Fiction.

  | Serial murder investigation—Fiction. | Santa Fe (N.M.)—Fiction. |

  GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.C268 D78 2016 (print) | LCC PS3619.C268 (ebook) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041936

  Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

  Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites.

  Midnight Ink

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  To Kara.

  One

  “One of those nights,” Detective Rick Lewis said.

  “Cold enough.” Detective Denise Aragon pulled a wool cap over her buzz cut. Spring around the corner on Santa Fe’s Plaza, up here snow under the trees, headlights glinting off ice in the stream they crossed just downhill.

  “I meant the moon. You could read a newspaper.”

  Or see dead eyes in the Volvo’s trunk.

  Aragon angled her flashlight at the young woman, her head on a spare tire, the rest of her zipped inside an orange and blue sleeping bag tapering from shoulders to feet.

  Lewis forced latex gloves over his hands. He opened the passenger door, then the glove box.

  “Maybe that’s Cynthia Fremont,” he said. “Vehicle registration with that name, from Asheville, North Carolina.”

  Aragon looked more closely at the young woman’s face. Sunburned cheeks below goggles of pale skin around chalky eyes. Jet black hair with a midnight-blue sheen. It had been dyed. Blond roots had continued to grow after her heart stopped beating.

  She saw something she’d seen on homeless drunks who died face up on beds of folded cardboard. The girl’s lips and nose had been shredded by birds.

  But she still had her eyes. Birds had not touched them.

  “She’s been lying out in the open,” Aragon said. “So why put her in here?”

  The parking lot was at the very edge of the city limits. Some of the pavement under their feet was county jurisdiction. All of it was owned by the federal government, like the forested mountains rising to meet the bright disc of the full moon.

  A sheriff’s Suburban had preceded them up the winding road from the city. The bumper decal told them the officers inside were with Court Services. Two pickups with Game and Fish officers and a Subaru from Open Space had joined the caravan. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, even a white Ford Expedition from the Department of Homeland Security. Aragon was not going to let this crowd do anything but hold back reporters and camera crews.

  Except no media was here. Just a mob from state and federal agencies tripping over each other in the silver light.

  Another car arrived. Two women and a man stepped out, reflective letters on their windbreakers saying “FBI.” They swung flashlights across the parking lot, leaving the Volvo to the detectives, nobody clearly in command yet.

  She was ready to reach into the trunk. She pulled on two sets of blue latex gloves and leaned in. At the girl’s hairline she noticed dark, blue skin. She pressed and the skin turned white, then blue again when she removed her finger.

  Lewis moved behind her, his size blocking the moon. The beam of his flashlight joined hers.

  “Her head was hanging down,” he said. “Look how she’s laid out. You’re carrying her on your shoulder, you could roll her off, glad to lose the weight. But somebody laid her down carefully.”

  “Two people holding arms and feet.”

  “Used that tire like a pillow.”

  “Takes time for blood to pool under the skin like that. Face down, then they turned her over. How long you think she was carried?”

  “What’s with the sleeping bag? Not doing her any good.”

  They turned toward the whine of engines laboring up the hill, three Jeeps carrying U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officers.

  “Great,” she said. “A couple of housing inspectors and a crossing guard, we can get going for real.”

  Lewis’s phone rang. He stepped away to take the call. Aragon felt along the bag. She had the sense the girl might be naked. At the bottom she was surprised to feel boots through the nylon and down.

  “Walter Fager found his wife dead inside her store,” Lewis said, back at her side, returning the phone to his pocket. “She was cut up bad.”

  “Somebody doesn’t know how to use a knife.”

  “Say what?”

  “Should have used it on Fager.”

  She wished the medical investigator would get here. She wanted to open the bag, see the rest of the girl, know how she died.

  Lewis said, “I’ve answered hours of his questions. Now he can answer ours.”

  “Watch Fager take the case.” Aragon, her mind in two places now, felt through the bag for the shape and weight of the boots on the girl’s feet. “Defending whoever killed his wife. Show what a badass lawyer he is. Free advertising for life.” The boots were heavy; stiff soles.

  “Nobles wants us down there,” Lewis said, “it being Fager’s wife.”

  Dewey Nobles was Deputy Chief for the Operations Division. It included the Crimestoppers tip line and Criminal Investigations, which owned Aragon and Lewis.

  “What about Hotdog and Sauerkraut?” she asked. “They were at their desks, Omar talking about the kind of boat
he wants, he had more OT.”

  “Fager’s suing them. Black-and-blue gangbanger versus Omar Serrano and Conrad Fenstermacher. Risk Management doesn’t want them anywhere near Fager.”

  “He’s sued us.” She caught a whiff of wood smoke under the odor of tissue decay. “Where we going?”

  Lewis gave an address on the east side of downtown where Linda Fager ran a used bookstore and curio shop. Aragon knew it, one of many small shops that couldn’t possibly make a profit under the weight of downtown rents. Fager probably propped it up with cash fees he didn’t report for his law practice.

  “Store’s called Fager’s Finds,” she said. “Fager finds his wife. Fager finds her dead.”

  “What do you want to do here?”

  “You know any of these people? I’m not trusting her to Smokey the Bear.”

  “Rivera with FBI. Tomas. Does reservation homicides.”

  The FBI trio was now at the front of the Volvo, camera flashes showing their profiles and the passenger door Lewis had opened. Rivera was easy to identify as the only male in the FBI team. He pointed out photos he wanted then dictated notes into a digital recorder. Aragon approached and interrupted without introducing herself.

  “She was camping. She didn’t die here.”

  Rivera turned and dropped his gaze to look down, everybody always taller than her. A cold breeze fluttered the black hair on his high forehead, making her think of someone else. She had to fight a memory taking her away from the moment, the job right here.

  He chucked his chin at the mountain. Lights moved through trees. He already had people searching the mountainside.

  “That’s an expensive sleeping bag,” Rivera said. “Big Agnes. Superlight, but rated to sub-zero. Not something for car camping. And she’s wearing hiking boots.”

  Rivera was way ahead of her. He wasn’t one of the Fucking Brainless Idiots dumped into New Mexico after screwing up somewhere else.

  “Let’s hope the laces are tied,” he said. “Might give us something. Something small, like did she tie them herself. You with Lewis?”

  She handed him a business card.

  “Our boss thinks a lawyer’s wife in a bookstore is more important than a pretty girl in a trunk. Keep us in the loop.”

  More FBI personnel had arrived at the edge of the parking lot and were marking off a perimeter with yellow tape.

  Rivera provided his own card. “I’ll need your report,” he said, letting her know that this case was his.

  “That’s why you’ll keep us in the loop,” feeling a little better about this.

  She walked to the back of the car for another look. She found the Big Agnes logo on the midsection of the sleeping bag. The letters had been arranged to make her see the outline of a camel or a Sphinx, maybe playing off the bag’s mummy design. For the first time she noticed the empty box of Clif bars and crumpled packaging for a backpacking water filter. There was definitely a camp. It would be near water. A stream ran on one side of this parking lot, but she knew it wasn’t there. The body had been carried from farther away. Carried for miles.

  “I’ll drive,” Lewis said to get her moving.

  “We have to go,” she told the girl who might be Cynthia Fremont.

  Lewis got the car warm. She peeled the wool cap off her skull. On the ride into Santa Fe she called Rivera. He should search the shores of a lake she knew up in the mountains.

  Two

  It wasn’t his hand beating the drum. The drum beat in his hand, pounding inside, his fist shoved deep in his pocket. The beating drowned out the football game playing above the bar and the women, shirttails knotted above flashy belt buckles, throwing down shots, shuddering, shrieking as the liquor hit the back of their throats. The rhythm wrapped in his fingers carried Cody Geronimo far away from the annoying people in this ridiculous tourist bar. He had work tonight. The drum would not beat forever.

  “Ready for another?”

  He looked up at a waitress balancing a tray of empties.

  “Alone in your thoughts?” the young woman asked.

  “Hardly alone.”

  He raised his beer mug. His hand shook a little, not nerves, not the excitement still with him. It was the beating of the drum running through his body. He hoped she didn’t see it.

  “Certainly, I’ll take another.” He uncrossed his legs, the silver tip of his cowboy boot catching light as it dropped to the floor.

  She took his glass, recognition in her eyes. “I love your paintings. Finished for the night?”

  “I haven’t been painting.”

  “I’m a slob with a brush. Completely. Half goes on the wall, half on me. Forget ceilings. You only got a little bit on your hair.”

  “I said I haven’t been painting.”

  “Sorry. I just thought.”

  She pointed at her temple before carrying his empty to the bar. He touched the spot she indicated on his own head and examined his fingertips.

  Not paint. Blood.

  He wiped it off under the table then patted his head to see if he had any more on him. He had tried to be neat. He was always neat in his work.

  He rose and left before his beer arrived. He needed his studio while the drum still lived.

  He had walked farther than he thought. Across the center of Santa Fe, through the tree-lined plaza, down a narrow alley to the tourist bar he’d never noticed before, on a street he couldn’t recall. He never came here, t-shirt town, a world away from his gallery but less than two miles apart. He retraced his route as best he could, finding he hadn’t been seeing anything outside his own head. Not street signs, nor familiar buildings and businesses, intersections he knew. What he’d been seeing: colors, far too many, overdone, truly a disaster; his hands at work, making sense of the chaos, his own heart beating, like an assistant in the room watching; finally the drum, taking it into his fist, seeing it pulse inside his fingers, actually seeing its vibrations ripple up his arms.

  He’d been seeing sounds, seeing tastes, seeing textures, seeing heat and cold against his skin. Everything visual, one medium, one pure, ceaseless line.

  Cars circled the plaza. Now he knew where he was. A white car with the hood painted black slowed and steered close to the curb. Bass notes thumped from trunk speakers. He saw them, black mallets flying from the vehicle’s frame.

  He stepped under the portal of the Palace of the Governors where, during the day, Indians sold jewelry off blankets. The two-tone car moved past, slowing again near a woman walking alone. She shifted her purse to the shoulder away from the street as something was yelled from the car. He saw the angry words: blacker than night, ravens with talons bared.

  Music, laughter, the clinking of glasses drifted from a balcony above him, a sprinkle of reds, oranges, yellows descending in the night sky. More tourists. More ridiculous people. He didn’t like this part of Santa Fe. He preferred Canyon Road, the winding rows of art galleries, his own near the top where the street narrowed. That was where he was headed once he reached his car, outside the bookstore where inspiration had struck.

  Did he turn here, or was it the next block? No, a little farther yet.

  He didn’t remember closing the door to the bookstore or walking the first couple blocks. His head had cleared later, when he decided he needed a drink to calm himself, give his hands time to settle down.

  This wasn’t how he did his work. He had rules, guidelines, procedures. A proper workspace. The right tools for the right job. But the woman had looked at him when she handed him the book he wanted. More than looked. Opened herself. He saw straight into her, to the beating of the drum.

  She had not fought much. When she turned away, a quick blow with the same heavy book she’d handed him had staggered her. Her neck fit neatly in his hands and he thought of clay on a potting wheel. He’d found a place to work in the little bathroom in the back. Cramped, but the sink
was there at his elbow.

  The boxcutter on the counter by the cash register did fine in place of the blades in the velvet purse in his studio. Her skin did what he wanted and he was pleased. He hadn’t been into masks before. It could be a new genre to explore. The problem would be showing this line of work.

  At least her mask would enjoy an audience. He wondered who would find her, how they would react. He hadn’t thought of it at the time, but the staging itself became an integral part of the presentation. That’s how the most genuine creative forces worked, without any conscious direction from the artist.

  She should thank him, what he’d done for her. A Cody Geronimo original. No woman alive could say that.

  Except for the spot of blood on his hair, he’d been meticulous. He used her plastic gloves from a box under the sink. He’d stripped to protect his clothes. Then he’d washed and dried himself with paper towels discarded outside the store. He stopped the sink and left the faucet running. Water was overflowing as he backed away, destroying his footprints, a tide smoothing the sand.

  Yes, he had closed the front door on his way out. He hoped so.

  He avoided the lights of the La Fonda Hotel and aimed for the darkness of a covered walkway. He paused at the lit window of a gallery offering Indian art. Unpainted frames held portraits of war chiefs shaded in greens and blues, their faces distorted as they morphed into wolves and bears. Eagles rose from their heads. Claws became eyebrows.

  Not bad. But he’d seen it before. The godawful pink coyotes, the cowboys in yellow slickers, the repetitious pastels of New Mexico mountains, the Rio Grande Gorge always painted as a gash in dark earth. Only his work was unique, irreplaceable.

  Another painting in the window stood out. A continuous single line on a plain background gave form to the face and torso of an Indian woman with exaggerated cheeks and thick upper arms. The simplicity was exquisite. Genius.

  It was a mass-market poster of his own work.

  That’s how he could paint when his hands were steady. Tonight he worked in a more forgiving medium.

  His Range Rover was almost around the corner. He would be alone in his studio, no human assistants, no tourists gawking through windows. He had a gallery opening tomorrow and much to do. He would be busy until dawn.