“Detective, if you called me here for a lecture on ethics,” Fager pointed at Goff, “you’ve got the wrong person delivering today’s lesson.”
Goff threw down his spoon. It bounced off the table onto his lap.
“Setting me up to argue I planted a gun on Luis Gallardo … ”
“It wasn’t my client’s gun.”
Goff leaned forward, hands shaking.
“You want to talk about the man who stapled your wife’s face to a wall, we got a conversation. You want to justify your bullshit, I’m gonna finish my meal like you’re not here.”
Fager pushed back his chair and half rose. “This is a mistake.”
“He worked the first Cody Geronimo murder,” Aragon said.
Fager didn’t move. “Linda wasn’t his first?”
“Tasha Gonzalez wasn’t his first,” Goff said, looking straight at the lawyer.
“So tell me exactly why I’m here with this asshole,” Fager said to Aragon, then settled into his chair. “Who’s Tasha Gonzalez?”
“We know you can take cases apart,” Aragon began. “You want the man who killed your wife, you’re going to have to put one together. Sam will be your contact. He hasn’t heard the tape, so he’s not tainted.”
“Except in other ways,” Goff said as a Mexican woman placed a dish by his bowl of menudo. He picked up a fried pork skin and plopped it in his mouth. “Awesome chicharrones,” he said, licking his lips. “Amazing stuff, skin. It’s actually an organ, the body’s largest. It sweats. Gets goose bumps. Tickles. Makes footballs, lampshades if you’re a Nazi. And if you’re Cody Geronimo, it makes lovely wall hangings.”
Aragon’s eyes told Goff to shut up.
She said to Fager, “We want you to put Leon Bronkowski on this.”
“I’m already on Geronimo,” Fager said. “Why do I need you?”
Goff produced an accordion file from under the table and pushed it across to Fager.
“You didn’t get that from me,” Aragon said. “Maybe I don’t even know what’s in there.”
Lewis cleared his throat and spoke for the first time.
“On this, Mr. Fager, you’re a citizen. Thornton would always have more information on your wife’s murder than you would ever see. That just changed.”
The detectives stood to leave.
“Don’t call me again,” Aragon said. “Go through Sam.”
They left. Fager thumbed through the file.
“I trust everything’s here.”
“It’s not,” Goff said, fried pork skin crunching in his teeth.
“Something’s missing from the file?”
“Nope,” Goff said, and slid the preliminary autopsy results across the table. “From your wife.”
Fager took the files home and set up a place to work on the dining room table. For some reason he pulled down the shades in the middle of the day. He put aside the preliminary autopsy report, spotted red with Goff’s menudo, and dug into the rest of what the police had assembled in less than twenty-four hours.
The first officers on scene reported his statements, what they found in the bathroom, and their efforts to secure the property. Detectives Aragon and Lewis later found a credit-card receipt giving the time Geronimo purchased a used book, a hardback, entitled Transformation: Mastering the Mystery of Found Art, by Paolo Merced. He had paid eighteen dollars and eighty-four cents. The file contained a copy of the receipt and a forensics report that the original held latents from Linda and Geronimo. The book was purchased one hundred and thirty-four minutes before Fager’s 911 call.
The inventory of seized property was short. A cell phone, a belt with turquoise stones set in silver. Coins. A wallet with credit cards and four hundred sixty-seven dollars in cash. Indian totems, a small bear made from coral and a snake in onyx. A baggie containing very small bones, likely avian, and pieces of a tiny snail shell.
Fager was studying diagrams of the scene when he heard a motorcycle throttling down in the driveway.
“Hell you doing?” Leon Bronkowski, dressed in leathers, face red from wind, filled the doorway. “Your mission is grieving. Leave this to the cops.”
“It’s a mess, Bronk. We could do a better job … ”
Bronkowski swept the taller man in his arms and lifted him from his chair.
“You cry yet?”
Fager avoided his eyes.
“I should make you cry.” Bronkowski crushed Fager until he groaned. Photographs by a coffee cup caught his eye. “Jesus,” he said and released his friend.
“I haven’t opened the photos of Linda. That’s Tasha Gonzalez. Geronimo killed her, too.”
Bronkowski peeled off a leather vest and unsnapped his chaps. “What are you doing with this stuff? You should be thinking on your years with Linda, unlocking those iron bands you got round your heart. How did you get these files?”
Instead of answering, Fager shook out a folded section of the newspaper. Below the front-page story about Linda’s murder and Geronimo’s arrest was a sidebar announcing a new show at Geronimo’s Secret Canyon Gallery.
“He rips Linda apart and gets front-page advertising.”
Bronkowski’s eyes locked on a Beretta on the breakfront. Fager had carried the nine millimeter through Bosnia and managed to keep it after leaving the service.
“That for you or Cody Geronimo?”
“What? Oh,” Fager looked over his shoulder at the pistol. “Don’t know why I got that out. Get up to speed on these files. Gonzalez as well as Linda. Then we’ll talk about how to proceed.”
“How about we proceed to shoot the piece of shit?”
Fager pushed forward a stack of papers and turned to his laptop.
Bronkowski looked at the files scattered over the dining table, legal pads filled with Fager’s scrawl, crime scene photos, diagrams, photocopied pages bristling with Post-It notes, three empty coffee cups. He looked again at the Beretta and kept his eyes there as Fager tapped keys.
Nine
Marcy Thornton and Associates, P.C. occupied all six thousand square feet of a Prairie-style mansion on Paseo de Peralta, across from the state capitol and next to some low, cinder-block buildings Fager had connected to form his office complex. In the conference room, reporters occupied chairs arranged in a semicircle on an enormous Persian rug. In the middle, Thornton sat at a writing desk. She worked on a brief while camera crews set up.
She had learned media skills as a young associate for Walter Fager. She bought the much grander building next to his complex when she rang a bell on her first case after going solo. They shared a parking lot, where her red Aston Martin often pointed at his black Mercedes.
Thornton’s secretary said everybody was ready.
“I’ll be quick.” Thornton put down her pen, pushed back from the desk and stood, smoothing her black silk pants. “I have an appointment across town.” They didn’t need to know the appointment was with her stylist. “First, my heart goes out to my colleague, Walter Fager, upon the loss of his lovely wife. Linda was a bright light in this dark world, and I hope the authorities will quickly apprehend her killer.”
Her eyes and voice darkened.
“That said, there is no excuse for the way Santa Fe police treated my client. Cody Geronimo is a respected member of our community. Clearly he was profiled. Instead of conducting a careful, patient investigation, they grabbed the closest Indian at hand. Snap judgment driven by prejudice and bigotry has permitted the real killer to remain on our streets.”
She took a drink of water to give reporters a second to write that down. She was almost done.
“We could fire off a tort claim notice for his unlawful arrest. But there has been enough grief over this incident. Mr. Geronimo wishes to state that he prays the police henceforth focus their resources on making Santa Fe a safer place for all citizens, regardless of their
racial or ethnic background. That is all.”
Thornton waved off questions with the excuse that she was running late. As she escaped through a side door, her secretary distributed copies of her statement so no reporter could misquote her. If they caught her on her way to her car she would repeat her canned lines. In handling reporters, Fager had once instructed, “Screw them and their questions. Their job is to print what you want future jurors to read.”
Thornton stopped by her office to collect her purse. Montclaire was on the leather sofa painting her nails. Today it was blue.
“I wanted to see you before I took off,” Thornton said. “Cody left some of his toys out.”
Aragon and Lewis returned to the office. They caught up on overtime requests. A stack of interdepartmental memos told them the seminars they were required to attend by the end of the quarter and the chief’s decision to leave unfilled the position of captain for Criminal Investigations, putting Dewey Nobles in charge by default. They’d pulled an old case two days ago, a stabbing at the South Capitol complex. The file covered Lewis’s desk. Three years together and this was the only case they hadn’t closed.
He tried to dig into it, but his mind was on Linda Fager’s murder. He couldn’t remember a more solid arrest. They knew the killer, knew how he did it. But there was now little practical difference between Geronimo and the assailant behind their only open file. Both were beyond their reach, free to do whatever they wanted, including shed more blood.
Aragon wasn’t concentrating on paperwork any more than he was.
“Because Dewey No-Balls,” she said.
“You’re talking to yourself.”
“You should hear what I’m keeping inside. What’s for dinner tonight?” she asked as Lewis drew on his notepad.
“You want to join us?” Lewis asked.
“I get a kick hearing a big dude like you planning meals for his kids and wife.”
“Mac and cheese, three cheeses: parm, cheddar, and jack. Green beans and salad.”
“No dessert?”
“That’s the salad.”
“You’re a hard-ass, Lewis.”
“Really, we’d love to have you over. It’s not good, always eating dinner alone, when you’re not eating it here.”
“Next you’ll tell me to get a cat.”
“I already did.”
Aragon smiled and said, “Geronimo had beer on his breath.” She slipped her Springfield into a holster behind her hip and dropped her shirt to cover the gun. “I want to know where he went for a cold one after cutting up Linda Fager.”
Lewis turned his notepad. Aragon saw a timeline of the Linda Fager murder.
“And I thought you were focused on a mid-level bureaucrat getting a blade in the kidney.”
“We know Geronimo strangled her,” Lewis said. “We’ve got a fractured hyoid and petechiae. But no bruising from fingers squeezing the neck, no thumb marks on her throat. Talking to Thornton, he didn’t say exactly how he did it, just that he choked her. I would guess he used his arm in a chokehold, another reason they haven’t raised latents.” He touched the back of his head. “Contusion here. First he clubbed her. She went down, he was at her throat from behind.”
“Weapon?”
“Didn’t break the skin. How about a heavy book? Maybe the one he bought. He pays, she gets back to work. Wham.”
“He hit her hard enough, she’d go down.”
“Small woman in her fifties, thin arms.”
“Not a mark on Geronimo. She didn’t put up a fight.”
“Once she’s down,” he said, trying to see it, “Geronimo had to prepare for what came next. He told Thornton he hadn’t gone in with anything on his mind but buying a book. Linda Fager looked at him. Whatever that did to him, he went off. Killed her then dragged her to the bathroom. I would guess she had the boxcutter where she received packages. He didn’t bring a staple gun with him. Probably found that in the store, too. Walter Fager says she had one, but couldn’t identify it positively as hers.”
“He should have been covered in blood. He stripped down to keep his clothes clean. But that wouldn’t take long,” she said.
“And after, took a bath at the sink, head to toe. Poured water over Linda Fager to take care of prints and trace evidence. Let the water overflow to cover the floor. Then somehow he dried himself.” Lewis paused. “Pretty sloppy, you think of it.”
“Except the boxcutter and staple gun clean and drying on a paper towel. Like he was caring for his tools. Maybe he used paper towels on himself, but we didn’t find them in the store. He might have taken his trash with him when he went for his after-work beer. If we were still on the case, officially, we’d delay garbage pickup, search every trash can between the store and wherever he had his beer. I need a copy of this.” She tapped her index finger on the timeline.
“We’d be knocking on doors up and down the street. We’d be searching his Range Rover, his house, poring over his clothes and those fancy boots and everything in his pockets. We’d get that book he bought, see if Linda Fager’s hair or blood is on it.”
“We’d be doing it right.”
“Keep my half-assed timeline. Fill in the blanks. Tomorrow’s chest and triceps.” They worked out three times a week at Brazos’s weight room on the south side of town, not far from Killer Park. “We can talk about Tasha Gonzalez then.” Lewis lightly kicked the heavy document box on the floor by his chair. “I’ll read up tonight.”
“When do you plan on sleeping?”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“Catch you tomorrow, Super Dad.”
Aragon faced Fager’s Finds. The plate-glass window had been covered with newspaper, the last order she gave before No-Balls yanked her off the case. An additional padlock had been installed and the key delivered to Fager. Not even Lewis knew she had kept a copy on her key ring, and the extra to the original deadbolt she discovered inside, under the cash register.
She lifted the crime-scene tape and went straight to the doorway to the little bathroom in back. The carpet was still damp. On a hunch, she opened the rear door. A garbage can sat in the alley fifteen yards away. She untucked her shirt and used its loose end to lift the lid. Inside she found a basketball-size clump of wet paper towels stained pink. Lewis’s theory about Geronimo stripping then bathing at the sink made sense. She slipped on the last pair of latex gloves she had and carried the can inside. Using one of the store’s garbage can liners, she bagged everything in the can. The lid went into a separate bag. She sealed the empty can in liners taped around the outside.
The pool of blood that had made young cops swoon had dried into a thick syrup, coating the linoleum and the edge of the toilet seat. The wall looked like it had been slapped with a mop dipped in red paint. Perforations in the drywall marked where eight heavy staples had been pried loose.
A cat had stepped in the blood and left paw prints heading into a far corner of the store. A defense lawyer could have fun with that. There was nothing she could do about it.
Aragon went to the counter at the front of the store. She stood behind the cash register, imagining what had passed between Linda Fager and Geronimo. She walked through it, noting how long each step might have taken, adding in time to wash and take out the trash.
She stepped outside onto the sidewalk, locked the door, and settled the crime-scene tape back into place. The evidence bags went in her car’s trunk, the empty can in the back seat. In the evening’s last light she studied Lewis’s timeline. Now to find the bar where Geronimo had been drinking after he killed Linda Fager. She turned left and headed toward the watering holes south of the plaza.
Lily Montclaire had just steered her car into the alley when she saw Aragon taking the garbage can into the back door of Fager’s Finds. The Mexican dwarf. The bald Mexican dwarf. Those hips were something. Powerful all across her thighs and pelvis.
You could break a finger in there, lose a hand snapped off at the wrist.
Arms bent, turned wrists up as she walked, the way a guy proud of his biceps carried himself. Aragon’s eyes were something, too. Cutting off her hair had done a lot to make them stand out. They were the kind of eyes you could make a living from doing ads for Luxottica or Maybelline. It would be a short career. These Mexican women lost their looks young. Not long past thirty they turned into the fried bread they ate with too many combo plates.
Maybe not Aragon. The senior partner on a homicide team, at least five years patrol before that, she had to be older than thirty. Ten more years the way she kept herself, hitting the weights to build those shoulders and arms, she’d be a human bulldozer. Paint her yellow, Caterpillar could use her.
Montclaire phoned Thornton to report that some of Cody’s mess had been cleaned up by the wrong person.
“She’s still working the case,” Thornton said. “I’ll get on that. You find the bar.”
Montclaire shoved her cell into her jeans. Geronimo didn’t remember where he had his beer. His head had been somewhere else, on “the drum within,” more of his flaky bullshit. He remembered turning right when he came out of the store. He wandered until he heard country music. Inside, women with bare midriffs. Tecate girl posters. Guys yelling at a big-screen TV. A table where he left fingerprints in Linda Fager’s blood.
Montclaire skipped the first bar she came to. Attractive men in tight pants and turtlenecks hung by the door smoking cigarettes. The next bar, inside a hotel, was decorated with Chihuly glass, woodcuts and orchids, and some guy with white hair playing flamenco guitar in a corner—nothing close to the dive Geronimo described.
Next a piano lounge. A block farther something called an enoteca, where only wine was served. Then she found the place.
She ordered a gin and tonic and picked a booth that allowed her to survey the room. On the back of a menu she sketched the tables and chairs, marked the location of the bar, the television, and front door, and added the men’s room to help Cody get his bearings. The schematic went into her back pocket. Geronimo could point out where he had been seated without having to come here again.
The Drum Within Page 5