The Drum Within

by James R. Scarantino

  “Dewey won’t buck DOJ. Hell, he’ll take credit for getting Santa Fe PD included,” said Lewis. “You’ll have to put up with him at the table.”

  “He’ll be pulling out chairs for your boss,” Aragon said.

  “We’ll give him a spot to stand for every media event. In the background, with the potted plants.”

  “So what’s next?” She hunted loose fries in the bottom of her bag.

  “The skeletons are en route to Quantico. Those bones will tell a story.” Rivera handed her the last of his fries when she came up empty. “Rick, I can give you five people to canvas relatives of the missing women on your list. You tell them what to do.”

  “An army,” she said with food in her mouth.

  “Also on its way to Quantico is that table Montclaire ditched. Cost us twenty bucks to buy it from the junkyard. Maybe the best investment the agency ever made. We find hair or blood, we get another match to the skeletons. Since the table came from inside Geronimo’s ranch—we’ve got Montclaire on video trying to sneak it into her Expedition, you can tell what’s under the sheets—we’ll get any warrant we want.”

  “We’ll get Geronimo’s gallery with what Bronkowski’s bringing,” she said. “And if that table has any DNA match, we’ve got Montclaire on felony obstruction. She wasn’t destroying evidence without Thornton telling her what to do. Maybe Montclaire would roll on Thornton.” She thought a little more. “Shit, and then maybe Thornton rolls on Judge Judy.”

  “We’d have to prove Montclaire knew there was evidence of homicides on that table to get to Thornton,” Lewis said.

  “Why else would she be scattering pieces along the interstate? She knew it was evidence that would hurt Geronimo. And there’s the fire Bronkowski thinks she started to destroy the bar table where Geronimo sat after killing Linda Fager.”

  “We can’t prove that bar table had Linda Fager’s blood on it.” Lewis and her kicking a case back and forth, the way they’d do it at Killer Park. The FBI agents sat back and watched. “It’s all ashes,” Lewis continued. “So much for a second obstruction charge.”

  “I’m more interested in arson, a second-degree felony. How do we wrap that around Montclaire? I bet I can break her. I don’t think there’s much steel behind that pretty face.”

  “We won’t get to talk to her without Thornton at her side. We won’t get two words out of Montclaire.”

  “We’ll get two: ‘Fuck you.’ We need to split them up. But how do you peel a client away from her lawyer who’s also her boss?”

  “All good. Lots of work for everyone. Lots to think about,” Rivera said, reclaiming control of the meeting. “Now for news you may not like. I have to open a file on Fager.”

  Nobody seemed surprised.

  Rivera explained anyway. “DOJ’s war crimes people have to consider Thornton’s allegations about Bosnia. It’s a huge distraction. But if we don’t investigate Fager as thoroughly as Geronimo, maybe more so, we pay for it at trial.”

  “We not only have to prove Geronimo did it,” Lewis said, “we have to prove Fager couldn’t, didn’t, and wouldn’t.”

  “Absolutely. And we have to tackle the fact that Linda Fager didn’t fit with the other women. We don’t know exactly why Geronimo killed Linda Fager. It’s troubling out behavioral analysts.”

  “She looked at him. That’s all it took,” Aragon said. “We got it on tape.”

  “We must get that tape in evidence,” Rivera said. “I’m confident we’ll succeed in federal court. You wouldn’t have retained a copy? One you missed in complying with Judge Rivera’s ridiculous order, one you left in a tape player perhaps?”

  “I don’t know everybody in this room well enough to answer that,” she said. She looked across the table at Agent Tucker. “We just met today, no offense.”

  He nodded, showing he understood what she was saying under the words.

  “Or,” Rivera said, “we sever Linda Fager from the others, separate trials, and don’t give Thornton an invitation to confuse the jury.”

  “That’s an invitation for her to confuse two juries,” Lewis said.

  That’s why Goff’s rabid, Aragon thought to herself. He sees Fager letting Geronimo off the hook, again. It doesn’t matter why he fell into Thornton’s trap, or how much he’s suffering. It just makes Goff hate him more.

  “Can’t blame him,” she said.

  “What?” Rivera and Lewis asked at the same time.

  “Nothing.”

  They divided tasks. Lewis would contact families of the missing women with Tucker assisting. Rivera was going to be occupied obtaining authorization and funding for the joint task force. Aragon would run down a current Mujeres Bravas crew. Their blue and green station wagons were easy to spot. She would ask how the women found work, who they considered their boss, who paid them, and show photos of the missing women.

  Aragon left feeling confident, though the Fager thing was a loose end. Thornton was going to get run over, her client crushed under her. Too much physical evidence was coming at Geronimo from too many directions. Even the sort of jurors who made it into the box in a Santa Fe courtroom would not be fooled.

  She headed to her apartment and collapsed on the sofa in time for the night’s last news broadcast. There was Fager throwing Thornton around like a rag doll. It was worse on camera. She watched herself putting Fager on the ground and Agent Tucker holding him there. The contorted, unshaved face under Tucker’s knee was hard to recognize.

  Her phone rang. Joe Mascarenas was watching the same news from his hospital room. She was prepared to tell him everything was under control. But the cameras caught something she had not noticed in the chaos: Thornton’s satisfied smile as Fager’s hands closed on her throat.

  “You see that?” Mascarenas said. “Defense exhibit one.”

  Linda Fager’s killer had strangled her, crushed her windpipe. Thornton could show the video, with blown-up stills on corkboard in front of the jury box. Have them out through trial, she forgot to take them off the easel by her table, apologizing to the judge but doing it again and again. And every time, needing no words at all to tell the jury Walter Fager was the one who should be on trial.

  Forty-Eight

  Adrenaline got Bronkowski almost across the Texas panhandle before he had to pull into a DOT rest stop. The place was fortified against tornadoes, a concrete bunker where drivers could huddle while the prairie was being chewed up and cars and trucks hurled into the sky. He napped for two hours, then got moving again, forcing himself through Amarillo by morning so that damned song didn’t get in his head and drive him nuts.

  The day grew around him as the outline of the Sangre de Cristo mountains rose from the desert. He forked north off I-40 at Clines Corners and took U.S. 285 toward Santa Fe. Only forty-nine miles to go. He called Fager, again. He had called him before leaving Fallon’s place. Again after Oklahoma City, and a couple times on the long, empty stretches to keep himself awake. Fager had answered none of his calls.

  In Santa Fe he went straight to Fager’s house. No lights inside.

  No answer at the door. The Mercedes was not in the yard or garage. Bronkowski drove to the office building. A car was parked in front with a man slumped over the wheel, probably a drunk passed out before

  wkilling someone and not needing the services of Walter Fager and Associates. But as he pulled past, Bronkowski recognized Sam Goff and started to worry. He parked and let himself in the back. The security system had been activated and Bronkowski punched the code. He tripped over books at the entrance to Fager’s office. Inside, empty coffee cups everywhere and paper spilling from desk to floor. The printer was open, with the toner cartridge pulled out. He left the way he entered, armed the system, then walked down the sidewalk to Goff’s car.

  He rapped on the driver’s window and Goff’s head shot up from its pillow on the wheel.

  Goff ru
bbed his eyes and rolled the window.

  “Where is he?” Bronkowski asked.

  Goff looked at Fager’s building, then back at Bronkowski.

  “He was there all night. A light in his office.”

  A thought occurred to Bronkowski and he went rigid.

  “How long you been out? When was the last you checked the clock?”

  “I don’t know. Damn. I didn’t mean to close my eyes. Maybe he went home to sleep.”

  Bronkowski hurried back to his car.

  Goff waited until Bronkowski was out of sight, then drove in the opposite direction, into the winding roads where big houses stood above Santa Fe’s old Spanish buildings.

  He pulled into Fager’s drive and crunched gravel as he approached the front door. Clearly no one was home, but he pushed the doorbell. He gave it three tries, with plenty of time between rings. He turned his back to the house and faced Fager’s yard, the sun above the mountains, a hawk coasting in a blue sky. Someone was walking a dog along the street. Goff yelled out, asking if they had seen Walter Fager this morning. They called back that they didn’t know anyone by that name.

  Goff pulled his cell and dialed Aragon. He got her on the way to work.

  “That motherfucker’s gone. Fager. I was on his office all night. Maybe I nodded off, just a little. I’m at the house. He’s not here, either. Bronkowski’s looking, too.”

  “Hold,” Aragon said as the voice of the police dispatcher crackled in the background. He waited. She came back on. “Sam, you really fucked up.” He heard a car horn blast. She swore at cars to get out of the way.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Shots fired at Geronimo’s gallery,” she said, and the line went dead.

  One officer guarded the gate at the sidewalk. Another stood at the front door under the elk antlers. A third officer was talking to two women across the street. A fourth emerged from the Secret Canyon Gallery and took a deep breath.

  Aragon clipped her badge on her collar and pulled her crime-scene bag from the trunk. She snapped on two sets of blue latex gloves, thinking back to the night she and Lewis almost ran out of supplies, bouncing from the Fremont scene to the bloody bathroom at the back of Fager’s Finds. She grabbed her last pair of plastic booties from her bag and turned to face Santa Fe’s latest murder.

  The officer at the gate said there was one dead inside. The two women across the street had called it in. They saw the shooter.

  She entered the front yard. Terra cotta statues had been blown apart. Amid the fragments, one pot stood intact, suffering only a through-and-through. She saw a bullet hole in the wooden post supporting the portal. She stretched the plastic booties over her cross trainers and stepped inside.

  A brass casing caught light from the front door. Silver-tipped cowboy boots pointed to the ceiling. Cody Geronimo had repaired his Tres Outlaws. He had tips again on both boots. But he was down to one eye. A hole had replaced his left.

  His ponytail was wet rope in the blood pooling behind his head.

  She scanned the room. A clear shoeprint by his body. A handprint in blood on the doorframe, another on the wall at the front entrance.

  Fresh air cooled her face. The window behind Geronimo was shattered, just a few shards remaining in the frame.

  The officer she had seen talking to the women across the street was waiting for her outside. More police arrived, and an EMT crew that would not be needed. Her cell chirped. It was Lewis. He was on his way from home. She told him to bring gloves and booties, she was out. She saw Goff pull up behind the ambulance. He got as far as the cop at the gate.

  She noticed another shoe print on the painted concrete floor just inside the door. It had been made by a large man. She was pleased the first officers on the scene had stepped around it.

  “Baca,” she said to the cop who had been talking to the women across the street. She knew him. He had worked patrol for six years and was good at it. “What did they see?”

  “They were watering their garden in the yard of their gallery. They live around back. They heard shouting, and a man was standing here looking at them. They didn’t notice the gun in his hand until he shot a ceramic bear. That must have been it.” He nodded at pink rubble containing one recognizable bear paw. “They couldn’t say how many shots he fired, but a lot. When he was done, he stood still, facing them, giving them a good look. He drove off in a light brown Camry. New Mexico plates. The bright yellow kind, not the new blue plates. They couldn’t see the number. I put that out right away.”

  “Good job. Description of the shooter.”

  Baca checked his notes. “Six-three, three hundred pounds. Curly black hair. Jeans. Plaid shirt. Thick belt, big buckle.”

  “What did he have on his feet?”

  “They couldn’t see. And he was wearing a black leather vest.”

  She was expecting a description of Fager. This was Bronkowski.

  She walked over to Goff at the gate.

  “Do you know Bronkowski’s concealed carry?” she asked.

  “He wears a snubby in the back of his pants.”

  “This guy fired more than five shots. There’s nine-millimeter casings on the floor.”

  “We know Fager has a Beretta nine. Who was it said they were going to shoot Geronimo in the face?”

  “The shooter was Bronkowski. Two witnesses saw him.”

  “Bronkowski didn’t trust automatics. Never carried one.” Goff thought for a second. “That’s why he rushed off. Came here. Saw what Fager did. Put it on himself.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I could never figure why he was Fager’s poodle. I talked to some cops who go to meetings at the VA where Bronkowski opens up. Fager saved his life when they were in Bosnia.”

  “He’d take a murder rap for his friend?”

  Police and emergency vehicles now blocked the street. The medical investigator’s wagon was here. She made a mental note to tell them about the slug in the wooden post. But there was something she didn’t want them to see.

  “This is bullshit,” Goff said. “Fager’s the guy. Maybe they were in on it together, and Bronkowski’s part was to confuse the evidence. You arrest the wrong guy. He walks at trial. They’ve got something cooked up.”

  “We’ve got handprints,” she said, but Goff had her wondering. The prints were too perfect, almost staged so they could not be missed.

  “Whose prints are on the casings? I bet Fager,” Goff said.

  “What was Bronkowski driving?”

  “Piece of shit Camry. Beige or tan.”

  “How about light brown?”

  “There a difference?”

  She needed a moment alone before the technicians and police photographers got here. “Sam, you better split. I don’t want you in the reports.”

  He slipped into the crowd that had gathered across the street. Cops were busy setting up a perimeter. OMI’s people were checking equipment or slipping into clean suits. She eased around the side of the gallery and found the storyteller figurine she had planted on the wall between buildings. The surveillance camera from Geronimo’s ranch was still inside. The broken window was at her back as she tucked the camera in a jacket pocket.

  Lewis was now at the gate talking with the officer. He came into the yard and they met by the ruins of the pink bear. Her mind was on what the camera may have recorded. It might show Goff was right, Fager at the studio, in and out before Bronkowski arrived. It might also show nothing but the window’s reflection.

  She said, “We have Bronkowski ID’d as the shooter. He’s in his car.”

  “I don’t know about his car. But I think I know where Bronkowski is. A motorcycle crashed into the overpass by the National Cemetery. Harley. Big guy in a leather vest. A Beretta in the wreckage. The bike was destroyed. The guy riding it is in worse shape.”

&n
bsp; Forty-Nine

  White crosses marched in neat rows up a grassy slope. At the top an American flag flew above veterans’ graves. The highway in front of the cemetery was empty, traffic diverted through downtown while crews swept the road of debris and an accident reconstructionist diagrammed the scene.

  The track of Bronkowski’s Harley showed he left the blacktop forty feet before the overpass. A single furrow down the middle of the dirt and grass median, back tire in direct line with the front, aiming straight for tons of reinforced concrete.

  Pieces of the Harley were crushed on the abutment and scattered beyond. The Beretta was found in a saddlebag snagged on a piece of exposed rebar. Ten yards away, a photograph of Linda Fager had been caught on the thorns of a cholla cactus.

  Bronkowski was on life support. Walter Fager was still missing. His black Mercedes had not been sighted. The state police had taken the BOLO statewide.

  A crowd of onlookers had clustered on slopes on either side of the highway. People placing flowers on veterans’ graves paused to watch. The news crews were content to get their film from a hundred feet away. Only one person pushed closer. Goff. Lewis went to where two uniformed officers had blocked him with their chests. He returned with a message.

  “He’s got a point. No sign Bronkowski was trying to brake. A motorcycle would have fishtailed if he slammed on the brakes.”

  Aragon spoke her thoughts. “He doesn’t use his own gun to kill Geronimo. He goes home to get his Harley, then tries to kill himself. Why here?”

  She looked uphill at the crosses. Men, a few women, who had served in the nation’s wars were buried here. Many of those graves held New Mexicans who had survived the Bataan Death March, then died one by one as later generations fought in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. And in an undeclared war in a little country now called Bosnia-Herzegovina.