Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Mask?” Trevana said, opening a drawer.

  I shook my head no. The drains in the floor weren’t just for corpses; half the badges in El Paso were supposed to have thrown up down here since they built it.

  “I’ll fix the files,” I said, nodding to Jennifer Rice’s drawer. “Whatever Hector messed up.”

  Trevana was watching me over his reading glasses now. Touching the frame on the right side, as if focusing.

  “Not so sure our friend is dyslexic anymore,” he said.

  “She couldn’t be eighty-six degrees, though…”

  Trevana shrugged, spun her file on the stainless steel so that it stopped rightside up for me.

  It wasn’t Davidson’s DI report, or even the preliminary CSU write-up, but Jennifer Rice’s phone records.

  They ran for two weeks—four pages. Every twelve or so lines, Trevana had circled a number. The area code was 915.

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  “Midland, Texas.”

  I flipped the top page around.

  “Her mother,” Trevana said, answering my next question before I could ask it. “She calls her every night at seven-thirty.”

  Then he waited for me to get to Friday night’s activity.

  I shook my head no. Trevana smiled, nodded.

  “I don’t know if she was alive or dead then,” he said. “But I do know she called her mother. Kept the line open for twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds.”

  “Do you always do this?” I said, taking a stool.

  “Do… what?”

  “Go over the files like this.”

  He nodded, like it was obvious—yes—then told me he didn’t want to be deputy coroner forever.

  I leaned in closer to the table, read the names associated with the numbers.

  “No roses,” I said, rotating the sheet back around to him.

  Trevana agreed, wasn’t interested.

  “She has to have been dead seventy-two hours,” I said. “That kind of atrophy, decay…”

  Trevana didn’t say yes and didn’t say no, just kept thumbing through the file.

  “In class, you never told us you did all this too,” I said.

  “I was trying to make one kind of detective out of you then,” he said, flipping his scalpel over his index finger, “not another.” He caught the scalpel right at the head, said, “Where were you when I called?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I called.”

  “Church,” I said. “Like you.”

  He smiled, let it pass.

  I stood with him, for Jennifer Rice.

  On the stand beside her he unrolled his leather kit. It gleamed with antique toys: hand-ground blades, extravagant funnels, screw-powered spreaders, hand-pumps; more; worse.

  “Will those…” I started, unsure how to phrase it, “will they—mess her up?”

  He smiled—a boy—swallowed it.

  “Da Vinci used precision tools not unlike these,” he said. “When autopsies were done in the round.”

  “Five hundred years ago, he used them,” I said, not looking up.

  “Has the human body changed that much since Mona Lisa?” Trevana asked, then, same breath: “You noticed her lips, of course.”

  I nodded, his best student, and he smiled, said it was epoxy of some kind, then traced where it had spilled or sprayed onto her neck. Some of her hair fixed to her throat.

  “Spray adhesive?” I tried. “Like for show livestock?”

  “Doesn’t dry hard enough,” he said, nodding. “That’s water-based anyway. This is probably just… what do they call it? Ziplip or something. The cement morticians use to keep their clients’ mouths closed for the funeral.” He touched her chin; it was clearcoated, the same as the lips. “Kind of a sloppy application, though.”

  “Like airplane glue, then?”

  “Similar,” he shrugged, pinching Jennifer Rice’s top up at the shoulder. With blunt-tipped scissors he cut through the fabric he’d separated, then down the side to her hip. Next it was her aquamarine pants, up one seam, down the other, then he bagged and tagged them both, put them on the CSU cart. On the shelf behind him I could see the little specimen jars for the lab, already taped over and signed. The trace from under her fingernails, from her nostrils, off her lips. Combed from her hair. I touched it with the back of my finger. It was straighter now, had been arranged around her shoulders.

  Trevana was more sentimental than he let on. Mona Lisa my ass. I nodded to the specimen bottles.

  “Thinking rape?” I said, no eye contact.

  Trevana shrugged, said, “It often precipitates the actual murder, yes.”

  He’d said it before in class, using precipitates instead of precedes to show the causal relationship: that a lot of women were murdered not because their killer wanted them dead, so much, but because he wanted to cover up what he’d just done to them. The joke he followed it with, standing over a cadaver, was that murder wasn’t brain surgery, this was, and then he’d inserted his scalpel.

  Because he was Mitch Trevana, he could get away with it.

  Now, looking for semen, he switched the light over from white to UV. There wasn’t any though, even when he parted her thighs with his pale, latex hands. Like death himself spreading her legs. It made me aware of how I was standing.

  “The mouth, then,” he said.

  He worked his way up there slow, rolling her forearms between his fingers, easing her over onto one side, then the other.

  That was when we found what Davidson hadn’t put on his diagram: some trauma on her left hip, like she’d fallen against something. Like her killer had pushed her front door open hard enough to throw her back against something, maybe.

  Trevana collected some of the dried blood around the wound then dictated the rest of his visual inspection into the headset he’d pulled on. He kept looking to the smear of dried blood on her hip, though, as if Jennifer Rice, dying, had reached around with a razor, cut her killer’s name into her skin, along with her manner of death, then signed and timestamped it. But he had all day to irrigate it, read what was written there.

  Now, now there was a procedure to follow.

  Trevana unrolled his leather pack farther, until only the oldest tools weren’t showing, then handed me some gloves, a sterile rag, and I followed his lead, dipping the rag in the solvent he had ready in a specimen bucket, anointing the oversprayed glue off Jennifer Rice until she was soft again. It was like she was being born, becoming a person under our hands, her lips parting for a first breath. I smiled, and then Trevana drew a black line down her chest with his blade, cracked her open.

  It was like Davidson had said in his report: she had no blood anymore, had been bled out. Exsanguinated. Trevana whispered it all into his headset, and then it was genitofemoral nerve and tranversalis fascia and Trevana explaining cupping to me—how Jennifer Rice’s killer should have heated a small glass bowl then placed it to the back of her calf. As it cooled it would have formed enough negative pressure to pull her blood up to the surface, distend all the radial arteries. Make her really bleed. Basic phlebotomy. And then he quit talking, was inside. Her heart, her liver, her kidneys. They were prunes of themselves, raisins. An old woman’s organs, after she’s laid in the bath long enough for all the water to evaporate, the minerals to calcify.

  “What could do this?” I said.

  Trevana ignored me.

  “Where’s the stomach?” he said in his professional voice, the one he’d used in class.

  I looked to the tray, to Jennifer’s Rice’s body cavity. The floor in between.

  He was right: no stomach.

  “Like she’s been frozen,” I said.

  Trevana cut a section of the skin of her thigh out, showed me I was wrong: under the microscope, there wasn’t even a hint of either the cellular organization—crystallization—or the chemical burn that, say, liquid nitrogen or other industrial refrigerants would have left behind.

  “Then what?” I sai
d.

  He weighed her: 66.9 pounds, naked. From the one hundred and seven DMV had for her. I did the math in my head, on the missing blood: eight pints, at just under a pound per pint, left her at just under a petite one-hundred. Minus the stomach—maybe two pounds, at the most, three with an undigested dinner?—and that still left twenty something pounds unaccounted for.

  “Hey,” Trevana said then, his hand covering his mike.

  I drifted over.

  It was blood, what little hadn’t bled out. In her fingertips, the nail beds—the capillaries that had burst when she’d been hung by the lamp cord, looped around her wrists, one side of the granny knot still visible on the ball of her thumb.

  Like the rest of her, the blood there was dried. Trevana hydrated it then sucked it up with a tiny burette, dental maybe. It emptied into a delicate glass vial. He taped over the lid, signed it.

  “How long will it take?” I said, about the blood.

  “For what?” he said, his index and middle fingers ready to pry her mouth open.

  “For everything you’re going to request the lab does with it.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Everything.”

  Trevana smiled, his miner’s light dancing across Jennifer Rice’s lower face. “Leave your radio on,” he said, and then bent to his work.

  Nate was waiting for me upstairs. Trying to keep his face down, it looked like. Not get made. That was how he talked sometimes, like he was in a movie with tommy guns and running boards.

  I nodded to him. He followed me down to the parking lot.

  “What’re you doing here?” I said.

  “What?” he said. “I can’t come downtown?”

  “You’re a lab assistant.”

  He shrugged about that, leaned against the concrete wall. I told him about Jennifer Rice’s autopsy. He just stared at the ground, processing.

  “So he’s taking the blood,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “That guy out in California,” he said finally, narrowing his eyes, the name slipping him. “The one who was in and out of mental hospitals, because he thought his blood was poison. Kept trying to replace it with rabbit blood and cat blood and stuff he made that was kind of like blood.

  “So that’s what he’s doing with it?” I said. The blood.

  “More important,” Nate said, smiling big, “how’s he getting in, right?”

  “The roses?”

  Nate nodded, biting his lip now, and held a letter up for me. It was a special provision thing from the Sheriff’s office.

  “What?” I said. “You’re a regulator now?”

  “Interagency cooperation,” he said. “They like that kind of stuff.” He shrugged, added, “I was the one who found the roses, right? They’re letting me follow through.”

  “Nate,” I said, my face suddenly warm.

  He nodded, looked away. “I’m going to figure it out too, though,” he said.

  “Figure… what?” I said.

  “What’s going on here,” he said, then, quieter, conspiratorial almost, his head close to mine, “You don’t think it’s over, do you?”

  I closed my eyes in something like pain.

  Nate went on: “I mean, look at it. He took her blood, didn’t penetrate her sexually, not even in a compensatory manner, with knives or anything. Arranged her in the closet. All this extra shit. What does this tell you?”

  “That you want him to be a serial killer,” I said, watching his eyes.

  “Just because I want it doesn’t mean it can’t be true too,” he said. “C’mon, Marta. He thought about what he was going to do to her, right? I mean, whatever he did to accelerate her decay—he would only do that if he was anticipating our pursuit.”

  I looked up to him, lost.

  He explained: “The way she looked, we thought she’d been there longer than she was, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And why do that?” he asked, leading again.

  “Nate,” I said, trying to stop him.

  “…because then,” he went on, “then, for the first twenty-four hours or so, we’d be looking for him on Tuesday, Wednesday, not think the murder had been immediate. That he was immediate. And immediate—it can… does mean two things. Soon, and—close. ‘I’m in the immediate area, so will be there immediately,’ see?”

  “But why stall us like that?” I said, not really meaning to play along.

  Nate sucked his top lip in, hooked his chin over my shoulder.

  “Because it’s not over,” he said.

  I turned to see what he meant. It was Madrone, leaning against a pillar. Listening.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “Your radio’s off,” he said back. “Cell too.”

  “I thought I wasn’t on the case?”

  He smiled, shook his head no, I wasn’t. Pushed off his pillar, leaving a clean spot in the soot.

  “What is this, then?” I said.

  He shrugged like it didn’t really matter.

  “Something’s come up,” he said.

  “Mitch found something?”

  “Trevana always finds something, Villarreal. You’ll learn that before too long.”

  “Then what?”

  “Your amigo,” he said. “Primo, primito, compadre, compañero… how do you say ‘boyfriend?’”

  “Richard?”

  “Try again.”

  Boyfriend…

  “Davidson?” I said, quieter, and Madrone smiled, fingershot me, then pulled me away from Nate by the arm.

  Crossing the parking lot, I tried to tell Madrone that Davidson hadn’t transposed Jennifer Rice’s numbers.

  He pulled me to the passenger door of his car.

  “You know, Villarreal,” he said, “say you were actually on the case, here. Me as lead detective. Do you think I would really authorize giving privileged information to officers from another unit?”

  “Nate’s smart, sir.”

  “So we should trust everyone who’s read a few books?”

  “Nate would never—what are you saying?”

  He opened the door, guided me down to the seat, his hand to my waist in a way I knew he was aware of.

  “You’re not even twenty-five yet, Villarreal,” he said, right down into my shoulder. “You don’t know what trust is until you’ve been properly betrayed.”

  I looked away from him, let him close the door, climb in his side.

  “Don’t talk to me about trust,” I said, and made myself not tell him about the first fourteen years of my life, when I’d thought I was a real girl, a real Villarreal, not just some brown baby carried from one room to another by a nun.

  Madrone shrugged, leaned over his rocker panel to spit, holding his tie to his chest.

  “You said this was about Davidson,” I said.

  Madrone nodded, slid his face into a pair of polarized sunglasses.

  “Your little friend,” he said, finally. “He’s not answering his cell phone.”

  I shook my head, shielded my eyes from the sun as he pulled into the street. “He’s asleep, sir. This is nighttime for him.”

  “Yeah, well,” Madrone shrugged. “Officially, since he was DI at that—on Saturday. Officially, he’s on call, in case we can’t read his handwriting or something.”

  “I saw his handwriting,” I said. “It’s legible.”

  “He got high marks for penmanship, yes.” Madrone tongued his lower lip out into a self-satisfied smile, made a wide right onto Piedras.

  “Twenty-eight cents a mile,” he said, accelerating.

  “Why do you need him then?” I asked, not giving up.

  “Where do you think he is right about now?”

  I exhaled through my nose, could see how this was going, how it wasn’t.

  “Rosa’s,” I said. “Dinner. He’s probably not on a night schedule yet. It’s his favorite place.”

  “CBT, or the one up in Sunland Park?”

  “CBT,” I told him. It was a joke of a name, stood
for ‘Cantina Bodega Taquería,’ a riff on the only Café la Rosa that had been in operation when Marty Robbins wrote the song. It was up on Doniphan, maybe. Rosa’s CBT was down here by us, at Paisano and Ochoa, close enough to the border that it didn’t need any songs sung about it. A five-minute walk from St. Vrain and 6th, which led to Tays. To Jennifer Rice.

  Madrone nodded, started angling the car south and west, ducking under the interstate.

  “We think he might have taken something that wasn’t his,” he said.

  “From the scene?”

  “From Trevana.”

  “What could Trevana have…” I started, but then Madrone pulled it from under his seat. At first I thought it was a whistle, a child’s recorder from a gift shop: sixteen inches long, cut at a sharp angle at one end, so that it came to a razor point.

  But then I guessed at the diameter, saw it for what it was: one of Trevana’s antique autopsy or mortuary tools, heirloomed in some drawer in the morgue.

  Madrone nodded, passed it over. This was what had been used to bleed Jennifer Rice out. One like this and its sister, each threaded up into a calf. Metal udders, human drains.

  “So,” I said, trying to work in as much sarcasm as I could, “because the coroner’s missing one of his museum pieces—”

  “—it’s called a trocar.”

  “Okay. Because the coroner’s missing one of his fucking trocars, and Davidson works in the coroner’s office…”

  We were cutting east on Ochoa, now.

  “CSU finally filed all their shit,” he said. “We got an eight-point match on your little friend. Want to know where?”

  I lowered my forehead into my right hand.

  “It was his first time at a crime scene,” I said.

  “We got a thumb and index off the bulb out front, by the garage, Villarreal.”