Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “It was his first time, sir,” I said again. “He wasn’t even wearing gloves when he left me, I don’t think.”

  “Or when he killed her.”

  “You can’t even put him in the area.”

  Madrone smiled. “Let me worry about that,” he said, winking through his urine-tinted sunglasses, then pulled into Rosa’s CBT. Five minutes from the crime scene.

  He stopped at the entrance.

  “What’s he drive?”

  “I’m not going to help you do this to him.”

  “I do have a radio, Villarreal. Would you rather I request a make and model on Davidson, Hector, so everybody knows?”

  I scanned the parking lot for Davidson’s rusted Brat. It wasn’t there. Madrone called it in anyway, looking at me as he said it: “Davidson, Hector.” Like I could stop him at any time.

  “Like I said,” I told Madrone. “He’s probably just asleep.”

  “We knocked.”

  Unbelievable. “You can’t be this sure,” I said.

  Madrone let his head loll back, as if amused by my naivety.

  “You don’t even know what he was suspended for,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Some pinches mentiras,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  He opened a manila folder, showed me.

  It was two bodies, a man and a woman. Two corpses in the morgue, naked to the light. They’d been arranged on the second autopsy table, missionary position. The table I’d leaned over to kiss Davidson, once.

  “Impropriety with the dead,” Madrone said, closing the folder. “They all try it sooner or later. Crime of opportunity, y’know?”

  I was staring straight ahead. Trying not to think of the nipple and lip chart Davidson kept in the morgue. He was tracking color, seeing if they all matched, if you could make race from aureole.

  “Now you know,” Madrone said, clicking his seat back, loosening his belt.

  I shook my head no. “It wasn’t him.”

  “He was just the one who got suspended for it?” Madrone snapped back, leaning over the steering wheel with his thick forearms.

  I nodded yes, slow. That he was just the one who got suspended for it.

  When Davidson never pulled into the parking lot for us and Madrone’s air conditioner would only stay cold if we were moving, he eased us back onto Paisano.

  “Trolling,” he said, drumming the flats of his fingers into the dashboard.

  “If you really had something on him,” I said, “then it wouldn’t just be us, would it? You, I mean.”

  Madrone smiled, shrugged. “Maybe I want to catch him in the act, Villarreal.”

  “Of kidnapping somebody? Taking her against her will to do things she doesn’t want to be doing?”

  “And here I thought this was date numero uno,” Madrone said, making a Cadillac right, hand over hand, “but look at it this way if you want. Since your hotshot fuckbuddy’s gone for the day, can’t teach you anymore about how CSU can undermine a homicide investigation, clog it up with paperwork and bullshit and other secretarial chain-of-evidence crap, this is your opportunity to learn something about real police work.”

  I just stared straight ahead, rode.

  Two hours later, looping back from Davidson’s apartment complex to check the parking lot of Rosa’s—no Brat anywhere in El Paso, it seemed—I told Madrone that it had been Richard who did that, in the morgue, framing Davidson. Madrone just said that he’d love to corroborate it. Maybe I should get Richard on the phone, yeah?

  I watched dusk drape itself over Paisano.

  “Hector’s not missing,” I said. “You’re only missing if you’re supposed to be somewhere and aren’t.”

  “Or if somebody important wants to talk to you, can’t find your sorry brown ass.”

  I closed my eyes, opened them. Directed Madrone to Davidson’s parents’ nursing home.

  He smiled like he’d pried it out of me, then wasn’t content to just sit in the parking lot but wanted to talk to Barry and Marcia, ask if they’d seen their lovely son.

  I followed two steps behind. The Davidsons were in the cafeteria. Marcia’s face softened when she saw me. “You just missed him,” she said, holding the back of my elbow in her hand the way old people do, so they can watch your lips.

  Madrone slashed his eyes over to me, swallowed a grin, then we both turned to the sound of the door at the end of the hall creaking open.

  It was Davidson, backlit by the afternoon sun, an unopened bottle of water in his hand that his father was already reaching for with his dry fingers.

  I opened my mouth to say something—that this wasn’t what it looked like—but Davidson wasn’t even looking at me. Just Madrone.

  “Hey!” Madrone called, reaching with his hand, the cafeteria suddenly quiet.

  Davidson shook his head no to Madrone, just stared at him, then looked to me with the same eyes, held his lips together and shook his head.

  I’m sorry, I said inside, but it was too late already.

  Davidson stepped forward, like he was actually going to meet us, give himself to Madrone, introduce us to his parents even, and Madrone smiled, lowered his arm, and I cringed inside, could see what Davidson was doing: not stepping forward to us, but to the pullcord high up on the wall. The one only the staff could reach, in case of real emergency.

  “Hec—” I got out, trying to use his first name to show how serious this was, but he was already pulling the cord. Immediately, the quality of the light in the cafeteria and hall changed, all the recessed blue bulbs flashing, nurses and senior citizens and cafeteria workers pouring from every door, clogging the halls with walkers and wheelchairs and carts.

  By the time Madrone fought his way through to the door, Davidson was gone.

  Minutes later I stepped out into the emergency lane. It was the last place I wanted to be. Madrone was there, still leaned over, out of breath, the thighs of his slacks pinched between his fingers and thumbs, the fabric a plumb line from there to his waist. Finally he stood, straightened his tie down along his chest, and said, discounting Davidson’s escape as if it had never happened—which, officially, it hadn’t—“It is kind of standard for homicide detectives to leave emergency contact numbers, y’know, Villarreal?”

  “Richard’s not even supposed to be on until tomorrow,” I said, playing along if it kept us off of Davidson, let his Brat get farther away. “I don’t know why you’re saying he’s AWOL either, even. You want to know why he’s not answering his phone? It’s not because he’s hiding, sir. It’s because he left the charger plugged into the socket in my bedroom. So he’s probably only turning it on to call. If he’s even in range.”

  My voice was soft, because I didn’t want this to escalate.

  “But he hasn’t tried to call you?” Madrone asked in the same polite tone.

  I looked across the concrete at him, didn’t look away. The way he’d said it. Like he was making it easy for me to just nod, lie.

  “You pulled my records,” I said.

  He shrugged, started walking to the car. Said, getting back the power he’d just lost to Davidson, “Easiest warrant in the world to get, Villarreal.”

  “Where was he calling from, then?” I asked, my door not locked.

  “We just got your records, not an active trace. It wasn’t long distance, though.”

  I closed my eyes, covered them with my hand.

  “You want to know where he goes now, right?”

  Madrone didn’t say yes, didn’t have to. It was beginning to feel less and less like Jennifer Rice looking so much like me had been coincidence.

  “Juarez,” I said. “His ex-wife was from down there.”

  Madrone was writing it all down in the grubby little notebook in his head. Or pretending to. I didn’t even care anymore, just wanted to go home, change clothes. Sleep.

  He started the car, gunned the engine too high then palmed his cell, flipped it open. Said, using it like a prop, “My first wife,
we used to have a system. She’d call my office, ring a certain way, and I’d pick up.”

  A bus for the elderly was alongside us, waiting for us to move from its spot. All the old people staring down into my window.

  “Guess we weren’t to that stage of our relationship, Detective,” I said, taking up the knock-off version of Trevana’s missing tool again. I’d been playing with it on and off the whole afternoon, knew its balance points too well already. Beside me, Madrone, tapping his fingers on the top of the steering wheel, cycling them back and forth. Thinking about what he was going to do to Davidson, probably. Soon enough the sharp end of the tube found the back of my calf through my slacks and I breathed in, a chest breath. The kind that rolls your eyes back a little. I dropped the tube, embarrassed. Madrone looked over to the sound, to me, and narrowed his eyes to say something I probably deserved but got interrupted by the radio mike he’d already been holding, to call out an APB on Davidson, for whatever charge he wanted to make up.

  He looked at it, held it back by the dash so Dispatch wouldn’t be too loud. From what I could gather through the garble of call codes, somebody up towards Bliss had just phoned in, screaming for an ambulance. A guy, about his girlfriend. What was important was that he’d tried to give her mouth to mouth, but couldn’t get her lips open.

  Dispatch fed Madrone the address and he lowered the radio then brought it back up, said, “Call whoever’s still listed as death investigator for the Tays street job.”

  Dispatch hesitated, checking something on her end evidently, then came back: “The deputy coroner is listed as currently available, sir.”

  Madrone smiled, shook his head no.

  “Thank you,” he said. “But is he listed as DI for Tays?”

  Check, check, “No. But this is—?”

  “—related? Yes. In which case you’re supposed to call who’s already associated, right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No buts,” Madrone said. “Just call him, whatever he has listed for his cell, and keep calling until you get him, savvy?” He looked at me for the next part: “He should be waking up soon.”

  After that he turned his headlights on, let them wash across all the parked cars of Rosa’s.

  “St. Lo,” I repeated.

  It was the address Dispatch had fed him.

  He turned to me as we left the parking lot, nodded.

  “You know it?”

  I nodded, unsure. I had seen it before, though, St. Lo. Had tried to figure it out, whether it was a Vietnamese-Catholic graft or the patron saint of depression or what.

  I looked to the dash, the hood, the road going faster and faster under the car, then took Madrone’s radio off the dash, pushed the call button in, to ask for a name to go with the address, then remembered: the paper folded into my pocket. All the nurses who hadn’t shown up for work.

  I’d asked the information girl for Friday’s no-shows, but what she’d given me was all of them up to the time I’d asked her. Up until eleven o’clock last night.

  I reached for the paper in my pocket just as Dispatch came back.

  “A name?” I said into the mike, breaking all kinds of radio protocol, probably.

  Madrone took the radio away from me, said he needed the 411 on the last address.

  Dispatch came back with Mena, Carrie Mendoza.

  I unfolded the list, held it in both hands. There were seven nurses gone. Of the seven, three were Mexican, or married to one.

  I was shaking my head no, please, but it didn’t matter what I did anymore.

  Of the three nurses with Mexican names, only one lived on a street called St. Lo: Carrie Mena.

  There were no blue doors in her neighborhood. Not like Tays, like Jennifer Rice. This was where all of Ft. Bliss’s civilians lived. Madrone turned his headlights off, coasted in, and I found the tip of my index finger touching the back of my right calf again, where the blood had been drained from Jennifer Rice.

  “Maybe it’s just tetanus,” I said, about Carrie Mena’s mouth not opening. “Lockjaw.”

  “Yeah,” Madrone said, standing. “Or maybe her bubble gum just dried around her teeth.”

  We stood from the car and he slid something across the vinyl roof to me. It was a dark blue windbreaker, FORENSICS ironed on back, in bright yellow.

  It was the model from two years ago, didn’t say CSU like CSU was wearing.

  “I’m only letting you into the house because I don’t trust you out here with the press,” Madrone said. “Don’t touch anything, though, got it?”

  “I am certified, you know.”

  “Not with Homicide,” he said back. “Not without Godder.”

  I shrugged into the windbreaker. It came down to my thighs, made me into a little girl. I lost my hands in the pockets and looked around.

  It wasn’t hard to tell which house was the murder house. The whole lot was wrapped in yellow tape, a present for the news.

  The patrolman guarding the door wasn’t standing beside it, but in front of it.

  Madrone was almost chest to chest with him before he stopped, tracked up the line of buttons to the lantern jaw.

  “Officer?”

  “We’re using the back door, sir,” the patrolman said, no eye contact. Instead, he was watching the man with the telephoto lens, slouching by the mailbox.

  Madrone looked back to the photographer, to the officer, the door, and shrugged.

  We went around back, through the kitchen.

  “No roses,” I said, nodding to the bare counter.

  Madrone shrugged, turned around, and I followed when he walked out of the kitchen, into the living room.

  Because we were expecting to have to skirt a couch or two, line up for the hall then stand before the closet, Carrie Mena caught us off guard.

  “Fuck me…” Madrone said, almost laughing, just from the suddenness of it.

  Carrie Mena. She was why the officer hadn’t wanted the front door open: she wasn’t in the closet like Jennifer Rice, but out in the open.

  Jennifer Rice had been lucky.

  Carrie Mena was—had her hands, the tips of her fingers, fixed to the underside of the doorframe which led to the hall. Her wrists still tied together with a clear phone cord.

  She wasn’t in scrubs, either, but a leather and diamond-stud g-string.

  Jennifer Rice’s murder had been tender almost, compared to this.

  Carrie Mena’s right nipple, it was gone. Not so much cut off as torn away, then the wound preserved with more of the glue.

  I covered my chest, stepped back.

  The nipple wasn’t all, though.

  Because she wouldn’t hang from the bottom of the doorframe without her feet touching the carpet, her legs had been sawed off below the knee. They were leaned up against the wall beside her like boots she’d taken off because they were full of blood.

  I walked up to her like you’d walk up to la Virgin, were she to appear before you under a bridge, or by a dumpster.

  “…don’t touch,” Madrone said, and I held a hand back to him, knew.

  Her fingers on the doorframe.

  They hadn’t been nailed or stapled, but glued. The skin of her fingertips was stretched, stretching. The pads of two fingers had already pulled away. The boyfriend’s resuscitation efforts, probably.

  He would had to have breathed into her nose, though. Which, I mean: her legs were sawed off, right?

  Like with Jennifer Rice, the desiccation had been artificially—chemically— advanced. Her skin grey, already going slack over muscles that had atrophied, dried out.

  I lowered myself to her legs, leaned up against the wall.

  The two quarter-inch holes were there, just more ragged this time, one of them cut through at an angle. And they’d been separate from Carrie Mena by the time she began to decay as fast as she had.

  “The shower,” I said, over my shoulder, and Madrone walked on stiff legs into the hall, the bathroom.

  While he was gone, the officer behind
the front door said what I already knew: that the shower head was busted. Why else be out here?

  I looked to Carrie Mena again, her long black hair arranged over the breast she had that was still whole.

  What didn’t make sense was the absence of spatter. Because, when her lower legs were being sawed off, she would have, should have kicked, fought. Slung blood into the kitchen and living room both.

  But she’d been bled some by that time too. So maybe she was unconscious?

  Nate had been right: this was too elaborate, too much like communication, one person talking to us in the only medium he knew: violence. Telling us something.

  We just had to read closer. Everything.

  “We need her body temp,” I said to myself, and just as I said it, my cell shook on my belt. I jumped, cursed myself for it. The officer stationed on the other side of the living room looked away, down, and I loved him for that kindness. Needed to love somebody.

  I opened the cell up to my ear.

  “Como ’sta, chica.”

  It was Davidson.

  I smiled. Looking at Carrie Mena, everything that had happened to her, I smiled.

  “Stay away,” I said, in Spanish, and was about to hang up when he spoke again: “Mitch wanted me to tell you something.”

  “¿Qué?”

  I was having to use Spanish because I didn’t know who was listening.

  Davidson answered in English: “That—I don’t know. That cut on her back.”

  “Sí.”

  As I said it, waiting for his reply, I walked around Carrie Mena. She had the injury too. Just that and her g-string. Davidson still talking: “…Trevana says to look for something by her front door, that she maybe fell against.”

  “¿Semejante qué?”

  It was a formal construction, so he could get it. He did: “Something like… he said round. Like, the cut in her, it’s almost a circle. Like she fell into it maybe.”

  “Sí,” I said, nodding, almost touching Carrie Mena’s hip, but then Madrone was there.

  “He started in there,” he said, “finished here, looks like. Had to improvise.”

  I nodded and he looked to my phone, then to me.

  “Him?” he said, and I said it in English to Davidson this time—“Stay away”—but all he said back was “Too late,” then stepped into the room with us, both hands up.