Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

“Five,” I said, maybe a quarter mile later. “You said five girls dead.”

  “You think the girl from Tuesday just got away?”

  “I don’t know she didn’t,” I said, then, “At least… nobody tonight.”

  Richard made a wide turn, tracking a pair of headlights in the rearview. Finally he came back to me: “So you collect three hundred girls off a list. Twice that many, to be safe. All that does is make him adapt. El Paso’s full of women. He’s already shown us he’s a raccoon. I think he can probably find one of them if he wants.”

  “Raccoon?”

  “Gonna get in the trash no matter what you do.”

  “We keep saying he,” I said, “him. Not the plural.”

  “It’s just one guy,” Richard said, the city falling behind us now, building by building, house by house. Ahead it was just the testing grounds or whatever they were: miles and miles of mesquite, enough sand humped around each shrubby tree that they weren’t even trees anymore, just pods of dirt laced with branches. The effect was sculpted, artificial, until you walked out in it, lost all sense of direction. The kind of place you could hide a dead girl, ten yards off the asphalt. El Paso’s Lomas de Poleo.

  I only knew about it because our forensic anthropology class—Trevana’s—had left a mule deer out there one semester, for entomology, watched it decay week by week.

  “You’re taking me to the desert,” I said, suddenly aware of my seatbelt.

  “I’m taking you home. Show you something.”

  “You missed Hondo, then.”

  “They’ll be watching your street,” Richard said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “If I thought it was you,” I said. “One guy.”

  “It is.”

  “You?”

  “One guy.”

  “¿Y tú sabes esto… como?” I said.

  He shook his head, said, “Two guys—you leave two sociopaths… or, just one sociopath, one follower. Two bad hombres. Leave them in a room with a girl, a victim, and—” He pulled one side of his face up, as if even thinking about it hurt. “It’s like boys with crickets. There’s nothing left when they walk out of the room. Anyway, all the shit, the staging. It’s communication. One clear message. Not two people talking through one dead girl at a time. One.”

  He held his index finger up from the steering wheel, as if that settled it.

  “Who’s he talking to, then?” I said.

  Richard shook his head, like this was the bad part. “You, I think.”

  I blinked long. “That would—it would mean he would have to have known I would be the first tech there.”

  “And why would you be the first tech there?” he said.

  I got it slowly: “….because I would come with Homicide. You.”

  He looked to me to see how I was saying it. He didn’t like what he saw.

  “What can I say to make you believe me?” he said. “Doesn’t there come a point where all the evidence against me becomes my own defense, you think?”

  I shrugged.

  In five minutes we turned onto Marie Tobin, Richard’s headlights going the kind of black that I had to imagine the halogen filaments, dying down. We coasted to a stop a street up from mine, the front tire chirping against the curb.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Up there,” he said.

  It was a patrol car, nose to nose with another, the patrolmen out, talking.

  “They’re watching something,” Richard said.

  “No shit,” I said back. “What?”

  “Us if you open that door,” Richard said, looking to my hand on the handle. He tapped the locks down anyway.

  For twenty minutes then, nothing, just the patrolmen, killing time.

  “You noticed this when you when you were getting your charger,” I said.

  Richard shrugged, said, “Of all the questions you have, that’s the one?”

  He was right. I watched a mouse-colored cat streak from tree to tree, across the street.

  “Okay,” I said, finally. “Question one. You never told me you were a medic in the Army.”

  “I never told you my first girlfriend’s name either.”

  “Or your ex-wife’s,” I added.

  His head snapped around for that. “What’s she got to do with it?” he said.

  “Those names on the news,” I told him. “They’re all her battered women.”

  Richard closed his eyes in pain.

  “You still haven’t answered question one,” I said.

  “Because it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I was a punk kid in the Army. Your age. All I knew of field medicine I’d learned from taking deer apart with my old man. It didn’t matter, though, see? I was the back-up. I was never supposed to have to cut anybody.”

  I chanced a look over. He was talking into the steering wheel. Holding onto it with both hands, eight and four, palm-up.

  “Dígame,” I said. Tell me.

  He drew his lips in tight, remembering, then brought it all down to what he could manage: “Our real medic, Johnson, he went down. Not shot, gonorrhea. From his wife, yeah. The Army’s not like you think. Not in peacetime. We were just doing bullshit field maneuvers, too. Nothing was supposed to happen.” He shrugged, rubbed his knee, looked out his side of the car. “But then it did. I wasn’t driving. Crack, I think. He was. Crack Man. And you don’t wear fucking seatbelts in a jeep, when you’re just going to have to dive out anyway. When you’re gung-ho. But yeah. It rolled, life sucks, the tragedy never stops, etcetera.” He smiled, then, said—recited—“Pain is weakness leaving your body.”

  It was a recruitment slogan. Richard’s smile was razor sharp now.

  “We left a lot of weakness in Arizona that day,” he said. “Army should have been proud.”

  “But you—you had to…?”

  “To fix them, yeah. The ones the Jeep rolled over. Pressure bandages, tracheotomies—everything I’d learned, all at once.” His eyes were shiny now, wet. “Everything I’d ever seen in a textbook.” He laughed, covered his mouth. “…couldn’t even save my own fucking knee, though…”

  “Did any of them…?”

  “Die for lack of triage?” he said, joking his way out. “More like because of it. What the inquiry board said, anyway.”

  “But you—honorable discharge, right?”

  He wouldn’t be a detective otherwise, I didn’t think.

  “Part of a deal,” he said, “keep the families of the deceased happy. Any more questions, now? Ask me about my mother’s funeral. That should be fun. Or, I used to have this dog that ate some rat poison once, tried to chew its own intestines—”

  My hand was on his, on the console.

  “Don’t tell me they were going to die anyway,” he said, looking away. “Reyna used to always say that.”

  “I’m not Reyna.”

  “They trusted me,” he said, taking his hand back. “That’s the thing, see? Goddammit, I don’t like talking about this shit, Marta. Okay? Why do you think I never told you?”

  “You don’t hunt anymore,” I said. “Question two.”

  “Do I even carry a knife?” he said back, looking at his open hands. His blunt, heavy instruments, the ones he always defaulted to first. “Do you believe me?”

  “If you tell me what happened to that—the garage clicker Yanez had.”

  Richard smiled, said, “You say his name like you were friends.”

  “You were with him when he died,” I told him. “Then, presto, no remote.”

  He shook his head, said, “And that’s why you think it’s me? Shit, Marta. You didn’t see what that truck did to him. His car. There was nothing left.”

  “So you didn’t take it?”

  He looked directly at me, said it clearly: “No, I didn’t take it.”

  “I had to know for myself,” I said. “Nate says—”

  “Nate Kerning?”

  “Koenig. He says a good investigator has to suspect those closest to him first.”

  Ric
hard rubbed his chin with the finger and thumb of his right hand.

  “He would know, I guess,” he said.

  “I’m saying you’re closest, Richard.”

  “And I’m saying—do you even know what paranoia is?” His tone was all about not wanting an answer. “I figured this one out a long time ago. It’s suspecting everyone around you, like Nate boy says, instead of just some slob off the street, who would make more sense, really. Magnifying your prejudices and—”

  “The girls all look like me, Richard.”

  “What about Trevana’s Mexican, then?” he said. “You checking his prints too?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I wanted it to be him, even. It would have been easier.”

  Richard smiled. “Because he’s… closer, that it?”

  “Who’s paranoid now?”

  He shrugged, turned his head briefly for a house door opening and closing.

  “I didn’t finish,” he said. “Paranoia. It’s suspecting everyone around you, yeah. Which is to say putting yourself in the middle of everything.” He looked at me for the closing: “It’s a form of narcissism, Marta.”

  Down the street, the patrolmen were stepping into their cars, screeching away. Somewhere down the road they turned their sirens on.

  “You’re not listening,” I said. “I cleared Davidson. Now I’m here.”

  Richard looked at me for a long time before saying it: “You mean it’s my turn now?”

  I looked away, nodded, said it—“To clear you too”—then Richard eased the car off the curb, down to where the patrol cars had been.

  “So you believe me, then?” he said, before stepping out of the car.

  “For now,” I said.

  “It’s a start,” he said, then went to the mailbox, came back with a name: “Jessica Bueno-Vasquez.”

  “Not Padilla?”

  He held the envelope up to show me Jessica Bueno-Vasquez.

  Ladio Padilla was the kid who’d wandered into Stanton Elementary this morning. Just down the street. One block over from my house.

  “Hispanic, though,” I said, unfolding my list. Richard didn’t ask.

  We tried the Bs first, then the Vs. She was in the Vs.

  Richard looked behind us once, securing the perimeter, watching the whole street at once, and then did some military hand signal that he was going around back.

  I gave him time to make the alley and went to the front door, knocked.

  Like at Reyna Cruz’s, the door swung back under my hand.

  I held one hand sideways in front of my mouth, the other hand behind me, on the gun.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Police.”

  Nothing. Every light in the house on.

  The living room I was in was toys, toys, the TV on too loud.

  I opened my mouth to say it—“No”—but just shook my head instead. Could see what had happened here: a young boy had had complete run of the house for two days, maybe. Thirty-six hours. Until he decided to go to school two years too early.

  Ladio Padilla.

  His name didn’t match because his dad didn’t live here.

  I swallowed, stepped into the kitchen, ready to stop breathing, not have to smell Jessica Bueno-Vasquez, a lapful of whatever lotions and shampoos Ladio would have brought her, trying to make her better, but she wasn’t there. Just the refrigerator, open, her face on the side, with Ladio. The floor before it wet.

  Richard appeared at the kitchen window suddenly, my gun coming around before I could stop it.

  He didn’t move, tapped the glass with his.

  I let him in the back door, touching the handle with the tail of my shirt, and, together, we went to the showerhead in the main bathroom. It was unmolested, virgin. The bedroom too, and Ladio’s bedroom, and all the closets. Even the garage.

  “Maybe she did get away,” Richard said, standing in the wide doorway between the kitchen and living room. I was in the living room, looking at everything at once.

  I shook my head no, I didn’t think so.

  On the counter I’d walked past to step in the fridge water were a dozen red roses in a cut glass vase. Just that. I’d been looking for blood, and he’d left flowers.

  “Thought this part of it was over?” Richard said about the delivery ruse.

  “Me too,” I said, running my finger a breath off the petals.

  “You okay?” Richard said, one hand rising for me, for the base of my jaw, maybe, but his phone stopped him. My phone.

  He brought it to the side of his head without saying anything, just listened then folded it halfway down, holding it out to me.

  “For you,” he said. “Dispatch.”

  I took it, listened, then hung up.

  “What?” he said.

  “Another one,” I said, “another girl,” and then we were ghosting out the front door hand in hand, into the car, and the only thing I took from the house was a small, plastic dump truck. For Ladio. To replace his mother.

  Richard didn’t say anything.

  Her name was Estetica Barrientos. I got that from the patrolmen out front. They were the same ones who’d been guarding Jessica Bueno-Vasquez’s house. She was in the back of a consignment shop down on Findley, past where all the old ice cream trucks were parked.

  Richard dropped me off two blocks away, kept me in his headlights as long as he could, my shadow reaching far ahead of me.

  There were no news vans yet, no CSU van. As far as El Paso knew, Estetica Barrientos wasn’t a Spanish Angel, was just dead.

  They were half-right.

  She was in back, in the fitting area, positioned on the pedestal in front of the three-way mirror. At first it was easy to think she was alive, just standing very very still—a spider on her arm she didn’t want to disrupt—but it was an effect of how she’d been made to stand: a naked mannequin was holding her up, a chair bracing both of them.

  It was easy to miss the mannequin because Estetica Barrientos was wearing a billowy white dress. Wedding, quincenera. It spilled around her like milk.

  I sat down in one of the fold-out chairs, felt myself suddenly in the background of a forensic photograph.

  The tech let me step out, flashed again.

  I looked at Estetica Barrientos from a different angle then, and past her, to the folding metal chairs where the mothers sat, watching their daughters pose, and opened my mouth to try to breathe, all the water in my body rushing hot to the back of my eyes.

  The jacket draped across one of the metal chairs was the FORENSICS windbreaker Madrone had loaned me.

  “No,” I said, stepping back, “no.”

  I was the Seventh Spanish Angel.

  Day 7

  Friday 11 July 2003.

  Liz P.’s cameraman woke me. His right hand cupped my whole shoulder; I was a doll to him, didn’t know who he was for a few moments, just that I hurt. All along my side. My cheekbone even, like a burn. Then I remembered, pushed away from him. I was in the cargo area of the KVIA van. The burn on my cheek was the plastic turf carpet, the stiffness in my side the metal floor just underneath.

  Last night, on Findley, the van had been the only safe place. After seeing my windbreaker at the crime scene. After closing myself into a dressing room, dialing Nate’s number into my cell over and over, my call bottoming out on his voice mail each time. After Nate, it had been Davidson. His cell, not the morgue phone, because Trevana would be there, waiting for Estetica Barrientos, ready to tell Richard where I was. He was underground, though, Davidson, encased in concrete. And dead people. No signal.

  Twice, standing in front of the plate glass of the consignment shop, watching all the news patrols jockey for position, I’d seen Richard cruise by in the far lane. The second pass, he’d lifted his chin forward, ahead of him, and I knew I was supposed to meet him where he’d dropped me off. I didn’t. When my cell rang in my pocket, my own name fading into the caller ID, I thumbed it off, looked to the open cargo door of Liz P.’s van. She’d stayed so long at the scene that I fi
nally curled up, closed my eyes. Hid. Until now.

  “Where are we?” I said to her cameraman.

  In answer, he turned sideways, out of the square of daylight shining in: another parking lot. Cars, kids, noise.

  “Mary J. Stanton Elementary,” Liz P. said from the front seat, her words rounding off because she was lining her lips. She angled her vanity mirror to me. “We didn’t know where else to take you. That wouldn’t, you know, compromise you.”

  “But—” I started, sitting up too fast, and Liz P. turned around, said, “We didn’t park in front of your house, don’t worry. And we’re expected to be here—the general area. A woman down the street is missing. She was on the list.”

  “Jessica Bueno-Vasquez,” I said.

  Liz P. nodded, not quite surprised. “You missed my early report,” she said. “We did save one last night, anyway. Technically, I guess, we’re saving her today.”

  “Who?” I said, momentarily lost: I was today’s girl.

  “How’s the better question,” Liz P. said back, passing me a brush I hadn’t asked for. “It was her—what my mother would have called foundational garments.”

  “Like the third one?” I said, pulling my hair out to the side to see if it was really that bad. “G-string?”

  “The opposite,” Liz P. said, “but yeah. Not a rhinestone thong, but granny panties. A yard of billowing silk, I mean. Under a wedding dress. Can you say shotgun wedding?”

  “She was pregnant?” I said, pulling myself half-up with a seatback.

  Liz P. shook her head no, said, “Mitch Trevana would have seen that, I think.”

  I blinked, catching up. Said, doubting it, “You have his preliminary report?”

  She just stared at me, said, “How do you think we knew about the underwear?”

  “Then… what?” I said.

  “Lote Bravo,” Liz P. said, as if she were talking me into it now. “Dressing them in each other’s clothes, right?”

  “Today’s girl was supposed to be pregnant…” I said, getting it.

  “Not just supposed to be,” Liz P. said, watching her cameraman direct his camera out into the parking lot, “she is. Second trimester. Fourth page of that list from the shelter. Police picked her up at her house in Chihuahita last night at six-fifteen. Monica Corrido Armendariz Iglesias.” The way she said it, showing off her pronunciation, how she could let her tongue cascade down through the syllables, I knew she was practicing for a follow-up report.