Land of Burning Heat

by Judith Van GIeson

  Warren Isles would never come to Tamaya to see one customer if two would get him a better price. Romero stood still, letting Claire and Warren dance this dance. She was grateful to him for that.

  “I received such a good offer that I had no choice but to part with it. After all, it was only a scholarly article with a limited market.”

  “Who made the offer?”

  “Peter Beck. The author of the article.”

  Claire longed to sit down now but remained standing trying not to show anger, weak knees or any other feeling while Detective Romero took charge.

  “When exactly did this transaction take place?” he asked.

  “Forty-five minutes ago more or less,” Warren said. “I asked him to join me for dinner but he was in a rush.”

  “And where is this Peter Beck now?” Romero asked.

  “Catching a late flight back to California I suspect.”

  “He came all the way from California to buy this journal from you?”

  “He wanted it very badly. It’s an article he wrote several years ago. I gather he had very few copies left.”

  Romero stared at the attaché case beside Warren’s foot. “Do you always bring your briefcase to dinner?”

  “Only when I’m conducting business.”

  “Do you care to show me what else is in it?”

  The emotions played across Warren’s face as he calculated what was good for Warren and what was best for Warren.

  “Do you have a warrant?” he asked.

  “No, but someone attacked Ms. Reynier in the Bosque while she was waiting for you. I could bring you in for questioning and hold you until I get a warrant.”

  “You were attacked?” Warren asked. “I’m shocked. No damage was done, I hope. You look well.”

  “I changed my clothes and cleaned up,” Claire said.

  Warren took a deep sip of his wine. “I had no idea you were attacked. I didn’t even know you were here. Of course I will show you what is in my briefcase.” He picked it up, placed it on the table, keyed in the combination and snapped open the brass latch.

  A small document encased in plastic lay on top of a pile of papers. The paper inside the document was crinkled and had rough edges. The words written in ink in an elegant script were faded but legible. They had survived for more than 400 years in New Mexico’s dry climate. To Claire it was a voice from the grave. She leaned close and read “Todo sta de arriva abasho. El fuego o el garrote. Dame el fuego. Adonay es me dio. Joaquín.”

  The tremor in her knee got out of control and she had to sit down. “Where did this come from?” she asked.

  “Peter Beck. In exchange for his article and a considerable amount of my money, he gave it to me. Here.” Warren Isles slid his plump fingers inside the protective cover and touched the precious paper that held Joaquín Rodriguez’s last words.

  “Leave it alone,” Romero said, while Claire thought of the wine, the butter, the salmon Warren had eaten for dinner, the greasy fingerprints he was putting on a priceless document.

  Warren removed his fingers.

  “You are aware, aren’t you, that this is evidence in a murder investigation?” Romero asked.

  “Lieutenant Kearns told me that when he interviewed me. I intended to bring it to the Sheriff’s Department just as soon as I finished dinner.”

  “How did Peter Beck explain having the document in his possession?” Romero asked.

  “He says Isabel sold it to him. He claims he had nothing to do with her death and that she was fine when he saw her last. He feared the document would be lost or damaged if he turned it over to the police as evidence.”

  “Did you read his article before you sold it to him?” Claire asked.

  “Yes. In fact I made a Xerox copy. You might find it useful. Do you mind?” he asked Romero as he reached for the case again.

  “Are there any other valuable documents in there?” Detective Romero asked Warren while he looked at Claire.

  She couldn’t think of anything. Besides, everything in the briefcase already had Warren’s fingerprints on it.

  “Just the usual ephemera,” Warren said. He flipped through the papers until he found the one he was looking for and handed it to Claire.

  He and Romero parried while Claire read the Xerox of the article, learning, just as she had expected, that an archivist in Mexico City presented Peter with long lost documentation that the orphan Daniel Rodriguez was given to Manuel Santos to raise, that he took his adopted father’s name, that he left Mexico City and came north with Oñate’s expedition in 1598. It was Peter’s theory that Daniel stepped out of the crowd and spoke to his brother as he was led to the burning ground. That Daniel convinced the Inquisitor Manuel Santos not to burn his brother alive. Peter admitted it was quite possible there had been no conversion, which would mean the words now in Detective Romero’s possession represented Joaquín Rodriguez’s last feelings.

  This was the theory the scholar and mentor Richard Joslin questioned. It remained unproven until the cross and the document turned up under Isabel Santos’ floor and tied the Santos family to the Rodriguezes. Peter Beck was the one person who knew exactly what Isabel’s find meant. Had Isabel refused to sell it to him? Claire wondered. Had Peter Beck lost his temper and killed her accidentally or with intent? He’d ended up with the document that proved his theory, but what good had it done him? It resembled having a stolen Van Gogh in the closet, a guilty pleasure to admire but impossible to share with anyone else; to do so would implicate him in Isabel’s death. Claire had seen Beck drive away in the white car. He could well have been the one who attacked her in the Bosque wrapped in the black cape and armed with the viciousness of an Inquisitor. But what about the person who ran her off the road and stole the mezuzah from Isabel’s house? The mezuzah was evidence that the Santoses had a crypto Jewish connection. Peter might wish to have it in his possession and hide that evidence, but where was the black SUV?

  Warren Isles was also a skillful liar, and they only had his word for how the document ended up in his briefcase.

  “Have you and Peter ever met before?” she asked Warren.

  “As a matter of fact, we met the same day I first met you. I was curious about the document. He wasn’t willing to admit he had it at that point, but he did ask me to find copies of his article.”

  “What kind of a car do you drive?” Romero asked.

  “A Jaguar. It’s in the parking lot. Would you like to see it?”

  “Yes,” Romero said. His cell phone rang. He listened for a few minutes then said, “We’re in the Corn Maiden Restaurant.”

  “Backup has arrived,” he said to Claire. “And Peter Beck was apprehended on I-25.” He turned to Warren. “He claims that you were in possession of Joaquín Rodriguez’s last words and tried to sell them to him.”

  “Well, that’s a lie. When you examine the document I’m sure you will find Peter’s fingerprints all over it.”

  And he’d covered himself by putting his own fingerprints on it, thought Claire. What else would the physical evidence show? Anything Peter or Warren said could be dismissed as self-serving.

  “We’re bringing both of you in for questioning,” Detective Romero said.

  “You’re arresting me here in the Corn Maiden?” Warren asked.

  “Only if you don’t come in voluntarily.”

  “Well then, of course, I’d be happy to help,” Warren said.

  Chapter Thirty

  ROMERO’S BACKUP WAS THE DEPUTIES CLAIRE HAD MET EARLIER—Anna Ortiz and Michael Daniels. Deputy Ortiz was assigned to take Claire’s statement. Romero and Daniels took Warren out to the parking lot to examine his Jaguar and then to the detention facility.

  By now the last few diners had left the Corn Maiden. Only the staff remained, and they were busy shutting down for the night. Claire opened her purse to demonstrate to Deputy Ortiz that nothing but cash had been taken.

  “I need to take your purse and wallet to test for prints,” Ortiz said, �
��but you can keep your credit cards, driver’s license and ID. Show me where you were attacked. I’ll take your statement there.”

  “All right,” Claire said, although she had no desire to return to the Bosque.

  Anna Ortiz’s Sheriff’s Department vehicle earned her a parking space right in front of the hotel entrance. They drove to Claire’s truck.

  Claire handed her the black cape which became a hooded poncho once the lights were turned on.

  “The assailant wore this when he attacked you?” Ortiz asked. “Yes. I found it later in the woods with my purse.”

  “We’ll check it for evidence.”

  The emblem on Ortiz’s car also gave her permission to drive across the field and they were back at the Bosque all too soon. They found the spot where Claire had been knocked down. To her the dirt looked like it had been disturbed by wings. They walked through the woods to the tree where she had found the poncho and her purse. The Bosque that had seemed so gray and spooky earlier, became black and white under the beam of Ortiz’s flashlight.

  They returned to the car where Ortiz called for someone to guard the crime scene. Then she took Claire’s statement.

  Once the statement was finished and more deputies had arrived, she drove Claire to her truck. “Are you all right to drive home?” she asked. “Can I follow you?”

  “I’ll be all right.” Claire felt better as time went by.

  “Take care,” Deputy Ortiz said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  ******

  Claire took the interstate back to Albuquerque wondering if she might see a white car beside the road or any sign of Peter Beck’s arrest. She didn’t. Lightning flashed, splitting open the darkness above the West Mesa. When she got home she gave Nemesis his dinner, worked the stiffness out of her shoulder with a shower massage, took a painkiller and climbed into bed. Hours later the sound of thunder woke her. The clap was so loud and close she expected the smell of ozone to fill her house. She calculated lightning had struck ground somewhere in the nearby Sandias. The reverberating sound of thunder brought back the pain in her shoulder and the fear of the day. Next came the sound of rain, a rushing, purging, cleansing rain that turned the drainage arroyos to white water rapids. Any animals on the prowl would be scurrying for cover. As she lay awake listening, Claire remembered she’d been in the middle of a dream when the thunder clapped. She’d been chasing a white rabbit down a narrow, winding road. The rabbit came to a hole and hopped in. She followed, tumbling through emptiness until she landed in a hall of mirrors with gigantic images of the duplicitous faces of Peter Beck and Warren Isles facing each other. Whatever statements they gave were smoke and mirrors. In this case physical evidence was everything.

  The thunder clapped again, but it didn’t shake her house this time. It sounded as if it had moved to the far side of the Sandias, a sign the storm was heading east. The rush of the rain was over. Now it had the gentle, pinging sounds of the strings of a guitar. It soothed her pain and lulled her to sleep.

  ******

  When the pain woke her in the morning, she took some aspirin and went to work. Later in the day Romero called and confirmed that Peter Beck’s and Warren Isles’s statements were self-serving and contradictory. Each claimed the other had tried to sell him the document. Both of their prints were on it. They released Warren but were holding Peter until his house in California could be searched. A Historical Journal of the Americas was found in his car along with considerable cash, far more cash than Warren Isles carried. Claire was convinced Peter had attacked her, but she would have felt safer if Warren had been incarcerated, too.

  “Have you released Tony Atencio?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  When they got off the phone she called Harold Marcus and told him the Sheriff’s Department was holding Peter Beck in custody as a suspect in the death of Isabel Santos.

  “You think he killed her over the document?” Harold asked. “There’s a man who takes his work far too seriously.”

  “He found evidence in the archives in Mexico City that Manuel Santos adopted Daniel Rodriguez, Joaquín’s brother, and that Daniel took Manuel Santos’s name. It would be wonderful if we could prove that Daniel brought his brother’s last words with him to Bernalillo.”

  “The staff here is working on the DNA analysis and testing the tooth enamel. We should have the results soon,” Harold said.

  “Thanks,” Claire replied.

  ******

  It was a long week. Every morning Celia poked her head into Claire’s office and asked, “Heard anything yet?”

  And every morning Claire had to answer, “No.”

  Romero called on Friday to ask if he could stop by her office.

  “Of course,” Claire said.

  “What time would be good for you?”

  “After three,” she said. That was when Harrison left for the weekend.

  “I’ll be there,” Romero said. He didn’t bother to stop at the Information Desk this time and surprised Claire by knocking on her office door a few minutes after three.

  He sat down in the visitor’s chair and said, “We released Tony Atencio on bail. He’ll be tried for theft, but Beck’s our suspect in Isabel’s death. He’s a college professor. Atencio’s a gangbanger. But you know there really isn’t a lot of difference between ’em. They’re both the kind of guys who will do anything to make their names come out and feel important. Atencio didn’t lie to us, anyway. Beck did.”

  Claire saw disappointment in his face that the academic world he had admired at a distance turned out to be no better than the petty criminal world he dealt with every day. She didn’t know his world, but she’d lost any illusions she had about academia once she took her first job at the U of A.

  “We established that Beck flew to Albuquerque four times this summer,” Romero continued. “Once on the day Isabel Santos died, once to talk to us, once on the day you met Warren at Tamaya and were attacked at the Santos house and once more on the day we arrested him. On every trip he used a different airline and rental car company. Hertz rented him the SUV. Did he think he was concealing his actions by spreading his business around? The guy may be a brilliant scholar, but some of his other actions weren’t too smart.”

  “Scholars are better at work than they are at life,” Claire said. “People who can write a brilliant book can’t fix a leaking faucet.”

  “Beck likes silk shirts,” Romero said. “The fiber we found, which was on Isabel’s clothes, matched a shirt in his closet. We never did make a fiber match with Tony Atencio. We located the SUV Beck rented, took paint samples and matched the paint found on your bumper. Tey Santos identified the mezuzah that was in Beck’s safe deposit box. He must have gone back to the house looking for anything that could tie him to Isabel’s death.”

  “The mezuzah proves that the Santos family had a Jewish connection and Peter Beck was probably the only person outside the family who knew that.”

  “We also found twenty copies of the Journal with his article in it. Some of them were library copies. It would have been better for him if he had destroyed the stuff.”

  “Historians are packrats,” Claire said. “It’s impossible for them to destroy anything.”

  Romero’s eyes circled the crowded bookshelves in her office, and Claire wondered if he thought she was a packrat, too.

  “The article proves Beck knew the Santoses were descended from Daniel Rodriguez. He must have known that a smart person like you…” Romero smiled at Claire.

  She smiled back.

  “…would track the article down and come to the conclusion that once Beck heard a document from the Inquisition was found in the house of a family named Santos, he would want it badly.”

  “It proved his hypothesis. My thought was that once I had the article in hand I could persuade you to investigate Beck farther, to get a warrant and search his house.”

  “When we confronted him with the evidence we had, he admitted he’d been to Isabel’s but he claime
d she was alive when he left. He says Isabel sold the document to him, but there is no record he took any money out of his accounts to pay her. We believe Isabel refused to sell. There was an argument that became a physical struggle. Isabel fell on top of her purse with the cross inside, or else Beck would have grabbed that, too. He panicked, took the document and left the house. In our opinion Isabel was dead at that point. If he’d left her alive, she would have been able to ID him.”

  “I suppose he justified taking the document by convincing himself that something could have happened to it if he left it there.”

  “Something might have. Tony Atencio or even Manuel Santos could have destroyed it. But if Beck had called us, we would have taken care of the document. If Isabel was still alive, we would have taken care of her.”

  “But then Peter would have had to admit what he’d done.”

  “Better to have admitted it right away. The longer he denies it, the tougher the prosecutor’s gonna be. If he’d come clean immediately, we wouldn’t have any more crimes to charge him with. What do you think? Was he trying to kill you or just stop you from connecting with Warren?” Romero moved forward in his chair and Claire saw curiosity and concern in his eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. It wasn’t a subject she enjoyed thinking about. “Runners use the trail. Peter was in plain sight and he didn’t have much time. A murder in the Bosque would have been investigated a lot more thoroughly than a mugging. A murder investigation might have led to Peter. I also think he’s a coward who runs away when he’s in trouble. By selling the document to Warren, he preserved it. Possession would have made Warren a suspect in Isabel’s death if you hadn’t accumulated all the other evidence.”

  “Most of the evidence we have is circumstantial, but we have a lot of it. It’s just a question of what he’ll be charged with.”

  “Did anyone else in the family receive money from him?” Claire asked.

  “There’s no evidence of that.”

  “Who paid off Chuy’s gambling debts?”

  “Manuel. It was bad for his image to have a brother way deep in debt. We couldn’t get any prints from the poncho or your purse, but we traced a call from Beck’s cell phone to the front desk at Tamaya around the time the message was left that Warren would be late. There’s no evidence Warren ever made that call himself. Beck will be arraigned on Monday morning. I thought you might like to be there.”