Malice

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “What’s that, dear?” Jack Swanburg asked as he plopped his round body into the driver’s seat.

  “Nothing, Jackie, old boy,” Connie replied, winking at Marlene. “Just a little girl talk.”

  Heading west from the airport toward Denver, Jack Swanburg explained that they were meeting in a room at the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office with the 221B Baker Street Irregulars. “We’ve helped with a couple of their cases, so the sheriff allows us to use the room,” he explained. “One of your gal pals will be there. Charlotte Gates flew in from Albuquerque, and I hear there may be a couple more surprises.”

  “That’s great,” Marlene said admiring the view of the mountains just to the west with the sun glistening off the snow on the peaks. She liked Gates, who was the first of the 221B Baker Street Irregulars she’d met.

  The Irregulars were an eclectic mix of scientists and cops, many of them retired, who had formed the group more than ten years earlier for the purpose of combining their skills and specialized knowledge to locate the clandestine graves of murder victims. Since the early days when law enforcement agencies had been leery of these “amateur detectives,” they’d gained a reputation by performing as promised until their assistance was sought by agencies all over the world. Their methods ranged from ground-penetrating radar to forensic botany and bloodhounds, plus a healthy dose of deductive reasoning made famous by their hero, the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who, according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had lived at 221b Baker Street in London.

  Marlene had met Charlotte Gates, a forensic anthropologist from the University of New Mexico and director of the Forensic Human Identification Laboratory in Albuquerque, in New Mexico. John Jojola had asked for the professor’s help locating and exhuming the hidden graves of Taos Indian boys murdered by the priest Hans Lichner. That was the same time that Marlene and Lucy had met Jojola, who Marlene had assisted in solving the crimes, and he’d thereafter been swept up in the Karp-Ciampi cyclone, as had the 221B Baker Street Irregulars.

  After getting the photograph from Maly Laska, Marlene had immediately called Swanburg, who was the president of the group, and asked for their help in finding Maria Santacristina. He’d asked a few preliminary questions, and then asked how fast she needed the Irregulars to get to work.

  “Boy, that’s fast,” he’d said. “But come to Denver, talk to the gang, and let’s see what can be done.”

  Swanburg reached Interstate 25 and turned south toward Douglas County, a rural but rapidly developing area on the tail end of Denver. As they hit the interstate, they passed a big amusement park that appeared to be closed for the winter. When she saw the bright red Ferris wheel, Marlene thought again about her father, Mario, and in particular about a day trip she’d taken the past fall to Coney Island with him.

  In the intensity of the search for Kane and the hostage crisis at St. Patrick’s, followed by Rachman shooting Butch, she’d had a tough time getting over to see her dad, who was living alone in Queens. Knowing he’d be even less forgiving on the telephone, she’d just gone over to see him and realized that she’d indeed been gone too long when she saw the state of his yard.

  All of the many decades they’d lived there and raised a family, Mario and Concetta Ciampi had always been very conscientious about their yard. They had a system, he said. He took care of the lawn and trees; she was in charge of the flower beds. Now it looked like a house where, as he liked to complain, “nobody cares about nothing.”

  The yard was covered with unraked leaves from the previous fall, and the flower beds and lawn were overgrown, dried up, and brown, even though the neighbors’ neatly kept yards were beginning to show hints of green. The neighborhood was once again becoming popular with young families, who exhibited pride of ownership—like her parents once had—and, she imagined, probably looked at the Ciampi house with disdain.

  Inside, the house was in even worse shape, with stacks of un-washed dishes in the sink and lying around the kitchen and living room. It also smelled like he hadn’t opened a window all winter or taken out the trash regularly. Even the odor of his pipe, which she’d loved as a child, now clung like a stale gray fungus to the walls, furniture, and drapes.

  She found him sitting in his favorite chair in the living room with the curtains drawn, watching a rerun of a college basketball game in a stained bathrobe and his underwear. He had a beer in one hand and a bag of Doritos in the other.

  “Geez, Pops, do you think you could clean up every once in a while?” Marlene said. She meant it to come out lighter than it did, but the Catholic guilt trip was washing over her in waves and she was feeling a little stressed out.

  “Why? It’s not like I have company coming over,” he replied sarcastically. “And your mother doesn’t mind.”

  The criticism stung Marlene and the comment worried her. Mario was convinced that her mother’s soul was trapped in the house, waiting for him to join her before she “went to heaven.”

  It was one of the reasons he resisted her suggestion that he move into an assisted-living community. He was showing early signs of senior dementia—not as debilitating as her mother’s Alzheimer’s had been, but enough that she worried about him hurting himself. But every time she brought up the topic of “the nicest community near the beach on Long Island,” he’d reacted angrily, and so far she’d left him where he was.

  The dementia, which seemed to come and go like the tide, frightened her. By the end, her mother had not remembered Marlene’s name and suspected that the “real Mario” had been replaced with an imposter. It was horrible to watch a woman who had always been so strong—the real rock of the family—leave her mind before she left her body.

  The thought made Marlene feel even guiltier because she hoped that she wouldn’t have to witness the same progression with her father. It would mean an extra visit to the confession booth and yet another promise to be a better daughter.

  Determined to start right then and there, Marlene made him get dressed, which he’d done only with a great deal of grumbling. Prying him out of the house, she’d driven to Coney Island for a hot dog at Nathan’s. Munching the dogs—which he’d said “are nothing compared to when we used to come here”—they’d strolled down the boardwalk and stopped in front of the Coney Island amusement park, which was also closed for the season.

  The sea air and hot dogs had a marvelous effect on Mario’s disposition. He pointed at the Ferris wheel with a big grin. “You remember when you and your mother and I would come here?”

  “Yeah, Pops, I remember,” she said. “I asked you what would happen if the Ferris wheel came off and started to roll to the ocean, and you said, ‘Why, it will keep going all the way to France, where they’ll pin it to the side of the Eiffel Tower like a giant pinwheel.”

  Mario laughed. “You believed me and demanded to ride over and over again, hoping it would roll to the sea. Finally, they were closing the park and we had to leave, which was a good thing because your mother and I were sick to our stomachs from so many rides. But you were so mad when I pulled you out of the seat that you kicked me in the shins.”

  “And Mom said you deserved it for telling me such lies,” Marlene said, giggling.

  Mario gazed a moment longer at the Ferris wheel, then sighed. “Those were great days, eh, Marlene,” he said. “Your mother was so young and beautiful. She stayed so beautiful…though not so young, I have to say.”

  Marlene had nestled up against him as he put one of his thin arms around her shoulders. “I miss her so much,” he said. “I am not afraid to die. In fact, I look forward to it so I can see her again.”

  “I miss her, too, Pops,” Marlene replied. She felt for just a moment what it was going to be like when he was gone, too, and vowed again to make the effort to see him more often, and bring her kids.

  Fifteen hundred miles away, Swanburg was asking her a question for a second time. “How’s Butch?”

  “Oh, um, great,” she stammered. “He still needs to take it easy, but he’s
recovering and antsy to get back to the DAO.”

  Swanburg shook his head. “Man, he was lucky that bullet in his neck stopped short of killing him.”

  “Nonsense, no luck at all,” Connie said. “It was the will of God. Don’t you think, Marlene?”

  Marlene thought about how to answer. Her relationship with God had been improving of late, but it had taken a long downward turn before that and recovery was a long, slow process. She guessed that her current religiosity encompassed the reassuring rituals of the Catholic Church, but with a strong affinity for the nature-based spirituality of John Jojola. “I think that is as good a reason as any,” she replied.

  “Balderdash!” Swanburg replied. “As a scientist, it’s as simple as somebody messed up—fortunately, I might add—at the bullet plant. It’s nothing more than an equation: not enough force to move a certain amount of mass at a sufficient rate of speed to kill the man. Sorry, Marlene, your man was saved by physics, not mythology.”

  “How do you know that God didn’t cause the machine at the plant to malfunction?” Connie countered.

  “And that one very special bullet happened to end up in the clip of the assassin’s gun in just the right order so that it would be the projectile that struck Butch in the neck, and not the one that passed through his leg?” Swanburg turned so that Marlene could see his face and rolled his eyes.

  “God would know, he knows everything, that’s what makes Him God instead of you, Jack Swanburg, and don’t you dare roll those eyes again or I’ll poke ’em out.”

  “Well, then, why not just stick out a big God finger and slow a sufficiently charged bullet?” Swanburg scoffed. “Why go through all that trouble starting at the plant and then selecting the correct bullet when the gun was being loaded?”

  “My point exactly,” Connie announced triumphantly. “God didn’t need to cause the machine at the manufacturer to malfunction. Not unless that was part of the plan. But God works in mysterious ways, so who knows?”

  “Ay-yai-yai,” Swanburg cried out, wiping a plump hand over his hairy face. “See what sort of witchcraft and bah humbug I have to live with, Marlene?”

  “For nearly fifty years, you old egghead,” Connie retorted. “And I’m still trying to save your soul so that we can spend eternity together…. What was that? Are you mumbling something under your breath again, Jack Swanburg?”

  “No, my sweet,” Jack replied innocently. “If converting to the Roman Catholic Church would assure me a spot next to you for all of time, I would confess my sins and, after I finished sometime in the next month, prostrate myself to the Holy See and become one of the pontiff’s pious patrons. However, I am not yet convinced, though you are welcome to keep trying.”

  “And you better believe I will,” Connie replied.

  Marlene laughed, and when both Swanburgs turned with question marks on their faces, she explained. “Now I know how Butch and I sound when we’re together.”

  Dropping Connie off at a local shopping mall—“I have no interest in Jack’s macabre hobby, however noble it might be”—the other two continued to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office. Pulling into the nearly empty parking lot, Marlene smiled when she saw the truck with the New Mexico license plate.

  Lucy and Ned made it, she thought. She hadn’t seen her daughter since Christmas. She hoped that she’d be able to convince Lucy to return to Idaho with her so they could spend a little time together. Ned, too, if he wants, she thought. Can’t imagine what cowboys do in the winter.

  The young couple was waiting for her inside the lobby of the Douglas County Courthouse. Lucy was immediately in her arms for the enthusiastic hug that she’d demanded from her mother when she was a little girl but had seemed to not want anymore—until they’d traveled to New Mexico nearly two years earlier and reestablished their bond. She was hoping for a similar road trip, and if Ned had to get back to the ranch, she was prepared to rent a car and drive to Idaho.

  Marlene was pleasantly surprised at how good Lucy looked. When she left New York, her daughter looked like a young woman who’d been crying and not sleeping for two weeks. But leave it to her cowboy and the New Mexican air to revive her spirits and console her. Grateful that he was so dedicated to Lucy, Marlene hugged Ned extra hard, which sent him into his usual shy mode, with red face and hands jammed in his pockets as he rocked back and forth on the heels of his cowboy boots.

  When Marlene asked Lucy if she could meet in Denver, the idea had been to spend some time with her and maybe talk her into the road trip. Marlene hadn’t encouraged her to come to the meeting with the 221b Baker Street Irregulars. Lucy had experienced enough of the dark side of human nature, she didn’t need any more, Marlene thought.

  However, ever since Christmas, when Marlene had talked about the man she knew then as Eugenio Santacristina, Lucy had been asking a lot of questions about the case. She seemed particularly interested in the fact that Santacristina was Basque.

  When Marlene told her about the photograph handed to her by Maly Laska, Lucy had insisted on attending the meeting. “I don’t want to explain it now, Mom, but I need to be there,” she said. “I’m supposed to be there.” And she was going to bring Ned if he could get off work.

  There was no use trying to talk her out of it, either. Lucy could be as strong-willed as both of her parents, especially if she was convinced that God was directing her actions. Plus, Marlene didn’t feel like getting cussed out in a few dozen different languages.

  Marlene handed the envelope with the photograph to Jack Swanburg, who took one look at it and headed down the hall “to make a digital copy so that I can project it on the screen in the meeting room. You go on in and say hi to the folks you know and introduce yourself to those you don’t.”

  The first person Marlene saw when she entered the room was Charlotte Gates, a petite but athletic-looking woman in her fifties with a face tanned to the color of mahogany by decades spent in the blazing sun of the American Southwest. With her opal eyes sparkling, Gates jumped up from her seat and ran up to Marlene for a Lucy-like hug.

  Next in line to greet her was Tom Warren, a bloodhound handler she’d met before. He was a sheriff’s deputy by day, whose dogs were renowned for finding human beings living and dead. “Hey, Marlene,” he called out from the other side of the room. “The gang says hi—Buck, Little Sam, Annie, Ollie, and Wink.”

  There were also two new faces. One was Jesse Adare, a boyish-looking crime scene technician with a local police department, but his specialty contribution to the Baker Street Irregulars was as an aerial photography buff. As he explained, he used model airplanes—some with wingspans of eight feet—mounted with cameras, or infrared sensing gear, and even a system that could take what the camera lens saw and in real time create a three-dimensional contour map.

  The other new face belonged to geologist James Reedy. With his grizzled salt-and-pepper beard and perpetually sunburned face, he looked more like an old-time prospector than a professor of geology at nearby Colorado School of Mines.

  “Look out for that one,” Gates said, pointing to Reedy. “He looks harmless enough, at least when he’s had a bath after a week or so in the desert looking at rocks. But he’s one of the practical jokers of this bunch. Nothing’s safe or sacred.”

  Reedy narrowed his eyes. “I’ll get you for that one, Gates,” he sneered. “Would you prefer short sheets or a rattlesnake in your sleeping bag?”

  “You forget, James,” Gates growled back. “I know places where not even this macabre group could ever find you, not that they’d try.”

  When Swanburg returned to the room, he asked Marlene to stand “and tell us a story.” She’d been through the group’s briefing procedures before, but it always felt like she was having to recite in front of the nuns again.

  Marlene decided to start by talking about how she met Santacristina, or Katarain, rather than just jumping straight into the case. However, she left out the part about him being a fugitive from Spain.

  When she was
done with that part of her story, she went back and talked about the disappearance of Maria Santacristina. She then proceeded chronologically up to what she and Fulton had discovered so far, such as Huttington reporting his car stolen two days after Maria disappeared. However, she left out the photograph she’d received from Maly Laska to see how they would react to Katarain’s theory that his daughter’s disappearance was connected to Huttington turning on O’Toole.

  “He thinks Huttington is being blackmailed,” Marlene told the Irregulars. “The prosecutor—a really sharp guy named Dan Zook—is interested in the case, but doesn’t think he can get an indictment without a body.”

  Up to that point the members of the Baker Street Irregulars had remained silent, just sitting back and listening or scribbling notes on pads of paper. But now they started to pepper her with questions.

  “What, other than her father’s story, do we have to indicate Maria didn’t run away?” Gates asked. “It wouldn’t be the first time that a young woman leaves without a trace to escape…possibly from sexual abuse by her father.”

  Marlene knew that the question would come; the Irregulars left no stone unturned in these briefings and that included asking the tough ones. But she hated hearing it.

  “I’d like to say that I think I have enough of a sense of her father to know that he had a great relationship with his daughter,” she replied. “But I know you guys are scientists and this is about ‘just the facts.’ So I wanted to give you that background. But now I want to show you a photograph I was given recently by a young woman who had accused Rufus Porter of raping her at the party that lies at the heart of the accusations against Mikey O’Toole. This photograph was sent to her with a message to get out of town or this would happen to her, too.”

  “You said ‘had accused’?” Adare asked.

  “She left after getting this photograph and now lives in hiding,” Marlene replied, and told the group about what had happened in that case with the evidence and changing stories. “I believe that this photograph is the key to finding Maria and bringing justice to her and her father…and maybe Mikey O’Toole.”