Double Homicide

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The kind of mix Katz would’ve thought volatile, but like the rest of Santa Fe, Tesuque stayed pretty calm.

  The sky was jammed with stars—awash in diamond light—and the air smelled of juniper and piñon and horse manure. Lawrence Olafson’s place was on a narrow dirt road well beyond the town limits, at the far, high end of the Los Caminitos tract, a posh neighborhood of big, pretty adobe dream houses on five-to-fifteen-acre lots.

  No streetlights since they’d left the Plaza, and out here the darkness was a thick, tangible fudge. Even with high beams, the address was easy to miss: discreet copper numerals on a single stone post. Katz overshot, backed up, continued up the sloping drive, slick with patches of frozen water. Five hundred feet of dirt road swooped through a snow-topped piñon corridor. There was no sign of the house until the third turn, but when you saw it, you saw it.

  Three stories of rounded angles, free-form walls, and what looked to be a half dozen open patios along with an equal number of covered portales. Pale and monumental against a mountain backdrop, lit subtly by the moon and the stars and low-wattage lighting, it was ringed by a sea of native grass and globules of cactus, dwarf spruce, and leafless aspen branches that shivered in the wind.

  For all its size, the place was a harmonious fit with the environment, rising out of sand and rock and scrub like a natural formation.

  Officer Debbie Santana’s cruiser sat in front of the quadruple garage that formed the house’s lowest level. It was parked perpendicular, blocking two and a half garage doors. Katz left the unmarked several yards away, and he and Two Moons got out and stepped onto crunchy gravel.

  A climb up twenty stone steps took them past a river of shrubs to massive double doors hewn from wood that looked ancient. Nailhead borders, hardware of hand-hammered iron. Above the door a carved plank: HAVEN.

  Darrel pushed at the door, and they stepped into an entry hall bigger than Katz’s entire apartment. Flagstone floors, twenty-foot ceilings, some kind of free-form glass chandelier that he figured might be a Chihuly, peach-blush walls of diamond plaster, gorgeous art, gorgeous furniture.

  Beyond the entry was a step-down great room with an even higher ceiling and walls that were mostly glass. Officer Santana sat on a tapestry sofa next to Sammy Reed. Reed had gone from weepy to numb.

  Darrel said, “Nice place. Let’s tear it apart.”

  They spent the next three hours going over six thousand square feet. Learning plenty about Olafson, but nothing that told them a thing about the murder.

  A Jaguar sedan, green and sleek, resided in the garage, along with an old white Austin Healey and a red Alfa Romeo GTV. Olafson’s Land Rover had been ID’d in the driveway of the gallery.

  They pawed through closets full of expensive clothes, mostly with New York labels. Bankbooks and brokerage accounts said Olafson was more than solvent. Gay and straight porno was stacked neatly in a locked drawer of the media room. Plenty of bookshelves in the leather-walled study, but very few books—mostly coffee-table numbers on art and decorating, and biographies of royals. The borzoi, huge and fleecy white, slept through it all.

  Art was everywhere, too much to take in during a single visit, but one painting in the great room caught Katz’s eye: two naked children dancing around a maypole. The pastel tints were of a mellow summer. The kids were around three and five, with fluffy yellow hair, dimpled buttocks, and cherub faces. Given the sappy theme, it could’ve been poster art, but the painter was skillful enough to elevate the image. Katz decided he liked it and checked the signature. Some guy named Michael Weems.

  Two Moons said, “Think we should look for kiddie porn?”

  That took Katz by surprise, shook him a bit. He checked his partner’s face for irony.

  “Eye of the beholder,” said Two Moons, and he headed for Olafson’s desktop computer.

  The PC switched on, but the opening screen demanded a password and the detectives didn’t even try.

  Bobby Boatwright, a sex-crimes guy on the two to eight-thirty shift, was as good with machines as any technohead. Let him have a go at it before they bundled it off to the state police forensic lab on Highway 14.

  They unplugged the computer and took it along with the printer and battery pack into the entry hall. Then back to the private world of Lawrence Olafson.

  Under the four-poster in the regal bedroom, they found a tooled-leather scrapbook. Inside were clipped articles about Olafson.

  “What?” said Darrel. “He lulled himself to sleep with ego trips?”

  They paged through the album. Most were puff pieces from art magazines, describing the dealer’s latest auction, acquisition, or price-setting sale. But also there were negative pieces: whiffs of deals gone sour, questions about authenticity. Why Olafson kept those was anyone’s guess.

  Under the scrapbook was another volume, smaller, bound in cheap green grass cloth. That one held clippings about ForestHaven, including the News-Press story about the small-time ranchers sued by the group.

  Bart Skaggs, sixty-eight, and his wife, Emma, sixty-four, had been targeted specifically because they struggled financially to raise five hundred head of beef cattle to market weight, using their federal grazing rights in Carson Forest as collateral against bank loans for feed and stock and equipment. Each year, the interest ate up $31,000 of their $78,000 gross income, but until ForestHaven brought the Skaggses to court using the Endangered Species Act, they’d managed to scrape by.

  The suit claimed damage wrought by the Skaggses’ herd was jeopardizing native rodents, reptiles, foxes, wolves, and elk. The judge agreed and ordered the couple to reduce the herd to 420. A subsequent refiling by the group cut that further to 280. Having to shift half their grazing to private land at ten times the cost plunged the Skaggses into red ink. They’d closed down and retired, were now living on a thousand dollars a month in Social Security payments.

  “My family’s been ranching these lands since 1834,” said Bart Skaggs. “We withstood every natural disaster you can think of but we couldn’t stand up to crazy radical environmentalists.”

  Emma Skaggs was described as “too distraught to comment.”

  When asked for his reaction to the couple’s loss, ForestHaven’s board member and chief complainant was unrepentant: “The land is threatened and the land reigns supreme—above any individual’s selfish needs,” said Lawrence Olafson, a well-known art dealer with galleries in Santa Fe and New York City. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  Olafson had highlighted his own comments in yellow marker.

  “Proud of himself,” said Darrel.

  “The land reigns supreme,” said Katz.

  They filed the book as evidence and took it with them.

  “Breaking eggs,” said Two Moons as they left the house. “That bashed-in head of his.”

  Katz raised his eyebrows. His partner had a way with words.

  They loaded the computer and its paraphernalia in the trunk of the car, and Katz warmed up the engine.

  “The guy,” said Two Moons. “His house has a lot of stuff, but something’s missing.”

  “Pictures of his kids,” said Katz.

  “Bingo. The ex-wife I can see, but the kids? Not a single picture? So maybe they didn’t like him. Doc said the scene showed lots of anger. That’s how I saw it, too. What’s angrier than a family thing?”

  Katz nodded. “We definitely need to track down the kids. Talk to the ex, too. Want to do it before or after we find Bart and Emma Skaggs?”

  “After,” said Darrel. “And tomorrow. Those two got shafted. I don’t feel like waking them up at”—he peered at his watch—“four-eighteen. We’re well into overtime, partner.”

  4

  Katz put on as much speed as the dark, winding roads would allow, and they made it back to the headquarters at Camino Entrada by 4:45.

  After logging Olafson’s computer into evidence, they did some preliminary paperwork on the case, agreed to meet for breakfast at nine at the Denny’s down the bl
ock from the station, and headed home. Two Moons had the Crown Vic because this was his month for take-home, and Katz made do with his grubby little Toyota Camry. Given the state of his social life, he didn’t need better wheels.

  Darrel Two Moons drove to his house in the South Capital district, took off his shoes at the door, and withstood an instant of chilled feet as he unlocked the door and stepped into his living room. Nice room; he always liked coming home to it. Seeing the kiva fireplace. The old twisting vigas lining the coved ceiling. Genuine old wood, the color of molasses. Not the faux-aged logs he’d noticed at Olafson’s mansion.

  Who was he kidding? Olafson’s place was unreal.

  He took off his coat, got a raspberry Snapple from the fridge, sat down at the kitchen table, and drank.

  Looking through the arch at his living room. Pictures of Kristin and the girls and him taken at the Photo Inn at the DeVargas Center last Christmas.

  Just about a year ago; the girls had done some growing since.

  His castle.

  Right.

  He loved his house, but tonight, after hiking through Olafson’s spread, the place looked tiny, maybe even pathetic.

  A hundred-and-eighty-grand purchase. And that had turned out to be a bargain, because South Capital was booming.

  A working cop able to move into the north side courtesy of MetLife insurance and the last will and testament of Gunnery Sergeant Edward Two Moons né Montez, United States Army (ret.).

  Thanks, Dad.

  His eyes started to hurt, and he gulped the iced tea fast enough to bring on some brain freeze.

  By now, the place had to be worth close to three hundred. An investment, for someone who could afford to sell and trade up.

  A guy like Olafson could trade little houses like playing cards.

  Could have.

  Two Moons recalled Olafson’s crushed skull and berated himself.

  Count your blessings, stupid.

  He finished the Snapple, still felt parched and got some bottled water, went into the living room, and sat with his feet up, breathing deeply to see if he could catch a hint of the soap-and-water fragrance Kristin left in her wake.

  She really loved the house, said it was all she needed, she never wanted to move.

  Fifteen hundred square feet on an eight-thousand-square-foot lot, and that was enough to make her feel like a queen. Which said a lot about Kristin.

  The lot was nice, Darrel admitted. Plenty of room out back for the girls to play and for Kristin to plant her vegetable garden and all that other good stuff.

  He’d promised to lay down some gravel pathways, hadn’t followed through. Soon the ground would freeze over, and the job would have to wait until spring.

  How many more d.b.’s would he encounter by then?

  Soft footsteps made him look up.

  “Hi, honey,” said Kristin, squinting and rubbing her eyes. Her strawberry-blonde hair was ponytailed, but strands had come loose. Her pink terry-cloth robe was cinched tightly around her taut waist. “What time is it?”

  “Five.”

  “Oh.” She came over, touched his hair. She was half Irish, one-quarter Scots, the rest Minnesota Chippewa. The Indian blood expressed itself in pronounced cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Eyes the color of sage. Darrel had met her during a visit to the Indian Museum. She’d been working there on a summer internship, doing clerical work to pay for a painting course. The eyes had snagged him, then the rest of her had held him fast.

  “A case?” she said.

  “Yup.” Darrel stood and hugged all five feet of her. Had to bend to do it. Dancing with Kristin sometimes nipped at his lower back. He didn’t care.

  “What kind of case, honey?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Kristin’s green eyes focused. “If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked.”

  He sat her on his lap and told her.

  She said, “Did you tell Steve?”

  “Tell him what?”

  “That you’d had an encounter with Olafson?”

  “Totally irrelevant.”

  Kristin was silent.

  “What?” he said. “It happened a year ago.”

  “Eight months,” she said.

  “You remember?”

  “I remember it was April because it was the week we were shopping for Easter.”

  “Eight months, a year, what’s the diff?”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Darrel.”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  The moment she hit the mattress she popped right back to sleep, but Two Moons lay on his back and thought about the “encounter.”

  He’d dropped over at the Indian Museum to see a show that included a couple of Kristin’s watercolors. Pictures she’d done the previous summer, sitting in the garden out back. Flowers and trees, a nice soft light. Two Moons thought it her best work, had pressed her to enter the juried show.

  When she made it, his chest had swelled.

  He made half a dozen visits to the show, using his lunchtime. Taking Steve twice. Steve said he loved Kristin’s work.

  During the fifth visit, Larry Olafson bounded in with a middle-aged couple—an all-in-black couple wearing matching nerd eyeglasses. East Coast pretentious art types. The three of them walked through the show at breakneck speed, Olafson smiling—more like sneering—when he thought no one was looking.

  Uttering snide comments, too, to his too cool friends.

  Darrel had seen and heard when Olafson reached Kristin’s watercolors and said, “Here’s exactly what I mean. Insipid as dishwater.”

  Two Moons felt his chest swell in another way.

  He tried to cool himself down, but when Olafson and the couple headed for the exit, he found himself springing forward and blocking them. Thinking this was a bad idea, but unable to stop himself.

  Like something had taken him over.

  Olafson’s smile faded. “Excuse me.”

  “Those pictures of the garden,” said Darrel. “I think they’re good.”

  Olafson stroked his white beard. “Do you, now?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Then I’m happy for you.”

  Two Moons didn’t speak or move. The all-in-black couple shrank back.

  Larry Olafson said, “Now that we’ve had our erudite discussion, would you kindly get out of my way?”

  “What’s wrong with them?” said Two Moons. “Why’d you put them down?”

  “I didn’t put them down.”

  “That’s what you did. I heard you.”

  “I’ve got a cell phone,” said the woman. “I’m going to call the police.”

  She reached into her purse.

  Two Moons stepped aside.

  Olafson passed him and muttered, “Barbarian.”

  Darrel had felt like an idiot for weeks. Thinking about it now made him feel stupid.

  Why had he even told Kristin?

  Because he’d come home in a foul mood, ignored the girls. Ignored her.

  Talk, she was always telling him. You need to learn how to talk.

  So he’d talked. And she said, “Oh, Darrel.”

  “I screwed up.”

  She sighed. “Honey . . . forget it. It’s no big deal.” Then she frowned.

  “What?”

  “The pictures,” she said. “They really are insipid.”

  He found that he’d been grinding his teeth at the memory and willed himself to relax. So he didn’t like the victim. He’d worked other cases where that happened, plenty of them. Sometimes people got hurt, or worse, because they were bad or stupid.

  He hadn’t told Steve the story. No reason to then. No reason to now.

  He’d work this one hard. For some reason, reaching that decision made him feel better.

  Gunnery Sergeant Edward Montez had been all army, and Darrel, his only child, raised on bases from North Carolina to California, had been groomed to follow.

  At seventeen, living in San Diego, when he fo
und out his father was going to be sent to Germany, Darrel rebelled and went over to the nearest Marine Corps recruitment office and enlisted. Within days, he’d been assigned to basic training in Del Mar.

  As his mother packed suitcases, she cried.

  His father said, “It’s okay, Mabel.” Then he trained his black eyes on Darrel: “They’re kind of extreme, but at least it’s the military.”

  “I’ll like it,” said Darrel. Thinking: What the hell have I done?

  “We’ll see. Make sure you learn something from them besides killing.”

  “Like what?” Darrel rubbed his newly shaved head. The loss of his shoulder-length hair in ten seconds and the way it lay on the floor of a barbershop in Old Town still freaked him out.

  “Like something useful,” said his dad. “A trade. Unless you’re planning to spend the rest of your life jumping to attention.”

  Midway through his hitch, his mother died. Mabel and Ed Montez were both chain-smokers, and Darrel had always worried about lung cancer. It was a heart attack that got Mom. Only forty-four, she’d been sitting in the front room of a noncom housing unit outside of Hamburg, watching Wheel of Fortune on U.S. Army cable, when her head pitched forward and she never moved again. Her last words: “Buy a vowel, stupid.”

  The Marines gave Darrel compassionate leave for a week, then he returned to the base in Oceanside. He was a lance corporal by now, training grunts, earning a rep as a tough DI. The little crying he did, he did in private.

  His father quit the army and settled in Tampa, Florida, where he lived off his pension and got depressed. Half a year later, he called Darrel and announced he was moving to Santa Fe.

  “Why there?”

  “We’re Santa Clara Indian.”

  “So?” Darrel had been made casually aware of his heritage. As an abstraction, something historical. The few times he’d asked his parents about it, they’d inhaled their unfiltered Camels and said, “Be proud of it, but don’t let it get in the way.”