I shrugged as if that didn’t matter, as if I hadn’t stumbled into the convenience store a shuddering wreck thanks to the media scrutiny. With the tips of my fingers, I traced a pattern down the side of his neck, then pressed my hand to his chest. His eyes got that faraway look and he put his hand over mine and lifted it so that he could kiss my palm.
Just then another car pulled up on the other side of us. One look let me know it was full to bursting with teenage girls. The cashier had spread the word.
Jason started the engine and we pulled out before any more could arrive.
I leaned across the console, pressed my cheek to his shoulder, and traced my fingers down his arm.
“You trying to get us in a wreck?” he teased.
“Really? That distracting, huh?”
He just chuckled and planted a kiss on my forehead, his way of saying he was going to give as good as he got once his hands were free.
We got back to his sister’s house minutes later, and the place was still quiet. If people were awake, they weren’t up and about yet. The only one who saw us enter was Boots, the orange tabby with white socks that the family had recently taken in. Jason and I stole across the living room, decorated in the traditional, southwestern style with sturdy, pinewood furniture and punched tin embellishments, including a large mirror with a punched tin frame over the kiva fireplace. The place even smelled like juniper incense.
Once back in the guestroom, I shut and locked the door. Fighting was something we could do anytime. While he was here, it made more sense to focus on what we couldn’t do long distance.
“What is that in the driveway?” I heard Jason say in the other room as I stepped out of the shower.
“That’s Libby.” Kyra Armijo, Jen’s eighteen year old stepdaughter. Even though Jason and I owned a house, it was in the middle of renovations. It needed a state of the art security system before the interior decorator got to work furnishing it. Things had run over schedule and Jen insisted that we stay with her.
“You named your car?”
“Shut it, Jason, or I scratch your face.”
“Hey, come on. That thing’s gotta burn gas like anything.” The car they were talking about was a bright red Jeep Liberty.
“It was cheap.”
“Before you factor in the cost of gas.”
“I’ll do it. Don’t push me.” I could just picture her with her fingers hooked like claws, a French manicured nail on the end of each. This, actually, counted as her and Jason getting along. Before they’d achieved this détente, they had spent a lot of time glaring at each other and not talking at all.
“Can I ask why you named your car?”
“Because I’ve gone off the rails. I bought an SUV, gave it a name, and the cops will be here for me any minute because I’m that out of control.” What made her words all the more ironic was that as a younger teen, she’d been way off the rails. The fact that she could laugh about it showed how far she’d come.
“Don’t expect me to get you out of an arrest.”
“Why are you even here? Aren’t you supposed to be smiling at the cameras like a dork somewhere?”
“Since when were you guys cat people?”
“We’re human people. We just happen to own a cat now. Huh, Boots? You gonna stay with us now?”
“Since when?”
“Since he wandered into the house. We put up signs to find his owner but no one’s called, and it’s very sad. He clearly misses his old owner.”
The rest of the conversation was drowned out with the sound of my hairdryer. I’d heard enough of their bickering to get the general gist.
By the time I got my hair dry and my makeup on, Jason was gathering his things to leave. We managed a quick kiss before he had to hurry out the door.
Opening scene from the season premiere of Blood Ritual:
The strobe of patrol car lights cut into the pitch black night as a siren screamed its way towards a suburban home. The house door stood open, the lights off. One of the front windows was shattered.
The police cruiser skidded to a stop in the driveway and the two officers got out, flashlights in hand, sweeping the beams over the front yard to illuminate a smiling and cheery yard gnome and a wild rabbit that hopped away from the noise to get lost in the bushes.
“Hello?” one of the officers shouted. “Anyone here?”
When there was no answer, he and his partner exchanged a knowing look. “Hello!” he yelled again. Into his radio he said, “We’re at the property, the door’s open and there’s no sign of anyone.”
“Mack!” shouted his partner. He shone his flashlight into the front door onto a lifeless hand in a pool of blood. The arm and the rest of the body were hidden from view.
“That’s probable cause. Let’s go.”
The two cops stormed into the house, testing the light switch to find no electricity. Their flashlights animated the shadows of knickknacks on the mantle, shoes set out against the wall, and a frightened housecat that yowled and ran out of frame.
Mackenzie dropped to his knees next to the lifeless hand and checked for a pulse. “It’s faint,” he said, “but it’s there.”
His partner just shook his head, pulled out his radio, and barked, “We need an ambulance.”
CUT TO:
An office, with a woman in a suit, her feet up, her badge lying on top of a pile of papers. The phone rang and she answered, “Drew Clayborn.” Her expression changed from casual to serious as she took her feet down and leaned in closer to the phone base, as if this might improve her ability to hear what the caller said. “Understood. Yes, I’m on my way.”
She grabbed her badge, pulled on a trenchcoat, and marched out of the office. A secretary behind a desk looked up to follow her with his gaze as she swept past, checking her gun and slipping it back into her shoulder holster.
BEGIN OPENING CREDITS.
The first thing I heard when I walked into the lab was the police dispatcher’s voice coming from a police scanner set up on the counter.
“Okay… We’ve had a call in to 911 that someone heard popping noises at a house. Hernandez? Wolfson? Can you guys get over to a house in Volcano Cliffs?”
“Popping noises?”
“That might have been gunshots. It’s all I’ve got. Can you go check?”
“Not right now. We’ve got someone stalled out in the middle of Coors and then pretty sure we got a DWI. And two people just ran a stoplight.”
“Well, when you get a chance, here’s the address.”
“Yeah, okay.”
The lab was in a basement and had enough fluorescent light banks in the ceiling to make anyone look like a walking corpse. The place was still empty; I was the second person to arrive today.
The first to arrive, a man, straightened up when he saw me. He’d been leaning against a worktable at the back of the room and had his dark hair buzzed short. His gray green eyes looked me over and his mouth turned down at the corners. “Chloe Vanderholt?”
“Yeah, hi.” I debated holding out my hand for a handshake, but since he didn’t, I didn’t.
“Right… so…” He looked me up and down, in an appraising rather than lecherous way, and said, “Come back to my desk. We should probably talk. I’m the new supervisor here.”
“Miguel Gonzolas?”
“Yeah, that’s me.” He turned to lead the way. The lab was one large room with desks at the back, shelves of books in the corner, and equipment arrayed on counters and worktables throughout.
From his aloof manner, I got the distinct impression that this wasn’t a friendly, welcome-to-the-team kind of chat. Once at his desk, he hooked a chair from a nearby desk for me and sank down into his seat. “I’ve never met you before, which is kind of strange since I’ve been interviewing new applicants since before I got promoted to supervisor.”
“I was interviewed by the previous supervisor and the Police Chief-”
“I know. That’s not normal.”
Because
this lab was under the jurisdiction of the police department, the Chief of Police was its director, so her conducting an interview was something she had the power to do, even if it wasn’t the sort of thing she ever, actually did. I wondered now if this new supervisor was going to terminate me on the spot just to get back at her. That idea did have a certain appeal.
“You went to a good school and got good references and all that,” he said. “I’m sure you can be a good crim.” “Crim” was short for criminalist, and was what most forensic scientists called themselves. “But, we haven’t had any job openings lately. Our budget is real tight. I mean, how did you even apply?”
It was all I could do not to squirm on the rock hard cushion of the office chair. “I was just offered an interview a few months ago.” Not my usual style at all. Jason and I had discussed it at length, since it was obviously a courtesy extended to the Vanderholt name. In the end I’d chosen to believe that it was just the APD’s way of keeping the whole thing under wraps. No one else in the lab would find out unless the Chief decided to hire me.
“So you’re saying you didn’t even apply?”
“No. The pay they offered was extremely low. They told me about the tight budget.” I also liked to think this meant the whole deal wasn’t corrupt.
He looked me over again.
“The pay’s kind of a non-issue for me,” I said.
His mouth quirked up at the corners.
“This is the field I want to work in. This is a city I know. Two years ago I was just another undergrad at UNM working my way towards a job like this. Now I’ve got a famous last name, but I’m the same person.”
No one ever believed me when I said that, other than the Vanderholts, at least.
“Listen,” I said, “if this is a problem, I can leave. I won’t ever breathe a word to anyone about it-”
“No. If Madame Chief says you have a job, you have a job. Let’s get you set up in your desk, get your phone line, stuff like that. The other guys, when they come in, they’re all going to know something’s fishy, though.”
And he made no offer to smooth ruffled feathers. He was polite enough when he showed me my desk and my little personal safe. The evidence was stored on site, and Miguel took me into the other rooms, which included a walk in freezer (which had, besides the evidence, a small stash of frozen Evol Burritos), walk in refrigerator, and a room with rack after rack of shelves. There was a simple procedure to log what piece of evidence I was working on and I could then store it in my personal safe until I was done with it.
By the time we got back from the tour of the evidence storage, the lab had filled up with a dozen or so other people. Now that I saw them, I could see what Miguel meant when he called them “the other guys.”
Every single one of them was male.
“Okay, we’ve got a second call in regarding a house in Volcano Cliffs.”
I only half listened as the dispatcher confirmed that this was the same house in Volcano Cliffs that two cops had checked on just a little while ago, over an hour after the first phone call. The cops had knocked on the door, gotten no answer, and that was that. An unanswered door was not grounds for a search warrant.
“Tell the caller to go over and check. We can’t just break the door down.”
“Yeah, the operator gave that same advice.”
“Okay, so what do you want us to do about it?”
“Just make a note of the second call. I’ll let you know if anything else comes of it.”
As they spoke, I took heated superglue in a metal tray and put it and a baseball bat that had been used in an assault and battery, into a large glass terrarium, which I sealed up tight. This was one way to reveal latent fingerprints. Some crime labs had fancy cyanoacrylate fuming tanks, but this was not a fancy lab.
After a painful round of introductions, in which I had gone to each person by myself and said hello, I’d decided to keep to myself and just do my job for the rest of the day. I hadn’t given out my last name, but I heard it in whispers throughout the lab. More than once, I felt an irritated gaze. But I would make this work. Eventually they’d see I just wanted to do the job and get over their reservations about me. There was no shortcut through this process.
I did wish, though, when lunchtime rolled around, that someone would offer me an Evol Burrito. Several guys grabbed them, so I wasn’t sure whose stash it was. Once they were microwaved, the scent of green chile and lime hung in the air for the rest of the afternoon.
On the way home, I could tell I was being tailed by one car, perhaps two. The sun was just low enough in the sky that I couldn’t block it with the fold-down visor. It cast a rich rose light over the city, so that even the glints in the silver chrome of cars nearby looked deep gold. I drove with one hand outstretched to shade my eyes. One of the cars was so close to my tail that I fought the urge to slam on the brakes and mash its grille, but I knew that even the legitimate press would run wild with that one. My friend, the white sedan, pulled into the passing lane two cars behind me. Great.
Three cars followed me down the exit ramp, but I didn’t want to believe they were all tailing me. The farther into the Sandia Foothills I drove, though, the more obvious it became. Three paparazzi? I did not want to know what kind of headline had given me this kind of fame, but I was sure I’d find out. I felt a certain lightness as I turned down the private road to Jen’s house and saw my unwanted entourage pull over.
When I reached the house, Jason’s Prius was out front. I got out and ran inside with a mix of excitement and worry.
I found him in the living room, talking to Jen, who looked at him with her usual sisterly condescension. To her, he would always be her ridiculous, irresponsible little brother, even though he was only three minutes younger. He’d once thought that it was because he was the last of the siblings to get married, but our wedding hadn’t changed a thing.
My suspicion was that because Jason had moved away from the rest of the family when he was fifteen, he’d always be fifteen to Jen. He and their mother had gone to Hollywood, where he’d soon gotten work and become a star. Hence Jen had seen the rest of his adolescence in brief visits, on television, and projected large on the movie screen and it was as if all of it had become fiction in her mind. Even their little brother, Steve, was more of an adult in her eyes than Jason.
Right now my husband wasn’t going to give her any hassle over it. She was seven months pregnant with twins, which was why I didn’t see a whole lot of her even though I lived in her house. The doctor had ordered her to keep her activity to a minimum. At the sight of me, her face lit up. “Chloe!” She had the same deep blue eyes as Jason and the same color hair, though hers had curls. Once people found out Jen was Jason’s twin, they wondered how they hadn’t noticed it before. The family resemblance was strong.
I took a deep breath. There was definitely a lingering scent of garlic in the air. “That better not be your cooking I smell.”
“Don’t you get after me, too.” She was a professional chef who liked to cook to relieve stress, boredom, anger… pretty much any emotion. At times it was endearing, but right now it was bad for her health and that of her babies. “That’s Kyle’s cooking you smell. He made a bunch of meals this afternoon and put them in the freezer.”
I’d learned during this visit that he was a master chef in his own right. Kyra had explained to me that this was how they met; he’d been foreman of a building site next to her old restaurant and had plied her with homemade New Mexican food and offers to teach her some family recipes. Only, when he found out he was flirting with Jason Vanderholt’s sister, that had been a shock. Jen didn’t see him for a week, until she started go to past his building site with deliveries of fresh baked bread and cookies. According to her, it’d taken until the end of the construction project to talk him around.
Jason got to his feet and came over to hug me. “Hey,” he said softly, right into my ear. “My last interview for today got pushed into tomorrow.”
Jen g
rinned at the sight of us with our arms around each other. I’d been Jason’s friend for months before anything romantic happened, and I gather all during that time the family had been in agreement that Jason should try to become more than a friend, if he knew what was good for him. I’m still not entirely sure why they all voted for a girl who grew up in a trailer park in the South Valley and had bullet scars on her person.
“Okay,” I said, “so there isn’t a news story out that we’re on the brink of divorce again?”
I expected the usual chuckles, but Jen and Jason exchanged a look. “There’s always some kind of story like that.” He sounded defensive. “I just wanted to come see you.”
“Ignore the tabloids,” said Jen. “Pure fiction.” She’d once banned Jason from visiting when his bad press got to be too much. Like their parents, she had a rigid idea about how people should live and was especially protective of Kyra, who hadn’t had a lot of structure in her early childhood. If she thought the tabloids were printing pure fiction, then she was likely right. She’d been dealing with this for much longer than I had.
“What is the story?” I asked. “Just out of curiosity?”
“There are a few, and they’re all stupid,” said Jason. “Forget about it.” This time, he turned away from his sister. I saw his expression blank for a split second, like a shadow passing, and then he looked at me as if he had nothing to hide.
My phone rang before I could think of what to say next. The number that popped up wasn’t one I knew. “Hello?”
“Vanderholt. It’s Miguel.”
“Oh, hi.”
“We’ve got a crime scene on the West Side. Wilson’s the other crim on call tonight, but he grew up a block away from there. It’s too likely he’s got a personal connection. Neither of the ballistics guys can make it, so I’m calling you. Can you come work the scene?”
“This the one that we heard the calls about all day?”
“Yep.”
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