Nobody's Damsel

by E. M. Tippetts

  “I was in her house on the day of the shooting,” Laurie blurted out.

  I wasn’t able to school my features, so I feigned a coughing fit to cover my face. Quick, I thought, look satisfied but skeptical that this is the whole story. I imagined Kyra when she was still in high school, telling me that she hadn’t called her boyfriend once all day, when I strongly suspected she’d been texting him instead.

  “It was just that once!” Laurie insisted. “Just that once. And we argued, but I didn’t hurt her.”

  Detective Baca had the perfect poker face. He gave nothing away. I imagined Laurie grabbing Esperanza and dragging her out of her house. That was an easy prompt. I was instantly upset. The poor little girl! This woman, I told myself, was lying and obstructing our case. Days had been lost because she’d held out on us.

  A little voice in the back of my mind reminded me that I didn’t know, or even really suspect any such thing. Still, it was all a matter of wearing the right expression.

  Laurie burst into tears.

  I couldn’t think of any more emotions to feign. I looked at Detective Baca in confusion. His expression betrayed nothing as he watched her cry.

  “All right,” he said. “We know you didn’t hurt Esperanza. We know you care about that little girl.”

  “I’d never hurt her.”

  “We aren’t here to find fault with you. We need your help. Something happened and you can tell us about it. Will you do that, for us? For her?”

  “Teresa called me to say…” Laurie hiccupped a sob. “To say that she felt threatened.”

  “By whom?”

  “His name’s Carlos Nunes.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “I hired him to do some yard work and he did a good job. We always have weeds in the front yard. Can’t get them to go away, and I don’t want to use Roundup, you know?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  There was no way I could listen to this exchange and hide my desire to leap across the table and shake the information out of this silly woman. I got to my feet and faced the wall.

  Laurie burst into fresh tears. “He seemed all right. Teresa asked how he was and I told her he was good. So she had him clean tumbleweeds out of her back yard.”

  “Tumbleweeds? When was this?”

  “Months ago. In the fall.”

  “So why was he around, threatening her last week?”

  “She had him come do more odd jobs. He was cheap, you see? He only asked for two dollars an hour.”

  “How old is he?”

  “I don’t know. Said he was in high school at West Mesa.”

  “All right. So he did odd jobs around her house.”

  “And a couple of weeks ago they got into a fight about whether or not she’d paid him and she told him not to come back. But then she told me she was getting threatening phone calls.”

  Why, I wanted to know, had she covered this up?

  “But you didn’t believe her. You thought she was over dramatic,” said Detective Baca, milking the situation for more information.

  “Right.”

  “And so when something bad happened, you didn’t want to believe it at first, because you think you could’ve prevented it if you’d listened.”

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. But why didn’t you give us Carlos’s name earlier?”

  “He told me that if I did, he’d come for me.”

  It was simple enough. It was one of the oldest tricks in the book, and we hadn’t uncovered it because it hadn’t occurred to us to press this one witness just a little bit harder. The answer to the whole case had been right here all along, but we’d searched high and low, interviewed dozens of people, and hit three residences yesterday alone, all in a wild goose chase.

  Laurie continued to cry. “He told me that if you found him, he’d know I was the one who told, and he’d come kill me.”

  “Ma’am, we can protect you,” said Detective Baca. “You tell us everything you know about that young man right now. Can you tell us what he looked like?”

  “I can get you his make and model of car and his license plate number.”

  “All right, we’ll start there.”

  “He drives-”

  “Now when you say drives, have you seen him recently?”

  “Not since last week.”

  “All right, go on.”

  “He drives an old, red Mustang.” She rattled off the license plate number; she had the thing memorized.

  “Why didn’t you give an anonymous tip?” I couldn’t help myself. It was all I could do not to slap her.

  “He’d know it was me,” she said. “He’ll know. Teresa didn’t talk to anyone else on the street, I don’t think. I don’t know! I don’t know. I didn’t want to think that he’d hurt Teresa, but he went over there and… I didn’t see him take the girl. I didn’t! I saw him over there and then I went to get the phone, and then he was gone and… I went over there and knocked and there was no answer… I wasn’t sure what had happened. I called 911 and said I heard gunshots, but nobody would go into the house until I called and-and said that I saw blood.”

  “Which you never saw?” said Detective Baca.

  “No. I lied. I just wanted someone to go in there. Things didn’t seem right. I did not know that the girl was missing-”

  “So why did you tell us you saw the father’s truck?” he asked.

  “Because I had to say something. You knew I called 911… I shouldn’t have lied. I just didn’t know what to say. I didn’t! He’s going to kill me. He’s going to come and kill me.”

  “Have you had any contact with him since that day?” asked the detective.

  “No.”

  “Okay, listen, we’ll keep you safe. You’re safe, and you called us when you thought there was danger and you kept calling. Who knows when we’d have discovered the crime if you hadn’t done that.”

  But then, I thought, you lied and misled us and took us in the wrong direction. I took a deep breath to steady myself. I definitely did not have what it took to be an interrogator. I’d last fifteen minutes before someone had to come into the room and pry my fingers from the interviewee’s neck.

  “We’re on the same side here,” said Detective Baca. “You know his car. You know his address?”

  “I know where I sent him money for the yard.”

  “Okay, we’ll be needing that. Anything else you know about him? His family? Anything like that?”

  “No. Nothing. He was just a kid who came knocking on doors and offered to do yard work.”

  “Right. We’re going to be right back. Thank you for what you’ve told us so far. You sit tight. Everything’s going to be okay. You’ve done the right thing.” The detective grasped my arm and took me out of the room.

  “I’m sorry,” I said the moment the door swung shut. “I know I need to control my temper. I just… I want to kill her.”

  “I can’t believe you got her to break down like that. You’ve got a real knack, Miss Chloe.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “You glowering at her like you know she’s lying. She folded so fast. Last time I leaned on her, begged, threatened, played nice, nothing worked.”

  “I was doing math problems.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Badly. It’s what Jason says he does if he needs to look serious in a scene.”

  Detective Baca stared at me as if I’d just spoken Esperanto.

  “Jason gave me some acting lessons.”

  “Ah. They worked.”

  “I-I guess.”

  “Let’s see if this information she gave us is worth anything, but either she’s been taking acting lessons too, or she’s afraid for her life right now.” He waved the piece of paper on which he’d written the car license plate number and the address.

  Suffice it to say, the car was registered to one Carl Eisner, who was both a pedophile and a suspected serial killer. He wasn’t a high school student, but often posed
as one and had conned people all across the Southwest, though this was his first hit in New Mexico. He was twenty-six.

  Suffice it also to say that the address out in Rio Rancho, off a dirt road, yielded our final crime scene. Final because we found Esperanza, or what was left of her. Five of us from the lab went out to work on site, as much to give each other moral support as to get the job done quickly and efficiently. The afternoon was bright and sunny, so sunny that the world seemed bleached and washed out by light as we worked.

  I don’t want to talk about, or even think about what we uncovered. Never again would I look askance at Lillian when she told me she could never forgive herself for not getting an attempted murder conviction. No matter how long I live, I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for not getting Laurie Hitchens to fold the night she approached me at the CSI van. I don’t care if I wasn’t allowed to talk to her about the case, or that there was absolutely no way for me to know she was a witness. She was right there, on the night, and I didn’t get the facts until a week later.

  Though, as with most abductions turned murder, Esperanza was likely killed within three hours of being taken from her home. Our little angel had her wings before the police even busted down the front door of her house. Part of why I’d chosen forensic science for a career was because I didn’t want to be part of the cavalry, showing up to crimes in progress in the hopes of rescuing the innocent. I wanted to help, but I didn’t ever want to get that close to the action. I’d thought that gave me an emotional safety buffer. How wrong I was. Although it hadn’t been my job to ride out and save the damsel in distress today, I had to pick up the pieces afterward and know that she’d left this world all alone, feeling like nobody’s damsel. That’s a guilt from which there’s no absolution.

  My friend in the white sedan pulled up, his car jouncing on the dirt road and raising a cloud of dust, while we worked the scene. I was getting supplies out of the van, and this time, I didn’t have the patience for mercy. “Get out of here,” I ordered him.

  “You got a deal for me?” He leaned out of his window, all arrogance and condescension.

  I marched right up to his car, leaned down so that my eyes were level with his, and said, “I don’t have to make deals. Here’s the deal. You are talking to one of a dozen people who can convince the APD that you shot yourself, in the back of the head, with a shotgun, six times. Do not mess with me. Get out of here.”

  His eyes widened slightly, and I don’t know if it was the threat, or the sudden knowledge that something very serious had gone down, but he drove away, leaving another cloud of dust kicked up off the unpaved road in his wake.

  “Clayborn,” said Mitchell, “it’s over; we’re not going to find her. You’ve followed every lead, questioned every witness, searched every scene. There’s nothing more we can do. Some cases never close.” He stood in the doorway of Clayborn’s office. Clayborn sat with her back to him and stared out the window.

  “Little girls don’t just disappear into thin air.”

  “That we know of, but that’s the thing, for a certain percentage of our cases, we just don’t ever know.”

  “So you’re here to criticize me some more? I burned through too many leads too fast, destroyed evidence that might be useful to other cases, and still didn’t get results?”

  “On the contrary, you done good. I never thought I’d say this, but here’s a cold case, and I’m not wondering, ‘what if’. There are no ‘what ifs’. You moved fast, followed every lead, questioned every witness, got facts that I wouldn’t have been able to extract in an interrogation, and this dead end is the real deal. There’s nothing in this file that makes me think anyone could have done more. Suffice it to say, I’m impressed.”

  “I didn’t find her.”

  “Yet. But you type your work up for the cold case file and the moment anyone finds anything, they’ll have one heck of a detailed report to guide them along.”

  Clayborn shook her head.

  “You gotta let it go, Clayborn. There are other victims who need someone like you to champion their cause.”

  She got to her feet and twirled her trenchcoat around her shoulders.

  “Where you going?”

  “Gotta pay a visit to a friend’s house. Then I’ll be back to type up the reports.”

  “You don’t have to do that tonight.”

  “I’ll be back.” She tossed her hair out of her eyes and strode out of the office.

  CUT TO:

  Clayborn strode into a church with a high, gothic ceiling and ornate stained glass windows set into its stone walls. Without glancing right or left, she marched up the aisle, turned to one of the side chapels, and paused in front of a rack of lit candles. She dug in her pocket for some change, tossed it into a wooden box with a slot in its lid, and picked up an unlit candle. For a moment she held it and lifted her eyes to the figure on the crucifix, behind an iron grille.

  She set the candle in a holder on the rack, lit its wick, and stared up at the crucifix again as she shook the match out. Rather than bow her head, she lifted her chin, spun around and headed out again.

  CUT TO:

  Clayborn returned to her office, shut the door, and broke down. While the rest of the department went about their business, she paced, heaving sobs, and going through tissue after tissue, which piled up in her garbage can.

  Finally, her pacing slowed and she looked at her desk. With a steely look in her eyes, she began to gather together the Hope Tanner file. As the hours wore on, she could be seen typing away at her computer, printing page after page.

  The clock read one a.m. when she folded the file shut and stamped, COLD CASE on the outside. On her way out the door, she grabbed the purple sock monkey.

  CUT TO:

  Dale Tanner opened his door, blinking with surprise to find Clayborn standing on his porch. It was still nighttime.

  “I saw the light was on,” she said. “Not a surprise that you can’t sleep.”

  “What do you want?”

  Clayborn handed over the sock monkey. “I’m sorry. I did everything I could, and the moment I’ve got another lead, I’ll be on it.”

  Tanner looked down at the stuffed animal. “But?”

  “But for now, it’s over. I can’t sleep either.” She stepped back off the porch. “I really am sorry.” She turned, and left.

  Tanner watched her go, then went inside, shut the door, and sat down on his couch. His expression, when he looked up, was pure despair.

  “It is with regret,” I told the assorted media at the press conference, “that I report that Esperanza Dominguez is deceased, and her case has been deemed a homicide. We cannot release details at this time, as this remains an active investigation. Our prime suspect is Carl Eisner, aged twenty-six. I’ve got several mug shots here. He is wanted on two counts of murder, five counts of kidnapping, and fourteen counts of sexual abuse to minors in four states. He was last seen in Albuquerque one week ago, but the condition of his last known residence indicates he likely has not been living there in the last few days. He could be anywhere. There is a reward for any information that leads to his capture. I’ll now take questions.” I pointed at random. It was hard to see faces. My vision was blurry.

  “Are there any funeral arrangements for Esperanza and her mother?”

  “Not at this time.”

  “Is there a charity or foundation that people can send donations?”

  I listed several, including the Polly Klaas Foundation.

  “How does it feel, as a crime survivor, to report a child’s death?”

  That one made me shake my head. “I think it’d be hard for anyone, crime survivor or not.”

  “Will you continue to work for the APD?”

  “I’ll take questions about the case. This press conference isn’t about me.”

  “Has your husband been informed-”

  I shook my head and stepped down from the podium. “No further questions.”

  Detective Baca grasped my a
rm and guided me out of the room while reporters shouted and made a hubbub behind me. “You done good, Miss Chloe,” he whispered. His voice was tight with emotion.

  When I returned to the lab, after the press conference, I found Jason and Dave there, sitting at my desk, with a case of micro brewed beer. The rest of the guys in the lab were all gathered around talking and drinking from bottles. A few even laughed.

  In this mundane setting, under the terrible lighting, Jason could have been anyone. He looked almost average, except for his deep blue eyes.

  “There she is,” he said when he caught sight of me coming across the room. “How you holding up?” He held out a bottle, which I accepted with a smile.

  “Good job at the press conference, Vanderholt,” said Miguel, raising his beer to me. “To Esperanza?”

  “To Esperanza,” everyone agreed, holding their bottles aloft, then swigging them down.

  The beer was just the right mix of bitter and sharp. Jason knew how to find the good stuff.

  “So, now that you’re here,” said my husband, “I have news. My friend Vicki Hanson is going to take over the lead for Blood Ritual.”

  “She’s gonna play a Native American police detective?” said Miguel.

  “No, Molly Two Moons just quit, like the day before they were going to start shooting the season premiere. She’s been a nightmare to work with – speaking off the record, of course.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Vicki’s going to play a new detective, take the series in a new direction. Which-” he held up his hands “-I know, usually means the end of the series, right?”

  “Pretty much,” said Miguel.

  “I’m going to guest star in the season premiere, give my old friend some support. I’ll have a recurring role actually. You guys mind if I pick your brains from time to time about how criminal investigation is really done?”

  He didn’t need to ask, of course. The guys all thought that was beyond cool. They were star struck, having Jason there, acting like one of them. What they didn’t realize was that Jason was just eating it up. He loved being a normal guy, kicking back with a beer.