“Have you seen this man?”
The composite this time was the older man with the gun who’d frightened the Lopezes out of their home . . . and probably saved their lives, considering how fast the building had gone up.
“No, I can’t say I have. That is, it’s similar to any number of people I’ve seen but it doesn’t bring anyone immediately to mind.”
Salvador grunted; it was a rather generic Anglo countenance, in fact. Offhand he’d have said Texan or Southern of some sort; there was something about the cheekbones that brought Scots-Irish hillbilly to mind, and the long face on a long skull, but even that was just an educated guess. The Corps was lousy with that type.
“Do you think Mr. Brézé is capable of, mmm, violent actions?”
She paused for a long moment, looking down at her fingers. When she met his eyes again, his alarm bells rang once more.
“I think he’s capable of anything. Anything at all.”
“Had a temper?”
She shook her head. “No. He was always a perfect gentleman. But I could feel it.”
Which would be a big help in court.
“Now, you saw Ms. Tarnowski later that evening?”
Now Demarcio flushed. “Yes, with Ms. Brézé . . . Adrienne Brézé. At La Casa Sena; they were having dinner at a table near mine.”
That was an expensive restaurant on Palace, just off the plaza, in an old renovated adobe that had started out as a hacendado’s townhouse. Not the most expensive in town by a long shot, but up there.
“You didn’t speak with them?”
“No. They, umm, didn’t seem to want company.” Her eyes shifted upward and she blushed slightly. “They seemed sort of preoccupied.”
Ah, Salvador thought. That sort of preoccupied. Is this an arson case or a bad movie? Sister catches her on the rebound from her brother, so brother burns the house down? Where do these sorts of people come from? Do they step out of TV screens or do the screenwriters know them and use them for material?
“You knew Adrienne Brézé socially?”
“No. I’d never seen her before. Didn’t even know Adrian had a sister.”
“Then how did you know the woman’s name?” he said.
An exasperated glance. “I asked the maitre d’hotel at La Casa Sena, of course! I’m a regular there. So is Adrian.”
He hid a smile. I think Ms. Demarcio is a nice lady. She’s concerned about Tarnowski. But I also think she’s a gossip of the first water.
“Thank you, Ms. Demarcio—”
“Well, aren’t you going to tell me anything?”
He sighed. Usually you didn’t, but he needed to develop this source.
“We’re investigating the circumstances of the fire at Ms. Tarnowski’s apartment, and trying to find where she is.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly; that meant We think it was torched, without actually saying it.
“And her disappearance?”
“Ah, yes. There’s no reason to suppose it’s anything but a sudden move—”
“And no reason to suppose it is. I talked to the Lopez family, and there was a man with a gun.”
He sighed. Santa Fe was a small town. “True. We’ve got Santa Fe and Albuquerque and the state police all looking. Here’s my card.”
He slid it across the low table. “Please let me know immediately if Ms. Tarnowski contacts you, or you get any other information.”
Outside, Cesar met him, and they walked down toward the end of Canyon, then turned right across the bridge over the small and entirely dry Santa Fe river with its strip of grass and cottonwoods. That led to Palace just north of the Cathedral, the reddish sandstone bulk of it towering over the adobe and stucco of the neighboring buildings. Salvador jammed his fists into the pockets of his sheepskin jacket and scowled, pausing only to give the finger to a Mercedes that ran the yellow light and nearly hit them. Right afterward, a rusting clunker with the driver’s door held on with coat-hanger wire did the same thing.
“This is screwy,” he complained, after he’d filled his partner in. “But at least we’ve got names to go with our composites. Adrian and Adrienne Brézé.”
“This is fucked up, amigo,” Cesar said cheerfully. “Because the databases are still not giving us anything even though we’ve got the names. They don’t have e-mail addresses, they don’t have bank accounts . . . You did send them out?”
“Yeah, local, state, Fart Barf and Itch, and Homeland Insecurity, which means the spooks. It can take a while, even now they’ve got the whole system cross-referenced.”
“It shouldn’t take a while to get something. Everyone leaves footprints. The question is, my friend, should we be thinking of this as an arson case, or some sort of kidnapping? Scorned boyfriend revenge thing, he burns the house and snatches her?”
“A little early for that.”
Cesar grinned and showed his notepad, a picture of an elderly but wellmaintained Prius. “Abandoned car on Palace, ticketed and towed about an hour ago. Registered to—”
“Ellen Tarnowski.”
“So maybe, it’s not so early.”
Salvador’s notepad beeped. “Well, fuck me. Take a look.”
The picture was from the security cams at Albuquerque Sunport, the airport in the larger city an hour’s drive south; the face-recognition software had tagged it.
“That’s Brézé and our mystery man with the gun, all right. Still in the black leather outfit. Nine thirty to San Francisco last night, just opened up and the request got it. Wait a minute—”
He tapped at the screen. “Fuck me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“They didn’t have tickets. Look.”
“Could be tickets under someone else’s name.”
“No, there were two vacant first-class seats according to the ticketing record. But look, when they cleared for takeoff they recorded all the first-class seats as full. But there aren’t any names attached to these two. Which isn’t supposed to be possible. Breaks three laws and twenty regulations.”
Cesar made a hissing sound of frustration. “Mierda, for a second I thought we’d get a name on Mr. Shotgun. What about the other end?”
“Flight got into San Francisco International . . . nothing on the surveillance cam there, and it should have got them.”
The younger man grinned. “Maybe they got out on the way, sí?”
“Yeah, at forty thousand feet. At least we can retire the kidnapping theory, Cesar. But Tarnowski’s still missing, even if Mr. Boyfriend didn’t snatch her. Or I suppose he could have a third party holding her.”
“Okay, we got her last known location in Santa Fe. Here.”
The building that housed La Casa Sena and several upscale shops was mainly nineteenth century, adobe-built with baked-brick trim, rising around a courtyard-patio that featured a pool and a huge cottonwood. Originally it had comprised thirty-three rooms of living-place-workroomstoreroom-quasi-fortress that presented a blank defensive wall four feet thick to the outside, intended to repel Apaches, bandits, rebels, and tax collectors whether Mexican or gringo. Now there was a wine boutique, several stores selling upscale jewelry and froofraw, and the restaurant occupying two sides of the rectangle.
Iron tables stood out under the cottonwoods, vacant this time of year; the flower beds were sere and brown as well. A glassed-in box near the entrance covered the original well that had supplied water to the complex. He glanced at the menu posted beside the door; they weren’t open for lunch yet.
“Ever eaten here?” he asked.
“Twenty-five for a ham sandwich?” Cesar said, peering at the prices. “You loco?”
“I had dinner here once. An anniversary, the last one before Julia divorced me. The food was actually pretty damn good.”
“Jesus, if lunch is like this, what’s dinner for two cost?”
“About the price of a trip to Paris.” Salvador grinned and read the small print: “And the ham sandwich has green chile aioli, ciabatta, aged Wisconsin Gouda�
��”
“It’s still twenty-five dollars for a fucking ham sandwich. Okay, a ham and cheese. I don’t care if the butter was made from the Virgin’s milk.”
“Can I help you?” a young woman in a bow-tie outfit said, opening the door. “Lunch doesn’t start seating until—”
They flashed their badges. “The manager, please.”
That brought quick action: “I’m Mr. Tortensen—”
After the introductions, the manager showed them through to his office, though Salvador felt as if half the contents of his wallet had vanished just stepping over the threshold of the front door into the pale Taos-style interior. Even the office was stylish. The man was worried, brown-haired, in his thirties, lean to the point of emaciation, and licking his lips.
“What can I do for you, officers?” he said.
Salvador leaned back in the chair. He knew he could be intimidating to some. People who’d led sheltered lives particularly. He didn’t have to do anything in particular, even if they were people who’d consciously think of him as something they’d scrape off their shoe on a hot day.
“You had two guests at dinner yesterday,” he said. “From a little after five thirty to seven thirty. Ellen Tarnowski and Adrienne Brézé. I’d like some details.”
The man started very slightly, and then his mouth firmed. “I’m afraid our clients’ confidentiality is—”
Cesar cut in smoothly: “Ms. Tarnowski’s house burned down last night, and there’s suspicion of arson. Her car was found and towed from a parking spot not too far from here. We have independent confirmation that she was here last night, and she’s a missing person with this as her last known location.”
Salvador nodded. “So we’d really appreciate your cooperation in this arson and possible kidnapping investigation.”
The manager started; short of shouting terrorism it was about the best possible way of getting his attention.
“Let me make a few calls,” he said, pulling out his phone.
Cesar worked on his notepad. Salvador crossed his arms on his chest and enjoyed watching the manager sweat as he tried to get back to his routine. People came in to talk to Mr. Tortensen about purchasing and things that probably made perfect sense. At last, a harassed-looking man in his early twenties came in; he was slimly handsome, but looked as if he really wasn’t used to waking up this early. Which, with a night-shift job like waiting tables, he might not be.
“Ah, this is Joseph Morales, officer,” Tortensen said. “He had A17 . . . their table . . . last night.”
Maricón, Salvador thought—clinically, he wasn’t bothered by them. There had been one he knew who was an artist with a Javelin launcher. He could put a rocket right through a firing slit, which has a good dirty joke in it somewhere.
“Pleased to meet you,” Morales said to the policemen with transparent dishonesty, but he was at least trying to hide it. “How can I help you?”
The restaurant manager started to speak, and Salvador held up a hand. “We’re interested in a party of two at one of your tables last night.”
He held up his notepad with Tarnowski’s face.
The waiter laughed—it was almost a giggle. “Oh, them. Yes, I remember them well. They ordered—well, Ms. Brézé ordered—”
He rattled off a list of things, most of which Salvador had never heard of. He held up a hand.
“What did that come to?”
“With the wines? About . . . twenty-five hundred.”
The manager was working his desktop, and nodded confirmation. Cesar gave a smothered sound that had probably started as an agonized grunt, passed through indignation, and was finally suppressed with a tightening of the mouth.
“Tip?”
“Very generous. Seven hundred.”
Outside, Cesar shook his head. “Seven hundred for the tip? And you went there?”
“I was starting to get worried about Julia, wanted to show her I thought about something besides my job. Didn’t work. Three weeks later, she told me I was just as far away living here as I had been when they deployed me to Kandahar.”
“Ai!”
“Yeah, sweet, eh? What’s the next stop?”
“I’ll try and see if anyone around saw the van that Adrian Brézé and Mystery Man in Leather were using after they left the burn site.”
Salvador laughed. “And I’ll get back and catch up on my paperwork. Don’t you wish this were a TV show?”
“So we could just work one case at a time? Sí, the thought has crossed my mind.”
III
“OKAY,” CESAR SAID TWO WEEKS LATER. “GUESS WHAT? SOMETHING FUNNY on the Brézé case.”
“Tell me something funny. I could use it.”
Salvador sipped at a cup of sour coffee and looked out the window at a struggling piñon pine with sap dripping from its limbs; they were having another beetle infestation, which happened every decade or two. Firewood would be cheap soon; he could take his pickup out on weekends and get a load for the labor of cutting it up and hauling it away.
The prospect was a lot more fun than the case he was working on now. Man beats up woman, woman calls cops, woman presses charges, woman changes mind, couple sues cops. Tell me again why I’m not selling insurance?
“The funny thing is the analysis on the DNA from the puke I found in the Dumpster behind Whole Foods,” Cesar said.
“Ain’t a policeman’s life fun? Digging in Dumpsters for puke?”
“Sí, jefe. Nice clean white-collar job, just what my mother had in mind for her prospective kid when she waded across the river to get me born on U.S. soil. Anyway, there’s blood in the puke.”
“I remember you telling me that. The attendant says it was Adrian Brézé’s puke, right?”
“Right, he saw him puking out the rear of that van, thought he was drunk. I’m pretty sure that Brézé paid him something to forget about it—he sweated pretty hard before he talked, and I had to do the kidnapping-and-arson dance. He saw the blood in it too.”
“So he’s got an ulcer. Even rich people get them. How does this help us?”
Cesar scratched his mustache, and Salvador consciously stopped himself from doing likewise.
“I’m not sure it does,” he said. “But it’s funny. Because the DNA from the puke is not the same as the DNA from the blood. In fact, the DNA from the blood is on the Red Cross list. One of their donors, a Shirley Whitworth, donated it at that place just off Rodeo and Camino Carlos Rey. It seems to have gone missing from their system. They clammed up about it pretty tight. We’ll have to work on that.”
Salvador grunted. “Let’s get this straight. The puke is Brézé—”
“Presumably. Male chromosomes in the body fluids. But there’s no Brézé in the DNA database.”
“That’s not so surprising; they only started it a couple of years ago, and it just means he’s not a donor and hasn’t been arrested or gone to a hospital or whatever. But the blood is definitely some Red Cross donor’s?”
“Sí. So, funny, eh?”
“Funny as in fucking weird, not funny as in ha-ha. Because it had to be in his stomach, right?”
They both laughed. “Good thing we know he comes out in daylight, eh?” Cesar said.
“Yeah, and he doesn’t sparkle. I’d feel fucking silly chasing a perp who looked like a walking disco ball . . . but he did drink it . . . maybe some sort of kink cult thing?”
“So I’m not surprised he puked,” Cesar said, still chuckling. “It’d be like drinking salt water, you know? Blood is salt water, seawater. My mother used salt water and mustard to make you heave if you’d eaten more than you should.”
Salvador could feel his brain starting to move, things connecting under the fatigue of a half-dozen cases that were never going to go anywhere. Then his phone rang. When he closed it, he was frowning.
“What’s the news, jefe?”
“The boss wants to see us, now.”
The chief’s office wasn’t much bigger than his; Santa Fe was a sm
all town, still well under a hundred thousand people. It was on a corner, second story, and had bigger windows. The chief also had three stars on the collar of his uniform; he still didn’t make nearly as much as, say, Giselle Demarcio. On the other hand, his money didn’t come from San Francisco and L.A. and New York, either.
Cesar’s breath hissed a little, and Salvador felt his eyes narrow. There were two suits waiting for them as well as the chief. Literally suits, natty, one woman and one man, one black and one some variety of Anglo. Both definitely from out of state; he’d have put the black woman down as FBI if he had to guess, and the younger man as some sort of spook, but not a desk man. Ex-military of some type, but not in the least retired.
Possibly from the Army of Northern Virginia, a.k.a. the Waffen-CIA.
“Sit down,” the chief said.
He was as local as Salvador and more so than Cesar, and might have been Salvador’s older cousin—in fact, they were distantly related. Right now, he was giving a good impression of someone who’d never met either of the detectives, his face like something carved out of wood on Canyon Road.
The male suit spoke. “You’re working on a case involving the Brézé family?”
“Yes,” Salvador said. “Chief, who are these people?”
“You don’t need to know,” the woman said neutrally; somehow she gave the impression of wearing sunglasses without actually doing it. More softly: “You don’t want to know.”
“They’re Homeland Security,” the chief said.
“Homeland Security is interested in weird love triangles?” Salvador said skeptically. “Besides, Homeland Security is like person, it’s sort of generic. You people FBI, Company, NSA, what?”
“You don’t need to know. You do need to know we’re handling this,” the man said.
Wait a minute, Salvador thought. He’s scared. Controlling it well, he’s a complete hardcase if I ever saw one, and hell, I’ve been one. But he’s scared.
Which made him start thinking a little uncomfortably that maybe he should be scared. The man was someone he might have been himself, if things had gone a little differently with that IED.
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