Cold to the Bone

by Emery Hayes

  “Divide and conquer,” she said. “You take the mom. She’s more likely to respond, I think, to a strong male figure asking the questions.” Nicole had appealed to her as a mother. Now they needed to dig into her role as a wife and a woman of means. Alma Esparza’s loyalties were divided among her daughter, her husband, and herself. “I’ll question the father. I’m going to keep it open. I don’t think he’ll say much. Not until we have something to press him with.” She paused and worked the zipper on her parka. “I want to take Joaquin with us, back to the station. Away from the hotel and his parents.”

  “He’s a minor.”

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  They took the elevator up and walked past the familiar photos of Native American leaders and the heroes of the rodeo.

  Lars knocked. He was an imposing Nordic figure with buzzed blond hair and shoulders that made a battering ram obsolete. Nicole stood one foot back and one to the right so that she’d have an unobstructed view of the room when the door was opened.

  The doctor was surprised. He stared at Lars, and his eyes flared. The sheriff and undersheriff wore their department parkas, opened now that they were indoors, but no uniforms, and stocking caps that bore the emblem of the state law enforcement agency. They raised their badges in a synchronized movement that revealed side arms and cuffs. Lars said, “Police, Dr. Esparza.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. His eyes hooked on Nicole’s face. “We were expecting you.”

  “Why?” Nicole asked. She stepped into the room ahead of Lars and nodded at Joaquin, who was sitting on the couch dressed in denim and flannel. “Why were you expecting us, Doctor?”

  “You told us you’d be back,” the doctor returned. “And you called.”

  “But, you expected me last night too,” Nicole said. “Isn’t that true?”

  His face softened. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not like Beatrice to run so late. To not answer her phone.”

  Mrs. Esparza stood. Nicole deliberately refrained from greeting her and spared her now only the briefest of glances.

  “Detective Solberg will interview you, Mrs. Esparza. Here in the room.” Nicole glanced at Joaquin. “Come with me,” she said. “You too, Dr. Esparza.”

  “Where to?” the doctor demanded.

  Joaquin stood and pushed his feet into a pair of heavy boots. Size tens? Probably. She glanced at Dr. Esparza’s feet. Tennis shoes, name brand, and smaller than she’d expected to find. The whole Esparza family was small in stature, but Dr. Esparza seemed to have slim—even delicate—hands and feet.

  “For now, we’ll use the resort’s conference room, but bring your coats,” she advised. “And your identification.”

  “This isn’t necessary,” the doctor began. “You don’t need to split us up like this.”

  Nicole held the doctor’s gaze. “You’re hiding something. All of you. And just so you know, this department considers lies of omission as damaging as bald-faced sinkers.”

  “We didn’t lie to you.”

  “Put your coat on, Dad.” Joaquin pushed the parka into his father’s hands, then shrugged into his own. He walked across the room and opened the door.

  “Joaquin,” his mother implored. “Your father is right. We do not have to go anywhere with the police.”

  “Of course you do, Mrs. Esparza,” Lars informed her. “Every one of you is guilty of obstructing justice.”

  At this point a bluff, but probably not by much. Nicole was beginning to suspect that the truth ran deep beneath their surface. They would have to pry it out of the parents, but maybe not Joaquin. The kid was waiting at the door.

  “Your daughter is dead, and we’re here to help. What aren’t you telling us?” Lars continued to press.

  Nicole watched Joaquin slip into the hall and nodded to the father. “Let’s go.”

  She turned, fully expecting Dr. Esparza to follow.

  “This isn’t necessary,” the doctor stated again. Control slipped from the man’s demeanor. “I am the one to blame for Beatrice’s death.”

  Nicole stopped; Lars stepped closer, blocking the door.

  “No, Enrique. That’s not true,” Mrs. Esparza objected.

  “It is.” Dr. Esparza spread his hands in supplication. “I expected too much from her. Not in the way many fathers do. Wanting the best for our children, that is admirable. Allowing them to dance with danger, that is criminal.”

  He shrugged into his coat. “I will go with you, but not my wife. Not my son. They are not part of this.”

  “Did you kill your daughter, Dr. Esparza?” Nicole asked.

  He paused. Nicole noticed a tic in the man’s eyelid.

  “Yes.” His face was grim, his tone resolute. He hadn’t made a confession but a decision.

  “How?” she pressed.

  “I strangled her, as you said.”

  He was deteriorating. His lips were trembling, his arms and legs shaking. He wavered on his feet. The man was near collapse, and Nicole hated the necessity of it, but she had to push him over the edge. They had to know if his confession was genuine or contrived; if truth was at its essence, or guilt.

  “And did you do that with your bare hands?” Nicole asked. “With twine? With the start cord from a snowmobile?”

  “Multiple choice, Sheriff?” he asked, his voice wafer-thin and about as substantial. “My hands, of course. Death, as love, is a very personal matter.”

  He held his hands up in front on him, turned over so that the pale skin of his wrists was exposed below the cuffs of his parka. His hands were small, the fingers thin and tapered. They were the hands of a surgeon, and possibly the hands of a murderer.

  They had to take him in.

  9

  Nicole stepped off the elevator on the second floor and into a small lobby. She followed the signs to the business office and conference center but did not find Joaquin there. When she and Lars left the room, Dr. Esparza between them but not cuffed, Joaquin had been nowhere to be seen. She’d thought he’d gone ahead, found the conference room and waited, slouched in one of the padded chairs at the long table, but the room was so empty that her footsteps echoed on the travertine tiles.

  She returned to the elevator and pressed the call button but didn’t board. She’d caught movement out of the corner of her eye, a flash of cobalt blue that could have been Joaquin’s parka, and she followed it around the curving corridor and into a sitting area.

  Joaquin stood with his shoulder propped against a rustic beam, a panel of windows behind him showcasing the snowfall. His dark eyes were somber, but he met her gaze and held on.

  “He confessed, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  Joaquin nodded. “That was plan B,” he said, and a smirk twisted his lips. “He got there pretty fast.”

  “What was plan A?”

  “Denial. We’re good at that. We’ve been living in it for years. Maybe forever.”

  “What have you been denying?”

  He shrugged. “Lots of things. We pretend that we’re as good as everybody else. Better, even. That’s really big in my house. My parents still have the accents—Mexico City. Both of them, but if you ask them where they’re from, they always say San Diego. We live in a big house with a view of the ocean, drive new cars. My mother will only buy us clothes with a label on them, but it has to be the right label, and that’s always changing. She wants—needs—to have everything right. Because she was poor, she says, and doesn’t want to remember it. Same reason my dad drives the Lexus and chases snow in the winter. Because he can. Now.”

  He stopped and straightened. He shifted so that he was looking out the window. His eyes caught the swirling snow, and it held his attention.

  Nicole followed him into the moment. He was gathering his thoughts. Steam. She saw sparks of his anger in the comments he’d made about his parents, but not as sharp as what she’d witnessed in the early hours of the morning. Loss could be a blunt object. It left a person dazed, an
d sometimes grateful for life and what they had left of it.

  “What else, Joaquin?” Nicole asked. “What about Beatrice?”

  “What did my father say?”

  “That he killed her, but not much more than that.”

  “He loved her,” Joaquin said. “He didn’t kill her.”

  But Nicole knew that the dynamics in a family could be insidious. From their first conversation, she’d known that Joaquin had been branded as the black sheep and that Beatrice was emerging as the star. Children were often compared to one another, with one rising as a favorite. But the favored weren’t always the safest. Fourteen years on the job had made that clear to Nicole.

  “Sometimes we hurt the people we love. You’re old enough to know that.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded but lowered his forehead to the window. The snow was thick and frenzied. Flakes hit the glass and melted, leaving a thin film of moisture that quickly turned into ice and then slid down the pane and back into the cycle of precipitation. “Love isn’t forever. It’s not even all the time.”

  She stepped closer. Joaquin was taller by two inches but lighter, his slim build evident even in the parka. He still had time to grow into his body. To reach his potential, as Beatrice did not.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Parents don’t love their kids every minute. We make that impossible.” He turned to her and leaned back so that his head and shoulders were resting on the window pane. “I piss my dad off regularly.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Yeah. But I make him proud on purpose too. It’s all a choice, right?”

  “What choices did Beatrice make?”

  His head was tipped back, and the overhead lighting cast shadows on his sharp cheekbones and beneath his jaw. His eyelids lowered, and he stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. All signs that the defiance was returning. But he answered her.

  “Bad ones.”

  “Why?”

  “Not always.” He shrugged. “She thought she was being good.”

  Good. Good girls don’t do this …

  “What does that mean, Joaquin?”

  “You should ask my parents.”

  “I will. But right now I’m asking you.”

  “I don’t know the whole story.”

  “Tell me what you do know.”

  “And you’ll fill in the rest?” The smirk was back but pained. It softened his face rather than hardened it.

  “I’ll dig for the rest,” she corrected. “That’s what I do, Joaquin. I find the truth.”

  “Why?”

  “So your sister can rest in peace. And so that you can too.”

  That made him tear up. He swallowed, and Nicole could almost hear him choke on his sadness.

  “My father—” he began, his voice thick with emotion. “He’s deep into something. It’s not good. Medicine is supposed to be good, but not when it mixes with greed.”

  “Your father is greedy?”

  “He wants to be someone, you know?”

  “He’s a doctor,” Nicole pointed out.

  Joaquin shook his head. “Not good enough. Not for him.”

  “So what did he do about that?”

  “How good are you?” he wanted to know, and an intensity entered his eyes. More anger than revenge; more light than dark. Hope, maybe. “At finding the truth?”

  “I won’t disappoint you,” she told him.

  He considered her words and found promise in them.

  “I think he sold his research,” Joaquin disclosed.

  “What kind of research?”

  “I don’t know. Something with cancer, for sure, because that’s what he does. I just remember hearing him for years complain about being so close, if he could only get the hospital to pay for this or that, or get him some equipment he needed that would make a difference.” He pushed away from the wall and stood over her, his hands now resting on his hips. “But that changed. Suddenly he was on cloud nine, you know? Walking around the house and saying things like ‘I’m the man’ and ‘I finally did it. Me, a hungry little boy from south of the border.’”

  “And you don’t know what he did, Joaquin?”

  He shook his head. “He called it Nueva Vida.”

  New life. Nueva Vida. Beatrice had scrawled the words in her diary, sometimes in sweeping letters, other times etched short and sharply into the paper.

  “How was Beatrice involved in Nueva Vida?” What bad decision had the victim made that could have led to her death?

  “She knew,” he said simply.

  “She knew what your father’s breakthrough was?”

  “Yeah. She knew, and she didn’t like where he was taking it.”

  Had Beatrice done something to stop her father? Had she threatened to?

  “How do you know she didn’t like it?” she pressed.

  “She said so. And they argued about it.”

  “Your father ever lose his cool?”

  “Sure, but never with Bea. She was giving too much of herself already to ‘the cause.’”

  “How so?”

  “I think she was the human sacrifice.”

  “‘Lab rat,’” she quoted. “Your last text to your sister.”

  Regret rippled across his face. “Exactly.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  But he shrugged and his lips pressed together in mutiny. Nicole waited. She eased back on her heels and watched him.

  “I’m the help, Joaquin,” she said.

  “My father lied to you. The old Bea, she was strong and healthy. But that changed last summer. She got sick all the time. She looked like she was dying. Sometimes. Then suddenly she was better than ever.” He shook his head, bewildered.

  “And you think your father used Beatrice to test his breakthrough?”

  “She would die for us,” he said. “And maybe she did.”

  “Explain that.”

  “Whatever my dad was doing, it was too much. Bea said so. She told him she wasn’t enough to make a difference. That it would take many more. They argued about that, a lot.”

  “Many more what?”

  “She didn’t say, and when I asked questions, Bea clammed up. But I think she was talking about test subjects. I think she was the only one, and Bea worried that wasn’t enough.”

  “But she didn’t quit?”

  “No. My father said she was the traction they needed. She would get them the attention necessary. She was the catalyst for change. And Bea went with it.”

  “Maybe your father wouldn’t let her quit.”

  But Joaquin was shaking his head. “Bea wouldn’t give up. She was a people pleaser. She did it to help my father, but to save the world too, because she had that kind of heart. Open to everyone.”

  “Was your father’s discovery big enough it would change the world?”

  “I don’t know. But my father is not altruistic.”

  “And Beatrice was?”

  He nodded. “And naïve. That was the problem. They fought about that more than anything else. You want to know about Bea’s bad decisions? Here’s a big one, the worst it can get: she wanted to save the world, and she was willing to die to do it.”

  Nicole let that rest. She had other questions, other possibilities to explore.

  “Would she defy your father, take his discovery to someone who cared?”

  “No. She would never do that. She loved our father, our family. We always came first.”

  Strong words, but Nicole had seen family sell each other out for less. She changed direction.

  “Who’s Kenny?” she asked.

  Joaquin’s upper lip curled into a smile that was more cruelty than kindness.

  “I told Bea she needed to scrape him off her shoe.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “No one does.”

  “Except maybe Beatrice did,” she pointed out.

  “I told you, she liked everyone.”

  “But was he her boyfriend?”
<
br />   “I hope not.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me if it was true. She knew how I felt about him.”

  “How do you know Kenny?”

  “What do you know about the world of the wealthy?” Joaquin countered.

  “From the inside? Nothing,” she admitted. “So educate me.”

  “Protégé.” He said the word like it was explanation enough, but continued when Nicole frowned. “Protect the legacy. That’s number one. The spoken creed. You can’t take it with you, and that really sucks. Worse, though, is if you can’t trust it will survive future generations. So parents groom. And that’s Kenny.”

  “The groomed?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you despise him for it?”

  “That and other reasons.”

  “You’re the son of a wealthy man,” she pointed out.

  “Yeah, but I’m the outcast. The black sheep.” He laughed curtly, and it cut through the air like an explosion of glass. “Remember?” he prompted. “My father gave up on me.”

  “And focused instead on Beatrice.” She let that sink in. “Did you hate her for it?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t get it. A protégé has to be ruthless.”

  “And that wasn’t Beatrice?”

  “She didn’t have the right stuff either.”

  And Nicole wrestled with his earlier words, how Beatrice had been willing to die if it helped others.

  “Because she would give it all away?”

  “Exactly. My father hoped she would change.”

  “But you didn’t think so?”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “So who’s Kenny?” she tried again.

  “The son of one of my father’s colleagues. One of the men from a Big Six pharm company. We saw a lot of them for a while. I guess that’s what they do—throw our families together and pretend it’s a good mix.”

  “What was wrong with Kenny? Other than the grooming?”

  “Entitlement,” Joaquin said. “He was so full of it, it floated in the air around him.”

  And a trait common in date rapists. Nicole felt her stomach tilt.

  “And Beatrice felt the same way,” Nicole said. “She didn’t believe in privilege either.”

  “She was better at it,” he said. “She could find something to like about everyone.”