Accustomed to the Dark (3 page)

“What's he do for a living?”

“Deals drugs. Pretty big time, up there in Denver.”

“So what's he doing in the New Mexico state pen?”

“Shot a guy down in Albuquerque. Once in the forehead. Then once in each eye.” He shrugged. “Kind of showy, but I guess it did the job.”

“Why?”

“Why show off, or why kill the guy?”

“Why kill the guy.”

“Small-time dealer. He stiffed Lucero somehow. That's what the guy's wife said, anyway. But who knows. Maybe Lucero didn't like the guy's suit.”

“What are Lucero and Martinez doing together? Martinez is a street guy, a loser. Sounds to me like Lucero's out of his league.”

“They were cellmates.” He shrugged. “Maybe they were sweethearts of the rodeo.”

I nodded. “How'd they manage the breakout?”

He glanced at his watch again. “Lucero had a pistol, a twenty-two automatic. Overpowered one guard. Got to the control center. Picked up some radios—police band—and some flack jackets, and then they went out over the roof.”

“There's razor wire up there. That's what the flak jackets were for?”

“Yeah. They flung 'em over the wire. Tied some overalls together and dropped down.”

“What about the exterior wire?”

“Cut. Bolt cutters. From the outside.” He smiled sourly. “What we call an accomplice.”

“Where did Lucero get the gun?”

“I got no idea.”

“Come on, Hernandez. I've been to the pen. Visitors are frisked beforehand. Meetings are allowed only under observation. Prisoners are body-searched afterward. Someone looked the other way. A guard. Maybe more than one.”

He shook his head. “That's a separate investigation. Not my jurisdiction.”

“Lucero have a lot of money to toss around?”

“I got no idea.”

I let it go. “How much lead time did they have? After the break.”

“Not much. Ten, fifteen minutes.” He looked down again at his watch, then back up at me. “Speaking of time. Sorry, Croft. I got a few other things to do around here.”

“Will you let me know how this is going? The investigation?”

“No,” he said. “I'll let you know when we find Martinez and Lucero.”

“You people didn't find Martinez before. Six years ago.”

“Yeah, you did. And nearly killed him, I heard.”

“Not exactly.”

“Banged him up some.”

“So he said.”

“He said it in court. You could've lost your license.”

“I'm still here. So's the license.”

“Yeah, well—” The telephone rang. Keeping his eye on me, Hernandez answered it. “Yeah. Yeah. Right. You handle it for now. Gimme a few more minutes here.”

He hung up the phone. “Forget about it, Croft. This is a state police investigation. No way I'm gonna jeopardize it for your sake.”

“It seems to me that you owe—”

He raised a hand. “Don't push it.”

“—that you owe something to Mrs. Mondragón. Will you be talking to Hector Ramirez at the Santa Fe PD?”

He looked at me silently for a moment. Then, finally, he nodded. “Yeah. I'll be in touch with Ramirez, probably.”

I drove back into town, stopping at the first pay phone I could find. I called the hospital. There had been no change in Mrs. Mondragón's condition. She was still in recovery. She was still stable.

I kept moving, using movement to stop myself from thinking and feeling, to keep my body racing ahead of my brain and my heart.

Rosa Sanchez had moved from the barrio on Santa Fe's west side, where she had lived four years ago. The man who now lived in her tiny apartment had no idea where she was, or who she was.

She wasn't listed in the phone book. I tried information. She had no unlisted number. I went to the office, dragged out the Martinez file, and I made some more phone calls. I learned, from a woman who had once been a friend of Rosa's, that Rosa had gotten married about two years ago. To an Anglo, the woman told me, but she didn't know his name. She hadn't seen Rosa for a while, and thought she might have left town. I called a clerk I knew at City Records and she pulled the marriage license. The groom had been a Mr. Robert Theissen. Not a typical Santa Fe name. I flipped through the phone book. A Robert Theissen was listed at 433 Acequia Court. I dialed the number but no one answered.

Rita kept a .38 Smith & Wesson in the office safe. An Air-weight, two-inch barrel, shrouded hammer. I unlocked the safe, took out the pistol, checked it, shoved it into my right pocket. Concealed carry is illegal in New Mexico, but I didn't much care.

Before I left the office, I called the hospital again. No change.

Acequia
means ditch in Spanish, and the
Acequia Madre
, the mother ditch that once carried water to the farms and households of the hidalgos who lived here, four hundred years ago, still runs through the old and wealthy part of town, in the shade of the cottonwoods and the pines.

There were no ditches on Acequia Court, and no cottonwoods. The street was part of a new development off Airport Road. Crowded onto both sides of it were boxy one- and two- story frame houses disguised to look like adobe. Each was perched on a small square treeless lot of green grass, and each sat no more than twenty feet from its neighbor. Most of the tiny lawns were carefully fenced along the sides with brown planking—marking off private domains amid all that closeness—and most of them were strewn with children's toys: tricycles, bicycles, wagons, tall plastic dinosaurs lying stiffly on their sides.

There were no toys on the lawn at 433 Acequia Court. Someone had taken good care of the grass, which was almost lush, and someone had planted a neat flower garden along the front edge of the house. Crocus and daffodil, tulip and hyacinth, their colors radiant against the shiny green of the ground cover.

I parked in the driveway behind a Ford Taurus and a Chevy pickup, got out of the Jeep, walked up the asphalt. I noticed that the front curtains were drawn shut.

Drawn curtains at midday. Two cars in the driveway, one for Robert, one for Rosa. And no one had answered the phone.

I slid my hand into my right pocket and I rang the doorbell. I waited. Nothing. I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked.

I slipped out the Smith, held it down by my thigh, and gently pushed open the door with my left hand. I stepped in.

Robert Theissen was in the living room. He was lying on the floor, fully clothed, face up. He had been shot once in the forehead, once in each eye.

I found Rosa in the bedroom. She lay naked and spread-eagled along the big bed. They had done the same things to her, but they had played with her first.

4

“S
O WHO WAS
she?” Hector asked me.

“Her maiden name was Rosa Sanchez. She was the woman who located Martinez for me. Six years ago.”

“When you brought him in,” he said.

“Yeah.”

We were out on the enclosed back porch, both of us sitting on inexpensive aluminum folding chairs webbed with plastic. I had gone through the house, found nothing, walked out to the car, slipped the Smith & Wesson back into the glove compartment. Returned to the house, carefully picked up the phone, and dialed 911. The police had arrived about an hour and a half ago, first a couple of SFPD cruisers, then an unmarked city Ford carrying two detectives, then a pair of unmarked state police Chevrolets carrying state plainclothes people. I had told my story three or four times, and now the state cops and the locals were trying to figure out who had jurisdiction.

I was telling Hector the same story. He had shown up about five minutes ago. The technical people had lifted prints from in here and they had let me roll open the jalousie windows. But the floor out here was an imitation Mexican tile that held the heat of the sun. The air was warm and motionless.

Hector had arrived wearing a jacket but he was back in shirtsleeves now. The jacket was draped along the back of another piece of aluminum furniture, a frail-looking chaise lounge.

“She was what?” Hector asked me. “Martinez's girlfriend?”

“Yeah. One of them.”

Like Dr. Berger, Hector looked more tired than he had the first time I'd seen him. There were small bruises now beneath his dark brown eyes. Maybe I just hadn't noticed them before. “Why'd she give him up to you?” he asked me.

“She was angry at him.”

“Yeah, but why you? Why not the police?”

“I happened to be around.”

“We never knew about her.”

“No.”

“If we'd known about her now—”

“She'd still be alive? Come on, Hector. If you'd known last night, maybe. If someone had told me about Martinez last night, yeah, maybe I could've told someone about Rosa. And yeah, maybe she'd still be alive now.”

Hector's face was expressionless. “Hey,” he said. “I was out of town. Remember?”

I took a breath. “Yeah. Sorry.” I was saying that a lot lately.

“You could've told me,” he said, “about the woman this morning.”

“I didn't remember her then. I was a bit preoccupied. I didn't think of her until a couple of hours ago. And once I did, I knew that I could find her as quickly as you people could.”

“You came out here hoping that Martinez was still around.”

I shook my head. “I wasn't sure that Martinez knew who'd given him up. But it seemed like a good idea to check on her.”

“You had to figure that if Martinez knew, he could've still been here.”

“He wasn't.”

“If he had been, you could've walked into a bullet.”

“Martinez is long gone, Hector. Rosa and her husband are room temperature. They've been dead since last night.”

“You didn't know that before you showed up. It was a dumb move.”

I shrugged. It wasn't the first dumb move I'd ever made, and it wouldn't be the last.

He frowned. “You're not carrying, are you, Josh?”

“That would be illegal, Hector.”

“Got something in the car? That Smith of yours?”

“That would be legal.”

“Yeah.” He sat back, frowning again. “Doesn't make much sense, though, does it?”

“What?”

“Hanging around town. Him and the other one. Lucero. Santa Fe was crawling with cops last night, within an hour of the breakout. Cruisers everywhere. Why didn't they leave when they could?”

“He had a score to settle with Rosa. And with Rita.”

“Dangerous for him. Stupid. Especially trying for Rita. And that's something else. You're the one who brought him in. Not Rita. Why shoot
her?
”

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe he wanted to go for both of us this morning. And maybe someone showed up. A hiker. A family. Or maybe he shot her this time because he didn't kill her when he shot her before. I don't know. Have you figured out where he fired the rifle?”

He nodded. “Up above Gonzales Road. We found the cartridge casing. Berger was right. It was two-twenty-three. Two pairs of footprints. Not prison shoes—they both found themselves some nice new boots somewhere. We've got casts of the prints. One of them fired the rifle, and then the two of them walked down to Gonzales. Had a car waiting. Nothing on the car yet.”

“That's something else to think about.”

“The car. Yeah.”

“They're getting around too damned easily, Hector. You've got at least three people here—Martinez, Lucero, and whoever cut the perimeter fence at the pen. Like you said, the town is crawling with cops. Why hasn't anyone spotted them?”

He nodded. “Maybe not a car. A van. A utility vehicle.”

“Maybe.” I stood up. “We done?”

He nodded. “Where you going?”

“Back to the hospital.”

“Hey, Rita,” I said.

She lay still. Her eyes were shut.

They had moved her to Intensive Care. In the square, sterile room she lay on the pale green sheets looking small and frail and lost. A white bandage covered the top of her head, wires and plastic tubes snaking from beneath it. Another tube ran from her nose. To my left a respirator rasped slowly, in time to the soft rise and fall of her chest. Above her head, a color monitor displayed her vital signs. Heartbeat, brainwaves, the interior pulse and rhythm of her life, the muscular contractions, the spikes of electrical energy, reduced to bright banal lines on a television screen.