The Replacement Child (21 page)

He realized that he hadn’t bothered to think of a way to explain to his wife why he was just getting in at two
A.M.
It felt strangely annoying that there was no one waiting at home to ask him where he had been all night.

O
fficer Manny Cordova was busily erasing something when Gil stopped at his desk the next morning.

“Manny, let’s go have a talk.”

Manny looked up, surprised. “Sure,” he said, and he followed Gil into an interrogation room.

Manny eyed the manila file folder that Gil slapped on the table as he sat down.

“What’s up, Gil?” he said as he took his seat across from Gil.

“That’s what I’m wondering, Manny.”

Gil opened the manila folder and started. “Yesterday you told me that you saw Hector Morales’s car in Oñate Park around four thirty
P.M.
on Monday. You said you saw a person in Morales’s car hand something out the window to someone in a Chevy that resembled Melissa Baca’s—is that correct, Manny?”

“What’s this about, sir?”

“That’s what we’re getting it. Is that what you said?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

“You know what I can’t get, Manny. I can’t get why you’re lying to me.”

Manny looked at the door as if he expected someone to walk in. In that instant, Gil knew for certain that Manny was
lying. Gil hoped that Manny had just made an honest mistake. Gil watched him open his mouth to speak, then shut it again and look down.

Gil tossed a pile of papers onto the table. “Those are court records from Judge Padilla. Hector Morales was in Española at his DWI hearing from two
P.M.
to almost six on Monday. A guard in the parking lot remembers watching Morales sit in his car and smoke at least four cigarettes from about three forty-five
P.M.
until after four thirty. Morales and his car were both in Española, Manny. So, my question is, where were you at four thirty
P.M.?”

“I was driving to an MVA when I passed by Oñate Park—”

“No, you weren’t. According to an incident report, you were out at a gas station near the interstate checking on a drunk male. That’s all the way across town.” Gil sighed. “Hector Morales says he never sold drugs to Melissa Baca.”

Manny finally looked up. “You’re going to believe a mojado drug dealer over me?”

Gil looked at Manny until he looked down again. Then Gil waited. The tricks he used to get confessions out of suspects worked on cops, too. All he had to do was wait.

And Manny obliged. “Gil, man, what are you saying? Okay, so I wasn’t there. I heard it from one of my informants, and I thought it would sound better coming from me.”

“Who’s the informant?”

“Hell, I don’t know, just some guy. I didn’t know him.”

“Some guy you don’t know comes up to you out of nowhere and says he saw Melissa Baca on the day she died buy drugs, and you believe him? Does this guy know Melissa by sight? Does he know Morales by sight? Come on, Manny, let’s do better than that.”

Manny still didn’t look up.

“Manny, what are you doing? Are you trying to sink your career? Just tell me the truth.” Cordova didn’t move. “For God’s sake, what is this?” Gil asked.

Manny stared at his hands. “Sir, can I go back to work now? I have to finish my run sheets.”

Gil leaned back and sighed. “Why did you go 10-7 for twenty minutes at eight nineteen
P.M.
on the night Melissa died?”

Manny was still looking down. Gil had thought for sure the question would shock him enough that he would look up. He didn’t answer for a few seconds.

“I went to get something to eat,” Manny said.

“According to the call logs, you already ate. Two hours earlier.”

“I was hungry again.”

“Where did you eat?”

“I grabbed something at Burger King.”

“Burger King takes five minutes. You were unavailable for twenty.”

Twenty minutes was enough time for Manny to have killed Melissa but not to have transported her body to Taos. At nine
P.M.
Manny had been seen at an alarm-check call by another officer. “Manny, if you know anything about Melissa’s murder …”

“I don’t. I was eating,” he answered dully.

Gil sighed. Pollack was outside in the hall, listening to them talk. Gil’s job was to shake Manny loose. He was more likely to confess to someone he knew. Since Gil couldn’t get anything out of Manny, it was Pollack’s turn.

“Good luck, Manny,” Gil said as Pollack came in.

Gil left and found Chief Kline in the next room, watching through the two-way mirror and listening to Pollack question Manny. Kline looked both controlled and tense, like a man on a tightrope. His gray hair was cut whisker-short, his black uniform crisp.

“What are you going to do? We don’t have enough to hold him,” Gil said.

“He’ll be suspended until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” Kline said.

“He was seen at an alarm-check call at around nine
P.M.
the night Melissa was killed.”

“I know. Enough time to kill her but not bring her anywhere,” Kline said. His light Texas accent skipped over the word
anywhere.

Gil watched Pollack and Manny through the glass for a minute before he said, “Sir, I think maybe it’s time I get off the case. Now that one of our own may be involved—”

“I think it’s premature,” Kline interrupted.

“Sir, I feel strongly that this is a state police investigation—”

Kline cut in again. “Lieutenant Pollack and I agree that this is not the time for you to be excused from the case.”

L
ucy rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 9:07
A.M.
Hell. She really needed to sleep more; her night out drinking with drug dealers had given her a hangover. She tossed for two more hours, trying to get back to sleep, but finally gave up at 11
A.M.
Two vitamins served as her breakfast. She called a cab and went to get her car, which was still in the parking lot at the Silver Cowboy.

A few minutes later, she was parked in front of Patsy Burke’s house, the crime-scene tape hanging limply. She heard a crow making a racket somewhere nearby. She craned her neck to look up. The bird was swaying on a power line that drooped over Scanner Lady’s house. Wasn’t a crow an omen, a warning of impending death?
Sorry, you’re too late, buddy,
she thought.

She yelped as her cell phone rang. It was Major Garcia.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called you back, but things here have been dicey,” he said kindly, surprising her. She wanted to be mad at him.

“Um, no problem,” she said.

“I’ve been looking into whether or not Patsy Burke was
Scanner Lady. Her neighbor, Mrs. Schoen, confirmed Mrs. Burke was in the habit of listening to the police scanner and calling the newspaper.” Garcia hesitated. “In fact, Mrs. Schoen told me that you asked her the same thing.”

“Oops. Sorry. I didn’t mean …”

“Don’t worry about it. I know you were just trying to come to terms with it,” he said gently. Wow. Maybe he was a nice guy. Lucy silently took back all the times she’d wished he were dead. Garcia continued. “We do have a problem, though. The answering machine won’t be much help in confirming if she’s your Scanner Lady. The voice on the message isn’t Mrs. Burke. It’s a man’s voice. We called her son, and he confirmed that he made the message for her so people would think a man lived in the house. You know how it is. We’ve tried to find another recording of her voice, but no luck so far. We’ll keep trying.”

Before hanging up, Garcia promised to call her back when he found out more. She thought,
Like I believe that,
before she could help it. She rolled her eyes, reminding herself that she was supposed to like him now.

Lucy noticed that the voice-mail light on her cell phone was blinking. She called in for her messages and cringed as she heard Gerald Trujillo’s voice reminding her that they were meeting at the fire station later in the day for more medic training. She quickly deleted the message.

Down the street, the crow over Patsy Burke’s house had gone, but Lucy could see the top of the cell tower in the distance. If Patsy Burke had been home, she could have heard Lucy’s entire cell-phone conversation with Garcia over her police scanner.

G
il was sitting at his desk, having just hung up with his mother, when he heard someone call his name. He looked up to see Maxine Baca standing with an old jewelry box in her
hands. Joy had one like it that she kept her “secrets” in—old birthday cards, valentines from boys, and a small ring that Gil had given her when she was five.

Mrs. Baca hadn’t slept, he was sure. Her hair was un-brushed and pushed up on one side, making her look off-kilter. She shoved the jewelry box into his hands.

“I found that under her dresser last night. I didn’t know what to do with it so I … You can have it and people can say what they want.” Gil opened the box and looked inside. He expected to find heroin and needles. Instead, he found himself staring at a stack of Polaroids.

T
he ice-skating rink at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center doubled as a cool-down room for Lucy. Her arms ached, and she knew that she had overdone her workout, trying to weight-lift out her stress. She hunched over on a cold metal bench and peered at the kids’ feet as they skated, trying to figure out how they balanced on the blades. Lucy had grown up mostly in L.A. and Florida, where ice skating was not a popular pastime.

Before moving to New Mexico, she’d had a Clint Eastwood fantasy of the state—filled with cactus and dust and cattle. But Northern New Mexico was nothing like that. In the summertime it was green, its fields filled with wildflowers. In the fall the aspens turned bright yellow, cutting a stripe of gold across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In the winter the snow came.

New Mexico was now in a drought; it hadn’t snowed in a month. Everyone wanted snow—they prayed for it. But Lucy had a secret: she hated snow. She liked the
idea
of snow. It was pretty, and she loved how it looked like white icing when it coated the tops of the mountains. But she had no idea how to walk in it, drive in it, or deal with it. When she met her first snowfall in Santa Fe, she wanted to call in sick to
work so that she wouldn’t have to figure out how to maneuver her car in it.

She’d tried to learn to like it—had even taken skiing lessons with Del last year. But her instructor had pulled her aside, saying, “You really don’t have the knack for this.” After that, she’d given up trying to live with the snow and decided to hate it. It was more honest than pretending. If it never snowed again, she’d be happy.

The metal bench was getting cold, so she took her towel and headed out the door. The sweat had dried, and her face felt like it was coated in dust. She glanced at the newspaper racks next to the door. A headline in the
Santa Fe Times
caught her eye:
WOMAN STRANGLED, POLICE SAY
. At first Lucy thought the story was about Melissa Baca, that the
Santa Fe Times
had managed to get hold of her autopsy as well. But the article was about Patsy Burke. Lucy felt a burn of guilt. If only she’d somehow been able to tell Tommy Martinez that Patsy Burke had been strangled. Damn ethics rules. Now, the
Santa Fe Times
had scooped them on the cause of death.

Lucy fished out fifty cents and pulled out a paper. The first paragraph of the article on Patsy Burke was wordy. It needed about ten words taken out. That gave Lucy some comfort. The rest of the story didn’t reveal anything new.

She got into her car and threw the paper on the passenger seat before the thought struck her. What did it matter which newspaper got the story first? Strangled or not, Patsy was still dead. And Lucy was responsible.

Lucy looked at her watch. She was supposed to meet Gerald Trujillo at the fire station in a half hour. She still had time to run home and take a shower. She would only be a few minutes late.

She waited at an intersection, trying to make a left turn out of the community center. Just as the traffic broke enough for her to merge into the lane, she took a right instead of a left toward
her house. The road she was on intersected with the highway and she turned onto it, the traffic becoming lighter, then turning into a trickle. She headed east, not toward the mountains but toward the plains, unrelenting in the distance.

She didn’t know where she was going.

I
’m curious why you didn’t mention that you and Melissa were having problems,” Gil said as way of greeting Jonathan Hammond. Gil stood in the doorway to Hammond’s apartment. He hadn’t been invited in. He had called the school after Mrs. Baca’s visit, only to be told that Hammond had the afternoon off.

“It wasn’t problems,” Hammond said. “It was just a rough patch.”

“What do you mean ‘rough patch’?”

“We had a disagreement.”

“About what?”

“It was something minor.”

“What was it about?”

“It really isn’t something that needs to be discussed.”

Gil realized that he wanted Hammond to be Melissa’s killer. But twelve students and several teachers had seen Hammond directing the dress rehearsal. The state police had talked to all of them. Not a second of Hammond’s time was unaccounted for the night Melissa died.

Tired of standing in the cold doorway, he walked into Hammond’s apartment without being invited. It was decorated in brown and the furniture was mostly large antique pieces. The place was fairly neat, except for an overflow of books in piles
on the floor and a half-finished bottle of Jose Cuervo on the coffee table.

Gil took a packet of photos from his pocket and tossed them onto the oak dining-room table, watching for Hammond’s reaction. There wasn’t one.

“You don’t seem too surprised to see these photos. You must have seen them before?” Still no reaction. “Maybe you took them?” That barely got a rise out of him.

“No.”

“Who did take them?”

“I have no idea.” Hammond stared at the photos without touching them.