When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (16 page)

“Hispanic,” she said. “But it wasn’t a man. It was a woman.”

*   *   *

Down the hall behind him, Gil heard the elevator doors open. Something changed in Natalie Martin’s face, making Gil turn to look at who was coming toward them. It was Joe and Kristen Valdez, followed by a doctor wearing a knee-length white lab coat over green scrubs.

“I’ll let you talk to the doctor,” Gil said.

He joined Joe and Kristen a little way down the hall.

Joe said quietly, “The husband is stable, but they aren’t sure how bad it is yet, or if there is brain damage. They’re talking about transferring him down to Albuquerque to get trauma surgery.”

Gil nodded, then said, “I was just going over what happened with Mrs. Martin. Turns out, one of the suspects is a woman.”

“That explains the female-type things on the shopping list,” Joe said.

“Gil,” Kristen started to say. “I am so sorry. I should have interviewed her more—”

“It’s okay, Kristen,” he said. “It happens.” He saw the doctor put his hand on Mrs. Martin’s shoulder then walk back toward the elevators.

“Let me go to talk to her again,” Gil said. “I think it’s better if I do it alone.”

Natalie Martin had gone to sit back down, smoothing the hair on one of the twins.

“Mrs. Martin?” Gil asked. “Can we talk some more?” She nodded, and he sat down across from her, their knees almost touching.

“You said you heard them yell,” he said. “Did they have any kind of accent?”

“The Hispanic man had a Northern New Mexico accent. The woman’s maybe was more Mexican.”

“What makes you think that?”

“When she was on the phone, she spoke Spanish. Really fast Spanish.”

“She made a phone call?” Gil asked, getting his notebook out for the first time. That was new, too.

“On her cell phone, when she was telling me to be quiet,” she said. “She only talked for a second before the Anglo man yelled at her to hang up.”

“Do you know what the woman said when she was on the phone?”

“No,” she said, wiping away more tears. “I don’t speak Spanish. But she was talking to another woman. I could hear her voice.”

“What else did you hear?”

“She said something about her
mija
…”

“She said
mija
? Are you sure? She didn’t say
mi hita
or just
hita
?”

“It was definitely
mija,
” she said. “My friend named her dog that.”

“Did you hear the woman on the phone say anything else?”

“No—but there was a baby crying in the background,” she said. “It couldn’t have been more than a week old. Its cry still had that really high pitch. My boys sounded the same when they were born.” She glanced back over to them, curled up in their chairs.

“You told Officer Valdez they had a gun,” Gil said. “Can you describe it to me?”

“Uh … it had a long barrel that was thinner than most guns you see on TV shows, and it had wood on the handle.”

“Okay, good. Is there anything else you can tell me?” He said. “Maybe something you forgot to mention to Officer Valdez.”

“There was something weird,” she said. “They knew about my husband’s 1965 Pontiac Tempest. They were looking for the keys.”

“Why was that odd?”

“How did they know he had a Tempest?” she asked. “He hasn’t had it out of the shed since the summer.”

“Maybe they were just looking for a getaway car,” he said.

“But we have two other cars in the driveway, out in the open,” she said. “And they specifically wanted the Tempest. They said so.”

Gil wasn’t sure what to make of this. He could tell Mrs. Martin’s anxiety was rising, likely due to his questioning, and decided it was time to wrap it up for now.

“I just have one more question,” he said. “Do you or your husband have any connection to the movie business or the film that’s being shot out at the penitentiary?” Gil asked.

“I don’t,” she said. “My husband is a scientist, so I doubt it, but you’d have to ask him when he wakes up.”

Gil thanked her and went back over to Joe and Kristen.

“I’ll stay with her for a little while,” Kristen said. “And I’ll call a crisis counselor to come talk to her.”

“Thank you,” Gil said. He watched her go sit with Natalie Martin.

Joe watched them as well, shaking his head. “The Martins don’t exactly fit the victim profile,” he said quietly. “Neither of them looks like a rich Anglo male to me.”

“I guess we need to rethink the profile,” Gil said. “But then we need to rethink a lot of this case.” Down the hall, they could hear the twins starting to wake.

“The husband’s lucky to have gotten this far,” Joe said. “Hoffman must have shot him from a little too far away. Kristen said the gun Mrs. Martin described sounded like a Browning pistol. If it hadn’t been a .22…”

“He’d be dead already,” Gil said.

*   *   *

By 7:00
A.M
., Gil and Joe were back at the station. Gil called one of his cousins and asked him to go shovel his mom’s driveway, then he called home, just to make sure Susan and the girls were all right being snowbound. They were busy making cookies and watching movies. He spent the next few minutes trying to explain to Joe about how a baby’s cry changes as it gets older.

“How could anyone tell the age of a baby by its cry?” Joe asked. “I’m not buying this.”

“Susan can. She says it’s a part of being a mom.”

“If we do find the baby, do you think Mrs. Martin would be able to ID its cry?” Joe asked. “What if we do a crying baby lineup…”

“I don’t think it works that way,” Gil said.

“Then let’s call Susan and ask how it does work.”

“I’m not going to bother my wife while we’re in the middle of a case.”

Joe reached over and picked up Gil’s phone and hit redial. “Hi, Susan, it’s Joe … no, Gil’s here with me … I was calling you”—he paused, waiting for her to finish saying something—“Oh, thanks for the invitation, but I don’t know where I’ll be spending Christmas at this point … I just … Okay … well, I just have a quick question for you. Can you tell how old a baby is by its cry alone?… Uh-huh … sure … okay … all right. Thanks. Talk to you later.”

“What did she say?”

“She said it’s a mom thing.”

Gil tried not to smile, and said, “If Natalie Martin is right about the baby’s age, that might help us. If we can track down all the babies born in the last two weeks, it could lead us to the mother.”

“And then what?” Joe asked.

“The person with the baby was either the baby’s mom or a babysitter,” Gil said. “I actually think our female suspect is the mom.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “I can see that. Only a mother would call home to check on her baby while committing a home invasion.”

“Plus, Mr. Burns had pads and tampons on the list,” Gil said. “After a woman has a baby, she needs those things for a couple weeks. He could have been buying those for his accomplice.”

“Then we just need a list of babies born in the last couple of weeks,” Joe said.

But an hour later, they were nowhere. The spokesperson for the hospital said she would need a signed release-of-information form from all the patients before she could give out any names. Gil and Joe were about to call the district attorney to see about any legal way to get the names when Gil had an idea. “Maybe there’s another way to do this,” Gil said. “My mom still reads the newspaper every day. When we go over there on Sundays for dinner, she keeps the obituaries so she can tell Susan and me about who died. But she also reads the weekly baby announcements with Joy and Therese. The girls think some of the names the parents choose are funny.”

“If only we knew someone at the newspaper,” Joe said, picking up his cell phone. He put it on speaker as Lucy answered her cell phone saying, “Hi Joe.”

“Hey, what do you know about baby announcements?”

“When a woman and a man love each other very much they can express that love by having a baby, and sometimes they like to share the news with the entire readership of the newspaper…”

“Lucy,” Gil said. “Who handles the announcements at the paper?”

“At the moment, I guess I do. What do you need?”

“A list of babies born in the last two weeks,” Joe said. They heard her yawn. “Are you still in bed?”

“I know I’m a slacker, but some people don’t get up at seven o’clock, especially when they have the day off.”

“It’s only seven o’clock?” Joe said. “How long have we been up?”

“Sorry,” Gil said to Lucy. “We didn’t look at the time.”

“No problem,” she said, with another yawn. “Let me get some clothes on, and I’ll call you as soon as I get into work.”

“Wait. You’re naked right now?” Joe said.

“Thank you,” Gil said to Lucy, interrupting Joe and hanging up the phone.

*   *   *

Gil’s call hadn’t actually woken Lucy up. She had been awake since 6:30
A.M
. and just lying in bed, having gone to sleep at 10:00
P.M
. the night before. Her early bedtime wasn’t because of some new dedication to getting enough sleep. Rather, it was the result of two tablets of Benadryl, which she took at 9:00
P.M
., after she became scared she might leave the house to go get beer.

She got dressed and took a step out of her front door and into a pile of snow. She’d forgotten about the storm. She waded her way over to her car and got in. She drove slowly to work, but not as slowly as some of the other drivers who were white-knuckling it down the streets. Every time there was a winter storm, it was like a surprise party had been thrown for the entire city, with lots of white confetti covering everything. No one seemed to ever expect it, even when the meteorologist predicted it. Even when it was all anyone would talk about. It didn’t matter. Snow always sent Santa Fe into shock. Not that she was one to talk. There were many things about the snow she couldn’t get used to. One was snow fog. The other was snow thunder. Lucy had only seen fog a couple of times in New Mexico, always just after it had snowed. The sky would be clear and cold, yet fog would come from the ground, giving the snow a ghostlike quality. Snow thunder was something Lucy thought she’d made up one night while sleeping. There’d been a snowstorm as she slept, and she thought she’d heard a rumble of thunder. She dismissed it as impossible, until the next day, when Gerald asked her, “Did you hear that thunder?”

Lucy got to work and, with a swipe of her key card, went into the newsroom. She fumbled for the switch on the wall, and the overhead lights strobed on. Some kept winking, deciding if they wanted to work today. She made her way back to her new office and turned her computer on. Her desk was still barren. She hadn’t had time to add any little touches, not that she had many touches to add. She’d never been a picture-of-pet-on-desk person. The computer finished its start-up, and she sat down. Time to work.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

December 23

Lucy called Joe’s cell phone about an hour later, saying, “We only publish the baby names once a week, in the Sunday paper. I have the babies from last week, but the hospital hasn’t sent me anything from this week yet.”

“How many names are on the list?” Joe asked over the speaker.

“About twenty,” she said. “By the way, just to be clear, this is public record. These people all signed waivers that allow us to publish their information. I am not breaking any journalistic ethics by doing this.”

“Journalists have ethics?” Joe said.

“If you want, I could make you go find last week’s paper yourself,” she said.

“Thank you, Lucy,” Gil said. “Let us know when you get the information from this week.”

The list Lucy sent to them actually contained the names and parental information for nineteen babies. Gil and Joe looked it over for a few minutes. They narrowed it down to female infants only, based on the suspect saying
mija
and not
mijo.
That left nine babies. Gil knew they’d eventually run the names of all the parents through the police database, checking for warrants and former arrests, but for now they’d start with people whose last names were probably Mexican. The assumption that the female accomplice was not from the area was based on two things Natalie Martin had said—that the woman spoke fast Spanish and that she used the phrase
mija.
If the woman had been from Northern New Mexico, she would have said
hita.
Of the nine baby girls born in the last week, only two had last names that were almost definitely Mexican.

“Explain to me how you know Godinez and Escobar are Mexican last names and not New Mexico ones?” Joe asked.

“I only said they were more likely to be Mexican,” Gil said. “That’s because those aren’t really traditional local names.”

“You mean, none of the conquistadors who founded Santa Fe were called Escobar or Godinez,” Joe said.

“Pretty much.”

“What about a last name like Garcia or Lopez?” Joe asked.

“Those could be either Mexican or New Mexican,” Gil said. “If Godinez and Escobar don’t pan out, we’ll look at Garcia and Lopez.”

Gil looked over the information. Both Godinez and Escobar didn’t have fathers listed, only mothers. He typed the mothers’ names into the police database, but only one came back with a record. Guadalupe Escobar, mother to Georgina Rose Escobar, born nine days ago. Escobar, who was eighteen, was awaiting trial for drug possession and resisting arrest. The drug enforcement task force had raided a known drug dealer’s house three weeks ago and found Escobar smoking pot in a bathroom. The arresting officer had written in the report, “Suspect is nine months pregnant; ask DA about possible child endangerment charges.” Gil doubted the district attorney would file abuse charges in regard to a fetus, but it had been good thinking on the officer’s part. Gil next checked if Escobar had a car registered in her name. The search came back saying N
O
I
NFORMATION
F
OUND
, but there was a recent address.

“And look at this, under aliases,” Joe said. “She uses the nickname Lupe. Remember that
L
on Ivanov’s chest? Maybe she’s the one who carved it.”