Angel Fire (5 page)

Her desk, made of a rich, varnished mahogany, was nearly invisible beneath piles of notes, newspapers from around the country, videotapes, and her computer. Her chair was covered in the same Italian leather as the couch. The wall behind her desk was covered with awards she had won over the years, her Pulitzer the centerpiece among them.

The room, utterly silent, warm, and profoundly comfortable, was a womb. Here she found in turn solace, inspiration, seclusion. She had spent many hours sitting in her leather-bound chair, staring out the window, since she’d had the house built two years ago. She was untouchable here, completely relaxed. The only people who had ever been inside were Jeffrey and her grandparents when they came to visit. It was here she sat, surfing the Web, looking for more information on the items she had clipped from the paper.

The missing people Lydia had read about in the clippings clearly were not the concern of anyone important. Shawna Fox was a chronic runaway. It seemed like the investigation was half-assed, but the argument she had had with her foster parents led police to assume she had taken off just like she had from her three prior foster homes. The boyfriend, Greg Matthews, insisted vehemently that Shawna never would have left him, but no one seemed to give his opinion much weight. Christine and Harold Wallace were recovering addicts who had been in and out of rehab for most of their adult lives. Their disappearances probably wouldn’t even have been notable if every single thing they owned, including their wallets and car, hadn’t been left behind—and if they hadn’t owed two months rent to their landlord. He was the one who had reported them missing to the police. There were no detailed profiles of any of the victims in any of the papers. The bigger
Albuquerque Journal
did not even carry a mention of the events, except a small item about the surgical-supply warehouse break-in.

There was of course a slew of articles on the congresswoman’s son and his battle with leukemia, the missing dog, and the family’s graceful forbearance in the face of tragedy. The usual human-interest stuff. But Lydia could find nothing more on the Internet to expound on the
Santa Fe New Mexican
article that reported the dog’s body having been found mutilated at the Church of the Holy Name.
So what do we have here, Sherlock?
she asked herself in the sometimes mocking, sometime scolding tone that was her inner voice. It was partially her, partially her mother … Whoever it was, she could be a real bitch.

Not much, except the buzz
. What she had was three of what the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit termed “high-risk victims,” people like prostitutes, drug addicts, or runaways whose lives or actions make them an easy mark for predators. She had arson and animal mutilation, two elements of the textbook “triad” of warning signs for a serial offender. Missing hospital supplies and a dog that had had his organs removed with “surgical precision” according to the local paper. And then there was the Church of the Holy Name and the blind man, whom she’d seen and dreamt about. The only thing connecting the church to the rest was that the dog had been found there. But still …

She typed the church name into the search engine, expecting a few listings for bingo games and charity events in the
New Mexican
. Instead she found 243 matches from newspapers and national magazines across the country.

Juno Alonzo, the blind man she’d seen playing his guitar the night before, was a bit of a celebrity. In fact, there were those who believed he was a healer and a psychic. Juno had lived at the church since he was a child. His uncle, Father Luis Claro, had raised Juno since his mother had died.

Most of his life had passed without incident until just two
years earlier, when a woman who had been blinded in a car accident claimed he had returned her sight. An autistic boy was allegedly cured by Juno’s touch. A man claimed that Juno had contacted his dead wife and solved the mystery of her death. Of course, upon these stories hitting the mainstream media, the sick, dying, and curious of the world had descended upon Angel Fire like locusts, accompanied by the obligatory media circus. Juno Alonzo had refused interviews, claiming he had nothing to do with any of the healings. He made only one statement to the media: “If the people who have come to see me have been cured of what ails them, then it is God’s will and has nothing to do with me.” And when a young boy Juno visited in the hospital died after a failed organ transplant, the melee died down. People went away and Juno was forgotten again.

As Lydia read on, she vaguely remembered hearing about the story. It was before she had bought her home in Santa Fe. She chalked it up as a sensational type of story common to the supermarket tabloids. People were always looking for miracles in the dark unknown of the world, forever looking for the face of the Virgin Mary on the side of buildings, looking for Elvis in Las Vegas, looking for order in the chaos of life. This type of searching tended not to interest Lydia. There was enough in the real world that needed figuring out.
I guess it never occurred to anyone that if Juno was a healer, he probably could have cured his own blindness
, she thought sarcastically.
But maybe that was God’s will too
.

At the end of the list of articles about Juno were two items from 1965. She couldn’t believe the local paper was so on the ball as to have digitized their archives back that far, but maybe they had a lot of time on their hands. The first item was about a Serena Alonzo, who had murdered her husband by setting their house on fire while he was passed out drunk. She claimed to have killed
her husband because he beat her and she feared for the life of her unborn child. The item had come up in the search because her brother, Father Luis Claro, was a young priest at the Church of the Holy Name. Serena was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Which turned out to be a pretty short sentence, according to the next item, because Serena had died while giving birth to her son in a prison hospital. The boy, Juno Alonzo, was born blind. Father Luis took custody of him and planned to raise him at the Church of the Holy Name where he resided.

I
t was an interesting backstory, but Lydia wondered if anyone at the police department had information on current events they wanted to discuss. Though she doubted anyone would be rushing to the phone to take her call, Lydia knew most people she called were rarely happy to hear from her, especially the police. Chief Simon Morrow of the Santa Fe Police Department was certainly no exception. When she made a call, she had questions; for whatever reason, they usually seemed to be questions people weren’t eager to answer. She had been hung up on, sworn at, had her life threatened. She didn’t take it personally. And she was very persistent. Lydia had asked some hard questions of Chief Morrow in the past, questions that would lead to her Pulitzer. He had given answers that ultimately had led to his resignation from the St. Louis Police Department. She had thought his career was over then, deservedly so. But he had turned up in Santa Fe like a bad penny, as Lydia’s mother used to say.

Lydia was on hold, and she could almost see Simon Morrow rubbing his sweating middle-aged balding head unconsciously as he sat in front of his phone, trying to decide whether or not to take her call.

“Ms. Strong, how can I help you?”

“Chief Morrow, it’s good to hear your voice,” she said with mock cordiality. “Really.”

“How long have you been in town?”

“Long enough to pick up on a few things.”

“Such as?”

“I was wondering about Lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“Yeah, the dog that was found mutilated at the Church of the Holy Name. You might remember, Lucky was missing a few vital organs when he turned up.”

“Sad story. What about it?”

“Is there an ongoing investigation?”

Morrow paused for what she assumed was his attempt at dramatic effect. “Ms. Strong, you are aware that the mutilation and death of a dog, while tragic, does not warrant a murder investigation.”

On the other end of the line, Lydia was practically salivating. She was tapping her pen rapidly against the pad on her desk. She could smell it. She could taste the blood in her mouth. “I am quite aware of that. I just thought, in connection with some of the other peculiar criminal activity in the area—for example, the surgical-supply warehouse or the missing-persons cases you have open—there might be some connections to be explored.”

“I see. Thank you for your input, Ms. Strong, but I fail to see how this concerns you.” He was, she knew, attempting to sound cold, intimidating, but there was an almost imperceptible quaver to his voice that told her he was hiding something.

“Just consider me an involved citizen.”

“With an overactive imagination.”

“That’s what you said the last time we spoke, Chief. Do I have to remind you how wrong you were?”

“There’s nothing here, Ms. Strong. Nothing at all.”

“Are there photos of the location where the dog was found?” she pressed.

“No.”

“Okay, we can play it this way if you want to,” she said, her voice level and soft, “but we’ll be talking again soon. Sooner than you’d like, I bet.”

“I’ll look forward to it. Really.”

A
s Simon Morrow slammed down the phone he issued a string of expletives. Continuing to curse, he rose quickly, knocking over a cold, black cup of coffee.

He barely saved the photos of Lucky’s mutilated body that lay spread across his desk.

H
er run the night before had soothed Lydia’s restlessness, but only temporarily. But morning had turned to afternoon and the afternoon to early evening as Lydia had sat at her computer, and her focus was beginning to drift.

She began to think she would call Jeffrey and ask what he thought about the articles and their possible implications. But then she began to think of other things. Memories of her mother began to sear her, and her restlessness began to feel physically uncomfortable. She shut down the computer and got up to stretch. The house was silent and lonely. She had to get out.

She walked to her bedroom and entered the walk-in closet, started flipping through the rows of designer clothes that she collected with zeal.

When she let the impulse take her, it took her to extremes. Sometimes it would come on her hours or days before she acted upon it. Her conscious mind would push it away until it could no longer be ignored. Even now, as she pulled the sleeveless black Armani dress over her lean, tightly muscled body and slipped her slender feet into high-heeled Gucci black leather pumps, she barely acknowledged what she was about to do. She wrapped her lustrous blue-black hair into a loose French twist and held it in
place with two red lacquer chopsticks. She applied no makeup to her pale skin except a deep-red shade of MAC lipstick, to accentuate her stormy gray eyes. It wasn’t that she didn’t take responsibility for herself and her actions. It was only that she had about as much control as a junkie looking for a fix. All she was aware of as she headed out the door was a sense of relief that she wouldn’t be spending the night alone.

In big cities like New York, the game was more dangerous, the quarry more unpredictable, more plentiful. In Santa Fe, she would usually find herself in the hotel bar of the Eldorado, maybe in a restaurant off the square, possibly a dive bar by the side of the highway. It didn’t matter.

“May I help you, miss?” She was greeted by the smiling maître d’, a young man who looked too young to be wearing a tuxedo.

“Just a drink. I’ll sit at the bar.”

The bar was more crowded than usual. Though the permanent residents of Santa Fe had opposed the construction of the Eldorado, the luxury hotel was packed with tourists year-round. Opera season, ski season, Indian Market, the art galleries on Canyon Road drew the country’s idle rich. It had proved to be good hunting grounds the last time she had visited.

She spotted him at the end of the slick black bar. He was young, mid-twenties; his thick, dark hair was pulled into a ponytail at the base of his skull. He exuded wealth, his black cashmere sweater draping elegantly off taut pecs and strong shoulders. His Rolex glittered in the dim track-lighting above him. A martini, half-finished, sat before him. He traced the edge of the glass with a gentle fingertip. Melancholy, contemplative, definitely alone. She sat down across from him, a good distance, but directly in his line of vision.

“Ketel One, straight,” she told the bartender, an elegantly dressed black man with a shaved head and a diamond stud in his right ear.

Her eyes swept the room. A couple nuzzled in a cozy booth with the intimacy of people who could see only each other. A group of well-dressed, bejeweled older women, obviously on vacation from their husbands, had had too much to drink and were laughing loudly. A young woman, trying to look more sophisticated than she was in a sequined dress and cheap satin shoes, sipped a white zinfandel and watched the door expectantly. A tall, muscular man walked in the door and stood awkwardly as the maître d’ outfitted him with a jacket that was too small. Before he put it on, she noticed a tattoo on his arm. In the darkness of the room she could barely make it out, but it looked like a crucifix. The maître d’ then escorted him to a small table in the back of the bar; Lydia imagined it was to keep him out of sight of the better-dressed clients.

When the man across the bar raised his eyes, he caught hers. She did not look away. Like always, she compared him to Jeffrey. Like always, there was no comparison. But he would do. He was quite handsome. She liked them dark and brooding. He smiled a practiced smile. She smiled back with equal skill and lowered her eyes, shyly. How she loved the game. She raised the glass to her lips, feeling the cool vodka burn her tongue and slide down her throat. She did not look at him again. If they did not come to her, she would walk away. But they usually came. And when she raised her eyes to glance at him again, he was on his way over to her. Chopin played mournfully in the background, as ice cubes in crystal glasses and the murmur of conversations were a music of their own.