Death Song (17 page)

Kerney and Hewitt ended the meeting with four priority goals established: find Brian Riley as quickly as possible and determine if he was to be treated as a suspect; identify the unknown person Denise Riley had been secretly seeing; delve deeply into Denise’s past, particularly those years when she was living away from Santa Fe; and complete the gathering of saliva samples for DNA comparison testing.

Outside the conference room, Clayton gave Paul Mielke the scoop on Matt Chacon’s conversation with Denise’s employer and the tale of the office desktop computer that had crashed the day after her murder.

“Detective Chacon secured the computer,” Clayton noted, “and will let us know if he finds anything.”

“Do we know if Riley’s son is a computer whiz?”

“That’s a good question,” Clayton replied. “We should ask the North Carolina authorities to check it out.”

“I’ll give them a call,” Mielke said as he walked away.

A few minutes later Paul Hewitt caught up with Clayton in his borrowed office. “We’ve got to find Brian Riley,” he said from the doorway.

“I heard you and Chief Kerney loud and clear on that, Sheriff. I’m on it.”

“How are you on it, Sergeant?”

“Ramona Pino is en route to the restaurant where the boy worked to see if she can scout up some information. Two SFPD detectives are making the rounds of juvie hangouts in the city to locate anyone who knows him or where he is. I’ve got a deputy calling the North Carolina high school authorities and Tim Riley’s ex-wife to get a list of classmates he might have stayed in touch with. We’re also putting the word out to snitches on the street.”

“Very good,” Hewitt said. “I’m heading home to Lincoln County. I want daily updates from you, Sergeant.”

“I’ll route them through Chief Kerney and Sheriff Salgado,” Clayton replied.

Hewitt nodded. “You’re going to make a first-rate police chief someday.”

“Thanks for the compliment, Sheriff, but that’s a long way off, if ever.”

“You never know,” Hewitt said as he waved good-bye.

The downtown restaurant where Brian Riley had briefly worked as a busboy catered to patrons who could easily afford a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine to complement their perfectly plated, expensive gourmet meals. Except for Chief Kerney, who’d inherited some megabucks from an old family friend, Ramona Pino thought it highly unlikely that any member of the Santa Fe Police Department had ever eaten at the establishment.

The swanky restaurant, according to several old-timers on the force, stood on the site of the long-gone downtown bus depot, which had housed a small diner renowned for serving the best green-chili cheeseburgers in town. Back in those days, uniformed officers assigned to Plaza foot patrol almost always chowed down at the diner, which had a varied menu, good food, and reasonable prices.

But that was then, and the new Santa Fe was now a vastly different place. Since the transformation of the bus depot into a world-class restaurant, just about everything else in the downtown part of the city had also changed. Plaza businesses that catered to locals had vanished, replaced by stores and eateries that served the tourist trade. The price of a nice dinner in a fancy Santa Fe restaurant to celebrate a special occasion was now way beyond the means of the average citizen, which definitely included the men and women sworn to protect and serve.

Many officers, including those who had working spouses, were holding down part-time second jobs. A growing number couldn’t afford to live in Santa Fe and were now commuting from the boomtown city of Rio Rancho that sprawled along the Rio Grande west of Albuquerque. The joke going around the department was that when a major disaster hit the city, FEMA would probably lumber into Santa Fe faster than the officers who lived out of town could arrive.

Inside the restaurant, the hostess area at the top of the stairs was unoccupied. Servers were setting up a long row of tables for what appeared to be a large dinner party. At the bar in the back of the room, a bartender was polishing glassware and talking to a man who wore a chef’s coat with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

Ramona approached, identified herself, and asked to speak to the manager, owner, or whoever was in charge. The man in the chef’s coat told her the manager, Pearce Byers, was in the back. He went through the kitchen double doors to get him.

While Ramona waited, the bartender, a strapping six-footer with a leering smile on his pretty-boy face, gave Ramona the once-over. The guy looked to be the bad-boy type who preyed on women and lived off them when he could.

Ramona stared him down.

Pearce Byers came out of the kitchen and advanced quickly on Ramona. Dressed in a linen shirt and wool slacks, he had a scowl on his face that pinched his eyebrows together. “What can I do for you, Officer?” he asked.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Pino,” Ramona said as she handed him her business card, “and I need a few minutes of your time.”

Byers glanced at the card and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Certainly. A few minutes. Sorry to be so rushed, but I have a party of twenty arriving any time now and a number of early pre-concert bookings for the piano recital at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.”

Ramona surveyed the dining room. All was ready for the alleged onslaught and there wasn’t a customer in sight. “I need to talk to anyone on your staff who might be able to put me in touch with Brian Riley. He worked as a busboy here last summer.”

Byers looked thoughtful. “The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

“He was here for a very short period of time,” Ramona said. “No more than a month. I was told he was fired for tardiness.”

“Oh, yes,” Byers said, touching his finger to his lips. “I tend to forget the problem children we hire who slip through our screening process. As I recall, we took a chance on him because his father was a police officer. But he wasn’t fired for tardiness; he was canned for coming to work stoned.”

“On drugs or alcohol?”

“Does it really matter?” Byers answered. “But to answer your question, not only did he show up stoned, but he was caught smoking pot on breaks behind the building with an apprentice cook. We fired them both.”

“Who was the cook?” Ramona asked.

“Randy Velarde. He was enrolled in the culinary arts program at the community college.”

“I need to see Velarde’s employment application. Riley’s also.”

Byers looked past Ramona toward a large group of people who’d arrived at the hostess area. “Can’t this wait until later?”

“No, it can’t,” Ramona answered.

Byers sighed in frustration, called one of the servers over, asked him to seat the waiting party, and told Ramona he’d be right back with the employment applications.

The pretty-boy bartender, who’d been listening with great interest, leaned over the bar. “If you can’t find Randy at home, he may be in class at the community college.”

“Do you know that for a fact?” Ramona asked.

Pretty Boy nodded. “When I ran into him a month or so ago, he said he was working days as a grocery store stocker and taking classes at night and one morning on his days off.”

“Did he say what store he was working at?”

“No.”

“Thanks,” Ramona said.

Pretty Boy didn’t answer right away. He was distracted by a very attractive woman with long brown hair who hurried up the stairs and joined the just-seated party. He gave the woman a thorough once-over before returning his attention to Ramona.

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Do you know where I can find Brian Riley?”

“Nope, that I don’t know,” Pretty Boy said as he went to the end of the bar to take drink orders from a couple with Palm Springs tans.

Byers returned with the employment applications, slapped the papers on the bar in front of Ramona, and hurried away to greet arriving customers at the hostess area. Ramona copied down the information she needed and made her way to the kitchen, where she asked the executive chef and several of her assistants about Randy Velarde’s work in the kitchen. They characterized him as moody, inconsistent, and a pothead. The one cook who vaguely remembered Brian Riley put him in the same category.

Byers came bursting through the double doors just as Ramona was writing down names and phone numbers.

“You can’t be in here,” he sputtered angrily. “This is unacceptable.”

“I’m done,” Ramona said with a smile.

“Next time, come back after we’re closed.”

Ramona closed her notebook. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Tranquilo Casitas, Space 39 was the address Randy Velarde had listed on his job application. It was a run-down trailer park on Agua Fria Street just inside the city limits, located between a sand-and-gravel operation and a small subdivision of “starter homes” on tiny lots. Hardly a tranquil place to live, it was a well-known trouble spot. Patrol officers were frequently called to the location to quell domestic disputes, break up gang fights, and investigate break-ins and burglaries that were usually drug-related.

On the way to the trailer park, Ramona ran a check on Randy Velarde. He had a clean sheet, but given the fact that he’d been fired for smoking marijuana on the job, Ramona doubted that Velarde was an upstanding citizen.

She pulled into Tranquilo Casitas and bumped her way down a paved asphalt lane that had so many potholes it resembled a bombed-out Baghdad roadway. All of the mobile homes in the park were older single-wides, and many were in disrepair. Some had plastic sheeting on the roof held in place by automobile tires. Others had broken windows covered with scrap plywood. A few were missing the skirting used to hide the concrete blocks that elevated the trailers off the ground.

The single-wide at space 39 was no better or worse than all the rest. On one side of the trailer jutted a half-finished covered porch made of plywood. Scrap lumber and construction trash littered the area. The hulk of an old Japanese subcompact pickup truck sat in the mud ruts of the parking space. Ramona climbed three rickety wooden steps that rose to the plywood front porch, and with her badge case open to display her shield and police ID, she knocked on the door. A young teenage girl, no more than five-one and a hundred pounds, opened up. She had an infant riding on her hip. The distinctive smell of grass wafted out the door.

“I’d like to speak to Randy Velarde,” said Ramona, who wasn’t at all interested in making a misdemeanor arrest on a pot possession charge.

“My brother’s not here right now. Why do you need to see him?”

Ramona studied the girl’s face. She looked clear-eyed and seemed alert to her surroundings. “I’m trying to locate someone Randy worked with last summer, Brian Riley.”

The girl pushed the baby’s tiny hand away from the front of her blouse. No more than four or five months old, the infant had a dirty face and a urine-stained diaper. “What did Brian do?”

“Nothing,” Ramona replied. “Do you know him?”

“Yeah, sort of. He stayed here for a couple nights last summer before he left town.”

“Where did he go?”

The baby started to cry. The girl pulled a pacifier from her pants pocket and stuck it in the baby’s mouth. “I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him much.”

“Why was he staying here?”

“I think he had a fight with his father or his stepmother. Something like that.”

“Would Randy know where Brian went?”

The baby spit out the pacifier. The girl picked it up, put it in her pocket, and shifted the baby to her other hip. “Maybe. Look, I’ve got to feed him.”

Ramona heard a toilet flush. “Where is Randy?”

The girl put her hand on the door. “In class at the community college. He doesn’t get home until after nine.”

“Is the baby’s mother working?”

“I’m his mother,” the girl said, jiggling the baby on her hip. “He’s my little
hijo
.”

“Where’s
your
mother?”

“Working.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a housekeeper at the hospital.”

“Is there anyone here with you?”

“Javier, my
hijo
’s father.”

“What’s your name?” Ramona asked.

“Vanessa Velarde.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Are you in school?”

Vanessa shook her head. “There’s no one to look after my
hijo
during the day but me.”

Ramona smiled understandingly. “A baby is a lot of responsibility to take on. Let me see what I can do to get you some help.”

Vanessa smirked and gave Ramona a sour look. “I don’t need any help. School sucks, so I dropped out. Next year I’ll get my GED and then I’ll get a job.” She closed the trailer door in Ramona’s face.

Ramona walked to her unit and drove away. In her years on the force she’d yet to meet any fifteen-year-olds who were mature enough to know what was best for them. On Agua Fria Street, she pulled to the side of the road, called the lieutenant in charge of the juvenile division, and gave her the heads-up on Vanessa Velarde. The lieutenant promised to contact social services and request that a caseworker make a home visit.

Ramona knew it could be days or weeks before a caseworker showed up at the trailer to determine if Vanessa and her baby needed protective services. She glumly wondered if any good would come from bringing social services into the picture. Even with help, being a low-income, fifteen-year-old dropout with a new baby was a hell of a deep hole to climb out of.

The Santa Fe Community College, a relatively new institution of higher education established some twenty-odd years ago in cramped, temporary quarters in a Cerrillos Road business park, was now located outside town on a modern campus near a rapidly growing residential area that fronted I-25.

At the administration office Ramona was directed to Ms. Carpenter’s classroom, where some twenty culinary arts students, all dressed in loose-fitting cook’s jackets, stood at a food prep area watching their instructor demonstrate how to properly bone an uncooked chicken. Ramona, a notoriously bad cook with little interest in the subject, found Ms. Carpenter’s skill with a knife impressive. Carpenter made short order of the task without slicing any of her fingers. After she’d finished the demonstration, Ramona pulled her aside and asked her to ID Randy Velarde.