The Replacement Child (18 page)

She planned to explain this to Garcia. If he ever showed up. After forty-five minutes, she settled on writing Garcia a note, asking him to call.

T
he news meeting was lasting forever. Lucy tried to hide her second yawn. Patsy Burke’s death had become a brief. The story’s first paragraph would be, “Santa Fe sheriff’s deputies are still investigating the slaying of an elderly woman who was found dead in her home on Wednesday.” Her murder went from a front-page story to a four-paragraph brief inside the local section within twenty-five hours. A new record.

Melissa Baca’s death had also been moved from the front page to the local section, and it said basically the same thing as Patsy’s—no new leads. Melissa’s death had been more spectacular than Patsy’s—a schoolteacher being tossed off a famous bridge—so it was being buried more slowly.

Lucy tried to pay attention as they talked about the front page package—a story about how much water the new municipal golf course was using.

As they were wrapping things up, Tommy Martinez came to the door and motioned her outside.

“I think I can get a hold of a copy of the Melissa Baca autopsy,” he said.

“Fabulous. When can you get it?”

“In a few hours.”

“Any clue what it says?”

“Not yet.”

She went back into the news meeting and told the other editors what Tommy had said. Melissa Baca’s murder was back on the front page.

T
he office was still cold as Gil did a property search on the Internet. The station was quiet; most officers who weren’t out on patrol had found a reason to go someplace warmer. He was trying different variations of the name Baca in the search engine—C de Baca, C’Baca, Cdebaca. Baca and its cousin name, Ce de Baca, were fairly common in Northern New Mexico. There were four Bacas—none related—of the 139 police officers who worked for the city of Santa Fe.

Chief Kline had asked Gil to find Ron Baca and fill him in on the investigation as a courtesy. Gil had called Ron’s cell phone several times, only to be greeted with, “The number you are calling is not in service.” He knew that Pollack had said Ron had an alibi for Melissa’s murder. But he was curious why Ron would have gone off to the Pecos and left his mother all alone. It didn’t make sense to him.

Gil was searching for any property belonging to the Baca family. He thought maybe Ron was staying at a family-owned cabin in the Pecos and was hoping to find a phone number for it. But there was nothing. The search turned up only Mrs. Baca’s house, Ron’s mobile home, and a mention of a trailer that had been bought by Daniel Baca in the late 1970s.

“You know, Gil, you’ll go blind sitting that close to a computer screen.”

He looked up to see Officer Joe Phillips blowing into a steaming cup.

“You didn’t get me any coffee, Joe?” he said without smiling.

“Get off it, Montoya. You know I don’t drink that stuff. This is cocoa. It even has little marshmallows in it. I thought it wasn’t macho enough for you,” he said, laughing. Phillips had
been on the force for only a little over a year, but he had a lot of common sense.

“Actually, Joe, you can help me with something. Does Hector Morales still live in that apartment on Airport Road?” he asked.

“Nah, he moved a few months ago. Do you need to find him?”

“I was just about to go look for him.”

“I’d wait until tonight. It’s Thursday. He’ll be at the Silver Cowboy. It’ll be safer, and you won’t have to worry about his girlfriends or his kids being around,” he said before walking off, sipping his cocoa.

Gil was getting ready to leave when the phone rang. It was one of the medical investigators, Cindy Cornell. They’d worked on a stabbing together two years back. She told Gil the same thing everyone else had: “I don’t have a copy of the Baca autopsy, and I can’t get a copy.” But she added, “I did hear that the report is back on the syringe they found in Melissa Baca’s car. It was wiped clean of prints, which is weird.”

Gil agreed. Drug addicts weren’t usually so neat.

“Oh, yeah,” Cornell said. “I also heard a rumor that a newspaper was leaked the autopsy.”

“Which newspaper?” asked Gil.

“The one with the green name. I mean, it’s written in green. Do you know which one I mean?”

He knew which one she meant—the
Capital Tribune.

T
he copy editors invited Lucy on a walk to Starbucks a few blocks away, but she turned them down. She needed to be alone. The dark was just starting to settle in as she walked toward the Plaza. Piñon smoke clung to the air, warm and sweet. The haze in the air made the streetlights glow and wink softly. The setting sun was starting to hit the Sangre de Cristos, making the peaks look pink and purple. She made her way
down tiny alleys and through archways leading to courtyards with now-dry fountains. The stair-step, two-story buildings were seamed together, with one giving way to the other, so that each block was made up of one huge, mismatched structure. A curved missionary arched roof flowed into the flat-topped pueblo roof of the next building, which joined the art-deco tile of the next.

The shop owners in the low adobe buildings were starting to close up. Every other store seemed to have the words
trading company
in its name. Golden Bear Trading Company. Eagle Wings Trading Co. The cheap stores sold cowboy hats from the Philippines and American Indian rugs made in China. The expensive stores sold antique photos of Georgia O’Keeffe and turquoise bracelets made on the pueblos.

She heard laughter coming from the third story of La Fonda hotel’s patio just above her. The hotel was one of the most famous and tallest buildings in town, at barely five stories. Only St. Francis Cathedral was taller. By law, no building could be taller than the cathedral.

When she reached the Plaza, she watched the tourists. It was easy to spot them. They were always so much better dressed than the locals. If you could afford to vacation in Santa Fe, you could afford to dress well. A family walked past her, the kids looking like blond Stepford children in their neat white shirts, pressed khaki pants, and parkas. The father was J. Crew, the mother Ann Taylor. Clean-cut American upper class.

Down the street, a man was yelling incoherently, his voice guttural and coarse. She thought at first he had Tourette’s syndrome, but as she got closer she realized that he was just German, yelling to his relatives across the street.

She made her way to the tamale vendor on the corner of the Plaza. The man nodded at her in recognition, and she ordered the usual: pork with red chile. Lucy was a firm believer in food ruts. She got stuck in them often. Two weeks ago it had
been baked potatoes. Last month it had been sopaipillas with honey.

The tamale steamed as the man handed it to her, almost falling out of the corn husk it was baked in. She paid for her food and found a cold bench on the Plaza to sit on.

She watched the jewelry sellers sitting under the portal of the Palace of the Governors, which was a palace only in the New Mexico sense. It was a huge, dark-beige-adobe hacienda built in the 1600s on top of an old Indian settlement. The palace had changed hands frequently over the years: Spanish, Indian, Spanish, Mexican, American, Confederate, American. Every passing army seemed to have conquered it. The building was now a museum, but she could still make out the edges of the old fort.

Lucy always marveled at the walking encyclopedia she had become since working at the newspaper. She could have been a Santa Fe tour guide, sitting in a bus and telling vacationers from Minnesota, “And off to your right is the oldest public bathroom in the United States.”

She watched one of the sellers under the portal of the Palace of the Governors polish a squash-blossom turquoise necklace laid out on a bright blanket. The woman was sitting bundled up in comforters, to fight off the cold shadows and the hard concrete. All the sellers under the portal had to be American Indian. It actually was a rule. There had been some big lawsuit in the 1990s brought by Hispanic sellers who thought they had as much right to sit under the portal as the Indians. The state supreme court had decided the issue. Only Indians. So the Hispanic sellers had been forced to sell their paintings and santos on the other side of the street, which didn’t seem that bad a fate to Lucy. They got to be in the sun and away from the shade of the portal. They got to be on the Plaza.

The Plaza itself was only about a block square, with sidewalks crisscrossing its grassy areas. If it had been back East, they
would have called it a park, and a small one at that. But here it was the Plaza, with a capital
P.

The early conquistadores had built the Plaza to serve as a vegetable garden and center of the fort. It had been a place of cockfights, public floggings, Indian slave markets, and bullfights. It was the end of the Santa Fe Trail in the 1800s. Its renown had grown from that.

The real estate along it was the most expensive commercial property in Santa Fe. When the Gap opened a store on San Francisco Street across from the Plaza in the late 1990s, the newspaper wondered in its editorials what was becoming of Santa Fe. A brand-name store on the Plaza? Treason. But by the time the Starbucks opened down the street, the groans had turned into simple grumbling.

Lucy tossed her tamale wrapper into a garbage can and walked back to work, dodging a group of children and harried mothers.

Once in the newsroom, the receptionist greeted her with, “Some cop is trying to get a hold of you. He said he’d call back.”

Finally. It was about time Major Garcia decided to call her back. She’d left him two more messages since getting to work.

Her phone was ringing as she sat down.

“Ms. Newroe?” It was a man, but definitely not Garcia. “This is Detective Montoya. We spoke yesterday?” Like she could forget. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you. Would it be possible for me to come down there to talk to you?”
Interesting,
she thought. Most likely he wanted to ask for the names of the anonymous sources who had leaked the info about Melissa Baca’s drug use.

A half hour later, Montoya and Lucy sat in the conference room at the newspaper. She had a cup of awful-tasting coffee in front of her. She was gripping the Styrofoam cup in her hand purely for composure, like a smoker feeling calmed just by holding a cigarette.

“I heard you have a copy of Melissa Baca’s autopsy,” Detective Montoya said. So, he was going to try to talk her out of using it.

“And?” The less she said, the better.

“I was wondering if you could do me a favor. I’m not asking you to break any rules, but I wanted to see if I could get a copy of the report.”

Lucy was surprised. Definitely not what she had expected. “Don’t you people have one?”

“I don’t have access to the report,” Detective Montoya said. Then she knew: he was being shut out by the state police. “I’m acting as the liaison for the family. I’m trying to help them through the process and be there as a spokesman for them.”

She finished the thought for him: “And it would help if you knew what the autopsy said before it hit the papers tomorrow so you could coach the family on what and what not to say?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that.”

Lucy admired Montoya for coming to her with his hat in his hand. The relationship between the media and the police was adversarial at best. Newspapers used the police to get the crime stories that sold papers. The police used the newspapers to print the stories that showed the public they were keeping the city safe. Montoya had just stepped over a well-established invisible line. Lucy wondered why.

“I should have it around nine
P.M.
I don’t feel comfortable faxing it to you. I can come drop it off when I get off work around eleven
P.M.
,” Lucy said.

She wasn’t actually breaking any journalistic rules by giving him the autopsy, but she was stretching a lot of unwritten ones. Most editors wouldn’t even have considered it, not wanting to encourage a relationship with the police. But she had a reason: if she scratched his back, maybe he would scratch hers. She needed help with the Patsy Burke problem. And he could give it.

Not that she would get in trouble for giving Montoya the paperwork. She would be very careful. She would not reveal where they had gotten the autopsy from—not that she actually knew. Tommy hadn’t told her. And Tommy was already calling the family to get their comments, so Montoya wouldn’t have time to tell the relatives how to spin the details. Montoya wouldn’t even see the autopsy until eleven
P.M.
, so technically she wouldn’t be leaking any information—by that time, the story would be up on the
Capital Tribune
’s Web site and accessible by the general public.

Montoya hesitated. “Actually, I’m going to be out doing some legwork.”

“On the Baca killing?”

As he answered yes, she watched him. She didn’t like the look he gave her. She still didn’t know him well enough to be able to interpret his looks. He looked like he didn’t trust her.

“Fine. Just tell me where and when to meet you. Denny’s? Village Inn?”

G
il knocked hard again on the front door of Ron Baca’s mobile home. No answer. It was just after five
P.M.
and almost fully dark. It had been in the fifties again today, but as soon as the sun went down, the cold had come in with a mission.

He walked around the mobile home looking for a window to peek in. All the blinds were down. He left his card on Ron’s door with a note to call him when he got home from the cabin.

After that he drove to Mrs. Baca’s. The house was full of people again. His knock was answered by Betsy Sanchez, a woman he’d briefly dated in college before he met Susan. The last time he’d seen Betsy had been after a Halloween party when he was eighteen. She had gotten mad at him about something—he couldn’t remember what—and had slammed his car door as
he dropped her off at home. She was Mrs. Baca’s niece. They chatted without enthusiasm.

He found Mrs. Baca sitting in a blue-and-white-upholstered chair in the living room. She was hunched over, staring at her hands, a half cup of coffee on a table next to her. She had more color in her cheeks, but she jumped when he spoke to her. She was wearing different clothes, although Gil wasn’t sure they were an improvement—a very loose sweater missing a middle button and a pair of green pants. She looked like Therese when she tried to dress herself for kindergarten.