When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (4 page)

The double front doors of the house had been made in the local Colonial Spanish style, with crude geometric shapes carved into heavy wood, but they hadn’t been solid enough to withstand several well-aimed blows. Gil and Joe looked closer at the marks next to the deadbolt, which could have been made by a metal baseball bat or crowbar. A deadlock bolt extends only about an inch into the doorjamb. One sharp blow to the door’s weakest point—just to the left of the lock—can force the metal bolt to splinter through the doorjamb, which is exactly what someone had done. He would have been inside before anyone had time to react.

Gil and Joe stepped inside the house and swept the beam of their flashlights over an open foyer with cobalt blue Mexican floor tiles and twenty-foot cathedral ceilings. Two curved archways led in opposite directions out of the entryway. Gil went left, followed by Joe. Their flashlights lit the room in patches, giving slight hints of what the walls and floor looked like. They appeared to be in a living room with carpeted floors that made wet, squishing sounds as they walked. A fifty-inch plasma flat-screen TV mounted to the wall had holes smashed through it. A leather sofa and love seat were arranged nearby. Gil kept his eyes on the carpet as he moved his flashlight carefully, making sweeping motions across the floor. He didn’t want to disturb the scene any more than it already was. He looked up just as the beam from Joe’s flashlight bounced off something across the room. It took a moment in the darkness to realize the light was reflecting off the open eyes of one of the dead men.

Gil and Joe stopped where they were, about ten feet away from the bodies, and surveyed the scene. They would do a visual examination only, leaving the field medical investigator to give a full review once she got on scene.

The dead men were each tied to wooden chairs that had been taken from the dining set in the room just off to the left. The men were bound at two points—at the chest and legs—by a wrapping of duct tape. Gil and Joe moved closer. From this angle, they could see that the men’s arms were pulled behind them, their hands pinned by duct tape.

The men both looked to be in their fifties and were wearing dress shirts and pants. Only one had his mouth covered with duct tape. The other one, who had a dark beard, seemed to have a broken nose, and a few cuts on his chest were visible through his partially unbuttoned shirt. Gil shone his flashlight on the head of the man nearest to him, while Joe did the same on the other body. Unlike the bearded man’s body, the one Gil was inspecting seemed to have been relatively unscathed. There was a combination of soot and water in the man’s hair, and in his head, something else: a bullet hole.

“It looks like a .22,” Gil said. “The entrance wound is pretty small.”

“My guy is the same,” Joe said. “And I can see an abrasion ring from where the gun was pushed against the skull.”

“I have a good-sized exit wound,” Gil said, looking at his dead man’s left temple.

“Me, too,” Joe said. “They were shot at close range. You see any shell casings around?”

Gil crouched down and shined his light parallel to the floor. “No, I don’t see anything,” he said. “But they could have been washed away by the hoses.”

“You know what else I don’t see,” Joe said. “Burned skin. The fire never reached them.”

Gil went back to inspecting the clean-shaven man’s head, then swung his light back and forth as he made his way down the man’s upper chest, where he was duct-taped to the chair. The tape holding him in place was unremarkable: the gray kind found at any hardware store. The man was dressed in a white button-down business shirt, making a visual inspection of his torso and upper arms impossible. But his lower arms were covered in cuts varying in length from two to six inches. The cuts were mostly shallow except for a few that seemed to be closer to puncture wounds. Gil moved back to inspect the lower torso, where the man’s shirt was tucked neatly into his pants. He glanced over to Joe’s body and noticed something different.

“Hey, Joe, shine your light on your guy’s crotch,” Gil said.

“Why, you dirty man,” Joe said as he moved the beam of his flashlight. The man’s shirt was not tucked in, and his belt and zipper were undone. There was also dark staining between his legs.

“That looks really gross,” Joe said. “I don’t want to know what that is, and I want to stop looking at it. I’m moving my light now. You can check his crotch by yourself later.”

Gil went back to inspecting his dead man’s body, moving his light down the legs, which were also duct-taped to the chair. Nothing else stood out.

Solano came up behind them, carefully following the beam of his flashlight.

“Hey, Gil,” he said. “We found something in one of the back rooms.”

Joe and Gil followed Solano through the house, which got more charred as they moved toward the back. Joe swore as water dripped down on their heads in the freezing cold. They stepped into a bedroom that was now half open to the night air, its floor covered in charred debris. The fire had done the most damage here, as had the firefighters, who had cut through the ceiling to ventilate the room and torn down the walls to root out any remaining flames. In the middle of the room was what had once been a bed, and against the far wall was a dresser that had been turned over in the firefighting. Near the closet, something was hanging from a wooden ceiling beam. Gil couldn’t make out what it was in the dark. He directed his flashlight toward the hanging object, telling Joe to do the same.

Gil thought at first it was dark clothes dangling from a wire hanger, then realized what it was.

“Now we have three bodies.” he said.

*   *   *

The dead man was wearing blue jeans and nothing else. He had been suspended from the ceiling by his hands, which were wrapped in wire and tied above his head. The wire was hanging from one of the decorative viga beams by a screwed-in eyehook, which had probably once held up a large hanging plant. This body had burned.

“It looks like this is where the fire started,” Solano said, pointing up to the blackened ceiling. “There are burn patterns here that could be from an accelerant…”

“You mean the fire started on the body?” Joe asked.

“It looks that way,” Solano said. “My guess is gasoline was dumped on him and lit on fire.”

“Any way to tell if the guy was alive when it happened?” Joe asked.

“Not just by looking at him,” Solano said. “Maybe they can find out when they do the autopsy.”

“If the fire started here, why didn’t this part of the room burn more?” Gil asked.

“The fire probably wasn’t hot enough,” Solano said. “The ceiling and wooden vigas would burn at a higher temperature than, say, curtains or bedding. The thermal gasses from the accelerant probably ignited the carpet or some fabric. And then the fire would have moved toward the closest source of oxygen, which would have been a window or vent, probably toward the eastern corner of the room.”

“Or what used to be the eastern corner,” Joe said. He went over to where a wall had once stood and was now a hole about five feet wide. If there still had been a window there, it would have looked out over the snowy piñon forest and the view of the city in the valley below. Joe shifted his footing and slipped on a small patch of ice. He had to brace himself against a pile of debris so as not to fall. He paused for a second before looking at Gil. “I don’t mean to alarm you, but our crime scene seems to be freezing.”

“We should call Liz,” Gil said. Liz Hahn was a field investigator for the state Medical Examiner. It was her job to collect bodies, take photos, and measure the dimensions for the Coroner’s Office. Gil had already called her once tonight, on his way to the scene. She had told him she would be there as soon as she could, but was waiting for her partner, Shelley, to come home to watch the kids. Liz was as close as Santa Fe got to having a full-time medical investigator. That was because, population wise, New Mexico was a small state. More than half of its 1.6 million people lived in Albuquerque, and the other half was spread out over 122,000 square miles of desert. Only Albuquerque had crime investigators on duty at all times, and it was also home to the state’s only medical examiner. When someone was murdered, the body always went to Albuquerque for an autopsy. In most towns, there was one field deputy, who, like Liz, worked only when there was a corpse and usually had another job to pay the bills. The investigator in Tucumcari was a taxidermist, while the one in Roswell was a housewife. Liz worked as a technical writer for a medical journal.

Liz answered on the third ring, and Gil explained the situation. “What do you want to do?” he asked. “We could wait until morning.”

“We’ve gotta do it right now,” she said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes, and I’ll call Adam to see if he can help.” Adam Granger lived in Santa Fe but was technically the investigator for Española, about thirty miles down the valley. He and Liz had an unspoken agreement to cover for each other during vacations or when a scene was rough. And this scene was particularly rough.

Gil and Joe walked back out to the driveway, which was almost empty of fire trucks now. Since Solano had ordered most of the crews to go home, only a few were left to finish cleanup. The driveway was clear enough for Deputy Paul Gutierrez to pull his cruiser closer. He got out and came over to Gil and Joe.

“Do we have any names yet?” Joe asked.

“I’m still tracking those down,” Gutierrez said. “According to the security guard, there are no neighbors around. The only permanent residents were these two guys.” In Santa Fe, 30 percent of all homes were vacation properties. The homeowners would come into town only a few times a year, usually for the opera season in June or the Indian market in August. “The guard didn’t know them except to wave,” Gutierrez said. “He went to the office to get the names.”

Adam Granger pulled his van up next to Gutierrez’s car. Adam got out and adjusted his white turban, which must have been jostled in the process.

“Adam,” Joe called across the cars. “Wass up, dude?”

“Nothing much,” he said as the two men fist-bumped. “What’s up with you?”

“At the moment, I am fricking jealous of your turban, man. That thing must be warm. I am freezing off some very delicate parts out here.”

“It’s functional and fashionable,” Adam said, patting his head. Adam’s family was Sikh, followers of Yogi Bhajan, who led an ashram with thousands of faithful outside the city.

“How is it inside?” Adam asked.

“Getting worse by the moment,” Joe said. “I hope you brought your crampons and ice pick.”

*   *   *

Lucy looked down at her hands, which were red and raw from handling the icy fire hose bare-handed. Her heavy gloves had quickly become frozen stiff, and she’d had to take them off in order to pack the hose. She had blisters on her palms and between her fingers.

The car ahead of her moved, and she inched forward to the drive-through window. A minute later she was taking quick bites out of a burger while trying to keep her eyes on the road. When they had gotten back to the station after being released from the scene, Lucy was more than ready to head home. Her bones ached, and her throat was raw from the smoke. But they spent another hour restacking the hose, trying to get as much water out as they could so it would be ready to use for the next call—which came just as Lucy was pulling onto her street. She listened to her handheld radio as the dispatcher called out the emergency code. A 29-Alpha 4: a motor vehicle accident without injury. They wouldn’t need an EMT, and especially not one who might fall asleep on a patient. She turned her pager off so she wouldn’t be tempted to join in the fun. As a volunteer, Lucy was the one who decided if she would go to a call, and she decided to go a lot, so much so that it had been interfering with her real work. She needed to get to bed. Tomorrow was her first day in a new position at the paper.

She drove down Alto Street slowly and purposefully. She’d almost run over the Martinezes’ fourteen-year-old calico cat the day before, and she did not want to almost do it again. Her headlights played over adobe fences built within inches of the street curb. It might seem like that tightness would make the road claustrophobic, but Lucy found it charming and old-timey, especially at this time of year, with the electric
farolitos
lining the flat-topped roofs—real
farolitos,
with their candle-in-a-paper-bag fire danger, only for special days, such as Christmas Eve. For everyday Christmas lights, most everyone, from fast-food restaurants to government offices, used electric
farolitos.
They were just blocks of brown plastic shaped to look like paper bags that covered each white light bulb in a string; but the effect was magical.

She parked in front of her house and touched the Our Lady of Guadalupe mosaic by the front door as she went inside. She was starting to have an indecent fantasy about taking a hot bath in her claw-foot tub with a roaring fire in her kiva fireplace when she frowned. The living room light was on. She hadn’t remembered turning it on. She dropped her keys in the bowl by the door and kicked off her shoes on her way to the bedroom. She stopped short in the doorway, looking at the person in her bed. She also hadn’t remembered having company.

“How did you get in?” she asked Nathan, who was lying on her bed reading
Catcher in the Rye.

“The door was open,” he said turning to look at her. He was naked except for his boxer shorts and the endless tattoos that ran up his body. She must have forgotten to lock it in her hurry to get out the door and to the fire.

“Why are you here?”

“I thought we could hang out since you’re leaving on your trip in a few days.”

Lucy sighed. “I feel like I need to explain to you the fundamental nature of a booty call,” she said. “First, I have to call you …

“I get it…”

“And, second there is no hanging out.”

“Why not? Is that the law of the booty call?” He was trying to make her laugh. She smiled instead. He continued, “With as much as you are calling my booty, maybe we should … I dunno … talk about it or something. I’m here almost every night.”