When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (6 page)

*   *   *

Kristen Valdez looked out the kitchen window of the mobile home she shared with her mother as she kneaded dough. She punched it and turned it, sprinkling flour on the countertop when the dough stuck to it in places. She stopped long enough to stir the red chile and elk stew simmering on the stove next to her, then got back to pounding the dough and looking out the window again. Across the stream on the icy dirt road leading to Nambé Pueblo, her mother had stopped to talk with Josephine Gonzales. Growing up, Kristen and her brother had been warned to stay away from the Gonzales’s house after Kristen’s mother saw Josephine peeping in a neighbor’s window. Kristen’s mother told them, “There is only one reason to look through someone’s window in the dark.” She didn’t say it aloud, but Kristen and her brother knew what their mother meant. Nighttime peeping was a sure sign someone was a witch. That was why you didn’t leave your curtains open; otherwise the witches who prowled the night could see inside and cause harm. It was also why you didn’t take food from a stranger, or you might feel an animal clawing inside your stomach. But Kristen wondered if her mother’s warning about the Gonzaleses had less to do with witchcraft and more to do with the family being multigenerational heroin users. That wasn’t unusual in this part of the state. Josephine’s two sons, George and Luke, hadn’t escaped the family’s addiction of choice. The boys had been hooked on it since they were teenagers, just like their mother, father, aunt, and grandmother. Tribal police visited the Gonzaleses house often, usually after lots of yelling or gunfire.

Kristen watched her mother hug Josephine Gonzales good-bye, then start back to the mobile home. Kristen wasn’t surprised to see her mother acting so friendly with a supposed witch. You had to be especially nice to witches so they wouldn’t curse you. Kristen punched the dough again, trying to knead out all the lumps. She wasn’t sure witches existed, but she respected how her mother felt about them.

Plus, Kristen had seen things that made her wonder. One time, she was playing up in the hills when she saw a bundle of shredded rattlesnakes and coyote hair hanging in a tree. Another time, just after her twentieth birthday three years ago, she’d seen witch lights dancing in the forest, the balls of fire seeming to float above the tree line. But then, Nambé Pueblo had a long history with witches. Among the nineteen pueblos, Nambé believed in them the most, and that belief tended to lead to executions. In the 1800s, Nambé Pueblo had more than five hundred members, but by the turn of the twentieth century, the high number of witch executions had made that number dip to eighty-eight. A local priest predicted at the time that Nambé Pueblo would be extinct in fifty years because of the killings. The pueblo arrested their last witch in 1940. Kristen wasn’t sure what had happened to that final witch. He or she might have been executed. The pueblo now had about two thousand members. But as Kristen’s mother would say, just because witches were no longer arrested, it didn’t mean they weren’t still around.

The trailer door opened and a blast of cold air came in along with a swirl of snow. Her mother stomped her feet, saying, “
Hita,
are you done yet?”

“Mom, were you talking to Josephine Gonzales?” Kristen asked instead of answering.

“Yes,” her mother said as she unwrapped her scarf and took off her boots. “Her son George is missing.” Kristen didn’t respond. George probably had just been arrested—or had overdosed.

Kristen gave the dough one last punch before letting it rest under a towel so it could rise. She would finish the dough today, but she wouldn’t bake the bread until tomorrow. Proper bread baking took two days. It would be done in plenty of time for the Christmas dances, when a crowd of people would come to their house for food. Christmas was one of the few times during the year when the pueblo tribes allowed the public to watch their dances. Picuris and San Juan put on the Los Matachine dances, while San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Taos performed their versions of the buffalo, basket, or turtle dances. Nambé Pueblo did the deer dance, which was given as an apology for taking the life of a deer and in thanksgiving. Intermeshed with the dances were the traditional Christmas events—waiting for Santa, going to Mass, opening presents. For as much as they were pueblo people, they were also Catholic. It was the way it had been for four hundred years.

*   *   *

Gil hadn’t even put the foil-covered bowl of green chile stew down on his desk before Joe started talking to him.

“I have made my way through that list of friends that Liz gave us, and all I have to report is that I have now woken up every gay man in Santa Fe,” Joe said, flipping through his notebook. “And that’s a lot of gay men.” Santa Fe was second only to San Francisco in the number of gay households per capita. The list Liz had given them last night was two pages long.

“Thanks for doing that, Joe,” Gil said.

“Unfortunately, none of them had much helpful to say,” Joe said. He started to read aloud from his notes: “Our guys went to a dinner party four days ago and, I quote, ‘seemed fine.’ They didn’t mention any problems to anyone. When I asked about the chance of an affair, everyone told me the same thing: ‘hell, no.’ I wish I’d been that certain of my ex-wife,” he said, glancing up at Gil before looking back at his notes and adding, “They had plans to meet Christmas Day with friends to open presents. That’s it.”

“What about threats or problems with anyone who is homophobic?” Gil asked. The idea the murders were a hate crime was not far-fetched. It wouldn’t have been the first time in Santa Fe. There had been beating incidents in 2005, 2006, and 2007. In one case, the suspects included a teenage girl who, with a group of others, kidnapped a man and tried to “beat him straight.” Liz had been the lead medical investigator for that case, but hate crimes against gays had become much rarer in recent years.

“Nothing,” Joe said. “They didn’t go to gay bars or really go out much at all, except to friends’ houses. They were an old, boring married couple.”

“Okay,” Gil said. “What about the third victim?”

“No one has any idea who Mr. Burns could be—”

Gil interrupted, saying, “That’s what we’re calling him? Not ‘John Doe’?”

“But,” Joe continued, “the most popular guess is that Mr. Burns is an unexpected Christmas houseguest, but neither of our victims had kids or close relatives who might show up out of the blue like that.”

“All of that doesn’t tell us much,” Gil said. “Has Liz gotten back to us on time of death?”

“Hang on,” Joe said. “I’ll text her.” A moment later his phone buzzed; he looked at the screen and said, “She writes, and I quote, ‘TOD was 4:00
P.M
. yesterday. Same for all victims. Don’t text me again.’ It’s amazing how much she loves me.”

“Okay,” Gil said. “They were killed about an hour before the fire department got on scene.”

“Now we need to know the last time someone talked to them or saw them in public, so we can get the timeline straight,” Joe said, popping a Cheeto into his mouth from a bag that had been open on his desk for three days. “I think our best bet would be to call Price’s office and see when he was at work.”

A half hour and several phone calls later, all they had to show for their efforts was an appointment at Los Alamos Laboratory with an assistant security director.

Joe leaned back in his chair and asked with a sigh, “What do you want to do now?”

“Go back to the house,” Gil said, pulling on his coat. Joe was doing the same when he noticed the bowl covered in foil on Gil’s desk. “Why do I smell garlic?”

CHAPTER FIVE

December 21

Lucy got to work at 9:15
A.M
.—late on her first day. She’d had to dress like a professional since she’d now be interacting with the public. Usually, she looked more like a pizza delivery person in jeans and a T-shirt. Today, she was wearing a button-down blouse that had taken way too long to iron and gray pinstriped pants that needed to be hemmed.

She walked through the backdoor of the
Capital Tribune.
The building was a mishmash of old and new, with parts from the 1800s and the 1970s. Some of the exterior walls had seams where the old and new didn’t quite line up. She went into the windowless newsroom, empty of people, where the cubicle dividers made playhouse-sized streets and alleys. The quiet made her nervous. She was used to a humming office where editors yelled headline ideas over to the copy desk, and where the Photo Department held meetings while standing in front of the bathroom. They would all come in later. For now, all that was making noise was the police scanner jumping from station to station. The relative silence allowed Lucy to take in the newsroom sans employees. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The sea-foam green walls and low-hanging fluorescent lights made it look like an empty aquarium.

But her new desk wasn’t in the newsroom. She walked past the cubicles and out the opposite door, leaving the squealing scanner behind her. She went up a sloping step, then down three more. The linoleum changed from black speckled to pink, and she made her way to the left, to the Features Department.

She got to her desk and sat down, stowing her purse in the bottom drawer. The top of the desk was mostly empty, except for the computer, a few pens, and an old pad of Post-it notes. The previous owner of the desk had been Shelley Lovato—mother of three, native Santa Fean, lover of the Dallas Cowboys, and employee at the paper for twelve years. She’d been one of fifteen employees laid off without notice two weeks ago. Just eighteen days before Christmas. Shelley, who had been in advertising, had cried when she’d walked out of the building for the last time.

Other newspapers that had made similar staff cuts never recovered. More than a hundred newspapers across the country had closed since the recession in 2009. That’s what had happened to the
Santa Fe Times,
the other newspaper that served the area. After 150 years in business, it stopped its printing presses and went completely online, with only four staff members doing a job that used to take fifty. Lucy’s ex-boyfriend Del Matteucci had lost his photography job at the
Times
in the process. Lucy had followed Del to New Mexico from Florida when he first got the job. Their breakup, which began six months after they moved, had gone on for months. They had been the ultimate recyclers—using and reusing each other whenever one of them got lonely or wanted sex—until four months ago, when Lucy finally ended the cycle. She had thought their “breakup” would live up to its name, leaving her more than slightly broken, but she had been strangely content. Since then, they had talked only infrequently. The last time was two months ago, when he got laid off and told her he was moving back to Florida.

Though Lucy didn’t lose her job, she did lose her slot in the newsroom. They had offered her the cops’ reporter position, but she turned it down, not wanting to kick Tommy Martinez out of the job. Instead, she switched to Managing Features Editor, which was a title they made up just for her. While her overall job description was vague—she was to “help as needed” with feature assignments—the actual day-to-day work was clear: to write the funeral notices and birth announcements. Her boss, managing editor John Lopez, had tried to sell the new position as “restructuring,” saying they would be handing her more responsibilities as time went on, but the new title and the power that might someday go along with it were just sugarcoating. And she knew it. After her meeting with Lopez, she locked herself in one of the pink bathroom stalls at the newspaper and cried. The toilet paper she spooled out from the dispenser to mop up her face ran out before her tears did. Many journalists given her fate would have quit, but there was one thing that kept Lucy from turning in her letter of resignation: Lopez had promised she’d get her own column. That was something every journalist wanted. Columnists have their own audience. They were allowed use their own voice to express opinion, something that was strictly verboten in normal journalism. Having her own column would be a step up—or, at the very least, a step sideways—from City Editor, while being transferred to Features was not. In essence, she was demoted and promoted at the same moment.

She noticed a box next to her chair and realized that the night janitor had moved her things from her old desk. On top of the pile was a stack of business cards that had been ordered for her over the summer. She took one out. It had “City Editor” embossed in gold under her name. Lucy took the entire stack and threw it into the trash can next to her desk.

*   *   *

It had started to snow lightly by the time they pulled up to the house. Gil parked on the street, but waited to get out until Joe finished his bowl of stew. Then they walked up the long driveway as two squirrels played in the piñon and juniper trees nearby. Joe stopped and looked down at the fresh snow in the driveway, a frown on his face.

“What are you thinking?” Gil asked.

“I grew up in Pittsburgh so I know about two things: the Steelers and snow. This driveway was plowed recently, like, by a truck,” Joe said, stopping and looking at the edges where the asphalt met the forest floor. The snow off to the side was deep and piled up a foot high. “See, there are the marks from the front of the plow,” Joe said, pointing at a straight diagonal mark in the snow. “It’s been plowed in the last few hours.” He looked back down the driveway and said, “I’ll be right back,” then he jogged back down to the street. In a moment he was back, saying, “The neighbor’s driveway has been plowed, too. They must hire someone to do it.”

“That would make sense,” Gil said. “A driveway full of snow is a sure sign someone isn’t home.”

“We should check on the snowplow guy,” Joe said as they reached the front door. “It snowed yesterday morning, then again last night. Maybe he saw something when he was plowing. He could have been the last person to see our victims. He might even know who Mr. Burns is.”

Gil nodded, saying, “We can ask the security guard who does the plowing.”

They reached the house, which from the front showed little evidence of the fire. The plow had taken away the tracks of the fire engines. The house itself was covered in a dust of white with red chile
ristras
hanging out front, green bows tied on each.