The Replacement Child (17 page)

Tears came to Mrs. Schoen’s eyes as she said, “Thank you, bless your heart.” She wiped away the tears with a Kleenex she pulled out of her bra and said, “The more you cry, the less you pee.” Then she walked away.

L
ucy was finished with work by eleven forty-five
P.M.
and by midnight she was sitting at the Cowgirl bar with a table of drunk journalists from both local papers. No wonder the public had no faith in the press. They were all alcoholics.

The letter of the night was
S.
Lucy had started with a screwdriver and a stinger. Now she was waiting for the waitress to deliver her snakebite—whatever that was—while she and the copy editors debated whether a slow comfortable screw counted as two S’s or one. She had wanted a tequila sunrise but a cute sports reporter from the
Santa Fe Times
had nixed that,
saying that the drink had to start with an
S
to count, not end in one. Lucy could have argued the point. The game was of her creation, after all, but she decided instead to go sit on the sports reporter’s lap. It seemed like a good solution.

She hadn’t even considered not drinking tonight. She thought she would go insane if she kept thinking of Patsy Burke. Or kept trying not to think of her. Lucy took a sip of her snakebite and changed it to a gulp in midsip. She would give up drinking tomorrow. Maybe. If she didn’t find another dead body. If she didn’t get someone else killed.
Help.
Another gulp.

She tried to focus her attention on the man whose lap she was sitting on. She took his beer out of his hand and put the mug on the table. Then she took his now-free hand and wrapped it around her waist.

“I was falling off,” she said, smiling. He smiled back. They talked in the slurry voices of drunks. She felt slightly sluttish at how brazen she was being. She smiled to herself. Brazen. Now there was a Harlequin-romance word. She had been having a mild flirtation with the man for months, but she didn’t know him well. She knew that he was from Alabama, wasn’t a very good writer, and needed to learn Associated Press style. He also didn’t quite have the knack with women. His movements were always a bit off. He was the kind of guy who needed a set of sex instructions: insert tab A into slot B. But he had sweet lips. She planned to kiss him. Maybe a lot. But that was all. She needed a distraction from her messed-up life, not an addition to it.

The waitress returned with Lucy’s next drink—a screaming orgasm. Lucy took a big swig out of the glass and poured the rest of her snakebite into it. She mixed the two drinks into one, slopping some liquor over the side.

The sports reporter asked what she was doing. Lucy smiled. A hard smile. “I’m making a new drink. I’m calling
this one the Scanner Lady.” Lucy winced at the taste as the drink hit her throat. But she tipped it back farther and kept gulping, not stopping until the dregs were running down her blouse.

T
he police station was freezing when Gil got there just after eight
A.M.
The receptionist told him that the repairmen were working on the heat. He kept his coat on as he dialed his mother’s number.

She answered on the fifth ring. “Mom, I’m going to go buy a new blood-sugar machine for you today. I’ll bring it over later.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,
hito.
Aunt Sally is bringing mine back. I told her how upset you are about it.”

“Okay. But you have to do the test as soon as you get the machine back and call me with the number.” She didn’t say anything and they hung up.

Next, Gil called Pollack to make his morning report. He didn’t have much to tell. Pollack answered with a cheery “Good morning.” Gil told him about his interviews from the day before. Pollack said little, not giving Gil even an idea of where their investigation was headed. He told Gil to stay focused on what had happened during the hour before Melissa had gotten home. Pollack was saying, “Okay, thanks, good-bye,” when Gil asked, “Did you get the autopsy results?”

Pollack hesitated. “Yes, we did, but I’m afraid that information is being restricted, Gil. Sorry.” The state police had agreed to release information to him, but only on a case-by-case basis.

“Can I ask why?”

“We don’t want it getting into the hands of the media.” That intrigued Gil. The autopsy must have turned up something. “Could you at least tell me the cause of death?”

Gil heard Pollack put his hand over the receiver and say something to someone in the background. When he got back on the phone, all he said was, “I’m afraid not.”

“How about the toxicology results?”

“We don’t have that yet, but when we do, the answer will probably be no. You know how it is. If it wasn’t for that damn press leak, I could tell you. Sorry.”

Gil hung up and called the OMI, but the clerk told him that access to the file was restricted. Gil tried getting around the clerk by calling all the medical investigators he knew. He left five messages.

He spent the next hour calling other officers at the state police, the Taos Sheriff’s Department, and the Taos police. They were just as frustrated as Gil. Pollack wasn’t releasing the information to anyone.

A
t nine thirty
A.M.
, Lucy locked her front door and got into her car, pulling on her leather gloves in the cold.

It was a little too early for her to be out of the house, but her hangover had had her up at 7:58
A.M.
, and now the headache was keeping her awake. Her search under the bathroom sink had yielded only an empty bottle of Pamprin.

She remembered little of the night before, although she was fairly sure that she had done some almost-illegal things with the sports reporter in the parking lot of the bar. She hoped he wouldn’t call her. Sort of. She needed to stop getting drunk. Really. She was getting pathetic.

She went to Albertsons to get some aspirin and spent five minutes reshelving two oranges and some toilet paper. On her way home, she decided to make a detour.

She parked her car across the street from Patsy Burke’s house, unremarkable and adobe colored. There were old newspapers collecting in the driveway—Lucy counted two
Santa Fe Timeses.
But no
Capital Tribune
s. Someone must have swiped those. It was the only newspaper worth stealing. The crime-scene tape across the door had come loose and fluttered in the wind like the tail of a yellow kite.

She waved at the man across the street who had come to watch her. The neighbors probably loved this—their own little
Cops
show.

Lucy had called Mrs. Burke’s number an hour ago only to be greeted with “this number has been disconnected.”

She had considered trying to break in and listen to the answering machine, assuming it would just be a matter of trying all the doors and windows. But she was too chicken and paranoid to try it.

She sat in her car just watching the house, wondering about Patsy Burke’s life. Lucy had been in too much of a hurry to ask Claire Schoen about Mrs. Burke’s children. Lucy wasn’t even sure she had kids. The pictures in her house could just as easily have been of nieces and nephews.

The flower beds in front of the house were brown, but obviously well tended. A wreath made of pink ribbons and dried flowers hung on the front door. Lucy was sure that Mrs. Burke had made it herself. Old ladies did that type of thing, didn’t they?

Lucy glanced in her rearview mirror and saw a gray sheriff’s car coming down the street toward her. She quickly drove down the block and into the cul-de-sac, careful to keep her car out of sight.

She got out of her car and made a show of checking a house number against a piece of paper in her hand, which was actually a receipt from Burger King. She glanced back up the street. Major Garcia and a gray-uniformed deputy were going into the house.

She got back into her car and sighed. The only way for her to get out of the cul-de-sac was to drive past Scanner Lady’s house. And Garcia might see her. And think she was nuts.

She noticed a dirt road leading from the cul-de-sac, likely a utility road or a very well-worn ATV path. Some Santa Fe neighborhoods got around the county street planners by making their own back-door roads: short dirt paths that led to major streets.

As she started down the road, her Camry made loud complaints about the ruts and grooves. Thankfully, the road was dry. Chalk up one good thing to the lack of snow. She went over a huge bump and almost walloped her head on the ceiling. Just like a roller coaster. She started scanning for a country-music station. Dirt roads called for country music. She turned up the volume on an old Tim McGraw song and tried to sing along. He was saying something about still loving a woman who had dumped him for another man. Country-music love always sounded like stalking.

The road twisted around piñon trees and dropped down into an arroyo. She’d been driving for only a few minutes when the road made a sharp curve right. She had to cut the wheel to avoid hitting the cement base of a cell-phone tower.

G
il was still at his desk at the police station when Officer Manny Cordova came over and sat heavily in the chair next to Gil’s desk.

“I have two things,” Cordova said with his usual smile. “The first one is that I talked to Ron, and he said to give him a call if you need any help. He’s still up in the Pecos.”

“When is he coming back to town?” Gil asked.

Cordova shrugged. “I don’t know. He did this exact same thing when his dad died. He stayed up there for weeks. It’s just his way.”

“What’s the second thing you had to tell me?”

“I remembered something last night,” Cordova said. He kept scanning the office from side to side. “It really didn’t hit me until then. I think I saw Melissa Baca at Oñate Park about four thirty
P.M.
the day she was killed.”

Gil looked at him, considering. There was only one reason why Melissa Baca would have been there.

“Tell me about it,” was all Gil said.

“Well, I was driving down Cerrillos Road going to an MVA on St. Francis and Alameda when I passed the park. I always drive slow when I go by there, you know, to check it out, no? So I drove past slow and saw a purple Dodge Reliant lowrider with New Mexico plates next to a car that looked liked Melissa’s brown Chevy.”

There was only one purple Dodge Reliant in town. It belonged to Hector Morales. Morales wasn’t usually at the park himself—he usually had one of his runners take care of the small deals. But occasionally he would take a buy at the park to show his employees how it was done. He believed that trafficking drugs was all about the marketing and the personal relationships with his clients. It was based on some idea he’d gotten from watching a late-night infomercial when he was on cocaine. He used his MySpace page to drum up customers, but he and his clients wrote in a code that the police had never broken. Morales had had three dealing arrests in the early 1990s. Since then, he had been arrested dozens of times but always found a loophole. Morales’s street nickname was Pony but the police called him Teflon.

“Anything else, Manny?” Gil asked.

“Well, I was pretty far away but it looked like the driver of the Dodge Reliant handed the driver of the Chevy something.” Cordova sounded like he was testifying before a grand jury. “That’s all I saw.”

“Are you sure it was Morales’s car?”

“Oh yeah. I’ve busted him plenty. I’m one hundred percent sure it was him.”

“How about Melissa’s car? How sure are you that it was hers?”

Cordova thought for a second. “I’d say about seventy percent. If I hadn’t been going to that MVA, I would have stopped to check it out. You know that, sir, right?”

“Manny, I guess I’m concerned that you didn’t bring this up before. Didn’t you think it was important?”

“Sorry, Gil. I just didn’t think of it. Melissa wouldn’t be at a place like that. It looked like her car, but I can’t be sure.” Cordova looked at the floor. “And I feel bad that I didn’t stop. I know I should have, or called it in. I know I broke procedure.” He looked back up. “Anyway, I hope it helps.”

Cordova got up and walked off before Gil could ask more about it. But Gil had finally figured out what Melissa had been doing during that hour after she’d left work but before she got home: buying drugs.

T
he dirt road came out onto the highway. Once she hit the pavement, Lucy drove to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. She entered the glass-and-steel building and asked the front-desk clerk if she could see Major Garcia, knowing full well that he was at Scanner Lady’s house. But she didn’t care. The receptionist told Lucy to wait. Which she did, in a gray metal chair that rocked when she tapped her foot against the floor.

Lucy had finally figured out how no one but Scanner Lady had heard the conversation between the cops on the police scanner—blame it on the cell tower just a few blocks from her house. The officers hadn’t been on the police radio; they’d been on cell phones.

Lucy couldn’t believe that it had taken her so long to figure that out. Police scanners were notorious for picking up cellphone conversations when a cell tower was close-by. The frequencies between the towers got all mixed up. Cell-phone calls
sounded like normal traffic on a police scanner. Scanner Lady wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.

At the
Capital Tribune
last summer, they had heard about a house blowing up on the west side. Lucy had sent a reporter and photographer scrambling while she listened closely to the police frequencies. At ten
P.M.
, close to deadline, Lucy was still waiting to hear from her reporter when the scanner piped up. Two police officers were talking. Lucy knew within seconds that they weren’t on the police radio—they were swearing and using first names as they discussed the explosion over their cell phones and talked freely about the cause of it—a meth lab in the basement. She quickly called the reporter. The reporter, without revealing his source, got confirmation from the police that it had been a meth-lab explosion. The next day, she’d gotten an e-mail from John Lopez congratulating her on the scoop.