The Replacement Child (26 page)

She had been careful to sit a few seats away from the sports reporter she had kissed two nights ago. She was nice to him. Said “hi” and “how are you?” with true sincerity. But she didn’t want him to get the impression that she was overly interested. He kept giving her goofy drunken stares.
Lord, help me.
After an hour, she pretended to go to the bathroom and slipped out of the bar.

She picked herself up off the floor of her apartment and flipped on her answering machine. First message from Mom. Second one from Mom. Third one from Gerald Trujillo: “Lucy, I missed you at the fire station this afternoon.” She erased the rest of the message without listening to it. She sighed and plopped onto the couch.

She stretched her arms over her head to release some of the tension in her shoulders. She needed to talk to Gerald. To really talk to him. She needed to ease her guilt.

She turned the television on and started watching an old
Cosby Show.

The phone rang. She looked at her watch. Just after two
A.M.
Who would be calling this late? She let the answering machine pick it up. It was the sports reporter she had been indecent with. Damn. “Hey, Lucy, you left the bar tonight without saying good-bye.” She went to bed without listening to the rest of the message.

L
ucy tried to roll over in her sleep, but the movement made her back muscles cut with pain, jarring her awake. She had overdone it with the weights yesterday, a few too many reps—and too little previous gym time. She knew that her mother would say it was from stress:
Lucy, you always hold your anger in your shoulders.

Sitting up stiffly, she looked at the clock—six thirty
A.M.
She groaned. It was her freaking day off, and she was awake and in pain before the sun was up. She tried to turn her neck from side to side to stretch it, but her shoulders wouldn’t give. She now had aspirin but no heating pad or ice packs.

She tried to swing out of bed without hurting herself. She pulled on a button-up shirt without putting on a bra, afraid that trying to hook the contraption might strain something. She tried to put on a pair of jeans but couldn’t bend over. She decided to wear the sweatpants—aka pajamas—that she had on. She then slipped on her tennis shoes without tying them.

She drove to Walgreens, the only twenty-four-hour store in Santa Fe, and cruised the aisles looking for pain-relief stuff. She was loading up with ice packs and Epsom salts when she noticed a toothbrush sitting in the vitamin rack.

She sighed and walked past the toothbrush, her aching back giving her an excuse to ignore her obsession for a day.
But a second later she was back, picking up the toothbrush and detouring to the soap, shaving cream, and toothpaste aisle. The toothbrush deserved to go home. She walked up and down the aisle, staring at the shelves. Why weren’t the toothbrushes in this aisle? She walked the aisle again. Toothbrushes had to be in this aisle—it defied all shelf-stocking logic that they weren’t. Toothbrushes go next to toothpaste. Everyone knows that.

She looked for ten minutes more before finally giving up. She was too sore to keep up the search. She decided to buy the toothbrush—she couldn’t bring herself to throw it on any old shelf, and it was about time she got a new one anyway.

She was in the checkout line when she glanced over at a rack next to the register. Next to the batteries, in the impulse-buy area, was a display of toothbrushes.

When had the purchase of a toothbrush become an impulse buy? Who says as they stand in line with Pepsi and Doritos, “Gee, it’s been months since I brushed my teeth. Maybe I should get one.” Lucy slipped the toothbrush onto the rack, making sure that no one was looking. But there was no one else in the store.

She was back at home, toweling off from an Epsom salts bath, when the phone rang. It was Major Garcia.

“When we interviewed Mrs. Schoen the other day, she said that Mrs. Burke used to keep a log of the scanner calls she heard,” Garcia began. “The original inventory from the house didn’t show any log, so we searched it again, but no luck.” He was chewing on something and getting harder to understand. He swallowed and said, “I don’t suppose you saw a log near the scanner when you were first there? It was just an ordinary notebook.”

Lucy thought. She had been intent on Mrs. Burke’s body. She had no idea if there’d been a notebook nearby. She said so to Garcia.

“All right. The son is sending up a videotape of his daughter’s
birthday. Mrs. Burke’s voice is on there. We should have that today or tomorrow at the latest. I’ll call you when I get it so you can ID her voice. And another thing—at this point I’m going to involve the police investigating Melissa Baca’s murder, just to let them know that our two investigations might be connected. It seems suspicious that the only thing stolen was a notebook.”

He hung up before Lucy could say anything more. She stood naked in her bathroom. In a quick few sentences, Garcia had given her what she had been desperate for. Validation. With a capital V. Another human being actually believed she wasn’t crazy. But Garcia’s words didn’t affect her as she had expected. She’d thought she would feel happy. But instead, there was only cool determination.

G
il rubbed his eyes as he sat at his desk. He’d had only a few hours’ sleep since leaving Mrs. Baca’s last night. He had watched her house until he was hunched over from lack of sleep and then had driven home.

He had called his mother an hour ago but there had been no answer. She must still be at church, he thought.

Now, he was checking old reports to see if Melissa Baca had ever filed a complaint against the boyfriend who had slapped her, which, according to Judy Maes, had happened three years ago. He already knew that there was nothing. The first thing he had done after Melissa’s death was to check her record. She had never been arrested or filed a restraining order against anyone. There wasn’t even a parking ticket. Now, he was rechecking.

He also was looking at statutory-rape offenders to see if any of the men might have come in contact with Sandra Paine—someone like a teacher or a friend of her father.

At least those were the reasons he had given the officers who had asked why he was in the office just after sunrise.

He checked his watch again—seven
A.M.
He still had an hour until the morning shift came in. He was really checking the arrest records of Officers Ron Baca and Manny Cordova, something he couldn’t do in a room full of officers. He had spent the first hour just trying to get organized. He had looked over Ron Baca’s reports but found nothing unusual.

He was just getting started on checking Manny Cordova’s reports when someone called his name. He quickly blanked out the computer screen before looking up.

Officer Joe Phillips tossed a
Capital Tribune
onto Gil’s desk.

“I thought you might be interested in that story,” Phillips said, pointing to an article.

Gil started to read it. As he’d expected, it was about the toxicology results on Melissa Baca. When he got to the fifth paragraph, he realized why Phillips was showing him the paper: “According to an agenda released by the Citizens’ Police Advisory Review Committee, Melissa Baca was scheduled to go in front of the committee on Monday.” The story didn’t say why Melissa had been going to the meeting.

Gil thanked Phillips and went in search of Mrs. Sanchez, the police-station receptionist who compiled the agenda for the police advisory committee.

He found her making copies, the Xerox machine humming loudly. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun and she had on her usual brown skirt and blouse. On weekends she was part of the Motor Maids, a national group of women motorcycle riders. Last year, Mrs. Sanchez had ridden to Palm Coast, Florida, on her Honda Gold Wing for the Motor Maids national convention. Gil had a hard time thinking of Mrs. Sanchez as a leather-clad biker. He suspected that was on purpose. Gil wondered if she played the part of the grandmother at work so that her biker hobby would come as more of a shock. Her voice always had a strange pitch to it, as if she was quietly laughing at everyone.

“Detective Montoya,” she said, greeting him. The copies were flying quickly off the machine and into the holding tray.

“Mrs. Sanchez, did you put together the agenda for next week’s Citizens’ Police Advisory Review Committee?” he asked.

“Was there a typo?”

“No. I had a question about one of the items. Number five on the agenda.”

“Yes. The young woman who wanted to complain to the committee about a police officer.” Gil wondered how Mrs. Sanchez had remembered that without looking it up.

“Can you tell me about it?”

Mrs. Sanchez stopped the copy machine and looked at Gil over the rims of her glasses. “The young woman, a Miss Baca, I believe …” She stopped, considering for a second before saying, “Ahh, yes. Now I see where you’re going with this. I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection before. But Baca is such a common last name in Santa Fe. I assume my Miss Baca is the same Miss Baca who died this week? Interesting.”

Mrs. Sanchez continued, not expecting Gil to comment. “Miss Baca called last Friday to say she had a complaint to make against a police officer. I told her about the advisory committee, and she asked me to put her on the agenda. We didn’t discuss who the officer was or the circumstances of her complaint.” If Gil had actually become a lawyer, he would have wanted a witness like Mrs. Sanchez—precise and articulate.

“Did she say anything else?”

“She did not. That’s it. I mailed out the agendas as usual.”

“Including the ones to the newspapers,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Of course.” She realized the problem and looked at Gil accusingly. “Of course, at the time I mailed out the agendas to the newspapers, Miss Baca was still very much alive.”

“There’s an article about it today in the
Capital Tribune.”

“That’s why they were calling me last night. I swear, they
called every five minutes. It was well after ten
P.M.
I saw their name on the caller ID and didn’t answer. I decided if they wanted to talk to me, they could do it during business hours.”

Gil called Pollack at the state police to tell him about the article and what Mrs. Sanchez had said.

“Yeah. I got a thousand messages from the
Capital Tribune
last night,” Pollack said. “I had already given them their daily briefing so I didn’t call them back. I figured they were just being pushy. I guess you can tell I’ve only been the PIO for a few months. I’m not too bright sometimes. At least that’s what my boss told me when he called me an hour ago, yelling.”

“I’m going to head over to Mrs. Baca’s to see if she knew what Melissa was going to say to the advisory committee.”

“Actually, you better come over here. I’m not really sure what this means, but Officer Manny Cordova turned himself in to us a few minutes ago.”

G
il watched Manny Cordova through the two-way mirror in the interrogation room. Cordova sat alone, drinking a Coke and reading an old
People
magazine.

“What did he say when he showed up here?” Gil asked Pollack.

“Nothing really. He said his lawyer told him to turn himself in but not to say anything. The lawyer is on his way here, but got stuck in some snowstorm in Farmington.”

“How long will it take him to get here?”

“Well, it’s a four-hour drive normally. In a snowstorm, I’d say closer to five or six. I think the weirdest thing is that it’s gonna snow. I thought the forecast was clear.”

Pollack went on about the weather but Gil had stopped listening. He wondered if Manny was the police officer Melissa had been planning to lodge a complaint against.

“Actually, I’m glad you’re here,” Gil heard Pollack say. “Someone has to call your boss and tell him that one of his officers
turned himself in to us. And don’t ask me how, but the press already knows.

“Oh, and something else. The sheriff’s office called and said they might have an investigation connected to ours, but they don’t seem to think there’s much to it. You know that old lady who died out in the county? A Mrs. Burke? They’re seeing if there was some association to Melissa Baca. We haven’t combined the cases yet. For now, they keep their dead body, we keep ours, until we can prove the two are connected.”

Pollack gave Gil the details of the case, calling Lucy “some newspaper editor” and calling Mrs. Burke “some tipster.” Gil smiled. Lucy had finally managed to get someone to listen.

Pollack started snapping his fingers and said, “And just so you know, we checked some more on Ron Baca’s alibi. It seems a next-door neighbor was outside working on his car most of the night. The neighbor saw Ron Baca go into his mom’s house around eight
P.M.
and leave after eleven
P.M.
The neighbor says he was outside all night and would have seen Ron Baca if he had left the house at all. I guess the guy was trying to change the oil, which is a five-minute job, so he must suck at it.”

So Mrs. Baca had told the truth when she said that Ron had been fixing the washing machine. But that still didn’t explain why Ron hadn’t told anyone that Melissa had shown him the photos of Sandra Paine. Ron was not a sloppy police officer. Maybe Melissa’s death had made him forget about it? But Gil doubted it. Maybe Melissa had asked Ron not to mention it? Maybe.

Gil called Chief Kline, who didn’t say much about Manny Cordova. Kline was just about to hang up when Gil said, “Sir, I really feel that it’s time for me to stop being a part of this investigation. Manny Cordova is a fellow officer. This is strictly state police territory. I believe it’s a conflict of interest for me to continue to be involved.”

Kline didn’t answer, but asked to speak to Pollack. Gil
handed the lieutenant the phone. The two men talked for a few minutes. Pollack said, “I’ll tell him,” and hung up.

He started jingling the change in his pocket as he turned to Gil. “Sorry, buddy, you’re in for the long haul.”

Pollack’s phone rang. Gil went over to survey the snack machine. The Doritos might start to look good after a few hours of waiting for Manny’s lawyer to show up.