The Replacement Child (28 page)

Gil was starting to lose his patience with her. While her pain was palpable, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was an act. Was all this confusion and helplessness just a cover-up?

“Why didn’t you tell me about the heroin?” he asked almost coldly. She said nothing. “Mrs. Baca, you have to be straight with me. I have to tell the state police about this,” he said, trying to keep from sounding frustrated.

Gil considered the possibility that Mrs. Baca had played a part in Melissa’s killing. Mrs. Baca was the only one who had said that Melissa left the house at eight
P.M.
the night she was killed. Melissa could easily have found out about Maxine’s drug use. Could Maxine have strangled Melissa after they
argued about it? It was possible. This whole time he had been looking at Mrs. Baca as an alibi for Ron, but Ron was also an alibi for her. Pollack had interviewed the neighbor, who said that he’d seen Ron and his car but never mentioned seeing Maxine. The only person who could vouch for Maxine’s whereabouts was Ron. Was he trying to protect his mother by staying out of town?

Maxine started straightening the covers on Melissa’s bed. She was fixing the pillows when she said, “I did it so I would know what it had been like for him.”

“Like for who?”

Maxine continued. “He was
mi hito.
He was everything to me, and I let him die….” She trailed off. Gil understood—it was about Daniel.

“How often do you do drugs?” Gil asked.

She didn’t answer him. She stood still for a second, swaying, then walked past him, through the kitchen and out the back door. Gil quickly followed. She walked into the backyard, past a swing set and a small shed, to the corner of the property marked by a fence. She stopped at a small hill of sandy dirt and dropped to her knees. She started digging, the frozen dirt not giving easily under her bare hands. As Gil stepped toward her to pull her away, he saw a syringe sticking out of the newly dug earth.

G
il called the crime-scene techs out to the Bacas’ backyard. They unearthed a few dozen syringes, a half-dozen spoons, and hundreds of small plastic bags of heroin. Gil kept trying to get Mrs. Baca out of the cold, but she refused to go inside. She sat watching them with a strange look on her face.

Pollack showed up a few minutes later. He pulled Gil aside, saying, “Does she trust you?”

“I guess.”

“Good. Then you can go
Magnum, P.I.
on her.” Gil translated
this to mean that he should be the one to interview Mrs. Baca.

Gil had an officer go inside to get Mrs. Baca a blanket. Gil waited until she was wrapped in it, still watching the excavation, before he started.

“You’ve been buying heroin since after Daniel died? That was more than twenty years ago?”

Maxine nodded.

“And you never took the drugs?”

“No … I … I … It was because of my sin that he died.”

“What sin was that?” She didn’t answer him and instead started to recite the Hail Mary. Gil spoke over her prayer. “Did Ron know?”

She stopped and said, “Yes. He tells me the best place to buy it. Sometimes he comes with me.”

A strange mother-and-son activity, thought Gil. “Did Melissa know about it?”

Mrs. Baca didn’t answer right away. Gil waited, watching the crime tech catalog the items. A few moments later, she said, “I don’t think so.”

“But you can’t say for sure?”

“No. I … No.” She started saying the Hail Mary again. Gil watched her for a few minutes, not sure what to do for her.

Gil walked over to Pollack to update him. At first, Pollack wanted to bring her in on drug-possession charges to question her more forcefully. He seemed to think that Mrs. Baca was hiding something. But Gil quickly talked him out of it. They had no proof that Mrs. Baca had ever used any of the heroin, and the media would want to know why they had arrested a sixty-four-year-old woman whose daughter had just died.

Gil didn’t mention to Pollack that Mrs. Baca was mentally ill. He was sure of that now. It had been hard to tell whether she was just a grieving mother, but he wondered how normal she had been before Melissa was killed.

He got permission from Pollack to call the crisis hotline to
get Mrs. Baca some help. The woman on the phone said that they would send out a counselor within the hour. Gil needed to find Ron, but he didn’t want to leave Mrs. Baca.

If Melissa had found out that her brother was helping their mother buy drugs, she might have confronted him. Maybe Melissa hadn’t been going to file a complaint with the Citizens’ Police Advisory Review Committee about Manny. Maybe it had been about Ron. If she had reported her brother, he would have been fired. Maybe it had always been about Ron.

Gil didn’t know Ron Baca well, but he had looked over Ron’s arrest records. Gil knew that the way an officer writes a report can tell a lot about him. Ron was an average officer. Not clever. Not unintelligent. Just unremarkable. His reports were short on details and long on missed opportunities. In one recent report, Ron had made note of a car that he had stopped for weaving in traffic. By the time dispatch came back to tell Ron that the car was stolen, he had already let them go. And then didn’t try to catch them. As Ron said in the report, “unable to ascertain location of vehicle.”

Gil had also gone over Ron’s personnel file, with Chief Klïne’s permission. There were no complaints about excessive force, but there also were no commendations for bravery. He hadn’t taken any classes that might lead to advancement or boost his investigative skills. He didn’t go above and beyond. His performance reviews were short and monotonous. Year after year, supervisors had urged Ron to take the initiative. But year after year, no change. His inability to impress meant that he had gone as far as he ever would in the department. He would never rise above his position as sergeant. A quick handwritten note on one of the reviews read, “victimization?” Gil didn’t know who had written it, but he knew what it meant. It fit what he knew about Ron.

Nothing was Ron’s fault. Gil remembered the stolen-car incident. Gil had overheard Joe Phillips ask Ron what had happened. Ron’s response, in all seriousness, was, “It wasn’t my
fault the car was stolen. What was I supposed to do?” Ron didn’t even realize why that answer revealed all his flaws. When backed into a corner, he would blame everyone else for his getting there, even if he’d walked into the corner himself.

Gil knew that Ron Baca hadn’t killed his sister. His alibi was solid. The neighbors had seen him go into his mother’s house at the same time that Melissa was being killed in Oñate Park. Ron might have had a motive if Melissa was going to complain about him to the police advisory committee, but he still had no opportunity. And there was still Manny Cordova, waiting back at the state police station.

Mrs. Baca was shivering now as she prayed, but Gil still couldn’t persuade her to come inside. As the crime-scene techs worked, Gil pulled Adam Granger, the lead tech, aside. Gil had known Granger, who was also the tech in charge of Melissa’s case, for years. Their daughters were on the same soccer team.

“I don’t suppose there was dirt on the syringe found in Melissa’s car?” Gil asked him.

Granger kicked a clump of dried mud. “I was just wondering the same thing. I’ll go to the lab right now and check on it.”

P
ollack came up to Gil and asked, “Do you think she knows anything else?”

Gil stared at Mrs. Baca for a minute before saying, “No.”

“Well, in that case, we got a bunch of loose ends that we need to tie up,” Pollack said. “Where do you want to start? I’m thinking about the brother….”

“Actually, I’d rather track down the principal and get his take on the pictures,” Gil said. He was worried about Sandra Paine, despite what her parents had said. For him, the endangered living took precedence over the dead. He wanted to find out who had abused her, and, knowing that the parents wouldn’t help, he hoped Strunk would.

Pollack nodded. “Yeah, and tell him one of his students is banging an adult. That might get his attention.”

Pollack said that he’d keep an eye on Mrs. Baca until the counselor showed up.

Strunk’s home was in the foothills, down a long driveway. The house must have been about ten thousand square feet. It was finished with adobe-colored stucco and had a big, arched entranceway. It couldn’t have been more than a few years old. In Santa Fe’s market—where the average price of a home is $282,000—it had probably cost at least $2 million.

As Gill pulled up to the house, he saw Ken Strunk standing outside. He got out of his car, and Strunk shook his hand warmly as the two of them stood in the driveway, where Strunk had obviously been cleaning out his car. The trunk and all the doors were open. A bucket of water and a few wet rags dripped on the pavement next to the gray Lincoln Town Car. A wet/dry vacuum sat nearby.

“Detective Montoya. I received your messages. Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. My wife and I drove to see her mother in Las Cruces Wednesday night, and we just got back in town.” He gestured at his car. “I never realized how much stuff you find between the seats after a long road trip.”

“Was it a planned trip?” Gil asked, mostly to make small talk.

“Actually, no.” Strunk hesitated. It took him a moment to add, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but we went because the school’s board of governors thought it would discourage the media’s interest in our school. It was a public relations move. The hope was that things would have died down by the time I got back. But clearly that’s not the case if you’re here.” Strunk put down his wet cloth. “So, what can I help you with, Detective?”

“Did Melissa ever mention anything to you about a student of hers named Sandra Paine?”

“Yes. About a month ago, Sandra was caught drinking vodka on school grounds.”

“How was Melissa involved?”

“She’s the one that turned Sandra in.”

“What did you do?”

“We called Sandra’s parents. They insisted we call the police. The parents wanted to scare her straight, that sort of thing. So two officers came and brought her down to the police station. There were no charges filed.”

“Do you remember the officers’ names?”

“I don’t know, off the top of my head, but I keep my school files here at the house for security reasons. I made a note of it in her file. We can go check.”

They walked though the garage and into a study done in the same muted tones as Strunk’s office at school.

“Detective, do you mind if I ask why you’re asking about Sandra? She’s an intelligent girl but has an inconsistent home life.”

“Do you know her well?”

“Actually, we only met that one time when she was brought to my office. Is she in more trouble?”

Gil answered his question with a question: “Did Melissa ever mention anything else to you about Sandra?”

Strunk smiled. “I get the feeling you’re not going to tell me why you’re asking. Okay, Detective, I’ll try to control my burning curiosity. Did Melissa ever mention Sandra?” Strunk thought for a moment. “No, just that one time.”

Strunk pulled a manila folder out of a tall wooden filing cabinet. “Here it is. It was about a month ago. The students had just gotten back from Christmas break. And the officers who came were …” He hesitated. “I only have last names but it looks like Officers Valdez and Cordova.”

S
andra Paine lay on her bed, waiting for her mother to come home to drive her to Santa Fe’s airport so they could ship her off to Denver. They still hadn’t told her how long she
would be exiled for. She gave them a week before they caved and took her back. All she had to do was call her father “Daddy” and talk to her mother incessantly about college.

She picked up her cell phone and for the fourteenth time—she had been counting—played the last message from her boyfriend. “Sandra, I need to talk to you right away….” The message cut off after that. She played it again. She loved listening to his voice. He had left the message yesterday, but she hadn’t called him back. That had been Lacey’s idea. “Sandra, men only want women they can’t have, so play aloof,” Lacey had said. “Don’t talk to him. Make him really sweat.” They decided that she would call him from Colorado but only leave a message. They called it “denying him access.” As Lacey had said, “He’ll be pining away.”

Sandra started biting her nails. She wished she still had the Polaroids they’d taken together. They would make her miss him less. She especially liked the ones she had taken of him. But her father had confiscated those in the “second incident.” That had been a week ago and it was completely her mother’s fault.

Her mom had come home crazed from some party disaster she had been in charge of and decided that Sandra’s room needed to be inspected. The inspections usually meant rumpling through Sandra’s closet until her mother broke down crying and left. But this time Mommie Dearest had been deranged. She threw things out of drawers and sent stuffed animals flying while Sandra watched. She found some of the Polaroids taped under the bottom shelf of Sandra’s entertainment center. But she didn’t find the other ones, taped under the TV.

Mom slapped Sandra hard but said nothing, then went to her room, turned off the lights, and closed the door. Her father came home a few hours later. Sandra heard them yelling at each other. She wasn’t worried. After the “first incident,” a month ago, when she got busted with the vodka, she had been
grounded for three weeks. Two days later she was at the mall, shopping for shoes with Lacey.

The parents came in to give her the verdict a few minutes later. Her father opened her door without knocking and said, “What did you do with him?”

“Like I’m going to tell you,” Sandra said.

“You are going to tell me, young lady.”

Sandra ignored him and, with a sly smile, turned her back on them and started typing on her computer.

“Sandra, why won’t you tell Daddy what he wants to know?” her mother asked. God, but she was annoying.

“Because it’s none of his business.” Sandra started typing faster.

That’s when they told her that they were sending her to her aunt’s in Denver. That got her attention. She cried and threatened, but they didn’t give in. Her mother sat in the corner and said little. She wasn’t normally that quiet.