Dangerous Attachments (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 1) (22 page)

Sylvia said, "I've got an oddball theory that the jackal is afraid of his own reflection."

"Like a vampire?"

"Vampires don't have reflections, they have boundary problems." Sylvia shrugged. "I'd say the jackal has something in common with a vampire: lacunae in the ego."

"Speak English."

"Lacunae are holes, gaps, craters in the ego. Too little ego, too much ego."

Rosie bit her lower lip. "So the jackal has a screwed-up ego?" She broke off when her husband returned to the table.

Ray gave his wife a sharp look. Sylvia was surprised by the intensity in his eyes. There was tension in the Sánchez family, and it centered around Rosie's work.

Ray started to gather up the leftovers and empty plastic containers. He had hardly eaten anything. He said, "I don't want to hear about people who cut up other people. It's almost Christmas." He dropped the litter into a trash can and walked to the crowded carousel.

Sylvia patted Rosie's arm and said, "Ray's right. We'll talk about the jackal later. You still want that little espresso maker?"

"You aren't serious? This isn't L.A.,
jita."
Rosie held two fingers in front of her eyes. "Let's split up. I don't want to know what I'm going to get."

Most of Sylvia's time was spent in lines or dodging the logjam of pedestrian traffic. She found classic videos for Rosie and Ray:
The Thin Man, The Big Steal, Rope of Sand
. Usually, she purchased her videos through a mail-order house, but this was last-minute shopping. When she spied a mini espresso machine at Design Warehouse, she couldn't resist. For Tomás, the simplest choice was a gift certificate at the CD store.

She enjoyed the shopping and found it lifted her spirits. After much debate, she decided on two illustrated dinosaur books for Jaspar. On a display rack, she noticed a children's book,
Circle of Wonder
, by N. Scott Momaday. She thumbed through the pages and loved the illustrated story about Christmas in a New Mexican village. She put it in her basket, joined the checkout queue, and paid for her final Christmas purchases.

She found Ray waiting back by the carousel. Rosie, lugging packages, soon joined them, and the three made their way out of the mobbed mall. Sylvia took a grateful breath of fresh air as they crossed the lot.

There was ice on the asphalt, and several cars executed three-sixties in slow motion while helpless passengers threw up their hands.

When neither Ray nor Rosie said a word, Sylvia sighed and touched Ray. "Don't worry about Rosie."

He put his arm on her shoulder and raised his mouth toward her ear.
"You
tell her to slow down. Maybe she'll listen to a shrink."

"What are you guys whispering about?" Rosie asked.

With his rumpled shirt and polyester jacket, and his
thinning salt-and-pepper hair, Ray Sánchez looked like he owned every one of his forty-eight years.

Sylvia said, "She'll be okay. She's got you." Her mood suddenly plummeted. She had a good career in her hometown. She'd worked hard to earn the respect of friends and peers. She'd worked her ass off and Duke Watson could take everything away on a trumped-up charge.

She said, "Two clients called this morning to cancel. They read the paper." The food she'd eaten churned in her stomach. "I need a lawyer, and I'm going to talk to Juanita Martinez tomorrow at her firm's Christmas party."

Rosie said, "She'll eat him alive."

"I hope I'm there to watch," Sylvia said bitterly. She caught sight of a battered dull-blue fender dotted with snow. Her 1986 Volvo was a mess after the high-speed encounter with Lucas Watson; Sylvia identified with her car. Her auto shop had recommended a new Volvo; when she refused, they had tried to repair the damage.

Rosie had to trot to keep up with Sylvia. "How far do you think Duke Watson will go with this? Do you really think he'll base a lawsuit on vicious lies?"

Sylvia gazed down at her friend's face now furrowed with worry. "I think he's done a lot worse. I spent Monday afternoon at the
Journal
morgue; I looked up everything on his wife's suicide."

"His wife?" Rosie interjected. "What's that got to do with this?"

"If it was a suicide," Sylvia said.

Ray's eyes widened. He shifted his packages. "You think he murdered her?"

Rosie shushed her husband. "Raymond."

"I think it's possible," Sylvia said quietly. She started to tell them about her talk with Matt England but stopped herself. He'd spoken to her in confidence; she appreciated his candor.

She leaned against the Volvo's trunk and felt the cold metal, even through layers of wool. "But I don't know why."

"You're serious?" Ray lowered his voice. "Do you have any evidence?"

Sylvia shook her head. "And no motive."

"Then don't even say such a thing out loud!" Rosie said, "Duke Watson is a bully and a politician, but that doesn't make him a wife-killer."

Ray shrugged. "I've heard of weirder things."

Rosie stared at Sylvia and tried to view her objectively. She saw a woman who looked afraid, alone, vulnerable, and delicate in spite of her physical stature.

Sylvia's mouth quivered. She got into her car, started the engine, and rolled down her window. In a small voice she said, "I think I'm in deep shit."

T
HE LAST LIGHT
of day barely penetrated into the dentist's office. Matt England tried to ignore his foul mood and concentrate on his job. He was careful to step wide around a coagulated puddle of blood. There was more—three maybe four quarts—on the floor, the walls, the bodies. The preliminary analysis on the wall spatter was easy. It was high-velocity impact spatter, mistlike, that had traveled a short horizontal distance.

The dentist was sixty-eight years old according to his driver's license. He had been shot once in the throat and once in the right temple. The second bullet had traveled through his right hand before it reached his brain. He'd
fallen back against the dental chair, and now he resembled a prone patient.

Hansi Gausser, on call for the Department of Public Safety crime lab this week, was hunched over the dentist's body. Hansi lifted his chin, waved an arm at Matt, and said, "OMI's due here any minute. I think we're ready for them."

Matt nodded.

"Mr. Ortiz was too old to be taking out people's teeth. From the look of the place, he was retired or semiretired. That drill's a museum piece," Hansi mumbled.

"So maybe the patient was a friend. Or maybe he was persuaded." Double homicides, especially when the victims were apparently nice, middle-class retirees, weren't everyday occurrences in northern New Mexico. The sight of the bodies made Matt angry.

"I can tell you this because I'm a genius," Hansi said. "This was one—maybe more than one—fucked-up killer."

Matt moved carefully toward the female victim. They were guessing she was the dentist's wife. She was pictured in numerous photographs around the house. She might have been anywhere between fifty-five and seventy years old. Her soft gray hair was still neatly bound into a bun. She was wearing a pink sweater and a darker pink skirt, both now drenched with blood. It was difficult to discern her facial features because she'd taken one bullet in the mouth and one in the forehead.

She was sprawled on her back, in the doorway to the office. Matt stared down at her and thought of his own grandmother. She had died peacefully, in her own bed,
surrounded by family. Mrs. Ortiz had been robbed of a tranquil death.

He and Gausser had spent more than two hours on their search of the office—the video, photographs, sketches, the inventory. The conspicuous evidence had been logged, bagged, and transported to the van outside. When possible, each item would be carefully vapor-checked for prints. If they got extremely lucky, they'd get one good print to run through the automated fingerprint identification system, AFIS.

Sometimes the work got to him physically. Like now, his back hurt like hell and he had a headache. He wanted to stretch out on his own couch, zone out, and wash down a double shot of tequila with a beer chaser.

In lieu of that, he began a careful inventory of the rest of the house. He passed a fingerprint technician in the hall; gray aluminum powder covered the banister. Matt climbed the stairs gingerly.

The second story consisted of the Ortizes' bedroom, a small bathroom, and what looked like a combination sewing and guest room. In the bedroom, a double bed was covered with a hand-crocheted spread. It looked like something Matt's mother would've made. Two children were portrayed in separate studio portraits—complete with a baby-blue sky and Greek pillars—and kept on matching bedside tables.

From the looks of numerous additional photographs, the Ortiz children were now grown, with kids of their own. They hadn't been notified of the murders yet.

Gently, he lifted a gold-colored crochet doily that rested over the head of the bed. The knots in the thread seemed amazingly delicate and much too small to be
made by someone's hands. He replaced it, checked the closets, the drawers, the other rooms. Everything was neat and in its place.

From the look of her clothes, Matt knew that Mrs. Ortiz was the orderly one. She probably attended mass three times a week, and she kept track of all the children and grandchildren and their birthdays. And he'd win a bet if he had any takers that she selected an outfit for her husband each morning, and she laid it out on the bed. After all, Mr. Ortiz was colorblind; it said so on his driver's license.

He could smell the faint scent of licorice on the air. Slowly, he walked down the stairs, and he entered the kitchen through a swinging door. Mrs. Ortiz had left a tray of
bizcochitos
on the kitchen counter. He sniffed the cookies, absorbed that sweet cinnamon aroma, and noticed the crumbs. Two cookies were missing; a trail of crumbs led to the door. Mrs. Ortiz was too conscientious to let those crumbs lay where they fell.

The killer had liked
bizcochitos
. Matt didn't; they were too dry and sandy for his taste.

In the den, he found the patient files: thirty years' worth. He flipped through a history of patient's crowns, fillings, bridges, and caps.
A-C, D-F
, etc. . . . But he stopped at
S
. The files for
T
through
Z
were gone.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

R
OSIE GLARED AT
the stack of reports that covered her desk on Christmas Eve. The attorney general's office was generating mountains of paper for its riot report, and the state police were conducting their own interrogations. Copies of even the most sensitive documents crossed Rosie's desk: hostage depositions, inmate interviews, medical files, and letters from enraged family members. She had lists that accounted for file cabinets damaged, vending machines destroyed, National Guard equipment used, hostage names, names of those sodomized, and names of the dead. Administration files at North had gone up in flames during the first hours of the takeover; reconstruction would take months. Fortunately, the master prison records were kept at Main. Unlike the previous riot where all records were destroyed, the master records had remained intact and had been used to account for the living and the deceased. Matching body parts was a real problem this
time around. One emergency response team member, a combat veteran, had vomited from the stench and sight of the mutilations.

Rosie swallowed hard. Nightmares of the riot repeatedly woke her in a cold sweat Ray wanted her to ask for a leave of absence, but she ignored his pleas. There was too much work to be done, and pressure from the governor's office, the Department of Corrections, and the warden was intense. The official demand was the same from each office: get the dead buried and assign blame to the living: the predators.

Piecing together the chronology of the riot through inmate eyes was the hardest task of all. Ultimately, it was the only way to answer the most difficult questions—who led the murder squads, who committed the actual killings? After the riot in 1980, almost $2,500,000 was spent to finance nine trials that resulted in twenty-five murder convictions and seventy-nine convictions for lesser crimes.

Rosie didn't know if they'd do as well this time.

Under "Inmate Interviews" Rosie had crossed off those who had already been transferred to federal and state prisons, county jails, the state hospital in Las Vegas, and St. Vincent's Hospital. Of the remaining names, several were circled. Bubba Akins was a reinterview. Since most of the inmates in protective custody (or "snitch row") had been listed as dead, she had only two names left to interview there. Before she closed her book, Rosie circled three more names to include. Elmer Rivak, Theo T. Bones, and Robot Rodriguez were not residents of North, but as porters, they'd spent the entire riot caught in the administration building.

Through a series of phone calls, Rosie established T. Bones's and Rivak's whereabouts. They were part of the work detail at North Facility. A crew of about forty inmates was still removing debris from the areas that had been burned, flooded, or otherwise damaged. Rosie left word to have the two inmates removed from work detail on December 26 for interviews.

As she was about to leave the office to question Robot Rodriguez, Matt England knocked on the door. He eased his body into a vinyl chair and gestured toward her desk. "What a mess."

Rosie set her hands on her hips. "You don't look so hot yourself."

"I can't complain. Just overworked, underpaid, and overdue." Matt England relaxed his long legs, the toes of his cowboy boots at three o'clock. "So, I had a chat with your friend Bubba Akins."

Rosie raised her dark eyebrows. "And?"

"I don't know," England said. "Bubba was one of the first out of his cell and he took the first hostage, but I can't pin much else on him. Crime lab's got their report. Bloody palm prints, latents, blood and tissue samples. Nothing nasty belongs to Bubba although the word is that he killed a homie."

Deep furrows lined England's brow as he closed his eyes. "At least it's not as bad as 1980. It took four days before crime scene areas were taped off in Main. Four days while the politicians, lawyers, and reporters were touring the freak show and palming souvenirs. God knows what physical evidence we lost . . ."