The Replacement Child (33 page)

No answer.

“Mrs. Baca, can you hear me?”

Nothing.

“Mrs. Baca, if you can hear me, please make a noise.”

Silence.

He called out a few more times, but it was quiet. He heard the police scanner inside, but nothing else. The silence made him even more edgy.

There wasn’t a clear line of sight to the interior. All Gil could see through the open door was a brown-paneled hallway wall three feet away. He guessed that the living room was down the hallway to the right and a bedroom to the left, like the standard layout of a mobile home. He would have had to lean his head through the door to get a look in either direction. But Gil expected that Ron would be armed.

He would need another officer to provide cover to get through that door. One-man entry was against regulations. All
he could do was wait. The way he was crouched was killing his ankle. He tried to focus on the door, to take his mind off the pain.

A patrol car pulled up. He signaled the officer—he didn’t see who it was—to go around the trailer. Another officer appeared. He motioned her to him.

“We’re going inside,” he said to the officer. He thought her last name might be Lopez. She nodded, looking calm.

They went into the trailer, his adrenaline rush making the living room a blur of brown furniture. He could see into the open kitchen. On the linoleum floor was a growing puddle of blood. It was coming from Ron Baca, who was facedown on the tile with his Smith & Wesson still in his hand.

Mrs. Baca sat in a vinyl kitchen chair, her hands in her lap. An old police-issued revolver on the table next to her. She watched the blood as it oozed across the floor, fascinated.

“Mrs. Baca?” Gil asked. His gun still out. “Mrs. Baca, what happened?”

“He killed my baby,” she said, still looking at the blood. “I heard what you said. You said he killed my baby.”

Gil went to the table and pushed the gun away from her. He heard Lopez calling on her radio for an ambulance.

L
ieutenant Pollack—the newspaper’s one-and-only snitch—had called Lucy to ask if she would mind talking to him about Patsy Burke’s death. As Pollack had said it, “We have combined the investigations of Melissa Baca and Patsy Burke.”

It was getting dark, almost five thirty
P.M.
, as she drove to the state police department.

Meeting Pollack would be interesting. She had this image in her head of a used-car salesman in a police uniform or a washed-up high-school football star. The kind of guy who needed glory; the kind of guy who got off on seeing his words in the newspaper.

She was two blocks from the police department when the EMT pager in her glove compartment went off, making her jump at the noise and swear out loud. Hadn’t she turned that thing off? She frantically opened the glove compartment, throwing Taco Bell napkins everywhere. Where was it?

She found the pager and was trying to turn it off—where was the stupid switch?—when the dispatcher loudly gave the address of the call: only a few blocks away. Lucy took a deep breath. She should go to the call. Actually, she had to go to the call. She would prove to Gerald that she was a responsible adult if it killed her.

Lucy looked at her watch. Pollack had been up in the air about what time he wanted to talk to her, “Just sometime tonight” was the way he put it. He could wait a little while longer.

She was already shaking when she pulled up to the old mobile home behind the other emergency vehicles.
Take a deep breath,
she thought.
You were trained to do this. Sort of.

She met Gerald Trujillo on the way in. He gave her his summary of the situation: “The patient is a seventy-six-year-old female named Phyllis Parker with respiratory problems,” he said without animation. “She’s perfectly fine, but we need to check her out.”

“Cool,” was all Lucy said. He could at least have smiled at her and said hello.

Inside, other paramedics were bent over an old woman in a La-Z-Boy. They were asking her questions, but she stubbornly wouldn’t answer.

One of the medics was yelling, “Look, we just need some answers so we can help you better.”

“Lucy, why don’t you get a blood pressure,” Gerald said. Hell. Was he trying to punish her?

She rooted around in the paramedic’s medical bag, looking for a blood-pressure cuff and stethoscope. After a few seconds of watching her futile search, Gerald opened the front compartment of the bag and handed her the equipment. Damn.
She was trying. Honestly. She moved toward the woman to put the BP cuff on her, knowing full well that she had no clue what she was doing.

“Get the hell away from me,” the woman said sharply to Lucy. “Not you. I want one of them to do it.” The woman gestured toward the male paramedics.

Lucy stepped back, stunned. It took a second for her to realize what the old woman had said. For the first time, Lucy looked around the room. It was dingy and cluttered. The dark-paneled walls made it look cryptlike. The garbage can in the kitchen was overflowing and a dog was yapping behind a closed door. In the corner were stacks of
Capital Tribunes.
Next to a half-filled ashtray on an end table was a police scanner.

“Lucy,” she heard Gerald say from somewhere across the room. “Lucy,” he said again. Why was he yelling? She turned and saw that he was standing right next to her. “Earth to Lucy. Let’s focus here,” he said. She took a deep breath to steady herself. She gave Gerald the stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff, her hand shaking. He noticed, but he didn’t comment. He probably just thought she was freezing up again. She took a few long, hard breaths as she watched him fasten the Velcro on the BP cuff around the woman’s flabby upper arm.

Lucy stepped back toward the old woman and said, “Hi. You might remember me from the
Capital Tribune.
I’m Lucy Newroe. And you must be Scanner Lady.”

I
t was almost six thirty
P.M.
by the time they had transported Scanner Lady to St. Vincent for treatment of chronic emphysema and bronchitis. Mrs. Parker wouldn’t talk after Lucy told her that she was an editor at the
Capital Tribune.
But Lucy didn’t need to hear her speak again. She was sure. She knew that voice.

During the ride to the hospital, Lucy busied herself with
putting away equipment in the ambulance so that she wouldn’t have to think. If she thought, she might explode. Or more likely implode. She felt nothing. And she wanted to stay that way for as long as possible. She needed a drink. Hell, she needed a keg.

Lucy was in the hospital hallway, putting clean sheets on the gurney—making a bed, finally something she knew how to do—when she heard someone call her name. She looked up to see Gil limping toward her.

“Gil,” she said, “what are you doing here? I was just going to call you.” She watched him walk for a second before saying, “You’re limping.”

“I rode in with the paramedics. We brought Ron Baca in.”

“Great, you found him. What happened? Did you beat him up?” She smiled as she tucked the sheet under the gurney’s mattress.

“He’s dead. His mother shot him.”

“Oh my God,” Lucy said. She stared at nothing on the tea-colored wall. Patsy Burke’s killer was dead. But Patsy Burke wasn’t her Scanner Lady. Patsy Burke was someone else’s Scanner Lady. Lucy closed her eyes for a moment. She couldn’t think about it. She couldn’t.

“Is Mrs. Baca all right?” she asked.

Gil didn’t answer; he just shook his head. They stood for a few moments more before he asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I brought in a patient,” Lucy said. She felt the need to protect him from the truth. She would suffer for both of them.

Gil stared at her, his look unreadable, before saying, “Mrs. Baca overheard us on the phone when we talked before. She thought that when I said Ron had killed Mrs. Burke, I meant he had killed Melissa. She misunderstood. She thought her son killed her daughter. That’s why she shot him.”

Lucy moved to him and touched his arm. “Oh, Gil.”

He reached out and brushed her hair out of her eyes.

They stood silently for a moment before she spoke. “It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

“It wasn’t your fault either,” he said intently.

“If only I believed that.” She turned and walked down the hallway, pushing the gurney to the ambulance bay doors. Outside, the dark sky was low with clouds.

G
il was opening the front door of his house when he heard someone in the kitchen say, “I was just getting ready to go to bed.” Susan sat at the table in her nightgown, her calculator and a few bills cluttering the tabletop.

Gil sat heavily in the chair opposite hers. She opened the refrigerator, grabbed a beer, and set it down in front of him. “You look like you could use one,” she said.

Gil took a swig. “What are you doing up?”

“Waiting for you,” she said, punching a few numbers on the calculator. “Your mom called and wondered when you were coming over. I told her that you couldn’t make it tonight. I figured you were too busy at work.”

“Thanks,” he said. He watched Susan as she went back to clicking at her calculator. “The Melissa Baca case is over,” he said, realizing that he was hoping she would ask him about it.

“Good. You could use a break. You should see if you can get Monday off.”

He stood up, planning to take the beer with him as he changed into his pajamas, but he stopped at the door. “We should take the girls to Bandelier Park tomorrow. It’s been a long time since we’ve been there.”

“Joy was just there a few days ago, and besides, the girls and I are going clothes shopping.”

“I think we should do something together as a family.” He tried to make it sound unimportant.

Susan looked at him curiously before saying, “Okay. I’ll make some sandwiches.”

Gil took his beer off to bed.

I
t was almost eight thirty
P.M.
when Lucy made it to the state police station. After leaving Gil standing in the hospital hallway, she’d gone and sat in the ambulance. Gerald had found her there. They’d ridden back to her car in silence.

Now she sat in the state police station, waiting. She didn’t know what she would tell Pollack. She couldn’t possibly tell him the truth. The truth would leave her too exposed. She would have to lie. She just didn’t know what she would lie about. Anything. Everything.

She got up and paced in front of the blue metal chairs in the hallway where she’d been told to wait. She couldn’t do this. She wouldn’t. Someone else could tell her story. She was done.

She walked out of the police station, got into her car, and went home. She opened her front door and, without turning on the lights, went into her bedroom. She dropped into bed, fully clothed.

Sleep came fast, but it was laced with strange dreams about barking dogs that turned into babies who could talk. She eventually gave up, annoyed. Not knowing what else to do, and scared to be left with her thoughts, she dressed again and got back into her car.

As she took the highway out of Santa Fe, it started to snow lightly, the clouds obscuring the view of the mountains in the early light. Snow. She was too tired to be scared of driving in it.

She knew that she should call Pollack, to tell him why she had flaked out. She knew that she should call the newspaper, to let them know that the Melissa Baca case had been solved. She glanced at her cell phone on the passenger seat. She picked it up and switched it off, tossing it into the backseat. She heard
it clunk its way down to the floor. The state police would hold a press conference about it in a few hours. The newspaper could find out then.

No one would care that Mrs. Burke’s murder would never be solved. The state police would close the case in a day or two and never officially announce that Ron Baca had been the killer. “He’s dead,” they would say. “What purpose does it serve to charge him with Mrs. Burke’s murder?”

Lucy took the turnoff to Chimayó and pulled up in front of the santuario. There was only one other car in the parking lot. Tourists don’t do cold, snowy, Sunday mornings. The church looked hollow and somber. She noticed for the first time that all the windows had security bars on the outside, a twentieth-century theft deterrent on a 1700s church. A hard reminder of how the village of Chimayó had become a camp for black-tar-heroin dealers. She walked into the dimly lit church, past the pews. The church was darker than usual because of the clouds outside. The badly painted white walls did little to brighten it. She felt like the carved black vigas on the ceiling were reaching for her head. She quickly went to the front of the church. She didn’t genuflect or bow in front of the altar as she passed it, not knowing how to do it, convinced that she would trip if she tried.

She squeezed through a low door and stopped. She was in a room crammed full of leg braces and crutches, discarded by those who had been healed. Statues of Jesus and saints she couldn’t name were everywhere.

She went through a smaller door, into the tiny back room with the holy dirt. Weak light streamed through a small window. A crucifix wrapped in blue satin had been placed in a glass box with a kneeler in front of it.

Squatting in front of a hole in the ground, she scooped up a handful of the sandy dirt, letting some of it slip though her fingers and fall back into the hole. She stared at the dirt in her hands for a moment before she began to rub it all over herself—
in her hair and on her face and her clothes. Bowing her head, she felt the dirt run down her back. She closed her eyes but nothing would come. Praying was not something she knew how to do. “Oh, hell,” she said out loud, to no one. She laughed at herself, the sound muted by the old adobe walls. Then she started to cry, the tears skimming down her dirty cheeks.