When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (22 page)

Mary hesitated, but someone inside spoke in a low tone that Kristen couldn’t hear, and Mary opened the door. As Kristen moved past Mary, she noticed the other woman had her coat on, keys in hand, and was holding her purse. Inside the trailer, a dark brown shag carpet and a wood stove churning out heat gave the place the feel of warm dirt. A baby about six months old sat in a bouncy swing, while a toddler around two years old hit some wood blocks with a plastic hammer. George’s mother sat on a brown-plaid sofa next to a Christmas tree loaded with tinsel.

Kristen nodded at Josephine Gonzales, who was so petite she seemed in danger of being sucked into the couch. “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Gonzales,” Kristen said. “My mother wanted you to have this.” She handed the foil-wrapped bread to Josephine Gonzales, who looked at it with suspicion, causing Kristen to say, “It’s just pumpkin bread.” They hadn’t offered Kristen a seat or anything to drink, making it clear they wanted her gone. She took another moment to glance around the room, but nothing seemed out of order. She said Merry Christmas to them again and turned leave. Next to the front door were a rolled-up sleeping bag, a camp stove, and a box of granola bars. Without commenting on the camping gear, she went back outside and got into her car. She pulled away and drove down the street to her own house. But instead of getting out, she parked where she could see the only road leading out of their neighborhood. And then she waited.

About five minutes later, the Black Ford F-150 drove past, with Mary Gonzales at the wheel. Kristen watched until the truck was almost out of sight before she started to follow it.

*   *   *

The hospital was dark and quiet as Gil and Joe walked through the hallways. Natalie Martin was still in the same waiting room, but the sleeping children were gone, replaced by a woman sitting next to her, holding her hand. Natalie Martin introduced them to her sister, who had flown in for the holidays. Natalie Martin said the medical team had decided to do the surgery at the hospital instead of flying her husband down to Albuquerque. So, after her boys had been picked up by her friend Julie, she was still doing what she had been for the last twenty-four hours: waiting.

Since the reporter’s phone call last night, Gil and Joe had been going over all the threads of the case, checking everything that might indicate a connection between the victims and the laboratory. Gil kept officers in front of the Escobar house, and he sent a car to Abetya’s to keep up the surveillance. Gil called Chief Kline to update him, and Gil suggested they hold off alerting the movie people until they had either verified or debunked the reporter’s story.

“We should just call Lucy,” Joe said. “She’s the one who figured out the laboratory connection. She might know more about it.”

It was a solid suggestion, but Gil didn’t want to call her. At the moment, he never wanted to talk to her again. “I think she’s proven she cannot be trusted as a resource,” he said.

“Come on, Gil,” Joe said. “We should at least ask her.”

“That’s not an option,” Gil said. It must have been his tone, because Joe let it drop.

They kept sifting through all the papers at the office for another fifteen minutes, until Gil finally accepted there was one sure way to find out the truth. That was how he ended up in the hospital. He hadn’t wanted to bother Natalie Martin again, but the only other choice was to go to Lucy, and that was something he wouldn’t do.

“Mrs. Martin, we do have a few more questions for you,” Gil said, pulling one of the upholstered chairs closer to her and sitting down. “Do you know this man?” He showed her a picture of Abetya. She shook her head, and Gil asked, “He isn’t one of the men who broke into your home?”

“No,” she said. “I haven’t seen him before.” Gil looked at Joe, who nodded. It seemed more and more likely that Abetya was the burned man.

“Can we ask more about what kind of work your husband does?” Joe asked, trying to get an answer to their other question—how Hoffman and his team had found their victims. During the car ride over, Gil and Joe discussed the idea that maybe the home invasion crew worked off two victim lists: one from the movie studio and one from the lab.

“He’s a biochemical engineer,” she said.

“And where does he work?” Gil asked.

“He does water safety testing for the state,” she said.

“He doesn’t work for the lab?” Joe asked. “Not even doing contract work or something?”

“No,” she said. Joe looked over at Gil. It looked like Lucy’s tip was wrong; the victims were tied to the movie after all, not the lab.

Then Natalie Martin added, “But I did.”

“You did?” Joe asked.

“That’s where I worked before the boys were born two years ago,” she said. “Actually, I guess, technically, I’m still employed there. I took a leave of absence after my maternity leave was up.”

“In what department did you work?” Gil asked.

“Primary Structural Biosystems,” she said. Joe swore and went pacing off a few feet. “But I can’t tell you what kind of work I did. It’s classified.”

“And do you know Dr. Jim Price and Stanley Ivanov?”

“I know Dr. Ivanov,” she said. “I’ve heard of Dr. Price. I think he might have been the one who replaced Dr. Ivanov when he retired.”

“But you’ve never met Dr. Price.”

“No,” she said. “I was on maternity leave when he transferred over.”

“Do you know if Dr. Ivanov and Dr. Price knew each other?” Gil asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I kind of doubt it.”

“Why’s that?”

“I barely knew Dr. Ivanov, and we worked together for ten years.”

Gil stood thinking for another second. Something was nagging at him. It took him a moment to realize what it was. “You’ve never met Dr. Price,” Gil said again, more to get his thoughts in order than as a question. “So there would be no way that he would know about your Pontiac Tempest?”

“No,” she said. “But Dr. Ivanov might have known about it. I kept a picture on my desk of my husband and me standing in front of the car the night he proposed. My husband’s big proposal idea was to take me out for a ride after finally getting the car redone and then ask me to marry him as we looked at the stars.”

She started to cry, and her sister, who had been silent for the entire interview, hugged her tightly and said, “I think it’s time to take a break.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Martin, I know this is hard, but I have just a few more questions,” Gil said. The sister sighed heavily and leaned back in her chair.

Gil took this as a sign he could continue. “Can you think of anyone at work who had a problem with you, Dr. Price, and Dr. Ivanov specifically?”

She shook her head, then added, “But the people in my office … it wasn’t a happy work environment.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Everyone there is brilliant, but they do better working by themselves,” she said.

“Can you elaborate?” Gil asked. She didn’t answer for a moment. He could tell she was reluctant to talk about it. He tried a different tact. “You’ve been on leave for two years, Mrs. Martin. You haven’t returned to work, but you also haven’t quit. Why is that?”

“I love the work,” she said.

“But you haven’t gone back.”

She shook her head and closed her eyes. “It was my dream job,” she said, opening her eyes at looking at Gil again. “But those people…”

“Your co-workers were competitive?” Joe asked.

“It was more than that,” she said. “In every lab it’s expected that your co-workers will take your chemicals or make sure your experimental protocols are out of date. That kind of stuff happens all the time. People get envious of others moving ahead and want to slow them down. But in our department, it went beyond that.”

“How so?” Gil asked.

“I had my own lab, which I kept locked, but I would come in and find alcohol dumped in my cell cultures, killing months of work. Or whole sections of papers I was going to publish would somehow get permanently deleted from my computer. It finally got bad enough that I told my boss, Dr. Goodwin.”

“What happened?” Joe asked.

“She said I was doing it myself because I wanted someone to blame for my mistakes,” Natalie Martin said. “She made me take a lie detector test, and the security officers kept pulling me in for interviews. After that, I kept my mouth shut.”

“Did you ever find out who was behind it?” Gil asked.

“No. And by the end, I didn’t care; all I wanted was to get out of there,” she said. “The last straw was right after I found out I was pregnant. One of the first things I did was get rid of all the chemicals in my lab that could cause birth defects. A week later, I was running some DNA when I noticed that the agarose gel I was using had a blue tint. I ran some tests and found someone had put ethidium bromide in the gel.”

“That sounds bad,” Joe said.

“Ethidium bromide is a teratogen,” she said, her voice angry. “It intercalates double-stranded DNA. They were trying to expose me to it to give my babies birth defects. What kind of person does that? I took maternity leave the next day.”

*   *   *

Lucy was asleep on her bunk when a corrections officer opened the cell door. “Lucy Newroe, you have a phone call.”

She followed him to the guard station and picked up the phone. She recognized Joe’s East Coast accent instantly.

“How you holding up?” he asked, surprising her with his concern.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m thinking about getting a prison tattoo while I’m in here, to add to my street cred.”

“I can’t get the charges dropped, but I can get you out of there.”

“No, I think I’ll stay,” she said. “I have arraignment in a few hours, and I’ll get out then.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, I don’t want any special treatment. I’ll work my way through the system like everyone else. I screwed up, and I need to pay the price. But thanks anyway.” Clearly, hearing the AA dogma over and over about taking responsibility for one’s mistakes had made an impact on her, she thought.

“You did the crime so you’ll do the time?”

“Something like that, but, really, I just don’t want to go home. There’s a pile of laundry there I want to avoid as long as possible.”

“We got your phone call, or rather the one from your co-worker,” he said. “Thanks for the tip, even if you kind of screwed us in the process.”

“If you had just called me back, we could have avoided all this unpleasantness,” she said. “But aren’t you going to ask me how I found out the lab connection?”

“I kind of feel like I don’t have the right to ask,” he said. “Not after everything. Plus, I kind of think you’ll claim some journalist ethics crap and not tell me.”

“That was the plan, but you had to go and ruin it.”

“Let me know if you need anything.”

“What does Gil have to say about my being in here?”

Joe hesitated. “Not much.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “Dad’s too busy to worry about the screwed-up kid in jail. Does he even know you’re calling me?” Joe didn’t say anything. She said, “So, he doesn’t. That must mean you’d think he’d get mad if he knew we were talking.”

“Something like that.”

“Well, thank you for checking on me, Joe. I really appreciate it.”

“Okay,” he said, reluctantly about to hang up.

“Hey, Joe,” she said, catching him before she heard the click ending the call. “Merry Christmas.”

*   *   *

Gil sat in the passenger seat of the marked SUV parked illegally outside the hospital. Since Joe was driving today, he had been taking full advantage of the perks of having a marked police vehicle—the main one being they could park where they wanted; Gil was trying not to complain about it. Joe had stepped outside to make a phone call, shivering in the morning cold. Gil assumed the secret call was to a woman, maybe someone Joe was supposed to meet in Las Vegas before the case got out of control. Now Joe was back in the driver’s seat with the car idling, typing in the names of the employees who worked in Primary Structural Biosystems from a list given to them by Natalie Martin. The list was two years out of date, but it was a place to start. Joe ran the names through the DMV database to get home addresses. There were six who lived in Los Alamos, three to the north, in Rio Arriba County, and seven in Santa Fe County, two of whom had been Dr. Price and Dr. Ivanov. Natalie Martin was the only one who lived in the city of Santa Fe. All in all, there were fourteen people who needed to be notified about Hoffman.

Joe called the Rio Arriba and Santa Fe county sheriff’s departments, asking them to put patrol cars in front of the workers’ houses in their jurisdiction, while Gil called Chip Davis up in Los Alamos to let him know. Davis said he would send security officers to the employees on the list who lived up on the Hill, and offered to make sure the list Natalie Martin had provided contained the most recent information. Before Davis could hang up, Gil told him what Natalie Martin had said about the sabotage at the lab.

“Did you ever find out who was behind it?” Gil asked.

“It was an internal matter,” Davis said.

“Whom did you suspect?” Gil said.

Davis hesitated before saying, “We only conducted a minimal investigation.”

“Why was that?”

“What happened to Dr. Martin was unfortunate but not unusual. It wasn’t a priority.”

“Is it normal for employees to be given a lie detector test when they complain they are being harassed by a co-worker?”

“I’m afraid I can’t discuss our security policies,” Davis said. That was the sound of the famous Los Alamos wall of silence going up. Gil knew he wasn’t going to get any more answers, so he hung up. As he waited for Joe to finish his call, he watched in the side mirror as the exhaust from their SUV swirled around the bumper. Something about it seemed peaceful.

“What are we thinking here?” Joe asked after he hung his phone. “Where did Tyler James Hoffman get this employee list from?”

“Dr. Price’s house was the first one they robbed, so it makes the most sense they got the list from him,” Gil said.

“Except Natalie Martin says she didn’t know Dr. Price, so he wouldn’t have had her address.”

“Maybe they went to Dr. Price’s house and he gave them Dr. Ivanov’s address,” Gil said. “Then they went to Dr. Ivanov’s house, and he gave them Natalie Martin’s address.”