Thirty-four

She sat with the street people in the main library on Washington Avenue, smelling them, a man next to her with his head in a skullie bloodstained above the ear. A fresh gash peeked through greasy hair. He nodded like he knew her, this nearly bald, brown woman, face in gauze and tape, huddled over old magazines staring at pictures of girls.

She’d asked for decades-old Cosmo magazines. The reference librarian brought boxes from the basement. Aragon was lucky they had them, the librarian told her, so much of the library’s collection had been scanned and digitized to save storage space. In another couple years, there would be no paper under this roof.

Aragon took a quick look and came to the counter with something she’d found just under the top layer of magazines. Old Hustler issues. Somebody had kept the boxes for reasons other than a backlog in digitizing.

She had twenty years to look through, knowing this was a long shot and there had to be a better way. Certainly not every issue would be here. Rivera could probably get a rookie agent in DC to go to the Library of Congress and make sure they weren’t missing anything.

Was Cosmo in the Library of Congress?

The street people around her changed. The odor did not. She dragged the boxes to a carrel and used them to wall herself off.

This wasn’t her world in these pages. “Look sexy now: make them obsessed with you.” And “What he’s really thinking when you talk dirty.”

The magazines on the floor by her toilet had articles like “Boobs: A Girl’s Best Friend for Concealed Carry.” Or “Mother’s Day for Moms Who Love Guns.”

Aragon searched the Cosmo back issues for the photos Lily said she did when her modeling career was hot. She found lots of tall, thin blondes with almost-uniform face, eyes, and cheekbones. No Lily yet.

“You done with these?”

It was the street guy with the head wound, squinting at the boxes.

“You wondering what are the ten secrets to every woman’s wildest fantasy?”

“The boxes,” he said. “I could use them. I already know the secret to every woman’s fantasy. It’s only two.”

“Tell me, two what?”

“Love. It’s that simple. And respect. The hardest things to give, the hardest to get. Who needs a magazine subscription to learn that?”

“I like the way you think.” She peeled off a twenty and handed it to him. “Buy yourself some Neosporin for that head,” she said and hoped she wouldn’t see him drunk later on the Plaza.

She got a text from Lewis to call. She went outside and found a spot away from the tourists moving between the Plaza and Marcy Street.

He’d just spoken with Thornton’s cleaning woman. Caught up with her at the last job for the day. You need to hear what she says. And don’t worry how you look. Just get over here.

Ermelina Garza waited with Lewis inside the front door of a place called Great Adventures Family Dentistry. Garza wore a flowered smock tied in the back, a purple clip holding white hair, hands as red as Aragon’s burns.

“Some name,” Aragon said before she saw the African safari motifs, the life-size plastic animals kids could climb, a fort of plastic logs under fake palm trees. The receptionist wore a safari shirt with epaulets and a pith helmet. “I get it.”

“Mrs. Garza, I want to show you a photograph,” Lewis said. “Denise, your phone? I don’t have the photos on mine. Step over here in the shade so you can see better.”

They moved from the front door to stand under a sign listing the dentists’ names.

“Yes, that’s Miss Thornton.” Garza settled glasses on a chain on the bridge of her nose. She reminded Aragon so much of her grandmother, around sixty years old, wide hips from bringing children into this world, wide shoulders from carrying a family on her back. “And that’s Miss Lily.”

“Which one of these women would take flowers from the office?”

“Miss Lily. But now she’s gone, Miss Thornton lets me.”

Aragon said, “That’s what she meant by ‘I take the flowers home now.’”

“Always the roses,” Garza said. “She likes roses.”

“Flowers in five places in Thornton’s office,” Lewis said, “twice a week. Reception, Thornton’s credenza, the conference room, Montclaire’s desk, and the main hallway. Mrs. Garza doesn’t know how many in each vase, but says there were a lot. We can get the quantities from the florist.”

“When was the last time there were roses?” Aragon asked.

Garza squinted an eye, furrowed her brow.

“Last week? Miss Thornton won a case. Roses when she won.”

“We didn’t go back far enough,” Lewis said.

Aragon felt momentum building. “How do you know when she’d win a case?”

“Oh, the mess in the morning. Bottles, clothes, spills. They’d call, because I usually came evenings. Come now, what’s her name up front, Maria Nicole. She’d say, clean up before we open. Hurry. I work all night, so I’m up. But I double my hours. Missus Thornton tells me do that.”

“And was there a mess last week?”

“Like it was Cinco de Mayo.”

Aragon showed another photo, of Judith Diaz. “Did you ever see her?”

“I clean her house. And Miss Lily.”

“How do you get in to Miss Lily’s house?”

“I have a key, and the codes.”

Aragon stepped closer to Garza. She added a serious tone to her voice.

“Miss Lily is with the police. She’s helping us on something very important.”

“She’s very nice.”

“Yes, she is. She needs clothes from her house.”

“Denise.” Lewis was giving her a look. She ignored him.

“She asked us to get the clothes, but her keys are in the house. We were going to call a locksmith. You could save Miss Lily some money.”

Lewis, stress in his voice this time. “Denise.”

“Why were you in Miss Thornton’s office making a mess? All the police. That black powder everywhere, I don’t know how to clean it up.” Garza pulling back a little, a hand shielding her eyes from the sun. “Why is Miss Lily working with you? I don’t know.”

“Why is Miss Lily working with us?” Aragon opened her palm to take her phone back from Lewis. She scrolled through files, searching for another picture. “She’s helping us find the person who killed this girl.” She turned the phone so Garza saw a photo of Cassandra Baca, the one of her dead, in the dumpster. “We have to stop that person. They could hurt another child. They need help themselves.”

“Roses.” Garza extended a finger to touch the image. “So many roses. Dios mio.” She chewed a knuckle. Aragon kept the screen in front of her face. “That poor child. Let me get my purse.”

“When was the last time you solved a crime without breaking the law?”

Lewis stood behind Aragon at Montclaire’s front door as she punched in the code Garza had written for them.

“You don’t have to come in.” She used the key and the door popped open, swollen in the frame from heat blasting the wood, stale air rushing out.

“I’m as good as in already.” Lewis checked the street on the other side of a low wall made to look like adobe. The houses in the hills here, north of downtown, were on larger lots, most with elm or pine trees blocking their view of each other. “I don’t stop you or run straight to Sergeant Perez … You’re doing this to me again.”

Aragon left the door open for Lewis. She heard him close it behind her, saw the light from outside shut out.

“All right, what are we looking for?” Lewis asked.

She tapped a wall switch with the back of her hand. Track lighting under thick, rough-cut timbers showed a Mexican tile floor, a Navajo-style rug, low leather furniture. Dust on everything. It was cool in here, the thick walls doing the job of air conditioning. A bookshelf ran along the wall opposite the couch, photos of a much younger Montclaire in frames on the shelves. No books. Just dozens of framed photos of young Lily.

“Are we digging through panty drawers?” Lewis hadn’t come very far from the door.

“We’re looking for pictures.”

“There’s pictures.” Lewis swept his hand toward the bookshelves. “Lily likes to look at herself, doesn’t she? She hasn’t aged too bad.”

“Models have portfolios. At Santa Fe University, you see girls with the big black folders walking around, the ones who want to break into movies. Lily’s always going on about her glory days in front of cameras, marching down catwalks. Pedaling a bike through sand and posing on a seesaw. I want to see if she’s been lying to us, or not telling us everything. So much of what she’s told us, we can’t take to the bank.”

“That check would bounce. What’s a model’s portfolio look like?”

“Like this.”

On the coffee table, alone, lay the black, oversized folder she’d seen before when she brought Lily to collect clothes. It was closed with a string wound around a black leather tab. Aragon sat on the couch and brought the portfolio onto her lap. Lewis joined her, his weight on the cushion leaning her toward him. Under the cover were loose photographs of Montclaire holding an umbrella in rain, sprawled on cascading marble stairs, and a sheet of proofs, close-ups of her face from different angles.

The first mounted photograph showed Montclaire on a stool, hands under her thighs, stretching her long arms, heels on the highest rung, bony knees wide. It was the only photo, centered on the page of stiff, heavy paper.

“Look how young she is,” Aragon said. “Barely a teenager.”

“The camera’s looking straight up her dress. It’s almost kiddie porn.”

“This is.”

The next page, black-and-whites mounted on the corners, Montclaire in the exact same pose as the first shot. But naked.

Aragon felt something right then. Montclaire had been abused like herself, by a camera instead of a gang pinning her to a hot sidewalk. She concentrated on Montclaire’s eyes. In the early photos there was a spark, a girl setting out on the rest of her life, excited, having fun. Even in the early nude photos there was life, a challenge to the camera, determination overcoming fear.

More nude shots, getting more graphic, the look of determination fading, then Lily in a fur, a dead animal around her shoulders, ice and snow in the background. Older, more cleavage than the first shots. The dead eyes showed up for the first time. At a distance, the clothes, the colors, the setting made her. Up close, it was all the eyes and the dark light inside.

Aragon felt Lewis tense on the couch next to her, their thighs touching as they looked through the portfolio. His breathing grew shallow. The hand on his knee balled into a fist.

“Rick?”

“They killed her.” He’d seen it, too. “This is a dead woman in designer clothes, all these glamorous locations. Look, her arms and legs, you start seeing the bones, more and more every year. This one of her and the ravens, she’s in black. This one, on her back, just bones under the skirt, laying back, like, come on in.”

“Her face in that one, pasty. Like ash.”

“Those eyes aren’t seeing anything.”

“‘When dead girls were in,’ Montclaire said once.”

The next shot showed Montclaire clearly posed as a corpse, the skeleton under her skin so close to the surface, shadows making it jump out. Eyes painted black, lips, fingernails, hair. The tip of her tongue, too, between white teeth.

“On a bed of roses.” Aragon exhaled it more than said it. Surrounding a dead Lily Montclaire: red, red roses, the only color in the shot matching a drop of liquid in the corner of black lips.

The house was quiet, cool, in shadows except for the light they’d turned on. They sat in silence. They’d seen so much together. They were sharing something else they knew would be with them the rest of their lives. Something no one would ever feel the way they were feeling it now.

Aragon was the first to move. She turned the page. More dead Lily shots. That was Notre Dame in Paris behind her in this one, on her spine, the back of her hands splayed on the ground, legs hooked over the stone wall, her pelvis thrust toward the thousands of statues and faces on the church front. This was Times Square, dead Lily in a gutter, tourists snapping photos. Nobody on a cell calling for help. Was that staged, the tourists actors, or did the photographer stand back to catch the crowd’s reaction? Maybe disguised as another fascinated passerby?

Dead Lily in a folding seat in a football stadium, a beer in the holder on the back of the seat in front, half-eaten hot dog by stiletto heels, other trash around her feet, a team practicing on the green rectangle below.

Dead Lily in an airport waiting area.

Dead Lily at Mardi Gras, a string of beads, a naked pale chest, nipples—shit, painted black—poking at fat men with mouths gaping, drinks in plastic cups spilling on polo shirts.

“What were these photos advertising?” Lewis’s hand was shaking. He’d seen a girl die in the past minutes as they turned pages. He was probably thinking of his own girls, how they could go from the pure, happy child in the first photos—a really pretty girl—to this. Like that.

“Nothing I’d want to buy.”

The last page had the cover from an old Cosmo issue. The stupid headers: “Twelve ways to enjoy dangerous sex and laugh afterwards.” Jesus. “Eat your way to power orgasms.”

“You could write that one,” Lewis said, pointing. “The hidden power of Lotaburgers. The green chile G spot.”

He was trying for something to lift the shadows. It was okay.

Two small photos were taped to the bottom corners of the magazine cover, the ones Lily had told them about: her in a sundress pedaling a bike across a sand dune, and her on a seesaw. Her face in Cosmo. The high point in her career.

Or the end of it.

The one of her on a seesaw was not the way Lily had described it. It was two Lilys: on the low end, a dead weight, the ashen skin and black makeup; a living, breathing Lily in a yellow sundress and hat suspended in the air at the other end of the board.

“I found this magazine at the library. I remember the stupid advice columns. There were no photos of Lily Montclaire. That was her fantasy.”

“These photos are all of a sudden different.” Lewis turned back to the one right before, dead Lily in the passenger seat of a convertible, an expensive car, a bottle of Champagne in a lifeless hand. “She’s alive again.” He returned to the sunny photos.

“Except for her double on the seesaw.”

“These are taken from a distance. You can’t see her eyes. On the bike she’s looking away. On the seesaw, she’s looking toward the sky.”

“Dead Lily’s looking straight at the camera.” Lewis returned to the nude photos at the beginning, then closed the book, rewound the string around the leather tab, and settled it in the dust-free square on the coffee table. “This what you wanted to find?”

“More than I expected. But something else I want to check.”

She pushed herself off his leg to stand and entered the hallway to the back of the house. Bedrooms on the right, the bath across the hall. Dark in here, only clerestory windows up high above a modern, European-style shower stall of slick stone. A showerhead as big as a sunflower.

Lewis, behind her, said, “I don’t understand these designs, no shower curtain, no door. They remind me of outdoor showers at the Jersey shore. With my girls, we’d have a flood every night. I guess that’s why there’s a drain outside the shower on the floor, too.”

“Lily did it here.”

Aragon saw it: Cassandra Baca showering after a rough party with older women. Facing the wall and showerhead, her back to the bathroom.

“Cassandra never finished rinsing,” Aragon said. “Lily killed her where the body wouldn’t gather trace evidence and clean-up was easy.”

“Shit. The caked shampoo in her hair. She threw her wet into the dumpster.”

“Those movies, they don’t show every second, I know, but they don’t ever show Lily biting Cassandra. She brought her here afterward, driving the Durango that night. Maybe she paid Cassandra for an extended one-on-one, suggested the shower before she headed home to that filthy bathroom her mother trashed. Freshen up, let me give you some tips on makeup and hair. I was a fashion model by your age, you know, with my own agent, flying all over the world, limousines from the airport. New York, Paris, Rome. It’s something you might want to try. With your looks and body, you could make a lot of money. And then she shot a girl washing her hair and dreaming.”

“Let’s get out of here.” Lewis was already moving into the hallway. “I want to stand in the sun.”

They walked streets, letting their minds work, keeping thoughts to themselves. Lewis’s phone rang. It was Elaine Salas. She wanted to see them. They returned to their car and drove to Salas’s office.

“You found something,” Salas said. “I see it in your faces. I did, too. But it confuses the hell out of me.”

She’d found blood in Thornton’s office, under the sofa. She showed them a fleck of dried blood on a microscope slide, held down with another slide on top. But something wasn’t right. It was drops of blood, hard to see on the Persian carpet. Distinct drops of blood. No spatter. No spray. No blood anywhere else in the office, including the sofa above.

It looked like it had coagulated before it hit the carpet fibers. It hadn’t been absorbed. In other words, it hadn’t come straight out of a body.

She ran the samples fast against Cassandra Baca’s blood type and DNA and got a nearly perfect match.

How’d it get there?

Aragon said, “I think I know. But we’ll never prove it.”