Chapter Two

A MAINTENANCE MAN DISCOVERED THE BODY when he unlocked a storage room in the basement of Zimmerman Library on Tuesday morning after the long Memorial Day weekend. By the time Claire got to the Center for Southwest Research at nine, all the staff was buzzing about it. Knowing that the best source of information for anything that happened on campus was her colleague Celia Alegria, Claire went to her office.

Celia wore a black dress today. Since there had been a death over the weekend, it seemed like a prescient choice, although on Celia black wasn’t somber. She enlivened it with lots of turquoise jewelry.

“What happened?” Claire asked her.

“Paul Begala in maintenance found a body in a storage room.” Celia tapped the floor with the toe of her shoe for emphasis. “Right under here. It was a woman who hasn’t been identified yet.”

“A homeless person?” Homeless people and impoverished students slept in secluded nooks all over the university. One of those students had eventually become a successful script writer and a model for all those with no permanent address. It used to be that when librarians came to work in the morning they smelled breakfast cooking in the tunnels under the building. But that problem should have been solved by the new security system.

“Did you have someone in mind?” Celia asked.

“Ansia.”

“Why?”

“She was evicted last week during the Jorge Balboa reading. I wish I’d done something to help her.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Told the campus police not to be so rough. Ansia lives a dangerous life. She might have gone into the storage room to sleep and hide over the weekend.”

“Which raises the question of how she got in.” It was Celia’s job to assign and protect the security codes that gave people access to the elevator that led to the basement and the stacks. The same security system guarded the rooms where rare manuscripts and books were stored and allowed only staff to enter and leave the library after hours. Celia gave a code to staff members and graduate students who needed one, changing the numbers periodically as staff came and went.

“Let’s hope the police find that out,” Claire said.

“Let’s hope,” Celia replied without conviction.

“How did the woman die?” Claire asked.

“The police haven’t had time to do an autopsy yet, but there was heroin in the room. Most likely she OD’d.”

******

The police didn’t get to Claire’s office until Wednesday afternoon when a detective named Francine Owen showed up. Her hair was streaked with gray and she wore it pulled up tight like she was trying to give a lift to a tired chin. She had the plump body of a pampered pet, but her eyes had a feral watchfulness.

“Do you have some time to talk?” she asked Claire.

“Of course.”

“Good.” Detective Owen settled into a chair.

“Is this about the woman in the basement?” Claire asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you identified her?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not Ansia?”

“No. The woman we found did not resemble her and Ansia has been seen on Central since the body was discovered. We’re calling the victim Jane Doe. She had a pocketful of twenty-dollar bills. Her plastic bag contained a change of clothes, a toothbrush, a comb, and baby wipes. We found nothing to identify her—no credit cards, no driver’s license, no voter registration, zip, nada. Even the labels had been ripped from her clothes. We were wondering if you could help us.”

“How could I help?” Claire asked.

“I have a photo of the deceased. Would you take a look?”

Claire didn’t relish looking at a picture of a dead person, but she assumed she had no choice. “All right,” she said.

Owen handed over the photograph. The woman’s face was pale and devoid of expression, as if she had been floating in water for days and any trace of feeling had been washed away. The watery thoughts brought back a more distant memory.

“I may have talked to her once about a year ago by the duck pond,” Claire said, remembering a white face coming out of the growing darkness. “It was evening and the Venus-Jupiter conjunction was visible in the sky. The woman pointed it out to me and said, ‘Venus is brighter than most people realize, so bright it casts a shadow. It’s visible in the daytime, too, to those who have eyes to see. I know. I’ve seen it.’ Then she walked away. It was getting dark. I didn’t get a good look at her.” Claire stared at the photo. “It could be this woman.”

“Do you have any idea who she was?”

“No, but I talked to her again last week at the Jorge Balboa reading in the Willard Reading Room. She acted as if she recognized me.”

“Who is Jorge Balboa?” Owen returned a wandering strand of hair to her tight hairdo.

“A Chilean poet,” Claire said. “I arranged a reading for him. It was free and open to anyone who wanted to attend. Ansia came to the doorway and shouted out her own poetry until the campus police took her away.”

Detective Owen smiled. “Ansia has become a poet? What did she have to say?”

“Something about her chiva, her BB, her jeringa, her candy man.”

“She’s an addict. Those words mean heroin, syringe, connection.”

“She also said, ‘You got me all tore up from the floor up.’ ”

“That means she’s using. Did you know that the word ansia means heroin on the street?”

“I thought it was Spanish for anxiety,” Claire said.

“It also means longing and desire. Addicts love heroin more than sex, food, shelter—more than life itself. When all their other veins are gone, they’ll find a car mirror on the street and shoot up in their eyeballs. Heroin killed Jane Doe. What did she say when you talked to her last week? Anything that could help us identify her?”

“She was sitting alone near the back of the room. She had a plastic bag on the chair beside her. She picked it up and moved over to make room for me. Her looks and her dress were subdued. She would have been quite pretty if she’d made some effort. She wasn’t someone I would have particularly noticed, until she told me I looked beautiful.” Claire felt embarrassed to admit this.

Officer Owen smiled as if she remembered what it felt like to be called beautiful. She smoothed her hair. “How sweet,” she said. “It sounds like she recognized you, then.”

“It’s possible.”

“Did she have a plastic bag when you saw her at the duck pond?”

Claire revisited her memory. “She might have.”

“That’s one sign of a homeless person. We’re checking the shelters to see if anyone can identify her. We think she went into the storage room to shoot up and sleep.”

“How did she get in? You need to punch in a code to use the elevator. You have to be a graduate student doing research at the center or a staff member to get the code.”

“We’re looking into that and showing the photograph around to see if anyone can ID her.”

“Has the autopsy been completed yet?”

“Yes. Jane Doe died of an overdose of China White heroin. It’s a West Coast drug, better quality than we usually see on the street in Albuquerque. Whenever something very pure or very strong shows up we see more deaths.”

“I wouldn’t have thought the woman I talked to was an addict. She was so quiet and neat.”

“Jane Doe had needle tracks in her arms and she had twenties, the price of a BB.”

“That’s the currency you get from an ATM machine,” Claire pointed out.

“It’s unlikely the money came from an ATM machine. Jane Doe wasn’t carrying a card.”

“I’m curious. Do the police consider an overdose a murder or a suicide?” Claire asked.

“Any unattended death is treated as a homicide. The only prints we found were the victim’s. If it was a suicide, she left no note to prove it.”

“Would that make the person who sold or gave her the China White a murderer?”

“It might, but it would be difficult to prove. There are other means of putting dealers in jail.” Detective Owen consulted her notes. “I understand that you work with rare books.”

“I do,” Claire replied, wondering what on earth that had to do with the death of Jane Doe.

“We found this in the room with the body,” Detective Owen handed over a book-sized illustration encased in a protective plastic cover.

Claire felt her lunch lurching inside her stomach. “Oh, no.”

“You recognize this?”

“It’s from the book Ancient Sites by the explorer Thomas Duval with illustrations by the expedition artist Quentin Valor. They were the first Europeans to visit many of the sacred sites in the Southwest. Valor sketched Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, and Mesa Verde among other places. This particular illustration is of Spiral Rocks in southern Colorado.” Claire loved Valor’s work and thought it was a tragedy there was so little of it. “Quentin Valor had a short, adventurous life and was shot to death in a barroom brawl when he was thirty-three.”

The artist’s illustrations were full of exquisite detail, but they also captured the mystery and magnificence of the sacred sites. There were two pinnacles at Spiral Rocks spun into shape by eons of wind and water. A chasm several feet wide had developed between them. That was how they would stand and how they would remain until eventually they disintegrated and turned to dust. Twins. Always together. Always apart.

“Does the library have this book?” Detective Owen asked.

“We did,” Claire said. “It was down the hall in the Anderson Reading Room. We had a pristine first edition.”

“Is it valuable?”

“Intact it’s worth several thousand dollars. With pages removed, it’s worth less. I’d say the illustration alone is worth two hundred dollars.”

“Could this Jane Doe have been stealing illustrations from the library and selling them for drugs?”

It was something Claire hated to even consider, but it was a definite possibility. “See how straight this edge is?” She pointed. “The illustration was very carefully razor-bladed out of the book. It could be the work of a professional. It doesn’t look like the work of an addict.”

“Can you show me the book?” Detective Owen asked.

“I hope so,” Claire replied.

She took Owen to the Anderson Reading Room, where even a detective had to show ID before being admitted. She went to a balcony shelf and was pleased to find Ancient Sites exactly where it was supposed to be. Claire lifted the book from the shelf, checked the index for Spiral Rocks, and turned to the page. Her stomach lurched again when she discovered a smooth edge where the illustration had once been. Detective Owen placed her illustration beside it and one razor-bladed edge connected with another in a perfect fit. Claire turned to the other illustrated pages in the book and was relieved to see them all in place.

“Maybe she began with Spiral Rocks intending to work her way through the book,” Owen said.

“If I were gutting this book for drug money, Spiral Rocks wouldn’t be my first choice,” Claire replied. She showed Detective Owen the Chaco Canyon illustrations, which were even more magnificent than the one of Spiral Rocks. Chaco Canyon was a vast and important ruin created for purposes that still weren’t understood. Spiral Rocks was small and intimate in comparison, created by the forces of nature and not by man.

“Those rocks look like . . . you know what,” Detective Owen said.

Claire knew. The Southwest was full of rocks that resembled erect penises. “I don’t think that’s why Jane Doe cut this illustration out,” she said. “Maybe Spiral Rocks represented something to her. If she traded it for China White, you wouldn’t have found both the illustration and the drugs in the storage room, would you?”

“Unless she traded something else for the China White and planned to trade Spiral Rocks the next time she needed to shoot up.”

Claire’s eyes circled the reading room. From floor to balcony, from balcony to ceiling, there were rows and rows of valuable books. The story of the Southwest could be found in this room. How would anyone ever establish what had been cut out of the books here? You’d have to open every book, check every page. There were thousands of books in the Anderson Reading Room and many contained artwork. “Do you think there is a drug dealer who would trade drugs for art?”

“Not at the street level, but maybe higher up. Those guys have to put their money somewhere. Why not collect art? China White is a better class of heroin that we usually see in Albuquerque. Maybe we’re looking at a better class of dealer. On the other hand, Jane may have been selling artwork to another interested party and using the cash to buy drugs. She could also have been turning tricks for drug money.”

“If Jane Doe was systematically looting books in the Anderson Reading Room, she had to be doing it when there was no one around, which again raises the question of how she got in. She’d need an ID in the daytime and a security code after hours.”

“What about the cleaning people? Could they have let her in?”

“No one but staff cleans in the Anderson Reading Room. The security people don’t have a code either. If they find that someone has left a door open, they are supposed to notify Celia Alegria.”

“She’s on my list,” Detective Owen said.