He celebrated Midnight Mass, a High Mass attended by a platoon of altar servers and perfumed by incense. “Smells and bells” they had called such ceremonies in the seminary.
Father Hugo presided on Christmas Day, giving Riordan the morning off. Though he could have slept in, he woke at his usual hour—four-thirty—and after Matins, he went into the courtyard for a breath of air and his survey of the heavens. But a winter storm was blowing in from the west; a thick overcast extinguished the stars. Nor, when dawn broke, was the sun visible through the rolling, roiling, pewter-colored clouds.
In need of mild exercise, he paced around, feeling lean and fit; now, more than three weeks into his fast, and despite breaking it several times, he’d lost ten pounds and had found never-used notches in his belt. Gratifying as this was, he looked forward to the care package Lisette had promised to send from an Italian deli she knew in Tucson, where she’d gone to spend the holiday with her son and Pamela. Riordan had placed an order with her: aged provolone, soppressata, roasted red peppers, kalamata olives. He was already thinking of what he could make with them. An antipasto. Bruschetta. Sausage and peppers. Then, as if he’d willed its arrival, he saw through the iron pickets of the courtyard’s gate a large box wrapped in brown paper lying on the ground. It must have been delivered last night. He opened the gate, picked it up—it was quite heavy—and lugged it into the courtyard. Ice cubes rattled inside. His name was scrawled on the top of the box. That was all—his name. No return address, no shipping label. Of course. A delivery service would not have brought the package on Christmas Eve, and if it had been sent all the way from Tucson the ice would have melted by now. It had to be a gift from someone local, although San Patricianos, adhering to a hallowed Mexican tradition, usually did not exchange presents until January 6, the Epiphany and the end of the Christmas cycle.
He removed the outer paper, then the candy-striped gift wrapping, its green ribbon tied in a squashed bow. Beneath it was a Styrofoam chest, with a greeting card taped to the top. His heart stopped when he opened the card and glimpsed a cartoonish version of La Santa Muerte, with a curved line connecting her rictal grin to a speech bubble that read, “Feliz Navidad y próspero Año Nuevo.” Inside the chest, a Santa Claus hat topped by a white tassel stood upright on a bed of ice. He caught a faint but unpleasant odor as pulled out the hat with a quick movement, like a magician plucking a cloth to reveal an astonishing trick. As he did, the object beneath the hat rolled backward in the softening ice. There was a moment of incomprehension, a very brief interval—a couple of seconds at most—before his mind grasped what his eyes saw: the severed head of the parish secretary, Domingo Quiroga.
* * *
It was the Old Priest, shuffling into the courtyard to water his garden, who found him, some two hours later. Seated on the stone bench beside Father Kino’s bust, he was staring at his discovery, its matted hair and shriveled flesh dripping moisture as they defrosted. Riordan had no idea how he had summoned the nerve to remove it and place it on the cooler’s lid. He could not explain why he had not raised an immediate alarm and flown to Delores Quiroga’s side, nor why he was sitting there, transfixed by her husband’s severed head. He was in shock, of course, utterly numb and almost paralyzed; but there was more to his peculiar behavior. Something was stirring deep in his mind, vague as a mist, some insight or perception, some truth floating just beyond grasp. It seemed that if he looked into Domingo’s damp, dead face long enough, the bluish lips would part and he would speak, as it were, revealing the nature of the insight, the perception, the truth.
The Old Priest, unsure of what his weak eyes beheld—from his position in the courtyard, he could see only the back of the head—approached Riordan with the movements of a stalking hunter. When he stepped around the bench and recognized the object of his pastor’s attention, he nearly fainted. Moving for the first time in a couple of hours, Riordan reached up and caught him before he fell and lowered the old man onto the bench beside him. The Old Priest made an unintelligible sound, an “Ai, ai, ai” before eking out two words: “Dios mío!”
“God has nothing to do with this,” Riordan said.
The Old Priest’s lips flapped silently. The horror exerted its magnetism on him as well—he could not take his eyes off it. “Do … do…” he tried to say.
“Sí, es Domingo,” Riordan said. “I found him—it—here this morning.”
He was amazed to hear himself speaking with such objectivity.
“Police … You must go…” the Old Priest said, recovering somewhat from his own shock.
“I will…” He waved a hand at the church. The choir was singing the “Gloria,” their voices muted by the thick walls. “When Mass is over. I will go to the police then. We don’t want to spoil everyone’s Christmas.”
The two men were silent for a few moments.
“Tell me again that story about Azazel,” Riordan said, out of some hazy notion that the truth he sought to extract from his mind might be hidden within that ancient myth.
“Qué? Qué estas preguntando?”
“Azazel. Tell me again about him.”
“A being … Some say a being … some say a place.… Both … some say both. The devil and the kingdom of the devil.”
“Might that have been the ancient Hebrews’ way of explaining evil? God does not have full dominion. He shares dominion with Satan.”
Tearing his rheumy eyes away from the head, the Old Priest looked at Riordan as if he had gone mad. Riordan himself wondered if he had, the question was so wildly inappropriate.
“Padre, please … the police,” said the old man. “You must go now.”
“When the Mass has ended,” Riordan said.
* * *
Domingo had been kidnapped shortly after he and his wife came home from Midnight Mass. The street was dark, which was why they hadn’t noticed that both federales guarding their place had been shot to death in their car. Inspector Bonham speculated that they had been killed during the fiesta, possibly while Mass was in progress, to make sure there would be no witnesses. Their bodies, sprawled on the front seat, weren’t discovered until midday on Christmas. Nor were there any outward signs of violence—no bullet holes in the doors, no shattered glass. The driver’s-side window had been lowered, which led Bonham to conclude that the pair might have been talking to their killer. Both had been shot in the same way: two .40-calibers to the head.
He was interviewing Riordan in the municipal police station, just the two of them in an interrogation room furnished with a table and two metal chairs. Once, Rigoberto Ochoa—the municipal police sergeant—stuck his head in the door and asked if he could listen in. A sharp look from Bonham sent him away.
Delores had spent all of Christmas, day and night, under sedation, but she was now able to speak more or less coherently, Bonham continued. She’d had the house keys in her purse and entered through the front door. Aside from the briefest glimpse of two men in ski masks and a crack to her skull, she remembered nothing. When she came to, hog-tied and gagged, Domingo was gone. Bonham examined the scene with an evidence technician and determined that the kidnappers had dragged Domingo out through the back door, where they’d broken in, and into a vehicle in the dirt alley. Tracks indicated a pickup with heavy-duty tires. Then they took him somewhere and decapitated him. “The rest of Domingo’s body,” Bonham related, “is missing—”
“Dear God, they didn’t do that while he was still alive?” Riordan asked.
Bonham spread his hands and shrugged. If his kidnappers did kill him first, they must have shot him in the chest, because there were no wounds to his head. They’d wanted it intact.
Riordan knew he would see it the rest of his life, lying faceup, staring up at him through the ice, like the face of some ancient human discovered in a glacier.
“Your men were supposed to protect him, and they couldn’t even protect themselves.” Still dazed, he spoke in the voice of an automaton.
Ignoring the reproach, Bonham said, “This was a warning to Domingo’s brother—better start paying your cuota—but it was meant for you, too. You more than the brother. I don’t need to tell you what for.”
“No.”
“Do you have any reason, any reason at all, to think that Domingo was mixed up with the cartel?”
“No. I do not.”
“Any idea who might have done this?” asked Bonham.
Riordan’s eyes darted, seeking something, anything, to rest on. He would remember this moment, for he did not weigh pros and cons, pluses and minuses, and come to a decision. The decision had made itself. It had been sitting in his brain since the day before, waiting for him to find it.
“Talk to Danielo García,” he said.
“You think this García murdered Quiroga?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what to think.”
“Then why should we talk to him?”
“He’s not a little snapper. I’d put him in the barracuda category.”
Bonham clasped his hands behind his neck and slowly flapped his elbows. “C’mon, Padre. Stop being coy.”
“Danny thinks of himself as an executive, kind of an accounts manager in the Brotherhood’s extortion division. He makes sure the bills are paid on time. I can’t say if he was the one who put the squeeze on the Quirogas. His big—what should I call it? customer? client? victim?—is the copper mine. So much per week per metric ton. He didn’t say how much.”
Bonham squinted at Riordan. “He told you this?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“A couple of weeks ago.”
“That would have been before our last conversation at the base.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you mention him then?”
Riordan answered by not answering. Bonham acknowledged with a low “Mmmmm-huh” and an almost imperceptible nod.
“It was privileged information?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“So it took something like this for you to change your tune?”
“Don’t trivialize it, Inspector, Professor, whatever you are. Domingo was a good man, a decent man. These monsters will stop at nothing, so I guess I’d better not let anything stop me.”
The Inspector-Professor-Whatever-He-Was studied Riordan for a long moment. “You want to make things right, and this is the right way to do it.”
“No, it’s the wrong thing for the right reason.”
Bonham let out a laugh that sounded like a bark. “I’ve been known to do the right thing for the wrong reasons.” Standing, he leaned across the table and placed his hands on Riordan’s shoulders. “I’ll speak plain. Valencia wants those names. He’s obsessed because we’re in prehistoric times in the Sierra Madre. The name of the game is dominance, and at the moment the score is: the Brotherhood, four soldiers, two cops; soldiers and cops, zero. Valencia means it when he says he’ll arrest every man, woman, and child in this town if that’s what it takes to find out who killed his boys. If we catch whoever murdered Quiroga, you’ll be the first to know. Which means that we had better be the first to know if someday somebody walks into your dark little closet and tells you he pulled a trigger on those four troopers. And anything else we might find useful. Plain enough? You’re in for a dime, in for a dollar.”
“Quid pro quo.”
“Precisamente! Exactamente!”
“The chances that anybody is going to confess to that are slim to nil,” Riordan said.
“But there is a chance, and we want it covered.”
“And the chances I could match a voice to a face, a face to a name…”
“We don’t expect you to ID anybody. If you can, fine; if you can’t, fine, too. All we want is to hear what you hear. You let us worry about the details.” Bonham sat down again and rocked his chair backward, bracing it against the wall. “But it is too bad you don’t have what I have.”
“A badge and a gun?”
“Ha! Synesthesia. Look it up. Your voice makes me see green circles—like sunspots, only they’re green. So let’s say I didn’t know who you were but that I’d seen you once or twice and heard you speak. Then let’s say we were in your dark little closet, and you said something. I’d see the green circles and remember what you looked like. It’s a gift, Padre Tim. Useful in my line of work.”