Thirty-One

Joe Donnelly knew she and Lewis would not give any statements to Professional Standards outside the presence of a union representative. Yet here he was at her door unannounced, dropping in like family, the low morning sun behind him making her shield her eyes.

What he said stopped Aragon from closing the door in his face.

“You did the right thing saving those paper towels. We’ve got Geronimo’s DNA, and Linda Fager’s blood.”

Aragon tugged at her night shirt, her toes cold from the outside air. She said, “Skin cells. Love ’em,” and forgot what she really wanted to say.

“If you had waited any longer, the evidence could have disappeared into a garbage truck.”

“Why are you here?”

“To tell you good job, Denise. When was the last time you heard that? And what the hell happened to you?”

There it was. Using her first name, just as when he had come around to her side in his first internal affairs investigation of her work.

“Just made coffee,” she said, and led the way to the kitchen area in her efficiency apartment. Donnelly did not scan her place like an investigator making the most of an opportunity. She handed him a cup that said, “NRA Whitington Center.” Her cup said, “Girls Just Wanna Have Guns.”

“Black,” he said, and she poured. “Like those shiners. I hope the other person looks worse.”

She swept newspapers off the sofa. She had gone to sleep without pulling it into a bed. Before Donnelly knocked on her door she had been reading the front-page story on Fager’s crusade. The morning television news had his story again: The heroic fight for justice, one man against a heartless system. Never mind how he used that system when he had a paying client.

She sat and pulled a blanket over her legs. Donnelly remained standing, nowhere to sit except on the blanket next to her.

“First, I’m telling you, Judge Diaz’s complaint to the mayor about you taping Geronimo talking to Thornton, it’s going nowhere. I talked to a dozen law professors and ex-judges. Only Diaz’s lefty teacher at UNM Law saw any problem with what you did. Mascarenas shared with us a brief Fager wrote for him. It’s good. We stepped off the area where you recorded Geronimo. He had no reasonable expectation of privacy. Objectively reasonable being the test, I learned. It’s Judge Diaz who’s unreasonable and never objective.”

“Worse when Marcy Thornton’s on the case.” Aragon let it go at that. She wasn’t about to stick her neck out with accusations she couldn’t corroborate.

“We both know the score on those two,” he said, surprising her how easily he said it. “But that’s a long-term project. We can’t do anything on the state level. Forget the DA taking on the Chief Judge. The AG lives by the rule that you don’t prosecute members of your own party. We’d need friends at the federal level.”

Aragon smiled. After what Rivera would hear from Fager, they would be making plenty of federal friends.

“And,” Donnelly said, “I don’t like hearing that Walter Fager deserves a taste of his own medicine. Linda Fager deserves no less from us because of who she married. The way she was killed, there’s a good chance her killer will do it again.”

“He’s had plenty of practice.”

Donnelly studied her over the rim of his cup.

“I know you haven’t been observing your suspension. Your face tells me what your mouth won’t.” He held up a hand. “I don’t want to know. Keep on doing what you’re doing. I came to tell you I’m getting the forensics out of deep freeze. It’s my own channel. Dewey Nobles won’t know. Over the transom you’ll get everything a lead detective on a homicide is entitled to.”

“What’s a transom?”

“You make me feel old. I want to talk about Omar Serrano.”

“I don’t.”

“I received an audio file of him sexually harassing you. Calling you Butch.”

Sneaking around with a hidden recorder taping fellow officers was not Lewis’s style. Serrano’s partner, Fenstermacher, had been present, standing back with a pissed-off look. He had caught her at the copy machine a day later and apologized. Maybe burning Serrano on a harassment charge was the only way he could get assigned to a better partner.

Cops nailing other cops over PC shit. A homicide detective getting over the transom, whatever that meant, what she needed to catch a killer—the SFPD had come to this.

“Don’t know anything about it,” she said.

“Has he engaged in sexually hostile comments, made you feel uncomfortable because of your gender or sexual identity?”

“He makes me uncomfortable because he’s a lousy cop.”

“Agreed. I want him riding a Segway at the train station, checking busker licenses, nowhere near real police work.”

“You want real police work, stretch out the suspension. I need more time.”

“First I heard of a cop wanting stiffer punishment. Listen to that audio file. Confirm it’s Serrano and you’ll get more time.”

“Not an even trade. Pegging a murder investigation to a hazing beef. C’mon.”

“Good women can move into Serrano’s slot.”

“The women on my mind are named Linda Fager, Cynthia Fremont, Tasha Gonzalez. They’re not chasing a promotion.”

That made Donnelly smile. “Okay, I’ll tell Dewey I’m the one needs more time because you’re such a hard case.”

“Dewey. When does Professional Standards notice him? He makes Diaz and Thornton possible. When are you going to take him on so that the real police work you value so much can happen every day? So Professional Standards investigators and homicide detectives don’t have to conspire to get the job done before the Deputy Chief wakes up?”

“Thanks for the coffee.” Donnelly handed her his cup and let himself out.

Even if it was only manufactured homes welded together, Aragon liked Javier’s monastery in the pines a lot more than this one. The Buddhist compound sat back from busy Airport Road, behind a dirt parking lot. The entrance was at the end of a narrow alley, the monastery’s high white walls on the right, a neighbor’s dogs and chain-link fence topped with razor wire on the left. Approaching the monastery’s main gate, Aragon felt she was walking the state pen’s exercise yard.

Above the white wall, a tower with shining Asiatic eyes looked down on her. Gold leaf reflected sunlight. She saw a spot where gang graffiti had been covered over. The taggers had reached within six feet of the tower’s decorations. She wondered how long the gold leaf would last.

At the end of the grim gauntlet she found a plaza of single-story wooden buildings. A retreat center had drawn people with license plates from all over the country. Roshi’s white Audi roadster was there. Nobody was around except for a woman in a patterned dress sitting cross-legged on a porch, eyes closed, rocking slightly. Aragon looked for an office but found only a door through white walls to the temple grounds.

The meditating woman opened her eyes.

“Please enter,” she said. “You are expected.”

Aragon had not called ahead. Maybe they said that to everyone who appeared on their doorstep.

Inside the walls, a Scandinavian sort of man—long jaw, mop of blond hair, blue eyes, thin limbs—was raking leaves. All of three leaves. He told her the Roshi was praying and would be out in a minute. He spied a fourth leaf across the courtyard and picked it up by its stem to add to his tiny pile.

Just as she began to enjoy the stillness inside the walls, the thumping bass of a gangster war wagon passed on the street. The man tending leaves flinched at the assault on the courtyard’s quiet. The sound receded as the priestess, today wearing a saffron robe, emerged from a curved doorway. The priestess shielded her eyes against the glare, then opened arms wide.

“Jeep.”

“Buff Roshi. Can we talk?”

They moved to a bench at the edge of a rectangle of smooth river stones.

“What happened to your face?”

She was tired of the question and again explained the Krav Maga class.

“We have definitely traveled different paths,” Buff Roshi said. “I hope we can catch up, do something together. Old times. What would be fun?”

“Any Holly Holm fight.”

“Pass. How about Pitbull? He’s coming to Albuquerque.”

“The rapper?”

“He’s great. My boyfriend loves him. But this will be our night.”

“Can we take your car?”

“Sure. I should have asked. Is there anyone in your life?

“Yes. No.” She didn’t know how to answer about Rivera. Maybe she could talk to Buff, down the road, when they got to know each other again. “Do you go,” Aragon looked at the robe, “like that?”

“Come on. Tight jeans and J Lo chiffon. But you’re not here about a girl’s night out.”

“Buff, I need to know more about celestial burial. Did you see photos of the girl?”

“I didn’t look very closely. I didn’t want to.”

“May I describe her wounds? It’s important.”

Buff Roshi nodded. She took a breath, preparing herself.

Aragon described the lacerations on the thighs. “Is that part of the ritual, or another anomaly, like the writing on the prayer flags?”

“The body is opened to ease its use by creatures of the air and speed transformation of the corporeal individual. In some ceremonies the viscera are exposed.”

“The body is opened after death?”

“Of course. This is a burial ceremony.”

“This girl was alive when she was cut.”

“Perhaps you have a sacrifice, not a burial.”

“The wrists almost suggest suicide. But with the legs, I can’t buy it.”

“The possibility of suicide makes me no happier.” Buff Roshi tilted her head to the sky, sighed, came back. “Buddhist views are more complicated than you find in Christianity’s blanket condemnation. Some Buddhists say saints would not kill themselves, though we have contrary accounts. Some hold the belief that the truly enlightened, those who have mastered themselves, may choose as they please in regards to the death of their mortal carcass. For the unenlightened, Buddhist ethics prohibit suicide. It is an irrational act of desperation and folly. In her next life she must again face that desperation and the evil fruit of seeking annihilation. Was this young woman perhaps suffering a terminal illness?”

“The autopsy found minor liver damage, maybe from substance abuse. Otherwise, an attractive, healthy young woman.”

“And the writing on the flags?”

“Tentatively identified as Ogham, which I’m told was the language of Druid priests.”

“I think you’ll find your answer in the message of those flags.” Buff Roshi folded her hands. “I must tell you I am very disturbed by this. I see a perversion of Buddhist beliefs and practices. Now I fear the same has been done to the faith of my Wiccan friends. Many of their ceremonies are conducted using the old Druids’ language.”

Another war wagon rolled by beyond the walls. Aragon waited for its clamor to pass before continuing.

“I have one more thing to ask. Our girl had sex shortly before she died. Does that fit at all with this transformation thing?”

“Transformation thing. I may use that in my lessons on nirvana.”

“I didn’t mean to … ”

“No, I like it.” The Roshi smiled. “About sex. Buddhism does not see one’s genitals as a pathway to enlightenment. But Wicca in its original form was a fertility religion.” She held up two fingers of her right hand and closed her eyes. Aragon wondered if she was shutting out the world or searching her memory. She opened her eyes with a look of sadness. “A woman in Albuquerque a few years ago, Sylvia something—as in sylvan forests and woods—used sex in a self-shaped transformation ritual. She killed her partner when he was inside her. That is desecration in any faith tradition.”

“I remember. A young Anglo woman picked up an older man, Hispanic, father of three. I think they met in a casino. Took him to the mountains, and killed him as he came under a full moon. The experience was supposed to change her, and it worked. Changed her from a young woman with a future to a lifer without parole.”

“Let’s change the subject,” Buff Roshi said, and took Aragon’s hand, an old friend again, not so much the religious official. “I really want to hear about your life, why you became a police officer, what that’s like. Maybe you could join us for an introduction to meditation. A guided introduction. With the stress and horrors of your work, you might find it beneficial. Do you ever wonder why the people you pursue do what they do?”

Only if it helps me nail them. I could give a fuck what makes them tick.

That’s what she’d say to another cop. To this gentle woman she said, “Thanks, Buff. I’ll keep it in mind.”