Forty-Five

“Lesson one I got from Walter in my first trial,” Marcy Thornton said, facing the mirror. She picked a blond hair off the lapel of her black silk jacket. “When you look a jury in the face, they have to see you believe your own words. Helps to have a little truth in the mix, he’d say, like false movie buildings in westerns held up by a few solid timbers. He liked talking like that. We got these speeches after he’d win a case, a little bourbon in him, helping us baby lawyers along the path to being badass lawyers. He said something I really like, Walter at his most eloquent: With a single pillar of truth to lean on, you could build a city of lies. He was some builder, that Walter Fager.”

“Pants are right for this,” Montclaire said, on Thornton’s office couch touching up chips on toenails with a toothpick dipped in polish. “You need them paying attention, not leering at your legs.”

“Then you wear pants, too.”

“Damn,” Montclaire found another chip. “Sandals were all wrong for Cody’s ranch. You have remover? This isn’t working.”

“In the bathroom, under the sink. Keep up with me on the visuals,” Thornton said, and tugged her cuffs through the sleeves of her jacket. “I want my jurors knowing our facts before they’re selected. We can’t do this once Cody’s arraigned.”

Montclaire spoke from the bathroom off Thornton’s office, her head in the cabinet under the sink.

“Pitcairn came through. He was inspired.”

“His bill is inspired. But we’ve got Fager’s military records.”

Montclaire returned with a little bottle in her hand. “Forget it, this is taking too long. Closed toes.”

“We both do pants.”

“Both of us in black, we’ll kill. Back in a sec. I haven’t forgotten how to change in a flash.”

“I can’t believe I actually get paid to do this,” Thornton said.

Lewis hung at the back of Thornton’s conference room, where he could see everyone. Aragon sat up front with reporters. Nobody questioned her as she claimed a chair directly in front of the podium, set up with a microphone and single white rose and easel to the side. Behind that, a secretary was extending a projection screen along the length of a pole with a clip on top. In the aisle between chairs Aragon saw a PowerPoint projector.

Montclaire entered first, long legs under black pants, a little flare above her high heels, a folded leather bow over closed toes. She propped on the easel an enlarged photo of an aluminum ranch gate and a lock hanging by a snapped hasp. Then came Marcy Thornton.

Short, energetic steps carried her to the podium, the cut of her black suit making her seem taller. She looked out over a room full of reporters and cameramen. Her gaze settled on Aragon.

“Detective. Glad you’re getting this first hand. My journalist friends don’t always quote me accurately.”

Aragon leaned back, crossed her legs and aimed her belt recorder at Thornton like a weapon.

Thornton addressed the room. “We provide these facts to assist the authorities in discovering the truth, and bringing the real murderer to justice.”

Aragon leaned into the reporter next to her.

“Did she say something about truth?” She didn’t whisper.

Thornton gave Aragon a bitter smile.

“This broken lock.” Thornton pointed to the photo on the easel. “For years my client has observed signs that someone has been trespassing on his ranch land. He thought they were souvenir hunters, searching for arrowheads, bullets and such at the site up the river where Apaches fought the U.S. Calvary over a hundred years ago. So that he could substantiate a complaint to the appropriate agencies, he installed a surveillance camera. That camera was recently stolen and its theft reported to the county sheriff.”

Never mind the camera was in Geronimo’s workroom, aimed at the embalming table. Aragon kept that to herself.

“Before the camera was stolen, it recorded a middle-aged man driving across my client’s property, clearly with a destination in mind. My client eventually identified that person as Walter Fager.”

Aragon texted Lewis: Film at ten. Not. Only G’s word. Video card was wiped.

“My client is understandably leery of the police, after he was wrongly accused some years ago of murdering a woman named Tasha Gonzalez. Then came his latest wrongful arrest at the hands of the same law-enforcement authority. But I digress. My client followed Mr. Fager’s tire tracks. What he found disturbed him greatly. My client found a graveyard beyond his fence line. We believe Mr. Fager began visiting this site before my client bought the property, at a time when Mr. Fager wandered New Mexico in a drunken haze, having gone AWOL from the Army after the Balkan War. I will return to that.”

The reporters leaned forward. Aragon checked that her recorder was working.

“Cody Geronimo noticed something else even more troubling.” Thornton paused for effect. “Each time after fresh tire tracks crossed his land there would be news reports of police searching for another missing Santa Fe woman. Cody Geronimo uses a cleaning service called Mujeres Bravas. He got to know some of the women who cleaned his gallery. Some of them were among those reported missing. With that information in mind, he came to see me. As he was turning into the parking lot, the one you all used today, there outside Mr. Fager’s office he saw a Mujeres Bravas station wagon. Mr. Fager uses the same cleaning service that employed the missing women.”

Lewis texted Aragon: True. Fager uses MB.

“Cody Geronimo was scared. Of Mr. Fager. Of the police. He reached out to someone close to Mr. Fager, for more information and also to warn her. Linda Fager. He went to her store on the pretext of buying a book, but really to introduce himself and tell her he had very troubling information about her husband. She might be in danger. He said enough for her to get upset. Not angry at him making accusations against her husband. Upset that it had the ring of truth. She asked him to leave, but to return when she had time to compose herself. Cody Geronimo was seen in the bookstore talking with Linda Fager by two people, whose physical descriptions we will provide to the police.”

And who we will never find, Aragon thought. A risk-free throwaway that makes you look like a good guy.

“Cody Geronimo was also upset, and had a beer to calm himself. What he found on his return was utterly horrible. I need not describe the details, but assure you Mrs. Fager was so brutalized it threw my client into shock. He mindlessly dropped his car keys. He was terrified the killer might still be in the store and ran outside. He wandered, trying to stop hyperventilating. When he returned to his vehicle, the police were there. He was about to tell them what he knew and what he had seen. But they rushed him. Due to his prior bad experience with Santa Fe police, and unsettled by the horror he had seen up close, he panicked and fled, and was wrongly arrested shortly afterwards.”

Aragon threw a question at Thornton. It might be her only chance. The way it worked from here on out was lawyers asked questions of cops.

“All the women found behind your client’s ranch were Hispanic. Linda Fager was Anglo and fair skinned. Can you explain that inconsistency?”

“Not an inconsistency at all. Mr. Fager killed his wife because of what she had learned from Cody Geronimo.” Pencils scratching, flashes exploding, reporters mumbling to themselves as they wrote furiously. “Mr. Fager entered the store after my client informed her about the man she was married to. She confronted him. He butchered her and had the audacity to make the 911 call. The police should have seized his shoes and clothing, bagged his hands, and taken him into custody instead of the innocent man they profiled because he is Native American.”

The reporter next to Aragon dialed his cell phone. “Mr. Fager,” she heard him say. “This is Hank Thomas of The New Mexican … ”

“Please take your conversation outside,” Thornton said, and the reporter moved to the hallway. “Yes, we are saying that Walter Fager is the murderer, of those poor women in the desert and his own wife. He is now trying to cast his guilt upon Mr. Geronimo. He is exploiting a police error to portray my client as the prime suspect. All of it, his pathetic petition, his silly lawsuit, his statements to the media—all of it is designed to divert attention away from himself.”

“What’s this about his time in the military?” a female television reporter asked. Montclaire was at the PowerPoint projector. A black-and-white image appeared on the screen beyond the podium. A tall, lean American standing with darker men, some in turbans, some with scarves over faces, old rifles slung over shoulders. The setting was wild and mountainous. The American was armed with an M-16, a grenade clipped on his chest and a K-bar knife on his thigh.

“This photograph hangs in the office of Walter Fager. I saw it when I worked for him. That man with the rifle is a much younger Walter Fager.”

Aragon detected glare in the photo, as though it had been shot through a window.

“Mr. Fager insists he served in Bosnia before the U.S. military officially entered that nation.”

Montclaire advanced the slide. A map of the Balkans appeared with a red arrow marking a small town whose name Aragon could not read.

“Just recently Mr. Fager revealed that upon leaving the military he was, in his words, ‘fucked up pretty good.’ We have learned the reason for his being fucked up pretty good.”

The next slide showed a pile of bodies inside a farmhouse.

“Batke, Bosnia. This photograph was taken by a young man from the village before he fled. According to records of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Muslim women were slaughtered here by Croatian militia. A Muslim charity has made contradictory claims.”

A commotion at the back of the room silenced Thornton. Walter Fager stood in the doorway, jaw set, staring at the screen.

Thornton squared her shoulders and continued.

“Walter Fager has told everyone who ever worked for him that photograph of him as a young soldier was taken in Batke, Bosnia. The Muslim elders of that community alleged it was an American who killed their wives and daughters. The allegation was dismissed as an effort by Muslim extremists connected to Al Qaeda to incite anti-American hatred. The Pentagon insisted Americans had never reached Batke. The war crimes investigators did not know about that photograph in Walter Fager’s office.”

Another photograph lit the screen. An aerial shot of a cleared plot in rugged mountains, distinct depressions in neat rows marking the ground.

“The Red Crescent found this field outside Batke.”

The screen shifted to show an aerial view of the graveyard beyond Geronimo’s ranch house. Neat rows, distinct depressions in the ground.

“And this is where the FBI discovered those poor women. Do you see any similarities? Draw your own conclusions.”

Walter Fager charged Marcy Thornton.

Aragon came out of her chair as quickly as a male reporter two seats away. Fager reached Thornton before they could intercept him. He lifted her off her feet by the front of her shirt and threw her against the wall. His hands went for her throat.

Aragon grabbed Fager’s right hand, put him in a wrist lock and bent back two fingers. He was on the ground in less than a second. The male reporter straddled him and bent back his other arm.

“Hey,” Aragon said. He was hurting Fager.

“FBI. Rivera sent me.”

The television crews removed cameras from tripods and moved in, competing with reporters snapping photos on cell phones and news photographers with digital zooms. A mix of fascination and pathos spread through the room. The man writhing on the floor, now sobbing, now spouting curses, was not the Walter Fager who had dominated Santa Fe’s courtrooms and terrorized assistant district attorneys for decades.

Aragon said, “His office. Next door.”

She released her wrist lock. Lewis helped the FBI agent lift Fager to his feet. Fager went quietly as they pushed their way through the media throng. Reporters trailed, shouting questions. Cameramen ran ahead for what was going to appear on the evening news like a perp walk.

The agent said his name was Tucker and helped get Fager to his office. The photo of Fager in Bosnia was there behind the desk, next to a photo of a scowling Winston Churchill. They asked if he had firearms in the office. He shook his head, said his gun was at home. A distraught secretary, paralyzed in her chair at the desk outside the door, confirmed that information. They checked Fager’s desk anyway and found no weapon.

Aragon got Rivera on the phone. They agreed Fager would not be at liberty long. A motion to revoke his release would likely be filed, with a hearing first thing tomorrow. She said Thornton had done a better job than they had tying Linda Fager to the other murders. Rivera wanted time to consider Thornton’s play and would call back later.

Next Aragon called Bronkowski. He said he was on the road, heading to Oklahoma.

“If you want to help your friend, I need to know what guns he keeps at home.”