Fifty-Three

The New Mexico Women’s Correctional Facility sat on old Route 66, now a frontage road to the interstate, a three-hour drive from Santa Fe. Same concertina wire, heavy metal doors, thick Plexiglas as a men’s prison. Same smells and sounds. Same grim gray everywhere, in the paint, the concrete, the bars, the crushed-gravel exercise area inside grey fencing. But here and there, on the metal scanner, the back of a computer terminal, a locked door: decals of pink ribbons showing staff support for breast cancer research.

Aragon displayed her badge and a guard called for Sylvia Bukar to be brought to a windowless room separate from the visiting area. The woman who entered stood about six feet tall. Dark hair, sunken cheeks. The orange jumpsuit hung off a bony frame. She carried a Bible. Around her neck she wore a wooden cross likely made in the prison’s work shop, glued together, no nails or staples.

“I don’t know you,” Bukar said.

Aragon again showed her badge. Bukar took her time to read the ID card under plastic.

“I like Santa Fe,” Bukar finally said. “There’s a church there, like Notre Dame, but small. They never finished it.”

“The Basilica of St. Francis.” She pointed to Bukar’s open collar where a blue Virgin Mary was drawn in her skin. “You get that in here?”

“One of the Catholic girls did it. I’m into the Virgin. I didn’t grow up knowing about holy women.”

“I’d like to talk about Cynthia Fremont.”

“She wanted to be a holy woman.” Bukar had a worn and distant prison look. A wave of sadness passed over her face. “That girl needed to let God just reach down and find her. She was such a Lone Ranger.”

“She came to see you.”

“Couple times.” Bukar fingered her wooden cross. “She always had questions.”

“About?”

“Why it didn’t work.”

Bukar’s dead prison eyes returned.

“She wanted to know about your ritual.”

“It was mine. I made it up. God, I was crazy back then.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

“I tell it in Bible study. Some of these girls were way crazier than me. It was supposed to change me, give me power, make me strong, lift me off the ground. Look what it did for me.” She tugged at her orange shirt. “And I stopped a man from being loved and giving love. He had three children.”

“What did Cynthia Fremont want?”

“Same thing. To be something better, stronger, something so different she wouldn’t recognize herself. She was trying to learn from my mistakes.”

“She killed herself, you know,” Aragon said. “Didn’t kill anyone else.”

“I had it wrong, she told me last time she was here. It didn’t work for me because I was taking instead of giving. She used some Chinese or something for the bad energy I turned loose by hurting another person. Said it had to be energy of profound generosity. Those were her words. Profound generosity. Something I read really clicked for her.”

Bukar opened her Bible. Aragon checked her watch. She was not going to sit for a lesson on Biblical genealogy, fifteen minutes of begats, or the hidden code in unrelated passages strung together by a woman who once thought human sacrifice was the path to personal improvement.

“No man has any greater gift to give than his life for his brother,” Bukar said without looking to the page she opened.

“Friend.”

“Who?”

“At the memorial for officers killed in the line of duty at the Academy, it says that. The Wall of Honor. But ‘friend’ instead of ‘brother.’ Greater love hath no man than to give his life for his friend.”

“Cynthia liked that a lot. Especially when she changed man to person and brother to mother.”

“No person has any greater gift to give than his life for his mother? I don’t get it.”

“Mother Earth. Cynthia decided that by giving her life to Mother Earth she would be transformed. She wouldn’t really die. She’d live as something different. She asked me once what I want to be. Girl? Out of here, I told her.”

Aragon thought about the site of Fremont’s personal ceremony deep in an untamed wilderness, the offering of her body to birds, leaving what was left for other animals. Even the sex beforehand with two men, another act of giving.

Bukar’s information did not come any closer to making sense of what Cynthia Fremont did to herself.

“I’ve been praying for forgiveness,” Bukar said. “But God tells me he has nothing to forgive. That girl was going to kill herself no matter what I gave her. Or what I said or didn’t say when I had the chance. She left happy last time. Like she had figured something out. Maybe she’s better off now, not in pain anymore.”

That sounded like a throwaway line, but Aragon sensed Bukar meant it. “What pain?”

“That girl was eating aspirin like candy. I never asked, but I figured something was hurting her bad.”

The autopsy showed Fremont had no health issues except minor liver damage possibly due to substance abuse. A detail she had forgotten from the very beginning of the case came back to Aragon. The tox screen showed elevated levels of acetylsalicylate in Fremont’s blood stream. Aspirin. A cheap blood thinner. Fremont had anticipated the blood clotting that made wrist slashing a poor choice for suicide.

“Just now you said she would kill herself no matter what you gave her. You gave her your knife. Sylvia, that’s what she used.”

Bukar wrapped her arms around her Bible and squeezed it to her chest.

“I told her where to find it. That was when I was still crazy, before God reached down for me. I’ll ask the girls to pray for her tonight. And me.”

Back in her car, she reread the tox screen. There it was, an extraordinary amount of aspirin in her system. Also a high blood-alcohol content. Alcohol acted as a blood thinner, something you learned as a beat cop. Street drunks could bleed like crazy.

And high levels of acetaminophen, working in tandem with the other neurodepressants. Fremont had dosed herself to make it easier to take the pain.

The sun was setting on the mountains above Santa Fe on her long drive back. The fading light turned them deep red. The Sangre de Cristo mountains. Blood of Christ. She wondered if Fremont had seen this and decided that was the place to let her own blood flow. Adding something from Christianity to her cocktail of Buddhism and Wicca and whatever else she threw into the mix.

Covering the bases, throwing it all against the wall, hoping something would stick. One lucky number or a winning combination—whatever worked—on a lotto ticket looking like those “co-exist” bumper stickers with symbols from all the world’s religions smashed together.

Or maybe Fremont was just an unhappy, sad, screwed-up kid leaving others to deal with the mess she left behind, thinking nothing of the two young men she’d tricked into helping her.

She should feel sorry for a girl who killed herself. She wasn’t feeling it.

The planning and determination it took, the will power to fight through the pain—Fremont wanted this. And would have had it except the two guys she selected were so horrified they didn’t let the birds finish. Instead of a raven—Hurry, my wings must spread. I must fly—Cynthia Fremont became a body found in a trunk, not the first, not the last.

She caught herself doing what she told Roshi Buff she never did, meditating on the why behind the violence and ugliness she faced in her job. But she let her thoughts run loose as the road took her home.