Seven

“Really, Mr. Fager. We have what we need,” said the voice on the phone, some assistant pathologist in the Office of Medical Investigator.

He did not explain why he was sparing Fager the ritual society demanded from next of kin, no matter the condition of their loved one’s remains. But Fager understood why they didn’t need him at the morgue. He had already identified Linda’s body three times. First, his 911 call. He said, “I found my wife murdered in her store.” He gave his name, her name, the address, and a description of her condition. The 911 operator made him repeat the last part.

Maybe because there was no face, it had been easier to handle. Just another body. He had seen lots of bodies. He did not hold them in his mind. None had been wearing Linda’s clothes, though, or her shoes and the jewelry he had bought her.

The second time he identified Linda was for the officers who arrived at the bookstore. Third time was for detectives Aragon and Lewis. They had questions and put him in a patrol car. There he sat until he learned Linda’s murderer had been apprehended. Until then, he believed they considered him their lead suspect.

He tried again to call up memories of Linda’s face. He concentrated on their honeymoon in Mexico. On the inside of his eyelids he saw tanned legs, red toenails, hands holding a drink with an umbrella. But when he ordered his mind to show her face, his memory clicked off like it had been unplugged to keep from blowing a fuse.

On the sidewalk, after calling 911, he had reached out to his only friend. Leon Bronkowski doubled as Fager’s investigator. They had been together since the Balkan War, when Bronk carried the squad’s M-249, a powerful guy back then who could pull field artillery into position without dropping his pack. Fager reached him in Pinedale, Wyoming, four days into a vacation, his Harley on the sidewalk outside his motel door. He was eating pizza in bed and watching black-and-white Westerns on the little TV that came with the forty-dollar room. Since the call, Bronkowski had been riding all night. He last checked in from Denver. He would hit Santa Fe this afternoon.

Fager had been facing a morning of arraignments and afternoon hearings in three courtrooms. His secretary phoned judges and rearranged his calendar. As for Linda’s shop, there was nothing to do. He would sell the building and inventory—after he found a cleaning service willing to step in. Without thinking what else she would see in the building, his secretary had offered to corner Linda’s terrified store cat and take it home. They would do it together when the police were finished. He’d ask them to put out food and water until then. They’d find the bin of dry food under the front counter.

His decks were clear to hunt Cody Geronimo. Mascarenas may have folded. The cops may have botched another case. Marcy Thornton may be standing on a mountain of technical Fourth Amendment issues and evidentiary privilege.

But a case never finished the way it started.

For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. That’s a law of physics. What went on in courthouses was theater and negotiation, a work of storytelling, no scientifically predictable forces determining what The Law should be. The rules were man-made, enforced by man, ignored by man. Broken by man.

In theory, a fair fight legitimized whatever result an imperfect court system produced.

But prosecutors were often baby lawyers who couldn’t sense a freight train coming if they were tied to the tracks. That cop on the stand with a high school education, or maybe a piece of paper from the community college, she’d been on duty thirty-six hours before confronting a trial lawyer primed for that exact moment. Prosecutors had fifty cases to the defense lawyer’s one. The District Attorney’s office couldn’t neutralize every scripted expert rolled out to bolster the narrative the defense lawyer wanted told. The crime lab was understaffed and underfunded. That judge on the bench depended on lawyers with the spare change to fund campaigns. Assistant DAs could barely cover car payments.

Forget fair fights. The law was what you made of it. So make as much as you can.

In his home office Fager had a framed pencil-drawing Bronk did after their close call in Bosnia: A stork with the outline of a frog lodged in its gullet. Hands reaching out of the stork’s beak and wrapping around its throat. The stork’s eyes crossed and bulged in alarm. Bronk had scrawled Never give up at the bottom.

Fager’s phone rang. It was his secretary, Roberta Weldon, distraught, calling again to ask about his welfare, but now also wanting to know if she should make funeral arrangements.

“No, Robbie,” Fager said, using a level voice to reassure her. “I don’t know when OMI will release Linda’s body.”

He told her to go home. He knew how much she had liked Linda. She gobbled up romance novels Linda sold for fifty cents off a rack on the sidewalk outside the store. Linda’s store cat had been her gift.

Fager spent the next two hours researching Geronimo and printing out everything he could find, regardless of source or relevance. A search of tax records turned up a house near the Santa Fe Opera. He found galleries on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, and Old Town in Albuquerque, and a warehouse in Espanola. All the properties were heavily mortgaged and subject to judgment liens. Marcy Thornton held the mortgages.

Geronimo’s Wikipedia and gallery website bio said he was born in Alamo, the remote Navajo reservation in west central New Mexico. But a story in the Magdalena Mountain Mail said he had been born in that village, thirty miles south of the rez, the son of a Basque rancher. An obituary in the defunct Catron County News quoted a hand on the Adobe Acres Ranch, another hundred miles south, saying that Geronimo had been born there, to Mexican parents working the national forest round up. The ranch bordered the abandoned Warm Springs Apache reservation, where the warrior Geronimo had once spent the winter. The paper later retracted the story, with an apology to settle a suit filed by Thornton. Some money was paid. Fager found the reports not in an online edition of the newspaper—there was none—but a blog written by a ranch wife from that empty part of the state.

Geronimo was forty-two years old by one account. Fifty in another. Never married. Attended Albuquerque’s Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute. The earliest record of the artist had him in Madrid, a former coal-mining town south of Santa Fe on the Turquoise Trail. He turned a crumbling mercantile into a fashionable gallery. His success drew other artists fleeing Santa Fe’s rents and rapacious gallery owners. He went the other direction. He moved into a compound on pricey Canyon Road and branded himself the Native American Picasso.

Fager noted that over the years Geronimo had gone from being Indian, to Native American, to simply Native. Geronimo never specified whether he was Apache, Navajo, or something else. Fager presumed Geronimo had claimed a tribal affiliation when he sought admission to SIPI, but his school records were not publicly available.

In Google images he found photos of Geronimo with celebrities and politicians. The former governor had used a Geronimo watercolor, a cartoonish vista of a New Mexico landscape, as background in his campaign logo.

Despite the millions flowing in, more millions flowed out. Geronimo had been through bankruptcy twice. Fager found a photo of Geronimo’s mansion near the Opera. He threw lavish parties, jetted off to Europe and Asia to hawk his wares, rented an apartment in San Francisco, and once owned a 100,000-acre ranch of checkerboarded public and private land in the wilds of New Mexico.

A telephone call interrupted his reading.

“I’m still doing okay, Robbie. Yes, I’m fine alone. Go home, please.”

Fager checked his watch. Half an hour until his meeting with detective Aragon. He organized what he had printed off the Internet and headed for the door.