CHAPTER NINE

 

“Pay me.”

“The dice hate me.”

“Pay up.”

Skywalker’s soft voice chimed in. “Welcome to the bankruptcy club.”

“Chite,” Kelly said in Spanglish, after which she handed over three hundred dollars’ worth of Monopoly money. Buddy Mandrell, one of her older sister’s suitors, smirked and dropped the money onto his stack.

“Watch your language,” Jerry said, rolling dice. “Your dad’s here.”

Kelly glanced over her shoulder. “He’s not listening,” she said.

Loren sat on an easy chair across the room, watching television and doodling on a pad. “I can hear perfectly well,” he said. “And that word had better have been chiste.”

Kelly blinked for a moment. “Sí, patrón,” she said. “I was just making uno chiste, that’s all.”

“Roll the dice, Ivor,” said her sister.

“Just a second.” Ivor Thomas left the folding table in the living room and stepped through the front door. The screen closed behind him on hushed hydraulics.

Ivor and Buddy were among the candidates to replace Katrina’s last boyfriend, whom she’d dumped about a week ago— Katrina changed boyfriends more frequently than she changed the color of her lipstick. Her tomboy tastes, fortunately for Loren’s peace of mind, led her to local kids, good ole boys in training . . . Loren figured he knew how to handle ole boys, all right.

The only problem was that sooner or later all apprentice ole boys start to dip snuff. Judging by the worn white circles on the back of Ivor’s and Buddy’s jeans, that stage had been reached by both of them.

Ivor reentered, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a blue print handkerchief. Loren looked up at him.

“You want me to get you something to spit in?” he asked.

Ivor shambled to a surprised stop. “Uh,” he said. “No, sir.”

Loren always brightened at the way young ole boys always called him “sir.” He looked over his shoulder at the Monopoly game. “How about you, Buddy?”

“No, sir.”

“Sorry to interrupt. Go right ahead with your game.”

You had to let ole boys know right from the start that they couldn’t hide anything from you. Then keep demonstrating it, in case they weren’t bright, because often they weren’t. And the ones that were smart— and there were more smart ones than a stranger might think— had got into the habit of acting dumb, because that was what the role required.

The phone rang, and Kelly ran to answer it. She was wearing a lot of makeup tonight, Loren noticed, scarlet lipstick and lurid purple eye shadow, nails done in a different but equally violent shade of purple. A T-shirt that read NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE EXCESS.

Dressing up for her sister’s boyfriends. The difficulty with Katrina’s habit of trying out several boyfriends at once was that they all got used to hanging around the house, and when Katrina made her choice from the pack, the rest of them often as not decided to hang around Kelly, something Kelly was all too willing to encourage. Her parents had declined to let her out on solo dates— group dates were okay— but the problem was a constant one.

“Hi,” Kelly said, answering the phone. “Tuesday? I’ll ask.” She came back to the living room, her body twisted in a coltish, ungraceful stance, ankles crossed, a stance that mirrored the social awkwardness of her position. “Daddy,” she said. “It’s Mrs. Trujillo. She wants me to sit Tuesday.”

Loren looked at her. “No.”

Her stance grew more awkward, more unbalanced. “What am I gonna tell her?”

“Tell her that you forgot that you already have a sitting job.” Loren reached into his pocket and pulled out his money clip. He took ten dollars off it and handed it to Kelly. “Tell her you’ve been paid in advance.”

“Okay!” brightly. Kelly spun about, the awkwardness gone, smiling around her braces. She danced back to the phone on winged heels.

“I don’t believe it,” said Katrina. “Ten bucks! Are you gonna actually—”

Loren scowled over his shoulder. “This,” he said, “is not a matter for discussion.”

The Monopoly game continued, a bit subdued. Bursts of mechanical hilarity came from the TV set, which was pulling in an Australian sitcom off the satellite. Loren returned his attention to the white recycled legal pad in front of him.

JOHN DOE, it said in big letters, right in the middle. Just below, in much smaller letters, were the initials r.d.

Loren had put the letters in lowercase so that they would be less intrusive. He didn’t even want to think about what they might represent.

If he did his police work, he thought, he wouldn’t ever have to think about it. If he could find the killer, get the proper evidence against him, it wouldn’t matter who the victim was.

ATL was at the top of the page, in medium-sized letters. Names— Dielh, Patience, Jernigan— were connected to ATL by radiating lines, then by another set of lines to John Doe.

Delta E was written and circled. So was Delta t.

Loren wished he could talk to Debra about it. Sometimes just talking helped to clarify things. But Debra was off helping to costume a production of The Gondoliers at the Presbyterian church, a favor to a friend.

Loren looked at the pattern and couldn’t find anything new in it. He put the pad down and stared at the TV. Someone had just made a joke and the canned audience was finding it hilarious. Loren did not understand why.

His skin felt as if it were radiating mild heat. He touched his forehead lightly with his fingers; they came away warm. He’d got a slight sunburn that afternoon, going from door to door in Vista Linda.

He hadn’t found a thing. No one had seen Jernigan return home, no one had seen John Doe, and no jury was going to believe a ten-year-old’s evidence about something he hadn’t really been paying attention to.

Maybe the autopsy would tell him something he didn’t know, though he doubted it.

He’d just have to keep putting pressure on people. Sooner or later, someone— most likely Timothy Jernigan—would inform. That was how most cases got broken— people ratted out their comrades.

And a good thing, too.

Loren put his pad down and went into the kitchen for a grape soda. He closed the refrigerator door with its commanding GUARD THE EARTH! poster and then saw that Skywalker had followed him into the kitchen.

“You want something?” he asked.

Skywalker shook her head, a gentle wave rolling through her long, straight hair. Her T-shirt had a cartoon of a humpback whale in combat fatigues and helmet, clutching an assault rifle. PROTECT THE EARTH! it said.

“No,” Skywalker said. “I’ve just gone bankrupt.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m not.” A bit defiantly, her lips pressed together. “I don’t want to be a success as a land developer, anyway.”

Loren grinned. “Good for you.”

“I’d rather play a more ideologically sound game. Like Monkeywrench or Balance of Nature or something.” She shrugged. “I got outvoted.”

Ideologically sound, Loren thought. Jesus. He sipped grape soda. “Do your parents agree with you? Is that why they live in town instead of Vista Linda?”

She nodded. “Yeah. They’re both active members of the Eco-Alliance.”

“Good for them.” They were on the right side of a few things, Loren thought, even if they were fuzz-brained enough to name their kid Skywalker.

“I mean, we drink bottled water in this town because of what the mines have done to the water table. And we’ve had three years of drought in a row, and the water table’s even farther down, and industry still won’t believe about the greenhouse effect. You’d think people would notice this stuff.”

“You’d think they would.”

“And all the timber industry can do is blame eco-saboteurs for starting forest fires that were clearly started by lightning strikes. Monkeywrenchers wouldn’t put more carbon dioxide in the air, for Christ’s sake. Industry can’t even keep its lies consistent.”

Loren nodded. “I hadn’t considered that.”

She scowled. “It really gets me annoyed.”

Loren looked at her. Every time he had a conversation with Skywalker, he had the impression he was talking to an adult, not a fifteen-year-old. His own children seemed so much younger.

And a lot more carefree.

Her parents, he remembered, worked at ATL. And Skywalker was bright, obviously kept her eyes open.

“I suppose you’ve heard about our murder,” Loren said.

Skywalker gave a little smile. “I thought you had a rule about discussing police business at home.”

Loren shrugged. “I thought you or your parents might know some of the people involved.”

“Oh.” She seemed surprised. “You mean this is an interrogation?”

“Sort of. Do you mind?”

She shrugged. There was an amused light in her eyes. “I guess not.”

“Do you know Timothy Jernigan? Or his wife, Sondra?”

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Amardas Singh? Joseph Dielh?”

Two more shakes of the head. “I guess I’m not much help, huh?”

“Where do your folks work, anyway?”

“My dad’s a specialist in crystal growth. I don’t think he deals with any of the people you’re talking about. My mom’s a particle physicist working in the black buildings, and she doesn’t talk much about any of the people she works with. She’s not allowed to, basically. And I don’t see her very often in any case.”

“She’s working all the time?”

She shrugged. “She and my dad separated. I live with my dad.”

“I didn’t know.” Uncomfortably. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay. I’m glad it happened, to tell the truth. Things were getting tense.” She gave a deep sigh. “Except now there’s a big custody fight. My mom wants custody just to keep Dad from getting me. It’s not as if she ever pays attention to me or anything.”

“Did they ever talk about William Patience?”

“The security guy?” Skywalker gave a laugh. “He’s an anal-retentive jerk, if you ask me.”

A gust of laughter broke from Loren. “You’ve heard about him?” he said.

“I’ve met him. He lectured to our church group— we’re in the Earth Church— about mountaineering and showed some slides. He’s one of the climbers who try to leave a clean mountain behind, picks up all his spikes and stuff. You know.”

“Not really.”

“With some people it’s respect for nature, but for him it’s just another way of being tight-assed. My mother used to complain about him all the time, about how the security people were always listening in on her phone conversations or getting on her case about putting her work in the safe every time she went for a cup of coffee. Everybody hates the guy.

“Of course,” nodding her head, trying to be reasonable, “it’s his job to be a tight-ass.”

“There are ways of being nice about it.”

“True. And he’s not nice at all.” She seemed happy now that she’d found a legitimate reason for disliking Patience.

“How come,” said Kelly, appearing in the doorway, “you let her use words like tight-ass and I can’t—”

“Because,” Loren said, “this is an interrogation. I have to take note of her exact wording and phraseology.”

“A what?” Disbelieving.

“I needed what your friend knows,” Loren said. “And now I do.”

The two girls caught each other’s eyes and burst into laughter.

Loren returned to his television and his pad, gazing for a long time into the unanswered scrawls that were his questions.

*

“Try and watch the tooth grinding, okay?” Debra put her spectacles on the night table and reached for the light.

“I’ll try,” Loren said. He was lying in bed but he didn’t feel like sleeping at all. Thoughts, images, disconnected ideas kept rolling through his mind. William Patience staring at Loren’s boxing trophies, the look of fear in Jernigan’s eyes, Mack Bonniwell standing with clenched fists on the church steps, Randal Dudenhof with his chest transfixed by his car’s steering column, the blood-spattered steering wheel bent and broken in front of his chest like a crumpled target symbol.

Debra turned off the light. “I can’t get over it,” Loren said.

“Over what?”

“How that dead man looked like Randal Dudenhof.”

There was a moment of silence in the darkness. “I haven’t thought about Randal for a long time,” Debra said.

“Do you know what happened to his wife?”

“Violet? She hung onto the ranch for a few years, then sold out to Luis and moved to Utah.”

“I knew that.”

“Provo, I think. Remarried and raised a lot of little Mormons.”

The T-bird smelled like Canadian whiskey, Loren remembered. Randal had won sixty dollars in the poker game at the Copper Country and had bought a fifth to celebrate. He’d probably been swigging from the bottle when he skidded on black ice and went off the Rio Seco bridge.

It wasn’t even illegal back then. You had to be some kind of communist to suggest a guy shouldn’t have a few drinks on his drive home. The jack Mormons and the other good ole boys could handle their liquor and they could spit a quid of tobacco right between the eyes of a sidewinder at ten feet and they could drive forty miles above the speed limit on icy roads and handle every slide.

They died in droves, pierced and crushed by velocity and metal that crumpled like paper, weeping and filling their drawers as their spirits bled away. Loren had cut enough of them out of crushed vehicles to know. So much for good ole boy machismo.

“First man I ever saw die,” he said.

“I know.”

“Damn. What a waste.” Meaning all of them, all the bodies torn by metal.

Suddenly Loren wished he had a cigarette. He’d never smoked— at the age when most kids in Atocha took up smoking or snuff, he’d been on the football team under a strict Mormon coach who would cut a player for drinking, smoking, or (he said) masturbation, though how he intended to enforce the latter proscription was never clear. (He could have, come to think of it, at least with the Mormons on the team— he was a bishop, and had the spiritual authority to ask them questions about their sex lives and demand straight answers.) Loren had never taken up smoking— drinking and strangling the goose were something else— and in Korea he used to give his free G.I. cigarettes away to the locals.

But for some reason he had a powerful urge to smoke now, to lie in bed and hold his wife’s hand and think aloud about what was happening in his town. The image of himself doing that struck him as impossibly poignant.

He took Debra’s hand. Her fingers were cool.

“Do you suppose he could be Randal’s son?” he asked.

“I was wondering that.”

“He used to run around on his wife a lot, Randal.”

Debra was silent for a moment. “That’s what everyone said.”

“But who the hell would he have a kid with?”

“I never heard anything.”

“Me, either.”

The words faded into the darkness. Loren remembered Randal at Connie Duvauchelle’s one night trying to make a deal with one of the girls to perform some sexual act, just about any sexual act, for the four dollars and change Randal had left in his pocket after pissing away the rest playing poker at the Copper Country.

“It couldn’t be the real Randal,” Loren said. “The guy was too young.”

The words seemed to hang in the dark, refusing to fade, and a sudden wave of panic struck Loren. Had he actually said that aloud?

Implied that the dead man might be the real Randal, even in the darkness of his own bedroom, to his own wife?

He could never say that, not even here. It would be taken as evidence he was losing his grip.

But Debra didn’t reply, and Loren felt a current of relief.

Tomorrow, he figured, he’d have to start applying pressure.

*

Roberts was back on his box across West Plaza for the early Monday service, swaying slightly with drink as he condemned the church by his presence. As Loren passed by he called out, “Miracles happen every day!” in a cheerful voice. Loren didn’t answer.

The church was only two-thirds full. It was perhaps appropriate that the sermon was on sloth. Sloth, the pastor maintained, was a sin that prevented people from doing their duty to God and their fellow human beings. Loren thought that even so, sloth was a pretty boring sin all things considered.

Loren didn’t need the sermon to fire him up for duty. He drove his family home, changed from his church clothes into his uniform, and then took the cruiser back to his parking place. Sword and arm of the Lord, he thought.

Eloy was in place behind the front desk. Loren gave him a cheery wave as he walked buoyantly up the hall. “Hey, Chief,” Eloy said, “the custodial staff are back from their weekend and want to know if they can clean up the hall.”

“Of course,” Loren said. He hadn’t given the old bloodstains a single look.

“You got some headlines, boss.” Eloy pulled out a folder and opened it to reveal a headline from that morning’s Albuquerque paper. POLICE CHIEF LEADS CHARGE ON DRUGS, it said, with a photo from the press conference, Loren in his helmet and armor, holding up the confiscated Mac-11.

Loren admired himself for a moment. “Mind if I take this?” he asked.

“I made a bunch of copies. Take all you need.” Eloy grinned up at him. “You noticed something funny about the headline?”

Loren looked at it. “No,” he said. “It’s a nice headline.”

Eloy gave a laugh. “It makes it sound as if you were on drugs when you led the raid.”

Loren looked at the headline again and the double meaning jumped out at him. He scowled. “Some asshole wasn’t doing his job at the damn paper.”

“Huh.”

“I should call and give them a piece of my mind. Letting the story go under a headline like that.”

“That kind of thing happens all the time.”

“Pisses me off.” Loren felt like waving a fist. “Finally we get a chance for some good publicity, and instead people are going to be laughing at us. I guarantee that.”

“Hey, Loren. Good bust.”

Loren looked up at the sound of the new voice and saw Salomon Tafoya, the chief of the police at the Apache reservation. Salomon was a barrel-chested, muscular man with a close-cropped Marine D.I. haircut. His bearing was straight-spined and military, and his uniform was black with silver flashes, reminiscent (if anything) of Hitler’s SS. He was not one of the gentle, pollen-scattering, Earth-loving Indians beloved by recent Anglo immigrants, but rather an Apache in an older style, practical, unsentimental, and as ruthless as he thought necessary.

Loren shook Salomon’s strong, capable hand. “What’re you doing in town, Sal?” he asked.

“An errand or two. And I’m picking up that troublemaking son of a bitch George Gileno.”

Loren nodded. “What’s Gileno’s problem, anyway?”

“The problem,” Salomon said, “is that he’s a troublemaking son of a bitch.” No humor intended.

“Buy you a cup of coffee?”

“Thanks, Loren, but I’ve got to pick up Gileno and get back to the rez.”

“Say,” remembering what he’d seen the other day, “I saw a group of young Apaches out on the plaza the other day. Some older man was pointing stuff out to them.”

“Part of the young men’s initiation,” Salomon said. “They have to memorize all the water sources in the territory.”

Loren looked at him. “What water source?”

“There used to be a spring on the plaza about a hundred years ago. We figure it’ll be there again.”

Loren contemplated his surprise. “Guess that explains why the Federal Building basement is always having these leaks.”

Salomon allowed himself a cold smile. “Water’s funny in this country. It comes and goes. Folks come and build, they should ask the people who’ve lived here for hundreds of years.”

“They had to take all the records out of the basement and move them into the old dance hall on Railroad.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

Loren shook Salomon’s hand again and said goodbye, then went to his office and sat at his desk. The paperwork from the double deliveries to Albuquerque, drugs and a body, were waiting in his In box. He ignored them and called the Office of the Medical Investigator in Albuquerque. John Doe’s autopsy, he discovered, was under way. The M.I. would call as soon as he was done.

Loren thought for a moment, then called an old fishing buddy named Larry, who worked at the Riga Brothers power plant, and told him he wanted to fish for some facts. Larry checked the weekend logs and confirmed that ATL had ordered full generating capacity for Friday, beginning at ten-thirty, but that the actual order for the power hadn’t come till six minutes after noon. ATL had taken all the power the old facility could provide till just before three the next morning and had announced its intention of buying more power beginning at ten-thirty that same morning. The power order had been postponed till two in the afternoon, then canceled altogether.

Loren thanked his informant and promised to catch some trout with him before the weather turned chill.

Loren looked at the figures he’d jotted down. Jernigan and Singh’s report of the first accelerator run, and the cancelation of the second run, were now confirmed. He hadn’t really ever thought their stories false, but if the stories had been lies, he would have had something to hang the liars with.

He looked up Joseph Dielh in the phone book and telephoned, encountering an answering machine. He left a message asking Dielh to call, then called ATL and left another message with his secretary. He was about to call Patience with a few questions, but there was a knock on his door.

“Photo opportunity, Chief,” Cipriano said. “Pedro and his buddies are being arraigned in ten minutes.”

“Be down in a minute. Which courtroom?”

“Santos.”

Loren heaved himself out of his chair and went to the men’s room to comb his hair and make sure his navy-blue uniform didn’t have too much lint. Then he made his way to Judge Santos’s court and sat in the back.

Television cameras squatted on tripods like one-eyed Martian invaders. Shorty was wearing his white suit, star, and Stetson. District Attorney Castrejon had shown up in person instead of delegating things to Sheila Lowrey, who was nevertheless present in her broad-shouldered suit. Mayor Trujillo pumped hands and passed out buttons among the spectators. Santos, the judge, ignored the circus and went on handing out sentences to the weekend’s drunks.

Robbie Cisneros, the Texas cousins, and the drug dealers were brought in shackled. Their attorney was a guy from Albuquerque named Axelrod, a man Loren knew by reputation as a syndicate mouthpiece. There was a story that he’d had a judge’s legs broken when the man found him guilty on a traffic citation.

Apparently the dealers’ connections had bought some high-class legal muscle. Axelrod wore, Loren considered, too many rings on his thick fingers, and had a few too many glossy waves in his dark hair. His manner, as glossy as his hair, made Loren want to take him into an alley and twist his head off.

Axelrod had made some effort to put his clients in coats and ties for the event, but even so they looked no more respectable than would Geronimo and his Apaches had they been likewise dressed. Robbie looked ghastly, eyes swollen shut, yellow and purple oil slicks seeping down his face. A walking bruise. The two Mexicans, Medina and Archuleta, were not being indicted for the drug-running charges— that would happen later, in federal district court— but on charges of firearm possession. Axelrod moved for separate trials for everybody, with translators provided for the two Mexicans. The two were alleged not to speak English, though when busted they seemed to have understood things well enough. Santos, a dignified, sleepy-eyed member of the Democratic apparat, took everything under advisement and set bail at $150,000 apiece.

The gavel banged— a recess— and all the extras filed out, leaving behind the usual shabby assortment of weekend drunks waiting to take their legal medicine. The two Mexican nationals were turned over to federal marshals, who marched them, chains and all, across Plaza Street to the Federal Building, to be arraigned on the drug charges. Shorty and Castrejon and Loren and the mayor, lined up in the hallway outside, each spoke their piece for the cameras before the reporters drifted off.

Loren, microphones jammed in his face, doing his rhetorical bit for law ’n’ order, saw Sheila Lowrey waving at him from behind the press of reporters. He finished and waded through the mob to her side.

“Can I buy you some coffee, Loren?” she asked.

“If it’s quick. I’m kind of busy.”

“Let’s go to my office, then.”

Sheila pushed through a heavy fire door and Loren followed her up a flight of stippled steel stairs toward her office. She poured him a foam cup of coffee from a mineral-scarred coffee machine waiting in the hallway, then led her past her secretary into her office.

It was a comfortable book-lined place, with shabby old furniture drawn from county storage and an untidy collection of paperbacks occupying the top of the bookshelf, above the law books. One of the two old varnished wood chairs was draped with her jogging outfit: T-shirt, shorts, white socks, and shabby running shoes, white with blue stripes. Loren had seen her bounding around the plaza at lunchtime. Loren’s gaze modestly shrank away from the halterlike arrangement she strapped about her breasts when running.

He hitched his gun around and sat on the other chair. He knew better than to actually drink his cup of coffee. He put it on her desk and left it there.

Sheila took off her horn-rims and waved them casually in his direction. “I think we’re in trouble on the Cisneros indictment.”

Loren looked at her in surprise. “Just because he got that syndicate hotshot from Albuquerque? We can—”

“Medina turns out to be the cousin of one of Mexico’s biggest drug dealers. The ones the papers call kingpins? The guy can spend millions if he has to in order to get the guy out of jail.”

“Let ’em see if it works here.”

“Axelrod has requested medical reports on all his clients.”

“’Cause Robbie resisted and got clocked? He—”

“And he’ll go to town on that warrant. An anonymous call, for God’s sake! And it didn’t come in on a 911 call, so it wasn’t recorded.”

Heat flared under Loren’s collar. He remembered the call, Eloy’s recognizing his voice. And he remembered that every call into the station was logged, though only the emergency calls were recorded.

Have to talk to Eloy, he thought.

“That warrant was legal,” he said. “Denver signed it.”

“Axelrod will try to have it overturned. And you can damn well bet he’ll charge police brutality. All he has to do is win one of those and the case gets thrown out. Robbie and the Texas boys walk. And he’ll try to get the drug shipment thrown out on the same grounds, fruit of the poison tree and all that—”

“Now, wait a minute!” Loren began.

Sheila held up a hand. “Give me a second, Loren. He’ll try to get that evidence tossed, but he probably won’t succeed. You didn’t search the truck on the grounds of that warrant, you searched it because you got a warning off the LAWSAT, and that’s legal.”

“You bet it is,” Loren glowered.

“Here’s the deal,” Sheila said. “One of the things we can do to really nail the Mexicans is to get one or more of the Texans or Robbie to turn state’s evidence. But if the indictments get tossed out, we won’t have any pressure to put—”

“They’re not going to get thrown out,” Loren insisted. “The case is going before Santos, for Christ’s sake!”

Sheila pursed her lips. “That’s what Castrejon thinks.”

“Well, he’s the D.A.”

“He figures all he has to do is deal with his cousin the judge and all the fellow cousins and Democrats in the system— and maybe he was right so long as Robbie’s lawyer was one of our sterling local public defenders, also cousins of the judge or cousins of Castrejon or cousins of somebody. But I disagree. I think it’s gonna be a bitch.”

“Just because of that Axelrod? He’s—”

Sheila put on her spectacles and leaned forward. “He plays by different rules than the local boys, Loren. Justice in this county is like a private club— things get done in this building in a certain manner because they’ve always got done that way. I don’t belong to the club, and working here has really opened my eyes.”

“Sheila . . .”

“But Axelrod doesn’t belong to the club, either!” The spectacles were off again, jabbing at Loren like a penknife. “And Axelrod is being paid a lot of money by somebody, not just to flout the club, but to burn the clubhouse down!”

Loren felt tongue-tied in the face of her vehemence. “Hey,” he said. “I’m on your side.”

The spectacle-knife sliced twice, disemboweling invisible foes. “The only way he can get his two boys off is to completely discredit the police force that busted them, okay? He can try to suppress the warrant, and he’ll either file a civil suit against you on behalf of Robbie, or he’ll file a civil rights complaint.”

“Civil rights complaint?” Outraged filled Loren’s heart. “On what fucking grounds—!”

“Robbie’s Hispanic, right?”

“I didn’t beat him up because he’s Spanish!” Loren said. “I beat him up because he’s a fucking thief!”

“Loren. Watch what you say around me, okay?” Sheila flung herself back in her chair. Her look was grim. “For a minute there it almost sounded as if you beat up Robbie Cisneros because you felt like it, not because you had difficulty apprehending him in the course of an arrest.”

Loren glared at her, knuckles turning white as he gripped the arms of the old wooden chair.

“Because if you did beat up Robbie just for the fun of it—” She peered at him nearsightedly. “—and I’m not saying you did, okay? But if you did, with someone like Axelrod on the defense, it’s going to come out in court.”

“Bullshit.”

“Let me tell you what Axelrod is going to do, Loren. He’ll get expert medical testimony that will indicate— well,” with a shrug, “that might indicate— that Robbie was beaten while he was in handcuffs. No defensive wounds, handcuff marks around the wrists, that sort of thing. He’ll fly his own doctor into town if he has to. Then he’ll depose every witness— you, Shorty, every officer present— and he’ll ask you to go through your story piece by piece. He’ll be hoping to trip someone up on the sequence of events. ‘And then what happened, Officer?’ ” imitating Axelrod’s glossy tenor. “ ‘The chief handcuffed the suspect,” another voice. “ ’What?’” back to Axelrod’s voice again—” ‘He handcuffed the suspect before Mr. Cisneros was struck?’”

“Loren,” seriously, “you know what he can do with that. He’ll tear us apart.”

Loren just looked at her.

The spectacles came jabbing forward again as Sheila leaned toward Loren. “If there’s a problem with this bust,” Sheila said, “I want you to tell me now. I can plea-bargain Robbie and his buddies and nothing will ever come out in court.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it.” Flatly.

“Loren,” warningly, “think about it.”

“Nothing wrong,” said Loren.

Sheila gave a long sigh. She put her spectacles on and leaned back in the chair. “Funny that I’m the only person in this building who doesn’t belong to the goddamn Atocha Men’s Dinosaur Association, and I’m the only one who knows how to defend it.” She picked up a pen and began writing on a white recycled legal pad, making notes to herself. “What I want to do is rehearse every witness. I want to do it before Axelrod can get to them.” Her level eyes rose from the pad and gazed steadily into Loren’s. “I want it clear to everybody that Robbie Cisneros tried to run away, that he resisted arrest and received all his injuries before he was handcuffed.”

“That will be made clear,” said Loren. “Absolutely clear.”

“And in your written report?”

“Almost done. I’ll get busy on it.”

She made a tick mark on her pad. “I want all the officers concerned to make appointments with me in the next day or so. I’ll also want to talk to everyone involved with the George Gileno arrest, because if Axelrod goes the route of the civil rights complaint, he’ll want to show that you beat up Indians, too.”

“That’s all?” Loren shifted in his seat. He just wanted to get out of there.

“No.” She was looking weary. “I happen to know that Mack Bonniwell is going to make a complaint against you for hitting his kid.”

“At least Len Bonniwell and A.J. Dunlop are Anglos.”

“Want to bet Axelrod offers his services to the father free of charge?”

Loren felt a tingling in his spine. They were lining up against him, his enemies, coming together, like the Deadly Sins all marshaled in Samuel Catton’s visions by the Master in Gray . . . Bonniwell and Dunlop and Cisneros and Timothy Jernigan and William Patience and Axelrod the legbreaker . . . He hadn’t quite seen the pattern before.

Atocha was under siege. Its enemies wanted to alter its ways, take away the rightness that, with all its faults, nevertheless underlay its existence. Of that Loren felt an absolute moral certainty.

“Axelrod is going to try to make this last weekend seem like a bloodbath,” Sheila said.

“If that’s the way he wants it,” said Loren.

She looked up sharply. “We’re going to have some absolutely clean cops here,” she said. “We’re going to have absolutely clean cops until this trial is over.”

“Cops here have always been clean.”

Her eyes were searching. “That’s not what the rumors say, Loren.”

Loren shrugged. “People always talk.”

“Fortunately,” Sheila said, “what people say, and what can be said in court, are two different things.”

“Fortunately,” Loren echoed. He stood up. “Thanks for the coffee.”

Sheila looked at the cooling, untouched cup that sat on her desk. “You’re welcome.” Her eyes turned up to his. “If you think I was hard on you, picture what Axelrod’s going to do. I hope you’re ready for that.”

“When the time comes.”

“The time is now, Loren. He’ll be waiting for you to slip up, waiting every second. Till this whole thing is over.”

“I’m always ready, Sheila.”

She looked at him, a small frown on her face. “I hope to hell you are, Loren.”

Loren made his way to the front desk, where Eloy was chatting on the phone. “Just a sec, Gloria,” he said, cupping the mouthpiece, and looked up at Loren.

“Business, Eloy,” Loren said.

“Right away, Chief.” Eloy excused himself from Gloria, whoever she was— certainly not his wife— and hung up the phone.

“Been ringing all morning,” he said. “People with missing children. They heard we had a John Doe, everyone’s scared it’s their John Doe. Pretty damn sad.”

“Sheila Lowrey wants to see you, about the anonymous tip that led to Robbie Cisneros’s arrest.”

“Oh. Sure.” Grinning.

“Now. I’ll answer the phones while you talk.” Loren cleared his throat. “The thing is, you have to be absolutely positive that the call was anonymous. That you have no idea who it was that called.”

Eloy winked. “Sure, Chief. No problem.”

Loren looked stern. “No winking, Eloy. Not at Lowrey, not at me, not at anyone. We could lose the bust.”

The grin faded from Eloy’s face. ”Right, Chief. What you say.” He rose from the chair. “By the way. The M.I. up in Albuquerque called for you. That London guy.”

“Autopsy’s over?”

“Yep. He said to call back.”

Loren sat at the chair and waited for Eloy to leave. He turned the pages of the phone log and looked at the entries for two days before. The 911 emergency calls were recorded on disk, but those coming into the desk were simply logged by the man on the desk. 09:03,the entry said, Chief Hawn, personal. This was crossed out with a neat blue ballpoint line, with Refused ID, tip re: armed robbery written in a smaller hand in the remaining space above.

Loren looked at the tiny handwriting. He had been taught all his career to preserve evidence.

He looked left and right, then tore the sheet out. He folded it in quarters and put it in his pocket, then flipped the page back to Monday’s calls.

He called Shorty’s office, and the sheriff himself answered.

“I want to talk to you about the drug bust,” he said.

“Go ahead, cousin.” Shorty’s voice was genial.

“Sheila Lowrey thinks we might have some problems,” Loren said, “now that Archuleta and Medina and Robbie Cisneros have this guy Axelrod.” He gave a brief explanation of what Lowrey thought Axelrod might try to do.

“The thing is,” he said, “we have to make certain that everyone in both our departments is clear on the series of events and how Robbie got his injuries.”

“No problem, cousin,” Shorty said.

“I mean,” making himself as clear as possible, “you’ll have to talk to your people.”

“I already have, cousin,” Shorty said. “I talked to my men the minute we delivered those guys to the jail.”

Surprise performed a slow, ominous dance on Loren’s heart.

“Thanks, Shorty,” he said.

“No problem, ese.”

Loren put the phone in its cradle. There was a sour taste in his mouth.

He wondered if he had been wrong. And if he had been wrong, how wrong had he been?

He looked up the medical investigator’s number in the massive desk Rolodex and dialed the number. He eventually got one of the examiner’s assistants, a man named Esquibel.

“London’s working on another popsicle,” Esquibel reported. “But I was present at the John Doe autopsy and I’ve got the tape here. Lemme play it through headphones, and I’ll summarize it.” Loren heard the sound of shuffling papers, the snap of a recorder button. “Okay, here we go. The body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished young adult Caucasian male, weight a hundred fifty pounds, seventy-three and one-half inches in length, age approximately twenty-two to twenty-eight. The body is received within a white body bag, with the closed end of the zipper covered by a ‘State of New Mexico, Office of the Chief Medical Investigator’ evidence label—”

“Skip that,” said Loren.

Esquibel went on to describe John Doe’s clothing, including the worn spots on the knees of his jeans, the little white circle on the back pocket consistent with a can of snuff— the Copenhagen can was described separately— and the metal collar tabs on the yoked shirt. There were no powder burns on the clothing, and Loren made a note of that. Esquibel continued with the state of rigor, postmortem lividity on the dorsal surfaces, length of scalp hair (5 cm. max), the width of pupils (0.35 cm.), the tobacco stains on the teeth, and the fact that Doe had been circumcised.

“Beneath the left arm,” Esquibel said, “is a 1.2-centimeter circular defect, with five stellate tears radiating from the center point.” Circular defect was M.I. talk for bullet wound. “These extension tears vary from 0.7 to a maximum of 2.1 centimeters in length. The tissues are extremely swollen, blue-purple and discolored . . .”

This went on for some time, as the M.I. opened the body with his standard Y-shaped incision, removed the organs, and weighed them. The liver weighed in at 1,700 grams, the spleen 130. “What happened,“ Esquibel said finally, “is that the guy got shot under the left arm, the missile tracking slightly downward”— missile was M.I.-speak for bullet— “and then the missile ricocheted off the fifth rib and was directed slightly upward. The missile bounced around inside, making some pretty crazy zigzags through the torso. Not uncommon, by the way. From the way the missile was flattened and its casing shattered, and from its erratic course, it’s a decent guess the missile came through the door of the car first and was tumbling when it hit Mr. Doe. The missile punctured both lungs and nicked the descending aorta. What we think happened is that he was able to function for a while after he was shot, but that eventually the aorta eroded and burst. It filled his lungs in a minute or two and he drowned.”

“The bullet?”

“We found it in his thorax. Caliber .41 Action Express, but I’m just a damn ignorant pathologist, so you’ll have to talk to criminalistics to make it official.”

.41 caliber, Loren thought. There weren’t a lot of .41 caliber guns out there, and that might make finding the shooter a little easier.

Loren heard the sound of flipping pages. “No alcohol or drugs in system. No powder marks on hands or arms. Palms show calluses related to manual labor. Blood type: A positive. Body normal: no tattoos, no sign of previous wounds. Defensive bruises on both forearms, like he was trying to protect himself against somebody swinging a baseball bat.”

“Or he got in a car crash and braced against the wheel with his arms.”

“I was about to say that. No other bruises, no signs of restraint, bite marks, ligature marks. Skin abrasion on the first two knuckles of the left hand, possibly indicative of fistfight. Small scar on left forearm, scar on right shin, scar on ball of right thumb. All the scars were old.Silver fillings on the following teeth.”

Loren jotted down the complicated dental jargon. “Nothing under the nails that you want to hear about. Mild gastritis at two locations in the stomach. That’s from your coffee or alcohol use. Stomach contents: coffee, potato chips, ham and American cheese on white bread, eaten approximately one hour prior to death. Heart normal. Brain normal. Lungs demonstrated tobacco or marijuana use. Liver showed mild cirrhosis consistent with heavy alcohol or drug use. Vermiform appendix present. Precancerous condition on the interior lower lip consistent with dipping snuff. No recent sexual contact. No semen in rectum, which I’m sure you’ll be happy to know.”

“Thanks. I’m delighted.”

“Got any idea who shot him?”

“Not really.”

“Because what you’ve got is a hard-drinking, fist-fighting, snuff-dipping, ham-and-cheese-eating manual laborer who got shot in somebody else’s car.”

“I know,” Loren said. All of this, he knew, added up to someone probably not a Republican, which would make the mayor even less interested in finding out who’d shot him.

“We’ve sent the finger, palm, and retina prints out on the LAWSAT. Nothing yet. Some tissue samples went upstairs to the histology lab. You can call criminalistics and see if they’ve done the work on the physical evidence.”

“They won’t have. But I’ll call them.”

“I’ll send the paperwork by the next mail. Just so you can get it all in detail.”

“Thanks.”

Loren called the criminalistics division and found, as he’d suspected, that they hadn’t got around to examining the victim’s clothing yet. Maybe they’d get to it by the end of the week, he was told; they were stacked up.

“We did look at the bullets, though,” Loren was told. The voice was female and a little fussy. “Forty caliber, and there was more than one gun.”

“Say again?”

“One of the bullets you took out of the car was from a different gun. Two people were shooting at this guy, but only one hit him.”

Loren, staring at the hallway in which the man died, let this information roll over him. His informant, knowing somehow that the information was important, gave him all the time he needed.

“What caliber?” Loren said finally.

“Both .41. Five lands and grooves, right-hand twist.”

“Any idea what kind of gun that would be?”

“Lots. Any Smith & Wesson, for a start.”

“Great.” Another phone call began to flash and chime on the comm board. Loren frowned at the system and tried to remember what button to push.

“That’s all I can tell you. If you find a gun or some brass, we can do a lot more.”

“I know. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Primly. “We’ll let you know when we do the other tests.“

Loren pushed a button, the right one, and answered. The call was a missing-person query from Allentown, Pennsylvania. Loren informed the querent that his male Caucasian early-twenties John Doe was not a black female Jane Roe in her mid-teens. The querent— Roe’s mother— sounded weary. Loren wished her luck and wondered how she had found out about the death so quickly.

Missing Children Hotline, he thought. On computer, accessible via modem.

As he logged the call he felt depression wash over him. He didn’t know whether to be relieved the woman hadn’t found her daughter dead or grieved that the anguish would continue, maybe for years. He thought of what he’d feel if one of his daughters vanished and was amazed at the woman’s calm. He knew that if Kelly or Katrina went missing, he’d be mad with rage and grief, mad beyond all hope of sanity, until his daughter returned to him.

Another light blinked on the comm board. Loren answered.

“Chief Hawn, please.”

Loren knew the voice.

“You’re talking to him,” he said.

“This is Bill Patience. Are you answering your own phones now? I knew there were budget cutbacks, but—”

Loren reluctantly offered the chuckle that the comment seemed to require. “The regular guy had an errand to run. I’m filling in.”

“Good.” Patience’s voice had a heartiness that seemed false as the devil. Loren despised it. “I’m just calling to ask if you have any information on your dead man’s identity.”

“None that I can talk about.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry, Bill.”

“It’s just that— well, we’re supposed to look into anything weird.”

“In case the guy was a spy.”

“More or less.” Reluctantly. Why, Loren wondered impatiently, did the guy balk at revealing what was public knowledge? It was the spies themselves who were supposed to be discreet, not the cops that hunted them.

“I guess he’s a dead spy now,” Loren said. “Looks more like my department.”

“I also have a complaint.”

All lining up, Loren thought. Axelrod and Patience and Trujillo and Bonniwell and Jernigan . . .

“A complaint?” He could hear his own false ingenuousness, as phony as Patience’s camaraderie, and for an instant loathed himself for it.

“Who from?” he said.

“Mr. and Mrs. Jernigan. Something about terrorizing them in their own home.”

“She asked me to leave and I did.”

“She says that your partner interrogated their son.”

“Asked him a few friendly questions, maybe.” Loren cleared his throat. “This is a murder investigation, Bill,” he said. “What’s wrong with asking people questions?”

“I’m just relaying a complaint that was made to me. I informed Mrs. Jernigan that my job was not to protect her from a legitimate police inquiry, and that if she wanted to take it any further, she could complain to your superiors.”

Loren wondered if she would. It would sound great, wouldn’t it, her complaint coming in at the same time as Bonniwell’s and Axelrod’s?

“Thank you for telling her that,” Loren said.

“I don’t really care for people using my office as a clearinghouse for domestic complaints.” There was an edge in Patience’s voice. Perhaps that was the first genuine thing he’d said all along.

“I had some questions for you,” Loren said. He heard footsteps in the corridor and saw Eloy walking toward him.

“Whatever.”

“Can I see your logs of who was checking in and out of your establishment on Friday and Saturday? It would serve to clear a lot of people.”

“Sure. I can’t let the original logs off the premises, but you can come and copy them if you like. Or I can have them photocopied and sent to you.”

Loren was suddenly conscious of the folded bit of phone log, the evidence he’d stolen, awaiting disposal in his breast pocket. Eloy, the log’s guardian, was hovering just behind him. “I’d like to look at them in person, if I can,” he said. At least he’d be able to tell if something had been ripped out.

“Just call for an appointment.”

“How about this afternoon?”

There was a slight pause. “Name a time.”

“Three o’clock?”

“Fine. I’ll leave word at the gate.”

“Another question.”

“Okay.” Patience sounded a bit weary.

“What kind of weapons do your people use?”

Patience’s answer was prompt. “Anyone here under suspicion, Loren?”

“What I’m trying to do is clear them more than anything else.”

“That should be easy, then. Our standard sidearm is the Tanfoglio TZ-M. That’s an Italian copy of a Czech military sidearm, the CZ75. Thought by some,” pridefully, “to be the best in the world.”

Loren jotted it down. “And the caliber?”

“Nine-millimeter.”

“Okay. And all your people carry this gun?”

“I can’t say what private weapons my people might have in their homes, but when on duty our people are required to carry the Tanfoglio. We want to have a common ammunition used by all weapons. It’s the same with the UZIs in the jeeps.”

Loren’s pen froze on the paper. “You’ve got UZIs in the jeeps?” he said.

“Standard UZIs. Nine-millimeter, firing the same ammo as the pistols.”

“This isn’t exactly known, Bill.” Loren could feel his voice rising.

“There’s been no reason for anyone to know it.”

“Where are they carried? What if some kid broke into a jeep and—”

“It won’t happen.”

“How can you say that?” A picture rose in his mind, A.J. Dunlop, in his torn black T-shirt, lank blond hair hanging down from his backward-turned gimme cap, standing in the darkness of the high school parking lot with a submachine gun in his hand. Yanking the bolt back and smiling and taking aim at the windows of the school.

“I can’t precisely reveal the details,” Patience said, “but there’s a security system in place to keep those guns from getting into the wrong hands.”

“I’m not encouraged,” Loren said.

“I’ll show it to you,” Patience said. “When you’re over here this afternoon.”

Loren said goodbye and hung up the phone. He looked up at Eloy. “How’d it go?” he said.

Eloy tugged at his foam collar. “Man, Chief. She asked me the same questions about fifty different ways. I feel like I’ve been through an interrogation. She should work for us, you know. Not for the D.A.’s office.”

“She’s sharp,” Loren said.

“Am I gonna have to testify under oath and everything?”

There was a funny tone in Eloy’s voice. Loren looked at him. “Could be. You got a problem with it?”

Eloy looked uneasy. “Guess not, Chief,” he said.

Another chime came from the comm board. Eloy and Loren both looked at it. “Another missing offspring, Chief,” Eloy said, and reached for the phone.

Loren rose, thinking of all the missing offspring in the world wandering from one place to another, rootless, ID-less, in worn boots and faded Levi’s, to be turned into victims by person or persons unknown.

Just like John Doe.

Loren walked into his office. He was going to solve this one, he thought. For all the parents of all the Johns and Janes who would never be found, who would cluster around computer terminals linked to the Missing Children Hotline and make hopeless phone calls to every little town where some pathetic corpse had got itself shot in someone else’s car. . .