When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (7 page)

Inside was a different story. The sun streaming through skylights showed glistening ice on most surfaces. Tiny icicles hung from the ceiling where water from the fire hoses had found its way off the roof and into the house. In the corners, snow—blown in through broken windows and damaged walls—had accumulated in slight drifts.

Gil went through the right archway, into the kitchen, while Joe went left, into the living room. Gil called after him, “Go to channel six.” He flipped his handheld radio to the right frequency and turned up the volume. He had purposely picked a channel that wouldn’t bounce off a radio tower, so any conversation would be just between him and Joe.

Gil went into the kitchen, which had a large butcher block counter in the center, the kind Susan wanted in their new house. The firefighters hadn’t come in here, so everything had stayed as it was: neat and tidy. Dishes put away and mint ice cream still in the freezer. It was a slice of Jim Price and Alexander Jacobson’s lives frozen in time.

Gil clicked a button on his radio and asked, “Are you noticing anything missing?”

“Part of the gaming system that was set up in the living room is gone,” Joe said. “It looks like someone took the controllers and maybe a few games.” Gil could hear Joe’s voice on the radio and a more muted version echoing through the house.

Gil went through the other door, leading away from the kitchen, and found himself in a sunroom with a billiard table. It overlooked a flagstone patio with a lap pool and a deck that jutted out on stilts.

Gil clicked his radio on and started saying, “What about cell phones or a computer”—when he heard a ringing that sounded like an old-fashioned telephone. The sound was muffled and bounced off the walls. Gil followed the noise down a hallway and into an office. On a desk next to some bills was a ringing cell phone. A second later, Joe walked in, holding his own phone to his ear.

“I thought I’d give Jacobson a call,” he said. In his hand was another cell phone. “I found Price’s phone still plugged into the charger in the master bedroom.” Joe punched numbers into both phones, checking their recent calling history and comparing the numbers dialed against numbers in his notebook.

“The last call made from either phone was two days ago, when Alexander called Jim,” Joe said. “There were a bunch of missed incoming calls this morning: I guess friends checking on them.”

Gil said, looking around the office, “I don’t see a computer on this desk. Did you see one anywhere?”

“No,” Joe said. “And you know they had to have at least one.”

“So we’re missing a computer and a gaming system,” Gil said. “If this was a robbery, they didn’t take much.” They made their way back out into the living room. The ice covering on the furniture was already starting to melt.

“What do we think about the hate crime idea?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know,” Gil said. “I’m not convinced.”

“I think the whole cut-off penis thing is pretty convincing,” Joe said. “You’re the Wikipedia of all things criminal. What kind of suspect would we be looking at if it was a hate crime?”

“Sixty percent of the perpetrators are white males,” Gil said. “And, I think, around thirty percent of hate crimes take place in a home.”

“It sounds possible,” Joe said.

“But hate crimes resulting in murder are very rare,” Gil said. “There are only about eight a year in the entire country and that includes all hate-motivated murders, including those that are about race and religion.”

“I guess this could have been regular torture and not hate-related torture,” Joe said. “But this is pretty extreme stuff. Our suspect took the time to carve a
T
on his chest … I wonder if there’s a gay-bashing word that starts with
T
?” Joe stopped to think.

“Let’s just keep all the options on the table,” Gil said. He glanced around the room. “Even if it was a hate crime, this scene doesn’t make a whole lot of sense logistically. There are two separate areas where the victims were held. From what Liz said, all the victims were alive until the end. One person wouldn’t have been able to keep control of that many people at once.”

“Right. You can’t be in this room with Price and Jacobson and keep an eye on Mr. Burns at the same time, or vice versa,” Joe said. “If there was just one suspect, he’d be running between the rooms all night long. At some point, he’d just put everyone in the same room.”

“Then we have a group of suspects,” Gil said. “That means home invasion of one kind or another.” Gil looked at his watch. “We should get on the road. The drive to Los Alamos might be icy.”

They were just getting back into the car when a dark SUV pulled up and a sandy-haired Anglo man in his early twenties leaned out the window. “Could you help me?” he asked in a Texas accent. “I’m trying to find the ski area.”

“Yeah, you missed the turn,” Joe said. “Just follow this road straight until you come to the stop sign. Take a right, and you’ll be on Hyde Park Road. Just follow that up into the mountains.”

“Thanks. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the skiing conditions?” the man asked, with a laugh.

“Actually, there should be some sweet powder,” Joe said. “But take it easy. It’s twelve thousand feet up there at the top. You can get dizzy real quick at that elevation.”

“Thanks for the tip,” the man said. “My buddy told me there was some great off-trail skiing.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Gil said. “Outside the ski area is National Forest land. It’s hundreds of acres of forest. If you get lost, you’re on your own.”

“Just you and the bears,” Joe added.

*   *   *

Natalie Martin sat on a bench in the mall, watching her twin boys play a made-up game that seemed to resemble hide-and-seek. Deacon would run around the plastic tree house as fast as his chubby two-year-old legs could manage until Devon, in the tree house above, popped out his head and growled. Then they would both start laughing until Deacon began to run again. It wasn’t a complicated game, but it was keeping the boys busy. And that had become Natalie’s main goal in life.

She waved as she saw her friend Julie pushing her stroller toward them. Julie’s twenty-two-month-old son, Connor, was waving his arms and legs trying to get out of the stroller before it had come to a stop.

“Okay, okay,” Julie said. “Hang on.” She freed her son, who went running off to join Deacon and Devon.

“Hey, you,” she said to Natalie, giving her a hug. “Weren’t we supposed to meet a half an hour ago? I’ve been wandering around looking for you.”

“Oh my God,” Natalie said. “I am so sorry. I have such a mom brain. I can’t keep even the simplest thing in my head.”

“Don’t you hate that?”

“Some days I wonder how I ever managed to get a PhD in chemistry.”

“I know,” Julie said. “I used to go into courtrooms and argue cases in front of a judge. I have no idea how I did that. I wore dresses and high heels and everything. Like a real grown-up.”

“I swear, as soon as we have kids there must be some hormone that makes us forget we were once smart, successful women,” Natalie said. Both women, despite sitting right next to each other, kept their eyes only on the playground.

“That’ll be something for you to figure out when you get your brain back. Maybe you’ll discover the mom brain hormone and make the big bucks.”

“When will that be?”

“When they go to college. I hope to God.”

“With any luck, the twins are both prodigies and off to college at twelve,” Natalie said. “Of course, all they are prodigies at right now is creating laundry. How do boys go through three outfits a day?”

“Are you kidding me? Connor is on his fourth today.”

They heard a cry across the playground.

“Speaking of which…” said Julie, as she got up to go to her son.

*   *   *

“What department did this guy work in again?” Joe asked as they drove toward Los Alamos. They had followed U.S. Highway 285 north out of Santa Fe for fifteen miles, dropping down into the wide valley cut by the Rio Grande more than thirty-five million years ago. Now they were on State Highway 502 heading west; after crossing the river and beginning the climb out of the valley, they had another twenty miles before they reached the lab.

“Primary Structural Biosystems,” Gil said.

“That could mean anything,” Joe said. “I wonder if he worked on bombs. Maybe the guy made biochemical weapons and someone killed him to get information. Or he was selling information to some international bad guy…”

“Like who?”

“The Chinese,” Joe said. “They’ve been the ones behind most of the recent spying cases at the lab.” He had been busy researching the lab on his phone’s Internet connection, telling Gil every detail about what he found. So far, he’d told Gil how the lab was built on a fault line and had frequent earthquakes. He also talked about how the water runoff that came down the mesa from the Hill had to be checked for radiation, since during the early days at the lab, they simply dumped nuclear waste in the arroyos. Now Joe was researching spying, which had a long history at the lab, going back to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the 1940s. But they were only two of dozens of spies caught over the years.

The Crown Victoria started to groan under the effort of getting up the hill, despite the fact that the highway itself was perfectly maintained, because trucks carrying radioactive waste also used it. Every week, the lab shipped containers of waste to an abandoned salt mine more than three hundred miles to the south for storage. In the last decade, the lab had sent more than eight thousand trucks from Los Alamos to Carlsbad, and they wouldn’t be stopping the shipments anytime soon. Sitting in the middle of a parking lot, on lab property, another thirty thousand containers of radioactive waste were still waiting for a ride. The trucks were followed by satellite and were equipped with warning alarms should a driver make a wrong turn or an unplanned stop. The nuclear waste was only low-level, but even so, Santa Fe had built an entire bypass highway around the city simply for the trucks on their way to the interstate.

Joe and Gil stopped at a gas station run by the San Ildefonso Pueblo and went into the attached restaurant. The menu had the usual list of New Mexico diner food: breakfast burritos, Navajo tacos, Frito pies, hamburgers, huevos rancheros, tacos, and hot dogs. Gil and Joe both ordered a Frito pie. They had barely ordered when the waitress came by holding two plates of Fritos chips covered with beans, onions, lettuce, cheese, and red chile.

“Man, this is the best,” Joe said, taking a bite. “This is like three of my favorite things together: beef, cheese, and snack food. I wonder if they could make a Cheeto pie?”

Gil watched cars come and go at the gas pumps. Some people were clearly from the pueblo, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, and some were lab workers in their suits and ties.

“Okay, here’s my new theory,” Joe said with his mouth full of Fritos. “What if Jim Price was selling secrets to the—”

“This is not a spy thing,” Gil said.

Joe rolled his eyes and said, “Fine. It’s not a spy thing. What, then? Love triangle? Radioactive experiment gone horribly wrong?”

“Maybe a home invasion,” Gil said.

“You still don’t think it’s a hate crime?” Joe said.

“I don’t know,” Gil said. “At the moment I’m just thinking about how the victims were killed.”

“Mr. Burns was torched and the other two were shot,” Joe said. “I wonder why the difference?”

“Maybe to cover up some evidence,” Gil said. “Or out of anger.”

“Tying someone up and then setting them on fire is a really messed-up thing to do,” Joe said, finally swallowing.

“Maybe Mr. Burns resisted or—”

“Or maybe he knew his killer. Like an ex-lover. I know that’s who I get raging mad at.”

“Or maybe even a co-worker…”

“What are you saying, Gil? That you want to tie me up and burn me alive?”

“Or shoot you. Depends on the day.”

CHAPTER SIX

December 21

Lucy had spent her morning checking e-mail and watching videos online of cats playing musical instruments. Occasionally, she considered trying to figure out how to do a birth or death announcement, but she ended up thinking about her column. A columnist for a midsize daily newspaper such as the
Capital Tribune
would often end up with a following. Lucy knew that having a column could give her some power. She had some experience as a columnist. When she was in college at the University of Florida, she’d had a column called “The Whine List.” Within a few weeks of the first column being printed, people started to recognize her. She got into bars for free and had several marriage proposals. Of course, that might have been because she came across in the column as a drunken slut. What she had been trying to do was show the hypocrisy of college: students furthering their education while simultaneously killing their brains with alcohol. She tried to find a humorous way to portray how most college students ended up with a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde personality battle; the good side who went to class during the day and the bad side who went out every night. But the subtlety of that message got lost in the hangover shuffle. Instead, she ended up coming across as a hero for the drinking class. It was an image she didn’t fight, not after she got banned from a fraternity for crashing one of their parties and then writing about it. Not after the president of the university publically mentioned her in the dedication speech for the new library.

Now she was being given a chance to do another column. Lopez hadn’t told her what kind of theme to follow—advice, horticulture, sports. All he’d said was, “Do whatever feels most natural.” Lucy, naturally, was thinking about doing a humor piece.

She was watching yet another cat play the piano when Tommy Martinez came in holding his reporter’s notebook.

“Hey,” he said. “I just wanted to come see your new place. It must be nice having your own office. Are you ready for your trip? You’re leaving tomorrow, right?”

“What’s up, Tommy?” she said.

“How’s Nathan doing?” Tommy had met Nathan a few weeks back, at the Cowgirl, where Nathan worked as a bartender. Lucy had been there, waiting for Nathan to get off work, when Tommy came in with a few of the copy desk people. Lucy considered trying to duck and hide, not wanting to have to introduce her co-workers to a guy who was basically a one-night stand who wouldn’t go away. But they spotted her, and she was forced to make the introductions, in which she referred to Nathan as a friend. Tommy, of course, got the gist of it.