Accustomed to the Dark Page 2

  “Perhaps next month. Perhaps never.”

  He shook his head slightly. “As I said, I am hopeful. I’ve seen many, many people recover from wounds that were very nearly identical to this one.”

  “With no residual effects. No permanent damage.”

  “None.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Well.” He considered whether to speak, decided to go ahead. He looked at me. “You know that some people consider the right frontal lobe, in right-handed people, to be the seat of the unconscious.”

  “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.”

  “Exactly. There’s a school of thought, not so much in this country as in Europe, which believes that damage to the right frontal lobe may possibly affect certain … aspects of the personality.”

  “Which aspects?”

  “The subconscious. Creativity. The so-called artistic impulse.”

  I thought of Rita’s watercolors. Sometimes on summer evenings she sat out on the patio, brush in hand, and she slowly filled sheets of paper with soft, subdued views of the town, of the stands of juniper and piñon, of the distant purple mountains.

  “But that’s speculation, of course,” said Berger. “And it is, as I say, a European school of thought. French, for the most part. In my own experience, and I do have fairly extensive experience with trauma of this type, I’ve never witnessed any such change.”

  “Were any of your patients artists, Doctor?”

  He pursed his lips again. “Mr. Croft, I assure you that there’s every hope of Mrs. Mondragón making a complete recovery. I wouldn’t say so if I didn’t believe it to be true.”

  “But no guarantees.”

  He produced the small, tight smile again. “There are never any guarantees, Mr. Croft. As I told you, however, I believe that Mrs. Mondragón has an excellent chance.” He stood up. “And now, gentlemen, forgive me, but I’m afraid I’ve things to do.”

  Hector and I stood. “When can I see her?” I said.

  He frowned, as though displeased by my failure to understand that the meeting was over. “She’s still in recovery,” he said. “She’ll remain there until we’re certain that she’s stabilized. At which point we’ll move her to the ICU.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “A few hours, perhaps.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, but I really must be going.”

  “I can’t see her until then?”

  “No. That’s impossible, I’m afraid.”

  As he came around the table, Hector stepped forward and offered a hand. Berger took it. “Thank you, Doctor,” Hector told him. “I’ll be getting back to you.”

  Berger nodded, released Hector’s hand, held out his own to me. I took it.

  “Mr. Croft,” he said. I nodded. I glanced again, not wanting to, at the stain.

  He escorted us out the door and then he went down the hallway alone.

  “A cold sonovabitch,” I said to Hector.

  Hector looked at me. “And if he weren’t?” he said. “Doing what he does? How long would he last, you figure?”

  He was right, but I wasn’t ready to surrender my dislike. I changed the subject. “Who’s in charge over at the state police?”

  He looked at me. He frowned. “There’s not much point in telling you to stay away from this, is there?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah.” He took a deep breath. “Hernandez,” he said.

  “Hernandez? He’s a foot soldier.”

  “He got promoted.”

  I nodded. “Okay, Hector. Thanks.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Josh.”

  “Right.”

  3

  THE STATE POLICE complex was out on Cerrillos Road, past the commercial district but before the entrance to the Interstate. I parked the Cherokee in the visitors’ lot and I stalked along the sidewalk to the entrance, a two-story box of black glass set midway in the long beige wall. I stepped into a small lobby and faced another door, this one locked. To my right, behind a wall of reinforced glass, a young woman with blonde hair took my name and dialed Hernandez. She spoke briefly into the phone, then hung up and told me to go on in. She buzzed open the interior door.

  The place was busy. Cops, uniforms and suits, were sprinting up and down the stairs, pacing quickly through the corridor on the second floor. The door to Hernandez’s office was open. He was sitting back in his chair, waiting, and he stood up when I walked in. “Croft,” he said.

  He was in his early thirties and he wore a military crew cut along the top of his square red head, and a pale gray chambray shirt that fit snugly against his broad shoulders. A brown tie, khaki pants. Beneath the desk, he would be wearing a pair of cowboy boots. He always did. “I heard about Mrs. Mondragón,” he said. “I’m sorry. How is she?”

  “When did you people know that Martinez was out?” I asked him.

  He pressed his lips together and nodded toward the door. “Close that,” he said.

  I stepped back, closed it.

  “Take a seat,” he said, and waved a big-knuckled hand toward a straight-back wooden chair.

  “I’m fine where I am.”

  Hernandez stared at me for a moment. He looked down at his desk and then he looked back up and he sighed. “You gonna feel any better if you dance with me for a couple of rounds?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ll have to wait in line.” He frowned impatiently. “C’mon, Croft. Don’t be a hard-ass. Take a seat and we’ll see what we got here. The two of us.”

  I crossed the room and sat down.

  With another sigh, Hernandez lowered himself behind the desk.

  He glanced at his watch. “I told them to hold my calls,” he said. “We got about fifteen minutes.”

  I said nothing.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “She’s in a coma.”

  “What do they think? The doctors?”

  “If she’s lucky, she’ll pull through.”

  “Jesus, I hope so.” He pressed his lips together and then he leaned back against the swivel seat, lay his arms on the arms of the chair. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “We blew it. I blew it. The Captain—Captain Gold—he tells me to make sure Mrs. Mondragón gets a warning. This is last night, maybe an hour after the breakout. He knew all about Martinez. I didn’t. Before my time.”

  I felt my face stiffen.

  He waved a tired hand, as though trying to wipe away what he’d just said, and knowing he couldn’t. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “So what. Anyway, about then—it’s nine, nine-thirty, and I’m up to my kneecaps in shit. I’m in charge, right? I’m ‘coordinating’ all this. And I’m liaising with the PD and the sheriff’s office. We got reports coming in from all over. From everywhere. Santa Fe, Pecos, Taos. Denver, for God’s sake. I got twenty, thirty guys out there, on foot, in cruisers, in the chopper. And that’s just from this office alone.”

  He took another deep breath. “Okay, so I’m the one makes the first mistake. I lateral the call. Pass it on. And what happens then, the trooper who’s supposed to handle it, call up Mrs. Mondragón, he makes the second mistake. He gets sidetracked. The call gets lost.”

  He frowned. “Okay, so I’m here all night. A shower, some clean clothes this morning, I’m ready to start all over. Superman. But I never check with the trooper. Then the Captain hears about Mrs. Mondragón—before I do—and he’s in here reaming me a new asshole.”

  He shrugged. “Fair enough. I deserve it. But a reaming, that’s like a dose of clap. It’s something you can spread around. So I track down the trooper and I ream him out. He’s a good cop, a damned good cop, but he takes it. Just like I took it.”

  “Who was the trooper?”

  He looked at me across the desk with tired eyes. “You wanna talk to the guy who screwed up, you’re talking’ to him. I’m sorry about what happened, Croft. It makes me sick. If I could go back and fix things, change them around, God knows I would.”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell Mrs. Mondragón.”
>
  He took another deep breath, filled up his cheeks, let the air out between puckered lips. “You wanna take a pop at me? A free swing?” He shrugged. “Go ahead. Get your rocks off.”

  “Tell me about the breakout,” I said.

  He stared at me for a moment. He glanced down at his watch and looked back up. He shrugged again. “Six guys. We picked up three of them already, all within five miles of the pen. Picked ’em up right away. We’ll probably grab the fourth guy sometime today. He’s a nothing. A bookend, like the other three. We figure Martinez and Lucero brought ’em all along to act as decoys. Set ’em loose on the ground, to keep us busy, and then took off. They had a car waiting. We figured they used the car to get out of town before the roadblocks went up. Looks like we figured wrong.”

  “Looks like it,” I said. “Who’s Lucero?”

  “Luiz Lucero. Not a local. From Denver. From Cuba, originally. A Marielito. One of those guys who landed here when Castro was tossing out the garbage. He’s a bug.”

  “How?”

  “He’s a psycho.”

  “What’s he do for a living?”

  “Deals drugs. Pretty big time, up there in Denver.”

  “So what’s he doing in the New Mexico state pen?”

  “Shot a guy down in Albuquerque. Once in the forehead. Then once in each eye.” He shrugged. “Kind of showy, but I guess it did the job.”

  “Why?”

  “Why show off, or why kill the guy?”

  “Why kill the guy.”

  “Small-time dealer. He stiffed Lucero somehow. That’s what the guy’s wife said, anyway. But who knows. Maybe Lucero didn’t like the guy’s suit.”

  “What are Lucero and Martinez doing together? Martinez is a street guy, a loser. Sounds to me like Lucero’s out of his league.”

  “They were cellmates.” He shrugged. “Maybe they were sweethearts of the rodeo.”

  I nodded. “How’d they manage the breakout?”

  He glanced at his watch again. “Lucero had a pistol, a twenty-two automatic. Overpowered one guard. Got to the control center. Picked up some radios—police band—and some flack jackets, and then they went out over the roof.”

  “There’s razor wire up there. That’s what the flak jackets were for?”

  “Yeah. They flung ’em over the wire. Tied some overalls together and dropped down.”

  “What about the exterior wire?”

  “Cut. Bolt cutters. From the outside.” He smiled sourly. “What we call an accomplice.”

  “Where did Lucero get the gun?”

  “I got no idea.”

  “Come on, Hernandez. I’ve been to the pen. Visitors are frisked beforehand. Meetings are allowed only under observation. Prisoners are body-searched afterward. Someone looked the other way. A guard. Maybe more than one.”

  He shook his head. “That’s a separate investigation. Not my jurisdiction.”

  “Lucero have a lot of money to toss around?”

  “I got no idea.”

  I let it go. “How much lead time did they have? After the break.”

  “Not much. Ten, fifteen minutes.” He looked down again at his watch, then back up at me. “Speaking of time. Sorry, Croft. I got a few other things to do around here.”

  “Will you let me know how this is going? The investigation?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll let you know when we find Martinez and Lucero.”

  “You people didn’t find Martinez before. Six years ago.”

  “Yeah, you did. And nearly killed him, I heard.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Banged him up some.”

  “So he said.”

  “He said it in court. You could’ve lost your license.”

  “I’m still here. So’s the license.”

  “Yeah, well—” The telephone rang. Keeping his eye on me, Hernandez answered it. “Yeah. Yeah. Right. You handle it for now. Gimme a few more minutes here.”

  He hung up the phone. “Forget about it, Croft. This is a state police investigation. No way I’m gonna jeopardize it for your sake.”

  “It seems to me that you owe—”

  He raised a hand. “Don’t push it.”

  “—that you owe something to Mrs. Mondragón. Will you be talking to Hector Ramirez at the Santa Fe PD?”

  He looked at me silently for a moment. Then, finally, he nodded. “Yeah. I’ll be in touch with Ramirez, probably.”

  I drove back into town, stopping at the first pay phone I could find. I called the hospital. There had been no change in Mrs. Mondragón’s condition. She was still in recovery. She was still stable.

  I kept moving, using movement to stop myself from thinking and feeling, to keep my body racing ahead of my brain and my heart.

  Rosa Sanchez had moved from the barrio on Santa Fe’s west side, where she had lived four years ago. The man who now lived in her tiny apartment had no idea where she was, or who she was.

  She wasn’t listed in the phone book. I tried information. She had no unlisted number. I went to the office, dragged out the Martinez file, and I made some more phone calls. I learned, from a woman who had once been a friend of Rosa’s, that Rosa had gotten married about two years ago. To an Anglo, the woman told me, but she didn’t know his name. She hadn’t seen Rosa for a while, and thought she might have left town. I called a clerk I knew at City Records and she pulled the marriage license. The groom had been a Mr. Robert Theissen. Not a typical Santa Fe name. I flipped through the phone book. A Robert Theissen was listed at 433 Acequia Court. I dialed the number but no one answered.

  Rita kept a .38 Smith & Wesson in the office safe. An Air-weight, two-inch barrel, shrouded hammer. I unlocked the safe, took out the pistol, checked it, shoved it into my right pocket. Concealed carry is illegal in New Mexico, but I didn’t much care.

  Before I left the office, I called the hospital again. No change.

  Acequia means ditch in Spanish, and the Acequia Madre, the mother ditch that once carried water to the farms and households of the hidalgos who lived here, four hundred years ago, still runs through the old and wealthy part of town, in the shade of the cottonwoods and the pines.

  There were no ditches on Acequia Court, and no cottonwoods. The street was part of a new development off Airport Road. Crowded onto both sides of it were boxy one- and two- story frame houses disguised to look like adobe. Each was perched on a small square treeless lot of green grass, and each sat no more than twenty feet from its neighbor. Most of the tiny lawns were carefully fenced along the sides with brown planking—marking off private domains amid all that closeness—and most of them were strewn with children’s toys: tricycles, bicycles, wagons, tall plastic dinosaurs lying stiffly on their sides.

  There were no toys on the lawn at 433 Acequia Court. Someone had taken good care of the grass, which was almost lush, and someone had planted a neat flower garden along the front edge of the house. Crocus and daffodil, tulip and hyacinth, their colors radiant against the shiny green of the ground cover.

  I parked in the driveway behind a Ford Taurus and a Chevy pickup, got out of the Jeep, walked up the asphalt. I noticed that the front curtains were drawn shut.

  Drawn curtains at midday. Two cars in the driveway, one for Robert, one for Rosa. And no one had answered the phone.

  I slid my hand into my right pocket and I rang the doorbell. I waited. Nothing. I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked.

  I slipped out the Smith, held it down by my thigh, and gently pushed open the door with my left hand. I stepped in.

  Robert Theissen was in the living room. He was lying on the floor, fully clothed, face up. He had been shot once in the forehead, once in each eye.

  I found Rosa in the bedroom. She lay naked and spread-eagled along the big bed. They had done the same things to her, but they had played with her first.

  4

  “SO WHO WAS she?” Hector asked me.

  “Her maiden name was Rosa Sanchez. She was the woman who located Martinez
for me. Six years ago.”

  “When you brought him in,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  We were out on the enclosed back porch, both of us sitting on inexpensive aluminum folding chairs webbed with plastic. I had gone through the house, found nothing, walked out to the car, slipped the Smith & Wesson back into the glove compartment. Returned to the house, carefully picked up the phone, and dialed 911. The police had arrived about an hour and a half ago, first a couple of SFPD cruisers, then an unmarked city Ford carrying two detectives, then a pair of unmarked state police Chevrolets carrying state plainclothes people. I had told my story three or four times, and now the state cops and the locals were trying to figure out who had jurisdiction.

  I was telling Hector the same story. He had shown up about five minutes ago. The technical people had lifted prints from in here and they had let me roll open the jalousie windows. But the floor out here was an imitation Mexican tile that held the heat of the sun. The air was warm and motionless.

  Hector had arrived wearing a jacket but he was back in shirtsleeves now. The jacket was draped along the back of another piece of aluminum furniture, a frail-looking chaise lounge.

  “She was what?” Hector asked me. “Martinez’s girlfriend?”

  “Yeah. One of them.”

  Like Dr. Berger, Hector looked more tired than he had the first time I’d seen him. There were small bruises now beneath his dark brown eyes. Maybe I just hadn’t noticed them before. “Why’d she give him up to you?” he asked me.

  “She was angry at him.”

  “Yeah, but why you? Why not the police?”

  “I happened to be around.”

  “We never knew about her.”

  “No.”

  “If we’d known about her now—”

  “She’d still be alive? Come on, Hector. If you’d known last night, maybe. If someone had told me about Martinez last night, yeah, maybe I could’ve told someone about Rosa. And yeah, maybe she’d still be alive now.”

  Hector’s face was expressionless. “Hey,” he said. “I was out of town. Remember?”

  I took a breath. “Yeah. Sorry.” I was saying that a lot lately.