Compromised Read online

  Patrol cars blocked both ends of the dirt alley. Thirty yards from where Lewis parked, people in white suits were building a platform over an open dumpster. A mobile home park fronted the alley, with single-story stucco homes on barren lots beyond that, most without garages, all with windows closed. Air conditioners and swamp coolers running full blast laid down a white noise backdrop to the crackling of police scanners.

  To the west, black smoke lifted into the sky from fires in the mountains above Los Alamos. At night a red glow defined the horizon. The wind was keeping the smoke out of the city, blowing it west across Bandelier National Monument and the forests that had been burned every summer for the past decade, making people wonder how there could be anything up there left to burn.

  They showed their badges and followed a pathway between yellow ribbons weighted with stones. The dumpster had the phone number of the disposal company under a warning that unauthorized use would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  “We make an arrest,” Aragon said, “we add illegal dumping. Don’t let me forget.”

  Lewis recorded the telephone number and said he’d call for when the dumpster was last emptied.

  Sergeant Ralph Garcia ran the show. He had the person who called 911 waiting in his car. Aragon and Lewis wanted to see the body first. Lewis asked how Garcia and his people had walked to the dumpster, where they had left their footprints. Garcia pointed to a board put down by residents of the mobile home park to avoid stepping in mud.

  “Back when we used to have rain,” Lewis said. “Wet stuff falling from the sky. I think I remember that.”

  Garcia raised his eyes to the fire on the mountains, something everyone was doing that week in Santa Fe.

  “It’s gotten bigger while we wait for you,” the sergeant said. “Crown fire now. It’ll be moving on Los Alamos tomorrow.”

  “Let’s see the body,” Aragon said. “Then we’ll talk to your witness.”

  Forensic technicians on ladders around the dumpster set braces holding scaffolds across the opening. Nate Moss from the Office of Medical Investigator, dressed head to toe in a white cleansuit, waved them closer, directing Aragon and Lewis to use the board across the dried mud.

  “I want to photograph the body in situ without trampling the articles around her,” he said. “We’ll try to lift her straight up. Your forensic folks can do their archeology on the trash afterwards.”

  “Is this thing safe?” Aragon tested the scaffolding. “It looks like junk you ran out and bought at Home Depot.”

  “Lowe’s. Don’t touch the dumpster.”

  Aragon pulled on latex gloves. She climbed a ladder and stepped onto a wooden plank. The smell below her made her catch her breath. She lowered herself to hands and knees then lay prone, her nose even closer to what was cooking inside the dumpster’s steel.

  A teenage girl’s body lay two feet below. Face up, naked. The corner of a stained mattress covered one leg. Styrofoam packing covered her head. Red roses, dozens, were piled to one side and Aragon thought of cleanup after a wedding or quinceañera. An arm lay under black plastic garbage bags that appeared to hold lawn cuttings, the other under an empty beer case. Bags leaked orange peels, vegetable cuttings, moldy bread, coffee grounds, soiled diapers. Aragon saw bruising on the left breast. Her eyes traveled down the girl’s torso: a bloated stomach, dark pubic hair shaved into a pencil-thin line, a clear bite mark on the inside of a thigh, the leg bent allowing her to see it.

  The tattoo on her hip was an automobile, a sports car of some sort. What Montclaire had told them to look for.

  “I want to see her face.”

  “Use this.” Moss passed up a set of barbecue tongs. “Lowe’s has all the latest in cutting-edge crime scene supplies. Let me get up there and photograph the process.”

  Aragon waited for Moss to clamber onto the platform opposite her, the opening and body below and between them. His weight bent the plank as he lowered himself to one knee.

  “Wait till I’m off,” she told Lewis, who’d started to climb up. “I don’t think these boards can hold all of us.”

  Moss aimed his camera and nodded. Aragon tried the tongs. She had to lift Styrofoam packing to see that the girl’s head was inside a reusable Whole Foods shopping bag.

  “I’m going to slide it off her head,” Aragon said, and Moss nodded behind his camera.

  She grabbed a corner of the bag with the tongs and tugged, slowly, trying to keep the head in place on its pillow of garbage. She saw twisted long black hair, bruising on the neck. A word from high school came back to her: “hickeys.” Then a smooth chin emerged, lips, the tip of a nose. She left the bag where it was, still pinned under the back of the head, and lifted enough to see the whole face.

  “She’s absolutely … ” Aragon swallowed, gathered herself. “She’s beautiful.”

  “Federal Bureau of Investigation. How may I direct your call?”

  Special Agent Tomas Rivera was in court in Albuquerque. His cell would be in a lockbox near the lobby. Aragon asked the FBI receptionist for voicemail, got it, and waited for Rivera’s recorded voice to finish instructing callers to leave a message.

  “Hurry back to Santa Fe, Tomas. The witness we’ve been looking for, the one that makes the case against Thornton and Diaz, we’re pretty sure she’s dead. Add homicide to the predicate acts we’ve got for you. Time your office formally took this on. Call me. We need help.”

  “We’ll have more federal help than we want,” Lewis said when she’d ended the call. “No more talking to Montclaire alone. Let’s interview Garcia’s witness before we have a crowd.”

  Sergeant Garcia had taken his own turn on the scaffold and was climbing down the ladder, his face the color of ash.

  “May we use your car, Sarge?” Aragon asked. “Find out what this person knows.”

  Garcia pressed the heel of his hand into his brow, closed his eyes for a second, and his color returned. “You think the dumpster smelled bad. Better roll down the windows.”

  “What’s wrong with your car?”

  “My car don’t stink. It’s the witness.”

  “Name?”

  “Gray,” Garcia said.

  “Gray what?”

  “Just Gray.” Garcia lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “Says she’s a St. John’s student. Too busy reading old books to wash, I guess. Check out her feet. She’s like the little people in that movie, The Rings. The furry ones don’t wear shoes.”

  “Hobbits?” Lewis asked.

  “A hobbit girl. First I thought she was wearing those shoes that look like gloves pulled over feet, where the toes slip into little sleeves or what you call them. I thought hers were black high-tops. It’s dirt. She’s caked in it.”

  Aragon rarely stepped on the campus of St. John’s College, the school of great books where kids who didn’t need a job out of college, might never need a job, burned up more per year in tuition than the average New Mexico family supporting four kids.

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “Looking for something to eat.”

  Aragon had seen what was in the dumpster. Nothing she’d feed to a starving dog.

  “I’m not kiddin’ you.” Garcia caught the look on her face. “She was hungry. Been up all night. Some guy made her get out of his car, she was gonna hitch from the corner of Cerrillos back to campus. Decided to dumpster dive. She lives in the dorm.” Garcia paused. “Where I guess they don’t got showers.”

  “We’ll talk out here,” Lewis said. “Let’s see this … Gray.”

  “Sergeant.” Aragon pointed to the mobile home park. “Could you start your officers on the door-to-door? We’re interested in anybody seen throwing anything in the dumpster during the last twelve hours. It’s a long walk across open ground with a body over your shoulder, so especially vehicles backing to the dumpster.”

 
“Roger,” Garcia said. “We know this place. We’re here a lot.”

  Aragon wished she’d worn a hat. She kept her hair buzzed to nubs so no one could grab it in a fight, and nails clipped to nothing so she wouldn’t draw an excessive force beef for scratching someone. Going around in the sun she’d get a wrinkled scalp, friends told her. When you see me with long hair and painted nails, she told them, you’ll know I’m retired.

  They crossed open ground to Garcia’s black-and-white, the gold stripes of the Zia symbol down the side and America’s Oldest Capital City printed below. Lewis opened a door and waved a hand in front of his face.

  “Miss, would you step out? We’d like to ask a few questions.”

  “Rick.” Aragon spoke as the door cracked open. “I’m sure Gray is hungry, maybe thirsty.” The door swung wide. A short young woman got out, bare filthy feet coming first. She had the sour smell of street people. Aragon caught herself stepping back. “There’s a Blake’s not far from here. We could call in for Lotaburgers.”

  “I won’t eat anything from there,” Gray said, an edge in her voice. “That place is full of pain.”

  “It’s a hamburger joint.”

  “I hear screaming every time I go by one of those. I don’t have an appetite right now, anyway. Who are you and what do you want from me?”

  “First,” Aragon said, coming back with some edge of her own, “I’m Detective Aragon and this is Detective Lewis. What’s your real name? We need that information.”

  “I choose Gray.”

  “For us to take your statement, subpoena you later—this is a homicide and we cross our T’s—we need the name you didn’t choose. What’s on your driver’s license?”

  “Chelsea Brinnon. But that’s not my name. It’s an oppressive fiction society uses to plug me into its imposed narrative. I am Gray.”

  “Right,” Aragon said, pulling out the notebook she carried in her jeans’ rear pocket. “Is that with an ‘a’ or an ‘e’?”

  A few more questions and the girl gave a DOB for Chelsea Brinnon. And one for Gray, born eighteen months ago.

  “Any plans to legally change your name?” Lewis asked.

  “That would be surrender to the system from which Gray has freed herself.”

  It was his turn to say, “Right.”

  “Why don’t you tell us how Gray came to be here and what you saw,” Aragon said.

  That approach, as though they would be talking about someone else, seemed to relax the hobbit girl. She squatted on her haunches and dragged a finger through the dirt. Aragon got low, too, so she could watch the girl’s eyes. Lewis remained standing, giving them shade.

  “I saw a bag of tortillas, corn tortillas, no refined flour. I was reaching for it, holding my nose against the smell, worse than any other dumpster, and I saw lots of roses under a sheet of cardboard. They looked fresh. What a waste. When I moved it so I could grab one, that’s when I saw the legs. I fell in then, did everything I could to get out without touching her. It was horrible.”

  She’d called 911 on her cell. A police car came right away.

  In exchange for a ride back to the St. John’s campus, she provided her parents’ address and her cell number, saving them the trouble of getting it from the 911 operators.

  They put Gray back into Garcia’s unit and went to their own car to talk things over in cool air.

  “I couldn’t see what killed her,” Aragon said as she handed Lewis a bottle of water. “We’ll have to wait on Moss.”

  “Thornton and Diaz know Lily’s been talking.” Lewis’s shirt had turned dark with sweat. He chugged half the bottle while Aragon cracked one open for herself. “They’ve been circling,” he continued, “trying to find out what she’s saying. If that’s really Andrea in the dumpster, we need to worry about Lily. She’s in danger. Thornton and Diaz have much to lose. I don’t know about Diaz, maybe she only sees them in court. But Thornton, she knows lots of very bad people.”

  “Agreed.” Aragon picked up the thread. “A judge with everything on the line, a lawyer who gets her jollies turning killers lose. I could see them doing it together. It took a lot of strength to lift a body that high, a hundred-pound standing military press. I don’t think Thornton or Diaz alone could do it.”

  She liked this part, kicking ideas back and forth, trusting each other enough to try out paths without being held to owning them.

  “You see the bite marks?” Aragon asked.

  Lewis nodded. “We need to get back with Montclaire, ask who chomped who where. I’m not convinced she never hurt Andrea. She was able to run interference for Cody Geronimo, not too bothered by what he’d done. She thought nothing of almost burning down west Santa Fe to destroy a table with blood evidence and other stuff when we were onto him. How much further to trying her hand at killing and using everything she learned as Thornton’s investigator to steer us wrong? She’s been in on police interviews, she’s watched testimony, learned where Thornton’s clients or our side slipped up. Are we letting our hots for Thornton and Diaz blind us? Lily was the last person we can put with Andrea. That makes her our top suspect.”

  “Thornton and Diaz have motive. I don’t see it for Montclaire. Killing’s a big step from the other stuff she pulled. It crosses one huge line for most people. Especially killing a girl.”

  Lewis pinched his sweaty shirt and lifted it off his chest, fanning himself with the damp fabric.

  “Maybe Lily’s one of the other ones,” he said. “Seeing a line that’s nothing to step over. Or seeing no lines at all.”

  The SFPD crime tech, Elaine Salas, arrived. She was the sole civilian who ran the department’s Crime Scene Auxiliary Unit. She had the help of several officers, but it was her show, no one else permanently assigned to CSA.

  They discussed what she could possibly learn from a dumpster and the hard-packed soil. Salas had her own ideas, and it was going to be archeology as Moss had said. She’d catalog the contents of the dumpster, their depth and position in the trash, and see if that told her anything. She was doing prep to lift latents off the dumpster when they asked her to get Gray’s.

  With Gray’s fingerprints in Salas’s mobile reader, they took her to the St. John’s dorm, AC blasting, windows down the whole way while Gray told them about the Fregan lifestyle, the reason she ate out of dumpsters and didn’t wash to minimize exploitation of resources and build her natural resistance to bacteria, bacteria having a right to live like everything else. They got no more, except questions about how could they not hate themselves, killers of young men of color, tools of the one percent, serving oppressors of the weak. Aragon asked if eating garbage could cause brain damage. The dead girl in the dumpster, she look like an oppressor to you? And, excuse me, Chelsea Brinnon, screw this Gray bullshit, this campus looks damn white and one percenty to me. And take a damn shower. You know how many poor people of color dream of being clean and smelling nice? Your stench is an insult to their aspirations and damn oppressive to this working-class Latina.

  Lewis said, “Working-class Latina? I thought you were a pig like me.”

  They dropped Gray at her dorm and kept the windows down to air out the car, driving out of the hills away from the St. John’s campus. They came along a green patch in the drought-brown of the city. Girls in yellow and blue uniforms ran across a soccer field, holding a line, charging forward, back, to the left, now right.

  “Pull over,” Lewis said. “For a minute.”

  Aragon parked outside the chain-link enclosing the field. A coach’s whistle penetrated the roar of the city.

  “There’s one of my reasons for being a cop,” Lewis said. “Katie, over on the other side, sixth from the end. Mind if I watch my daughter for a second? ”

  “First a minute, down to a second. We’ll sit here long as you want.”

  They did. Not saying anything, the car getting hot, neither noticing. Le
wis looked away, out the window. Aragon saw him raise the back of his hand to the corner of his eye.

  “I’m ready,” Lewis said and faced the windshield, his cheeks wet. It wasn’t sweat. He reached across the seat to lay his hand on her shoulder.

  “You alright?” he asked.

  Aragon looked down, to her left, making like she was searching for the button to bring up the window and dragging a fist across her eyes so Lewis wouldn’t see.

  “She was beautiful.”

  “She was,” Lewis said. “No kid deserves to be thrown out like trash.”

  “The one that did that to her … ”

  “A dumpster’s too good for them.”

  Three

  Walter Fager in court, in the witness chair without a tie, a black mock-turtle under his pin-striped Hart, Schaffner, and Marx jacket. And slip-on canvas shoes instead of wingtips telling them he was done with the past twenty years, the old-school jacket left over from those days. No longer a lawyer. Now a civilian and having fun.

  Not telling them much else.

  “Mr. Fager, I order you to answer Ms. Thornton’s question.”

  Marcy Thornton watched him lift his chin to meet the scowl of Judge Judith S. Diaz, black robe matching black hair and eyebrows, and even blacker eyes above bony cheeks. Her face had grown hard, lost anything girlish, the eyes and mouth getting the worst of it. But still she had a good figure inside the folds, and was proud of it.

  “You’re ordering me to answer,” Fager said. “If I don’t?”

  “You know I’ll hold you in direct contempt. The bailiff will lead you off the witness stand and through that door that your former clients used to enter this room. But you’re going the other direction, to the elevator, downstairs to a holding cell. The bus to the detention center leaves at six. I’ll schedule a hearing to reconsider upon notification you’re prepared to purge yourself of contempt and comply with this court’s orders in every respect.”