Sonny laughed halfheartedly. Whoever did these things usually drained the blood of the animal without spilling a drop. The image of Gloria’s pale, lifeless body floated before him, an image that haunted him. He had seen blood spilled in South Valley bars, but that seemed kind of normal when men got together to drink and arguments started.
Blood. That’s what life boiled down to. Blood and spirit. They had separated body and soul in a gruesome ceremony. Separated her vital juices from her body, and left the pale, white shell. The only way to lay her soul to rest was to find the murderer and find her blood.
He had felt Gloria’s restless spirit in the room. Rest, it cried, I need to rest! Sonny, if you loved me, find my blood and allow me to rest.
Or was his search really to lay his own fear to rest?
“You cold, Sonny?” Ruth asked and placed her hand on his shoulder. Her perfume was sweet, mixed with book ink amid the hushed whispers of the library. A book waiting to be opened, Sonny thought as he looked up at her.
“The air conditioning,” he explained.
“Hope you’re not coming down with a summer cold,” she said and went off in search of more files.
Sonny read on. The ranchers interviewed in the newspaper stories usually reported strange lights or sounds near the time a mutilation occurred. “I thought it was an army helicopter,” one old rancher was quoted.
“We seen lights flashin’ at night,” his wife added, “comin’ and goin’, kind of scary.”
“It was a flyin’ saucer, and it came right down behind the barn.” The couple was from southern New Mexico, near Tularosa. “Then it lifted straight up. Ain’t no plane or rocket over in White Sands that can do what that spaceship did.”
A handful of people in the state actually claimed they had seen flying saucers. Ranches were isolated in the wide open spaces of the raw landscape, and people just saw things. The canopy of the Milky Way at night was brilliant and immense, and it was etched with falling stars. Coyotes cried, and the large and barren landscape of the state became a ghostly moonscape. Loneliness filled the nights.
Why, a rancher would ask when he found one of his steers or bulls mutilated, would anyone do a thing like this? If there was no trace of human activity where the mutilation took place, the rancher and his wife grew nervous and looked to the skies.
“Maybe it was the lights we saw last night.”
“Maybe we’re being watched from outer space.”
The air force over at Kirtland had actually set up a special division to follow up on the sightings. But Sonny knew sure as hell the Kirtland boys wouldn’t talk. They’d been storing nuclear bombs and high-level radioactive waste in the Manzano Mountains outside of town for a long time, but they had the city duped into believing they were into nice, quiet peacetime experiments. The Kirtland payroll was a big factor in city economics, so nobody in city hall raised questions.
The nuclear waste was piling up. No end to it, he thought, and people don’t seem to give a damn. But he was aware of it. Sonny was sure the cancer that killed his father had come from his exposure to radioactive material. Sonny sighed, shook his head, and returned to the article.
“Hell,” one old rancher was quoted, “if it’d been poachers, they’d’ve taken the beef. Don’t make sense to poach a beef and leave it to the vultures. It’s the devil’s work, that’s what I think.”
Devil’s work, that’s what don Eliseo would say, too.
“Seguro que sí, Sonny, there’s diablos all around. They come to pull a curtain over your eyes. So you can’t see the Señores y Señoras de la Luz.”
Don Eliseo and his octogenarian friends had been telling stories recently. Strange things happened at night in the back roads of the irrigation ditches. No, not kids going out to smoke dope or sniff paint cans. The dogs barked, then whined, but they didn’t challenge the noises heard at night. Don Eliseo believed evil walked the earth.
“Last week we found a big spot in the field behind Toto’s house,” he had told Sonny. “Burned in a circle. No tracks. Just the strange burn. And Toto’s dog was dead. It’s no good, Sonny. Something evil has come to Ranchitos. It’s right here with us.”
In the old days the people of the valley believed that witches came in the shape of fireballs. In the deep recesses of the river bosque, the balls of fire gathered to do their dance for the devil. Some believed sacrifice of roosters and chickens took place. The witches danced with the devil, fornicated with the goats. The imagination was fired by the unexplainable, or perhaps, Sonny thought, by the belief in the spirit world. These very religious people still believed the devil and his witches came to do their evil work on earth.
His mother believed in those signs. “When we were children growing up in Socorro we saw the fireballs dancing along the river. Late at night they would come out. We could see them from our ranch. The old people said it was witches, and we believed. Mamá would take us inside to pray.”
There are good witches, Sonny thought. A shaman served the tribe and did good, like Rita’s friend, Lorenza Villa, a curandera who lived in Corrales. But there were those who did evil. Gloria seemed to have run into the murdering kind.
There was a postage-stamp-size article on the recent strange light that had appeared in the North Valley, near Ranchitos. So it wasn’t just don Eliseo and his friends, Sonny mused. The local cops called Kirtland, but the air force swore it had no tests scheduled that day and no helicopters in the area.
They called weatherman Morgan at one of the TV stations, and he thought it was the aurora borealis, the northern lights. Dry heat bouncing off the atmosphere. There had been no rain since a few stingy showers in early May and the heat and electricity in the air were playing tricks.
Sonny dug deeper into the files, trying to make sense of the cattle mutilation stories from around the state, working desperately, as if the search could nullify the cold he felt, the image of Gloria, his thoughts of his mother and tía Delfina sitting in the darkened house, feeling the grief which was so deep. He should get out of here and go to them. But what could he do?
“How’s it going?” Ruth asked.
“I was reading the cattle stories. Just going back a few years, I’ve found quite a few that occurred around the state.…” He paused. Around! That was it! “Can you bring me a state map? And thumbtacks!”
Ruth nodded and went off; she returned quickly. “Where can I pin this?” he asked. She cleared a bulletin board for him. He pinned the map on the board. “Around the state,” he kept repeating, “around the state.”
When Ruth handed him the thumbtacks, she felt his hand tremble. He looked at the notes where he had jotted the exact time and place of each mutilation, then he began to place a thumbtack where each incident had occurred. Tucumcari. Wagon Mound. Tierra Amarilla. Ramah. Quemado. A ranch in the Black Mountains. A ranch near White Sands. Picacho. Elida. And the most recent one on a ranch just the other side of the Sandia Mountains, twenty miles as the crow would fly, near the village of La Cueva.
Sonny breathed deep as he slumped back in his chair and gazed at the map.
“See,” he said.
“What?” Ruth asked. She stared at the thumbtacks on the map.
“What do you see if you trace the thumbtacks?”
Ruth traced the outline. “A circle,” she said as her hand swept round. “Except this one here at the Sandias. It’s—”
“The center.”
“And the four outside the circle?” Ruth pointed.
“The four lines of the Zia sun,” Sonny whispered. The same sign that had been etched on Gloria’s stomach. The Sandias’ thumbtack in the center of the sun was just where Raven’s Zia-shaped commune stood. He definitely needed to take a ride up there.
“What does it mean?”
“A theory. Nothing but a theory.” He glanced again at the article on the La Cueva mutilation.
I need to pay a visit to señor Escobar to check out that mutilated cow, and to Raven and his four wives, Sonny thought.
His stomach knotted as the image of Gloria’s cold body appeared superimposed on the map. Her navel was the center, her arms and legs spread out in the four directions.
“You okay?” Ruth asked, concerned.
“I’m fine,” Sonny answered, but he wasn’t. Something had gotten under his skin in the death room. Some strange power was making him see images, confusing his thoughts. Frank Dominic made sure I went into the death room with him. He lifted the sheet from his wife’s body so I could see Gloria. Why?
“I’ll keep these for you,” Ruth said as she gathered the map and the files he had been reading.
“Thanks, Ruth,” he said and took her hand. “Keep it secret.”
Ruth nodded. “You know what goes on between the researcher and the librarian is confidential.” She smiled. Ruth, the guardian of books, was herself a closed one.
The news of Gloria Dominic’s murder had been on the television they kept in the office, and she wondered if he was on the case. Sonny was trying to connect something, but she didn’t press. She never did.
“It’s like the sins confessed to the priest.” She held her fingers to her lips. What she had learned would not escape.
She was standing close enough for him to smell her perfume. Her hair was done up, but one movement would release the pins and her auburn hair would cascade over her shoulders. He needed to be held, he thought, by his mother as she held him when he was a child, or by Rita, whose love often lullabied him to sleep, or by Ruth, who was warm and alive, not cold and dead like Gloria.
She’s like a nun, he thought as he looked at her clear, gray eyes. She lives in a world of the sacred, in a sanctuary of books, whispers, spiritual thought, and great ideas.
She had hinted that she hadn’t had a man since her divorce. “Too busy,” she said once when they had lunch at Lindy’s.
She took his hands in hers and sighed softly. He had never held her hands or touched her before, and yet the impulse had been there.
“You take care of yourself,” she whispered.
“I will.”
“Anything I can do?”
She was a good-looking woman, but she had been hiding from the touch of a man, hiding her long, auburn hair, hiding behind the image of the librarian, hiding behind her glasses.
“Gloria Dominic was murdered last night,” he said.
She nodded. “It was on the television news.”
“She was my cousin.…”
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” She touched his cheek.
Her hands were soft and delicate, warm on the coldness he felt all over his body. He looked into her eyes and thought of Gloria.
Yesterday she was alive, warm, glowing with life, and now she was dead. Right now she was probably resting on a slab where one of the doctors of the office of the medical investigator was sawing into her. He would cut into her thigh and dig out again the femoral artery and vein to examine them carefully and finally open her vagina to take samples of the dried-up juices that could be found there. He would open her womb and know for sure whether she was pregnant or not. And as he cut, the doctor would mutilate her anew, surgically opening up her most private parts and exposing them.
“It was ugly,” he whispered.
Ruth sensed his anguish, touched his lips. “Oh, Sonny.”
He slipped his arms around her and held her, as if embracing her would make Gloria’s haunting image disappear. She stood quietly trembling in his embrace, his fear a new emotion that filled the moment.
He held her and felt the beating of her heart, then he smiled, said “Thanks for everything,” and slipped past her and out the door.
6
His mind churning and his stomach raw from hunger, Sonny drove north on Fourth Street to Rita’s Cocina. He needed to eat, and he needed to see Rita.
He flipped on his CB and found the police band was still buzzing with the Gloria Dominic murder, but there seemed nothing new on the case to report.
A thin veil of dust from the unpaved side roads hung over the valley creating an eerie curtain. The heat of the June afternoon had climbed to 90, the twilight would last long, and the cool of evening wouldn’t come till sunset. There was no prospect of rain to cool off the dry spell. The dull sky hung over the valley like a turtle shell, trapping the heat.
He swerved in and out of Friday-evening traffic, a silent ethereal flow that moved as an image in a bad dream. The traffic included shoppers going home, hurrying to the coolness of their swamp coolers or shade trees in the backyard. Working men who had spent all day under the blazing sun were now stopping at their favorite bars to cool off with a beer before heading home.
A few lowriders were already cruising toward Central, where they would join the summer-evening ritual, showing off their customized cars as they paraded from downtown to the Kmart on Atrisco. The loud music from their boom boxes shattered the otherwise quiet air.
Summer had arrived, and with it the high desert heat that was dry and therefore manageable. But without rain the sky would remain immense over the valley, and its beauty would become oppressive.
The autopsy, Sonny thought, and on a chance he dialed the chief on his mobile phone. He was surprised when he was passed through. Sam Garcia was working late.
“Anything new?” Sonny asked, doubting he would get any information, but the chief was in an agreeable mood.
“We got a set of tire tracks from the ditch road along the back of the house,” Garcia replied. “They look fresh. But who the hell knows; they could belong to a ditch rider. Medical investigator report’s done. Shows there was no rape.… We interviewed all the neighbors, but they heard nothing. Dominic’s house sits on a three-acre lot; someone coming in the back way wouldn’t have been seen. And the dogs were silenced.”
“Did the medical investigator find anything else?” Sonny asked. If Howard was right, the fact that Gloria was pregnant would be known by now.
The phone was muffled for a moment, then Garcia said, “No, nothing. We questioned the gardener. Leroy Brown, black, male, from the San José area. He was working for the Dominics up to a week ago. So was the housekeeper, Veronica Worthy. Both were hired by Gloria. And get this, both were fired by her. People we’ve talked to say the Worthy woman was devoted to Gloria Dominic. But Brown … I let both go, for now. Right now the tracks on the ditch road are the only thing we have going, officially. But I think we’ll find this is simpler than it looks, a disgruntled employee. That’s the only reason I’m telling you all this, because I think the whole thing is going to be over before it really starts.”
Someone behind Sonny honked angrily and broke the silence of the street. Sonny glanced in his rearview mirror and saw a couple of cowboys tailgating him in their high-riding, boss Chevy. They had obviously just left the local watering hole and were on the way to the next one up the street. On Friday nights, Sonny knew, the best rule was to let anybody who wanted to pass, pass.
Let them wrap themselves around a telephone pole somewhere down the road, Sonny thought. He sure as hell didn’t want to tangle with them. It was getting so that a lot of crazy motorists carried weapons in their cars. Only recently one had stepped out of his car to shoot another man over a simple traffic quarrel. Now these two cowboys were full of Bud and peering down at him from their high-riding truck, intimidating him.
It wasn’t anywhere near deer season, but Sonny could make out two high-caliber rifles in the gun rack.
“Enough.” Sonny frowned as he pulled off onto the shoulder of the road so he could concentrate on Garcia. The big four-by-four Chevy, riding three feet off the ground, barreled by. “I don’t want to be a statistic,” Sonny said, raising his middle finger in salutation.
“What?” the chief asked.
“Nothing. I don’t believe it,” Sonny replied. The chief was in a good mood. He was talking, but damnit! His theory sounded too simple.
“What the hell don’t you believe?”
“Shutting this down by conveniently taking in some poor gardener
who won’t know what hit him, that’s what!”
“Goddamn you, Sonny! I shouldn’t give you the time of day! What makes you get so high and mighty?”
“Delfina hired me!” Sonny shot back.
“You’re crazy if you agreed! I’m telling you, this isn’t what old Manuel trained you for! This is murder, not missing persons!”
“I need the MI’s report. Tell me, what else do you know?”
“Ah, shit,” Garcia replied. He was pissed off, and for a moment Sonny thought he might hang up, but he didn’t. “Okay, okay, the blow to the head didn’t kill her. She was cut open and drained while still alive.”
Sonny groaned. He had feared all day he would hear that, but he still wasn’t prepared. A cold sweat broke over him; he felt nauseated.
He lay his forehead on the steering wheel. His stomach was in a knot; he felt chilled, but he was sweating.
“Like I said, this is going to be a shit case. The press wants to hang me on this one. Did you see the five o’clock news? You watch the paper tomorrow, they’re going to cry for blood! People are scared stiff! ‘Satanic cult,’ the news said. Mayor called me in, she wants something done right now! I wouldn’t get into it if I was you. I don’t care if she was your prima.”
The phone went dead. Sonny slowly lifted his head and looked up the street. The cowboys in the truck had sped out of sight, cars moved steadily up and down the street, and Sonny pulled back into the traffic. The bars and restaurants were busy; life had not changed on Fourth Street. The drive-up window at Isidro’s Bar had a line of five cars. Mexican workers who had done dirty, heavy work all day now wandered in to drink a cold beer. Tonight they would dance. For a lot of these people, Gloria Dominic’s death would be of little or no interest. People they knew died every day and life went on. Life on the margin was rough, and on Fourth Street it was rougher. But it went on.
A black seed of fear had taken root in Sonny’s stomach. It was now the size of a fist, with tendrils that reached out and squeezed his soul. Gloria’s haunted voice cried to him.
He tasted bile in his mouth. His stomach was empty; he hadn’t eaten all day. The revulsion he felt when the chief said she had been drained while alive fed his nausea.