Seven Spanish Angels Read online

The third girl was back by the station, just off the interstate. Cebada. Her name was Maria Sein.

  It took me twenty-five minutes to get there, then two to knock—no answer again—then another four for me to try to look in the window by her door.

  Either she wasn’t there or she was being very very still.

  I knocked again, louder, ducked fast to the window to see anybody moving, and then Maria Sein walked up behind me, leading with her chest—walking fast to keep up with it. She was natural blonde. Spanish maybe, but not Mexican.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Glad to see you’re healthy.” The man walking behind her turned to watch me leave. I focused ahead, pretending not to notice, to be somewhere else, and then, accidentally, I was: the dumpster across the street. I recognized it.

  I kept my hand to the door of my car, didn’t open it.

  The dumpster. The way it was caved in in front, like somebody had backed into it hard at angle, just catching it with the corner of their bumper. I remembered it because the wheel-handed arms that stuck out from each side had collapsed around the impact some, as if absorbing it, hugging it to them to control the pain. I remembered the dumpster because I couldn’t figure out why it was empty each time I saw it—how did the mother trash truck line its arms up, to lift it? Did she love it enough to draw her shoulders together, angle her elbows in?

  Each time I saw it.

  I nodded, looked across Cebada.

  It was Richard’s complex. I’d studied the dumpster so much because I’d always had to sit in the parking lot, wait for him to get whatever he was getting then dive out the door so we could make it back to the station by one o’clock.

  I crossed the street without looking either way.

  Because Madrone had known that Richard was living with me, he probably hadn’t checked his last place of residence. Maybe he hadn’t gone to Juarez when he left my house, though. Maybe he’d simply come home. Maybe he’d been here all along.

  This time I went straight to the man draped in extension cords, bleeding work orders. He let me in not because I batted my eyes or had a good story, but because he was walking that way already, and didn’t care.

  “You don’t knock first?” I said, watching his key.

  “Forty-three J’s gone,” he said, making a motion as if kissing money off the end of his fingertips. “Just get what you need here, do the same.”

  I stepped in.

  The air conditioner hadn’t been on in weeks, it felt like. All the smells of past families were rising from the carpet, sticking to the walls. It was like walking into a memory; it made my eyes water. I closed the door behind me anyway, locked it. Said Richard’s name out loud, no response.

  The apartment was like I’d imagined it: thirteen-inch TV on a card table so he could watch it while he cooked; third-hand couch wallowed out on one side, no decoration, the TV stand before it empty; harvest gold kitchen with mold-black food. When Richard had showed up at my door, he’d left a lot behind. Like he had been starting over, trying to.

  I stepped into the hall, past the bathroom—empty, stained bathtub—and the bedroom was the same as the rest: mattress on the floor draped in layers of faded sheets (Richard hated blankets), a floodlight hanging from the clothes bar in the closet, the window foiled over then patched with all manner of tape.

  The closet in the hall was empty, had never been used for anything it looked like.

  I said his name again, because there was only one room left, but he wasn’t there, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to be.

  The last room was a desk, a folding chair, a bulletin board. A scrap furniture version of his office in Homicide, as if he needed to playact everything here before coming to work. Or like he brought his work home.

  There were still no decorations in the room—a study, it felt like, more than a second bedroom—but there had been: the walls were thick with staples and tack holes and nails, some gouged out, some pounded flush with the sheetrock. Little corners of paper under a few of them, and the carpet—my shoes were off again, like this was a crime scene—it was flat before that wall. Worn down, matted.

  I sat down at the chair and it leaned back too far. I had to gecko my hands onto the glass top of the desk to keep from falling all the way back, and still, it was close. Trick chairs; it was vintage Richard, constructing a room—a world—so it would only work for him. So he was the one who knew the tricks, the false steps, the low doors. So everyone else there would be a clown, compared to him.

  He’d probably managed to even booby-trap me somehow. Why Madrone was hating me: Richard had left some scent. Peed on me. Left his handprint on my face.

  I shook my head, pulled myself up, and saw it, framed between my hands, under the glass: the thing he hadn’t packed up, because it was so obvious.

  It was him when he was my age, or close. G.I. Joe Richard, Private Godder. BDUs, helmet, thirty less pounds, an assault rifle casual over his shoulder, all of it.

  Standing with him, dressed like him—for war—were six other soldiers. They all had their forearms turned so their cool tattoos faced the camera. It was supposed to have looked unintentional, probably, but then they’d all done it.

  It was a good picture.

  I lifted the glass, took it, brought it close to try to make out the tattoo—Richard’s was blurry now, like he’d been airbrushed, not tattooed—but it was too small. This close though, there was something else: on top of Richard’s helmet, where his forehead would be, about, were two pieces of what was probably red tape. They were the same length, and crossed to make a plus sign. Like a target. No: a medic.

  Another thing he’d never told me.

  I slid the picture into my rear pocket, tried to burn it in my head, not to sit on it, then turned, forgot everything: an old woman was standing there, watching me.

  “He’s not getting his deposit back,” she said.

  I lowered my eyes, crept past, to my car, the steering wheel practically melted. Waiting for the air conditioner to get cool, I stabbed my cell phone on.

  While I’d been knocking on doors, three messages had logged.

  The first was Richard. Just the caller ID, no voice.

  The second was a hang-up, no caller ID.

  The third was Nate.

  There was another dead girl. In Manhattan Heights.

  “You weren’t on my list,” I said to her, then closed my phone, turned it back off.

  Madrone’s FORENSICS jacket got me through the outer barrier, but then the patrolman posted at the door extended a hand, stopped me.

  “I’m supposed to be here,” I said, pushing his arm away.

  “Detective Madrone said vampire rules.”

  “Vampire rules?”

  “You have to be invited.”

  I shook my head, looked back to the crowd. It was just the hangers-on, now.

  “I’m already late,” I said, stepping around. “Dispatch had to leave a—”

  “Ma’am,” the patrolman said. “I’m sorry.”

  This time I stepped close to him instead of pushing his arm away.

  “This girl in here,” I whispered, up into his neck, his ear. “She’s the third in three days. All her blood sucked out, dressed in clothes that aren’t hers, maybe worse.”

  He just stared at me.

  “How about this, then? You don’t think I’m supposed to be in there. I say I am. If I can tell you in one guess what she does for a living, you let me in.”

  Thirty seconds later, I was walking barefoot across the hardwood floor of the living room.

  She was a dancer. One of her housemates had found her. I picked that much up in the living room.

  This time all the flashbulbs were coming from the bathroom. CSU was crawling along the carpet and walls of the hall, placing one white-gloved hand after the next, each movement so deliberate. When he’d even talk about them—about where I was going to transfer out to at the end of my six months in Homicide—Richard called them the mime troupe, the audio-visual crowd fro
m high school, just no high school around them anymore.

  “Chemistry club,” I’d corrected him.

  It was where I would have been if I hadn’t been so consciously Chicana back then. There was no word for coefficient in nahuatl though, so, for me, for four years, science didn’t exist.

  “¿Cómo se llama?” I said to the one of the techs, only hearing the Spanish as I said it. Not meaning to have used it, anyway.

  The tech looked at me over her mask, remembering me from school too, like I remembered her.

  She pushed her goggles back.

  “You should have your gloves on,” she said.

  I looked down at my hands, said it again: “¿Su nombre?”

  She looked to the bathroom.

  “DMV or stage?” she said, then before I could answer, told me: Rosario Flores—The Spanish Rose.

  Channel 7 was going to love her.

  I nodded thanks to the tech and stepped around her section of the carpet, for the bathroom, but heard Madrone’s voice welling up out of the bedroom at the end of the hall. Like he was walking out.

  Before realizing it, I’d stepped back into the living room, only giving him the back of my jacket. Of his jacket.

  The patrolmen and CSU milling around the living room quieted, looking at me—waiting for me to throw up, probably, because surely I’d just seen her.

  I made no eye contact, just stepped into the kitchen, realized that this was another thing the victims each shared: houses. Not apartments, like I’d been going to all morning.

  I should have seen it.

  In the kitchen, on the side of the refrigerator, was a poor photocopy of Rosario Flores’s dance schedule—a table with X’s and hours. Some she’d circled in red. I followed a row down to today, tonight. She was on, would have been, after two days off. Was maybe already not wearing her bra, even, so there’d be no lines.

  It explained why I hadn’t found her, though: she wasn’t a no-show yet.

  If there was just some other way to single her out—if we could figure out how he was picking them—she might still be alive.

  The tech dusting the front of the refrigerator looked to me, my jacket, just the front. It was enough; I was invisible.

  I stepped into the hall just as I heard Madrone come into the living room.

  I had to see her before he kicked me out, anyway.

  I nodded to myself that I could do this a third time, and stepped into the doorway of the bathroom.

  Rosario Flores was in the bathtub. No blood. Not there anyway.

  It was around, though.

  This time, the killer’d left it in glasses and cups, balanced on every flat surface of the bathroom. Each one brimming, white shoelaces in some of them—the ones closest to her, on the most obvious flat surfaces. The tips of the shoelaces burned, the plastic melted off.

  “Candles,” I said. He’d been trying to make candles.

  But—if he could do all this, he had to know it wouldn’t work, right?

  I turned back to Rosario Flores, trying to see her all at once. Her fingernails perfect, meaning she hadn’t been in a fight. Her breasts unbitten, rising above the plane of the water as if she were still proud of them, even in death. Or like they were flotation devices. Like the first two, her lips were tight; she had been told to keep a secret, not tell us anything.

  Her eyes were the kind of closed that looked just barely asleep, the kind you had to tiptoe around.

  I wanted to reach in the water, feel for the holes in her calves which had to be there, the semi-circle cut into her back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her, closing my eyes too, and from behind me, a voice said, “What for?”

  Madrone.

  I turned around.

  He shrugged, stepped in, never looking away from me. “I mean, you’ve got your series now, right?”

  “I didn’t want this,” I told him.

  Madrone stepped closer.

  “Did you know her name too?” he said, extending an index finger to a glass of blood, as if he were going to touch it—like he just wanted to tap the glass, see what fish would flash to the sound, look out at him.

  “No,” I said.

  Madrone walked over to the bathtub, his knees straight so that it was a stroll. I almost expected him to start whistling. Ask me for a hamburger today that he could pay for later.

  “Guess you saw it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You mean supersleuth Marta Villarreal missed something?”

  I stepped closer and he showed me: in the crook of Rosario Flores’s right arm, a needle hole. The idea of one, anyway: dripping from it in blue ink was the blood somebody’d drawn on her, afraid we’d miss it, get distracted by roses or something again. I’d thought it was an old tattoo, hardly even registered it.

  “Ten gauge,” Madrone said, about the hole. “That’s what CSU guesses, anyway.”

  “Diabetic?”

  Madrone shook his head no, said, “She did dance, like you said she would.”

  “That doesn’t mean she shot up, sir.”

  “I’m doing you a courtesy showing you,” he said. “Once we walk out of the bathroom, I’m arresting you. You’re not supposed to be on my crime scene.”

  “But I told you she was—”

  “I know,” he said, looking at her too. “A dancer. But that shit about the clothes.” He shrugged, opened his hand down to her. “She’s… what? A birthday girl?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Tell her,” Madrone said.

  “Trevana on the way?”

  “They’re trying to wake him up, I think,” Madrone said.

  “His assistant?” I made myself say.

  Madrone looked over to me for a long second, then down to the small evidence bag he’d just found in his pocket.

  “He’s where he belongs,” he said.

  “But—” Her, Rosario Flores. The water wouldn’t have masked her body temp enough that we couldn’t place her alive last night, when Davidson had been locked up.

  Madrone shrugged like it was all out of his hands.

  “Me for him, then,” I said.

  Madrone shrugged again. Didn’t seem to care anymore.

  “If your friend from the Sheriff’s office has anything to contribute,” he said, turning for the door, “no time like the present, yeah?”

  “I’ll let him know,” I said, and followed him out, into the cuffs he had waiting.

  The patrolman he gave me to led me out the front door, for all the cameras. I looked out across the lenses and faces and lights. The only familiar face was Liz P.’s cameraman, head and shoulders above the crowd, his camera angled down onto me.

  I looked away, let the patrolman guide my head down into the car.

  Before he went back into the house he turned the car on, locked all the doors.

  At first, alone, all the cameras were on me, my FORENSICS windbreaker, but then, for an instant, it was just Liz P. from Channel 7.

  She was watching me, had her head slightly out of line with her shoulders, to see me better.

  I smiled, turned away, and when I looked back, she was gone.

  Five minutes later, the patrolman in custody of me stepped off the porch. Immediately he was swamped by microphones, having to wade through.

  He turned his body sideways, made the yellow horse barrier in five long steps. The two officers there let him through, closed it behind him, and everything was backwards now: they were keeping the reporters in Rosario Flores’s yard. All of them except Liz P.

  She had been waiting for the patrolman, it seemed, stepped out in front of him, her head lowered to ask him one last question, which was odd, was making eye contact a shuffle. What was she doing? The officer shook his head no, apologized, and tried to step around, but Liz P. went with him, staying in front of him.

  From the other side of the car, so the light bar would be in the shot, make it look accidental, her blond cameraman was shooting all
this. I could just see his legs, pressed up against the plastic side glass.

  Liz P. was doing this on purpose.

  Beside the car now, she was still questioning the patrolman, being careful not to look at me but inside, to the idea of Rosario Flores. When one of the officers at the barricade stepped back to hold her in place while my patrolman stepped away, to his car, Liz P. stumbled forward, caught her hand on the officer’s chest, and brought her head up hard, slamming it into the officer’s nose, spraying blood onto the side glass of the patrol car.

  In two more steps, then, she had her hand to the butt of my patrolman’s gun, was pulling hard enough to spin him around. The gun wouldn’t come out, of course, but she’d assaulted an officer now, at the very least. Tried to take another’s weapon.

  My patrolman took her hand, calmly cuffed one wrist to the other, and led her around to the other side of the patrol car. It made sense: we were both going to women’s booking, women’s lock-up.

  Liz P. sat by me smiling, out of breath, her eyes wet.

  “I love being a fucking journalist,” she said.

  “You did that on purpose,” I said back.

  “Did you think he was just going to let me talk to you if I asked nice-like?”

  I shook my head, looked back to the crowd.

  At her window again was her cameraman. He was holding his heavy camera by his thigh, the red light on.

  “This is an interview,” I said.

  “Why are they arresting you?” Liz P. said back.

  My patrolman was still trying to help the other patrolman get his nose under control. In the back of the car, we had already been forgotten.

  I turned to Liz P. To her camera.

  “Because I know what’s going on,” I said, maybe loud enough.

  “You know who the Rose Killer is?” she said.

  I shook my head no, laughed a bit.

  “There is no Rose Killer,” I said.

  “Chupacabra, then?”

  “Close,” I nodded. “Try the Lote Bravo Rapist.”

  It only took four hours to get out of jail. Not because I was a cop, but because Liz P. was Liz P.

  At the Properties desk we pretended not to know each other. One of the items in my brown envelope was the faded snapshot I’d had in my pocket for too long. I could barely see the soldiers in it now. Richard was just another shape, a shadow. I left it in the metal trashcan, called a cab and collected my car from Rosario Flores’s. My first instinct after that, of course, was to finish what I’d been doing when Madrone interrupted: look at her, figure her out. She would be down in the morgue by now. But I couldn’t take any more dead girls, I didn’t think. I needed a live one.