Drowning Tucson (31 page)

Carmella Santiago begged her husband not to pull the trigger. But when he did, she fell in love with him all over again.

The mob outside the courthouse, the very next day, had fallen in love with her husband too. They had all watched him, on live television, walk straight up to the man being escorted into the courtroom by six sheriff’s deputies. The accused shuffled down the hall, his shackles confining his footsteps to an awkward trot. He wore a bulletproof vest and held his head low with his hands cuffed together—as if in prayer—attempting to hide his face but really only obscuring his chin. Cameras flashed, reporters shoved microphones in front of him, but he only pushed onward while the deputies shooed the cameras and microphones away as if they were a swarm of flying ants. And there, in the chaos of newsmen and law enforcement officers, Alejandro Santiago came into the frame of the television, walking up to the accused and pulling out his gun, raising it slowly, deliberately, and the deputies didn’t even react—who would think of pulling a gun in a courthouse?—and the accused looked up just as the deputies began to process the scene in front of them and Alejandro clenched his teeth and pulled the trigger and the back of the accused’s head exploded all over the deputies and the fuzzy microphones and the reporters and the cameras and Alejandro let the gun drop from his hands and held out his wrists and by then the deputies finally grasped what had just occurred so they wrestled Alejandro to the ground and cuffed him and took him into custody amid the screams of women and the stampede of frenzied people toward the exit.

Carmella had watched the entire event live on Channel 4 and was moved to tears. She stroked his face when it appeared on the TV screen, feeling the cottony static build up and imagining that it was her husband’s cheek. That he had forgotten to shave that morning in his haste to leave for the courthouse. She had begged him not to go, told him to leave it in the hands of the law, Alí, please, they will make him pay, that’s what they do, but she knew she had no power to stop him. She hadn’t really wanted to stop him anyway.

The TV showed the footage of her husband for three days straight. Nonstop. On every newscast. Footage from every angle. One cameraman from Channel 9 had unwittingly captured Alejandro’s approach—they liked to freeze the picture, zoom in, draw a white circle around her husband—and you saw him pretending to be talking on the payphone, nodding his head and glancing nonchalantly over his shoulder at the approaching deputies and the accused, and he simply turned around and the phone slid from where he held it pinned between his shoulder and his ear, and before the receiver had time to smash against the wall, the gun was already appearing from out of his waistband as he took large confident strides toward his enemy. That was one of their favorite angles. It puts a face on what might otherwise be considered a cold-hearted killer, they liked to say. Carmella chuckled whenever she heard that phrase. Her husband, cold? Anything but.

Carmella’s favorite angle was the one captured by Channel 18. It showed the look on her husband’s face right before he pulled the trigger and covered the camera lens with blood. They liked to freeze that angle too. Right before the gun goes off. It was the frame they had used for the front page of all the newspapers. Alejandro’s steeled jaw, his furrowed brow, and his eyes. His eyes made the photo. Those eyes that spoke his soul in a way she had loved immediately the first time she’d met him through a mutual friend over coffee in a night that ended with him stroking her cheek and brushing her forearm without her noticing because it had been perfect and his hands felt as if they had been there on her skin all along. And in the photo, her husband’s face taking up the top half of the
Arizona Daily Star’s
front page, on the rim of her husband’s eye, Carmella saw a tear lingering, ready to drop, the bottom of
it heavy and filled with just enough liquid that gravity would inevitably coax it over the edge of the lid. It clung to his eyelashes. Carmella thought if I had the technology, I’d blow up the picture until it was just the tear so I could see the reflection of that bastard right before my Alejandro blew his filthy brains out of his godless head.

She liked to look at the picture of her husband’s eyes—so determined, so unselfish. She could see what so many others had failed to see—that her husband had killed the man out of love, not out of hate.

Carmella had taped every newscast she could manage and she watched the tapes endlessly—Alejandro walks up to the man and BLAM. He puts out his wrists. It’s like a ballet. Alejandro, so graceful. He holds the gun out like a rose being offered to a lover. He lifts it tenderly and when it bucks in his hand, he releases it, and it drops to the floor like a dying bird. One fluid movement. Arms go up, he shoots, gun drops, and his hands are there, empty, like he had never had anything in them in the first place.

The part they stopped showing on the news was the accused. The way his head exploded yet his body continued to walk forward—she had counted—one, two, three more steps before it collapsed, finally accepting the idea that its head was missing. As if it wanted to go forward with the trial anyway to prove its innocence.

The story became national news. A man in Tucson is accused of the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl. The public is outraged. The morning of the alleged killer’s arraignment, the victim’s father, certain that the State of Arizona will not be able to impose real justice, takes the law into his own hands and murders the accused. It’s the oldest tale in the Southwest. Cowboy justice.
USA Today
loved the idea. Victim’s Father Corrals Accused. Standoff in the Southwest. New Sheriff Comes to Town. And on, and on.

The mob outside the courthouse had fallen in love with Carmella’s husband too. They demanded that he go free. They stood outside holding signs and chanting that his actions weren’t punishable. That he should be rewarded. The mob had appeared almost immediately upon seeing the live telecast of the murder. The mayor of Tucson had ordered riot police to set up a perimeter to contain the enraged crowd.

Carmella felt an immense pride in her husband as she watched the crowd grow in front of the courthouse. People had come from as far as Maine and Florida. They liked to tell the TV crews this sort of thing wouldn’t be an issue in OUR state. New York would just let Alejandro Santiago walk free. Florida would name a park after him. Oklahoma had already set aside an honorary stretch of highway for just this sort of event. Carmella liked the sound of the Honorary Alejandro Santiago Freeway. It flowed nicely from the tongue. She said it over and over again. The Honorary Alejandro Santiago Freeway. It made her happy.

The kidnapping of Samantha Santiago was not at all uncommon for Tucson. Children were abducted on a weekly basis and were never heard from again. Their faces were in constant rotation on milk cartons and post office walls. Not a month went by without some unfortunate parents coming home to find their child missing, only to call the police and get the brush-off because their missing persons division was swamped. It was the circumstances surrounding Samantha’s kidnapping that had made her case so high profile.

Twelve days before Carmella watched her husband live on TV shoot the accused man, Samantha, after spending the clear Saturday morning watching cartoons, had disappeared on the way to a friend’s house. All they’d found, after three days of relentless searching, was a melted ice cream cone lying beneath Samantha’s favorite Care Bear, Grumpy Bear, that she had taken with her. All the parents in the neighborhood had been notified of her disappearance, and someone called the Santiagos three days after she had disappeared to tell them of the ice cream cone and the stuffed doll lying in the street in front of their house, which was only two streets away.

The police chalked it up as another missing child to add to the ever-growing list of missing children in the greater Tucson area, and they sent a patrol to give the Santiagos the usual speech concerning children whose disappearance had lasted more than two days. So, three days later, with no leads and no clues other than the doll and the ice cream, two officers arrived at the Santiagos’s house in the early evening, parked their cruiser in front of the house where the neighbors, who were gaping out
their windows, shook their heads in grief for the mother and father, and knocked on the front door. Alejandro and his wife answered the door, hesitating when they saw two police officers who so obviously had no good news, then inviting them in for coffee so they could talk in private.

Both officers were rookies, which is why they’d been sent to do the taxing job of telling Alejandro and his wife that the odds, Mr. and Mrs. Santiago, that your daughter has been taken out of state—and of course there are exceptions—are pretty good. Perhaps she’s even been taken down to Mexico where children are often smuggled only to resurface many years later fluent in Spanish, having forgotten all their English and bearing an entirely new identity. That’s the worst-case scenario. There’s also a small chance that the person who abducted her may be contacting you about a ransom. If that’s the case—the officer cleared his throat, looked at his partner, who nodded for him to continue—please contact us and we’ll try our best to work something out with the criminal.

The officers didn’t tell the parents what is most common, that their daughter was either dead or maybe had even been smuggled down into the belly of Mexico where she’d be sold into slavery or prostitution. Most likely in Mexico City. But there was no point in telling them that.

On the fourth day following Samantha’s disappearance, the Tucson Police Department received an anonymous phone call from a family living on A Mountain. Their son had come home late at night from visiting his girlfriend down in the city when he had almost run head-on into an ice cream truck speeding down a secluded mountain road without its headlights on. He hadn’t been able to read the license plate number and waited a few days to tell his parents about the event because he worried he’d get into trouble for staying out too late. When he finally told his parents, they decided to call the police because nothing good could come from any vehicle driving on A Mountain at night with its lights off. Besides, ice cream men never came up there. It was mostly retirees who lived on the mountain.

And so, five days following the disappearance of their daughter, while the Santiagos lay in bed, pale and unable to do anything but pray for her safe return, the police sent a search team up to A Mountain to check out the tip. The search team, consisting of four police officers,
stumbled upon the body of Samantha Santiago at 1:36 p.m., in the blazing 115-degree summer heat. The sight of the little girl’s body caused two of the officers to faint immediately, their minds rejecting the picture of the dead girl bound by five lengths of bungee cord, and the other two officers, who had thirty-two years combined experience on the force and who’d found countless bodies in the desert over the years, grabbed on to each other for support and wept and vomited for almost half an hour until they could only dry heave and spit up blood and their tear ducts were incapable of producing another drop.