The Replacement Child (31 page)

Manny continued. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen. I tried calling her and stopping by the house, but she wouldn’t see me. On Monday, I saw her driving down Cerrillos Road, so I pulled her over at Oñate Park.”

“You used your police vehicle in the commission of a crime?” the DA asked. She sounded like she was trying to think up new charges.

Pollack, ignoring her, said, “About what time was this, Officer Cordova?”

“About eight fifteen
P.M.
She got out of her car and we started talking. I tried talking her out of turning me in. I tried to tell her she was overreacting, but she wouldn’t listen….” His jaw was clenched; his hands, not knowing where to go, went everywhere as he talked.

“So you hit her?” the DA asked.

Manny nodded. He wiped his eyes with his fingers and stared at the tears. “She fell backward and … and … I …”

“You choked her?” Pollack asked with a gentleness that surprised Gil.

Manny nodded again, not bothering to wipe away the tears anymore. They fell on his shirt, making dark spots. When he spoke, his voice was hard to understand. “She just stopped moving. I didn’t know what to do. She was just lying there and I didn’t know what to do. She wouldn’t move….”

Pollack quietly prompted Manny. “What did you do next?”

Manny took a long breath. “I called Ron Baca. I knew he would be able to figure it out. He told me to call some guy named Ken Strunk and tell him that if he didn’t help me, Ron would bring him up on statutory-rape charges.”

“What did Strunk say?” Pollack asked over the voice of the DA, who was saying something about birds of a feather.

“Strunk didn’t really want anything to do with it, but I told him there were pictures to prove he molested some girl and that if he helped us, we’d give them back to him,” Manny said. His tears were starting to dry up.

“Did you see the pictures?” Pollack asked.

“No. Melissa showed them to Ron and told him that Strunk was dating one of her students. I guess she wanted Strunk arrested or something. When I called Strunk, I just repeated what Ron told me to.”

“What happened next?” Pollack asked.

“That Strunk guy shows up fifteen minutes later, I guess about eight forty-five
P.M.
, maybe a little bit earlier. We put Melissa …” Manny hesitated. “We put her in the trunk of his car. Ron told him to toss her off the bridge in Taos to make it look like a drug deal. And it got her out of our police district.”

“And you went back on patrol?” Pollack asked.

“Yeah. I went to an alarm check.”

“And Ron was at his mom’s house fixing the washing machine when you called him?” A nod from Manny. “Whose idea
was it to lie to Detective Montoya about seeing Melissa buy drugs the day she died?”

“Ron’s. We did it to throw you guys off the track. He said it would be okay because we’d be getting Hector Morales off the streets. And we told the newspaper that she did drugs.” The anonymous sources Lucy had tried to tell Gil about.

“Did you talk to Ron Baca again the night Melissa died?” Pollack asked. Gil was pretty sure he knew where Pollack was headed with the question.

“Don’t you mean was murdered?” the DA said.

Manny answered Pollack. “I called Ron on his cell phone. I wanted to turn myself in to the state police and call the OMI, but he talked me out of it.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he didn’t think I should ruin my career over something that wasn’t my fault.”

“What time was the phone call?”

“About eleven thirty
P.M.
or so.” Pollack looked directly at Gil through the two-way mirror. Gil knew what he was thinking: Cordova’s call to Ron Baca on Monday night was the cell-phone call that Scanner Lady had overheard. Lucy was right.

“Manny, were you on patrol Tuesday night?”

“Yeah. A rookie was doing a ride-along with me.” Which meant that he was with someone all night, making it impossible for him to have killed Scanner Lady.

“Manny,” Pollack said, “why do you think Ron helped you get rid of Melissa’s body?”

Without hesitating, Manny said, “Because Ron’s a good friend. He’s like my brother.”

T
aking a break from the questioning, Pollack and Gil stood in the parking lot of the state police station. Pollack had wanted to get as far away as possible from the DA. When they left the interview room, Gil had heard Pollack say to the DA,
“He’s still a police officer,” overlapped by the DA saying, “He’s a cold-blooded killer.”

Now, in the parking lot, Gil watched Pollack pace. Pollack was smarter than Gil had given him credit for. Much smarter. Pollack had purposely not asked Manny about Patsy Burke’s killing. If he had, the defense would have known that there were more charges to be added against Manny, and they would have ended his confession.

Plus, their case for Mrs. Burke’s murder was weak. The sheriff’s deputies had recovered very little physical evidence at the crime scene. If they told Manny Cordova’s lawyer about it now, before they had a chance to question Ken Strunk or Ron Baca, they would ruin their chances of making the case.

“We have got to find Ron Baca. It was him, wasn’t it?” Pollack asked. Gil nodded. He knew what Pollack was talking about: Ron Baca had killed Patsy Burke. There was no one else left. Manny had been paired with a rookie cop Tuesday night. Strunk had been at the hospital with his wife. That left Ron.

“But how the hell did Ron know that Mrs. Burke was what’s-her-name—this Scanner Lady that editor told you about? How did he know that Mrs. Burke was the one who overheard their cell-phone call? He couldn’t have known her name. Dammit. How did he know to kill her?” Pollack said, kicking at a gum wrapper on the ground. “But I’m starting to think Ron Baca is a goddamn genius. He gets Cordova to call Strunk and gets Strunk to toss Melissa’s body, and the whole time Ron’s playing fix-it man at his mom’s. This guy is good. He had no real involvement. We can’t really prove a goddamn thing. All we have is that maybe he planted the drugs in Melissa’s car.”

Adam Granger had called back while they were interviewing Manny Cordova to confirm that the dirt on the syringe in Melissa’s car could have come from the Bacas’ backyard. Gil figured that Ron had planted the syringe and heroin in Melissa’s car after leaving his mother’s house. But Granger admitted that the dirt had very few unusual characteristics, so it could
have come from more than a dozen places in Santa Fe—something any good defense lawyer would point out. Or Melissa could have simply dropped the needle in her yard before putting it in her car.

Pollack continued his rant. “If we’re really lucky, we can get Ron Baca on accessory for Melissa’s murder. But as it stands, with the evidence we have right now, we’re looking at conspiracy. A goddamn conspiracy charge. He gets out in time for the Super Bowl next year—hell, he may not even do time—and Manny Cordova gets to rot behind bars.”

“How many guys do you have out looking for Ron Baca?” Gil asked.

“Pretty much everybody we could scrape up.”

“How about a search warrant on Ron’s trailer and his car?”

“We’re working on it.” Pollack started snapping again. “You know, I get why Cordova did it. I get why Strunk did it. I just don’t get Ron Baca. I mean, he helped his sister’s killer clean up. He must really be a helpful kinda guy. How does Manny’s conversation with him go: ‘Hey, Ron, I’m really sorry, dude, I killed your sister. Can you give me a hand?’”

Gil thought he might ask Mrs. Baca to explain it.

L
ucy flipped through stacks of pictures in the photo department at the
Capital Tribune.
She had been searching for ten minutes but still hadn’t come across the photo of Scanner Lady that Mrs. Schoen had dropped off. The newsroom was deserted. It was late Saturday afternoon. No one would be in for hours yet. It had taken her a while to get used to a newsroom that basically shut down on the weekend, but Santa Fe was a small town. The newspaper didn’t need to have a staff twenty-four/seven.

She finally found the photo five minutes later in a mailbox marked
TO BE ARCHIVED.
The picture showed Patsy Burke sitting at a kitchen table with three other women, playing what
looked like a card game. Oh, that’s right. Mrs. Schoen had said they had a bridge team. Mrs. Schoen sat across from Patsy Burke, smiling into the camera. Lucy went into the darkroom and got out a photo-magnifying glass. She peered at the face of Patsy Burke. Lucy had remembered right. Scanner Lady’s eyes were brown. Her hair was full gray. Lucy frowned. She had thought that Mrs. Burke’s hair was darker. Maybe she had dyed it recently. Lucy flipped the photo over to see if the date was written on the back. It wasn’t—but the names of the other players were. It took a second for the names to jar Lucy’s memory. When they did, she almost had to keep herself from yelling out.

She felt the need to batter her head against something. She had been the worst type of racist—someone who believes she’s not a bigot but still completely buys into the ethnic stereotypes. She had assumed that the bridge club Mrs. Schoen mentioned was made up of all Anglo women. Hispanic women don’t play bridge, right? Her and her stupid southern mentality.
Idiot, idiot, idiot.

Lucy glanced again at the picture on the desk. A smiling Patsy Burke sat across from her bridge partner, a smiling Claire Schoen. And seated between them were two women Lucy had never met, but she knew their names. An unsmiling Veronica Cordova sat across from her partner, a smiling Maxine Baca.

As Lucy dialed Claire Schoen’s number, she knew that she should have been calling the sheriff’s office or Detective Montoya. But that meant having to endure long conversations with them and the hope that they would call her back and tell her what Mrs. Schoen had said. It meant waiting. She couldn’t wait. Mrs. Schoen picked up on the third ring and Lucy asked her about the bridge club.

“Well, yes, I told you we were widows. I’m almost positive I said we were a bunch of police wives. All of our husbands were police officers. I said we were blue widows, right? I’m sure I did. That’s what we call ourselves, you know. It’s a dumb name, if
you ask me, but all the other ladies liked it. Patsy wanted to get some kind of T-shirts made with that on it, navy blue with white lettering. I wanted turquoise because we were in Santa Fe.”

“Have you ever played over at Mrs. Cordova’s or Mrs. Baca’s house?”

“Oh, yes, all the time. I feel so bad for Maxine, she just lost her daughter, Melissa, bless her heart.”

“Did you ever meet Mrs. Cordova’s or Mrs. Baca’s sons?”

“Well, I met Manny Cordova. A police officer like his father was. And I met one of Maxine’s boys, I don’t remember his name, but he’s a police officer, too, if you can believe it. You would think those women would have more sense than to let their boys be cops when their husbands got killed on the job.”

“Was it common knowledge that Mrs. Burke listened to a police scanner?”

“Oh yes. Veronica’s boy, Manny, used to tease her about it all the time. He’d say things like, ‘You know, Mrs. Burke, every time I talk on my radio, I’ll be thinking of you listening to me.’” Mrs. Schoen laughed. “That boy. What a clown.”

“And everyone knew she called the newspapers?”

“Pat told anybody who would listen about it. She wouldn’t shut up. She would go on and on when one of her stories was in the
Santa Fe Times.”

“But she also called the
Capital Tribune,
right?”

“I don’t know. I know she had a subscription to the
Santa Fe Times.
She liked their classifieds.”

W
hile Pollack went back to finish interviewing Manny Cordova, Gil went to Mrs. Baca’s. The police records officer called back as Gil was driving—Sandra Paine’s arresting officers had been Kristen Valdez and Eduardo Cordova, a fifteen-year veteran of the force and no relation to Manny Cordova. One more loose end tied up.

Gil pulled up to the Baca house. There were four cars in
the driveway. More company that Mrs. Baca didn’t want. An unknown relative let him in the front door without asking who he was. There were a few people in the living room. Veronica Cordova appeared at his side.

“Detective Montoya, I need to talk to you,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you. The police have
mi hito
and won’t tell me why. They just keep saying, ‘We’ll call you when we know something.’”

“Mrs. Cordova, there’s nothing I can do. It’s a state police investigation.”

“But you know what’s going on?” Her voice was quiet and full of tension. She kept glancing around the room to make sure no one could hear them. “You have to tell me. He didn’t do anything. You know him. You know he’d never do anything. He’s a good boy.”

“Mrs. Cordova, I can’t discuss it. The state police will call you when they know more. You should go home.”

He went to Mrs. Baca’s room. She was on the bed and looked like she was asleep, but Gil knew that she wasn’t. Her breathing wasn’t right.

He called her name. She didn’t move.

He walked over to the shrine to Daniel. He counted fifteen pictures of Daniel; the last one showed him at about age eighteen. Someone had added a framed picture of Melissa to the shrine since Gil had last been there. It was the one that Gil had seen of Melissa with her father. Now all the dead people in the Baca family had their pictures on the shrine.

He turned back to Mrs. Baca.

“Mrs. Baca, I need to know about Ron and Melissa.”

She mumbled something. Gil had to crouch down to hear her.

“Mrs. Baca, I didn’t hear you. I need to know about Ron and Melissa.”

He heard her more clearly this time when she said, “Melissa and who?”

“Melissa and Ron.” Mrs. Baca didn’t answer. He said more loudly, “Ron, your son.” She still didn’t answer.

Someone said from the doorway, “What do you want to know?” He looked up at Veronica Cordova. She was more composed now.

“I want to know about Ron. How did he and Melissa get along?”

“I’ll tell you if you get the state police to let me see my son.”

“Mrs. Cordova, I can’t promise anything….”

“Just ask them. I just want you to ask them if I can see him.”