Chapter 17

It was interesting watching Cecelia become, however temporarily, the junior partner in the team investigating Rodríguez's murder. She'd grown up doing chores, of course, and working in the fields, and she'd experienced being the low girl or woman on the totem pole in grade school, high school, and college, as well as at her employment after she got her degree. But not very long after Darlia had been born she'd gone into business for herself, and when she phased that out she was queen of the house, running it her way while I was out and about on my cases. I hadn't interfered much, if at all, with how she governed the household, for she did it well and what she wanted was almost always a good fit with what I wanted.

But she'd been a rookie cop recently, and now she was the new partner. She helped with the investigation, obviously – if Mills had shut her out, I'd have yanked her off and written him up, not that someone who'd requested her help would turn around and reject it. But he was a good cop, and however much he'd been trying to help her out, he also really believed she was a good cop, and gave her plenty of work to do. But she also made the donut runs, she went for coffee when they needed more, she did the xeroxing – she was, as I'd expected, the gofer. And she wasn't used to it.

But she bore it well. Mills never treated her like an object, but like the junior partner. Cecelia would have verbally removed his head if he'd tried the former, but she knew how things work in the world and went along with the latter. And a time or two – I didn't live in the investigators' squad room – I caught her grinning when he sent her to "go fer" this or that.

Meanwhile, the forensic information was coming in. The details weren't helpful. With the victim dying somewhere else, there wasn't much to go on at the scene where we'd found him. In the desert what little there was would, assuming the wind had been quiet, have given us more information, but in the humid and fertile environment of Oklahoma, evidence vanished among the growth, or walked away in the jaws or claws of animals and insects. Indeed, one of the reports that I saw talked about the maggots that had been getting ready to hatch out when we found the body. It was the first time I'd dealt with that aspect of forensic science, and I couldn't help remembering Patricia Cornwell's novel The Body Farm – which includes visits to the very real "body farm" in Tennessee where the research on insect, animal, and weather action on dead bodies takes place.

It was the first Friday in September, with the weather just beginning to cool down for autumn, when I called Mills and Cecelia into my office. When they'd gotten as comfortable in the visitors' chairs as they could, I said, "I know you can't rush an investigation. The evidence is there or it ain't, and either you can figure out what happened or you can't, and if you can either you can do it now or you can't. But I'm gettin' antsy here."

"Pressure from above?" Mills asked.

"That too, yeah," I said. "You know me by now – past a certain point if they push, I'll walk. But part of this job is listening to what the mayor and the city council say, and part of it's paying attention to the citizens of this town. And although the vic was a stranger here, probably passing through, there are some frightened people out there."

"We know," Mills said. "You've seen the reports. We're on the third or fourth interviews with some people. We're going through all the reports again, seeing if there are any connections we've missed or if anything jumps out at us. We're rereading what the FBI has given us. You know how it works, Chief – you were an investigator here when I was in diapers."

"Thanks for making me feel like an old man," I said.

"I didn't mean that," he said. "I was talking about your experience. You know how it goes. What do you want us to do?"

I leaned back in my chair. "First, I want us all to relax a bit. Yeah, I want to find this creep, whoever it is, and toss him in the joint. And being the chief, I've got to at least listen to pressure, and pass on what I think is appropriate. I'm y'all's ultimate supervisor, after all. But here's something that a lot of cops don't learn – this case ain't worth your health or sanity. No case is. Maybe you ought to back off just a tad bit, at least while we're in here. I know maybe I sounded like I was noodging, but I wasn't – and you sure flared up quick."

"I believe Officer Mills is simply frustrated with the lack of progress," Cecelia said. No other cop in history would refer to her partner by his rank and last name, but Cecelia has friends she's known longer than she's known me whom she addresses with an honorific, and who call her Mrs. Carpenter – they called her Miss Johnston until we got married.

"Yeah, we all are." I slapped my hand down on the thick file folder that was my copy of the case. "We got paper comin' out our ears, an' no idea who did it. I'm fusterated too. So let's just slow down an' relax."

"You're right, Chief," said Mills. "I shouldn't have jumped you like that."

"No prob," I told him. "I've got me a thought – it just come to me. Do we have any sort of real Hispanic community here in Red Hawk?"

I saw Cecelia's eyebrows go up, and if I'd been a betting man I'd have bet myself $100 that I knew that she understood exactly where I was headed.

"It's mighty small," Mills said. "They're mostly down in the southwest, though we've got some Mexicans around other places – some in town, a few out on the farms working the fields."

"I bet some of 'em ain't Mexicans," I said mildly. That term is still common in some places, even though most Hispanics are, in fact, not Mexican. Though probably the majority of foreign Hispanics in the United States are from Mexico, taking things as a whole there are more Argentineans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Hondurans, Chileans, and Spaniards – among others – in the world than there are Mexicans. And there are parts of the United States where the vast majority of the Spanish-speaking population was born here to families that arrived before the Mayflower set sail.

"Whatever," Mills said, obviously not interested in my implied lesson. "But they tend to clam up around cops, or anyone who doesn't speak Spanish."

I extended my hand to Cecelia in a go-ahead gesture.

"That's where I come in," she said. "I ought to have thought of it myself, and the fact that I did not illustrates my inexperience at this work." She paused for just a second, perhaps to give prominence to her next sentence. "I speak fluent Spanish."

"You do?"