Chapter 34

The hiatus was of course too good to last. There are occasional serial murderers who stop their killing for a time – for years, even – but they're unusual among the tribe, and most commit their murders more and more frequently as they come apart. So it wasn't a surprise when, on the Sunday before Valentine's Day, we were eating lunch at the Fuddrucker's in Coronado Mall when my cell phone rang, and Lt. Stubblefield told me there was another body. The cold had finally broken and it was a pleasant day, but that took the pleasure right out of it.

"I gotta drop my daughter off," I told the lieutenant, "and then we'll be there."

When I hung up Darlia said, "Another body?"

"Yeah." I looked at Cecelia. "He dumped this one on the edge of Tijeras Arroyo, in that gap where I doubted Davey Goldfarb had disappeared."

She raised her eyebrows. "Do cases often intersect in that fashion?"

"Not usually, but it's not all that weird. This guy's got a habit about where he leaves the corpses, and this one fits, though it's more dangerous for him than the previous ones have been."

"I got an idea," Darlia put in. "Letty lives down there, so why don't you just take me an' I'll walk to her house, or maybe you can even park at her place."

I looked at her. She'd done her hair in the temple braids that Chief Joseph often wore, though she didn't grease it up into a pompadour as the Nez Perce frequently did, and her hair is much longer than Joseph's was. "That ain't a half shabby idea. I bet your mom will be glad to call ahead too."

Cecelia grinned – she already had her cell phone in her hand. "If you two comedians will kindly stifle yourselves, I'll speak with Letty."

So we did, and she did, and we pulled out of the mall and headed toward Central and Tramway. The neighborhood we were going to isn't quite that far – it's south of Central, but not as far east as Tramway – but that was the general direction. Cecelia had talked about cases intersecting, but it wasn't just the case where I'd met Letty Ramirez – her last name had still been Goldfarb then – that had taken me to that part of town. When I'd first come to Albuquerque I'd had a case in the apartment complex where Burque Moreno had been living when I'd met her – and in fact the man who'd raped her and thus sent her to my office had been living there too. And I'd done some bodyguarding for a woman who lived in the area ... I wondered, as I drove, where Cinda Barelas was now, and how she was doing. I hadn't seen nor heard from her since 2006.

Most of my cases are elsewhere in town, but for some reason that little area in southeast Albuquerque had accumulated several. I guess random factors had all popped up there ... not that I know a thing about probability or chaos theory or whatever else might be relevant to the question. All I knew for sure was how to get where I was going, and that I wouldn't like what I found when I got there.

I couldn't believe the dump site. It was open ground, but only the width of a lot, or even narrower than that, since the houses along Piru were big and consequently needed bigger lots. This guy had run a huge risk dumping the body there. I knew the cops would interview everyone along the street, and especially the people who lived in the adjoining houses, and I hoped they'd come up with something. If the perp was charging into danger like this, he was likely to be making other mistakes too.

Meanwhile the body told me what the rest had, and the site likewise. That is, I learned pretty much nothing that I didn't already know. I found one partial print of what I thought was the perp's right foot, but without anything else to go on it could just as easily have been someone else. The body bore the usual quota of multiple stab wounds. I couldn't see any wound on the back of the head, but then that had only appeared on three of the bodies even though the medical examiner had found evidence for such a blow on all of them.

I stood looking out over Tijeras Arroyo. Behind me the cops were doing their thing, and I could hear the medical examiner describing what he saw into a tape recorder before they bagged the body. I felt as much as saw Cecelia come up beside me, her right side to my left as our custom has been for years, though we didn't hold hands just then. "We gotta go back to interviews," I told her.

"We have talked to some of those people three times – I know that I have spoken four times to two individuals. What can we learn from further interviews?"