“What’s your name?” Ramona asked.
“Vanessa Velarde.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Are you in school?”
Vanessa shook her head. “There’s no one to look after my hijo during the day but me.”
Ramona smiled understandingly. “A baby is a lot of responsibility to take on. Let me see what I can do to get you some help.”
Vanessa smirked and gave Ramona a sour look. “I don’t need any help. School sucks, so I dropped out. Next year I’ll get my GED and then I’ll get a job.” She closed the trailer door in Ramona’s face.
Ramona walked to her unit and drove away. In her years on the force she’d yet to meet any fifteen-year-olds who were mature enough to know what was best for them. On Agua Fria Street, she pulled to the side of the road, called the lieutenant in charge of the juvenile division, and gave her the heads-up on Vanessa Velarde. The lieutenant promised to contact social services and request that a caseworker make a home visit.
Ramona knew it could be days or weeks before a caseworker showed up at the trailer to determine if Vanessa and her baby needed protective services. She glumly wondered if any good would come from bringing social services into the picture. Even with help, being a low-income, fifteen-year-old dropout with a new baby was a hell of a deep hole to climb out of.
The Santa Fe Community College, a relatively new institution of higher education established some twenty-odd years ago in cramped, temporary quarters in a Cerrillos Road business park, was now located outside town on a modern campus near a rapidly growing residential area that fronted I-25.
At the administration office Ramona was directed to Ms. Carpenter’s classroom, where some twenty culinary arts students, all dressed in loose-fitting cook’s jackets, stood at a food prep area watching their instructor demonstrate how to properly bone an uncooked chicken. Ramona, a notoriously bad cook with little interest in the subject, found Ms. Carpenter’s skill with a knife impressive. Carpenter made short order of the task without slicing any of her fingers. After she’d finished the demonstration, Ramona pulled her aside and asked her to ID Randy Velarde.
“He’s not in trouble,” Ramona added. “I’m trying to locate a friend of his.”
Carpenter, a skinny woman in her fifties, with a wide mouth and big teeth, smiled in relief and called over a plump young man with a fleshy face and the start of a second chin. He looked fretful when Ramona identified herself as a detective and asked him to step into the hallway with her. Outside the classroom she asked Velarde if he knew where Brian Riley was living.
“I’m not sure,” Velarde replied. “Maybe down in Albuquerque. That’s where he said he was living the last time I saw him.”
“And when was that?”
“Three months or so ago at a club in town. He was with some college girl. They’d driven up to Santa Fe to party.”
“Have you heard from him since then?”
“Nope, but we weren’t that tight to begin with.”
“You were tight enough to smoke pot with him on the job and get fired for it,” Ramona rebutted. “Tight enough to let him crash with you last summer for a couple of days.”
“That doesn’t mean we’re bros,” Velarde replied. “Yeah, I smoked pot with him once or twice, and yeah, I let him sleep on my bedroom floor. So what? Why are you looking for him anyway?”
“His father and stepmother have been murdered.”
Velarde looked shocked. “No shit?”
“He needs to be found so he can be told,” Ramona continued. “Did he say anything to you about where he might be staying in Albuquerque?”
“No, but he gave me his cell phone number in case I was in Albuquerque and wanted to hook up. I never called him ’cause I’ve been too busy with school and work.” Velarde unclipped his cell phone from his belt, browsed through the menu, and read off a number.
Ramona scribbled it on the back of her notebook. “Thanks. That’s a big help. Your sister said Brian stayed with you last summer because of an argument he had with his father or stepmother. Was that what went down?”
Velarde shook his head. “Not even. His stepmother gave him money to move out of her house. I mean a wad of money. Don’t ask me why. He stayed with me for two days until the guy he was selling his car to came through with the cash. Then I took him to a motorcycle dealership on Cerrillos Road where he bought a used Harley. That was the last time I saw him until three months ago.”
“Did you actually see him buy the Harley?” Ramona asked.
Velarde nodded. “Yeah, it cost six thousand dollars and he only got fifteen hundred cash for his car. Like I say, he had a wad of money. I don’t know how much.”
“You’re sure Brian told you his stepmother gave him the cash,” Ramona reiterated, wondering if Riley had stolen the money.
“That’s what he said.”
“Did he say why she’d been so generous?”
“Nope.”
“When you last saw Brian, did he mention what he was doing in Albuquerque?”
Velarde shrugged. “Nothing special that I can remember. I asked him if he was working and he just grinned and shook his head.”
“Who was the girl he was with?”
“Some student at the university. She had an unusual name for a girl. I mean, like when she told me her name I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. Her name was Stanley.”
“Did you get a last name?”
“Na, she never told me what it was.”
“Describe her to me.”
“Maybe five feet five inches, curly light blond hair, real cute-looking. She said she was from Iowa.”
Ramona gave him a business card. “If you think of anything else or if Brian gets in touch with you, call me.”
Randy nodded, put the card in his pocket, and went back into the classroom.
On her way down the empty hallway to the campus parking lot, Ramona called Clayton and filled him in on her discoveries.
“That’s real good work,” Clayton said. “We need to find out what exactly went on between the boy and his stepmother. Did she really give him money, or is he a thief and a possible murder suspect to boot?”
“I can start looking for him in Albuquerque tomorrow morning,” Ramona suggested.
“I’ll take it from here,” Clayton replied. “Chief Kerney has assigned all his available detectives to the case. I need a supervisor to ride roughshod over them. That’s you.”
“Okay.”
“Detective Chacon tells me that the desktop computer Denise Riley used at work that crashed wasn’t tampered with at all. It had an outdated disk operating system that somehow disabled the system restore feature. The files on the hard drive weren’t wiped. He’s working on recovering the data, but what he’s found so far is just insurance business–related stuff.”
“My enthusiasm for new information today has just bottomed out,” Ramona said as she passed through the automatic doors and walked toward her unmarked unit. “I’m going home.”
“I wish I could say the same. Do you have someone there waiting for you?”
“No,” Ramona replied as she slid behind the steering wheel. “I’m going to practice boning an uncooked chicken.”
New information uncovered by Ramona Pino had caused Kerney to go straight from his office to Helen Muiz’s house. Since the start of the investigation Helen had refused to deal with anyone but Kerney, and he had a few important questions to ask her that simply couldn’t be put off.
Ruben answered the doorbell and took Kerney to the living room, where Helen was stretched out on the couch, covered by a comforter, a box of facial tissue within easy reach. The room was lit by one table lamp, and the window curtains were closed against the darkness of the night.