“One thing you might be interested in. There’s a memorial for Elena tomorrow afternoon at the funeral home chapel. Carlos is skipping a church funeral mass and has arranged for cremation.”
“Already?” Sam felt a rock fall to the pit of her stomach.
“Seems rushed to me, too. But with the election coming up . . . well, I don’t know if he’s just overwhelmed with things to do right now, or if he’s trying to jump while the sympathy factor is high.” He paused. “I’m sorry, that was not a kind thing to say.”
“It might be true, though.” Sam remembered her own uncharitable thoughts about whether she wanted to bake a victory cake for Carlos. “I don’t know, Beau. I’m kind of numb about it. Guess I’m just moving through the day as best I can.”
“I know. Look, maybe we could go together? There’s a wake at his campaign manager’s house after. At least he understood what poor taste it would be to invite people to the very rooms in which . . . it happened.”
“Are we invited, to the wake?”
“I don’t much care. I want to watch Carlos Tafoya in action, to see if I can judge the level of his grief. Because I have a real hinky feeling about this, especially with all the things Elena told you on her last night.”
“I’ll bake a memorial cake and we’ll take it. They’d have a hard time turning us away.”
Chapter 17
The pain was still too raw. It revealed itself on the faces of every person in the chapel. Elena’s portrait depicted a calm and polished woman. It was the official, candidate’s-wife shot that had been widely circulated along with Carlos’s own photos during the campaign. The flowers were large and showy and impersonal. The actual cremation probably hadn’t taken place yet, Beau told Sam, since the medical investigator’s office only released the body this afternoon. It was just as well, she thought, that they didn’t all have to stare at some metal urn up there.
Sam and Beau sat in the back row, the better to watch the crowd, he said. A law enforcement habit, she supposed. But why was he thinking along those lines?
From what Beau had told her about the circumstances of Elena’s death, he’d concluded it had happened at her own hands. The office of the medical examiner agreed, finding elevated levels of alcohol and sleeping pills in her system, but not fatal amounts. Sam herself could attest to the amount of wine her friend had drunk. And after her shocking revelation about killing a man, it wouldn’t come as a big surprise if she’d taken a little sleep aid before going to bed. But then she hadn’t gone to bed.
Had she been depressed enough to end her life?
Sam couldn’t quite rest easily with that theory.
The speaker’s words droned on, a blur to Sam. Carlos Tafoya sat in the front pew beside his father, Sam’s landlord, Victor Tafoya. The next several rows were reserved for family but most of the chapel seemed to be filled with Carlos’s political entourage and a selection of the curious and morbid. Sam found herself hoping that no one thought that of her.
With no graveside service to end the observance, goodbyes were said in the form of a reception line at the front of the chapel. Sam noticed that Carlos handed some of the people a small card, presumably the address of the wake.
“I already know where it is,” Beau whispered to her. “Go forward if you want, but I can skip this part.”
Sam decided that she could, as well.
“I took the cake to my house,” Sam told him as they left. “We need to stop by and pick it up on the way.”
In her kitchen she handed Beau the half-sheet, decorated in white-on-white with Elena’s portrait reproduced in edible color on top and touches of her favorite turquoise woven into the decorations.
“I’ll be right there,” she said. She went into her bedroom, slipped into more comfortable shoes and glanced at the wooden box.
The lumpy old thing, which had once seemed almost grotesque to her, warmed her with comfort when she picked it up. She hugged it to her and let her pain over Elena’s death retreat. Like a tangible thing, the dark feeling left her heart, traveled down her arms, through her fingertips and—unbelievably—into the box. Sam held it out, balanced on the palms of her hands, and stared at it.
The red stones winked back at her, brighter this time than their green and blue counterparts. Puzzled, Sam set the box on her dresser and backed out of the room.
“Everything okay?” Beau asked, reaching out to give her a hug.
“Yeah. I’ll be fine.” Actually, she felt better than fine. For the first time in days she had a feeling that everything would turn out all right. They would figure out what really happened to both Bram Fenton and Elena and how to set her spirit free.
They rode silently for a few minutes in Beau’s Explorer, headed for the wake at the home of Carlos Tafoya’s campaign manager. No one, it seemed, could face a visit to the house where Elena’s death had happened, barely thirty-six hours earlier.
“You know, there’s a lot about this that still bothers me,” Sam said, finally. “Aside from the fact that I don’t believe Elena killed herself over it.”
Beau stared steadily at the road ahead. “It bothers me too. I’ve told Sheriff Padilla that we need to launch a more thorough search for the knife and I want a warrant to search Elena’s possessions for clues, before Carlos clears out her stuff and moves into the governor’s mansion.”
“And?”
“And I have a feeling he’s shuffled the request to the bottom of the stack.”
“But why?” Sam had never especially warmed up to Beau’s boss, the sheriff who seemed more show than substance.
“Politics? Well, everything’s about politics this time of year. He’s so overly conscious of getting re-elected right now . . . and it probably wouldn’t be a good move for him to drag the Tafoya name through the mud right now either. If—I should say, when—Carlos Tafoya is elected governor, he’ll have power to sign a lot of funding for the county. If we’re ever to get our own crime lab, or even an extra assistant or two to help at crime scenes . . . well, the funding has to come from higher up.”
“So you think that Padilla and Tafoya are buddies, kind of helping each other’s campaigns, for that reason?”
He shrugged.
“Aren’t there internal investigations for this sort of thing? To discover whether a law officer isn’t playing by the rules?”
“I’ll push harder for the warrant after the election. It’s only a few more days. It’s just that evidence can disappear or be tampered with . . . oh, hell, what am I saying? Fenton’s death happened weeks ago. If something was going to vanish, it probably already did.” He slowed as they reached the road they were looking for. “Plus, selfishly, I’ll take a lot less flack from Padilla if I wait awhile. The guy’s been jumping down everyone’s throats recently. Pre-election PMS or something, I guess.”
Sam snickered at the image of the squat Padilla storming around the office like a wild woman on hormone overload.
“Control that grin of yours,” Beau cautioned. “He’s here.”
Sure enough, Padilla’s county car was parked among the dozen or so in front of the traditional adobe that sat overlooking the Rio Fernando from a bluff lined with brilliant yellow cottonwoods. Sam retrieved the cake from the back of Beau’s vehicle and they walked through an entry gate, past plantings of flowers and shrubs that looked as if they received daily tending by a master gardener.
The first person they encountered, just inside the front door, was Orlando Padilla’s wife, Margaret. She greeted them warmly and suggested that they place the cake on the dining table where a buffet of catered food interspersed with homemade dishes was set up.
“This is beautiful,” Margaret said. “Such a nice tribute to Elena’s memory.” She moved a couple of casseroles around, making space for the cake. “I didn’t know her very well, myself, but my husband says she was a classy
