curious look, tilting his head slightly to one side, his lips pressed together in a tight, thin line. “I am satisfied that your intent is well-meaning, but I wonder if you are capable of finding the gentle, loving story of community and service in Los Penitentes.” He pondered a moment. “Or if you are merely attracted to their suffering.” He waited.
I didn’t speak.
“An enlightened person will come to realize that they are both the same. But you are young, Miss Wild. You are young, and you did not even grow up here, and also, you say that you have no faith. What do you know of penance?”
His words demanded a reply, but I had none. I held his gaze without flinching for what felt like an eternity. Finally I spoke. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s the thing I’m supposed to learn about.”
He was quiet a moment, never taking his eyes from my face. “Yes, perhaps that is so,” he said softly. He smiled tenderly at me, then stood and started to put on his coat.
I stood, too. “Father Ignacio-”
He held up his hand to stop me. “If I don’t see you again, senorita, please be careful. There is danger surrounding Los Penitentes right now. May God be with you.”
“But I have so many questions…”
He reached out and took my hand and held it. “I think, Miss Wild, that you are very lonely.”
I gasped, his words stinging.
“Do not be so alone. Always remember, my child,
4
After our walk out onto the bridge, Agent Ebert and I returned to the parking area, where he introduced me to two other members of the crime scene task force. The Taos Pueblo police detective was most concerned about where the body had fallen in order to determine whether he had jurisdiction, which seemed unlikely after some discussion. Deputy Sheriff Jerry Padilla was someone I had worked with before on two separate incidents requiring arrests on BLM land. Padilla listened to Agent Ebert’s briefing, then spoke to me. “Jamaica, you probably want to scoot on out of here before the media arrive from Albuquerque. It’s a good thing for you it takes so long for them to get here from down south. Come on, I’ll walk you back across and you can get your vehicle from the rest area. I’ll tell the officer over there to let you drive back through. You’ll be the first car on the bridge since we shut her down.”
“So the forensics team is done on the bridge, then?” I said.
Padilla’s leather holster squeaked as he walked. “Yup.”
“How long will it remain closed?”
“Oh, I suspect shortly after you drive through we’ll open her up to vehicle traffic only. No pedestrians, though. Not until the incident is terminated and the body has been transported to OMI-the Office of the Medical Investigator down in Albuquerque. We’ll keep a uniformed officer here, right through the raft retrieval tomorrow, to keep pedestrians off the bridge until it’s all done.”
“Thanks for letting me get out of here before the press-”
He cut in: “We determined that we’re not going to release your name as a witness until we have more information on this crime. Matter of fact, we’re not even going to say we have a witness right now. Until we know more about who did this and why, we are going to keep a tight lock on things, and we want you to do the same. We don’t want you to discuss this with anyone who’s not involved in the case until we give you the go-ahead to do so. Might be good if you didn’t mention it to anyone outside of the task force, if you can swing that.”
“My boss knows. I had to tell him why I would be late.”
“Well, I’ll tell him what I told you, and let’s keep this thing under wraps. If the bad guys don’t know you saw them do the deed, they won’t be out looking for you. And they won’t know we’re out looking for them.”
At the BLM, behind the counter in the main lobby, Rosa Aragon served as receptionist, answering the phones and greeting visitors. Rosa was the river ranger who’d been rescued last fall after a dramatic search of the Rio Grande Gorge that brought the attention of national television to Taos. A chopper sweeping the gorge the morning after she had gone missing finally spotted her brightly colored gear spread out for maximum visibility on a sandbar. This was sixteen hours after her raft had capsized, smashing her against a rock and fracturing her leg in three places. A crew went in at once and got her.
As I had mentioned to Agent Ebert, I was part of that search and rescue mission, because it was one of the BLM’s own. But instead of finding Rosa, I discovered the fresh remains of a suicide jumper who had hoped to make the media with his last earthly act. He leaped into the gorge and landed headfirst, smashing his head in two like a burst watermelon. Unfortunately, since it no doubt happened in the wink of an eye, no one was actually observing the bridge at the moment he made the jump (or at least no report was made). His body then washed rapidly downriver, unobserved, and found its way into some reeds just in time for me to come upon him while patrolling the banks of the Rio Grande near the Orilla Verde Recreation Area, as part of the search mission for our river ranger.
Since then, Rosa had been putting in clerical time until her leg healed. I had been putting in time hoping the haunting nightmares and Technicolor memories of that jumper’s broken-up corpse would one day leave me. They hadn’t yet. After today, they’d have company.
“Roy in?” I asked Rosa.
“He’s in his office. But you missed all the fun. He had this forest ranger guy in here with him this morning. Eeeee! That guy was cute.”
“I missed all the fun, huh?”
Rosa winked. “He was really good-looking, I’m telling you.”
I headed back to Roy’s office and knocked on the door, even though it was open.
The Boss looked up from the list he had been making on a notepad. His thick mass of short, silver-blond hair was mussed from his recently removed hat. “Hey, there. Come on in. Have you had lunch?”
I walked in and slumped into a chair in front of his desk. “Lunch? I haven’t even had breakfast.”
“You want to go get something to eat?”
“I don’t think so. I doubt I could eat right now.”
Roy got up and closed the door. He stood beside his desk and looked down at me in the chair. “You want to talk about it?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it. There’s a special task force investigating, and they’re not going to release any details, including that there was a witness. So you’re not supposed to talk about it either.”
“Padilla called me and told me that. I’m not going to say a word, unless you need to debrief with someone.”
“I think I’m better off trying to put it out of my mind, Boss.”
“Okay, then. Maybe that’s a good idea. Let’s talk about something else. But before we do, I just want to make sure you know that if you need to take some time off-”
“No, I’m good. I’ll be better off if I stay busy, keep my mind occupied.”
“All right, then. I got an idea for keeping you occupied, if you’re sure you’ll be all right.”
“I’m all right. Go ahead, shoot.”
“Have you ever rode the section up by Canoncito?”
“Sure. I did a couple months up there from Pilar to Chimayo last fall during the no-burn enforcement. That was a cold tour of duty, let me tell you, without being able to build a fire when I camped.”
“That’s right, I remember that now. Well, we got reports that there’s been some fence lines cut up there, and there are four-wheel tracks leading into the protected wilderness area. The Forest Service says there’s also been heavy use on the mud path in through the forest from Canoncito headed toward Las Trampas, and trucks or
