the central coast.”
Clayton nodded and forced a smile. Armijo was enjoying recounting his factoids, and why not? It was a bust well worth feeling good about.
Armijo read the strained politeness in Clayton’s expression. “Sorry, man. Here I am gloating and you’ve got nada.”
“I still have Stanley,” Clayton replied. “Where is she?”
“Since she agreed to cooperate, I saw no need to arrest her,” Armijo replied. “So I’ve got her under wraps at her apartment in the company of a female officer.”
Armijo put the car in gear. “You want to go talk to her?”
Clayton nodded.
Armijo made a U-turn. The cop manning the barricade at the end of the street let them pass. “I think once Robocker and Birch have their legal problems behind them, they ought to hook up and get married.”
“Why’s that?”
“Think about it; with names like Morton and Minerva, it’s a marriage made in Heaven.”
“Minerva is a pagan name,” Clayton replied.
“Really?”
“She was the Roman goddess of wisdom and invention, along with a few other things.”
“What other things?”
“Art and martial prowess, I think.”
“Interesting,” Armijo said. “I wonder what the name Stanley means.”
“I haven’t a clue,” Clayton replied.
“Do you think the Romans had a goddess named Stanley?” Armijo asked. “Or maybe the Greeks?”
“Are you always like this?”
“Like what?” Armijo retorted innocently.
“So fast with the quips, the puns, the repartee.”
Armijo laughed. “I just use it to hide my angst.”
Clayton cracked a big smile, but didn’t for a minute doubt that Armijo meant what he said. “And I suppose Bromilow showboats so he can hide his angst.”
Armijo nodded. “Exactly. What do you do with yours?”
“Apaches don’t do angst.”
“Why not?” Armijo asked.
“We don’t have a word for it.”
Armijo slapped the steering wheel with his hand and laughed. “That makes total sense.”
Stanley—the original meaning of her name currently unknown but under discussion by the two officers—lived in an apartment complex that catered to young singles. In the parking lot, Armijo pulled into an empty space next to Brian Riley’s motorcycle, shifted in his seat, typed in something on the laptop, waited a minute, and then typed some more. Whatever came up on the screen made him smile.
“Stanley is an old English masculine surname that means ‘stone clearing,’” he announced.
“The old English were also pagans,” Clayton said.
“I think I saw that movie,” Armijo replied, pointing the way to Stanley’s apartment. It was a second-story unit located next to a staircase.
Armijo called in his location to dispatch, and the two officers climbed the stairs. Armijo rang the doorbell, and when no one answered, he stepped away from the door and called out to the officer inside. He waited a couple of beats before drawing his weapon. Clayton did the same.
Armijo knocked again, rang the bell, and called out to the officer once more. Silence. He raised a hand, counted one, two, three with his fingers and turned the doorknob. The door swung open easily.
Armijo went in low, shining the beam of his flashlight in a wide arc across the dark front room. Clayton went in high, searching for the light switch. He found it, and the harsh overhead light revealed an empty room. He cleared the nearby galley kitchen and dining area while Armijo moved toward the rear bedrooms. He returned to the front room just in time to see Armijo walk out of the bathroom, his face ashen gray. He shook his head sadly, holstered his weapon, keyed his handheld radio, and reported an officer down.
“She’s dead,” he added, “and I have a second body at this twenty.”
Clayton stepped around Armijo and took a look. The female uniformed officer was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet seat, her hands cuffed, legs bound with duct tape, and her mouth stuffed with what looked to be a washcloth. She had one bullet hole in the center of her forehead, and the wall behind the toilet tank was reddish brown with blood splatter from the exit wound. Her sidearm, spare ammo clips, and handheld radio had been dumped in the bathtub.
In the bedroom, Minerva Stanley Robocker was stretched out facedown on the bed, hands and feet bound by duct tape, with one bullet hole at the base of her skull. Only a trickle of blood trailed down her neck and stained the bedcovers.
A breeze through the open patio door to the bedroom balcony rustled the drapes. Clayton took a look at the door and saw tool-mark scratches near the locking mechanism. The door had probably been jimmied, which meant it was most likely the killer’s point of entry.
He went back and took a closer look at the side of Minerva Stanley’s Robocker’s face and spotted a bruise mark at the temple. He heard Armijo step into the room and glanced in his direction.
“What the fuck is going on?” Armijo asked.
“I don’t know,” Clayton said as he backed away from the body and followed Armijo into the front room. “But I’m guessing the killer entered through the bedroom balcony, knocked Robocker unconscious, and then dealt with the officer before returning to the bedroom to finish Robocker off.”
Clayton scanned the front room carefully. Except for the two dead women and the blood that been spilled, the apartment was as neat, tidy, and undisturbed as Tim Riley’s rented cabin in Capitan.
He’d spent hours in and around that cabin bagging and tagging everything he could think of that Tim Riley’s killer might have come into contact with—touched, brushed against, picked up, used, or stepped on. So far, forensic analysis had not revealed one shred of helpful evidence. He had a strong hunch that the CSI search of Robocker’s apartment would also yield a big fat zero in the evidence department.
He wondered who in the hell he was up against. One person? A professional? An organization of killers? The mob? The government? Spooks? And on top of all of that, where in the hell was young Brian Riley?
He stepped outside to the landing and speed-dialed Kerney’s private home number. Kerney picked up on the second ring and Clayton gave him the news.
“I’ll be on my way to your location five minutes after I hang up,” Kerney said, his voice still filled with sleep. “You call Paul Hewitt and let him know what’s happened. I’ll inform Sheriff Salgado, Ramona Pino, and Major Mielke. Let APD take the lead for now until we can sort things out.”
“Will do.” Relieved and glad that Kerney was willing to jump into the mix, Clayton disconnected, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. From two difference directions, he could hear the growing sounds of converging sirens.
Armijo joined Clayton on the landing, and in the light pouring through the open apartment door the two men waited silently during the last vestiges of a night neither would ever forget.
“Why don’t you meet and greet the arriving troops,” Clayton finally said, “while I start asking neighbors if they saw or heard anything.”
After arriving in Albuquerque, Kerney ran a gauntlet of APD cops and detectives before he could get close to the crime scene and start looking for Clayton. The entire complex had been cordoned off, and in three of the buildings within Kerney’s field of vision, he could see officers talking to residents outside their apartments.
He found Clayton in front of the building, where a CSI mobile lab was parked, talking with a man in a suit who had an APD captain’s shield clipped to the lapel of his jacket. Another man standing next to Clayton had a unshaven face and long hair that curled over the collar of his leather jacket, and wore a detective’s shield on a lanyard around his neck.
Kerney approached in time to catch an exchange between the captain and Clayton.
