The Price of Vengeance by James R. Scarantino

Author:James R. Scarantino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: compromise;the drum within;james scarantino;james r scarantino;Denise Aragon;santa fe;new mexico;fbi;police;mystery;mystery fiction;mystery novel;price of vengeance;denise aragon series;denise aragon mystery series;CVR05192017
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2017-12-11T19:18:47+00:00

Sixteen

She couldn’t work with the Percocet turning her brain into jelly or when the nurses let in cops and detectives and State police and probation officers and corrections officers and bailiffs and prosecutors bringing cards, candy, and flowers and hanging around long after they’d run out of things to say. She started having the hospital give the goodies to people without visitors. Good thing she and Lewis had gotten time alone with Margaret Baldonado before the floodgates opened.

At least her memory was working. She was correct in recollecting that Margaret had three children of her own, but she hadn’t known about the one from a different mother who’d stayed behind when the father dumped Margaret. Margaret had moved up through state government to a good job at the State Film Office arranging receptions, pitching New Mexico to producers, helping site locators, trying to get movies shot in poor towns with amazing scenery and no economy after the monthly welfare checks had been spent.

Today under questioning from Magnano was the first time Margaret had revealed what Amy McSwaim told her back in college.

“You don’t go around saying one of the most powerful people in New Mexico raped someone if you want to keep your job. Sure, you’re civil service, you can only be fired for good cause. So they doctor your personnel file, turn people against you, wreck your reputation to where it’s better to give up and keep your files sealed. What would I get from running my mouth except moving into an efficiency apartment with four hungry kids burning through food stamps?”

“But you told the FBI,” Aragon said.

“They asked at the same time we have a new governor who’s thinking of running against Valles. It made it easier.”

So they talked about Amy. Margaret remembered Amy McSwaim sitting her closest friends down, the two of them and Patricia Garza, a couple days later instead of the very next day after the rape, as Aragon recalled. She also placed the rape closer to Amy’s last day alive. And Amy had shown Margaret something Aragon hadn’t seen: torn underwear spotted with blood. She didn’t know what Amy had done with that evidence. Aragon said if she’d been a police detective at age nineteen she would have insisted on bagging the underwear and testing for semen and DNA. Margaret remembered that all Aragon wanted to do at the time was terrible things to Sam Valles’s most sensitive parts.

“Will Patricia learn I talked to the FBI?” Margaret asked. “I’m more worried about her than Sam.”

“We certainly wouldn’t share details like that,” Lewis said, in the orange plastic chair, taking notes. Margaret kept staring at the bandages on his head and then said her son had burned himself once lighting the grill with gasoline. She knew how much it hurt and she hoped his hair grew back.

“Still, she’s a senator’s wife,” she went on. “I’m worried.”

“Patricia’s not talking to anyone right now,” Aragon said. “Tell Rick what you remember about Amy’s injuries.”

Bruises on her neck, scratches on her cheek, the scraped knuckles on the back of her hand.

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