Chapter 1 Gunpowder Girl Nikon D2X • f/16, 1/8 sec., ISO 200) The little girl’s breath smelled of blood and gunpowder.
I’ve heard it said that children’s souls ascend into the heavens without the tethers of recollection and the pull of longing that their mothers carry—the connection to their bodies and their blood and their memory. But sometimes they must stay behind—their little voices must tell us their stories. The grief is just too much to carry.
It was 3:15 in the morning when her cold hand squeezed mine. My apartment had gone so bitter cold that I could hear cracking glass coming from my window ledges. I pulled my blankets closer, my gaze traveling toward the darkness in the corner. Her eyes were bright and framed by darkened bruises. I stared at her as the moon fell on our faces. I had no idea who she was, but she pulled on me, my stretched skin stinging as she drew me toward her.
“We’re waiting for you,” she said.
I became aware of the six other sets of eyes standing in the shadow, of the sound of their breathing like a collective wheeze, the liquid in their throats. I felt a sickness deep in my stomach—the pain of grief. There were so many of them, wheezing until their hearts went quiet. Time stopped as we stared at each other, fifteen minutes of their whispers on my skin. Our confrontation was interrupted by the sound of my phone ringing, the light bouncing on the nightstand. My heart was racing. I answered and the ringing stopped. “Hello.”
The black eyes were gone and the room had begun to warm.
“Hello, Rita. We need you up on the west side.” Samuels sounded strange. “Our specialist . . .” He paused long enough for me to check the blue reflecting light of my phone’s screen. We were still connected. “Our new specialist can’t continue.”
“I still haven’t been cleared with Dr. Cassler.” I looked at the clock. It was now almost 3:30 a.m.
“We need you down here.” There was a long and distant silence.
“Send me the address.” I hung up the phone and looked around the darkness of my room. Even though the girl and her shadows were gone, I couldn’t shake her or the smell of her breath. As I stood in my bathroom, water dripping from my face, I could smell smoke, gunpowder and the stench of burning hair, like it was billowing from my walls. I dressed, pulling my leg brace up over my thigh, the sharp sting of pain rolling down to my ankle. It did this every day. I told no one. It would be one more thing they would be able to talk about, another whisper around the water cooler. I would tell no one about my visitors this morning either.
7310 Platero Road NW, 4:14 a.m.
There were eight units already at the scene, mostly police vehicles and two quiet ambulances. Officers had the property taped off all the way through the end of the block as early risers stretched their necks over their fence lines. The air was still cold as I readied myself to begin another morning in my paper suit.
It had been an hour since the original 911 call. The report stated that a James Sandoval, pastor at First Desert Light Church, was on his way to the crime scene with the suspected perpetrator in the back of his vehicle. The suspect was a teenager, a Jude Montaño, the oldest son of Steven Montaño, a retired Albuquerque PD detective. Jude had come to the church in the middle of the night still holding a gun, blood splatter on his face. When Pastor Sandoval approached him, he raised the gun to the pastor’s face and pulled the trigger. Luckily, there were no bullets in the gun. Pastor Sandoval called the police and drove with Jude straight to the boy’s house, where they found every single member of his family dead from gunshot wounds—three girls, aged three, seven and fourteen; three boys, five, eight and ten; and both parents, Steven and Elizabeth Montaño, both forty-three.
Jude Montaño sat in the backseat of the patrol car, staring at me through the window as I pulled up. His back shook with every breath and tears rolled down his cheeks. He stopped crying when he saw my arm rise. I was pulled toward the house like a pendulum. I wondered if he could see her too.
The little hand pulled harder as I walked toward the crime scene. I looked down to see her bruises, the gunpowder freckles on her cheeks, the hole in her face like a honeysuckle bloom. Her mouth was bloody and swirled with white that leaked from both sides of her lips.
“I knew you would come,” she said. “Can you play with us?”
All the dead children were outside on the playscape in their pajamas, cavernous wounds in their backs and heads. I watched them chase one another up and down the slides while the oldest stared at the people passing in and out of their doorway. She turned her eyes on me, her expression one of anger—of finality. I think she was the only one who wasn’t confused about what happened.
The little girl never left me as I stepped onto the crime scene. Her siblings ran up and surrounded us, their voices unaware—a strange echo still giddy with childhood. The smallest one cried, raising her hands to me, wanting me to pick her up.
“Come play with us.” A boy pointed to their yard, scattered with dolls and toys.
I looked toward the door where the techs were assembling. A few officers stared at me, as they often do. I pulled away from the children.
“Rita, over here.” Samuels stood by a man with a graying beard. Sandoval, the pastor. The air was cold, the sun still behind the mountains.
“Rita Todacheene, photo specialist.” I extended my hand, and Pastor Sandoval took it, never saying a word.
Samuels motioned to the responding officer, the first on scene, a senior investigator named Louis Giovanni, to join us. He was already making his report, checking the temperature, and calculating the times. He read out what he had already taken down as I loaded my camera. Giovanni was brand-new to APD after four years in Minneapolis and another five in Los Angeles. He had come to Albuquerque to replace Sergeant Seivers, who had finally retired and moved to California to be with her grandbabies. I liked Giovanni because he was committed, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses—there was a mad scientist buried in him somewhere. He was very tall, quiet and reserved, but always seemed to know what questions to ask on scene and how to leave no stone unturned. That was how Seivers used to be. They had found someone who was almost her equal. Giovanni wasn’t privy to my special radar. Samuels still considered it compromising to cases. He never talked to me about it as long as I kept going to the shrink.
“Pastor Sandoval says the kid walked into the church and stood there silent, gun in hand. He knew right away something was wrong and drove them straight over here,” Giovanni concluded.
“Did you go inside, Pastor?” I asked Sandoval.
“Yes,” he answered after a hesitation. “But once I saw Steve, I came right back out. He was a friend of mine.”
I ducked beneath the tape, two cameras at my side. I could see our new specialist sitting in the ambulance, her hands over her face. My leg muscles pinched and burned as I coughed the smell of old blood off the back of my throat and started to take pictures. I backtracked from the scene, framing the front of the house, the number by the door, the blood-sprayed porch. Photo one, marker one. I photographed everything in the yard, the toys and bicycles, the new vehicles and construction equipment. From this viewpoint, nothing looked out of the ordinary. I pulled my notebook from my bag and diagrammed the scene as I saw it, lines and circles marking bodies and distance. Then I moved into the house.
At marker three, a man lay on the floor near the doorway, his face an explosion of blood and bone. I looked up to the ceiling of the porch, right above where Giovanni, Samuels and Pastor Sandoval stood talking. Pieces of brain tissue, skull fragments and flesh sprayed the columns, some nestled in the white macramé yarn planter, others embedded in the peeling paint and wood slats. The tissue smelled already, the earthy, milky smell of brain mixed with sharp iron.
After framing the blood and tissue from the porch in my lens, I moved to the man in the doorway. He looked up at the ceiling as if his face was still there, some memory loading before he died. Whatever gun had made this wound was powerful. Judging from the spray on the porch and doorframe, he was shot as he entered, surprised by his fate. A spattered recliner faced the door, its arms and back dotted with blood. I took twenty-seven photos of the man—the father, a former detective, a husband—his surroundings and his wounds. Blood pooled behind his head, a ten-inch-diameter circle embedded in the tan carpet with a wide river of blood trailing toward the door, small streams branching into the fabric. The bullet had hit him right at the upper bridge of his nose, knocking his eyes out of their sockets and pouring them into the sides of his hairline. On his right hand, there was a hole —a jagged tear between his middle and index fingers, bruising on the knuckles and fingers and deep cuts on his palm. There was a distinctive blackening of his hands and another hole indicating where he raised his arm for cover. The bullet had cut right through to his skull. A 9mm gun lay by his right side, the television lights flickering on its silver skin. The man’s ghost never came. When I photographed the wounds on his hands, I could smell gunpowder. Photo count eighty-seven.
I counted three rifle casings behind the couch, a .30 caliber ammo that was more suited to hunting animals. At this range, the man had no chance. The recoil of the gun could have caused the bruise on the boy’s face. We spotted two more holes above the front door and at the edge of the ceiling. Most likely the other two rounds had been fired inadvertently, a product of the boy’s inexperience with the gun’s power. I could hear the kids outside laughing. The oldest girl was watching me through the open door, the baby tugging at her nightgown.
Copyright © 2024 by Ramona Emerson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
