The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,107

put any weight on his ankle. As he stopped in front of the trailer, he heard the police radio—dispatch was sending out three backup units. But the sound hadn’t come from his own radio. It had come from the trailer. Gil strained his ears. He heard the muffled sounds of a police scanner somewhere inside the mobile home. Now Ron knew that they were coming. But it didn’t change things. Gil still had to get inside.

As Gil put on his vest, he looked around the corner and slowly made his way to the front door. He glanced along the side of the trailer, looking for a back door. There was one, but it had no steps leading down. A person would have to jump about four feet to get to the ground. Gil decided that he would have one of the incoming officers stationed there as he moved to the front of the trailer. Gil wanted to get into position while he waited for his backup and make sure that Mrs. Baca was all right.

Gil reached the front door and, crouching low and to the side, turned the knob. It was unlocked. He pushed the door open with his foot, expecting Ron to shoot or at least to make a run for it, but nothing happened. No noise inside. He looked behind him and to the sides of the trailer, wondering if Ron had gone out a window.

“Ron,” Gil called inside. “It’s Gil Montoya. I’m here to help.”

No answer.

“Ron, I just want to make sure your mom’s okay.”

No answer.

“Mrs. Baca, can you hear me?”

Nothing.

“Mrs. Baca, if you can hear me, please make a noise.”

Silence.

He called out a few more times, but it was quiet. He heard the police scanner inside, but nothing else. The silence made him even more edgy.

There wasn’t a clear line of sight to the interior. All Gil could see through the open door was a brown-paneled hallway wall three feet away. He guessed that the living room was down the hallway to the right and a bedroom to the left, like the standard layout of a mobile home. He would have had to lean his head through the door to get a look in either direction. But Gil expected that Ron would be armed.

He would need another officer to provide cover to get through that door. One-man entry was against regulations. All he could do was wait. The way he was crouched was killing his ankle. He tried to focus on the door, to take his mind off the pain.

A patrol car pulled up. He signaled the officer—he didn’t see who it was—to go around the trailer. Another officer appeared. He motioned her to him.

“We’re going inside,” he said to the officer. He thought her last name might be Lopez. She nodded, looking calm.

They went into the trailer, his adrenaline rush making the living room a blur of brown furniture. He could see into the open kitchen. On the linoleum floor was a growing puddle of blood. It was coming from Ron Baca, who was facedown on the tile with his Smith & Wesson still in his hand.

Mrs. Baca sat in a vinyl kitchen chair, her hands in her lap. An old police-issued revolver on the table next to her. She watched the blood as it oozed across the floor, fascinated.

“Mrs. Baca?” Gil asked. His gun still out. “Mrs. Baca, what happened?”

“He killed my baby,” she said, still looking at the blood. “I heard what you said. You said he killed my baby.”

Gil went to the table and pushed the gun away from her. He heard Lopez calling on her radio for an ambulance.

Lieutenant Pollack—the newspaper’s one-and-only snitch—had called Lucy to ask if she would mind talking to him about Patsy Burke’s death. As Pollack had said it, “We have combined the investigations of Melissa Baca and Patsy Burke.”

It was getting dark, almost five thirty P.M., as she drove to the state police department.

Meeting Pollack would be interesting. She had this image in her head of a used-car salesman in a police uniform or a washed-up high-school football star. The kind of guy who needed glory; the kind of guy who got off on seeing his words in the newspaper.

She was two blocks from the police department when the EMT pager in her glove compartment went off, making her jump at the noise and swear out loud. Hadn’t she turned that thing off? She frantically opened the glove compartment, throwing Taco Bell napkins everywhere. Where was