The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,46

uncooperative.” She emphasized the last word. “They said they’d call me, but in the meantime, the next step is to assume it’s Scanner Lady. I know I’m jumping the gun a bit, but without evidence to the contrary, you stick with the illogical—isn’t that what Sherlock Holmes always said?”

“Okay. We’ll assume for the moment it was Scanner Lady,” Gil said. “How can I help you?”

She got up from the bench and paced back and forth twice before answering. He could tell that she was trying to choose her words. She was nervous again.

“Well, here goes: if it is really Scanner Lady, she might have been killed because of what she heard on her scanner Monday night. What she told me about. The only two people in my office who knew she told me anything were myself and my reporter. I checked with him—he didn’t tell anyone. The only person I told was you, in a room full of cops. So …”

“Wait a second. Assuming that you don’t think I killed her, are you saying you think someone in the police station overheard our conversation and killed her?”

She didn’t answer and kept pacing, not looking at him, like his daughter Therese did when she was telling a lie.

“Ms. Newroe, there are so many things wrong with that assumption, I don’t even know where to begin. She could have been killed in a burglary, like Major Garcia said. The deputies know what they’re doing. Or she could have been killed for some other reason that has nothing to do with you. That would make the most sense. And even if she was killed because of what she told you—”

Lucy interrupted him. “Believe me I know, I know. I’ve been through this in my head. It might not even be her, for chrissakes. But it all comes back to this for me—what Scanner Lady told me involved a crime some cop committed. I talked about it in a room full of cops. The next day she’s dead. I think it would be illogical of me to think that the two things aren’t connected.” She was more defensive now.

“Ms. Newroe, even if all that were true, the main problem is that in our conversation yesterday, you never even said her name. You told me you didn’t even know her name. How could one of my police officers have killed her if he didn’t know who she was?”

“I know. I know. None of this makes any sense.” Her voice sounded like she was crying, but there were no tears. “But don’t you get it? I’ve got to know if my big mouth and her getting killed are connected. If there’s even a remote chance that I got her killed, I have to know.”

“Ms. Newroe, I really don’t see—”

She must have heard the finality in his voice, so she interrupted him. “Listen, Detective Montoya. Scanner Lady said she heard two Santa Fe police officers discussing a dead body. Maybe they were talking about Melissa Baca’s since that’s the only dead body we have around currently. Doesn’t it interest you that there’s the slightest of possibilities that whoever killed Melissa Baca may have killed Patsy Burke?”

He didn’t answer her because he didn’t know what to say.

She stopped pacing and stood so still that Gil wondered if she was holding her breath. She turned to him quickly. “What about the conversation between the cops over the scanner? That has to be on tape at the dispatch center, right?” The 911 dispatch center automatically recorded all conversations on the police-radio frequencies.

Gil shook his head. “I checked on that last night. I listened to the dispatch tapes from that night myself. There was nothing.” Even though he hadn’t really known what he was looking for, he had spent twenty minutes checking the tapes.

“How can that be? Maybe someone erased them. You guys have had that problem before.”

Four years earlier, two police officers had made the mistake of discussing over the radio how they looked at porn on the Internet while at work. When the investigators went to find the tape of that conversation, it had been “accidentally” erased by one of the dispatchers. The police officers and the dispatcher had been fired.

“I thought of that, so I asked the dispatcher working that night if she had heard anything. She hadn’t. And I believe her. There is no evidence of that call.” He said the next part gently: “Maybe your Scanner Lady made the whole conversation up. Maybe she’s a lonely