The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,56

New Mexico plates next to a car that looked liked Melissa’s brown Chevy.”

There was only one purple Dodge Reliant in town. It belonged to Hector Morales. Morales wasn’t usually at the park himself—he usually had one of his runners take care of the small deals. But occasionally he would take a buy at the park to show his employees how it was done. He believed that trafficking drugs was all about the marketing and the personal relationships with his clients. It was based on some idea he’d gotten from watching a late-night infomercial when he was on cocaine. He used his MySpace page to drum up customers, but he and his clients wrote in a code that the police had never broken. Morales had had three dealing arrests in the early 1990s. Since then, he had been arrested dozens of times but always found a loophole. Morales’s street nickname was Pony but the police called him Teflon.

“Anything else, Manny?” Gil asked.

“Well, I was pretty far away but it looked like the driver of the Dodge Reliant handed the driver of the Chevy something.” Cordova sounded like he was testifying before a grand jury. “That’s all I saw.”

“Are you sure it was Morales’s car?”

“Oh yeah. I’ve busted him plenty. I’m one hundred percent sure it was him.”

“How about Melissa’s car? How sure are you that it was hers?”

Cordova thought for a second. “I’d say about seventy percent. If I hadn’t been going to that MVA, I would have stopped to check it out. You know that, sir, right?”

“Manny, I guess I’m concerned that you didn’t bring this up before. Didn’t you think it was important?”

“Sorry, Gil. I just didn’t think of it. Melissa wouldn’t be at a place like that. It looked like her car, but I can’t be sure.” Cordova looked at the floor. “And I feel bad that I didn’t stop. I know I should have, or called it in. I know I broke procedure.” He looked back up. “Anyway, I hope it helps.”

Cordova got up and walked off before Gil could ask more about it. But Gil had finally figured out what Melissa had been doing during that hour after she’d left work but before she got home: buying drugs.

The dirt road came out onto the highway. Once she hit the pavement, Lucy drove to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. She entered the glass-and-steel building and asked the front-desk clerk if she could see Major Garcia, knowing full well that he was at Scanner Lady’s house. But she didn’t care. The receptionist told Lucy to wait. Which she did, in a gray metal chair that rocked when she tapped her foot against the floor.

Lucy had finally figured out how no one but Scanner Lady had heard the conversation between the cops on the police scanner—blame it on the cell tower just a few blocks from her house. The officers hadn’t been on the police radio; they’d been on cell phones.

Lucy couldn’t believe that it had taken her so long to figure that out. Police scanners were notorious for picking up cellphone conversations when a cell tower was close-by. The frequencies between the towers got all mixed up. Cell-phone calls sounded like normal traffic on a police scanner. Scanner Lady wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.

At the Capital Tribune last summer, they had heard about a house blowing up on the west side. Lucy had sent a reporter and photographer scrambling while she listened closely to the police frequencies. At ten P.M., close to deadline, Lucy was still waiting to hear from her reporter when the scanner piped up. Two police officers were talking. Lucy knew within seconds that they weren’t on the police radio—they were swearing and using first names as they discussed the explosion over their cell phones and talked freely about the cause of it—a meth lab in the basement. She quickly called the reporter. The reporter, without revealing his source, got confirmation from the police that it had been a meth-lab explosion. The next day, she’d gotten an e-mail from John Lopez congratulating her on the scoop.

She planned to explain this to Garcia. If he ever showed up. After forty-five minutes, she settled on writing Garcia a note, asking him to call.

CHAPTER NINE

Thursday Afternoon

The news meeting was lasting forever. Lucy tried to hide her second yawn. Patsy Burke’s death had become a brief. The story’s first paragraph would be, “Santa Fe sheriff’s deputies are still investigating the slaying of an elderly woman