Chapter Twelve
The first thing Annie did after she hauled all the stuff from her car into the tiny house, eight miles outside the New Mexico town of Drummond, was to whip up some cookie dough and get a batch going. That way, as she unpacked and found places to stow her things, the house filled with the comforting aroma of baking cookies.
Her condo in the city was much larger than this place, which had only one small bedroom, a cramped kitchen with ancient appliances, a combination living/dining area, and a bathroom in which the toilet and bathtub could very nearly be used simultaneously. Foot-thick adobe walls ate up more of the space.
But if she wanted wide-open spaces, all she had to do was step outside. A small assortment of trees surrounded the house. Beyond those, golden grasslands stretched almost as far as she could see in every direction, until jumbled rocky outcroppings or taller brown ridges blocked her view. Sparsely populated Hidalgo County formed the boot-heel of New Mexico, and the Mexican border was just ten miles south. Morgan had told her there was a quiet border crossing at Antelope Wells, which she would never have a reason to visit. The air smelled fresh and clean, the sky was a deep and brilliant blue. Birds hopped around on the trees or took to the air without warning, and their songs penetrated through the buzzing in her ears, although just barely.
Still, after the claustrophobia of Phoenix, it should have felt like paradise. And it almost did.
It was only a vague sense of unease itching at Annie that kept it from perfection. She couldn’t pin it down, didn’t know if it had to do with the solitude Morgan had promised, which had seemed so desirable in the abstract but maybe a little scary in practice, with the quiet, or with something else altogether. Every now and then she felt a tickle at the back of her neck. As she walked through the house, the rooms seemed oddly cool or warm, but not in any consistent way—one minute, the kitchen might be toasty from the heat of the oven, the next almost frigid, the next hot again. Was it because of the thickness of the walls, the shade cast by the trees around the house? She didn’t know.
Once she was moved in and her cookies were done, she still had daylight left to spare. She took the Johnny Ortega file outside with a glass of iced tea and a plate of cookies and set them all on a small metal table next to a metal-and-plastic outdoor chair. She watched the birds for a while, wondering what they were. A breeze picked up and set the branches of the trees trembling. That uneasy sensation poked at her once again, then vanished. Annie smoothed down the fine hairs on her arms and went to work.
Almost exactly four years ago, Johnny Ortega had been picked up fifty-some miles away from Drummond, inside the Kranberry’s Family Restaurant in Lordsburg—Hidalgo’s county seat, perched along the interstate near the county’s north end. He had checked into a motel called the Western Skies Motel, across a parking lot from the restaurant. Earlier that afternoon, just outside of Drummond, teenagers Kevin Munson and Carylyn Phelps had been stopped along a small county road changing a flat. According to the prosecution, Johnny Ortega was a wanderer who had seen the pair, pretended that he wanted to help, tied up Kevin and beat Carylyn to death with a jack handle. When he did, he probably hadn’t known she was pregnant—authorities weren’t even certain if she knew it. Then he changed the tire, used their car to haul Kevin a few miles away, carried him into a fallow field, and slit his throat. Having casually slaughtered the two local kids, he returned to his own car and drove up to Lordsburg.
Those were the bare bones of the case. Much of it didn’t make sense to Annie. If he had killed the teens, why stay so close by? Why not put in another couple of hours behind the wheel and head for Tucson or El Paso? What was Ortega doing on that little country road in the first place? It was close to the border, but he was an American citizen, born in east Los Angeles, so presumably he hadn’t just crossed illegally. Had he been in Mexico at all? There was no evidence suggesting that he had. Plus he was driving his own car, paid for, insured, and registered in California. Why kill Carylyn by the road but then take Kevin so far away—and in Kevin’s car, having changed his tire for him—meanwhile apparently leaving his own car parked near Carylyn’s brutalized body? Ordinarily if a young male and female victim were separated, it was the male who was killed first, then the female taken someplace where the perp could spend time assaulting her. Not that it couldn’t go the other way, but that was much less common. And in this case neither victim showed signs of sexual assault.
Ortega’s court-appointed public defender had brought up some of those questions but had been easily distracted by the theorizing and guesswork of the sheriff’s officers who had built the case. On a couple of occasions, it appeared the judge would intervene, forcing the public defender to take more interest in his own case, but ultimately there was only so much he could do. The jury came back with a guilty verdict in less than six hours. Three weeks later, Johnny Ortega was sentenced to death.
Annie flipped through the photographs in the file. Yearbook pictures of Kevin and Carylyn showed seemingly typical rural high school kids, white, cleaned up for picture day, grinning for the camera. Carylyn’s smile was less forced than Kevin’s, and she came across as outgoing. He had small eyes and a thick neck, and Annie wouldn’t have been surprised to find that he played football for the school team. Crime scene photos were less appealing. Crime scene photographers didn’t shy away from gore, but this one had seemed a bit reluctant to really zoom in on the damage that the jack handle had done to Carylyn’s pretty head. Kevin’s murder was somewhat neater, a quick slice across the throat that had nearly severed his head.
Annie closed the file with a sigh and sipped her tea. The sun had almost dropped behind the ridgeline to the west, its last rays throwing bright spears of light above the hilltops. The shadows under the trees had become darker, denser, on the way to impenetrable.
Morgan was right. Half right, at least. Johnny Ortega had been railroaded. Judging by his testimony and the investigators’ notes, he was not blessed with an overabundance of intelligence or mental acuity. His English was only so-so, and he may not have understood everything going on around him. He had a record of committing violent crimes in California, and he’d spent much of his life in foster care, juvenile detention, or prison. He probably wasn’t a nice man, and he might well have belonged someplace where he couldn’t hurt polite society.
But from the files she had read, she wasn’t convinced that he had killed these particular people. Far from it—she wouldn’t even have gone to the state’s attorney with such a weak case. Lt. Carson would have thrown her out of his office and told her to start over.
Unfortunately, Annie’s lack of confidence in the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office would get her exactly nowhere in court. Ortega could have filed an appeal, but he’d elected not to. The time to raise reasonable doubt had passed. To get his conviction overturned, she would have to find new and convincing evidence of his innocence—four years after the fact.
She would start by interviewing him at the prison, but that would have to wait until tomorrow. For now, the evening had turned cool, and she didn’t remember having seen any source of heat except an old pot-bellied stove in a corner of the living room. The time had come to stop worrying about Johnny Ortega and start figuring out how she would live in this strange new place.