The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter SIXTEEN

Saturday Morning

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Lucy zipped down streets and through traffic lights on her way back to Starbucks to drop off Andrea, who swayed and jostled in her seat, although she didn’t seem to notice as she told her story.
The woman Andrea had interviewed was Gladys Soliz Portilla. She had been the owner of the second car that had gotten torched. It had only taken a few questions to get Gladys to open up about it. The woman, who had come from Mexico with her young son a few months ago, had her Dodge Neon towed from the apartment parking lot. When she went to get it from the tow company, they told her she had to produce a lease showing she lived at the complex. Because of her undocumented status, she hadn’t signed a lease.
“Then,” Andrea said, getting into the story, “a man comes to her house and tells her that if she pays him eight hundred dollars, she can have her car back, but that’s like almost a month’s salary. She tells him that she’ll call the police. That’s when her car was torched. I guess when the people couldn’t pay, their cars were burned to send a message.”
“This towing company sounds lovely,” Lucy said.
“It just pisses me off that anyone would take advantage of people like this,” Andrea said. Lucy smiled. Andrea was still too young to understand that it was human nature to pick on the weakest among us, and who is weaker than undocumented single mothers? The whole scam relied on the victim not feeling like she could go to the police. When the woman went outside her role as the victim and threatened to call the cops, they proved to her that they were untouchable by torching her car.
“She says that it’s happened to at least three of her neighbors,” Andrea said, speaking fast.
“What’s the name of the tow company?” Lucy asked.
Andrea checked her notes and said, “Ultimate Towing, but I bet you all the tow companies in town are in on it.”
“Wait a minute,” Lucy said. “We have no proof of that. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” She found it strange to be the one urging restraint.
“Okay, so we need some proof,” Andrea said. “We can go over to Ultimate Towing, and I can pretend that they took my car—”
“Hell, no,” Lucy said.
“Fine, then, we can stake them out—”
“No way,” Lucy said. “Listen to me. That’s not how it’s done. There is a bunch of documentation we need to get on them first—”
“I’ll be careful, I swear—”
“I don’t care about that. You’ll ruin the investigation,” Lucy said, not realizing how cold she sounded until the words were out of her mouth.
Andrea looked a little stung and a whole lot young. The girl was just excited about doing real journalism, and now Lucy was crushing her.
“Okay, look,” Lucy said, trying to make amends. “How about we go over to the county impound lot? That’s where they would have taken all the burned cars.”
Andrea clapped her hands, which Lucy took to mean that she was up for it. What Lucy didn’t tell her was that they wouldn’t be going into the lot. It was a Saturday, so it was unlikely that anyone would be there to open the gate. Even if someone was, Lucy and Andrea were not official county personnel. They would never be let in. At best, they would be able to peek through the fence before they were scared away by a security guard.
Lucy drove out toward the grassy plains on the highway and turned down a dirt road where an orange sign full of bullet holes read: ROAD PERMANENTLY CLOSED. That never meant anything out here. There would be side roads and dirt paths that meandered out to nowhere. A bird squawked on a telephone line as they drove by.
They turned into the county impound lot, which was fenced with eight-foot-tall razor wire. They pulled up to the closed gate, and Lucy was about to explain to Andrea that they would have to just look through the fence when a little man in overalls wandered out of a small shack and opened the gate. He came over to them, looking at Lucy flatly, then over to Andrea.
“Hi,” Lucy said. She wasn’t sure what else to add. She hadn’t been prepared to make up anything about what her business there was.
He looked over the interior of her car and seemed to see something that made sense to him, because he said, “I’ll keep the gate open until you leave.” Then he walked away, never asking Lucy who she was or under what authority she was looking at the cars.
Mystified, Lucy glanced around the inside of her car, wondering what had made him decide she belonged there. It took a moment for her to realize that the man had seen her EMS radio firmly mounted on the dashboard and the large sticker on its side that read PI?ON FIRE AND RESCUE. Damn it. She had just inadvertently used her EMS credentials to get info on a story. Lopez would be so proud.
She maneuvered around the dirt lot, which was packed with county maintenance vehicles and cars that had been seized by the sheriff’s office during criminal investigations. Lucy drove slowly as they looked at the rows of cars, trucks, and vans. Andrea let out a squeal when she saw a burned car among some weeds. Lucy took it as her cue to stop.
“Okay,” Andrea said, getting out, her high-heeled shoes crunching on the dirt. “The woman said her car was a red Dodge Neon.”
“Do we know what kind of cars her neighbors drove?”
“Yeah, a Ford F-150. She said it was black. And then a blue Accord.”
They walked over to the burned-out car, but it didn’t match any of the descriptions. They kept walking in the maze of cars through what was all but a junkyard.
Behind a school bus, near some outer buildings, Lucy found one of the three. This was the blue Accord. Andrea clapped her hands in excitement.
They walked around it. The interior of the car was burned black, with jagged metal plates where the upholstery used to be, and the roof was charred a bright white. The back of the car was surprisingly untouched, and its cobalt blue paint glinted in the sun. The smell of burned plastic still hung around the area. Lucy took a few pictures of the car with her cell phone, then walked to the back of it to write down the plate. She was just starting to note the numbers when she saw a slash of red spray paint on the body of the car. She stared at the uneven paint, which had drip marks along its edges. Even with the bad application, it was possible to make out a few letters that hadn’t been eaten up in the fire. Actually, it was possibly a word. Maybe in Spanish, but all she could clearly make out was the beginning letters, EL TIE. The rest was lost to the fire.
Andrea came and stood next to Lucy, looking at the writing.
“What could that say?” Lucy asked.
“Maybe it’s ‘el tiempecillo’ or ‘tiempo.’ I don’t know.”
They walked farther into the lot. This time it was Andrea who found the next vehicle. It was the F-150. Or what was left of it. The windows had all splintered, and the dashboard had melted into the floor. The truck hadn’t been as lucky as the Accord—it was nothing more than a charred heap of metal.
“Two down, one to go,” Andrea said.
When they found the red Dodge Neon, it was sitting in remarkable condition at the edge of the lot. The windows were charred but intact. Only the hood had been bent up in the fire. Whoever had set this fire hadn’t done as good a job. The red spray paint was easily visible on the side of the car, even over the endemic red paint. It read EL TIEMPO DE PAGAR.
“What does that mean?” Lucy asked.
“Time to pay.”
Gil left the interrogation room as quickly as possible. He went to the room next door, which was the other side of the mirrored window, where Joe was waiting for him.
Before Joe could start on his rant, Gil began one of his own.
“How the hell had we missed this? Ashley tried to have Brianna adopted?” Gil said loudly and uncharacteristically. “What is going on?”
He cursed Detective Fisher in his head. Maybe Fisher took his own life because he knew how badly he had botched the case from the beginning. Gil took a deep breath. He was starting to get crueler as this case went on. Maybe that piece of himself he lost was his compassion.
“No one ever said a word about this,” Joe said. “Not Ashley, not Mrs. Rodriguez. No one.” Joe paced to the edge of the room, then came back more urgently, saying, “I think this guy is full of shit. There is no way. He’s a lying alcoholic pervert who doesn’t know what the f*ck he’s talking about.”
Gil attempted to calm himself but let Joe go on and on until he was worn out. Gil tried to think of how they missed it. They had checked all court records and every other conceivable type of official document. Maybe Joe was right. Maybe Rodriguez was lying.
Gil wanted so badly to be done with Rodriguez. The man was so far out of the realm of fatherhood. He was nothing more than a narcissist. He wanted something and he took it. The world owed him.
Gil knew he had to talk with Rodriguez again, though. He was the one who had the answers. He was also the only one who had ever mentioned an adoption. He hadn’t gotten whatever family memo had been sent around telling everyone not to talk about it.
Gil opened the door and went back in. He sat heavily back down in his chair and said as calmly as he could, “Tell me more about these adoption papers.”
“The lawyer said I had to sign them as a witness,” Rodriguez said, “but the whole thing must not have worked out.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, because Brianna came back,” Rodriguez said. “I guess if it had worked out my baby might still be alive . . .” His eyes got watery, making Gil want to get as far away from him as possible, but he needed Rodriguez to keep talking.
“Do you remember any names that were on the documents?”
“I know the lawyer’s name was Anna Maria, because that’s my sister’s name, but her last name was Roybal.”
Gil was confused. “Whose last name was Roybal?”
“The lawyer’s. I remember because she had pictures of her kids on her desk. A little boy and a girl. They looked so sweet.”
Gil got up and left before his revulsion finally got the better of him.
Ashley Rodriguez had tried to sleep during the night, but the contractions made it hard. At some point around 3:00 A.M., they decided that she was finally in real labor. Then the craziness began. They did more tests and gave her shots for the baby’s lungs. They talked about the chances of a vaginal birth since Ashley had already gone through a C-section. She heard the doctor say that Ashley should go through labor as long as possible so her body would release a hormone that was good for the baby. Ashley paid no attention. She was too busy just trying to make it though the contractions, which now made her yell in pain. Her mom was there, strangely quiet and asking lots of questions. Ashley even saw her take a few notes. She couldn’t even remember where her mom was when Brianna was born. Well, it had happened so fast. Her dad had been there, though. The thought made her dig her fingernails into the palm of her hand, the pain giving her a moment of relief. She brushed her fingers over the scars on her arms, where she had cut herself. A few were still fresh. She had told a nurse that they were from her cat.
Ashley had been twelve when she tried suicide for the first time. She was going to hang herself like she’d seen in a CSI episode. She had made the rope out of her clothes and thrown it around the bar in her closet. She cried for an hour before she finally decided that she wouldn’t kill herself then. Maybe tomorrow. She had been telling herself “Maybe tomorrow” for years. Her plan had changed over time, from hanging to a drug overdose to shooting herself with one of Alex’s guns. She never talked about it with anyone. She had always heard that people who threaten suicide are just doing it to get attention, but the last thing she wanted was attention. She just had a plan that she knew she would carry out one day. Then she would be free and safe.
She looked at the door of her room, scared and at the same time hopeful that it might open. That her father would be there. She hadn’t seen him since just before Brianna disappeared. She wondered if her mom had even called him now. She hoped she had. Because Ashley was feeling alone, and scared, and she knew her father would make her feel better. Like she was the only one he wanted or needed. That she was so special and beautiful. She felt suddenly nauseous. She needed to cut herself. To make it stop. But there were so many people standing around her. So she dug her fingernails into her hand until she felt the skin pop and the warm blood. The thoughts didn’t stop, though. They only got louder. Then, blessedly, the next contraction began, searing its way through her abdomen and allowing her to finally smile in relief.
Joe met Gil in the hallway outside the interrogation room.
“Okay,” Joe started. “Here’s my idea. I say we send this guy back to County because I’m sick of looking at him and then go talk to Ashley and her mom some more.”
“Do you think that’ll get us anywhere?” Gil asked.
“No. I honestly think at this point pretty much the only thing that’s going to get us anywhere is kicking that guy’s ass.”
“Anything more constructive?” Gil asked.
“I think that would be really constructive for me.”
“Well, thankfully,” Gil said, “I have another idea. Give me a second.” Joe wandered off down the hallway toward the vending machines as Gil flipped open his phone and dialed. His sister, Elena, answered, saying, “Hi, Gil. What’s up?”
“Do you know an Anna Maria Roybal? She does adoption law?”
“Hmm . . . maybe. There was an Anna Maria a year ahead of me in law school. Hang on a second, I’ll have to go look for my New Mexico Bar Association directory.” He heard her making noises in the background as she searched for the book. Knowing Elena, it was likely under a pile of legal papers. He heard her thumping around for another couple of minutes before she said, “Okay, here it is.” She gave him the number.
“What time are you coming up?” Gil asked her. Elena would be making the hour drive up from Albuquerque later in the day to go to his aunt’s fiesta party.
“I told mom I’d be there at one.”
“Oh, hey, by the way, Mom made her adovada,” Gil said.
“Fantastic,” she said. “I’ll bring some empty Tupperware.”
They hung up, but Gil didn’t put away his phone. He dialed the answering service for the district attorney’s office again, and left another message for the on-call lawyer to contact him. Nothing had changed with Geisler. Gil still had to interrogate him, but if the DA didn’t return his calls, he’d have to do it without the benefit of legal counsel.
Joe came back, sipping a Mountain Dew. “So what next?”
“A conversation with Anna Maria Roybal.”
Lucy made sure to compliment Andrea on her great investigative work as they drove back to Starbucks, where they had left her car. As Andrea was getting out, she was still buzzing about the story, talking about leads to follow and who to interview next.
Lucy finally said, “I promise you, we will get to it next week, when Tommy can help, okay? Just go have a good day off, and I’ll see you on Monday.”
Andrea said good-bye and closed the door. The car became blissfully silent, and Lucy took a minute to appreciate it. She decided to go on a drive. She took New Mexico 14 away from the city and into the flat plains of the valley, which was ringed by mountains and old volcanoes gone silent. The ground was covered in low, straight grasses that were drying into a haystack yellow in the late summer heat. The flatness gave way to a few roller-coaster hills.
She topped a rise and saw the desert change from a flat plain to rolling hills of pi?on and juniper. Below her, at least two miles away, a crease of green cut the ground. She knew there had to be a river there. The entire state of New Mexico was shades of brown and beige that were occasionally struck through by a line of bright shocking green that held the blood of life—water.
In Florida, she had never thought about water, about what it meant. There was just so much of it. Here it was precious. People had been killed over it. The Pueblo Indians and original colonists had built extensive acequia systems that brought the water from the rivers to the farmlands. They had created a complex system of water rights and inheritance laws around it. Each acequia had its own water board and mayordomo. Often, the water boards held as much power as a city government. All for simple irrigation ditches.
As she got closer, she saw that the river actually had water flowing in it, which was unusual. Most rivers were usually just dry arroyos until a fresh rain filled one up to the brim. The water would churn its way downstream until it petered out, and then the riverbed would be dry again. The arroyos varied widely according to landscape. Some had six-foot-tall cliff banks made of sand, while others were as wide as an eight-lane interstate.
Whatever its size, where there was once an arroyo, there will always be an arroyo. That’s why native New Mexicans shake their heads at newcomers who build their huge houses on an arroyo plain. That arroyo might not fill up with water for several years, but when it did—because it eventually would—that house would be gone.
As Lucy drove over the bridge that crossed the arroyo-turned-river, she saw that this one had a soft sand cliff for its riverbank, its jagged edge stretching off into the distance like a pink puzzle piece.
She thought about the man Gil had in custody, who was stuck in prison simply because of his mental illness. She wondered which prison was she was referring to—his brain or his cell. Just like her mother’s prison, and her brother’s. A family history of incarceration because of a simple problem of genetics. Lucy wondered if either of her grandparents had it. Or was it some long-lost ancestor who cursed them with it?
She had never met her grandparents. They had disowned her mother when she was in her early twenties over some money issue. Lucy never knew the specifics. They said it was because she was selfish and immature. They never knew that she was already hearing the voices then. The people in her mom’s head told her things. Strange things. They told her that the CIA was watching her and that the government would come for her. She was able to ignore them when she was a teenager. So much so that she finished nursing school and got married.
The people in her head never left her, though. They whispered and yelled and demanded. By the time Lucy was four, the voices started to win. Both her brothers were old enough to go to school, leaving Lucy home alone with a mother who would talk to herself in whispers and write endlessly on newspapers. When her father and brothers came home at night, her mother would pull it together and make a meal, looking drawn and worn, but sane.
By the time Lucy was in first grade, her mother could no longer pretend. That’s when the doctors first showed up. A parade of them with a brass band of various diagnoses, eventually settling on schizophrenia. Her mom was put into a psychiatric hospital to get her started on medication.
A week later, her mom came home looking blank, but no longer talking about the commandos. She would stay on the meds for about three months—three blissful months—then decide she was cured and no longer needed them. It was a cycle that would last until Lucy was eleven. Her dad was long gone by then, having left when Lucy was eight. She, her mother, and her brothers had moved without him to L.A., Atlanta, and then Tampa. Once in Tampa they had moved again and again, with the shifts of her mother’s mind. So often that Lucy had stopped unpacking. Or making new friends at school.
One day the police came to the house. Her oldest brother, Jason, who was fourteen, had stolen a car. In the middle of a chase with police, he had rolled the car four times. He was in the ICU on a ventilator. Lucy didn’t know it then, but that was the day her life would start. When things would go from the daily drone of almost unbearable to almost bearable.
At the time, Lucy and her brothers had been on what they called “mom watch.” Their mom was taking her medication, but they knew any day she would go off it. Before she did, they would make a plan of which of them would buy the food, which would cook, and which would make sure their mother didn’t try to kill herself—or them—yet again.
By chance, when Jason rolled the car, their mother was fully medicated—and something inside her clicked. She realized that if she went off her medication, she wouldn’t be able to care for her son. Soon the usual three months had passed, but her mom didn’t start complaining about the way the meds made her feel. Jason was moved to rehab, and her mother stayed with him, going in daily to help him with physical therapy. Eventually the rehab facility offered her a nursing job. Her mom had lost so many nursing jobs over the years, and Lucy knew it was only a matter of time until this one fizzled or exploded . . . but it didn’t.
When winter rolled around, they didn’t move to a new house, either. They stayed where they were. It took Lucy another two years to believe that her mother might stay on her medication. By then, though, Jason was starting to hear the voices, and it began again, only this time with a different main character. Her mother became a supporting actor where she had once been the star. It might seem ironic that a sick patient—now better—would be forced to care for another patient with the same disease, but it never seemed that way to Lucy. All she could think was that they would never be free.
She turned around near the Turquoise Trail volunteer fire department and headed back toward town. This time she was so caught up in her thoughts, she saw little of the scenery.
She thought of Alex Stevens. She knew nothing about him, but she hated him just the same. She hated him for preying on someone because the person was mentally ill. For lying and not caring that he had just ruined another person’s life. And he did lie. Of that Lucy was sure. She just couldn’t understand why. She didn’t know the ins and outs of the Brianna case well enough to make an educated guess, but she was happy to make an uneducated one—Alex Stevens was lying because he’d killed Brianna. This was his crude way of pointing the finger at someone who had no way to defend himself.
Lucy had no problem with this assumption, because the police had assumed much the same way that a mentally ill person must be the killer. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she was mad at Gil. In fact, she was furious. She had thought better of him. She had thought he wouldn’t assume that just because someone was insane the person was guilty. She wasn’t sure why she had granted Gil such lofty characteristics in her own mind. Maybe it was because in the past—their past—he had been so impeccably honest. And good. And kind. And cute. Lucy sighed. She knew how she sounded—like an infatuated girl. Now she was an infatuated girl who had just discovered her handsome prince was only human.
She got onto the interstate and took the exit toward downtown. She kept to the back roads to save time. She took Paseo de Peralta around downtown and headed toward Fort Marcy Park.
She pulled into the parking lot where Zozobra had stood two nights earlier. The ash from the fire had been cleaned up, as had the field that the hill overlooked. It had been carefully turned back into the baseball diamond that it was. Lucy walked over to the concrete slab holding the metal pole that served as Zozobra’s backbone, where a makeshift memorial had been erected overnight for the victim. There was a mass of candles on the ground, some still lit, others long gone out. A rainbow of plastic rosaries twined around the pole. Vases held flowers, some fake, some real, some handpicked from the roadside. There was a large poster that read HEAVEN HAS A NEW ANGEL and a fair number of stuffed animals—unicorns, teddy bears, and dolphins. Two women were at the memorial, standing off to the side. They prayed quietly on their rosary. This was typical of how New Mexicans reacted when a child was killed. A few years ago, when the body of an anonymous little boy was found buried in the sand of an Albuquerque playground, the neighbors of the park held daily rosary services and candlelight vigils. The playground was overtaken by a memorial much like this one. The neighbors said they prayed for the boy because his own family had left him unclaimed and abandoned.
Lucy thought again about Alex Stevens. Had he killed the little girl? Maybe. Probably. She had no proof, though, and she knew Gil would need proof and not just her word that Stevens was lying.
For that, Lucy would have to make use of some of her old-fashioned reporting tricks—and they were called tricks for a reason.