The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter TWO

Friday Morning

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Detective Sergeant Gilbert Montoya of the Special Investigations Team stood on a hill, looking out over the baseball field littered with trash—plastic cups, paper plates, food wrappers. The sun was still coming up, yet he could make out almost everything in the navy blue morning, the faintest trace of crispness in the newly autumn air.
He glanced up at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to see if any of the aspen had started to turn yet, but there was no flash of yellow. The hillsides still had their swatches of green. Then again, it was only the second week of September. In another month, the color would be there. He turned his attention back to the hill he stood on, which last night had served as a stage.
He walked back over to the pile of ash that had been Zozobra only eight hours ago and looked up at the metal pole that was permanently cemented into the hilltop. It had served as Zozobra’s backbone during all the burnings. The fifty-foot-tall pole, scarred and pitted with years of fire, still held tightly to the chicken-wire mesh of Zozobra’s skeleton from the night before.
Gil looked down at the huge pile of ash, as did the four other people standing next to him.
The four men were all members of the Protectores de la Fiesta, a group whose job for almost three hundred years has been to guard the fiesta’s tradition and symbols. Gil’s grandfather and dad had both been members before they died. It was an elite group, allowing in only male descendents from one of the forty or so Spanish families that founded Santa Fe.
Growing up, Gil always knew it was fiesta weekend by two things: his mother making tray after tray of carne adovada and his dad and grandfather dressing in the uniform of the Protectores—black pants and a yellow satin shirt with a red sash. The colors of the New Mexico flag.
The four Protectores who had been watching the remains of Zozobra all night were there to make sure no sparks got free and nothing got rekindled. They had been the ones who had prompted Gil’s wake-up call. As the sky had started to lighten, something strange in the ashes had caught their attention. They had raked and pushed the cinders around until they finally figured out what they were looking at—a human skull.
Gil had been woken up from a sound sleep. He had gone to bed early—just after 10:00 P.M. He and his family hadn’t gone to Zozobra. In fact, they had never gone together. The year his daughter Therese was born, there had been a gang shooting on the Plaza just after Zozobra burned. Susan had refused to bring their daughters since. Gil had thought about insisting they go this year. The girls were old enough—Joy was twelve; Therese was ten. The girls themselves had pestered Susan every day for the last week, but his wife never budged.
He glanced at his watch again, wondering when the field deputy for the Office of the Medical Investigator might arrive. Gil had called the OMI on his way to the scene and gotten assurances that someone would be there soon. He had already called his boss, Chief Bill Kline, to tell him the news: that thirty thousand people might have watched while someone burned to death. Kline’s only response was “I’m on my way.” Gil glanced again at the mountains, which were starting to glow with sunshine, then looked back at the ashes.
The skull had been bleached white by the fire.
It was a small skull. The skull of a child.
Gil looked away again.
Lucy woke up with a start from a dead sleep, her fire department pager screeching next to her on the nightstand. She grabbed it, cranked down the volume, and jumped out of bed, stumbling out of the room before she could wake up the man next to her.
Behind the closed bathroom door, she turned the pager volume up to barely audible and heard the dispatcher call out a car fire in an arroyo. She sighed and rubbed her eyes, debating. She wasn’t a firefighter, so she didn’t need to go. Hell, she was only a volunteer medic at the department, so she really didn’t need to ever go. She could just slip back into bed. On the other hand, the bed held its own problems she didn’t want to deal with. Plus, they might need a medic at the fire to run rehab for the firefighters. Should she stay or should she go? Honestly, Lucy would rather deal with a deadly fire than any man in her bed.
“Okay,” she said to herself, the decision made. She turned on the bathroom light and opened the top bathroom drawer. She pushed aside some tampons and pulled out her Breathalyzer. She knew from experience that if she drank a six-pack and then slept for at least five hours, the machine would register a .02. Last night, though, she’d done the unusual. She’d had tangy shots and sweet mixed drinks. Who knew what that’d do to her blood alcohol level?
She pulled out the device, which was about the shape and size of a cell phone, and blew into the mouthpiece. She had ordered the Breathalyzer a month or so ago after seeing too many DWI crashes. Now, if she did decide to have a beer or two, she could be sure the morning after that she was okay to drive. She considered it the ultimate act of responsibility.
She waited a minute, then looked at the digital readout on the machine. It flashed .07. The legal in New Mexico was .08, so she was good.
She walked back into her dark room, where she stubbed her toe on something in the middle of the floor, yelling out “Oww” before she could stop herself.
“What the hell are you doing out there?” came a voice from the bed.
“You left your shoes in the middle of the floor.”
“Only because you wanted to get my pants off so bad,” he said, chuckling.
The sound made her nauseous and annoyed. She was having day-after remorse, regretting that she’d ever brought him home. It had seemed like such a good idea last night. The alcohol was probably to blame for that.
She’d gone to the Cowgirl after Zozobra, looking for a drink and wanting to hold on to the frenzy of the crowd. She needed to be someplace loud and raucous, but the Cowgirl was quiet. She stood alone at the bar for a moment, looking over the few diners who were finishing up their meals. She had decided to leave when the bartender asked her what she wanted to drink.
She glanced up at him absently. He was studly, in that he was covered in studs. On his dog collar, in his ears, through his nose. She wondered where else.
“Umm, I guess I’ll just have a shot of something,” she said. As he turned to grab an amber bottle, she noticed a tattoo on the back of his shaved head. He poured her a generous shot of who-knows-what and set it in front of her. Lucy downed it in one swallow. It was sweet with a hard edge of alcohol.
“Is that the best you got?” she asked, running a little flirtation up the flagpole to see what happened. She was still geared up from Zozobra and needed to keep the spark going. She was all tension, and, as usual, it came out of her in naughty ways.
“Honey, I got a whole lot better than that,” he said with a smile. He took a clear bottle full of viscous liquid off the shelf, and she watched him mix her a drink. His arms were covered in tattoos.
He smiled, and she noticed he had on mascara and a sweep of purple eye shadow. Which was more makeup then she was wearing at the moment. Interesting. Maybe he was gay or bi? Lucy decided there was only one way to be sure.
“I’ve never slept with a man wearing makeup before,” she said. Might as well get an answer to the gay question before she got too far along in her flirting.
“What makes you think we’re going to sleep together?”
“What makes you think we’re not?”
Gil had been on scene for only a few minutes when Liz Hahn pulled up in the medical investigator van. Liz, from Ocean Grove, New Jersey, had moved to Santa Fe with her partner, Shelly. They had two kids, one of whom was in the same grade as Therese.
Liz called, “Hey,” over to Gil by way of a greeting. She stopped short of approaching the ashes and instead looked around. She flipped open a notebook and scribbled a few quick notes about the initial scene. She took a camera out of the duffle bag she was carrying and snapped a picture of the mountains as they became tinged with pink, then wrote down the time: 7:10 A.M. “Shelly is a sucker for sunrise shots,” she said before turning the camera to the ashes, clicking away for a good minute.
She went closer to the ashes, carefully crouching down next to the skull. She stared and wrote in her pad, then stared and wrote some more before taking another round of photos. She went back to her truck and got out a small hand rake, which she used gingerly on the ashes for a few minutes, before getting up and going over to the Protectores. Gil heard her ask them how they found the skull and when. They told her the same thing they told Gil—that they had been there all night, they stopped raking the ashes as soon as they saw it, and no one had touched anything since.
Liz looked over to Gil for confirmation, and he gave a nod of his head. She went back to the ashes. This time Gil joined her with his notebook, knowing that this was how Liz liked to work: first, get a clear idea of the scene; second, get as much information about the scene as possible; then lastly grab the nearest detective and formulate a theory. Gil liked the method. He always left with a good idea of what Liz was thinking. Not all investigators were so polite. A few actually forbade all people on the scene from talking and left without revealing a thing.
Liz gently poked at the skull with the tip of her capped pen before saying, “Obviously it’s a child. My guess is somewhere around one or two years old. I’ll have a better idea when we look at the skull in the lab.”
“Cause of death?” he said, scribbling in his notebook in his own shorthand.
“It’s hard to say, but let me show you this.” She tipped the skull over slightly to reveal something stuck on the bottom. It was a mass of swirled red, green, and blue gunk with wire and metal pieces frozen in it. “This stuff covers the whole back side. It looks like melted plastic. We’ll have to get that off before we can get a good look.”
“So you can’t even say it’s a homicide?”
“No. It could just be nothing more than improper disposal of a body. Who knows?”
“Boy or girl?”
“No idea,” she said, letting the skull fall back into place.
“I’m guessing the kid didn’t die in the fire.”
“I don’t think so. I haven’t seen any other bones that would indicate the whole body was here. Also, I don’t see any organic material here,” she said as she poked at the ash with her pen. “So the decomposition took place somewhere else and just the skull was dumped here.”
Gil nodded and asked, “Any way to know how long the kid’s been dead?”
She made a noise that could have meant yes or no. “The skull doesn’t look very brittle,” Liz said. “So my initial guess is, not that old, but the fire . . .” She looked up at the metal frame that had been Zozobra before saying, “I don’t know what the fire would have done to the bones.”
Liz stood up and called over to the Protectores, “Hey, how hot would the fire have been last night?” They looked at her blankly and didn’t answer. She shrugged and whispered to Gil, “Big fricking help.”
“It’s not their fault,” Gil said. “Those guys actually have nothing to do with Zozobra. The whole thing is run by the Kiwanis Club as a fund-raiser. The only thing the Protectores do is sit around the fire all night to make sure there aren’t any sparks. Then in the morning they clean the trash up. They consider it a way of protecting the sanctity of fiesta, which is what they are all about.”
“You know a lot about this,” Liz said.
“Too much,” Gil said.
Liz sighed, sat back on her heels, and said, “All right, so Zozobra is mostly made of paper and wood, so the fire wouldn’t have been that hot. Maybe like a thousand degrees. It would have had to be about fifteen hundred degrees to melt off flesh.” She stopped for a minute before saying, “Look, all I can tell you is the skull was probably dry when it ended up here, but where it was before that . . . I just can’t narrow the time of death down more right now. This kid could have died yesterday or fifty years ago.”
She stood up and dusted off her pants before saying, “This is Santa Fe. Cars don’t rust and bodies don’t rot.”
“Hey, you. It’s time to go,” Lucy said to the lump in her bed, as she pulled on her combat boots and laced them up. She tucked her navy blue fire department T-shirt into her black pants and clipped her pager on her belt.
The man turned over and smiled at her, saying, “I bet you don’t even remember my name.”
Lucy sighed. She just wanted him gone, so she said in one breath, “Your name is Nathan. You moved here five years ago from Pennsylvania. Your mom’s a Realtor. You haven’t talked to your dad in ten years, and your only sister is coming to visit in two weeks. The best job you ever had was working one summer as a heavy equipment operator for the Forest Service. And, oh yeah, you work at the Cowgirl to make ends meet, but your true passion is art because you like the creative process. Now get the hell up.”
“How did you remember all that?”
“I’m a reporter. I pretty much just interview everybody when I meet them. It’s a habit,” she said.
“Wait. I thought you were a waitress, and you worked at someplace downtown . . . or something. The only thing I know about you is that your name is Tina.”
Lucy had forgotten she’d used her one-night-stand cover ID with him. “You know, Nathan, I’m really boring, so that about covers it,” she said. “Now, you have to go.”
“Why are you wearing an EMT uniform?”
“Nathan,” she yelled. “Get up and get out. I have to go. Lives are at stake. Or at least the life of a car is at stake.”
She pulled him off the bed and rummaged around for his shoes and shirt, which she threw at him. He started to put on his pants, but she said, “There’s no time for that.” She pushed him outside in front of her as he pulled his T-shirt on.
She locked her door in the faint twilight as he struggled with his pants, saying, “At least let me . . .”
“Sorry. Good-bye.”
She jumped in her car and pulled out of her drive while calling herself into service on her EMS radio that was bolted onto her dashboard. She popped a mint into her mouth. She had to stop herself from looking back at Nathan and checking him out in his state of undress.
She wanted to speed through her neighborhood of old adobe houses and cottonwood trees, but the roads here were old—too old to accommodate more than one car. That made getting to and from her house a constant lesson in patience as other drivers stopped and started in the narrow lanes. This morning was quiet, so she quickly made it out into the world of real streets that had proper crosswalks and bike lanes.
She was at the fire station a few minutes later, having broken many a speeding law. She opened the passenger door of the ambulance, which had PI?ON VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT written in reflective paint on its side, and jumped in.
Paramedic Gerald Trujillo, in the driver’s seat, didn’t say good morning. The daily niceties between them had fallen away a while ago. They were partners, each knowing what the other required.
Gerald drove the ambulance out of the bay and into the street. She picked up the radio, saying to Dispatch, “Santa Fe, Pi?on Medic One en route to car fire.”
As Gerald flipped on the lights and sirens, Lucy smiled. She hadn’t lied to Nathan when she told him she was boring. She was—most of the time. A couple of times a week, though, right when the sirens started to blare, she became a true blue action hero.
“God, I hope it’s not her,” Gil heard one of the Protectores say as he stared at the ashes.
“I kind of hope it is in a way,” another answered. “You know, to help the family deal with it.”
“Yeah, but at least before they had hope,” the first one said.
“There was never any hope,” a third man said, before making the sign of the cross, kissing his thumb, and glancing up at the sky.
“I hope it’s not her,” the first one said again.
Gil knew whom they were talking about: Brianna Rodriguez.
While Gil had been waiting for Liz, he had called Santa Fe dispatch to see if any children had been reported missing in the past twenty-four hours. The answer had been negative, which he knew it would be. A missing child in Santa Fe was so rare, he would have known about it the moment it happened. Then the dispatcher had added, “There’s always Brianna.”
Two-year-old Brianna Rodriguez had gone missing during a family barbecue more than a year ago. The unofficial theory was that Brianna had been swept away by a monsoon-fueled flash flood. The family’s backyard was unfenced and backed up to an arroyo, like many Santa Fe homes. It had started to rain when they noticed she was gone, and within minutes an intense flash flood from a summer monsoon had filled the arroyo to the top, washing away any trace of Brianna. They had done ground searches and dog searches and interviewed everyone and anyone who had ever seen the girl. The Protectores, like Gil, had probably helped with the search, volunteering their free time to comb the neighborhood.
The only other possibility was that it had been a stranger abduction, which had been mostly discounted—until now.
“Is this kid big enough to be her?” one of the Protectores asked.
“Brianna was thirty-one and a half inches tall and twenty-two pounds,” Gil heard someone say next to him. He turned and saw Detective Joe Phillips, who had somehow walked up to Gil’s side without him noticing. Of course, Joe had served in the military, so he had been trained to be invisible. “She was a preemie, so she was a small kid,” Joe added as he watched Liz sweep ashes into a plastic evidence bag. Phillips was in his late twenties and had become a detective only a few months ago. He had been with the department for two and a half years following a stint with the Pennsylvania state police. Gil didn’t know much about Phillips’s life before he came to New Mexico, other than that he had gone into the army after high school and done a tour in Iraq. Gil had heard that Phillips had gotten married and divorced at some point, even though the man seemed too young to have an ex-wife. Phillips looked even younger than usual this morning. His red hair and goatee needed a trim, and he was dressed in T-shirt and jeans, as if he had just rolled out of bed. Gil knew he had worked Zozobra the night before—like most Santa Fe police officers—and wondered who had called him.
Phillips turned away from the ashes and looked at the rising sun, rubbing his eyes. He had been the first officer on scene when Brianna was reported missing. He had set up the initial search perimeter and set up a command center until a detective could arrive. That detective had been Brian Fisher, who committed suicide six months ago using his service weapon. A few months before Fisher died, the Rodriguez family had filed a lawsuit for police harassment against the department, Fisher, and Chief Kline.
Gil walked over to Phillips but said nothing, waiting for the other man to speak.
“It’s her” was how Phillips started. Gil still said nothing. “I thought we’d find her alive. Fisher—that goddamn moron—always knew she was dead.”
Phillips turned to face Gil. “I bet Fisher a hundred bucks that we’d find her alive. If that stupid bastard hadn’t killed himself, he would have enough money right now to buy us all breakfast.”
He turned back toward the sunrise and wiped his eyes again. Even though Fisher hadn’t been killed on the job, Phillips had worn a black band around his badge during the funeral. To him, it was Brianna’s case that had killed Fisher, and that made it a line-of-duty death.
“Fisher knew she was dead,” Phillips said, more to himself than Gil, before adding, “but who put her here?”
Liz, who had stopped working to listen to them, said, “Look, I can’t tell you if it’s her . . .”
“Liz,” Phillips said in a tired voice, “why don’t you shut the hell up? Of course it’s her. Who else could it be?”
“Joe,” she said, annoyed, her New Jersey accent becoming more pronounced, “there’s always the chance it’s just a skull from some archaeological dig. We’ve got a million of those going on all the time. Hell, every time anyone builds anything around here they find bones.”
Phillips shook his head and started to pace. Liz muttered something under her breath and went back to work.
Before Brianna, there had been no missing kid cases in Santa Fe since 2000. The last had been Robbie Romero, a seven-year-old who had walked out of his house one night to go visit his friend three doors down and was never seen again. These bones were too small to be from anyone over the age of five. Before Robbie, there had been no cases Gil could remember.
Phillips reached into his back pocket and pulled out a worn brown wallet. He opened it, taking out a small photo that was tucked behind his driver’s license. It was of Brianna. It showed her face and part of her shoulders, her chin resting sweetly on her hand. Her hair was short, not yet grown out from its baby wispiness. Tiny pink rhinestones sparkled in her pierced ears, matching her pink T-shirt with roses. Her big, dark eyes smiled. It was the same photo Gil had seen a thousand times—on posters at every convenience store around town and in the newspaper accompanying each story about Brianna’s disappearance. Phillips stared at the photo for a moment and seemed about to give it to Gil, but he put it back in his wallet, which he shoved into his pocket with force.
“I hate this,” Joe said. “What does this mean, finding her now? It’s been a year since she disappeared. Does this mean someone killed her last year and kept her body this whole time, doing who knows what with it? Or does this mean that he kept her alive and then just killed her, like, last week? . . . Oh, God.”
Joe walked off toward the bushes looking like he might throw up. Gil considered going over to check on him, but then realized that was probably a bad idea. As cold as it sounded, Gil couldn’t allow himself to get too caught up in emotion and speculation. No matter how horrible the crime seemed at the moment, he would still have to build a solid case, one brick at a time, just like any other investigation. He couldn’t head off into the scary places just yet. Or, like Joe, he would end up being sick.
An old Ford truck pulled up near the crime scene tape, and a man with a shaved head jumped out. Gil recognized him instantly. It was Mike Vigil, the director of Zozobra for the Kiwanis Club. Mike and Gil had played basketball together at St. Michael’s High School almost fifteen years ago. Gil walked toward him, and the two men shook hands. Gil assumed one of the Protectores had called him.
“What can you tell me?” Mike asked.
“Basically, all I can say is that we found a skull in Zozobra,” Gil said.
“I heard it was a kid’s skull,” Mike said.
“I can’t tell you anything more about it, sorry,” Gil said. He knew this had to be tough for Mike. He was in charge of the burning, which was a family event that usually went off without a hitch.
“Okay, but you’ve got to tell me this,” Mike said, his eyes tearing up slightly. “Did I burn a kid alive last night?”
“No, Mike,” Gil said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “No. Whoever the skull belongs to was long dead.” Mike nodded, taking a big breath of relief. Gil said to him, “Look, can I get your business card? I’m sure I’m going to have to call to get more information once the investigation gets started.”
Mike pulled a card out of his wallet and handed it to Gil, saying, “Thanks.” He stopped to shake the hands of the Protectores before getting in his truck and speeding off.
Gil went back over to Liz, who was packing up her gear. “How’s Shelly?” he asked, just to make small talk, hoping the normalcy of it would quiet his worms of worry.
“She was fine until she got a bug up her butt about moving out to Eldorado after your wife told her how good the schools are,” Liz said. “Have you and Susan found a place up there yet?”
“We have to wait until we sell our house in town.”
“Did you do the upside-down statue of St. Joseph?” Liz asked. “My cousin did that and he didn’t even have to list his house. Some guy out of the blue comes up to him wanting to buy it.”
“Yeah, we did that.”
“Did you bury it in the backyard, not the front?”
“Yeah, it’s just the market,” Gil said. “Susan wants us to buy a place in Eldorado even if it doesn’t sell.”
“And leave you with two mortgages? Hell no.”
Gil was helping Liz load her equipment back into her van when Santa Fe police chief Bill Kline pulled up in his black SUV. Kline got out, along with Captain Paul Garcia, who was the department spokesman.
He heard Liz say, “The big boys are here,” as the men came walking over.
Kline said, “Liz,” as a way of greeting. Gil told the men all that he knew: It was the skull of a small child who did not die in the fire.
Kline nodded, saying, “How long will it take to get an ID?”
“I don’t know,” Liz said. “It’s an hour drive down to Albuquerque, and then I’ll have to call in our skeletal specialist . . . it’ll be at least two hours or probably closer to three before I can tell you anything. An ID is probably going to take a lot longer, until at least next week. We could end up with inconclusive results because the bone sample was too weathered or damaged in the fire. Who knows. This is going to be a mess no matter how we slice it.”
“If it’s her . . .” Garcia said, trailing off.
If it was her, all hell would break loose.