The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter TWENTY

Saturday Afternoon

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Lucy was just finishing up her research at the office when one of the copy editors came over to her desk.
“Oh, hey,” he said to her. “I’m glad you’re here. I know it’s your day off, but I was going to call you about the SWAT thing last night. We need a brief about it.”
“What SWAT thing?” she said innocently.
“I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that Lopez told me to ask if you were there, and if you were, to tell you that you should get a brief in.”
“Umm . . . no, I wasn’t,” she said, lying.
“I could have sworn I heard your voice on the police scanner.”
She just smiled, hoping he couldn’t see the deception in her eyes, and said, “Nope.” She kept smiling until he walked away.
As fast as she could, she jotted down all the information she had on Alex Stevens. Then she pulled the crime scene photo she had gotten from Joe out of her purse and went to the Xerox machine to make a color copy. The machine took a minute to wake up, and Lucy tapped her foot, hoping to get out of the building before someone challenged her about the SWAT call again. She would have gladly forgone making the copy, but she knew Joe could call her and ask for the photo back at any time. Remembering the wolfish look on his face, she guessed it would be soon.
She stared at the bulletin board over the copier, which held a conglomeration of photos, memos, articles, and a single earring looking for its owner. There was also a bright blue flyer with the headline THE MEDITATION OF RELEASE. It was the same flyer that she had seen that morning at Santa Fe Baking Company advertising a meditation class tomorrow night. It was stalking her. She read it over again and smiled once more as she read the final words that promised “there will be no chanting.”
The copier finally sprang into action and spit out a single copy. She pulled it out of the machine’s tray, went back to her desk, and quickly shoved it in her purse. She hurried out the back door before anyone else could stop her. Out in her car, she sighed in relief and put her head on the steering wheel. She wouldn’t be able to keep dodging questions about her life at the fire station. She would have to tell Lopez that she simply wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t be a frontline spy for him.
She drove home and pulled into her driveway. Nathan’s car still was sitting in front of her house, which was exactly what she wanted. She went inside and put on a low-cut shirt with sequins. It was a bit much for this time of day, but it would do the job. Especially when put over a push-up bra, which in her case had to be a push-up, pull-forward, and thrust-out bra in order for her to have any kind of cleavage. She then put on dark jeans with cowboy boots. She spent the next forty-five minutes doing her makeup and her hair. She was still sporting hot curlers when she called Alex’s Towing.
A man she assumed to be Alex Stevens answered, and she said, “Hi. My boyfriend’s car, I mean my ex-boyfriend’s car, is in front of my house, and I need to get it towed.” She laughed and said, “You know how it is.”
“Yes, I do,” the man said, then asked for her address. She gave it to him and hung up.
She went to her closet and got out her black purse, which she had bought when she was a cops reporter in Orlando. The purse had perfect pockets for holding all of her investigative equipment. She transferred her wallet to the new purse and added a small makeup kit in case her face needed retouching later. She slid a voice-activated tape recorder into one of the side pockets. She said the word “sibilance” a few times, then rewound the tape and listened to make sure it was working. Next, she put a reporter’s notebook and three pens in another side pocket. Then she transferred over all her notes about Alex Stevens and the copy of the crime scene photo. It was only then that she realized she had left the original photo lying facedown on the glass of the copier at work.
She swore fast. The words ran together, tripping over each other into a continuous sound. She sounded like a singing cicada on a dark night. The photo was part of an official investigation, and to take it, she had flirted up a storm with a man who expected to get it back. Now it sat in the Xerox machine, just waiting for the next person to hit COPY.
She had no time to go get the photo now. The tow truck would be there in just a few minutes. Her only hope was that no one would try to make copies. That was possible, given that it was the weekend and the newsroom was dead. She sent up a little prayer, then finished packing her purse, adding a flashlight, camera, Mace, and a pocketknife.
You never knew where an investigation might lead you.
“What can you tell us about Brianna?” Gil asked, massaging his leg as it started to cramp from sitting on the floor.
“Actually, we changed her name to Bibi during her time with us,” Ms. Henshaw said.
“Okay,” Gil said slowly, “and what can you tell us about Bibi’s life here?”
“She was unable to enjoy our simple ways,” she said.
“How do you mean?” Gil asked.
“As you would expect, we conduct satsang to discuss our dreams—”
“What’s a santag?” Joe asked. Gil wasn’t sure if he was mispronouncing it on purpose.
“It is in satsang where we join each other and listen to a discussion of light,” Ms. Henshaw said.
“So, it’s a lecture,” Joe said.
“Yes, where we use hu to seek out our divine essence—”
“Use what?” Joe asked.
“Hu. It’s how we connect through uplifted voices with our divine self and thus our own—”
“So hu is a song,” Joe said.
“Yes, of devotion.”
“Why can’t you just say that—”
Gil interrupted. “When you were doing the hu, what happened with Brianna?”
“She was unable to concentrate on her inner path and found the only way to express herself was through crying.”
“She was two,” Joe said slowly, his tone implying that Donna Henshaw was a bizarre new breed that had never interacted with humans before. “No two-year-old can sit still through church.”
“Detective, we are not a church—”
“That much I got—” Joe said.
“So Brianna was crying during the satsang,” Gil said over Joe, trying to get her to continue.
“The Guru concluded that she had too much tamas.”
“I’m not sure what that means,” Gil said.
“A person who is tamasic has a force inside that is overwhelmed with shadows and resistance. It is the most negative of the three gunas, which refers to someone’s tendency. It is marked by destruction and darkness.”
“And you thought Brianna had this?”
“Yes.”
“Is there no cure?”
“We tried many remedies, but to no avail,” she said, still almost monotone. “We even held an eternal waters healing rite.”
“Yeah,” Joe snorted. “When the eternal waters healing rite fails, you are just screwed.”
Gil finally had enough. “Detective Phillips, you need to go outside.”
Joe stomped out.
“I’m sorry for that,” Gil said, trying to make his voice calm.
“I’ll say a prayer for him,” she said calmly.
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.”
Lucy was sitting outside on the curb next to Nathan’s car, when the tow truck with ALEX’S TOW written in red on the side pulled up. She got up and smoothed her hair.
A stocky man got out of the truck. His gray T-shirt was pulled tight over his chest and only partially tucked into his pants. The jeans were slick in places with oil and dirt. Like so many other Santa Fe men, he sported a small, thin mustache that followed the curve of his upper lip.
Lucy went over to shake his hand, saying, “Hi, I’m Tina. You must be Alex.”
“Nope,” the man said as he wiped his hand on his jeans before reaching out for hers and shaking it. “I’m Manny.”
Lucy smiled as her insides crumbled. She had assumed that Alex Stevens would be the driver. She never considered that he’d send someone else. Especially after she had been so charming and cute and happy and chirpy on the phone.
“Where’s Alex?” she asked, no longer trying to be cute or happy.
“His girlfriend is having a baby,” Manny said. “I’m just helping him out by driving his truck.”
It was a good excuse, but it didn’t make Lucy feel any less crushed. She had done so much research. She knew all of Alex Stevens’s information. She knew the names of his brothers and sisters. She knew what position he played on his high school football team. She knew the address of the house he grew up in as a kid. Damn.
Her plan had been to get Alex talking. She was going to pretend that she knew him. Hence the need for all the personal information. She was going to tell him things about his past that only someone you grew up with would know. He’d inevitably try to hide his ignorance by insisting that he did remember her from high school. As any old friend would, she would ask him about his life. The story about Brianna would come up. Then Lucy, in all her innocence, would say, “Hey, didn’t I see you at Zozobra on Thursday?” Then she would sit back and see what happened. He would have probably denied that he was there, but the man had killed Brianna. He would have had to be at Zozobra to watch the skull burn up in the fire. Or he put it in one of the public boxes. Either way, his face would tell her all she needed to know.
Now her little fantasy was over. Instead of getting the chance to feel smug and righteous as she exposed a killer, she would have to watch Manny and his greasy pants while he hooked up Nathan’s car.
“We did try to make it work,” Ms. Henshaw was saying. For the life of him, Gil couldn’t remember her new name. “I even bought Bibi this gorgeous handmade lace from Ireland to use as her turban, but she refused to wear it, or any turban for that matter.”
Gil thought of Joy and Therese at two years old. They had always refused to wear their sunhats, although Joy did become strangely attached to hers after she found out it worked better as a purse that she could fill with rocks and leaves. It always made Gil smile to think of Joy, barely able to walk, wandering around the house and the grocery store carrying her purse full of dirt.
“Do you know anything about Brianna’s, I mean, Bibi’s father?” he asked, wanting to get into the meat of the interview.
“Nothing,” she said.
“How were your interactions with Ashley?”
“There were none,” she said, pouring some tea for herself but not offering him any. “We never even talked on the phone. It was all handled by the lawyer and Judge Otero.”
“Judge Otero said he introduced you two.”
“I believe he meant that he introduced the idea to Ashley, and she contacted a lawyer,” she said. Gil found it interesting that she would so readily put words in Judge Otero’s mouth.
“How do you know Judge Otero?”
“We’ve been close friends for a while,” she said with a smile. “We share some common beliefs.” Gil found it hard to imagine that a local politician and this woman would ever even find themselves in the same room together.
“Do you think it’s a coincidence that Bibi disappeared just a month after you sent her back home?”
“No, it’s clear to me that she ran away.”
“Really?” Gil said, having a hard time not using the same tone that Joe had earlier. The more Gil talked to this woman, the happier he was that she never ended up adopting a child. She had no concept of children. A two-year-old could never form the intent it took to run away.
“Of course, it would not have been Bibi’s fault,” she said. “It would have been part of her tamas.”
“Do you know anyone here who has a particular interest in or dislike of the Catholic Church or the Virgin Mary?” Gil asked, not wanting to get back into the tamas discussion.
“No,” she said. “We stress the inclusivity of all faiths. Any talk against another religion would hurt God and therefore hurt ourselves. The path of all is the path of one.”
Gil seemed to have gotten all the answers he needed, so he stood up to leave, his legs creaking. He asked her if she had copies of the adoption papers, and she promised to e-mail them to him. The second such promise he’d gotten today. He thanked her and headed toward the stairs but stopped short.
He turned to ask one last question.
“Do you ever worry that you are creating a cult here?” he asked.
She smiled slightly, but it didn’t reach her eyes. Doubtless, she had heard the question before, although likely it had been phrased as an accusation. “All we are creating is a community,” came the automatic-sounding reply.
Lucy was sullen as Manny hooked up Nathan’s car. The large tow truck had a hard time maneuvering in the narrow street.
“This old part of town sure is tricky,” Manny said good-naturedly as he dropped the tow bar and eased it under the car. He latched a tie around the driver’s-side tire and got in the truck.
Lucy wavered. Her plan had been to say she needed to tag along with Alex Stevens on the pretense that when they dropped the car off, she would have to give Nathan his keys, which she still hadn’t found. That story was necessary just to get her into the confines of the tow truck with Alex Stevens and get him to answer questions. Now that was moot. She could just let Manny take the car over to the Cowgirl, and she wouldn’t have to get involved, but thinking of the Cowgirl made Lucy crave a beer. She decided to get into the cab. She was paying for Nathan’s car to get towed, after all; she might as well get a ride to a bar out of it. She told Manny she was coming along, and he shrugged.
She stepped up the side stairs to the truck’s cab and, using one of the hand hooks in the ceiling, hauled herself bodily inside, just like a little kid would, and got settled in her seat. Manny pulled away from her house, and Lucy surveyed the inside of the truck. The floor was covered in various papers, which were getting crushed under her feet. The center console had more papers, a stun gun, a crowbar, and several wire hangers.
“Where to?” he asked.
“The Cowgirl,” she said. “It’s where he works.”
“I hope you don’t mind if I smoke,” Manny said as he lit up a cigarette. She wondered how he could hold the slender cigarette tightly while wearing heavy work gloves. He looked to be in his late twenties, probably about the same age as Lucy.
“So have you been a tow truck driver for long?” she asked, trying to be friendly.
“About ten years,” he said, exhaling smoke. “I started when I was eighteen.”
“Have you always worked for Alex?” she asked, starting to warm up to the conversation. She could at least pump him for information about Stevens.
“Nah,” he said. “I only help him out sometimes, like when we have a really tough repo or like now when he’s gotta be over at St. Vincent’s.”
“What do you do when you’re not working for him?” Lucy said, only intending to make small talk about Manny himself before she started in on the questions about his boss.
“I work for a couple other companies in town, you know, just when they need me,” he said. The tow truck jostled over a pothole, and Nathan’s car behind them jumped. “So what do you do?” he asked, smiling. Clearly, her makeup and push-up bra were still doing their work, not realizing that Alex the big fish had gotten away.
“Oh, I’m an editor,” she said, not bothering with her cover ID.
“Huh,” he said. She could tell by his response that he didn’t know what an editor did.
So she said, “I work at the newspaper, and I just read over stories that the reporters write.”
“That sounds interesting,” Manny said, taking another puff.
“I used to be a reporter, though,” she added lamely, as if that were the more respectable of the two jobs.
They sat in silence for a moment. Something suddenly occurred to Lucy and she said, “Do you ever work for Ultimate Towing?”
“Yeah,” he said. “All the time.”
“Really,” she said, smiling at him. “I think you might know one of my friends. Her name is Gladys. She lives over on Airport Road at Hacienda Linda.”
Manny sat still. He didn’t seem to notice when a clump of cigarette ash fell onto his leg.
Gil walked back to the car. Joe sat in the front seat, texting on his phone. Gil got in and headed back toward the gate, where Gil returned the rifle to the woman in the guard shack. He drove out onto the main road before he said, “Joe, I’m not sure what to do with you sometimes. Your temper is getting to be a problem.”
For a few seconds Joe said nothing, then, looking out the passenger window, he said, “They dumped Brianna because she cried.”
Gil didn’t answer him.
Joe shifted in his seat to look at Gil. “You know, after Brianna went missing, I was trying to think of all kinds of stuff I could do to help. Like I would go out on my days off and walk the arroyo. Or I’d bring the guys watching the house coffee or whatever. Stuff like that. So this one night I looked up stuff about preemie babies, ’cause, you know, Brianna was a preemie. I was thinking, like, maybe if someone was, like, holding her and we could say she was a preemie with special needs . . . whatever. Anyway, I was reading these chats from all these moms who were just at their wits’ ends because their preemie babies cried like all the time. It’s this really common thing.”
“So you’re thinking maybe Donna Henshaw was right about Brianna crying all the time?”
“No, what I’m saying is if that bitch had spent ten minutes on the Internet and saw that preemies outgrow that stuff, that she might not have sent Brianna back to her house to get killed.”
They didn’t say another word until they reached the station.
Manny said nothing. So Lucy waited. She thought it was a good sign that he didn’t deny knowing Gladys. That meant that he was probably part of the scheme to rip off the immigrants.
She waited a little longer before saying, “Her little boy is just so cute. It must be hard for her to come here to a foreign country and start over. And you know why she did? So her kid would have a better life. You know, I don’t think my mom would have done that for me.” She silently sent an “I’m sorry” to her mom. “Would your mom have done that for you?”
They pulled up in front of the Cowgirl. It was late in the afternoon on Saturday, so the patio was full of people eating dinner and having a few beers. Lucy was worried that she had waited too long to say anything to Manny. Or that she had used the wrong approach. She had to keep the conversation casual, though. She couldn’t let him know the newspaper was investigating. He might tip off the other players. All he had right now was Lucy seemingly asking about her “friend.” Nothing more.
He got out of the cab without saying anything as he dropped the car slowly down to the ground. He unlashed the tire and put the tow cables back under the truck. The whole time, Lucy stood nearby. She tried to radiate friendliness and understanding so he might open up. He was climbing back into the cab when Lucy said, “How much do I owe you?” He stopped, half hanging out the door, looking at the floor of the cab. Lucy put her hand on his arm. “Let me buy you a beer,” she said. He surprised her by nodding.
They sat away from the bar at a small table. She saw Nathan at the bar chatting up a blond girl. Tonight he was wearing black jeans with a black T-shirt and a different pair of combat boots but the same spiked collar.
Across the table from her, Manny took off his gloves. His hands were callused and cut. It was probably an occupational hazard when you worked with metal and steel and horsepower.
“So tell me about your work” was all that Lucy said. The first rule of journalism was to start with open-ended questions. Nothing yes or no.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Usually . . . it’s fine.”
“And what about it isn’t fine?” she said, her voice going up at the end of the sentence to make it a question. The waitress came by, and Lucy ordered two Coronas.
“Just some stuff,” he said, staring at the table.
Lucy sat back and looked at him. He wanted to confess. He wanted to tell her about how he was preying on people. She just needed a way to tell him it was okay without actually saying anything. She needed him to trust her.
“Are you married?” she asked.
“I was, but she cheated on me,” he said. Lucy quickly saw the minefield there and took another path.
“Do you have any kids?” she asked, hoping the question wouldn’t blow up in her face.
“Yeah, two,” he said, still downcast.
“Really?” she said with lots of enthusiasm. She would have to carry all the emotion of the conversation until he took up his part. “How old are they?”
“One is five and the other is seven months,” he said, ever so slightly showing signs of coming back to life.
“Those are such great ages. Are they boys or girls?”
“I got one of both,” he said, almost expressing some interest in the conversation.
“That is fabulous. Do you have pictures?”
He reached into his back pocket and took out a leather wallet slick with grease. He pulled out two pictures, both showing the same tiny girl, who looked about ready to start kindergarten, and a little smiling baby.
“They are beautiful,” Lucy said, looking up at him. He nodded slightly. “He has your eyes.”
Manny smiled a little and asked, “You think so?”
“Absolutely,” she said as their cold beers arrived.
They were out of the conversational woods and headed into more open territory. All she needed to do was ask a few more questions about his family. Maybe a couple about his mom and where he went to high school. Then, maybe, if the time was right, she would ask him again about Gladys.