The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter TWENTY-ONE

Saturday Night

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Gil stood by himself in front of the whiteboard in the conference room. On it, he had started to write a timeline of Brianna’s adoption. So far, all he had written was Brianna’s birth date—May 5—and the day she disappeared, July 18, two years later. His goal this morning had been to find Brianna’s father so he could prove the blood on David Geisler’s samurai sword belonged to the little girl. Now it was almost 6:00 P.M., and he was no closer to figuring out who her dad was.
He had called Dr. Santiago on the way back to the station to check if Ashley had delivered the baby. He left a message for the doctor, who called him right back, saying, “I am sorry, but you won’t be able to talk to Ashley until after she delivers. She can’t even form a sentence right now . . .” Dr. Santiago didn’t finish the statement. Instead, she said, “Look, I can’t give you any additional patient information, except to say that that Ashley is completely effaced. She should be delivering soon.”
He had to talk to Ashley. It could not be put off any longer. He thought about interviewing her over the phone, between contractions, but whereas that might have been possible yesterday, today they simply had too many blanks for her to fill in. Plus, how do you ask a woman who is giving birth to identify the father of her first baby, a baby who is now dead? There was no proper etiquette for that conversation. Besides, if Ashley was anything like Susan, all she was doing between contractions was praying for them to stop.
Next Gil called another department in the hospital to get an update on David Geisler. The nurse on duty told Gil that Geisler was safely in his room, but he wouldn’t get a mental evaluation until tomorrow.
Officer Kristen Valdez, dressed in street clothes, popped her head in the door and said, “Hi, Gil. I just got off shift and wanted to see if you needed some help.”
“Thanks, Kristen,” Gil said. “Actually, I do need something that is fairly simple. That way you can get out of here and still make it down to fiesta.” He asked her to put together a folder of anything she could find out about Donna Henshaw and the Golden Mountain Ashram. She took a few notes as he talked, then went back out to the main room to work.
That left Gil to stare at the timeline on the whiteboard. He was wondering about the exact date Donna Henshaw had adopted Brianna when Joe came in saying, “Dude, I wanted you to be the first to know. My new spiritual name is Mr. Ram Inder Singh.”
“You went to their Web site and paid to get a name?” Gil asked.
“Hell, yeah. This shit is too funny to pass up. I got you a new name, too.”
“Really?” Gil said.
“Yep. You are now Mr. Baba Singh, which, in case you can’t tell, is a dork name. I have the cool name—I’m Ram.”
“How much did all of this cost you?”
“Twenty-five bucks each.”
“You spent fifty dollars to get us new names because it was funny?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“You clearly don’t have any wife or kids to support.”
“That’s exactly why I’m never getting married again. It takes all the fun out of life, doesn’t it, Mr. Baba Singh?”
Gil ignored him and looked back at the whiteboard, trying to fill in information on the timeline.
“Hey, Joe—” Gil said.
“Hey, who? You talking to me?”
“Okay, Ram. Do you remember how old Brianna was when Donna Henshaw adopted her?”
“She was twenty months old,” Joe said, “and twenty-five months when she went back to her mom. Then later she disappeared at twenty-six months on July 18.” Gil added all that information to the timeline.
“I don’t know about you,” Joe said, “but I’ve got even odds that Donna Henshaw or one of the women from the Vigilante Vagina League up there in the mountains has something to do with this.”
Gil, intent on the timeline, ignored Joe, instead thinking he should include the date Ashley met Judge Otero, who was in essence her adoption broker.
“Hey, Ram, do you have the court dates for Ashley’s speeding ticket?” Gil asked.
Joe pushed a few papers around on the table. “Okay, here it is. It looks like the first one was September third.”
“Her first one?” Gil asked. “How many times did she appear in Judge Otero’s court?”
“Umm . . . it looks like four times.”
“I thought Judge Otero said he only met her once,” Gil said. “Do you have your notes from his interview?”
“Hang on a second,” Joe said as he fumbled for his notebook, then read, “ ‘I did feel a little fatherly toward the girl the one time I met her. She came in my courtroom and told me she was three months pregnant.’ ” Joe added, “I guess the judge meant to say ‘one of the times I met her.’ ”
“Maybe,” Gil said, putting the dry-erase marker down. “Or maybe Judge Otero meant to lie to us.”
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Lucy would never have guessed that Manny was a lightweight. They were only three beers into the night, and he was already sloshing drunk, telling her everything she wanted to know. Lucy, on the other hand, who had been matching him drink for drink, wasn’t even buzzed. Maybe she had discovered her superpower: drinking men under the table.
She had already gotten the names of the ringleaders out of Manny, as well as how much money they were taking in. After beer two, she had started to write everything down since Manny was beyond caring, and she checked to make sure the tape player was still recording, just in case.
“You know the worst part,” Manny was saying, “these are my people. My grandparents came here from Mexico in the 1950s. I’m taking advantage of my own people.”
Lucy didn’t even need to ask prodding questions anymore. He just kept talking. At one point, while Manny was cursing out his bosses, Nathan came over; he had finally noticed her from the bar. He had the decency to look ashamed.
“Hey” was all he said as he stood by the table with a white bar apron tied around his waist.
“Hello,” Lucy said. “Your car is out front. I had it towed here.”
“You are the best,” he said soberly. Sincerely.
“Thanks. So I’ll see you later,” she said, turning back toward Manny, who was still swearing about his boss.
“Can I, you know, buy you a drink?” Nathan said. Lucy wanted to turn him down. It would have been best for everyone. Then again, it was a free drink, and he did owe her.
“You could get me another beer,” she said. He smiled like a hound dog and went back toward the bar.
“Me, too,” Manny yelled after him.
Lucy looked at the time on her cell phone. It was 6:13 P.M. They had been sitting here for almost two hours. She wondered how much more information Manny had to offer. What he had already told her had been great but limited, since he was nothing more than an underling, not a key player. He admitted towing two of the cars from the apartment complex to the tow yard, but he hadn’t asked any of the tenants for money and didn’t even know that the cars of those who wouldn’t pay had been burned.
She really just wanted to leave, but she would need to get Manny home safely.
She heard a cell phone ring nearby. It was a fast hip-hop song. It wasn’t hers.
“Manny,” she said to him, nudging his elbow. “That’s your phone.”
“Oh man,” he said, looking at the caller ID. “It’s Alex. He’s probably calling to see what his cut of the tow was, that chingada madre.” Manny didn’t answer it and turned off the ringer.
“I thought he was your buddy.”
“Yeah, right,” Manny said. “He’s nothing but a liar.”
“Why do you say that?” Lucy asked. Suddenly something occurred to her. “You mean that Alex Stevens is mixed up in the immigrant thing?”
“Him? No,” Manny said, scoffing. “He’s worse.”
“Really?” Lucy asked, leaning in closer. She had almost given up hope of pinning something on Stevens.
“Yeah, we do all these repos together that are five hundred dollars each, and he never pays up,” he said, shaking his head.
Lucy leaned back, disappointed. “Is that all?”
“What do you mean, ‘Is that all?’ He owes me almost a thousand dollars. Plus, he’s always bragging that he owns the tow truck and I’m just his driver, but I’m going to get my own truck some day. I just have to save up . . .”
“Then why are you still working for him?” she asked, back to wondering if it was possible for Nathan to take any longer with her beer.
“I don’t know,” Manny said. He turned his head slowly toward his phone and said, “I’m going to call him and tell him I quit.”
“That’s a great idea,” Lucy said, mostly out of annoyance at Alex Stevens. She knew encouraging one of his employees to quit was a petty way to get back at him, but then that was who she was.
Ashley Rodriguez wondered why someone had put a copy of that day’s Capital Tribune in her room. Maybe a nurse thought she would want to read about the bones found in Zozobra. The bones that might be her daughter.
The doctors had told Ashley that Brianna might have developmental problems because she was a preemie, but she had been perfect for the first four months. They had been happy then. Brianna was all smiles.
Then one day she stopped eating and started crying, screaming and gagging. It wasn’t just once in a while, either. It was every day. For hours and hours.
Her parents didn’t help much. Her mother called Brianna spoiled and would ignore her when she cried. Her father would jostle Brianna too roughly. Ashley would have to make up little excuses to get Brianna away from him, especially when he was drunk.
Her father reminded her of Judge Otero, whom she had met just before she found out she was pregnant with Brianna. He had helped her with a speeding ticket. He hadn’t asked for much in return.
A few weeks later, she was in his court again, on another speeding ticket. By then, she was pregnant and Tony was in jail. She was only seventeen, had no job, and had just dropped out of high school. She broke down in tears as she told the judge. He had a clerk show her back to his office after the session. He sat behind his big wooden desk and gave her a way out that she had never considered—adoption. He even gave her the name of someone who wanted to adopt. She recognized it. It was the name of someone famous. It was something she couldn’t consider, though. She still thought that Tony would get out of jail and that they would live together in a trailer on his parents’ property. One big happy family. Still, she kept the phone number tucked away in a drawer, just in case.
Of course, by the time Brianna was born, she knew Tony would never get out. She found herself in the middle of the night trying to soothe Brianna, wondering what it would be like to be free and childless again. She had thought that as Brianna got older, things would get easier, but they didn’t. When Ashley started feeding her baby cereal, Brianna choked her way through the first few bites, then threw the rest. Ashley, in tears, would plead with her baby to eat, but Brianna wouldn’t, and she would only sleep two or three hours at a time. Ashley took Brianna to the doctor, who said that there was nothing wrong. He told Ashley that she just needed to be more patient. Ashley tried.
One night, though, when Brianna was nine months old and lay screaming on Ashley’s bed, all Ashley could do was to yell “Shut up” over and over. She knew her parents wouldn’t wake up. They never did. Ashley threw her clothes around her room and smashed a ceramic bear. Brianna kept crying. Ashley grabbed a pillow and pushed it down hard on her daughter’s face. She only held it there for a moment, but after realizing what she had almost done, she grabbed her daughter and held her tight. Ashley swore she’d try harder.
By the time Brianna turned a year old, her father was getting more insistent. More needy. He called Brianna his little angel and kissed her constantly, even though his scruffy beard scratched her soft baby skin. For her first birthday, he bought Brianna some Bonne Bell lip gloss, “to make her look sexy,” he said.
That was when Ashley called the phone number Judge Otero had given her. It took a few more months, but suddenly Brianna was gone. Ashley had her life back.
And her daughter was safe.
Lucy was helping Manny get out of his chair, so they could leave, when Nathan came over to them.
“So, are you taking off?” he asked solemnly.
“Yeah, we got places to go, people to see,” she said, trying to brush past him.
“Here’s the thing,” Nathan said slowly. “I can’t let you drive. I’ve seen you drink four beers.”
“I’m not driving,” she said. “Manny here is.” He swayed slightly at the mention of his name. She realized just how ridiculous that sounded as she looked at Manny in his drunken stupor. She clearly hadn’t thought this through.
“Okay, I see your point. I guess we need to call a cab,” she said.
“Well, if you want to wait, I’ll get off in fifteen minutes,” he said. “I can take you both home.”
Lucy sighed. She sat Manny back down in his chair as she retook her own.
Twenty-five minutes later, Nathan appeared, sans apron, and the trio of them walked outside to his car.
“So, can I get my car keys?” Nathan asked, looking at Lucy expectantly as Manny leaned against the car for support.
“I don’t have them,” she said, confused. “I never found them. I thought you’d have your extra set with you.”
“Why would I carry around my spare keys when my car was at your house?” Nathan said.
“All right, fine. Whatever,” she said, getting annoyed. Nothing with Nathan was simple. “We’ll just get a cab, unless you can drive a tow truck.”
“Yeah, of course I can,” Nathan said. “I worked one summer as a heavy equipment operator for the Forest Service, remember?”
Nathan got the keys from Manny and opened the truck up. Lucy climbed into the passenger seat and started clearing out the papers and other junk so all three of them could sit in the cab. She threw the stun gun, crowbar, and wire hangers on the floor, but her OCD took over when it came to the mess of papers, which looked to be mostly invoices and other towing-related documents. She gathered them up into a bundle and then straightened them into a neat pile, which she held on her lap as she sat in the middle of the seat. Nathan helped Manny into the passenger side, then got into the driver’s seat, saying, “Where are we going?”
“Well,” Lucy said, “I guess we’ll take Manny home, and then you can drop me off at my house—”
“We can’t do that,” Manny said. “Alex will kill me if I let someone else drive his truck when I’m not there.”
“How about we go to my house and get my car keys,” Nathan said. “Then we can come back to get my car, leave the tow truck here, and then I can drop you both off at home.”
“This is making my head hurt,” Lucy said. “I guess that’s the best plan. Then Manny will have to get a ride tomorrow to pick up the tow truck.”
That settled, they pulled away from the bar. Manny fell asleep during the ten-minute drive, while all Nathan wanted to do was make small talk. She tried to keep her answers to one or two words until they pulled up in front of a house that seemed slightly run-down, although it was hard for Lucy to make anything out in the darkness without the punctuation of streetlights.
“I’m not really sure where my extra set of car keys is,” Nathan said, as he started to get out. “This might take a minute.”
Lucy sighed as she watched Nathan go into his house. She looked over at Manny, who was happily passed out leaning against the glass of the passenger-side window. She switched on the overhead light and dug around in her purse for her cell phone, to see if she had any messages. No one had called. Bored, she started to look over the stack of papers in her lap. Most of them were invoices and other records for work Alex Stevens had done with banks, which were trying to recoup their losses on defaulted loans by repossessing their cars.
She flipped through the records and realized some went back two or three years. Did Alex never clean out his truck? She started looking at the pages, thinking maybe she’d find something devious, like some evidence of fraud against one of the banks. As she searched, she checked the dates closely. She found some from last year and a few from the month of July. The month Brianna went missing. That made her stop. Maybe the papers might reveal some suspicious behavior patterns in the days after Brianna disappeared. Maybe they would show that Alex was back at work the next day, making him seem nonchalant about the lost little girl.
She didn’t expect to find what she did.
A paper from New Mexico Savings Bank confirming the delivery of a Chevy Tahoe to Socorro on July 18 at 1:43 P.M. The day Brianna disappeared.
Lucy’s brain worked as fast as it could under the influence of four beers. Socorro, in the southern part of New Mexico, was at least two hours away. If Alex Stevens was in Socorro at 1:43 P.M., he would have had to leave Santa Fe at noon and would have arrived back at 4:00 P.M. Lucy tried to remember what time of day Brianna went missing, but it wouldn’t come to her. She slid out of the truck through the driver’s door, still holding the document. She went up to Nathan’s house, his dark yard now haphazardly illuminated by the chunky pieces of light that came through the large front windows. She walked in without knocking and quickly took in the shabby furniture before yelling to him, “Hey, do you have today’s newspaper?”
“No,” he said, coming into the living room, “but go check the neighbors’ recycling bin on their porch. I just steal it from there.”
She went back outside without asking him how his search for the keys was going, then realized he hadn’t told her which neighbor to steal from. She surveyed the nearest houses as best she could using just the light thrown from Nathan’s house, looking for one with a porch. The next-door neighbor had a small porch with the dark lump of what could have been a couch on it. She went back to the tow truck, grabbed her purse off the seat, and fished out her flashlight. She glanced over at Manny, who was still sleeping, then closed the driver’s-side door quietly. She switched on her flashlight and crept up to the neighbor’s porch. On it was a green recycling bin. She pushed past a few empty cans of cat food and pulled out that day’s Capital Tribune. She scanned the front page quickly by the light of her flashlight. She knew Tommy had mentioned in his story what time of day Brianna disappeared. She opened the newspaper to the jump page. There in black and white it said, “It was 2:00 P.M. when the family said they first noticed Brianna was missing.” Lucy felt a surge of vindication. She said, “Gotcha,” to no one.
The light from Nathan’s house flashed off, and the street was in the dark once more. She tucked the newspaper under her arm, along with the bank document, as Nathan came out of the house. Turning off her flashlight, she made her way over to him in the dark.
“We’re going to the police station,” she said to him as they met at the truck door.
Gil was still in front of his computer, looking over the adoption paperwork he’d gotten from Donna Henshaw, when three people walked in the side door with a patrol officer, who said, “I met these guys in the parking lot looking for you.”
The tallest one, an Anglo man, had on a spiked collar and was dressed in black; the only skin visible that was not covered in tattoos was his face. A smaller man who was darker and looked Latino had a mustache and was wearing a dirty gray T-shirt and jeans. It was Lucy who stood out. She sparkled in a sequined top and tight jeans. Her hair and face were done up as Gil had never seen them.
“Hey, Montoya,” Lucy said, coming over to his desk. “This is Manny. He sometimes works for Alex Stevens as a tow truck driver. I got a ride with him tonight and found this in Alex’s truck.” She slapped a piece of paper down on the desk in front of Gil. “This is solid proof that Alex Stevens is a liar. Now, as a bonus prize, Manny here will tell you all about another crime involving Ultimate Towing. Just give him a ride home when you’re done.”
With an angry look at Gil, she started to walk out, but turned back to them and said, “Oh, and one more thing . . . I f*cking told you so.” She smiled smugly and left with the man in the studs following her, while Manny stared fearfully at Gil and Joe.