The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter TWENTY-TWO

Sunday Morning

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Gil, his shirtsleeves rolled up, was at his desk early. He had already checked in with everyone. Ashley was still in labor. David Geisler still hadn’t had his medical evaluation. Liz and Adam had no new information. Liz asked, “When are you going to give me DNA from Brianna’s dad?” Gil had no answer for her. He then called his mom, who immediately started talking about Aunt Yolanda’s party yesterday.
He had stayed at the office until 11:00 P.M. last night interviewing Manny, whose full name was Manny Luis Reyes. It had taken a while for Manny to open up, mainly because it appeared that Lucy hadn’t asked him if he wanted to talk to the police. Instead, she had technically kidnapped him and brought him to the station. He finally got Manny to talk about Ultimate Towing, but quickly realized it was a case for the major crimes division. Gil turned the investigation and Manny over to the detective in charge of that unit.
Gil had called Alex Stevens last night, politely asking him to come to the station, without telling him what it was about. At first, Stevens protested, saying that Ashley was still in labor, but Gil insisted. Finally, Stevens said he would meet them at the office at 8:45 A.M. the next morning. Not that night. Gil relented. Stevens would be easier to interview if he came in on his own terms.
Gil was using the last few minutes before Stevens arrived to take a look over the paper in his hand. It was the one Lucy had slammed down on his desk. He had a call in to the New Mexico Savings Bank to see if they had any more information about the situation surrounding the car Stevens had repossessed. Gil had already talked to the car’s former owner, waking him up. The man confirmed that a tow truck driver who matched Alex Stevens’s general description had been at his house about noon on July 18 of last year and taken his Chevy Tahoe.
Now they were just waiting for Stevens. Joe sat across from Gil, texting away on his phone.
Gil pulled down his shirtsleeves and put his suit jacket back on. He took a bolo tie out of his desk drawer. It had been his father’s tie and was made of a large piece of turquoise and some coral set in silver. In New Mexico, a bolo tie was considered as formal as a necktie; it was even the state’s official neckwear.
Joe, who had been watching Gil, said, “What’s the deal?”
“We have to get ready for the interrogation,” Gil said, taking his paddle holster off and putting it in his desk drawer.
“Wait, you said, ‘We have to get ready.’ That implies that we’re both doing the interrogation. Not just that you’re doing the interrogation.”
“That’s right,” Gil said.
Joe nodded to himself, looking pleased. “You think if you look all professional this guy is going to be more convinced to talk? Is that what all your books tell you?”
“Pretty much.”
“Cool.” Joe stood up, tucked his T-shirt into his pants, and locked his gun in his desk drawer. “I guess I need to start leaving a tie and dress shirt here, huh? This T-shirt just makes me look like your schlubby sidekick.”
Gil ignored the comment and asked, “So what should we think about before we get started with the interrogation?”
“That we are cool as shit?”
“Besides that,” Gil said. “Remember to always look for the good qualities in the person. Everyone has something decent in them.”
“So you find that decent thing and then exploit it?”
“Pretty much.”
“Anything to get a confession, huh, Gil?”
“Almost anything,” Gil said, thinking back to his interrogation of Rudy Rodriguez. The decent thing he had exploited in Rodriguez was his love of Ashley, even though it was love that was twisted beyond recognition. He sighed and then tried to get his head back into teaching mode. He wanted Joe to be able to get some experience out of all this mess. “So what should we take into account before we go in there?”
“The guy’s got no real experience with the system, which gives us a much better chance.”
“Why?” Gil asked.
“Because he won’t know our games,” Joe said. “He won’t know what to expect. If he’s had a lot of priors and been interrogated about other crimes, he’d know exactly what to say and not say.”
“Exactly,” Gil said.
“However, I do want to point out that Fisher interviewed the guy a dozen times,” Joe said.
“That could definitely impact this interrogation,” Gil said. “Do you have a baseline on him? I’ve only met him twice, and I wasn’t really concentrating on gauging his responses.” Gil kicked himself for that now. Maybe if he had been paying more attention yesterday during Alex Stevens’s ID of David Geisler, he might have caught something. Getting a baseline was really one of the fundamental rules of interrogation. The idea was to just talk to suspects about inconsequential things and see how they respond. Judge their eye movements and posture. Then, when you are interrogating them later and they deviate from their baseline, you know that you just asked a question that was not inconsequential to them.
Joe thought for a second before shaking his head. “Nah. Fisher handled all that kind of stuff the first time around. Plus, I wasn’t thinking like a detective back then.”
“Okay,” Gil said. “So we need to get a baseline. How should we go about doing that?” He was purposely asking straightforward questions to get Joe’s head into the right mindset. Make him think like an interrogator.
“Umm . . . I could take in an interview form and just ask him basic questions like his name and address and see how he responds,” Joe said.
Gil smiled. “That is exactly why the interview form was created. Just to make it easy for the interrogator to get the baseline.” The side door to the station opened, and Alex Stevens was escorted in by an officer.
“So, Joe,” Gil said quietly, “grab the interrogation form, and why don’t you get started? I’ll watch from the other side of the mirror and then come in when it’s time to move to the next part.”
Joe smiled but looked nervous. “Let’s rock and roll.”
A blast of noise from the pager woke Lucy up from a dead sleep for the second time in three days, but this time she was alone in bed, having had the good sense to let Nathan only drop her off and not sex her up.
She listened to the dispatcher call out an MVA with injuries on the interstate as she jumped out of bed. She ran naked around the room trying to find some clothes. She found two socks that actually were crunchy with foot sweat and no underwear. She suddenly remembered the laundry she had done in the dishwasher. She ran to the kitchen and opened the dishwasher door. She was greeted by the smell of mold. Or maybe it was mildew. Or maybe she didn’t care, because she was naked and didn’t have any underwear or socks. She ran back to her room and pulled on her work pants, minus underwear, and then pulled on her work boots, minus socks. The only underwear she did have was a bra, which, truth be told, didn’t have all that much work to do. She pulled on her EMS T-shirt, grabbed her handheld radio, and ran out the door. She was in her car and down the street before she realized she hadn’t done the Breathalyzer test. She’d had just the four beers with Manny, so that should put her blood alcohol level around .02. She hoped.
She and Nathan had left the tow truck in front of the Cowgirl, and then Nathan had taken her home in his car, which, she noted, actually did have gas in it. More than half a tank, in fact. That had made it quite easy to turn down his advances the night before, since he had clearly lied.
Gerald was already in the ambulance as usual when she arrived and jumped in. They didn’t say much as he drove, instead listening to the sheriff’s deputies on the radio who called in as they arrived on the scene. All of a sudden, she heard one of them yell into the radio, “Expedite, expedite, EMS, expedite,” basically a mayday. Gerald hit the gas, the sirens, and the lights in one motion, and Lucy called in on the radio. “Santa Fe, this is Pi?on Rescue One, we are expediting. I repeat, we are expediting.”
She looked over at the speedometer as Gerald nosed the heavy ambulance past 80 mph. They were on a straight open street with little traffic. An “expedite” call was bad. It meant that everything was going to hell in a handbasket.
Lucy braced herself as Gerald turned onto the interstate on-ramp and gunned it up the hill. On the radio, several deputies at once started calling out mile marker numbers to identify their location. Lucy tried to make sense of what they were saying. They kept talking on top of each other until the Santa Fe dispatcher said firmly, “This is Dispatch to all units. Clear the channel. I repeat, clear the channel.” There was silence for a moment until Dispatch said, “Pi?on Rescue One, what is your ETA to scene?” She heard Gerald next to her mumble a swear word, something she had never heard him do before. He did so now out of frustration. He could not get the ambulance to go any faster, and whoever was on scene needed medical help. Now. The deputies would not be freaking out unless they were desperate.
Lucy checked the map book and made a guesstimate. “Santa Fe, this is Pi?on Rescue One, ETA is approximately five minutes.” The dispatcher responded, “Copy that, Rescue One. All units, traffic can resume on this channel.” Gerald topped the speedometer out at 95 mph as the ambulance flew down the interstate. There was little traffic out this morning, so there were fewer drivers to frighten as a huge ambulance came hurtling toward them. Finally, in the distance, Lucy could see the strobing lights of the sheriff’s cars. She picked up the radio and said into the mike, “Santa Fe, Pi?on Rescue One on scene.”
Now for the horror, she thought.
While Gil waited for Joe and Stevens to get situated in the interview room, he picked up a file folder on his desk and started to flip through it. It was all the information Kristen Valdez could find on Donna Henshaw, the Golden Mountain Ashram, and Guru Sanjam Dev, from property records to background checks. It turned out that the exalted guru, who was Anglo, had had a run-in with the law when he was in India. He was accused of defrauding female believers by charging them hundreds of dollars for an audience. Gil only had time to read a few pages of the file before he had to go observe the beginning of the interview.
He went into the room with the two-way mirror, which was kept darker than the room on the other side. He sat at the table and took notes while Joe asked his baseline questions. Alex Stevens seemed fairly relaxed but tired. Gil wondered how much sleep he’d had in the last few days. Gil remembered when Susan was in labor, he didn’t sleep at all. Stevens’s tiredness might work in their favor. It would be harder for him to mask his reactions.
Joe was finishing up, so Gil grabbed some blank paper and a pen, put the paper in the manila file folder with Stevens’s name written on it, and went to the interview room. He knocked before he entered, to give Joe the ability to say “Come in,” thus cementing his authority. Joe would need all the help he could get in that department since he was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.
Gil went in, but instead of sitting down he kept standing and said, “Alex, do you know why you are here today?”
“Umm . . .” Stevens said, “I guess to talk about the guy you arrested?”
What Gil said next was basically the same introductory statement he’d made to Rudy Rodriguez the day before. “It’s recently come to our attention that we have been misled regarding some things about the day Brianna disappeared. I can guarantee you, Alex, that our investigation will uncover the truth. In light of that, if you know anything about it, you should tell me now.”
Stevens went suddenly pale. Which made Gil glad. It meant this interview might be easy.
Gil picked up his metal chair and positioned it exactly four feet in front of Stevens. Joe, who was watching Gil intently, did the same, putting his chair next to Gil. There was no table in the room and therefore no intervening furniture to make it easier for Stevens to feel protected. That was the point.
Gil sat down purposefully and leaned forward in his chair, saying, “Alex, I know you lied to us.”
“I only did it to protect my family,” Stevens said defensively.
“Sure,” Joe said, jumping in smoothly for a change. “I get that. I would have done the same thing.”
“It’s not like I did anything wrong,” Stevens said. “I only did what I had to.”
“I totally get that,” Joe said, almost in a murmur.
“Besides, that guy really needs to be locked up,” Stevens said.
“I completely agree,” Joe said.
“I mean,” said Stevens. “You guys said he was crazy.”
Alex Stevens was admitting not to being in Socorro when Brianna disappeared but to lying about David Geisler. Gil decided to jump in. There was a series of questions that had to be asked now, and Joe might not be able to pull them off.
“He is,” Gil said, continuing to agree with Stevens. “He’s in the hospital right now being evaluated. One thing you can help us with is just telling us what you know about David Geisler.”
“Who?” Stevens asked. Gil felt Joe take in a short breath. This was why Gil had jumped in. Why Joe couldn’t do this part of the interview. His anger might get the best of him, especially when faced with a subject who didn’t even know the name of the man he almost sent to prison.
“David Geisler is the man you saw in here yesterday,” Gil said with a knowing smile. He was almost relieved to be doing this interrogation. It was so clean. So simple. It brought him back to what he loved about the process—the control, the rules, and the self-discipline. Maybe it would banish from his mind the role he had played yesterday with Rodriguez.
“Oh,” Stevens said. “The crazy guy.”
Gil smiled. “Right. So how well do you know him?”
“I’ve never met him, just seen him walking around a few times,” Stevens said matter-of-factly, not even showing the least bit of remorse for what he had done.
“And you’d never seen him with Brianna?” Gil asked gently.
“No,” Stevens said, “but when I saw him in here yesterday, I knew he was crazy and that he might hurt other kids, so I did what was right.”
“What makes you think he’s hurt any kids?” Gil asked, trying to sound relaxed.
“Oh, I just assumed,” Stevens said. “I mean, the guy is seriously off. He needs to be locked up.”
Gil could have asked so many other questions, such as why Stevens would derail the investigation so completely or who he was trying to protect by identifying an innocent man. To ask those questions, though, Gil would have to pull out evidence of Stevens’s other lie. He wasn’t ready to do that. Yet.
The woman lay on the pavement of the interstate like a wrung-out rag. The force of the impact had twisted her torso and her lower body in opposite directions. The car that had crashed into her must have impacted at her femur, turning her body to the right. Then she hit the pavement as the car made its long, agonizing attempt to stop, turning her body to the left.
Lucy had no idea why the woman was walking in the middle of the interstate. Was she trying to cross it? Had she simply been walking along the side of the road and the driver didn’t see her?
It really didn’t matter. What mattered was that the woman wasn’t dead. She was as good as dead, but not dead yet. Likely she had no idea of what was going on around her. Lucy went and knelt down next to her anyway, touching her shoulder in the only place that wasn’t broken. Gerald started his physical assessment, but they both knew it was useless. People often think that when medics see an obviously dying patient, they will make every heroic effort to save her, that EMS workers will cut open the patient’s chest and clamp the aorta as she lies in the middle of the street—but that is fiction. In reality, when a woman has been struck full on by a car going 75 mph on the interstate, the laws of physics and rules of medicine are clear—she will die. Even if she is still breathing when the medics get on scene, protocol dictates that they do not start CPR. Because it will not work. They are required to do nothing. Lucy, though, was unaccustomed to doing nothing. So she put her hand more firmly on the woman’s shoulder as her breathing slowed to silence.
Because it was better than nothing.
“So we have another problem that we were hoping you could help us with,” Gil said to Stevens. “It’s about what happened the day Brianna disappeared.”
Stevens looked nervous. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” Joe said, jumping in, “we just wanted you to go through the events of the day one more time. Just to walk us through it.”
“Sure,” Stevens said. “So Ashley and I got up about nine o’clock that morning, and Brianna woke up a little bit later. Ashley changed Brianna’s diaper while I went to the store to get stuff for the cookout . . .”
Gil’s job at the moment was to judge Stevens’s level of detail. Usually the amount of specificity someone gives about a scenario says a lot. The more detail, the more likely the story is true. However, Stevens—like the rest of the family—had already been interviewed multiple times. He would have repeated over and over the day’s events. He would have said numerous times that he and Ashley got up by 9:00 A.M. Even if that was initially a lie, it was now one that he had told so many times that his emotions and body language had become used to it. His face would no longer provide the telltale signs that it was a false statement, and the baseline that Joe had so carefully noted would be useless. So, Gil planned to ask Stevens questions about that day he’d never been asked before. If Stevens did tell a lie, it would be a new one that the baseline would accurately define.
“What did you buy?” Gil asked.
“I got buns for the burgers, meat, and then some beer. Oh, and I think we were out of mustard, so I got some of that, too.” Stevens’s answer had been quick. This part of the story he had told before. Gil could see that Joe was watching Stevens intently, trying to judge his response.
“What did you do next?” Gil asked.
“I bought some gas, went home, and turned the grill on,” Stevens said neatly.
“Then what?” Gil asked.
“I put the TV on while the grill heated up, I opened a beer, then put the burgers on . . .” Stevens was well into territory that he had already talked about during previous interviews. It was where Gil wanted him. On familiar ground. Now he would throw him off that ground.
Gil interrupted Stevens, asking, “When did Mrs. Rodriguez wake up?”
“Umm . . . I guess about eleven or so . . .”
“And when did Justin come over?” Gil asked.
“At, like, noon—” Stevens said.
“And was Laura with him?”
“Yeah, she was—”
“And did they walk or get a ride?”
“They walked—”
“From where?”
“If you would let me finish talking I would tell you,” Stevens said, annoyed, but that was what Gil wanted. It was a version of electroshock therapy. To reset everything. If he was going to undo all of the badly handled previous interrogations, he had to throw Stevens severely off his game, so all of his rote responses no longer worked. Within that little exchange, they had traveled outside of the realm of what had come before.
“I’m sorry,” Gil said, sounding sincere. “Maybe we should start at the beginning again. Now, when you were at the store, how much did everything cost?”
“Ahh . . .” Stevens said. That simple hesitation told Gil that he had just asked a question Stevens hadn’t answered before.
“It’s okay if you don’t remember,” Gil said. “Let’s move on. You mentioned you bought gas. How much was the price per gallon?”
“I . . . I’m not . . .” Stevens said, fumbling.
Gil didn’t expect Stevens to actually remember any of this. It was more than a year ago. What Gil wanted was Stevens’s actual memories, not ones he had created over time.
“When you were back at home, what did you do with your keys?” Gil asked.
“I’m sorry?” Stevens said, looking confused.
“Your car keys,” Gil said. “Did you put them in your pocket? On the kitchen counter?”
“Umm . . . I guess I don’t know,” Stevens said. It was that statement that Gil had been waiting for.
“Are you sure?” Gil asked, having Stevens repeat it so the uncertainty of his answers would stay put.
“No,” Stevens said. “I don’t know.”
Gil nodded. He had one more question to ask as a test to see if Stevens would lapse back into his recitation. “When did you start to eat lunch?”
“I don’t . . . I think we started just after Justin and Laura got there,” he said, sounding unsure.
“Good, good,” Gil said. “And you were eating in the backyard?”
Stevens nodded.
“Great,” Gil said. He took one of the sheets of paper he had brought in and handed it and a pen to Stevens, saying. “Draw the backyard at the time Brianna disappeared.”
“What?” Stevens asked.
“Draw the backyard,” Gil said.
“Like a sketch of it,” Joe added.
They waited while he awkwardly drew while holding the paper on his lap. Gil made no effort to make the task easier for him, wanting to keep him right where he had him—off his game. Gil had sized up Stevens in the few minutes that Joe was getting a baseline. What Gil saw was a man who would flatly lie if confronted directly with the fact that he wasn’t present when Brianna disappeared. Stevens was the kind of person who would stick to his lie even when faced with proof of the truth. The only way to break down that kind of man was to shake him up. So Gil’s questioning technique had actually served a dual purpose—it washed the interview slate clean and broke down the man’s stubbornness.
Gil watched Stevens draw the arroyo, the house, the gas grill, the outside table and chairs. After he was done Gil said, “Now, if I understand correctly, it started to rain, and you were all about to go inside when you noticed Brianna missing. So show me on your map where Ashley was standing just before you noticed Brianna was gone.”
“Umm . . .” Stevens said, “I don’t know . . .”
“You have to know,” Gil said. “You were there. Was Ashley sitting, standing, what?”
“I guess she was sitting . . .”
“And where were Justin and Laura?”
“I guess they were sitting, too,” he said.
“And Mrs. Rodriguez?”
“Sitting,” he said, now more sure of his lie.
“And where were you?”
“By the grill,” Stevens said, assuredly.
“And when I leave here and go to the hospital and ask Ashley if she was sitting or standing when Brianna disappeared, what will she say?” Gil asked.
“Uh . . . I . . . umm . . .” Stevens said.
Gil leaned forward. “Look, Alex. It’s okay. I understand. You had a chance to make some money that day, and you took it. Like you said before, you were taking care of your family.” Joe was nodding in agreement. Gil purposely didn’t call Stevens a liar. He kept everything vague to soften his crimes. Gil continued, saying, “Now it’s time to stop. You have done an excellent job taking care of Ashley and the new baby on the way. Now it’s time to step up to the plate and tell us what happened. For your family.”
Stevens took a deep breath and said, “Okay, I wasn’t there . . . I had a repo job in Socorro.”
Gil should have been happy that Stevens admitted the truth, but instead he felt empty. Because Stevens’s confession meant that the family was lying about everything. It made Gil think about something he didn’t want to consider—that the family knew who the killer was and was protecting him.