The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

Sunday Afternoon

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Ashley lay on the hospital bed motionless, waiting, tense. She heard a nurse telling her to relax, but Ashley knew that was impossible. How could she relax when she only had a few minutes before the worst pain in the world started again? The pain was in control of her body. Ashley had no thoughts left that were her own. They all belonged to the pain. She whimpered as she felt the next contraction start to rise, then let out a high-pitched yell that seemed to go on for hours. She panicked, thinking the pain wouldn’t end this time. This felt like death. Like there was no going back.
She heard a nurse say, “Don’t fight the pain. Work with it.” Ashley just wanted it over. She wanted it out of her. The contraction started to fall off, and Ashley lay back. She wondered momentarily why Alex wasn’t there, but it hardly mattered. There was no need for him to be there. Her mother stood in the corner looking pale. Ashley had a wild thought that maybe her father had come in during the contraction. She looked around the room, peering at the faces of the two nurses and the doctor. She tried to study them; she had to make sure he hadn’t slipped in. The contraction started again before she could be sure, and the pain rose fast. She tried to fight it, but it was too strong. She couldn’t control it. She felt like her stomach was being crushed into a tight ball. She kept yelling until the pain stopped and she was panting on the bed.
Ashley tried again to look at the faces in the room. Her father wasn’t there. He wouldn’t be there. Thank God. She hadn’t seen her father since he moved out, always making excuses to her mother so she wouldn’t have to visit him.
The last time they were in the same room together was a few days after the actress’s lawyer had brought Brianna back. Ashley hadn’t missed Brianna as much as she thought she would. Of course, she missed the cuddles and the kisses, and every night Ashley would wake up because she thought she heard Brianna crying. There had been no real crying while Brianna was gone, though, and in the blissful silence, she could think.
Ashley had started dating Alex. She was thinking about getting her GED. She even thought about taking some college classes with the money she had gotten from the adoption. Then, five months after she left, Brianna was back. It was immediate. They called and twenty minutes later dropped her off. The lawyer said they didn’t want the money back. And that was that.
Alex was angry. She had told him about Brianna, but he hadn’t counted on ever meeting her. Her mother seemed fine with it, but then it was so hard to tell. It was her father who was the happiest. Ashley watched as he bounced the little girl on his knee and kissed her tiny face with his rough lips.
Ashley knew she had to do something. She would rather that Brianna die than go through what she had.
Ashley finally decided the best thing to do was write a note. She had taken a piece of paper and written, If you don’t move out, I will cut your balls off while you sleep. Then she tucked it under the windshield wiper of his car.
She was surprised how well it worked. He was gone the next day. Maybe he thought Alex had written the note. Or that Tony Herrera had ordered it done from jail. Either way, he left. For the first time, Ashley felt a glimmer of safety in her own home.
That vanished along with Brianna.
The next contraction came on faster than she expected, and suddenly she was in a pool of water. The nurses laughed and said, “Your water broke,” as if it were something to celebrate. The doctor looked down between her legs, and suddenly everything changed. The doctor said something about a prolapsed cord. One nurse helped Ashley get on all fours on the bed as the other nurse called out to someone that they needed an OR. The baby was in trouble.
Lucy parked her car near an old adobe house with an attached sunroom that had a lovely garden clinging to the shady areas. Two dogs came running up to her as she got out. One was a black Lab mix, and the other was a three-legged collie who really needed to get her hair brushed.
Lucy walked closer to the house and yelled, “Hello?” No one answered, so she stepped through the open door of the sunroom and called, “Hello?”
It took her eyes a moment to take in her surroundings, and suddenly she thought she had entered hell. There were bones everywhere on the rough wooden tables. They were being bleached in the sunlight. A large glass aquarium held no water or fish. Instead it was filled with what looked to be beetles and the severed head of some large creature that still had most of its flesh. It could have been a cow. Or a deer. A large stone pestle and mortar sat on a bench, clearly being used to crush bone into dust. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn that she’d just walked into a serial killer’s house.
She did know better, though. She had gotten Tamara’s address from Peter, then done some research on the woman before she left the office. It had been easy enough to do. She was a world-renowned naturalist artist. Her work had been featured at the UN building in New York City. She had a master’s degree in biology from Stanford, but after graduating she found herself drawn more to art that represented the real, living world. She started with sculptures of the interior of the intestines. She taught herself how to skin animals and process the tissues. She would make articulated puppet skeletons of bones from several different animals as a way to show how all of nature fits together. Her idol was Georgia O’Keeffe, who was famous for her paintings of bones. Tamara said in one article Lucy found, “Where Georgia O’Keeffe painted pictures of bones, I cut out the middle part and just use the bones as art.” The articles only referred to Tamara using animal bones. Never human.
“Hello,” called a female voice back to Lucy. A woman stepped out into the sunroom and smiled. She looked to be in her late fifties, with yellow curly hair. She was dressed in jeans and a tan linen vest over a white T-shirt. Around her neck, reading glasses hung from a red-beaded chain. She looked fit and happy. Like one of those older women who needed no makeup to help their beauty. She held paintbrushes in her hand and was wiping them with a rag.
“Hi,” Lucy said.
“Are you bringing me a dead cat?” the woman asked, smiling.
“Was I supposed to?” Lucy asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I was just teasing. A lot of times when strangers come to visit my studio they bring me roadkill for me to use in my work. Instead of flowers.”
“Sorry,” Lucy said. “No dead cats or flowers.”
“Why are you wearing an ambulance uniform?” the woman asked.
Lucy had completely forgotten once again that she was wearing her EMT clothes. “Umm . . . no reason,” she said, hoping that the subject would be dropped. “I actually just want to ask you a few questions. I’m with the newspaper.”
The woman’s face lit up, and her hands went up in the air in an expression of relief as she said, “Finally. I was beginning to think it didn’t work and I had spent all those hours for nothing.”
“What didn’t work?” Lucy asked.
“The publicity,” she said. “Here, come inside. Let’s sit down.” Lucy followed her though the sunroom and into the house, which had low viga-lined ceilings and Mexican tile floors. Out a huge picture window was a sweeping view of the plains. “Do you want any tea? Or water?” the woman asked.
Lucy said no, and they sat in comfy light green chairs by a low coffee table painted with sea blue streaks. On the table was a sculpture of a face, but it was made completely out of small bones. Another example of her work.
“Now,” Tamara said. “Tell me everything. How were they found?”
“Umm . . . I’m not sure exactly what you mean,” Lucy said. “Can I just clarify a few things?” Lucy pulled the photo of the crime scene out of her purse and handed it to Tamara, who put on her glasses and looked at the photo, smiling.
“So,” Lucy said, “is this your work?”
“Yes,” Tamara said, before adding, “Oh shoot, it looks like the balloons I put on there are gone. I guess the wind took them away. There’s five dollars down the drain.”
“And this was publicity?” Lucy asked.
“Yes. It’s guerrilla art. Like my version of graffiti or flash mobbing,” Tamara said. “My publicist and I figured that I would do these outdoor installations as underground promotion. The only way to make it work was to do it anonymously. I thought you all from the media would have contacted me about them on Friday, and we would get some free publicity for the show I’m doing at the Clear River Gallery on Canyon Road.” Tamara reached over to the coffee table, picked up a slick brochure, and handed it to Lucy. On its sand beige cover was a cross made of two long bones with the words I WAS DEAD AND BURIED. Lucy guessed that was the name of the show. Catchy.
“You can imagine how nervous I’ve been since I set the installations up,” Tamara said, still smiling. “I’ve been pulling my hair out wondering how they were being received. Of course, the artist in me decided that the reviewers simply hated the work and that’s why no one was calling me for an interview.”
“You realize that you used human bones?” Lucy asked. She had been struggling with the idea that a respected artist like Tamara would use Brianna’s remains.
“Of course,” Tamara said, scooting forward in her seat in her eagerness. “That was the point. I wanted it to be shocking to show how our society’s physical treatment of people’s bones is hypocritical. We spend millions of dollars a year to put bodies into the ground and another million dollars digging up ancient bodies that have been deemed museum worthy. I consider myself an anti-archaeologist.”
“What’s an anti-archaeologist?” Lucy asked.
“I believe that archaeology itself is no longer a science,” Tamara said. “Think about it. Why do archaeologists dig up our ancestors and their homes when they have computer programs that can virtually do it for them? It’s because they want to be the next person to find King Tut’s tomb. It’s about glory for them.”
“Okay,” Lucy said. “I sort of get that. So why did you use the Mary statues?”
“Because the Catholic Church is one of the worst archaeological offenders,” she said. “Most churches, even our cathedral here, have human bones on display. Every church in Europe has a body part of a saint that it’s known for. A church in Siena, Italy, has the head of St. Catherine in a box, while her right thumb and a foot are in other churches. It’s like entertainment or a circus sideshow.”
“Where did you get the bones?” Lucy said, still confused and trying to speak slowly. She hoped Tamara’s answer wouldn’t include the use of any form of the phrase “I killed.”
“Where I get all my bones,” Tamara said, then looked back at the photo and asked, “Why is there crime scene tape around my installation?”
Gil’s phone rang as he was driving back to the station. He saw on the caller ID that it was Lucy and almost didn’t answer it, but picked up on the fifth ring.
“So, listen, Montoya,” she said loudly. He could tell she was outside by the wind whistling through the phone’s mouthpiece. “I figured out why all those bones were left around town.”
“What?” he said. “How?”
“You know, I don’t want to say too much about that at the moment,” she said. He said nothing, so she filled the space. “I take that silence to mean that you think I’m crazy, but I swear I haven’t started to hear the voices yet. I really do know why the bones were left. I actually can tell you quite a lot about them now. For instance, I know that all of them were left before three different statues of Mary and that the skull in Zozobra had a lovely hat with plastic bottle caps attached to it.”
“It did?” he asked.
“Well, I was told it did,” Lucy said. “Maybe it came off in the fire.” Gil thought of the swirled plastic on the back of the skull that melted in the blaze.
“Where are you?” he asked. “Are you in any danger?” She must be with the killer. That would be just like her.
“Oh, it’s so sweet how you worry about me,” she said. “I’m fine. I just have someone that I want you to meet.” He heard her say to someone in the background, “Say hi to the nice policeman.” He thought he heard someone say “Hi,” but it was lost in the wind.
“So are you coming?” she asked. Gil agreed, and she gave him directions. As she was hanging up she said, “By the way, you might want to release the schizophrenic guy you’re holding, and you don’t need to bring any backup. It’s not what you think.”
Gil shook his head. With Lucy it never was.
They stood in the sunroom waiting for Gil, as Lucy nervously eyed the glass aquarium that held the beetles and the skull.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said, “but can I ask what this is?”
“Those are my Beetle Boys,” she said. “They’re my little helpers. They clean my bones for me. They’re carpet beetles. They’ll have that deer skull cleaned for me in two days.”
Lucy poked at some fur on one of the tables and asked Tamara innocently, “Where do you get your bones from?”
“Oh, all over,” Tamara said. “I find them or people bring them to me.”
“Where did you get the bones used for your recent installations?” Lucy asked. She was trying very hard not to step into interview territory that Gil would want to cover, so she was fishing around the edges.
“Those of course came from the archaeological dig,” Tamara said.
“That’s where you got them?”
“Well, sort of. I found them pretty close to the dig, plus the bones had weathering on the surface that continued into the bone tissue. You wouldn’t see that on a more recent bone.”
“Really?” Lucy said doubtfully. “Is there any way bone that is, say, a year old could be mistaken for bone that’s a hundred years old?”
“I don’t see how. Bone weathering is pretty consistent when it’s buried underground, especially around here where the soil isn’t acidic. I’m pretty familiar with the concepts.”
“But it sounds like you didn’t find these bones underground.”
“Only because they washed down the arroyo from the site up on the hill,” Tamara said as she peered into the Beetle Boys’ aquarium. “Before that they were buried. The state has only been digging up there a few weeks.”
The woman had made an assumption. It was as simple as that. She had assumed that when she found pieces of a human skeleton, the only place they could have come from was the archaeological dig. She never considered that the body could be fresh. Any other person who had found the bones would have called the police.
Lucy saw a large freezer in the corner and opened it. She poked around, seeing if any human body parts poked back. She pushed aside a frozen ziplock bag full of tamales. Underneath was a plastic bag holding a foot-long fuzzy stick. Huh. A furry stick in a freezer. Weird. She pulled the bag out of the freezer and looked at it closer. At one end of the stick was something lumpy she couldn’t make out through the ice crystals. She mashed the bag around until she got a better look. The lump turned out to be a paw. She said, “Oh God,” without thinking. “Umm . . . Tamara? Can I ask what this is?”
“That’s Esperanza’s leg.”
“Wait,” Lucy said aloud. “You mean the three-legged dog outside? This is her leg? Really? Why do you have your dog’s leg in the freezer?”
“I’m thinking about using it in a sculpture,” Tamara said.
“Okay,” Lucy said, the idea disturbing her. “How long ago did Esperanza lose her leg?”
“About four years ago, after she was hit by a car,” Tamara said.
“Hmm . . . Well, just FYI, I think Esperanza’s leg has seen better days, so you’ll have to figure out some way to incorporate a little freezer burn into your artwork.”
Gil stopped at the station to get Joe and then followed the directions Lucy had given him. Joe spent the drive asking questions that Gil couldn’t answer, like how Lucy had found the killer and why they weren’t calling in backup. A few minutes later Gil parked the car in front of a big house set well away from any main road and got out.
Lucy and another woman came out to the front of the house, followed closely by two dogs—or as closely as the three-legged one could manage with a hobble. The woman called hello to them and said, “I am so happy to see you. I’m Tamara.”
Gil looked over at Lucy and then back at Tamara, observing the entire situation before saying a word.
“Why are you happy to see us?” Gil asked carefully. He hadn’t known what to expect. He still wasn’t sure, but it was not this nice woman. Not this nice house.
“I’m so excited about being arrested,” she said.
“You think you’re getting arrested?” Joe asked.
“Of course,” Tamara said, all smiles. “I fully expect to be charged with desecration of a grave. I admit I did it. I even have my bail money ready to go.”
“Why did you do it?” Joe asked slowly.
“To show the hypocrisy of our archaeological system,” she said firmly. “We allow people who claim to be scientists to dig up people’s ancestors and display them, yet when I do the same thing, I get arrested. It was a part of my plan.”
Lucy interrupted, “It was for publicity.” She showed them the brochure of Tamara’s upcoming show. They read the line I WAS DEAD AND BURIED.
“Publicity?” Joe asked. “Seriously?” He turned and looked at Gil for what seemed like a full minute before he walked off a ways.
“He seems upset,” Tamara said.
“He’s always that way,” Gil said as he looked over the brochure.
“She got the bones from an archaeological dig,” Lucy said, trying to bring them back to the subject.
“Actually I found them in an arroyo just a few minutes’ walk away,” Tamara said. “They washed down from a new dig the state started. I guess they’re excavating another old pueblo or something. It’s just up on that hill over there.” She pointed at a mound off in the distance, about a quarter of a mile to the north.
“So, Officer,” Tamara said to Gil tentatively, “have you seen the art installations I did?”
Gil must have looked confused, so Lucy offered, “That’s what she calls the displays.”
“Yes, I have,” Gil said.
“Can I ask for a layperson’s point of view?” she asked, then, without waiting for an answer, said, “Did you get the symbolism of the jars I put in the cemetery installation? My idea was that I was speaking for the dead who are on display in our museums by printing on the cards the phrase ‘I was dead and buried.’ I meant the card to be like one of those explainer plaques you see at an exhibit but from the dead person’s point of view. Did that come across?”
“You know, I don’t think I got that,” Gil said.
“Please tell me that the coat of watches I made for the statue of Mary indicated our different measures of time,” Tamara said. “It was the idea that we all will be bones in the ground and ancient one day, and then we might end up in a museum.”
“I can’t say that I really understood that precise meaning,” Gil said, “but I am curious why you did the installations this weekend.”
“Because it’s fiesta,” Tamara replied. “Your Hispanic and Pueblo Indian ancestors have been some of the most exploited people when it comes to these digs. They are taking your grandparents out of their graves and putting them in glass cases. Did you know that there are more than a hundred and forty thousand archaeological sites identified in New Mexico and that the state has millions of stolen artifacts in its warehouses? It’s a disgrace.”
Joe strode back over to them and stood directly in front of Tamara and asked, “So you’re telling me that you had no idea that those bones you used belonged to Brianna Rodriguez?”
“Who’s Brianna Rodriguez?” Tamara asked.
Hobbit pi?on pine were everywhere as they walked, looking more like fluffy bushes than majestic trees. Cholla cactus lined the edges of the path, all spikes and tall, chubby arms.
Tamara turned off a fork of the main trail, and they walked until they were no longer following a path, more a suggestion of one. The sand between the clumps of vegetation made a patchwork maze where pink flower clusters and yellow star grasses grew unobtrusively. Ahead Lucy saw the dark green of arroyo trees.
They topped a rise, and the arroyo spread out below. It was at least three car lengths across with a drop-off that was a slope in some areas and a cliff in others. The arroyo bottom was gray-beige sand pocked with stones, driftwood, and nonnatural debris—plastic bottles, a lawn chair. It was mostly all trash that had gone downstream in the summer floods and ended up here when the river meandered out.
They stood looking over the riverbed as Tamara tried to find a way down. They could see the archaeological site just to the north, across the arroyo and off in the distance. Gil could see why Tamara thought the bones had come from there. The summer rains had created rivulets in the sand that led straight from the hill to the riverbed. The erosion patterns had misled her.
They walked slowly down to the bottom of the arroyo, picking their way carefully so as not to slide in the sand. Joe reached the bottom first, then put a hand out to help Lucy down. Tamara walked over to the other side and crouched down in the shade of a pi?on tree. As they approached, she took a stick and pointed to the small bones. Gil saw ribs and a few vertebrae. Tamara dug a little with her stick and revealed other small bones beneath the film of sand. The water runoff from the summer storms had probably tumbled and turned the bones many times, leaving them here to be buried by the desert.
The arroyo, which had been filled with nothing more than the sound of a meadowlark that morning, was now buzzing with activity.
Lucy had called Gerald Trujillo, who had been at the fire station, and asked him to look up the nearest dirt roads in their one-of-a-kind back-road map book. Gerald found an easy access road just a few yards down, and then people started to show up quickly.
The first had been Liz, who had been driving back up to Santa Fe to get a change of clothes and give her family a kiss. She got the call while she was on the interstate and was able to hit the right exit.
At the moment, Liz was bent over the bones with Tamara, saying, “The problem is that you didn’t account for the smaller bone size and density, which makes the weathering process happen more quickly. Bone weathering is all about the surface-to-volume ratio. The smaller the bone, the higher the surface-to-volume ratio and—”
“The quicker the weathering,” Tamara said, finishing her sentence. “I get it. Of course, I see where I made the mistake . . .”
Lucy sat in the shade of a cottonwood tree, just looking at the sky.
Joe came over to Gil, who was still watching Liz and Tamara. The two women had just shared a laugh about some concept of bone aging.
“So,” Joe said, in a low voice. “There never was any crazy person who was a serial killer pedophile with a mental illness and a guilty conscience.”
Gil said nothing. Their profile of the killer had been right, but they had created that profile based on an assumption—that the man who killed Brianna kept her bones in order to set up the elaborate displays. The problem had not been with the profile. The problem had been in that assumption. They never looked at the killing and the displays as separate events. David Geisler had suffered for it.
Gil looked down again at the map book in his hand. He had gotten it out of Liz’s car. It was the same book that all police and firefighters used to get around town. It had page after page of detailed maps. If you leafed through the pages fast enough, it was almost like a flipbook, showing the heart of the city, then the residential areas, and finally the rural lands. Where they were now. Gil had used that continuity to check a theory he had.
“I guess Ashley didn’t sell Brianna to a psychopath, either,” Joe said. “Now we just have to figure out how the body ended up here.”
When Gil had looked though the map book, he had been following a dotted line. One single line. From page to page, he used his finger to trace that dotted line. He followed that line from behind the Rodriguez house to right where they were standing now. In the map’s legend, a dotted line indicated an arroyo.
“The answer to that is easy,” Gil said. “Brianna did go into the arroyo behind the house the day she disappeared—but she didn’t fall in and drown. Someone stabbed her and threw her in. The water carried her here.”
Gil looked up at the sky as a crow flew overhead, then said, “We just narrowed our suspect list down to the four people who were in that house.”