The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter THREE

Friday Morning

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Santa Fe Municipal Court Judge Victor Otero pulled yet another paper from the stack and firmly, without flourish, signed his name. He flipped the paper smoothly over onto a pile laid neatly next to his elbow. He checked his watch. It was 7:55 A.M. Time to head into court. He was starting court early today because of fiesta. Most city workers had the day off. Since he was one of the Protectores de la Fiesta, he had been at Zozobra until almost 2:00 A.M., but he didn’t feel tired.
He stood, sliding his chair neatly under the huge oak desk, which had been used by every municipal judge since 1902. It had been his since 1994. He would move it to his office at home when he retired.
He took his robe off the coat hanger and zipped it up. He headed to the bathroom off his office to check his reflection. He looked intently at himself in the mirror. He straightened his red tie, just visible under this robe. His hair was less than a quarter inch from touching his ears. He would need to get it trimmed within the next week. He always went to Earl’s Barbershop, as his father and grandfather had before him. The Earl in charge now was Earl Junior. Earl charged him seven dollars for a trim and sold some of the best green chile in town, but the judge went there mainly for information, as did state senators, the police chief, and the mayor. Or used to. In the past twenty years, things had changed. Only the old-timers still went to Earl’s.
He glanced at his watch. Precisely eight o’clock. He took one last look in the mirror, then one last look at his office, making sure everything was in its place before going out into the courtroom.
Lucy stared down at the ground. Tiny rocks of every hue pockmarked the pink-beige earth. Periwinkle blue, dark chocolate, butterscotch. They were like a scattering of jelly beans from a knocked-over box. Bite-sized and smooth. She bent down and picked up a smooth black rock. It had a stripe of white through its licorice black center.
She heard a loud pop and looked up. The car on fire across the road groaned as the metal warped from the heat. Two firefighters on the hose directed a stream of water onto the fire. With a few sweeps of the nozzle—and a sizzle and a vent of steam—the fire was out.
She stood next to the ambulance, waiting like she always did for someone to get hurt or exhausted so she could spring into action. Her job on fire scenes was to be everyone’s Jewish grandmother. She was constantly asking, “Are you tired? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Sit, sit, while I get you something.” She made sure everyone stayed refreshed and renewed. Because if one firefighter got too tired, then all their safety was at risk.
This had been drilled into her head by Gerald, who, at the moment, was handling the hose as other firefighters popped the hood of the car with a crowbar to make sure the battery—or was it the carburetor—wasn’t on fire. She wasn’t a firefighter and had little concept of what they did.
She dropped the black rock into her pocket. She would add it to her collection at home, which included rocks she’d picked up during other calls in this same place. For some reason this isolated spot—ringed with pi?on pine and juniper—was a popular area for car fires. Why the car thieves, or whoever, kept dumping cars out here was a mystery. Why in their fire district? Why not a mile or so away, where La Cienega’s district started? Then they could get up at 6:00 A.M. to put out a car fire.
The area, with its remoteness, made for a fun secret getaway the whole family could enjoy—just not together. Here teenagers would gather to drink around late-night fires. Here parents would dump washing machines and mattresses that had finished serving their purpose. Lucy kicked at pieces of plastic and china embedded in the dirt. The desert was where household goods went to die. People seemed to think they could throw away everything unwanted and expect the desert to eventually cover it with sand.
Back east, especially in Florida, where Lucy grew up, plants and decaying foliage quickly reclaim the discarded junk of our lives. They pull it down into a warm, moist grave where it will stay forever hidden.
The desert can’t be trusted, though. It has two faces. On its surface, it can hide nothing. Everything is exposed and vulnerable. Underneath and underfoot, it can hide whole civilizations. Ancient bones and long-forgotten ruins.
The desert is always coy in what it hides and what it reveals. If what the sands reveal is a body, it will either be ripped apart by coyotes and vultures or mummified by the incinerating heat.
A few years ago, a woman walking her dog in the outskirts of Albuquerque found a bone. Most locals would have thought little of it. It actually happens all the time. The bone could have been from a prehistoric site. A wayward inmate from one of the thousands of archaeological digs in the state. It wasn’t. After bringing in backhoes and shovels, the police found eleven bodies. They were not ancient bones but the remains of women dead only a few years. Likely it was the work of a serial killer who thought, like so many New Mexicans, that if you dumped your trash in the desert, no one would ever find it.
Gil sat at his desk, waiting. Chief Kline had called in most of the other detectives for a meeting that was supposed to start ten minutes ago. Gil stared at the posters about rape and domestic violence that lined the walls of the station. The flags waving out front cast rippling shadows that passed over the windows, like a soft strobe light. Gil glanced at the book open on his desk. It was a criminal behavior analysis textbook. Next to that was a piece of paper where he had written the words fire, skull, child, and audience, followed by a line of question marks.
Joe came over to Gil’s desk and sat in the chair next to it, saying, “Can we get going already?”
“Relax,” Gil said.
Gil saw Kline go into the conference room, and he and Joe got up to follow. Inside was a group of a half-dozen detectives and a few officers who had hung back after the morning report to help with the new case. One of them was Officer Kristen Valdez, who had worked Zozobra last night but was back here this morning to help out. She must be exhausted, Gil thought, as he sat down at the long brown table with Kline at the head.
“Okay, first I want to thank all of you who have volunteered to work a double shift this morning to lend a hand,” Kline said. “We’ve got ourselves a case that is going to take some doing. Gil, why don’t you get us started?”
Gil pulled out his incident report and notebook. “At approximately six forty-four this morning we received a phone call from an individual who said he had found a skull at Fort Marcy Park. I was dispatched at six forty-seven and arrived on scene at seven oh two.” Gil told the rest of the story as the officers and detectives took their own notes—except for Joe, who stood in the back of the room, bouncing his leg. Gil’s report was over within less than five minutes.
“Thanks, Gil,” Kline said. “Now, I know we are all thinking that this could be Brianna, but we just can’t assume that—”
“Chief, I don’t—” Joe started to say as everyone turned to look at him.
“Hang on. Just a second. We need to look at this case two ways—like it isn’t Brianna and like it is. So, for those of us tracking the idea that it isn’t her, we’ll look at all national missing kids cases and see if there is any way this could be one of them. Like do any of the suspects have ties to New Mexico? You know the drill. The rest of us will treat this like it is Brianna until we find out otherwise.”
Kline took a deep breath, knowing the next part would be hard to say and harder to hear. “With Fisher gone, we need to start at the beginning of the investigation—” Joe started to talk again, but Kline said, “Hold on. I am in no way saying that Fisher did a bad job, but he’s gone, and we need to have new eyes on this now that there might be a body. Even if this isn’t Brianna, we need to have a new detective take over her case. I’ve been putting that off for too long. So that’ll be Gil.” Gil nodded.
Kline continued, “We have to pull all the police reports from the afternoon she went missing, both city and county. Look for anything out of the ordinary; traffic stops where someone acted strange, any break-ins in the area. Do the sex offender checks. The usual.”
Kline went on to hand out individual assignments and dismissed everyone from the room, with the exception of Joe and Gil.
“Now for the tricky part,” Kline said. “We have to notify the family. We can’t wait until we get a positive ID. This is going to be all over the news in just a few hours, and the public is going to assume it’s Brianna no matter how much we say that we can’t be sure. If we don’t tell the family now, they’ll get blindsided. Let me call Robert here and see what we need to do.” Robert Sandoval was the police lawyer and the man who stood between the department and the Rodriguez family attorney.
The department had been four weeks into the investigation of Brianna’s disappearance when the family had finally decided they’d had enough and filed a harassment lawsuit. Looking at it from their perspective, Gil wasn’t sure he could blame them. For the first few weeks, there had been a police officer on duty at all times in the house and a car stationed across the street. All the family’s phones were hooked up to recording devices, and every single one of their movements was detailed. By the fourth week, the police, after considering every lead, unofficially decided that Brianna probably died in an accidental drowning.
That didn’t stop public pressure about the case. So the department kept pushing so they could tell the media that they had exhausted every possible lead. It was when the family was approached about taking polygraphs and the FBI showed up to take forensic samples from everyone that they decided to file the harassment suit. The family released a statement through their lawyer saying that they believed as the police did—that Brianna had drowned. Now they just wanted to get back to their lives and grieve for their little girl out of the public spotlight. A judge agreed that the family was under undue stress and ordered the officers to cut back on their intrusions. The case had already cost the department hundreds of thousands of dollars, and without any new leads, the police agreed.
All but Fisher, who continued to visit the family’s home about half a dozen times, despite the warning, to check out new evidence, use the latest tracking gear, or just clarify a point in his mind. He was eventually suspended with pay for a week, which was the department’s way of saying loudly, “This is a reprimand,” then adding in a whisper, “But not really.” Fisher could have just considered it a vacation due to attitude. Instead he shot himself.
Fisher’s suicide gave the department yet another reason—like the lawsuit and the lack of evidence—to put the investigation on a shelf until they got a new lead. Gil only wished that lead had been finding a new suspect instead of a body.
Kline clicked his phone shut and said, “Okay, so Robert says I can’t talk to the family because I’m individually named in the lawsuit, but you two can go as long as we can justify it as necessary contact. Gil, why don’t you go over there and just let them know the circumstances. Joe, I need you there for continuity, plus it’ll give you a little on-the-job training. When you get back here we’ll get more of a game plan going.”
“Am I allowed to interview them?” Gil asked.
“Not without their attorney present. We can only do the notification. Nothing else. Keep it very informal. Just tell them we found something that might pertain to Brianna.”
Lucy stood by the ambulance as the guys finished up with the fire. Even though they were only twenty feet away, she couldn’t just walk over to them. She was in the safety zone, and they were in the incident zone. She wasn’t in protective clothing, only her regular uniform, while the guys in the incident zone were in full gear—helmets, face masks, breathing equipment, protective gloves, boots, coats, and pants. Because a car fire, even though it might seem like no big deal, releases toxins as it burns through plastic, gasoline, and rubber. Enough carcinogens to make a grown man die, if he gets too close.
So Lucy stayed where she was, daydreaming about sleep, until the radio on her hip squawked.
“Pi?on 373, this is Attack,” Gerald said. He was hard to hear through his face mask and over the rush of air from his breathing equipment.
“This is Pi?on 373. Go ahead,” she said.
“Are you ready to take down the VIN?”
“Copy that.” She grabbed a pen and a fresh incident report. “Go ahead.”
He rattled off the number as she wrote it quickly in the space provided on the report and then repeated it back to him. He then gave her the make and model of the car and a guess on its age. “Also, could you put a note on the form that there is some red spray paint on the side of the car? It could be graffiti, like it’s been tagged. There might have been letters, but it was hard to tell. Maybe we should notify the gang task force.”
He signed off, and she started filling in other blanks on the page. The date. The time. Personnel on scene. She then got into the passenger seat of the ambulance and pulled out a large, overflowing binder. Its cover was red and had the word backroads on it, handwritten on masking tape. This was a collection of all the streets, roads, highways, and interstates in their fire district. If a lost hiker called 911 from his cell phone and only knew his general location, this binder showed all the tiny side roads and untrampled trails that he might be near. Or when a person called to say there was a brush fire by Dead Dog Well, the pages could tell them the topography of the area and whether it was dominated by grasses or trees.
Sure, the county provided them with newly printed map books, which they used daily, but for the problematic places—the locations that didn’t appear on official maps—they had the binder. Yes, it was falling apart, but no matter how worn the exterior might get, the binder would never be thrown out. Because it contained something precious—thirty years of the fire department’s history. Every chief in the past three decades had added his wealth of information to the pages. The history wasn’t written down like a fully formed story. Firefighters have no time for that. The maps and the notes on them were the history. On the corner of one page was written the gate code to the ranch on Highway 599. On another were black X’s that showed the locations of caves and climbing cliffs. Even the attack patterns that the wildland firefighting crews had used during the huge Cerro Grande fire of 2000 were drawn in red marker across a map of Los Alamos.
Lucy opened the binder now to get a general description of their location. She actually had little idea of how they had gotten to the fire; there had just been one dirt road after another bringing them deeper into national forest land. She used her pinkie and some creative mapping to guesstimate the driving distance from town. She then filled that information in on its proper place on the form.
When she was done, she went in search of the sheriff’s deputy who had been on scene with them. He was sitting in his cruiser, with the passenger door open, talking on his cell phone. Lucy stood off a discreet distance while he chatted, not wanting to be impolite but hoping he would hurry up. He was a portly man with dark hair. She thought his last name was Segura. He finally noticed her, but instead of getting off his phone, he just covered up the earpiece and said, “What do you need?”
“I just wanted to give you the VIN,” she said, “and I was hoping you could give me the owner’s name for our records.”
“No problem.” He placed the phone on the seat next to him, not hanging it up, and got on the computer sitting over the middle console of his car. She told him the VIN, and he typed it in.
“Okay,” he said, looking at the screen. “The first name is Beto and the last name is Escobar. My God, that is such a Mexican name.”
“And the address?” she asked, not really wanting to get into a conversation with him.
“Hang on,” he said. A few more keystrokes and he said, “It looks like it’s 162 Airport Road.”
She was busy writing it down when he said, “Huh. That’s weird. We’ve had three burned vehicles come back to that same address this year. All different names, and we don’t have stolen vehicle reports for any of them. Must be some Mexican insurance scam.”
Lucy didn’t comment on the unlikelihood of that. She was trying to keep good relations between their respective departments. So she said instead, “We also just wanted you to know that the car has some graffiti on it, like it’s been tagged. In case the gang task force wants to know.”
“Thanks. I’ll write it down,” he said, smiling. She noticed the phone still open on the seat next to him. It bugged her for some reason. Who was this person that would stay on hold this long? His mother? His kid? As far as she could tell, the guy really didn’t deserve “on-hold” devotion.
She was about to step away when he said, “Hey, I’ve got a joke for you. What do you call a Mexican shooting a Chinese outside a Starbucks? . . . A cap-a-chino.” He started laughing.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” she said, in her best you-are-a-moron tone. “So now you’ve told me two things about yourself. One, you’re racist, and, two, you can’t tell a joke.”
She walked away as he started to sputter out some swear words and went back to the ambulance just as Gerald came over, pulling off his helmet and fire-retardant hood.
She handed him a bottle of water before he could ask for it, and he downed it in one gulp.
“Man, that fire was hot,” he said, wiping the sweat off his face. He took off his heavy bunker jacket.
“Do you need anything else?” she asked him.
“Just some food,” he said.
“Hey, so stupid racist cop over there says that the guy who owns this car lives at the same address as two other owners whose cars got burned,” she said.
“Sounds like someone really doesn’t like the people at that house.”
“Oh, and none of the owners have ever filed stolen car reports.”
“Really? That seems odd. How else are they going to get them back or get paid by their insurance company?”
“Maybe they know who’s doing it and don’t want to get them in trouble.”
“What, like a teenage relative?”
“Could be. Or maybe the Mafia. Or it’s part of a voodoo ritual. And let’s not rule out aliens . . .”
“Only an idiot would rule out aliens,” Gerald said, laughing. “Can we please just go get breakfast?”
Gil stood outside the station next to his unmarked dark blue Crown Victoria. While he waited for Joe, he speed-dialed his phone.
A woman answered saying, “Hello?” She sounded almost as if she’d been woken up.
“Hi, Mom. How are you?”
“Hi, hito. I’m fine.”
“Bueno, you sound tired today,” Gil said, automatically lapsing back into the local mishmash of Old Spanish and English. A sort of colonial Spanglish.
“Ah, I didn’t sleep very good last night. The neighbors had a fiesta party.”
“You should have called me.”
“Oh, hito, it was late. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Mom, I could have taken care of it,” he said. His mom was always like this, never wanting to trouble him with anything until it was a problem. When it wouldn’t have even become a problem if she had just told him about it in the first place. Gil wondered if she had been like this when she was married to his father. Or maybe he just noticed it more now that his father was gone.
It had been more than ten years since his father died. A heart attack when Gil was only twenty-three. Gil dropped out of law school and found himself taking a crash course in property taxes, insurance bills, and mortgages. He was suddenly in charge of it all, but it wasn’t something he and his mom talked about. It was just expected that he would take up the reins. So his younger sister, Elena, stayed in college and got her law degree while Gil did what was required. Now, more than a decade later, he still did.
“When is Aunt Yolanda coming to get you for fiesta Mass?” Gil asked. His mother was a former fiesta queen and was expected to go down to the Plaza to be part of the official ceremonies. His father had played the part of Don Diego de Vargas, the man who three hundred years ago had reconquered Santa Fe. It was how the two of them had met more than thirty-five years ago. When Gil was growing up, he always imagined that he would meet his wife the same way. Instead, he met Susan in college.
“She should be here by ten thirty or so,” she said.
“Okay, well, I’ll call you later, then,” he said, as Joe came out of the station and made his way over to the car. “Don’t forget to check your blood sugar.”
“Okay, hito. Have a good day.”
Gil hung up. “You set?” Joe said and got into the passenger seat, holding a palm-sized spiral notebook and a manila file folder.
“What have you got there?” Gil asked, nodding toward what Joe was carrying.
“Fisher’s original case notes,” Joe said. “I’ve been going over them since this morning. You know, to freshen up.”
“Good thinking,” Gil said as he backed the car out of the station and headed into town. “So what can you tell me about the family?”
“Well, you have Ashley, who is Brianna’s mom. She’s twenty now. She’s been on disability since this happened,” Joe said.
“She doesn’t work?”
“No. Then there’s Rose, Brianna’s grandma. That’s whose house we’re going to.”
“That’s where Brianna went missing?” Gil knew these details. His main goal in going over them was to cement them into his mind and see if there were any inconsistencies along the way.
“Right. Rose and Ashley live in the house with Ashley’s boyfriend.”
“What do you know about him?”
“His name is Alex Stevens, and he owns his own tow truck company.”
“They were all home when Brianna disappeared?”
“Yeah, and there were also two kids hanging out with them that day. One was Justin. He’s a cousin, who’s about fifteen. His house is just like a block away from the Rodriguezes’, so he is pretty much over all the time. Ashley babysits him after school. Then the other kid was Laura. I think she’s thirteen now. She’s Justin’s girlfriend.”
“So we have Ashley, Rose, Alex, Justin, and Laura who were there?”
“Yeah.”
“You keep referring to Alex Stevens as Ashley’s boyfriend and not Brianna’s dad.”
“Nothing gets by you,” Joe said, not sarcastically. “Brianna’s real dad has spent most of his time in jail since Ashley was pregnant. The guy pretty much has never been in the picture.”
“Okay, so five people were at the house the day Brianna went missing, and none of them have died or moved away since then.”
“Right, and as far as I know, Ashley is still dating Alex and Justin is still with Laura.”
“Everybody alibis each other?” Gil asked.
“Yep. They were all in the backyard together.”
“How many times have they been interviewed?”
“Before the lawsuit, probably around a dozen times each.”
“And the story never changed?”
“Never.” Meaning the family probably wasn’t involved. Cracks in the timeline would have shown up by now. Or they all had too much to lose.
“Fisher did all the interrogations?”
“Yeah, and he went after them every which way—soft, hard, alone, together. At the station. At home. Everything.”
Gil didn’t say it, but this was what he had feared—contamination so deep that the truth might never come out. Gil had known Fisher, of course. He had been a good guy who tried hard, but his interview skills were heavy-handed—and sloppy.
“Did anyone in the family take a polygraph?”
“By the time we got to that, there was the lawsuit.”
“Okay, so the family is out as an information source. What about suspects? Were there any?”
“No. We checked all known sex offenders, everything. There was never a viable suspect. That’s why we thought she drowned in the arroyo and her body just hadn’t been found yet.”
“Tell me about the evidence.”
“There wasn’t any. I mean, nothing. She was just gone.”
“What about fingerprints or footprints?”
“The only fingerprints were the family’s. As for footprints, it was monsoon season. It rained five inches in one hour. When I got there the arroyo was flooded and the backyard was soup.”
“All right. So tell me about what you did when you first arrived.”
“All right,” Joe said, shifting in his seat. “Umm . . . I got there a little after 2:00 P.M. Ashley, the mom, answered the door.”
“How did she seem?”
“Freaked out. She said they were all in the backyard grilling when it started to rain. One second Brianna was there, the next she was gone. She said she looked for Brianna for about fifteen minutes before she called 911.”
“Then what?”
“I searched the house.”
“You didn’t call it in?”
“No, I was thinking about the JonBenét case where she was inside the house the whole time but they spent hours looking for her.”
“How long did it take you?”
Joe was agitated, shifting in his seat. “Too long. I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes.”
“What was Ashley doing?”
“Helping me.”
“Where was everyone else?”
“Umm . . . the two kids—the cousin, Justin, and his girlfriend, Laura—were out walking around looking for her. I heard them yelling for Brianna across the arroyo. Rose, Ashley’s mom, was talking to neighbors, I guess, knocking on doors.”
“Is that everyone?”
“Alex, Ashley’s boyfriend, was driving around looking for her.”
“What did you see when you searched the house?”
“Nothing weird. In the kitchen they had food out for the barbecue. A few empty beer bottles. That’s it.”
“What about out back?”
“The grill was open and there was some food still out, soaked. I walked to the arroyo and it was overflowing, going a mile a minute.”
“When did you call for backup?”
“I called Garcia—he was the officer on duty that day—and everybody was there in just a few minutes. Fisher was the detective on call. So between all of us we started a ground search within about a half hour of her going missing. Turn here,” Joe said, pointing to the right. “It’s the third house on the left . . . That’s pretty much it,” he said as Gil pulled up.
Lucy sat at a booth in Denny’s and tried to listen to Gerald and the fire fighters across from her talk about hoses, as they had been doing for ten minutes, but her mind drifted as she gazed unfocused out the restaurant windows.
She looked down at her T-shirt, which read PI?ON VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT with an emblem over her left chest. Their department was a ragtag of volunteers, some who were firefighters only, some who were medics only, and some, like Gerald, who were both. Lucy felt bad that people might assume from her shirt that she was a firefighter when she was only a first responder. The lowest of the low on the totem pole of medics, with paramedics—referred to mockingly as para-gods behind their backs—at the top.
Since Gerald, sitting across from her and discussing hoses with zeal, was the paramedic in charge at her department, she guessed that made him her para-god. Lucy smiled to herself. Praise and glory to Gerald in the highest.
Lucy hoped her pager would go off again. She was exhausted but wired, and wanted something more interesting before she went into work.
She yawned and glanced around. Denny’s at 9:00 A.M. was its regular combination of elderly couples that didn’t look at each other and men in trucker hats who didn’t talk to each other.
Out the window, the Motel 6 on the other side of Cerrillos Road fluoresced in the morning light. The Quality Inn and the Floor Mart looked like they were just waking up.
Lines of cars drove along Cerrillos Road, avoiding the construction barrels that seemed to serve no purpose.
Cerrillos Road, the most cursed road in Santa Fe, was always under construction. It flooded like a river during the summer monsoons and cracked mercilessly after the winter snow. It seemed to be a giant five-mile-long strip mall of car dealerships and cheap motels.
It was an ugly road in a beautiful town. A scar on a perfect cheek.
When Lucy had first moved to Santa Fe a year and a half ago, she had no idea how to properly say words like “Cerrillos,” with all its double letters mocking her. During her first month in town, she had been laughed at by co-workers for pronouncing Acoma Pueblo like a combination of “a” and “coma,” and Pojoaque Pueblo like “po-jock” and “kay.” Her solution was to become a master eavesdropper. She data-mined conversations overheard at gas stations and grocery stores for the right way to pronounce the names of towns, streets, and mountains. She also picked up the walking-around Spanish words you had to know in order to have a conversation in English. She had learned that a porch was called a portal—with the accent on the second syllable—and that an exposed wooden ceiling beam was a viga. A santuario was a kind of church, and an arroyo was a dry riverbed. Now, she could almost whip out the right Spanish and Native American words like a local.
She took a final swig of her coffee and considered taking another bite of her breakfast. She had ordered Moons Over My Hammy based solely on the name, but the eggs had gone cold and the cheese looked pale. She poked at it with her fork, then decided to let it rest in peace.
She yawned again and shook her head to wake up, but she knew it was time to go. She had to be at the newspaper early today so she could go over her yearly review with her boss. She was not looking forward to it. She stood up and told the boys she was leaving. They had started to say their good-byes when Gerald said to her surprise, “I’m going to take off, too.”
Suddenly, she was wide-awake—and curious.
The Rodriguez house was set in an open area marked with a few small juniper trees and cut by the arroyo going past the backyard. It was in one of those Santa Fe neighborhoods where there is no structure to the streets or property. The roads were dirt, and the houses and trailers seemed to be in no particular order. In fact, there was a reason why some of the city’s streets were not precise in their design. Many local families had followed the colonial property inheritance rules. Traditionally, a father would equally divide the property between his sons. Then the sons would divide it between their sons, so that generations later, extended family members lived in tight family clusters, minus the pieces that were sold off to developers over the years. Gil guessed that was what happened here.
The Rodriguez house itself was simple. It was small and boxlike with its flat Santa Fe roof. They had chosen a pale shade of beige exterior paint many years ago that had never been refreshed, but the paved pathway leading to the front door was free of weeds, and there were a few flowers near the porch.
Gil knocked on the door, which was opened by a young woman with big eyes and long dark hair who was hugely pregnant. This had to be Ashley.
“Hi, I’m Gil Montoya, and you might remember Joe Phillips, with the Santa Fe police,” Gil said as Joe gave a little wave. Gil purposely didn’t use their detective titles so as to keep her at ease. As it was, she frowned at them, but Gil said, “I was hoping we could come in.”
He could tell she was about to refuse, so he said quickly, “It is important that we talk, and I think it might be easier for you if we sat down.”
She opened the door, and they followed her into the kitchen, where she eased herself down on a chair. A woman washing dishes turned to look at them and said harshly, “Ashley, why are the police in my house?” The woman might have been in her forties, but her heavily lined face made it hard to tell. Her hair was dyed a hard black, and she looked at them with suspicion. This had to be Rose, Ashley’s mother.
Gil introduced himself to Rose and asked her to join him at the table. She looked like she might say no but took a seat. Once the three of them were sitting, with Joe standing restlessly to the side, Gil turned to Ashley and said, “Look, I know you’ve a rocky history with us, and I’m not here to pretend that you haven’t, but we both want the same thing: to find out what happened. I know all of this has been incredibly hard on you all, but whatever has happened in the past is in the past. You and me are starting from a clean slate. Okay?”
“Okay,” Ashley said slowly, warily.
“Thank you,” Gil said. He took a deep breath and said evenly, “There have been some new developments today that we think could be related to Brianna’s case. I just wanted to come sit with you in person and talk about them, okay?”
“Okay,” she said again, less wary. Gil nodded. By repeatedly asking her permission to talk about the subject, he was trying to get her to feel like she was in control of the conversation. He knew she needed that control right now.
“Now, you’re going to hear things over the next few days, and those things may or may not be true, but I will always tell you the truth. I may not be able to tell you everything, but I will tell you as much as I can. Does that sound all right?”
She nodded.
“So, all of this means you’re going to have to trust me just a little bit. Do you think you can do that?”
She nodded again, looking scared. Gil took a deep breath to collect his thoughts. He could see Joe standing behind Ashley. His face was surprisingly tight with anger.
Gil turned his attention back to Ashley and watched her closely as he said, “This morning, we found a skull.”
He watched her for a moment as she tried to hold it together, looking anxious but okay, considering the situation, so he continued, “Now, it was in the ashes from Zozobra, and it was the skull of a child.” She nodded her head as she started to cry quietly, but she didn’t fidget. Mrs. Rodriguez looked down at her hands. Gil couldn’t tell them everything. The newspapers would be calling the family shortly, looking for a comment. He would only reveal to them the basic facts that the newspaper would already know: that they found a skull in Zozobra. Period. End of story.
“You think it’s Brianna?” Ashley said, biting her lip to keep from crying.
“It’s possible,” Gil said. A few tears fell on Ashley’s cheek. “We won’t know until we can do a DNA—”
“But she drowned in the arroyo. How did she get there?” Ashley asked, clearly fighting to keep composed.
“I don’t—”
“Where’s the rest of her?” Ashley asked, looking at her mom, who got up from her chair with tears in her own eyes and went to hold her daughter. As they twined their arms around each other, Gil noticed a few faint scars on Ashley’s wrists.
“Did she get burned alive?” Ashley asked, as her tears, now freed, started to overwhelm her.
“No, we don’t think—”
“Oh my God, oh my God . . .” she said, looking wildly at her mom.
“Ashley—” Gil said.
“Who would put her there? Oh my baby, oh my sweet baby.” Her face was pressed hard into her mom’s shoulder, and she started to sob as if she were gasping for air. She popped her head up suddenly and said, “I think I’m going to be sick.” Gil jumped up to help pull her and her pregnant belly off the chair. Her mom escorted her to the bathroom down the hall.
As soon as the two men were left alone, Joe turned to face Gil and said, “What the f*ck was that—”
The sounds of retching come from down the hall. Then running water.
“Okay, that’s gross,” Joe said, before turning back to Gil and saying, without lowering his voice, “What was all that shit about ‘whatever the cops did in the past I’m better than that’?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s sure as hell what I heard,” Joe said.
“Joe, I never meant to insult you or Detective Fisher—”
“That’s a load of crap—”
“I was just trying to establish a rapport with her.”
Mrs. Rodriguez came back in the room, saying, “I think she needs to lie down.”
“I understand,” Gil said just as the front door open and someone yelled, “Tía, we’re here.”
“That’s my nephew, my sister’s son,” she said, looking stricken. “I forgot, Ashley’s babysitting them. They don’t have school because of fiesta.”
A boy and a girl came into the kitchen and immediately looked at Gil with disdain.
The boy had blond Chia Pet hair, sticking straight out from his head in a round fuzzy ball. It was a crew cut gone wrong on a boy who shouldn’t have had one. In Northern New Mexico slang, he would have been called a coyote—a person who is half white, half Hispanic. It wasn’t a racial slur, only a locally used description, like Anglo or Pueblo Indian.
Next to him, holding his hand, was his girlfriend. She didn’t look nervous, more like ready for a fight, but then she was used to this, too. The excitement of being interviewed by the police had probably worn off months ago. She had dark eyes and a distinctive nose that Gil’s father would have said made the girl a Southern Colorado Hispanic. Long ago, two enclaves of conquistador descendents separated—one group stayed in Northern New Mexico and the other went to Southern Colorado. His father insisted that the passage of time had given each group defining physical characteristics. In the north, they tended to be taller and thinner and have bigger noses. In the south, they were stouter and had flatter faces. This, his dad would say proudly, was where Gil’s height came from. Their northern relatives.
The girl wore the typical heavy black eyeliner sweeping on top of the lid. It had been a popular look for Northern New Mexico girls since he had been a teenager. His wife said it made the eyes look more almond shaped. He thought it just made them all look sinister.
“Are you Justin and Laura?” Gil asked. Neither one of them answered, but the girl said mockingly, “More cops, great.”
“They found something,” Mrs. Rodriguez said, trying to pacify them.
“Where’s Ashley?” Justin asked.
“She’s not feeling good,” Gil said.
“Is she all right—” Justin started to ask, before Laura interrupted. “She’s supposed to be taking us to the Plaza for fiesta.” Laura was wearing a short-cropped pink tank top and running pants with sneakers, looking like one of the Bratz dolls Gil’s daughter Joy used to like so much. She had the attitude to match.
“I don’t think she’s up to it,” Mrs. Rodriguez said.
“Fine,” Laura said.
“Can I talk to you guys for a second?” Gil asked.
“No,” Justin said sharply.
“C’mon, dude, it’s about Brianna,” Joe said.
Justin rolled his eyes—and in that expression, Gil saw how tired the boy was. Not just of the questions, or of the police, but of all of it. Of death, or the possibility of it.
Lucy left her money on the table and waited for Gerald to catch up with her by the front door. He was taking his time, shaking and reshaking hands and smacking a few backs. She looked down at the racks of newspapers. Her newspaper was there, the Capital Tribune, along with the competition, the Santa Fe Times. There were also at least three weeklies there called things like Light Source, which sounded like it should be about proper lighting techniques for your home, or Heart Spirit, which sounded more like a name of a Kentucky Derby winner. Actually both newspapers were about the same thing—alternative healing. Santa Fe’s million-dollar industry. The weeklies advertised tarot readings, energy work, past life regressions, and somatic polarity. Lucy had lived in Santa Fe for a year and a half, but she had yet to get used to the Weird White People Syndrome—an illness afflicting only the entitled rich who came to town to experience the “magical healing” of the area.
They all came from the same cookie cutter. They were well-off, in their fifties or sixties, from back east; they drove huge SUVs and moved to Santa Fe for “the wide-open vistas.” They shopped at organic food stores. Went to art gallery openings. Sipped wine and talked about holistic bodywork.
Lucy turned her attention to a nearby bulletin board covered in a collage of the same kind of advertisements. There were flyers for yoga classes and various types of massage using crystals, Reiki, and organic honey. There was one for communicating with pets, including those who “had passed.” Lucy couldn’t imagine any reason someone might want to contact a dead pet. Unless Fluffy had learned how to talk, what the hell good would it do?
Laura had pulled Justin’s hand onto her lap. She was definitely the one in charge of the relationship.
They sat in the living room, the two teenagers on the couch with Gil across from them in an easy chair. Joe stood nearby, restless as usual, while Mrs. Rodriguez went to check on Ashley.
Justin was fidgeting, tapping his foot, which was in contrast to his casual posture as he leaned back into the couch. Nervous but trying to hide it.
“It’s possible we found Brianna,” Gil said. Maybe, he thought wistfully, if he had been allowed to interview them properly, he could have saved that information to be used as needed, to get a response—but the chief had been clear.
“Yeah, we guessed that,” Justin said.
“You don’t seem too broken up,” Joe said.
“Whatever. This time, just check to make sure it’s human,” Justin said. Joe, perpetually pissed off, snorted in disgust.
Gil knew what Justin was referring to. A month after Brianna went missing and a week before the family filed the lawsuit, forensic teams were digging in the backyard of the Rodriguez house. They were using heat-sensing technology that could locate decaying flesh. The equipment and the tech were on loan from the FBI. Someone had gotten too excited by a heat signature coming from a few feet underground—or maybe because of the FBI presence. The family had been corralled in the house and kept there, being questioned on and off, while forensic techs dug carefully for over twenty-four hours, finally uncovering the family dog, which had been buried a year earlier.
“This isn’t no dog,” Joe said.
“But it’s not Brianna,” Laura said with a cock of her head.
“What makes you say that?” Gil asked as the phone in his pocket started to vibrate. He ignored it.
“Because of your track record,” she said, annoyed.
“Besides, Brianna drowned in the arroyo,” Justin added.
Gil looked over at Joe, who looked out the window. Gil wasn’t sure what else they would get out of the visit. He wasn’t even sure what they had hoped to get. He felt like he had just opened a book in the middle and started reading, with no sense of plot, characters, or back story. He felt his phone vibrate again in his pocket but continued to ignore it. He wanted to finish.
“What we found points to a small child—” Gil said before the girlfriend jumped in.
“Yeah, well, come talk to us when you know for sure,” she said.
Gil decided that he was pushing the limits of what Chief Kline had wanted him to do. He was taking down all their new contact information when his phone vibrated again.
“Thank you for your time,” Gil said automatically as he headed out the door. Once outside he popped open his cell phone just in time to catch it before it went to voice mail.
“Gil,” his chief said before Gil could even get out a “hello.” “Get to the Santuario de Guadalupe. Now.”
Gerald, finally finished with his good-byes, met up with Lucy in the foyer of the restaurant, and the two walked outside together, the new morning starting to cast its shadows.
“We need to talk,” he said.
Lucy groaned. No good conversation in the history of humankind had ever started that way. It was a line used all over the world, a thousand times a day, to break up with boyfriends, to fire employees, and to order assassinations. She waited for Gerald to say something.
He considered his words carefully before saying, “So, what’s going on with you?” He stared her so dead in the eye that she had to turn away.
“What do you mean?” she asked in what she hoped was a calm voice as she looked at her combat boots.
“I mean like on the fire call you seemed . . . out of it.”
“How so?” she said, her voice sounding high to her own ears. She could keep up these deflecting answers for days. She hadn’t even used the classic “Am I?” response yet.
“Have you been drinking?” The question almost made her take a step back. She thought she had been so careful. She had taken every precaution. She had the Breathalyzer. She had popped a mint. She had masked her dark circles with big sunglasses.
Without thinking she gave the lie she’d personally heard a hundred times. It inevitably was uttered by guys who caused DWI crashes and men who’d beaten their girlfriends in an alcoholic haze. She said, “I had a couple of beers.”
“When was that?
“Last night, but I’m totally sober now,” she said. Legally, she knew that at least was true.
“How much are you drinking?”
“I told you, a couple of beers.”
“How often?”
“I dunno. A few times a week. It’s no big deal.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” They stood in the parking lot as Gerald watched her and waited for an answer.
“I don’t know, I’m just . . . I’m tired,” Lucy said.
“Tired?” Gerald asked.
Lucy didn’t say anything more. She only felt honestly, truly tired.
“Have you ever treated patients when you’ve been drunk?” he asked.
“No,” she said. When he didn’t look convinced, she said again, more strongly, “No. Never. I swear.”
“What about driving? Have you driven drunk?” he asked, his voice starting to edge into judgmental territory. Lucy was about to insist that of course she would never drink and drive when she thought about last night. How had she gotten home? She couldn’t quite remember. Surely Nathan had driven her. Although in the morning her car had been at her house, as had Nathan’s. She must have driven home from the Cowgirl. She couldn’t remember. Oh, God. She looked up at Gerald, knowing she had to lie but not wanting to. She did anyway. “No. I’m really careful,” she said firmly.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on with you . . .” he said without finishing the thought, then sighed. “Just . . . take care of yourself.”
“Yeah. Thanks,” she said hesitantly as he turned to leave.
Take care of yourself? That’s what you said to a person you hope to never see again.