The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter FIVE

Friday Morning

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Joe and Gil sat in Tecolote Café waiting to order. Adam had promised to call as soon as he made it to Albuquerque, where they would compare the new bones to the skull. Gil had called Liz on their way to the restaurant but got no answer, so he left a message. Then he called Ashley’s cell phone, but Rose answered instead, her voice worried. Gil could hear a loudspeaker in the background.
“Mrs. Rodriguez, this is Detective Montoya. Is everything all right?” Gil asked.
“It’s Ashley,” she said. “She kept throwing up after you left, so I drove her to the hospital. I was worried about the baby.”
“What are the doctors saying?” Gil asked.
“I don’t know, they’re talking about giving her an IV,” she said, her voice muddled in concern.
“You know, I’m sure it’s just a precaution,” Gil said. “I’ll call back later to check on you.”
As soon as he hung up, Joe started ranting and speculating about Brianna. Gil’s head was aching, and he needed some quiet to figure out their next step.
“Joe, please, let’s just stop talking about it for five minutes.”
Joe looked at his watch. “Okay, five minutes starts . . . now. In the meantime, check out the chest on that girl over there. Do you think they’re real?”
“I don’t know,” Gil said, amazed that Joe’d had time to even notice the woman in the few minutes they’d been in the restaurant.
“Oh, come on. Just make a guess.”
“Fine . . . yeah, I think they’re real,” Gil said absentmindedly, looking over the menu, trying to decide between the breakfast burrito and huevos rancheros.
“Are you nuts? Look how perky they are. You haven’t even looked at her.”
Gil sighed and turned to look, knowing that was what it would take to get Joe to cease and desist. He saw a dark-haired woman of about twenty in a tank top and jeans sitting with a man in a baseball cap. The two looked happy, smiling at each other over coffee.
“I still think they’re real,” Gil said, going back to his menu.
“Are you nuts?”
“I just don’t see a girl from Santa Fe getting breast implants,” Gil said. “That’s an L.A. thing.”
“Oh, man, where have you been? Like, statistically, half a million women a year get boob jobs. That’s like five million in ten years. Not all those women live in L.A.”
“If you say so,” Gil said quietly as the waitress came over to give them their coffee and get their order. Joe had decided on pancakes. As soon as the waitress left, he started up again. “Personally, I’m not against fake boobs. I know some guys think they’re too hard, but I’m all about image, you know what I mean?”
“No,” Gil said, taking a sip of coffee.
“Geez, Gil, we’re just talking here. Lighten up.”
“Joe, I just don’t think I have enough personal knowledge about fake breasts to make an informed decision,” Gil said with a smile. His attempt to lighten up.
“Well, I can tell you anything you want to know. I’ve done a lot of research on the subject. For instance, if you have an experienced doc, they won’t let you go too huge, like some of the porn stars.”
“Okay.”
“Dude, you have to know what I’m talking about. Don’t you ever watch porn?”
“I’ve been meaning to get around to that.”
“You’re telling me you don’t watch porn?”
“I have a wife and two daughters.”
“Every man watches porn. I don’t care if you’re married, single, gay, or straight,” Joe said. Gil didn’t answer, hoping Joe would let it drop. He should have known better. “You’ve never looked at porn?” Joe asked. “Never?”
“When I was a teenager . . .”
“So you were normal once? Thank God. I was worried,” he said, taking a large sip of his coffee. “Now I want to point out two things. One, it’s been five minutes, and two, the take-home message from this conversation is that you have, in fact, seen porn.”
Gil chuckled as his phone rang. It was Dispatch telling him to get to the cathedral.
Gladys Soliz Portilla looked at the green liquid on the bathroom counter. It was a small amount, but she had no idea what it might be. Toothpaste? A spilled energy drink? She sighed and wiped it up, wondering yet again why the hotel didn’t provide them with latex gloves for protection, not only from unknown substances they found in the guests’ rooms but also from the toxic chemicals they used for cleaning. Not that she would ever complain. Her only goal at the moment was to keep out of sight. Maybe after she became a citizen, she would join the hotel workers’ union.
She sprayed the mirror with the cleaner and wiped, ignoring her own reflection. Even so, she could make out the uniform she was wearing. A green polo shirt and black pants. Her long hair tied carefully back. The green shirt made her skin look strange, but their uniform was still better than the ones at other hotels, where they had to dress in silly gray maid uniforms with white collars.
She looked over the small bathroom to make sure she was done and then surveyed the rest of the room to see what else needed to be cleaned. In the closet, she saw hanger after hanger of little-boy clothes. She smiled as she touched them. They would look so cute on her son. As she made the bed, she saw that the boy had thrown his toys all around the room, so she picked them up and put them in a careful circle in the corner as if they were playing a game, thinking he would like that when he came back.
She locked the door of the room and pushed her cart to the next room. She knocked and called out, “Housekeeping,” in a loud voice. No one answered, so she let herself in. She started at the front of the room and quickly vacuumed the floor, watching the cord and making sure she didn’t run over the many clothes that were thrown around. She went out and got her dusting spray and her cloth. When she got to the desk, she began to wipe one corner, just visible under more clothes. She stopped the second she saw that her hand was right next to a stack of money. She froze, holding her breath, worried that any minute someone would come in and catch her staring at the pile of hundred-dollar bills. It was a big stack. Maybe about three thousand dollars’ worth. Her take-home pay at the end of the month was only about eleven hundred dollars, and her rent alone was seven hundred.
She quickly stopped dusting and went right to the bathroom, wiping vigorously. She felt the need to leave the room as soon as possible.
In a few minutes, she was done. As she locked the door behind her, she wistfully hoped that a person with that much money would leave her a tip. Guests never left her tips. She wasn’t even sure she would know what to do if she got one.
It had been a hotel worker who noticed the bones this time. He had been rushing to get to his front-desk shift on time and decided to cut through the church gardens. He stopped when something caught his eye. One of the statues—Our Lady of the Rosary—seemed to be cluttered with something colorful, but he was too far away to tell what it was. He debated going over to check on it. He was already late for work, but curiosity got the better of him. As he went closer, he saw Christmas lights twining around the statue of Mary and over green vines clutching an arched trellis that formed a half circle over the statue. Hanging off the shoulders of the statue was a cape made of broken digital and old-fashioned watches, stitched together by thin silver wire. He thought it was a prank or some kind of weird art.
A mobile hanging from the arch swung in the breeze and clinked together, catching his attention. It had a white rod from which dangled more white pieces that looked ceramic.
He was the son of a Wisconsin hunter, who had helped his father dress many deer before he was old enough to shoot his own. He remembered his father once telling him that one of the only ways to tell a human femur from that of a deer was to look at the bone’s core. He wondered why that had occurred to him as he stared at the display. It took a moment for it to register—the white rod of the mobile swinging merrily in the wind was a tiny femur.
Gil and Joe arrived at the scene within minutes of the call. They had taken their food to go. While Gil drove to the cathedral, Joe ate his pancakes with his bare hands. Gil just left his food in the car. On the way to the church, Gil had called the officer on scene and told him to shut the area down, giving him the same instructions as he had the officer at the Santuario crime scene.
Gil and Joe were silent as they walked around to the side of the cathedral, into a cool, green alcove that smelled of earth and flowers. There was no crowd here, only two police personnel looking tense, holding a makeshift curtain to protect the scene from the public eyes. The cathedral, in the heart of downtown, would be much harder to secure than the Santuario. Here all the buildings were squished together, forcing locals and tourists alike to walk everywhere. When they shut down the streets, someone would notice. Then the media would notice.
Gil suddenly got an idea. He walked over to one of the officers and said, “Have the guys on the crime scene line tell people who ask that the road is being shut down for fiesta Mass.” That should stall questions for a while. Gil looked at his watch: 10:50 A.M. It didn’t give them much time before noon Mass, when the mayor, the city council, and other fiesta attendants, including his mother and Aunt Yolanda, would be arriving.
Gil walked over to the statue of Mary and stood in front of her. She was stark white and small, standing about three feet tall and set on a brick pedestal. This statue, unlike the huge, overwhelming one of Our Lady of Guadalupe, was elegant and refined. Under the cape of watches Gil could see the careful detail of her ornate robes, almost lost in the white-on-white stone. Mary’s face was not downcast this time but looking straight forward. She wore a large crown and held a rosary dangling in her hands. The flowered vines that covered the trellis hung sweetly over her head, but the Christmas lights twisting around the statue covered her beauty. The killer had tied Mary up with the green wires and dead lightbulbs of the holiday season.
Joe looked at a gold plaque placed by the church at Mary’s feet, then started to read aloud: “Mother of Life, intercede before your Divine Son for the victims of abortion, euthanasia, domestic violence, murder, capital punishment, abuse, genocide, warfare, and other manifestations of the culture of death.” He shook his head. “I think that’s what you call ironical.”
Gil wondered if Joe knew how true that statement was, because this statue of Mary was not only called Our Lady of the Rosary but had another name—La Conquistadora. Our Lady of the Conquest.
The statue was a stone version of a four-hundred-year-old wooden figure that had her own ornate chapel inside the cathedral. Her history was the history of Santa Fe. The history of fiesta. It was she who had conquered New Mexico for the Spanish.
The wooden statue of La Conquistadora, made of willow wood from Spain, had come to New Mexico with the first waves of colonists who settled the area four hundred years ago, and she escaped with them to Mexico, a hundred years later, during the Pueblo Revolt. When the colonists, led by Don Diego de Vargas, came back to try to resettle the land, she was there again, and it was to her that Don Diego prayed, asking that he be able to take back the city without bloodshed. Since that day, all Santa Feans have honored his prayer to La Conquistadora by holding fiesta. Gil wondered if it was a coincidence that someone had put Brianna’s bones in front of a statue of La Conquistadora during fiesta weekend.
Gil clicked open his phone and called Officer Kristen Valdez, who had been at the office earlier for the meeting. “I need every available officer to check all religious sites in the city,” he said, “especially ones dedicated to Mary. Is that something you can coordinate from there? We’ll need someone with a map making sure we hit all the spots.”
“No problem,” she said. “What are they looking for?”
Gil gave her a description of what they had found so far and said, “Joe and I will check the rest of the cathedral property since we’re already here.”
Just as Gil was hanging up, Kline and Garcia showed up together again. Gil, with Joe tagging along, went to join them, and the four men walked away from the scene, making sure no one was in earshot. Gil told them about Valdez organizing the search and about the precautions they had taken at the scene.
“Sounds good,” Kline said. “Any ideas about what we’re dealing with here?”
“I think it’s a serial killer,” Joe said. “He’s playing with us.”
“A serial killer? In Santa Fe?” Garcia said. “That’s a new one.”
“Maybe someone who moved into the area recently?” Joe said. “Or maybe somebody who hates Catholics.”
“Maybe,” Kline said. “What do you think, Gil?”
Joe answered for him. “He thinks it’s a killer with a guilty conscience.”
“What do you mean?” Garcia asked, turning to Gil.
“Well, assuming these bones are Brianna’s, I think we can all agree that whoever killed her and set up this display is not your run-of-the-mill suspect,” Gil said. “I think he has a mental disorder and he’s feeling guilty for killing Brianna. He knows it was wrong and makes these displays to show God that he’s sorry. Mary is the main saint who intercedes with God on a sinner’s behalf.”
Garcia nodded, then recited a line from the Hail Mary, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners . . .”
“Exactly,” Gil said.
“Dude, all I know about the Virgin Mary is that she sometimes shows up on cheese sandwiches and tortillas,” Joe said to no one.
“So you’re thinking that the elaborate display is part of his disease presentation?” Kline asked, ignoring Joe.
“It might be,” Gil said.
“Just because the guy is nuts, that doesn’t mean he’s not a serial killer,” Joe said.
Gil sighed, tiring of this back-and-forth with him. “That’s true, but statistically serial killers make up only a fraction of all homicides. I think it’s more likely that Brianna’s killer is local and mentally ill and that this was his first kill. There was some recent stressor that made him do all this,” Gil said, gesturing to the statue.
“Could it be something to do with fiesta?” Joe asked, finally releasing his death grip on the serial killer idea. “It seems strange that it’s this weekend.”
“The whole fiesta thing is really about Mary,” Gil said, thoughtful.
“What about a cult?” Garcia asked. “We’ve a fair number of weird religious groups around here.”
“It’s something to consider until we have any other ideas,” Kline said, then added calmly, “I know we don’t have much experience with this kind of case. So if this is too much and we need more manpower, we can always call in the state police or the FBI.”
Lucy pulled up to her house and saw Nathan sitting on her front porch, going through her mail.
She rested her head on the steering wheel for a moment before getting out of the car.
“What are you doing here?” she said to him, annoyed. “Why are you opening my mail? Can you say federal offense?”
“Did you know they’re going to disconnect your electricity on Monday unless you pay nine dollars and five cents? Why wouldn’t you just pay that? Maybe if it was like two hundred, but nine dollars?”
Lucy grabbed the mail from him. “What are you still doing here?”
“I can’t find my keys. I must have dropped them inside.”
Lucy rolled her eyes and opened her front door.
He clumped in after her, saying, “I thought about trying to get in one of the windows, but I already have two B&Es and I don’t need a third strike, you know.”
“That’s the exact same problem I have with my prostitution charges,” Lucy said, throwing the mail down on a side table.
“Really?”
Of course she would pick up a felon with no sense of humor, who in broad daylight had really bad tattoos and some disturbing scars on his neck. She fished the licorice black rock out of her pocket and dropped it into a bowl by the front door. In the bowl were other candy-colored rocks and a few pottery shards. Lucy had taken to picking up pieces of the mishmash she saw on the desert floor, thinking they made an organic kind of potpourri.
They went into the bedroom to search for his keys, throwing aside dirty clothes. After fifteen minutes, they still hadn’t found them.
Lucy looked at her watch. It was 10:00 A.M. She worked the night shift at the newspaper—usually getting in by around 2:00 P.M. and getting done by 11:00 P.M.—but today she needed to be in by 11:00 A.M. so she could meet her boss for her first yearly review.
“Look, Nathan, I have to be at work in an hour. Do you have an extra set of keys or anything? I don’t think we’re going to find them here.”
“Yeah, back at my place. We can go over there to get them.”
“I can’t really do that. I have to get to work. How about I just call you a cab?”
He shrugged.
As they waited for the taxi, he sat on her bed. She needed a shower, but didn’t want any nakedness to happen until after Nathan left, so she put on her makeup. She would just have to avoid getting her face wet while washing her hair. She watched Nathan’s reflection in the mirror as she put on some cover-up. He was studying her bedroom in all its Goodwill furniture glory.
“Why do you have all these chairs in here?” he asked.
She looked at the walls lined with five wooden chairs that once matched a table, long since gone.
“It’s for when I play musical chairs with myself.”
“Really?”
She sighed. “No. I was trying to make a joke.”
As she patted on face powder, she realized the chairs were from a game of sorts. One she had played with her ex-boyfriend, Del Matteucci. The game had been called Let’s Move a Thousand Miles Away and Then Break Up. It wasn’t a very fun game, and she was definitely the loser. She had come to Santa Fe a year and a half ago to be with Del. She had wanted to stay in Florida, but he got offered a photography job at the Santa Fe Times. She had hoped to get a reporting job, but in the end, she took the only job she could find—night editor at the Capital Tribune. Six months later, they split up. The chairs, along with the rest of their joint possessions, became the playing pieces in the Break Up game. He won the coffeemaker and silverware, and she got the chairs.
She had half of her makeup done—so the left and right sides of her face looked like before and after makeover pictures—when she heard a honk of a horn.
“Nat, the cab’s here,” she said.
“Okay, sure.” He didn’t move.
“So, let’s all go out to the cab now. Come on. It’ll be fun.” She made shooing motions with her hands at him.
He finally got up, and they went to the door. He hesitated in the door frame. It was only at that moment she realized he might try to kiss her good-bye.
“I’ll just see you out to the cab,” she said to forestall any such thing.
She walked the few feet outside to the cab door, opened it, and said a sunny “Bye-bye. See you later.”
“Umm . . . you know . . .” Nathan started to say, not getting into the cab.
“Look, I really need to go,” Lucy said.
“Yeah, I know. It’s just that, you know, I don’t have any cash.”
“You work at a bar. Don’t you have money from tips?”
“Not really. Last night was really slow. Plus I owed this guy some money . . .”
He tried to do his best cute-dog eyes, which worked since he was still wearing his spiked dog collar.
“Fine. Whatever.” She went back inside and got her wallet. Outside, she said to the cabdriver, “How much to take this guy home?”
“About fifteen dollars.”
“Swell,” she said. “Do you have change for a twenty?”
“You know, I just realized,” she heard Nathan say from the backseat of the cab, “I’m going to have to take a taxi back here to get my car.”
Lucy leaned her head against the roof of the cab and started laughing. What was supposed to have been a free and easy one-night stand was going to end up costing her thirty dollars in consequences. She pulled another ten out of her wallet and gave it to Nathan as he said, “I really appreciate it. I’ll call you—”
“Take care.”
“But how will I pay you back—”
“See you later.”
“If you—”
She walked away, shaking her head. God, but she was a moron. She had just paid a man to go away.
Joe followed Gil as they entered the cathedral to check for any additional signs the killer might have left inside. Joe stood back a ways, looking uncomfortable.
Gil crossed himself with the cool holy water as he went though the doors. The church was just over a hundred years old, young by Santa Fe standards, and had been built in the French-Romanesque style. The interior was bright with sunlight, and tall ceilings were crisscrossed with flying arches. The locals had added their own touches, too. The Stations of the Cross were made in the santero style, and the huge altar screen featured Native American and Mexican saints.
Gil walked over to the front of the altar and genuflected, crossing himself and kissing his thumb.
“What am I supposed to do?” Joe whispered. “Bow or something?”
“Just keep walking,” Gil said.
“Man, I hate churches. When can we go investigate something in a bar? Now that’s my scene.”
They went over to the chapel of La Conquistadora, which was to the left of the altar. This was the only part that remained of the adobe church that had stood here since the 1700s.
The back wall of the chapel was completely taken up by a huge, ornate altar screen, painted in gold, rose, and green. The star of the screen was the two-foot-tall La Conquistadora statue. She was perched on her own special balcony, with a spotlight on her stoic face. She held baby Jesus in her arms and a rosary in her hands. Her long brown hair was made of real human strands and flowed out from under a crown made of gold and gemstones—and this was only her replacement crown. Her original crown was too valuable to be left out in the open, so it was safely stored in the vault of a local bank. The statue had its own collection of 150 dresses and $200,000 worth of jewels, including emerald earrings, silver bracelets, and a turquoise squash-blossom necklace. Today she was wearing a gown of black velvet with tiny red roses embroidered on it and a mantilla of white lace surrounding her.
Between the adoring public and the altar screen was a tall wrought-iron fence to keep the worshippers from getting too close to the four-hundred-year-old statue. A line of votive candleholders, some with flames winking red in the semidark, stood in front of the fence.
“So that’s La Conquistadora?” Joe said. “She looks kind of pissed.”
“Actually, I’m not sure if this is her or if this is the traveling La Conquistadora. They switch the two of them around sometimes.” He stood back and looked more closely at the statue’s face. “No, I think this is the real one.”
“What are you saying? This statue has a body double?” Joe said.
“Pretty much. The other one is over at the chapel in Rosario Cemetery. That’s the one that gets used for processions out of town and other things that might be too hard on the original one.”
“Sounds like overkill to me,” Joe said.
“She’s the oldest statue of Mary in the U.S.,” Gil said. “You have no idea what a big deal that is to Catholics.”
“What, are they afraid someone is going to take her?”
“Actually, yeah,” Gil said. “She was kidnapped in the seventies.”
“No way,” Joe said.
“It was huge news,” Gil said. “The governor and everybody was involved. There was a ransom note, and a priest was told to ring the cathedral bells to make the exchange. It ended up just being a couple of teenagers who stashed her in an old mine.”
Joe seemed to look a little more respectfully at the statue as Gil put a dollar into the collection box and used a small stick to light one of the red votive candles. Then he crossed himself, saying a quick prayer for Brianna.
They left the chapel and did a quick sweep of the rest of the building but found no other displays. They were leaving when Joe asked, “Why did your Don Diego de Vargas dude haul the statue all the way up here from Mexico? I gotta say, it’s kind of weird that a grown man carries around a statute of a lady. I guess they didn’t have blow-up dolls back then—”
“Knock it off,” Gil said sternly, the way he did when he was telling one of his daughters not to back-talk. “Show some respect.”
“Sorry. It’s just that I don’t get all this stuff. I mean, you guys build this whole church for her and she’s not even here all the time . . . Come to think of it, my ex-wife was a lot like that.”
Outside in the sunshine, they watched the crime scene tech finish up her work. She was packing the cape made of watches into an evidence bag, causing Gil to look at his own watch. It was 11:10 A.M. Just under a hour until fiesta Mass started, when hundreds of people would swarm the area on their way into church. They had to get this cleaned up soon.
His head started aching again as he thought through the case so far. Every turn they had taken today had offered nothing more than frustration. They still didn’t even know if this was a murder case, or if the bones were Brianna’s. Until they got either of those facts, they had little to do, except constantly slam their heads up against a wall of theories. Which seemed to be Joe’s method, and probably why Gil had a headache. To distract himself, he put a call in to Officer Valdez.
“Kristen, how is the search going?” he asked. “Anything so far?”
“Nothing yet,” she said, sounding a little stressed. “I had to let a couple officers respond to an accident on Cerrillos Road, so I lost some staff.”
“The cathedral is empty,” Gil said. “How are we doing checking other places with a Mary connection?”
“Well, we cleared the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, and I have someone going to Santa Maria de la Paz. Do you think we need to expand it to other places? How strong is the Mary connection?”
“Pretty strong.”
“How likely is it that there are more of these displays out there?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Gil said, considering the question for the first time. “If he decides to use all of the bones in displays, that could be a few more. So far, we’ve only collected a head, a femur, and toe and finger bones, and about a dozen other bones I couldn’t identify. How many bones are there in the human body?”
“The adult human has two hundred and six bones, but kids have more than that,” he heard Joe say behind him.
“Really?” Gil asked him, wondering how Joe ever had reason to know that information. “Okay. That leaves more than a hundred and eighty or so bones for him to keep putting around town.” He hadn’t considered the possible enormity of their situation yet. There was no way they could keep a lid on so many crime scenes. “Okay, Kristen,” he said, trying to get his head back in the game. “Let’s check that mural of Mary over on Alto Street. And I think there’s a cottonwood stump on Alameda that’s been carved into a statue.”
“Jesus, Gil,” she said. “If we start looking at all the images of Mary in town we could be at this for days.”
That was his new fear.
Gil had volunteered to check out the Rosario Chapel near downtown. It was only a mile or so away and situated back from the road, within the Rosario Cemetery.
“Let’s go lights and sirens,” Joe said as they got in the Crown Vic.
“No,” Gil said, starting to lose his patience. “You know the protocol. We can’t do that unless someone’s life is in danger.”
“You did it before when we went to the cathedral,” Joe said.
“That was under orders from the chief when we knew we were going to a crime scene.”
“There is going to be a crime scene right up here in this car if you don’t put the siren on.”
Gil ignored him, instead listening to the scanner to see if there was any chatter about other sites.
“You are such a safety dog, Gil,” Joe said, not letting the issue go.
“A what?” Gil asked, not sure what he was talking about.
“A safety dog. Like the guy who gets dressed up in a dog costume and goes to schools to tell kids to not play with matches or whatever.”
“I think that’s Smokey the Bear.”
“In my school it was the safety dog,” Joe said with conviction, “and that is so you, man. You always gotta follow the rules.”
Joe and Gil drove down a pine-tree-lined drive into the heart of the Rosario Cemetery. The gravestones were unmatched and uneven. Some were only hand-chiseled on a piece of rock, while others were full marble vaults. A few were written in Spanish from the early 1800s, and there was a scattering of brand-new ones. The names on the graves were from old Santa Fe families—Vigil, Gurule, Pacheco, Baca, and Ortega. In the middle of the graves was the Capilla de Nuestra Se?ora del Rosario, a small chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. To La Conquistadora, specifically.
The capilla had two small circular windows above an arched door, making the front of the church look like a surprised face. There were buttresses on either side of the front door, and a silver bell in the mission-style roof.
The church was built precisely on the spot where Don Diego de Vargas made his famous prayer. The chapel was permanent proof that Santa Feans kept their promise to honor La Conquistadora if she delivered the city to the Spanish. Gil knew the capilla would be closed. It was only opened during the fiesta procession that would take place on Sunday.
It wasn’t the capilla they were coming to see, though. They were coming to check the outdoor altar to Mary.
Gil parked the Crown Vic in the empty parking lot. He and Joe took a minute to steel themselves before getting out. Because they saw what awaited them.
They walked in silence over to the front of a permanent altar that had been erected by the church for open-air Masses. The chest-high altar, made of white marble, was on a dais up four brick steps. Behind the altar, a freestanding beige stucco wall rose up at least two stories. Nestled in a large cutout in the wall was a five-foot-tall white marble statue of the Virgin Mary. Where the other statues of Mary had been ornate, this one was unadorned. She was sculpted in simple flowing robes of white. Her hands were folded in prayer. Her beautiful face, looking down and etched in sorrow and grief, could have been reacting to the display on the altar below her.
This time the killer had been more intricate. Safely away from the prying eyes of the cars that passed by the gated cemetery, he had spent more time here. There was an array of glass containers, some empty and some with red liquid in them. Gil counted fourteen jars in all placed on the edges of the altar. As Gil got closer, he saw that some of the empty jars actually had bones in them. Placed next to each jar was a piece of heavy ivory paper, carefully cut out into a rectangle the size of a playing card and folded in half, like a seating marker at a fancy dinner. On each paper was written one sentence: I was dead and buried.