The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter SEVEN

Friday Afternoon

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Lucy walked into the newsroom and instantly knew something was up. It wasn’t that people were rushing around. There was just a certain anticipation. Newsrooms were a great barometer of the importance of a news story. For people who live and breathe news, the real deal—not just a story about county taxes—gets them excited. Bad news was their best friend.
Lucy went to her desk and had just turned her computer on when she heard someone say to her, “Hi, boss.”
“Hi, Tommy,” she said without looking. Tommy Martinez was the cops reporter; his charm gave him access to news sources that made him indispensable in the newsroom. “What’s going on? Everyone seems hyper.”
“A skull was found in the ashes of Zozobra,” he said.
“Seriously?” Lucy said, getting excited when any normal person would be horrified. It was the nature of their work. “Are we doing this as the front page spread?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “We haven’t talked about it yet. I’ve been too busy chasing the story.”
“We have to be,” she said. She got up and walked to the photo desk to find a printout of their daily news budget or someone who could tell her the scoop, but there was no one around. Maybe copydesk would know, she thought as she walked toward their warren of cubicles near the front of the windowless building.
She noticed that one of the lights overhead near the entrance to the newsroom was burnt out. The pocket of dark it left meant she could only make out hard shadows as a man came through the door, but she didn’t need extra illumination to make her brain fizz in recognition. She knew who it was.
Gil Montoya. She hadn’t seen him since January, and she wasn’t prepared to see him again. If she had been able to run and hide, she would have, but the only place to go was copydesk’s cubicle corral.
So she stood and stared as Gil walked toward her. She had forgotten how tall he was. How his dark eyelashes made his eyes seem ringed in eyeliner.
He stopped in front of her. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
He said nothing more as she nodded, her brain racing, trying to pin down an appropriate subject for small talk as the silence stretched out. They weren’t good enough friends or unfamiliar enough acquaintances to stand in comfortable silence. Lucy felt the need to make a joke, but then that was how she always felt around him. So she said, “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being in the fires of hell, how uncomfortable do you feel right now? Personally, I’d say I’m about an eight-point-two, but I could be talked into a nine.”
He smiled and said, “I’m going to go with five.”
“Bastard,” she said to him with a laugh. “You just have to show me up.”
“How have you been?” he said.
She considered the question. If she were honest, she would have to say not good. She lied. “Fine,” she said with a smile. “And you?”
Before he could answer, Peter Littlefield, one of the arts reporters, came up, saying, “Gil, it’s good to see you.” The two did the male back-patting hug.
“How’s Susan?” Peter asked. Lucy didn’t hear Gil’s reply. She had forgotten there was a wife. There were kids, too, if she remembered correctly. She let out the breath she had been holding. Why did she feel guilty? Not that she and Gil had ever done or said anything even remotely inappropriate. They really barely knew each other. All their conversations had been business, always business. But . . . but she felt closer to him than to anyone else she had ever known? That was true, but that closeness was simply because he knew her secrets. He had been a spectator to her sins. He knew what she had done and still didn’t shun her. As she would have shunned herself.
Nine months ago, Lucy had met Gil while checking a tip about two cops who were overheard talking about a body. By the time the dust settled, four people were dead, and Lucy was indirectly to blame for at least one of the deaths.
That was what her note in Zozobra had been about. Release me. There were so many things she needed to be released from; she wasn’t even sure which of them she had meant in the note. Release her from her sins, from the past, from the memory? No matter; those were all the same thing. What she really needed to be released from was the stranglehold of guilt that wrapped around her. Guilt for something she knew she wasn’t really to blame for. She felt the guilt, nonetheless. Because what she had said in an offhand remark led to a woman being killed. It was not her fault, but it was her burden.
Lucy kept a smile on her face as Peter and Gil talked. Peter said something about showing a Gil a picture of his new baby on his computer. As the men turned to walk off, Lucy said brightly, “Okay, great. It was good to see you again.” Gil smiled at her and walked away, leaving her feeling cheap and unimportant. She was having a day of feeling cheap. That made her wonder if Nathan had picked up his car yet.
Mai Bhago Kaur was in Natural Foods, looking for vegetables for tonight’s dinner. She watched a young mother next to her grab a handful of garlic and then some peppers as her baby gurgled in the shopping cart seat. Mai Bhago had to stop herself from telling the mother that she was poisoning herself and her baby with such pungent vegetables. Even worse, the woman was wearing down her feminine energies with food that was deeply rooted in heat and anger due to its masculine tendencies.
Mai Bhago reminded herself that the woman probably knew nothing of a sattvic diet. The woman was like most people, who tended to ignore the inherent energies in their foods and then wonder why they had chronic illnesses. What mattered was a food’s prana, or life force. Her own diet of brown rice and mild vegetables might seem too bland to other people, when to her it was rich in subtle flavors.
She found the zucchini that she was looking for and added it to her large assortment of fruit, then pushed her cart toward the front of the store. She mostly ate fruit, often going on fruit fasts. As a result, she was in the Natural Foods store almost daily buying bananas, mango, grapes, and kiwi.
As she passed by the bread aisle, she thought back to a therapist who once advocated the wholesomeness of bread buying.
Back before she had taken the name Mai Bhago Kaur, when she still was called Donna Henshaw and had just become famous, she thought it was the ultimate luxury to hire a cook and a maid. No more food shopping, no more cleaning. Then, after a year on her television show, when she was starting to feel the first grips of depression, her therapist asked her how often she shopped for bread. The woman tried to explain that food is life and it doesn’t just magically appear, it comes from somewhere. Mai Bhago knew that she was supposed to find some deep meaning in this, but she never understood what she was supposed to get out of it until much later, after years of yoga and meditation.
The cashier, a man in his fifties, smiled as she walked up. Mai Bhago knew that smile. The smile of recognition. The cashier would have been about eighteen when her show was on, right in her demographic, although they didn’t call it that back then. She smiled graciously as she started to put her food on the conveyer belt and readied herself for his compliments.
“Hey, it’s the Fruit Lady,” he said merrily and loudly. He had probably meant to be funny, as a conversation starter, but it caused a gut reaction in Mai Bhago.
Her face became plastic, a method her acting coach had taught her after the first time she didn’t win an Emmy. Don’t move the muscles in your face, he would say. Smile but don’t show teeth. You are disappointed you didn’t win but happy for the actress who did. She had spent hours practicing it. At the next Emmy show, when Joyce DeWitt, sitting two rows in front of her, got up to go to the stage instead, Mai Bhago went plastic without a thought. The camera flashed to her and she was plastic. When Joyce breathlessly gave her acceptance speech, Mai Bhago smiled along with the rest of the crowd. Plastic. Stay plastic. She had done it years ago, but she couldn’t do it now.
Mai Bhago took the money out of her wallet and handed it to the stupid, stupid cashier. She grabbed her bag, almost knocking over the person in line behind her. She didn’t apologize. She got out to her car and did some calming stone breaths to center herself, but it was only when she reminded herself that he was just a man, and an impure one at that, that she finally felt calm.
Gil walked back to Joe and the car, wondering why he hadn’t asked Lucy what she knew about the videotapes. That had been why he had gone to see her. When they were face-to-face, it didn’t seem so easy.
He got into the car and pulled out of the parking lot. After a moment, he said to Joe, “Let’s get back to the office and write up our report summaries. Something might jump out at us. At the very least, we’ll have all our ducks in a row in case the FBI shows up. Then we have to get that court order from the police for the tapes.”
They walked into the station and were inundated by questions and offers of help, which Gil was glad of. Gil asked two officers to go through local police reports where a suspect, victim, or patient—or anybody—had expressed delusions, especially about Mary or the Catholic Church. He asked a few other officers to call local churches to see if any had gotten threatening phone calls or letters, or had disgruntled parishioners.
Gil and Joe were just sitting down in front of the whiteboard again when Joe’s phone rang, a personalized ringtone of “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”
He answered, “What’s up?” Followed by “Uh uh . . . uh uh . . . damn. I thought we had something there. Thanks.” He hung up and said, “So there aren’t any national serial killer profiles that even come close to matching this. Could this be a new one? You read all that profile crap, Gil. What do you think?”
Gil tried not to smile as he said, “Well, by definition, a suspect has to kill more than one person to be considered a serial killer. As far as we know, he hasn’t.”
“Damn, I thought we were really onto something . . . I guess it could be a serial killer from, like, Sri Lanka,” Joe said as he looked over the suspect list.
“We still haven’t really thought about the notes he left us,” Gil said. “I think that’s significant. He’s making a statement.”
“Yeah, but what does ‘I was dead and buried’ mean? . . . Wait a minute,” Joe said, as he popped open his phone and started typing. “Okay, so no real hits on the Web with that phrase.”
“Well, let’s just write it on the board for now,” Gil said. “I don’t really have any better ideas of what to do with that. I guess we could have one of the other detectives do more research on it.”
Joe went up to the board and wrote in large block letters I was dead and buried. He then crossed “serial killer” off the suspect type list. Gil wasn’t sorry to see that theory go. That left the suspect list with four items: “pedophile,” “mentally ill,” “cult,” and “retaliation killer.”
Gil was asking yet another officer to find out about getting a court order for the security tapes when his phone interrupted him. It was Liz Hahn, finally returning his calls.
“Sorry that I’m just getting back to you,” she said. “I wanted to have some actual information to pass along. Are you ready?”
Gil went over to his desk and grabbed a blank piece of paper in front of him, saying, “Go ahead.”
“Okay. Before I get started, I just want to remind you that all of this is still preliminary, you know the drill,” she said. “Let’s start with the bones. The ones we have so far appear to match the age and decay rate of the skull.”
“So the general consensus is that the skull and the bones are from the same person?”
“Yes. Next, the bones and the skull performed well under stress tests, meaning that they were exposed to the environment for no more than two years. Also, given the desiccation, the bones were free of flesh for at least six months.”
“So they’ve been dead at least six months, but not more than two years,” Gil said, repeating it back to her. “We can’t do any better with time of death?”
“Nope. Sorry. Next thing is the age and sex of the victim. Now this part is actually straightforward because kids’ bones aren’t fully developed, especially toddlers’. That makes it easier to determine age.”
“Right,” Gil said, remembering how his daughters had the soft spot on their heads—where their skull was still forming—until they were almost two. Gil wondered if Liz ever thought of her own daughter while she did this work.
“Now, the posterior fontanelle in the skull was fully ossified, as was the anterior fontanelle, but the anterior cranial sutures weren’t. In fact, we’re lucky the fire wasn’t hot enough to separate the skull at the sutures, which weren’t very strong yet. Then, of course, as another age indicator, we have the epiphyseal plate’s growth zone.”
“Of course,” Gil said. He knew Liz would eventually spell it out in laymen’s terms, but she liked to use her clinical-speak to ease herself into the eventual normal, everyday language.
“All of this all puts the age right around one and a half to two years old,” she said finally.
“Consistent with Brianna’s age, although she was over two,” Gil said as Joe came over to eavesdrop.
“Yes, but according to medical records she was a preemie, so she would have delayed development,” Liz said. “Then we get to gender. Usually, we determine the sex by the pelvic bone, but that remodeling comes during puberty. So in kids, there isn’t really any sexual dimorphism, which means it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to tell you the gender.”
“Okay,” Gil said. He had been hoping to get a slam-dunk with the forensics, having it point either exactly to Brianna or exactly away.
“Last but not least, the identification,” Liz said, sighing. “We’re checking dental records in the national missing kids registry, but Brianna never went to the dentist, so we have nothing to compare in her case. That leaves DNA. We don’t have any DNA from Brianna, but both of her parents gave us blood and DNA samples last year. So we can use them to verify that the bones are Brianna’s. I’m supposed to tell you that DNA will take a minimum of a week to run, but I can get it done by Tuesday, I think.”
“Thank you, Liz,” Gil said.
“That leaves cause of death,” she continued. “Again, all of this is preliminary. The rest of the bones didn’t show anything unusual, but once we got the melted plastic off the skull, there were three distinct knife strikes through it.”
“Let me make sure I got all this,” Gil said. “We have a one-and-a-half- or two-year-old child of indeterminate sex who was killed in the last year or so.” Gil looked over at Joe before he added, “And was murdered.” As expected, Joe swore loudly.
Gladys Soliz Portilla sat in the hotel break room with the other maids and a few of the janitors. She was waiting for one of the cooks, who had promised to help her buy a Social Security number. He had said it would cost a hundred dollars, but she wanted to talk to him more before she made up her mind.
She already had her driver’s license—which in New Mexico anyone could get as long as they had other ID, even from Mexico—and she had gotten a tax ID number, so she could pay her taxes as an undocumented worker, and a bank account at one of the credit unions. She didn’t necessarily need the Social Security number. She could get along here without it. She was going to try to take some classes at the community college and get her GED, though, and while the college didn’t care if she was documented, she was worried that at any moment someone would ask her for it. To prove that she belonged.
The women she sat with were mostly from Chihuahua, like Gladys, and they were a loud, laughing bunch. She told them about the green spill she found in the room, but they only smiled. One of the women said, “You’ll get used to that. Soon, you won’t even care.”
Another of the women started to talk about a couple she knew who had been killed by bandits while trying to walk across the border through the desert near Nogales in Arizona.
Gladys had no horrible border-crossing story, as so many people did. She hadn’t had to battle the intense heat or days without food. She hadn’t been forced to pay a coyote, then be packed into a truck with dozens of others. She simply walked across the border to Columbus, New Mexico, as she had every day for six years when she was a child. Palomas and Columbus were two small, neighboring towns, and, as such, they shared a school. The school just so happened to be built on the U.S. side of the border. Gladys had gone to Columbus Elementary until she was in the sixth grade, but then she had to drop out to help out her mother at home. She had liked school, especially when she got to write poetry or paint. Now, she wished she had paid more attention in English class, so she could get a job as a cashier or maybe a waitress.
When Gladys went over the border for the last time three months ago, she told the guards that today she was crossing because she needed to register her son for school. They looked at him but didn’t mention that he was too young. Instead, they waved her across. She met her friend who was waiting for her a block away, who then drove her the six hours to Santa Fe.
She knew why the guards let her pass. They had known her husband and her father-in-law. Both had been police officers in Palomas, and both had been killed along with five others when the Juárez Cartel ambushed them as they drove in a convoy. After the funeral, there was talk of whether it also could be the work of the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels. To Gladys, it hardly mattered. Half of what mattered to her was now down in the cold ground, and she was left to protect her son.
She saw the cook come in and motion to her. She went over to him and smiled, saying quickly, “I’ve changed my mind, but thank you.” She didn’t wait for him to talk before she walked back to her table of loud friends. She was doing okay here without a Social Security number. If she had such a number, it might help her, but also make her more visible—and she had to remain invisible. For her son. She had already made herself too visible over the car problem.
Lucy, back at her desk, tried to concentrate on editing the water surcharge story that was on the computer screen. She corrected a few typos and some bad paragraph transitions. She still didn’t know what was going on with the skull story, since the newsroom was doing its best impression of a beehive and no one had time to talk. Work. Work. Work. Tommy was at his desk, laughing on the phone. She wanted to go ask him what he’d found out, but it was better not to interrupt him in precoital interview mode. He was all about phone foreplay. His voice was sweet; you could almost hear him calling you baby as he asked for your phone number. That was if you were, say, a female district attorney. If you were a male police officer, it was all about guns and what could be shot with them.
There were no other stories for Lucy to read in the editing queue, so she checked her e-mail, then decided to do a quick search for stories about car fires in Santa Fe. If what that racist cop said was true, they could have something newsworthy going on at that house.
She typed the street address of 162 Airport Road into Google and was given a map and directions to Hacienda Linda Apartments. So it wasn’t a house. It was an apartment complex. Weird. That probably meant the victims weren’t related and might actually be strangers. They’d all had their cars burned? Definitely weird. Next, she went to their news archives and typed in “car fire” as keywords. Hundreds of entries popped up, so she narrowed the search by date. That left about twenty different police notes and crime stories for her to look through for some kind of mention of other fires.
She was about ten minutes into the process when a police note from three months ago caught her attention.
“The Santa Fe Police Department is investigating the following reports: Firefighters were called to 1608 Calle Capitan on Saturday to extinguish a vehicle fire. The vehicle was beige in color and was a Ford Taurus 2003 with red graffiti markings on its rear passenger side.”
Lucy thought about the red spray paint Gerald had seen on the burned-out car that morning. She wished now that she’d thought to take a look at it herself. It might have told her who was responsible for this.
Joe had papers spread out on the conference room table, searching Fisher’s notes to see if there was a reference to any enemies. The only clean area on the table was where Gil sat, trying to finish up report summaries in between getting interrupted by his ringing phone.
One call was from Adam Granger, who was helping to process the evidence from the scenes. He had little to offer, except that, as expected, they were still working through the many sets of fingerprints on the Our Lady of Guadalupe statue, as well as lip prints where the faithful had kissed Mary’s cloak. They had gotten no usable prints at the cathedral or Rosario Chapel crime scenes, but they did find out that the red liquid in the jars was colored water, not blood.
As Gil was hanging up his phone, Kristen Valdez came into the conference room with a map filled with green X’s.
“So, okay,” she said, sitting down and spreading the map out in front of her, over Joe’s mess. “I think we’ve finally hit almost every religious site in the city that has an image of Mary, which, in case you were wondering, is about seventy-eight places. Now we’ve moved on to other churches and temples, just to cover our bases.”
“How many officers are out there doing this?” Gil asked.
“We have six of our people and then about another five retired guys,” she said.
“What are you saying to the churches when they ask what we’re doing?”
“We tell them it’s an ongoing case and just to call me if there is anything suspicious or they know of anyone who has a particular interest in the Virgin Mary,” she said, snapping her gum.
“Thanks, Kristen, and good job.”
“Yeah, good job, Valdez,” Joe said with a sideways smile. She smiled back as she folded up the map and turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway. “Oh, one more thing I was supposed to pass along,” she said. “We checked priors on the family, but there’s nothing new. Just old traffic violations against the mom, Ashley. Also, of course, the dad is still in jail.”
Joe jumped up. “Thank you, God, I completely forgot.” He yelled, “Thank you, Kristen,” as she went out the door.
When he saw Gil’s blank look he said, “The dad is still in jail, dude. It’s a gang thing.” Joe went up to the white board and added “gang” next to “retaliation killer” under the SUSPECT TYPE list. Just when they had started to narrow it down.
“What are you talking about? What gang would kidnap a little girl and kill her?” Gil asked.
“The Company,” Joe said with certainty. “That’s what the Feds are now calling the Gulf Cartel. I kind of like it.”
“The Gulf Cartel?” Gil asked. “Seriously? Why would they do this?”
“It’s a turf war,” Joe said, looking satisfied, as if he had finally won a long, hard argument. “Brianna’s dad is with the West Side Locos. That’s why he’s in jail. He was dealing heroin for them.”
“The West Side’s biggest rivals are South Side, and they’re a local gang,” Gil said. “I can’t see them doing something this extreme.”
“Yeah, but lately West Side and Sure?o 13 have been going at it hard,” Joe said. “I have a buddy in the gang task force who says that Sure?o 13 is making a play to be the area’s exclusive heroin distributor. They’re trying to push out West Side. And the Company supplies Sure?o 13 with all its guns and drugs.”
“You’re saying the Gulf Cartel killed Brianna to help Sure?o 13 get more territory?” Gil asked. “That sounds pretty weak. Besides, most of those guys have a tattoo of the Virgin on their backs. They revere her. They wouldn’t desecrate a church dedicated to her.”
“They only have her tattoo so when they get raped in prison the guy porking them from behind has to look at Mary while he’s doing it,” Joe said. “Those guys decapitate people left and right. They are crazy-ass killers.”
Gil had to admit Joe was right about that. The drug war across the border in Mexico had been tearing its way north for years and was starting to take pieces of New Mexico with it. Albuquerque, sixty miles to the south, was already beginning to get caught up in its random and astounding violence. The Gulf Cartel was just one of three that were fighting over routes to rich customers in the United States. The Mexican government was even offering a $2.5 million reward for tips leading to the capture of any of the Gulf leadership.
“I guess it’s possible,” Gil said. “Was Brianna’s dad that high up in the gang?” Normally, only lieutenants or higher would be subject to a retribution killing.
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “Let’s go ask him.”
Lucy still hadn’t seen a news story budget by the time she went into the afternoon meeting. Her boss, Harold Richards, who was just one rank below John Lopez, slid her a copy across the long wooden table. The conference room was more of a conference closet, which meant representatives from the various departments who attended the meeting spilled into the hallway. Lopez came in and took his seat at the head of the table.
He said, “So what have we got on the skull story?”
Richards answered, “We’re still chasing it. We have interviews from a couple of the Protectores who found it in the ashes, and we’re trying to get the cops to confirm that the skull belonged to a kid.”
“Do they think it’s Brianna?” asked one of the copy editors.
“No one is saying, so what we have right now is just two guys who saw the skull telling us it looked small,” Richards said.
“What do we have as far as photos?” Lopez asked.
The photo editor, Shaun Kirkpatrick, said, “Of course, we have photos of Zozobra burning, but we’re still trying to find a main photo.”
“Has anyone started a memorial yet at the site where they found the skull, with candles and stuff?” Richards asked. “There has to be one there by now. We could shoot that.”
“Maybe,” Kirkpatrick said, not sounding like he thought much of the idea.
“Let’s just keep chasing it and see what happens,” Lopez said. “What else do we have for the front page?”
“We have another case of bubonic plague in the county,” Richards said. “The fourth this year.”
“That’s about normal,” Kirkpatrick said.
“Anything else?” Lopez said.
Lucy zoned out while they talked, thinking about what she was going to get for dinner. She hadn’t eaten since that morning and hadn’t even gotten a free meal during her truncated review. The others around the table began to make rustling noises, which she took as the sign that the meeting was about to end, but just as they started to stand up, Lopez said, “There’s one more thing.” He waited for them to retake their seats before saying, “The police were here earlier asking for our security camera tapes.”
“What?” Kirkpatrick said. “Why?”
“They were looking into ways the skull could have gotten in Zozobra,” Lopez said.
Lucy finished the thought for him. “It could have been put into the offering box that was in our lobby.”
“Right,” he said. “As per our policy, they have to give us a court order, so if any other officer shows up asking for the tapes, just call me.”
“Wait a second,” Lucy said, confused and hesitant. “I thought the cameras were broken? Didn’t some repairman accidentally cut the wires to them a while ago?”
“That’s right,” Lopez said. “I checked with the security company before I talked with the police. The cameras won’t be fixed until the end of the month.”
“So there are no tapes,” Kirkpatrick said, disappointed. He had probably been hoping that he could use a still picture from the security camera feed to solve his lead photo problem.
“No, there aren’t,” Lopez said. “Of course, we couldn’t tell the police that. We need to be above reproach.”
“How does just telling them that there are no tapes make us below reproach?” Lucy asked. That’s why Gil had been here. He had come to the newspaper with his hat in his hand asking for the tapes. Tapes that didn’t exist. When Gil saw Lucy, though, he didn’t even tell her about it. He didn’t ask her for help. He just stopped by to say hi. For some reason that made her furious.
“This is the way it is done at all newspapers,” Lopez said with a fatherly smile. “You know that.”
“In the meantime, we’re jerking the cops around and making them think we have evidence,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” Kirkpatrick said to her. “Look at the big picture. The police can never think we’d bend over for them. We’re the watchdog. We have to be completely separate from them.”
“I agree with that,” she said, “but in this case—”
“It can’t be a case-by-case issue,” Richards said. Lucy was starting to feel ganged up on. “It has to be across the board. We cannot, under any circumstances, be seen as in the pocket of the police.”
“Wouldn’t we best serve the public by being honest—” she said.
“We are being honest—” Richards said.
“Lucy, you’re just saying this because you’re in bed with them,” Kirkpatrick said, causing Lucy to jump in surprise.
“What?” she asked.
“I just saw you talking to a detective in the newsroom—”
“I believe we’re done here,” Lopez said in his perfectly modulated, infinitely calm tone.