The Bone Fire: A Mystery (13 page)

Gil interrupted him. “I’m going to head into the newsroom for a second. I’ll meet you back at the car.” He went through the glass door before the receptionist or Joe could protest.

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.