The Bone Fire: A Mystery (14 page)

“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 Sureño 13 have been going at it hard,” Joe said. “I have a buddy in the gang task force who says that Sureño 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 Sureño 13 with all its guns and drugs.”

“You’re saying the Gulf Cartel killed Brianna to help Sureño 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?”