The Bone Fire: A Mystery (16 page)

Lucy realized she was halfway though the labyrinth. She spent the next few steps worrying that she had somehow gotten lost. But how do you get lost when the only walls are pretend and the path leads only one way? She could simply walk to the center of the maze instead of continuing to follow the brick pathway. It was just three steps away. It would be so easy. She sighed as the cobblestones twisted her away from the center yet again.

“What do you think?” Gil asked as he clipped his paddle holster back on his belt and snapped his ankle holster in place. They stood in the lobby of the detention center, the huge windows looking out over the endless grassy plain, giving incoming prisoners one last glimpse of the big, beautiful outside world. It was cruel, in a way. It would almost be kinder if the windows overlooked an industrial site.

“I think the gang idea just got shot pretty much to hell,” Joe said.

“Yeah, I agree,” Gil said.

“Okay, where does that leave us?” Joe asked.

“I think we have to go back to the family,” Gil said. “There’s a lot of questions I need to ask them.”

“That sounds good,” Joe said, getting into the car. “I’d like to know about this stuff with Ashley’s dad. And, oh yeah, ask her why the hell she lied about who Brianna’s father was.”

Gil headed the Crown Vic back toward town and dialed Mrs. Rodriguez’s
cell phone. She answered and told him they were all still at the hospital. Gil said he would meet her there.

As they drove along Interstate 25 and then took the downtown exit, Gil asked Joe to look over Fisher’s notes for any mention of Ashley’s dad. Joe flipped through a few pages before saying, “Okay, here it is. Ashley’s dad is named Rudy. He and Ashley’s mom split right before Brianna disappeared, but they aren’t divorced. Umm . . . it looks like he works for one of the pueblo casinos.”

“How involved was he in the initial investigation?” Gil asked.

“I’m not sure,” Joe said scanning the pages. “It looks like Fisher talked to him but that it was just a notification. We could check for any prior arrests, but Rudy Rodriguez is a pretty common name around here. Without his age or address, I’m not sure it would do much good.”

“We can get that from Mrs. Rodriguez,” Gil said without pointing out that this was information Fisher should have written down.

A few minutes later, Gil parked the car at Christus St. Vincent Hospital. They went up to the labor and delivery floor and were walking down the hallway to the patient rooms when someone said behind them, “Excuse me, officers.”

They turned around.

“Hi,” said an Anglo man who looked to be about twenty-five, with light brown spiky hair. “Rose wanted me to wait out here until you came. She’ll be out in a minute.”

This had to be Alex Stevens, Ashley’s boyfriend and the father of the current baby—or soon to be baby. Gil introduced himself, noticing that Stevens’s hands were rough and had deeply cut scars. Then he remembered he was a tow truck driver. Joe just nodded a hello to the man. The two of them probably hadn’t seen each other since the family filed the lawsuit.

“How’s Ashley doing?” Gil asked.

“Who knows,” Stevens said. “I haven’t got a clue about all this stuff.”

“Well, good luck,” Gil said, trying to think of a polite way to ask Stevens if he knew the identity of Brianna’s father. He couldn’t think of a way around the awkwardness of the question, so he let Stevens
leave to go relieve Mrs. Rodriguez. Instead, he would try to find out from Mrs. Rodriguez, who came out a few minutes later.

“How’s Ashley?” Gil asked, thinking she would have a better idea than Stevens.

“They have her hooked up to all kinds of machines and tubes,” she said. “She’s not even due for another month. I’m worried the baby will be early like Brianna.”

“We just have a few questions for you and then you can get back in there,” Joe said. They went to an empty waiting area and sat down. Joe sat next to Gil and studiously took out his notebook so he could write down the important facts of the conversation. He was supposed to be unobtrusive about it, but Gil noticed Mrs. Rodriguez looking for any movement of Joe’s pen.

“We’re making progress in the investigation,” Gil said, to distract her, “and we just needed to check in with you about a few things, okay?”

She nodded.

“So, first of all, our investigation seems to be pointing toward someone who has some mental problems,” he said. “Do you know anyone like that?”

She shook her head and said, “No. Not at all.”

“No neighbors or cousins?” Joe asked.

She shook her head again.

“Okay,” Gil said. “That’s fine. The next thing we need to check with you about is Brianna’s father. We just got done talking to Tony Herrera, and he says he’s not her dad. Do you know anything about that?”

“No,” she said, her forehead tightening into rows of confused wrinkles. “As far as I know Tony is Brianna’s father.”

“There is no one else who could be the father?” Gil asked.

“No. Ashley only has ever dated Tony and Alex, and she didn’t even meet Alex until Brianna was two years old.”

“Okay,” Gil said gently. “Now, the last thing we wanted to talk to you about was Ashley’s father. We’re probably going to be talking to him later, and we wanted to get your thoughts about him and his relationship with Ashley.”

“Like what do you mean?” she said.

“Were he and Ashley close?” Gil asked, forcing himself to become an observer of both the conversation and Mrs. Rodriguez.

“Oh yeah, they spent a lot of time together.”

“Did you ever think that he and Ashley might be a little too close?” Gil asked. He kept the words as innocuous as possible, hoping she would fill in the blanks.

“Well . . . I don’t . . . no, I don’t think so,” Rose said, looking away from Gil, considering, not really understanding his implication. Gil had been hoping that if Ashley had been abused by her dad, it had been something the family had already acknowledged, even if slightly. Gil had hoped that the father no longer lived at home because Rose had sent him packing after discovering the abuse.

That would have made the interview easy—he could ask Rose up front about it and get her thoughts. This would be harder. It was clear from her answer that Rose suspected something had happened, but it was also clear that she would never admit it freely. She was trapped, probably unconsciously, within her own guilt and inaction.

“Has Ashley ever had problems with her dad?”

“Only when she was mad, like any teenager.”

“What kind of things did she say?”

“Oh, you know—” She stopped and smiled weakly. “The usual things, like ‘I hate you’ and how she wanted to kill herself.”

“She said that?” Joe asked, too sharply, breaking the flow of the interview with just three words. Rose looked over at Joe and away from Gil. At that moment, Gil had never been angrier with Joe. This was not the annoyance over Joe’s endless conversations about breast size or his rants that reverberated with repetitive swear words. It was pure in its intensity. Gil forced himself to smile and spoke calmly to Rose. “How often would she say things like that?”

“Oh,” Rose said, her openness clearly faltering for a brief second, before her eyes went back to Gil and she said, “for a while there it seemed like every day it was about one thing or another.” She laughed. Gil smiled in response, mimicking her emotions.

“So she acted up a lot?” Gil asked. An abused girl would. It was classic behavior.

“Hijole, yes,” Rose said, shaking her head, smiling, remembering the bad times and rewriting them into funny little stories in her head. “She was drinking and smoking. And lying all the time. She got speeding tickets. I was at the courthouse so much they knew me by sight.”

“She took a lot of it out on her dad?” Gil asked.

“It was to the point that he couldn’t even look at Ashley without her screaming at him,” Rose said with a pitying look. Pity for her husband.

“How was Ashley after her father moved out?”

“She seemed the same,” Rose said. “Maybe a little less angry.”

“Is it possible that maybe she was more relaxed because her dad was no longer around?” Gil asked gently.

“Maybe,” Rose said. She seemed almost surprised she gave the answer with so little hesitation.

“It sounds like Ashley and her dad weren’t all that close,” Gil said.

“I think they were too much alike,” Rose said, agreeing. Contradicting herself. She seemed not to realize that the carefully constructed life that she presented to the world was falling apart under scrutiny. Gil did not point this out. It wouldn’t serve any purpose other than to humiliate her.

Gil took a deep breath to steel himself for the rest of the conversation. “Did you ever think that maybe as Ashley started to mature it was harder for her dad to relate to her?” Gil said. “Maybe that’s why they stopped getting along.”

Rose shook her head, but it seemed less of a negative answer to his question and more of a way to protect herself against what he was saying.

“You know,” Gil said, leaning forward, “it can be very hard for a father when his daughter starts to mature. She was this little girl, and now she’s this beautiful woman that all the boys are looking at.”

Joe started nodding in agreement, slightly redeeming himself from his earlier gaffe. She nodded as well. Gil leaned closer and said, “Rose, is it possible he did more than look?”

She nodded again. Gil felt some of the tension he had been holding on to leave him. “What makes you think that? Did something happen?”

“I don’t know . . . when Ashley was little, he would always tell her to pose sexy when he took her picture,” she said.

“And that bothered you,” Gil said. “That would bother any mother.”

“Then when she was older, he would buy her these tight shirts,” Rose said.

“Were there any other times?” Gil said. He was waiting for more, because he knew from experience there had to be.

“This other time, I came home and he was in the living room pulling his pants up and Ashley was sitting next to him,” she said. “He said he was just adjusting his belt, but you don’t pull your pants down to do that.” She looked up sharply, realizing that she had just described an awful scene in an almost nonchalant way. It was likely she had never told anyone that story. Certainly she had gone over it again and again in her head, cataloguing excuses for her husband and supplying logical explanations of how it was just innocent behavior. Now that she had told the story out loud, she could no longer pretend there was anything innocent about it.

Gil had one last question that he needed to ask before he could free himself from the conversation. “Rose, do you think your husband could have gotten Ashley pregnant?”

Lucy finished the labyrinth and then headed toward the sound of the music. She took the long way around, wondering why the street names downtown were so different than in the rest of Santa Fe. Here, there were no avenidas, calles, or caminos. It seemed strange that the oldest part of town was the one with the most Anglo-sounding streets. She dodged down Washington Street, trying to figure out what its original name had been. The road had already been in existence for a hundred years by the time Washington became president. Some long-dead conquistador captain was probably wondering what had happened to his street.

Lucy loved this part of town. When you stared at it, the history seeped out where the cracked edge of a building showed the adobe underneath. Every building was connected to the next with mismatched roofs and walls, and all of them were built in different
architectural styles that were called things like “Territorial” or “Pueblo Revival.”

As she got closer to the Plaza, the music and noise from the crowd got louder, making Lucy hurry up a step. She had never been to fiesta. It held the title of oldest continual celebration in the country, but it was really about a people who made a promise three centuries ago to throw a party if they were given back Santa Fe. And party they have. Every year since.

Lucy suddenly found herself in the throng. This wasn’t like Mardi Gras or Carnival. There was no raucous celebration or purposeful nakedness. This was nice fun. Family fun. That’s probably why the party had continued all these years. Because it was about family, and what was the native Hispanic population of Santa Fe but one big, genetically isolated family? This was the biggest family reunion in the world.

Mrs. Rodriguez went back into the room to see Ashley while Gil and Joe went to find a doctor. It was time to question Ashley. Beyond time, really. Clearly she had never been interviewed properly, but it wasn’t as simple as just going into her hospital room.

Gil had been there when both of his daughters were born and knew the drill. There were two stages of labor before it was time to push the baby out: the early stage, when the contractions last about thirty seconds and come every twenty minutes, and the active stage, when the contractions are longer and come every few minutes. If Ashley was in early labor, she could hold a conversation, but, if she was anything like Susan, during the active stage she’d be screaming out the pain. Gil needed to know what stage Ashley was in, and for that he needed a doctor.

They found one standing at the nurses’ station. She introduced herself as Dr. Mariana Santiago. Gil explained the situation as best he could to the doctor, then said, “It’s very important that I talk to her.”

Dr. Santiago smiled and said, “I’m sorry. That’s not a good idea. Ashley has a history of premature birth, and right now, we are trying very hard for this baby not to be premature. I’m afraid that any stress could be very detrimental to her and the baby.”

“I really only have a few questions,” Gil said.

“Is it possible that those questions will upset her?” Dr. Santiago asked.

Gil didn’t answer. The questions he had to ask Ashley were probably some of the most stressful she would ever have to answer.

Dr. Santiago smiled again. “I just can’t allow it right now. Check back with me later. When she’s out of the woods, you can ask her whatever you want.”

As she walked away, Joe said softly, “If we just go into Ashley’s room, who is going to stop us?”