The Bone Fire: A Mystery (27 page)

She looked at the door of her room, scared and at the same time hopeful that it might open. That her father would be there. She hadn’t seen him since just before Brianna disappeared. She wondered if her mom had even called him now. She hoped she had. Because Ashley was feeling alone, and scared, and she knew her father would make her feel better. Like she was the only one he wanted or needed. That she was so special and beautiful. She felt suddenly nauseous. She needed to cut herself. To make it stop. But there were so many people standing around her. So she dug her fingernails into her hand until she felt the skin pop and the warm blood. The thoughts didn’t stop, though. They only got louder. Then, blessedly, the next contraction began, searing its way through her abdomen and allowing her to finally smile in relief.

Joe met Gil in the hallway outside the interrogation room.

“Okay,” Joe started. “Here’s my idea. I say we send this guy back to County because I’m sick of looking at him and then go talk to Ashley and her mom some more.”

“Do you think that’ll get us anywhere?” Gil asked.

“No. I honestly think at this point pretty much the only thing that’s going to get us anywhere is kicking that guy’s ass.”

“Anything more constructive?” Gil asked.

“I think that would be really constructive for me.”

“Well, thankfully,” Gil said, “I have another idea. Give me a
second.” Joe wandered off down the hallway toward the vending machines as Gil flipped open his phone and dialed. His sister, Elena, answered, saying, “Hi, Gil. What’s up?”

“Do you know an Anna Maria Roybal? She does adoption law?”

“Hmm . . . maybe. There was an Anna Maria a year ahead of me in law school. Hang on a second, I’ll have to go look for my New Mexico Bar Association directory.” He heard her making noises in the background as she searched for the book. Knowing Elena, it was likely under a pile of legal papers. He heard her thumping around for another couple of minutes before she said, “Okay, here it is.” She gave him the number.

“What time are you coming up?” Gil asked her. Elena would be making the hour drive up from Albuquerque later in the day to go to his aunt’s fiesta party.

“I told mom I’d be there at one.”

“Oh, hey, by the way, Mom made her adovada,” Gil said.

“Fantastic,” she said. “I’ll bring some empty Tupperware.”

They hung up, but Gil didn’t put away his phone. He dialed the answering service for the district attorney’s office again, and left another message for the on-call lawyer to contact him. Nothing had changed with Geisler. Gil still had to interrogate him, but if the DA didn’t return his calls, he’d have to do it without the benefit of legal counsel.

Joe came back, sipping a Mountain Dew. “So what next?”

“A conversation with Anna Maria Roybal.”

Lucy made sure to compliment Andrea on her great investigative work as they drove back to Starbucks, where they had left her car. As Andrea was getting out, she was still buzzing about the story, talking about leads to follow and who to interview next.

Lucy finally said, “I promise you, we will get to it next week, when Tommy can help, okay? Just go have a good day off, and I’ll see you on Monday.”

Andrea said good-bye and closed the door. The car became blissfully silent, and Lucy took a minute to appreciate it. She decided to go on a drive. She took New Mexico 14 away from the city and into
the flat plains of the valley, which was ringed by mountains and old volcanoes gone silent. The ground was covered in low, straight grasses that were drying into a haystack yellow in the late summer heat. The flatness gave way to a few roller-coaster hills.

She topped a rise and saw the desert change from a flat plain to rolling hills of piñon and juniper. Below her, at least two miles away, a crease of green cut the ground. She knew there had to be a river there. The entire state of New Mexico was shades of brown and beige that were occasionally struck through by a line of bright shocking green that held the blood of life—water.

In Florida, she had never thought about water, about what it meant. There was just so much of it. Here it was precious. People had been killed over it. The Pueblo Indians and original colonists had built extensive acequia systems that brought the water from the rivers to the farmlands. They had created a complex system of water rights and inheritance laws around it. Each acequia had its own water board and mayordomo. Often, the water boards held as much power as a city government. All for simple irrigation ditches.

As she got closer, she saw that the river actually had water flowing in it, which was unusual. Most rivers were usually just dry arroyos until a fresh rain filled one up to the brim. The water would churn its way downstream until it petered out, and then the riverbed would be dry again. The arroyos varied widely according to landscape. Some had six-foot-tall cliff banks made of sand, while others were as wide as an eight-lane interstate.

Whatever its size, where there was once an arroyo, there will always be an arroyo. That’s why native New Mexicans shake their heads at newcomers who build their huge houses on an arroyo plain. That arroyo might not fill up with water for several years, but when it did—because it eventually would—that house would be gone.

As Lucy drove over the bridge that crossed the arroyo-turned-river, she saw that this one had a soft sand cliff for its riverbank, its jagged edge stretching off into the distance like a pink puzzle piece.

She thought about the man Gil had in custody, who was stuck in prison simply because of his mental illness. She wondered which prison was she was referring to—his brain or his cell. Just like her
mother’s prison, and her brother’s. A family history of incarceration because of a simple problem of genetics. Lucy wondered if either of her grandparents had it. Or was it some long-lost ancestor who cursed them with it?

She had never met her grandparents. They had disowned her mother when she was in her early twenties over some money issue. Lucy never knew the specifics. They said it was because she was selfish and immature. They never knew that she was already hearing the voices then. The people in her mom’s head told her things. Strange things. They told her that the CIA was watching her and that the government would come for her. She was able to ignore them when she was a teenager. So much so that she finished nursing school and got married.

The people in her head never left her, though. They whispered and yelled and demanded. By the time Lucy was four, the voices started to win. Both her brothers were old enough to go to school, leaving Lucy home alone with a mother who would talk to herself in whispers and write endlessly on newspapers. When her father and brothers came home at night, her mother would pull it together and make a meal, looking drawn and worn, but sane.

By the time Lucy was in first grade, her mother could no longer pretend. That’s when the doctors first showed up. A parade of them with a brass band of various diagnoses, eventually settling on schizophrenia. Her mom was put into a psychiatric hospital to get her started on medication.

A week later, her mom came home looking blank, but no longer talking about the commandos. She would stay on the meds for about three months—three blissful months—then decide she was cured and no longer needed them. It was a cycle that would last until Lucy was eleven. Her dad was long gone by then, having left when Lucy was eight. She, her mother, and her brothers had moved without him to L.A., Atlanta, and then Tampa. Once in Tampa they had moved again and again, with the shifts of her mother’s mind. So often that Lucy had stopped unpacking. Or making new friends at school.

One day the police came to the house. Her oldest brother, Jason,
who was fourteen, had stolen a car. In the middle of a chase with police, he had rolled the car four times. He was in the ICU on a ventilator. Lucy didn’t know it then, but that was the day her life would start. When things would go from the daily drone of almost unbearable to almost bearable.

At the time, Lucy and her brothers had been on what they called “mom watch.” Their mom was taking her medication, but they knew any day she would go off it. Before she did, they would make a plan of which of them would buy the food, which would cook, and which would make sure their mother didn’t try to kill herself—or them—yet again.

By chance, when Jason rolled the car, their mother was fully medicated—and something inside her clicked. She realized that if she went off her medication, she wouldn’t be able to care for her son. Soon the usual three months had passed, but her mom didn’t start complaining about the way the meds made her feel. Jason was moved to rehab, and her mother stayed with him, going in daily to help him with physical therapy. Eventually the rehab facility offered her a nursing job. Her mom had lost so many nursing jobs over the years, and Lucy knew it was only a matter of time until this one fizzled or exploded . . . but it didn’t.

When winter rolled around, they didn’t move to a new house, either. They stayed where they were. It took Lucy another two years to believe that her mother might stay on her medication. By then, though, Jason was starting to hear the voices, and it began again, only this time with a different main character. Her mother became a supporting actor where she had once been the star. It might seem ironic that a sick patient—now better—would be forced to care for another patient with the same disease, but it never seemed that way to Lucy. All she could think was that they would never be free.

She turned around near the Turquoise Trail volunteer fire department and headed back toward town. This time she was so caught up in her thoughts, she saw little of the scenery.

She thought of Alex Stevens. She knew nothing about him, but she hated him just the same. She hated him for preying on someone because the person was mentally ill. For lying and not caring that he
had just ruined another person’s life. And he did lie. Of that Lucy was sure. She just couldn’t understand why. She didn’t know the ins and outs of the Brianna case well enough to make an educated guess, but she was happy to make an uneducated one—Alex Stevens was lying because he’d killed Brianna. This was his crude way of pointing the finger at someone who had no way to defend himself.

Lucy had no problem with this assumption, because the police had assumed much the same way that a mentally ill person must be the killer. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she was mad at Gil. In fact, she was furious. She had thought better of him. She had thought he wouldn’t assume that just because someone was insane the person was guilty. She wasn’t sure why she had granted Gil such lofty characteristics in her own mind. Maybe it was because in the past—their past—he had been so impeccably honest. And good. And kind. And cute. Lucy sighed. She knew how she sounded—like an infatuated girl. Now she was an infatuated girl who had just discovered her handsome prince was only human.

She got onto the interstate and took the exit toward downtown. She kept to the back roads to save time. She took Paseo de Peralta around downtown and headed toward Fort Marcy Park.

She pulled into the parking lot where Zozobra had stood two nights earlier. The ash from the fire had been cleaned up, as had the field that the hill overlooked. It had been carefully turned back into the baseball diamond that it was. Lucy walked over to the concrete slab holding the metal pole that served as Zozobra’s backbone, where a makeshift memorial had been erected overnight for the victim. There was a mass of candles on the ground, some still lit, others long gone out. A rainbow of plastic rosaries twined around the pole. Vases held flowers, some fake, some real, some handpicked from the roadside. There was a large poster that read
HEAVEN HAS A NEW ANGEL
and a fair number of stuffed animals—unicorns, teddy bears, and dolphins. Two women were at the memorial, standing off to the side. They prayed quietly on their rosary. This was typical of how New Mexicans reacted when a child was killed. A few years ago, when the body of an anonymous little boy was found buried in the sand of an Albuquerque playground, the neighbors of the park held
daily rosary services and candlelight vigils. The playground was overtaken by a memorial much like this one. The neighbors said they prayed for the boy because his own family had left him unclaimed and abandoned.

Lucy thought again about Alex Stevens. Had he killed the little girl? Maybe. Probably. She had no proof, though, and she knew Gil would need proof and not just her word that Stevens was lying.

For that, Lucy would have to make use of some of her old-fashioned reporting tricks—and they were called tricks for a reason.

The front desk called to tell Gil that the lawyer had arrived. He went out to greet her. Anna Maria Roybal had brought her two children with her, a boy about eight and a girl a year or two younger.

“I hope it’s all right that they came with,” she said. “We were on our way down to fiesta when you called.”

“No problem,” Gil said as she escorted them through the office and into an interview room.

They all sat down, and the boy immediately started kicking the underside of the table. “Honey, stop that,” Anna Maria said, putting her hand on his leg. The little girl squished down in her seat, clearly intimidated by the whole situation. Joe popped his head in and said, “Hey, Gil, if you wouldn’t mind, could I take the kids on a tour of the station?”