The Bone Fire: A Mystery (31 page)

“They claim there’s vortexes around the city that open up to another universe,” Gil said, “and then there’s an alien landing pad up here in the mountains somewhere.”

“Cool, dude. Can we go look for that?”

“Just as soon as we find out what happened to Brianna.”

Gil heard someone walking behind the car and turned to see the young woman from the gift shop, who said, “She will see you now.”

Joe and Gil followed the woman to the main house.

“So are you related to the Sikhs in Española?” Gil asked, wondering how she would describe them.

“They are the White Sikhs,” she said firmly. Dismissively. “They are from the outside and they will always be from the outside.”

“You aren’t?” Gil asked, trying not to sound too challenging.

“Yes, because I follow Guru Sanjam Dev, victory be upon him. He is the first and only true Guru since the writing of the sacred scripture.”

The path beneath Gil’s feet crunched, and he looked down, stopping. The ground was littered with spent cartridges. A few were clearly .22 caliber from a rifle, while another was a .50 caliber, possibly from a machine gun.

“You’ve got shell casings here from some really diverse weaponry,” Gil said.

“The Guru likes us to honor the traditional Sikh warrior code,” she said. “As the scripture says, we accept death, and give up any hope of life.”

“That’s really dark,” Joe said.

“Many of our most famous warriors were women,” she continued. “My own name, Rajindar, comes from Princess Rajindar, who led three thousand warriors to save her cousin after he was captured.”

“So what you’re saying is, don’t mess with Sikh women,” Joe said.

“One of my favorite prayers is ‘May I die fighting with limitless courage,’ ” she said. “Of course, you are warriors, too. I’m sure you understand this.”

“Yeah, I’m not so much about the die fighting part,” Joe said. “I’m more about death by old age.”

“Is the .50 caliber from a rifle or a machine gun?” Gil asked.

“Actually a handgun, the Desert Eagle,” she said.

“That’s a whole lot of recoil to deal with,” Gil said, trying to gauge her knowledge about weapons.

“Yeah, and not much of a magazine,” Joe added. “It has like, what, seven rounds?”

“That’s the same that your Smith & Wesson has,” she said, nodding at the gun at Gil’s waist. Clearly, she knew her guns.

They entered the house through a glass sliding door, and she told them to take off their shoes. Inside was a white room with gold carpets. On a dais covered in heavy red brocade fabric and surrounded by gold pillars was a large book covered in gold cloth. Rajindar clasped her hands together in prayer, then bowed to the dais. Gil wondered if the book was the sacred scripture she had talked about.

They followed her up a flight of stairs to a loft with sweeping windows that overlooked the valley. In the center of the room, a woman in a blue turban kneeled next to a small, low table that held a steaming teapot and cookies covered in sugar crystals. The woman looked athletic and had obviously had plastic surgery. Her cheeks were shiny and tight. Her eyes shone bright green even from this far away. This had to be Donna Henshaw.

“Blessings and victory be upon you,” Rajindar said to Ms. Henshaw, then bowed low.

“Victory belongs to God alone,” Ms. Henshaw said, bowing low in return.

“Hello, Ms. Henshaw, I’m Gil Montoya with the Santa Fe police, and this is Joe Phillips,” Gil said. He normally would have offered his hand to shake, but he thought better of it here.

“Please, I prefer the use of my spiritual name—Mai Bhago Kaur,” she said, smiling. Unlike Rajindar’s, her smile seemed fake. Perhaps it was a side effect of the plastic surgery and Botox.

“Should I call you Mai?” Gil asked as he sat on the floor cross-legged.

“Of course,” she said, “and thank you for honoring me by using my spiritual name. Such a name is a vibrating blessing that summarizes our journey of intent here on earth and strengthens our journey to a higher destiny.”

“Oh, interesting,” Gil said, not quite following. He was about to move on to the next question when Joe interrupted. “Who gives you your name? Can you just pick one? Can I be Lancelot Skywalker?”

She smiled dimly at his attempted humor. “Because of my spiritual path, Guru Sanjam Dev, victory be upon him, gave me my name, but for others you can go to our Web site and for a small offering have your name selected.”

“Seriously?” Joe said, laughing. “You get people to pay for a random spiritual name generator?”

“May I inquire as to why you are here?” she said, looking at Gil, clearly done humoring Joe.

“We were hoping to talk to you about Brianna Rodriguez,” he said.

She nodded. “Of course. Before we get to that, I would like to present you with a small gift for taking the time to visit me in my home.”

“Of course,” Gil said, purposely mimicking her words, thinking she was going to offer him tea and cookies.

Instead, she said, “Detective, I am honored to be the acharya, the meditation teacher, here at our humble ashram. In order to gain this honor, I had to share my gift of purpose with the world, and it is this gift that I now focus on you.”

“Thank you,” Gil said.

“My gift tells me that you are not in harmony with your own subjective reality,” she said, smiling kindly. As a teacher would at a slow child.

“You know, I tell him that all the time,” Joe said.

“We all follow a path of spiritual enfoldment, which at its core reveals that we all are of the same divine essence,” she said serenely. “Detective, I assume you’re Catholic, with all your wonderful saints, who were seekers of the unequivocal truth, as well as your Holy Trinity, which are all located within your own body. We worship not only the sacred light but also the sound, and through this we will find our own personal God realization. Look inside your sacred temple and visit the inner planes to see that this is true.”

“Yes, of course,” Gil murmured, not sure where she was going with this. He added, “Thank you,” when she seemed to be expecting him to say more.

“I am fortunate to have a tincture of ginkgo, saffron, and rose that was placed in darkness and then allowed to absorb the vibratory force of an amethyst over seven days. It will increase your biological energies and encourages the cohesion of cells, organs, and glands. I will give this to you.”

She got up easily, her limbs supple and her muscles taut, probably the effect of decades of yoga. She opened a cupboard and took out a small, dark bottle with an eyedropper stopper. She sat back down and handed it to Gil, who took it. It had no instruction label of any kind. Gil wasn’t sure if he was supposed to drink it, rinse with it, or rub it on.

He set it down next to him and said, “Thank you,” again, realizing that it was the third time he’d used the phrase in roughly two minutes of conversation.

Lucy was just finishing up her research at the office when one of the copy editors came over to her desk.

“Oh, hey,” he said to her. “I’m glad you’re here. I know it’s your day off, but I was going to call you about the SWAT thing last night. We need a brief about it.”

“What SWAT thing?” she said innocently.

“I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that Lopez told me to ask if you were there, and if you were, to tell you that you should get a brief in.”

“Umm . . . no, I wasn’t,” she said, lying.

“I could have sworn I heard your voice on the police scanner.”

She just smiled, hoping he couldn’t see the deception in her eyes, and said, “Nope.” She kept smiling until he walked away.

As fast as she could, she jotted down all the information she had on Alex Stevens. Then she pulled the crime scene photo she had gotten from Joe out of her purse and went to the Xerox machine to make a color
copy. The machine took a minute to wake up, and Lucy tapped her foot, hoping to get out of the building before someone challenged her about the SWAT call again. She would have gladly forgone making the copy, but she knew Joe could call her and ask for the photo back at any time. Remembering the wolfish look on his face, she guessed it would be soon.

She stared at the bulletin board over the copier, which held a conglomeration of photos, memos, articles, and a single earring looking for its owner. There was also a bright blue flyer with the headline
THE MEDITATION OF RELEASE
. It was the same flyer that she had seen that morning at Santa Fe Baking Company advertising a meditation class tomorrow night. It was stalking her. She read it over again and smiled once more as she read the final words that promised “there will be no chanting.”

The copier finally sprang into action and spit out a single copy. She pulled it out of the machine’s tray, went back to her desk, and quickly shoved it in her purse. She hurried out the back door before anyone else could stop her. Out in her car, she sighed in relief and put her head on the steering wheel. She wouldn’t be able to keep dodging questions about her life at the fire station. She would have to tell Lopez that she simply wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t be a frontline spy for him.

She drove home and pulled into her driveway. Nathan’s car still was sitting in front of her house, which was exactly what she wanted. She went inside and put on a low-cut shirt with sequins. It was a bit much for this time of day, but it would do the job. Especially when put over a push-up bra, which in her case had to be a push-up, pull-forward, and thrust-out bra in order for her to have any kind of cleavage. She then put on dark jeans with cowboy boots. She spent the next forty-five minutes doing her makeup and her hair. She was still sporting hot curlers when she called Alex’s Towing.

A man she assumed to be Alex Stevens answered, and she said, “Hi. My boyfriend’s car, I mean my ex-boyfriend’s car, is in front of my house, and I need to get it towed.” She laughed and said, “You know how it is.”

“Yes, I do,” the man said, then asked for her address. She gave it to him and hung up.

She went to her closet and got out her black purse, which she had bought when she was a cops reporter in Orlando. The purse had perfect pockets for holding all of her investigative equipment. She transferred her wallet to the new purse and added a small makeup kit in case her face needed retouching later. She slid a voice-activated tape recorder into one of the side pockets. She said the word “sibilance” a few times, then rewound the tape and listened to make sure it was working. Next, she put a reporter’s notebook and three pens in another side pocket. Then she transferred over all her notes about Alex Stevens and the copy of the crime scene photo. It was only then that she realized she had left the original photo lying facedown on the glass of the copier at work.

She swore fast. The words ran together, tripping over each other into a continuous sound. She sounded like a singing cicada on a dark night. The photo was part of an official investigation, and to take it, she had flirted up a storm with a man who expected to get it back. Now it sat in the Xerox machine, just waiting for the next person to hit
COPY
.

She had no time to go get the photo now. The tow truck would be there in just a few minutes. Her only hope was that no one would try to make copies. That was possible, given that it was the weekend and the newsroom was dead. She sent up a little prayer, then finished packing her purse, adding a flashlight, camera, Mace, and a pocketknife.

You never knew where an investigation might lead you.

“What can you tell us about Brianna?” Gil asked, massaging his leg as it started to cramp from sitting on the floor.

“Actually, we changed her name to Bibi during her time with us,” Ms. Henshaw said.

“Okay,” Gil said slowly, “and what can you tell us about Bibi’s life here?”

“She was unable to enjoy our simple ways,” she said.

“How do you mean?” Gil asked.

“As you would expect, we conduct satsang to discuss our dreams—”

“What’s a santag?” Joe asked. Gil wasn’t sure if he was mispronouncing it on purpose.

“It is in satsang where we join each other and listen to a discussion of light,” Ms. Henshaw said.

“So, it’s a lecture,” Joe said.

“Yes, where we use hu to seek out our divine essence—”

“Use what?” Joe asked.

“Hu. It’s how we connect through uplifted voices with our divine self and thus our own—”

“So hu is a song,” Joe said.

“Yes, of devotion.”

“Why can’t you just say that—”

Gil interrupted. “When you were doing the hu, what happened with Brianna?”

“She was unable to concentrate on her inner path and found the only way to express herself was through crying.”

“She was two,” Joe said slowly, his tone implying that Donna Henshaw was a bizarre new breed that had never interacted with humans before. “No two-year-old can sit still through church.”

“Detective, we are not a church—”

“That much I got—” Joe said.

“So Brianna was crying during the satsang,” Gil said over Joe, trying to get her to continue.

“The Guru concluded that she had too much tamas.”

“I’m not sure what that means,” Gil said.