The Bone Fire: A Mystery (33 page)

“One is five and the other is seven months,” he said, ever so slightly showing signs of coming back to life.

“Those are such great ages. Are they boys or girls?”

“I got one of both,” he said, almost expressing some interest in the conversation.

“That is fabulous. Do you have pictures?”

He reached into his back pocket and took out a leather wallet slick with grease. He pulled out two pictures, both showing the
same tiny girl, who looked about ready to start kindergarten, and a little smiling baby.

“They are beautiful,” Lucy said, looking up at him. He nodded slightly. “He has your eyes.”

Manny smiled a little and asked, “You think so?”

“Absolutely,” she said as their cold beers arrived.

They were out of the conversational woods and headed into more open territory. All she needed to do was ask a few more questions about his family. Maybe a couple about his mom and where he went to high school. Then, maybe, if the time was right, she would ask him again about Gladys.

Gil stood by himself in front of the whiteboard in the conference room. On it, he had started to write a timeline of Brianna’s adoption. So far, all he had written was Brianna’s birth date—May 5—and the day she disappeared, July 18, two years later. His goal this morning had been to find Brianna’s father so he could prove the blood on David Geisler’s samurai sword belonged to the little girl. Now it was almost 6:00
P.M.
, and he was no closer to figuring out who her dad was.

He had called Dr. Santiago on the way back to the station to check if Ashley had delivered the baby. He left a message for the doctor, who called him right back, saying, “I am sorry, but you won’t be able to talk to Ashley until after she delivers. She can’t even form a sentence right now . . .” Dr. Santiago didn’t finish the statement. Instead, she said, “Look, I can’t give you any additional patient information, except to say that that Ashley is completely effaced. She should be delivering soon.”

He had to talk to Ashley. It could not be put off any longer. He thought about interviewing her over the phone, between contractions, but whereas that might have been possible yesterday, today they simply had too many blanks for her to fill in. Plus, how do you ask a woman who is giving birth to identify the father of her first baby, a baby who is now dead? There was no proper etiquette for that conversation. Besides, if Ashley was anything like Susan, all she was doing between contractions was praying for them to stop.

Next Gil called another department in the hospital to get an update on David Geisler. The nurse on duty told Gil that Geisler was safely in his room, but he wouldn’t get a mental evaluation until tomorrow.

Officer Kristen Valdez, dressed in street clothes, popped her head in the door and said, “Hi, Gil. I just got off shift and wanted to see if you needed some help.”

“Thanks, Kristen,” Gil said. “Actually, I do need something that is fairly simple. That way you can get out of here and still make it down to fiesta.” He asked her to put together a folder of anything she could find out about Donna Henshaw and the Golden Mountain Ashram. She took a few notes as he talked, then went back out to the main room to work.

That left Gil to stare at the timeline on the whiteboard. He was wondering about the exact date Donna Henshaw had adopted Brianna when Joe came in saying, “Dude, I wanted you to be the first to know. My new spiritual name is Mr. Ram Inder Singh.”

“You went to their Web site and paid to get a name?” Gil asked.

“Hell, yeah. This shit is too funny to pass up. I got you a new name, too.”

“Really?” Gil said.

“Yep. You are now Mr. Baba Singh, which, in case you can’t tell, is a dork name. I have the cool name—I’m Ram.”

“How much did all of this cost you?”

“Twenty-five bucks each.”

“You spent fifty dollars to get us new names because it was funny?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“You clearly don’t have any wife or kids to support.”

“That’s exactly why I’m never getting married again. It takes all the fun out of life, doesn’t it, Mr. Baba Singh?”

Gil ignored him and looked back at the whiteboard, trying to fill in information on the timeline.

“Hey, Joe—” Gil said.

“Hey, who? You talking to me?”

“Okay, Ram. Do you remember how old Brianna was when Donna Henshaw adopted her?”

“She was twenty months old,” Joe said, “and twenty-five months when she went back to her mom. Then later she disappeared at twenty-six months on July 18.” Gil added all that information to the timeline.

“I don’t know about you,” Joe said, “but I’ve got even odds that Donna Henshaw or one of the women from the Vigilante Vagina League up there in the mountains has something to do with this.”

Gil, intent on the timeline, ignored Joe, instead thinking he should include the date Ashley met Judge Otero, who was in essence her adoption broker.

“Hey, Ram, do you have the court dates for Ashley’s speeding ticket?” Gil asked.

Joe pushed a few papers around on the table. “Okay, here it is. It looks like the first one was September third.”

“Her first one?” Gil asked. “How many times did she appear in Judge Otero’s court?”

“Umm . . . it looks like four times.”

“I thought Judge Otero said he only met her once,” Gil said. “Do you have your notes from his interview?”

“Hang on a second,” Joe said as he fumbled for his notebook, then read, “ ‘I did feel a little fatherly toward the girl the one time I met her. She came in my courtroom and told me she was three months pregnant.’ ” Joe added, “I guess the judge meant to say ‘one of the times I met her.’ ”

“Maybe,” Gil said, putting the dry-erase marker down. “Or maybe Judge Otero meant to lie to us.”

Lucy would never have guessed that Manny was a lightweight. They were only three beers into the night, and he was already sloshing drunk, telling her everything she wanted to know. Lucy, on the other hand, who had been matching him drink for drink, wasn’t even buzzed. Maybe she had discovered her superpower: drinking men under the table.

She had already gotten the names of the ringleaders out of Manny, as well as how much money they were taking in. After beer two, she had started to write everything down since Manny was beyond caring, and she checked to make sure the tape player was still recording, just in case.

“You know the worst part,” Manny was saying, “these are my people. My grandparents came here from Mexico in the 1950s. I’m taking advantage of my own people.”

Lucy didn’t even need to ask prodding questions anymore. He just kept talking. At one point, while Manny was cursing out his bosses, Nathan came over; he had finally noticed her from the bar. He had the decency to look ashamed.

“Hey” was all he said as he stood by the table with a white bar apron tied around his waist.

“Hello,” Lucy said. “Your car is out front. I had it towed here.”

“You are the best,” he said soberly. Sincerely.

“Thanks. So I’ll see you later,” she said, turning back toward Manny, who was still swearing about his boss.

“Can I, you know, buy you a drink?” Nathan said. Lucy wanted to turn him down. It would have been best for everyone. Then again, it was a free drink, and he did owe her.

“You could get me another beer,” she said. He smiled like a hound dog and went back toward the bar.

“Me, too,” Manny yelled after him.

Lucy looked at the time on her cell phone. It was 6:13
P.M.
They had been sitting here for almost two hours. She wondered how much more information Manny had to offer. What he had already told her had been great but limited, since he was nothing more than an underling, not a key player. He admitted towing two of the cars from the apartment complex to the tow yard, but he hadn’t asked
any of the tenants for money and didn’t even know that the cars of those who wouldn’t pay had been burned.

She really just wanted to leave, but she would need to get Manny home safely.

She heard a cell phone ring nearby. It was a fast hip-hop song. It wasn’t hers.

“Manny,” she said to him, nudging his elbow. “That’s your phone.”

“Oh man,” he said, looking at the caller ID. “It’s Alex. He’s probably calling to see what his cut of the tow was, that chingada madre.” Manny didn’t answer it and turned off the ringer.

“I thought he was your buddy.”

“Yeah, right,” Manny said. “He’s nothing but a liar.”

“Why do you say that?” Lucy asked. Suddenly something occurred to her. “You mean that Alex Stevens is mixed up in the immigrant thing?”

“Him? No,” Manny said, scoffing. “He’s worse.”

“Really?” Lucy asked, leaning in closer. She had almost given up hope of pinning something on Stevens.

“Yeah, we do all these repos together that are five hundred dollars each, and he never pays up,” he said, shaking his head.

Lucy leaned back, disappointed. “Is that all?”

“What do you mean, ‘Is that all?’ He owes me almost a thousand dollars. Plus, he’s always bragging that he owns the tow truck and I’m just his driver, but I’m going to get my own truck some day. I just have to save up . . .”

“Then why are you still working for him?” she asked, back to wondering if it was possible for Nathan to take any longer with her beer.

“I don’t know,” Manny said. He turned his head slowly toward his phone and said, “I’m going to call him and tell him I quit.”

“That’s a great idea,” Lucy said, mostly out of annoyance at Alex Stevens. She knew encouraging one of his employees to quit was a petty way to get back at him, but then that was who she was.

Ashley Rodriguez wondered why someone had put a copy of that day’s
Capital Tribune
in her room. Maybe a nurse thought she would
want to read about the bones found in Zozobra. The bones that might be her daughter.

The doctors had told Ashley that Brianna might have developmental problems because she was a preemie, but she had been perfect for the first four months. They had been happy then. Brianna was all smiles.

Then one day she stopped eating and started crying, screaming and gagging. It wasn’t just once in a while, either. It was every day. For hours and hours.

Her parents didn’t help much. Her mother called Brianna spoiled and would ignore her when she cried. Her father would jostle Brianna too roughly. Ashley would have to make up little excuses to get Brianna away from him, especially when he was drunk.

Her father reminded her of Judge Otero, whom she had met just before she found out she was pregnant with Brianna. He had helped her with a speeding ticket. He hadn’t asked for much in return.

A few weeks later, she was in his court again, on another speeding ticket. By then, she was pregnant and Tony was in jail. She was only seventeen, had no job, and had just dropped out of high school. She broke down in tears as she told the judge. He had a clerk show her back to his office after the session. He sat behind his big wooden desk and gave her a way out that she had never considered—adoption. He even gave her the name of someone who wanted to adopt. She recognized it. It was the name of someone famous. It was something she couldn’t consider, though. She still thought that Tony would get out of jail and that they would live together in a trailer on his parents’ property. One big happy family. Still, she kept the phone number tucked away in a drawer, just in case.

Of course, by the time Brianna was born, she knew Tony would never get out. She found herself in the middle of the night trying to soothe Brianna, wondering what it would be like to be free and childless again. She had thought that as Brianna got older, things would get easier, but they didn’t. When Ashley started feeding her baby cereal, Brianna choked her way through the first few bites, then threw the rest. Ashley, in tears, would plead with her baby to eat, but Brianna wouldn’t, and she would only sleep two or three hours at a
time. Ashley took Brianna to the doctor, who said that there was nothing wrong. He told Ashley that she just needed to be more patient. Ashley tried.

One night, though, when Brianna was nine months old and lay screaming on Ashley’s bed, all Ashley could do was to yell “Shut up” over and over. She knew her parents wouldn’t wake up. They never did. Ashley threw her clothes around her room and smashed a ceramic bear. Brianna kept crying. Ashley grabbed a pillow and pushed it down hard on her daughter’s face. She only held it there for a moment, but after realizing what she had almost done, she grabbed her daughter and held her tight. Ashley swore she’d try harder.