The Bone Fire: A Mystery (4 page)

“No, Mike,” Gil said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “No. Whoever the skull belongs to was long dead.” Mike nodded, taking a big breath of relief. Gil said to him, “Look, can I get your business card? I’m sure I’m going to have to call to get more information once the investigation gets started.”

Mike pulled a card out of his wallet and handed it to Gil, saying, “Thanks.” He stopped to shake the hands of the Protectores before getting in his truck and speeding off.

Gil went back over to Liz, who was packing up her gear. “How’s Shelly?” he asked, just to make small talk, hoping the normalcy of it would quiet his worms of worry.

“She was fine until she got a bug up her butt about moving out to Eldorado after your wife told her how good the schools are,” Liz said. “Have you and Susan found a place up there yet?”

“We have to wait until we sell our house in town.”

“Did you do the upside-down statue of St. Joseph?” Liz asked. “My cousin did that and he didn’t even have to list his house. Some guy out of the blue comes up to him wanting to buy it.”

“Yeah, we did that.”

“Did you bury it in the backyard, not the front?”

“Yeah, it’s just the market,” Gil said. “Susan wants us to buy a place in Eldorado even if it doesn’t sell.”

“And leave you with two mortgages? Hell no.”

Gil was helping Liz load her equipment back into her van when Santa Fe police chief Bill Kline pulled up in his black SUV. Kline got out, along with Captain Paul Garcia, who was the department spokesman.

He heard Liz say, “The big boys are here,” as the men came walking over.

Kline said, “Liz,” as a way of greeting. Gil told the men all that he knew: It was the skull of a small child who did not die in the fire.

Kline nodded, saying, “How long will it take to get an ID?”

“I don’t know,” Liz said. “It’s an hour drive down to Albuquerque, and then I’ll have to call in our skeletal specialist . . . it’ll be at least two hours or probably closer to three before I can tell you anything. An ID is probably going to take a lot longer, until at least next week. We could end up with inconclusive results because the bone sample was too weathered or damaged in the fire. Who knows. This is going to be a mess no matter how we slice it.”

“If it’s her . . .” Garcia said, trailing off.

If it was her, all hell would break loose.

Santa Fe Municipal Court Judge Victor Otero pulled yet another paper from the stack and firmly, without flourish, signed his name. He flipped the paper smoothly over onto a pile laid neatly next to his elbow. He checked his watch. It was 7:55
A.M.
Time to head into court. He was starting court early today because of fiesta. Most city workers had the day off. Since he was one of the Protectores de la Fiesta, he had been at Zozobra until almost 2:00
A.M.
, but he didn’t feel tired.

He stood, sliding his chair neatly under the huge oak desk, which had been used by every municipal judge since 1902. It had been his since 1994. He would move it to his office at home when he retired.

He took his robe off the coat hanger and zipped it up. He headed to the bathroom off his office to check his reflection. He looked intently at himself in the mirror. He straightened his red tie, just visible under this robe. His hair was less than a quarter inch from touching his ears. He would need to get it trimmed within the
next week. He always went to Earl’s Barbershop, as his father and grandfather had before him. The Earl in charge now was Earl Junior. Earl charged him seven dollars for a trim and sold some of the best green chile in town, but the judge went there mainly for information, as did state senators, the police chief, and the mayor. Or used to. In the past twenty years, things had changed. Only the old-timers still went to Earl’s.

He glanced at his watch. Precisely eight o’clock. He took one last look in the mirror, then one last look at his office, making sure everything was in its place before going out into the courtroom.

Lucy stared down at the ground. Tiny rocks of every hue pockmarked the pink-beige earth. Periwinkle blue, dark chocolate, butterscotch. They were like a scattering of jelly beans from a knocked-over box. Bite-sized and smooth. She bent down and picked up a smooth black rock. It had a stripe of white through its licorice black center.

She heard a loud pop and looked up. The car on fire across the road groaned as the metal warped from the heat. Two firefighters on the hose directed a stream of water onto the fire. With a few sweeps of the nozzle—and a sizzle and a vent of steam—the fire was out.

She stood next to the ambulance, waiting like she always did for someone to get hurt or exhausted so she could spring into action. Her job on fire scenes was to be everyone’s Jewish grandmother. She was constantly asking, “Are you tired? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Sit, sit, while I get you something.” She made sure everyone stayed refreshed and renewed. Because if one firefighter got too tired, then all their safety was at risk.

This had been drilled into her head by Gerald, who, at the moment, was handling the hose as other firefighters popped the hood of the car with a crowbar to make sure the battery—or was it the carburetor—wasn’t on fire. She wasn’t a firefighter and had little concept of what they did.

She dropped the black rock into her pocket. She would add it to her collection at home, which included rocks she’d picked up during other calls in this same place. For some reason this isolated spot—ringed with piñon pine and juniper—was a popular area for car fires.
Why the car thieves, or whoever, kept dumping cars out here was a mystery. Why in their fire district? Why not a mile or so away, where La Cienega’s district started? Then they could get up at 6:00
A.M.
to put out a car fire.

The area, with its remoteness, made for a fun secret getaway the whole family could enjoy—just not together. Here teenagers would gather to drink around late-night fires. Here parents would dump washing machines and mattresses that had finished serving their purpose. Lucy kicked at pieces of plastic and china embedded in the dirt. The desert was where household goods went to die. People seemed to think they could throw away everything unwanted and expect the desert to eventually cover it with sand.

Back east, especially in Florida, where Lucy grew up, plants and decaying foliage quickly reclaim the discarded junk of our lives. They pull it down into a warm, moist grave where it will stay forever hidden.

The desert can’t be trusted, though. It has two faces. On its surface, it can hide nothing. Everything is exposed and vulnerable. Underneath and underfoot, it can hide whole civilizations. Ancient bones and long-forgotten ruins.

The desert is always coy in what it hides and what it reveals. If what the sands reveal is a body, it will either be ripped apart by coyotes and vultures or mummified by the incinerating heat.

A few years ago, a woman walking her dog in the outskirts of Albuquerque found a bone. Most locals would have thought little of it. It actually happens all the time. The bone could have been from a prehistoric site. A wayward inmate from one of the thousands of archaeological digs in the state. It wasn’t. After bringing in backhoes and shovels, the police found eleven bodies. They were not ancient bones but the remains of women dead only a few years. Likely it was the work of a serial killer who thought, like so many New Mexicans, that if you dumped your trash in the desert, no one would ever find it.

Gil sat at his desk, waiting. Chief Kline had called in most of the other detectives for a meeting that was supposed to start ten minutes ago. Gil stared at the posters about rape and domestic violence that
lined the walls of the station. The flags waving out front cast rippling shadows that passed over the windows, like a soft strobe light. Gil glanced at the book open on his desk. It was a criminal behavior analysis textbook. Next to that was a piece of paper where he had written the words
fire
,
skull
,
child
, and
audience
, followed by a line of question marks.

Joe came over to Gil’s desk and sat in the chair next to it, saying, “Can we get going already?”

“Relax,” Gil said.

Gil saw Kline go into the conference room, and he and Joe got up to follow. Inside was a group of a half-dozen detectives and a few officers who had hung back after the morning report to help with the new case. One of them was Officer Kristen Valdez, who had worked Zozobra last night but was back here this morning to help out. She must be exhausted, Gil thought, as he sat down at the long brown table with Kline at the head.

“Okay, first I want to thank all of you who have volunteered to work a double shift this morning to lend a hand,” Kline said. “We’ve got ourselves a case that is going to take some doing. Gil, why don’t you get us started?”

Gil pulled out his incident report and notebook. “At approximately six forty-four this morning we received a phone call from an individual who said he had found a skull at Fort Marcy Park. I was dispatched at six forty-seven and arrived on scene at seven oh two.” Gil told the rest of the story as the officers and detectives took their own notes—except for Joe, who stood in the back of the room, bouncing his leg. Gil’s report was over within less than five minutes.

“Thanks, Gil,” Kline said. “Now, I know we are all thinking that this could be Brianna, but we just can’t assume that—”

“Chief, I don’t—” Joe started to say as everyone turned to look at him.

“Hang on. Just a second. We need to look at this case two ways—like it isn’t Brianna and like it is. So, for those of us tracking the idea that it isn’t her, we’ll look at all national missing kids cases and see if there is any way this could be one of them. Like do any of
the suspects have ties to New Mexico? You know the drill. The rest of us will treat this like it is Brianna until we find out otherwise.”

Kline took a deep breath, knowing the next part would be hard to say and harder to hear. “With Fisher gone, we need to start at the beginning of the investigation—” Joe started to talk again, but Kline said, “Hold on. I am in no way saying that Fisher did a bad job, but he’s gone, and we need to have new eyes on this now that there might be a body. Even if this isn’t Brianna, we need to have a new detective take over her case. I’ve been putting that off for too long. So that’ll be Gil.” Gil nodded.

Kline continued, “We have to pull all the police reports from the afternoon she went missing, both city and county. Look for anything out of the ordinary; traffic stops where someone acted strange, any break-ins in the area. Do the sex offender checks. The usual.”

Kline went on to hand out individual assignments and dismissed everyone from the room, with the exception of Joe and Gil.

“Now for the tricky part,” Kline said. “We have to notify the family. We can’t wait until we get a positive ID. This is going to be all over the news in just a few hours, and the public is going to assume it’s Brianna no matter how much we say that we can’t be sure. If we don’t tell the family now, they’ll get blindsided. Let me call Robert here and see what we need to do.” Robert Sandoval was the police lawyer and the man who stood between the department and the Rodriguez family attorney.

The department had been four weeks into the investigation of Brianna’s disappearance when the family had finally decided they’d had enough and filed a harassment lawsuit. Looking at it from their perspective, Gil wasn’t sure he could blame them. For the first few weeks, there had been a police officer on duty at all times in the house and a car stationed across the street. All the family’s phones were hooked up to recording devices, and every single one of their movements was detailed. By the fourth week, the police, after considering every lead, unofficially decided that Brianna probably died in an accidental drowning.

That didn’t stop public pressure about the case. So the department kept pushing so they could tell the media that they had exhausted
every possible lead. It was when the family was approached about taking polygraphs and the FBI showed up to take forensic samples from everyone that they decided to file the harassment suit. The family released a statement through their lawyer saying that they believed as the police did—that Brianna had drowned. Now they just wanted to get back to their lives and grieve for their little girl out of the public spotlight. A judge agreed that the family was under undue stress and ordered the officers to cut back on their intrusions. The case had already cost the department hundreds of thousands of dollars, and without any new leads, the police agreed.

All but Fisher, who continued to visit the family’s home about half a dozen times, despite the warning, to check out new evidence, use the latest tracking gear, or just clarify a point in his mind. He was eventually suspended with pay for a week, which was the department’s way of saying loudly, “This is a reprimand,” then adding in a whisper, “But not really.” Fisher could have just considered it a vacation due to attitude. Instead he shot himself.

Fisher’s suicide gave the department yet another reason—like the lawsuit and the lack of evidence—to put the investigation on a shelf until they got a new lead. Gil only wished that lead had been finding a new suspect instead of a body.