The Bone Fire: A Mystery (5 page)

Kline clicked his phone shut and said, “Okay, so Robert says I can’t talk to the family because I’m individually named in the lawsuit, but you two can go as long as we can justify it as necessary contact. Gil, why don’t you go over there and just let them know the circumstances. Joe, I need you there for continuity, plus it’ll give you a little on-the-job training. When you get back here we’ll get more of a game plan going.”

“Am I allowed to interview them?” Gil asked.

“Not without their attorney present. We can only do the notification. Nothing else. Keep it very informal. Just tell them we found something that might pertain to Brianna.”

Lucy stood by the ambulance as the guys finished up with the fire. Even though they were only twenty feet away, she couldn’t just walk over to them. She was in the safety zone, and they were in the incident
zone. She wasn’t in protective clothing, only her regular uniform, while the guys in the incident zone were in full gear—helmets, face masks, breathing equipment, protective gloves, boots, coats, and pants. Because a car fire, even though it might seem like no big deal, releases toxins as it burns through plastic, gasoline, and rubber. Enough carcinogens to make a grown man die, if he gets too close.

So Lucy stayed where she was, daydreaming about sleep, until the radio on her hip squawked.

“Piñon 373, this is Attack,” Gerald said. He was hard to hear through his face mask and over the rush of air from his breathing equipment.

“This is Piñon 373. Go ahead,” she said.

“Are you ready to take down the VIN?”

“Copy that.” She grabbed a pen and a fresh incident report. “Go ahead.”

He rattled off the number as she wrote it quickly in the space provided on the report and then repeated it back to him. He then gave her the make and model of the car and a guess on its age. “Also, could you put a note on the form that there is some red spray paint on the side of the car? It could be graffiti, like it’s been tagged. There might have been letters, but it was hard to tell. Maybe we should notify the gang task force.”

He signed off, and she started filling in other blanks on the page. The date. The time. Personnel on scene. She then got into the passenger seat of the ambulance and pulled out a large, overflowing binder. Its cover was red and had the word backroads on it, handwritten on masking tape. This was a collection of all the streets, roads, highways, and interstates in their fire district. If a lost hiker called 911 from his cell phone and only knew his general location, this binder showed all the tiny side roads and untrampled trails that he might be near. Or when a person called to say there was a brush fire by Dead Dog Well, the pages could tell them the topography of the area and whether it was dominated by grasses or trees.

Sure, the county provided them with newly printed map books, which they used daily, but for the problematic places—the locations that didn’t appear on official maps—they had the binder. Yes, it was
falling apart, but no matter how worn the exterior might get, the binder would never be thrown out. Because it contained something precious—thirty years of the fire department’s history. Every chief in the past three decades had added his wealth of information to the pages. The history wasn’t written down like a fully formed story. Firefighters have no time for that. The maps and the notes on them were the history. On the corner of one page was written the gate code to the ranch on Highway 599. On another were black
X
’s that showed the locations of caves and climbing cliffs. Even the attack patterns that the wildland firefighting crews had used during the huge Cerro Grande fire of 2000 were drawn in red marker across a map of Los Alamos.

Lucy opened the binder now to get a general description of their location. She actually had little idea of how they had gotten to the fire; there had just been one dirt road after another bringing them deeper into national forest land. She used her pinkie and some creative mapping to guesstimate the driving distance from town. She then filled that information in on its proper place on the form.

When she was done, she went in search of the sheriff’s deputy who had been on scene with them. He was sitting in his cruiser, with the passenger door open, talking on his cell phone. Lucy stood off a discreet distance while he chatted, not wanting to be impolite but hoping he would hurry up. He was a portly man with dark hair. She thought his last name was Segura. He finally noticed her, but instead of getting off his phone, he just covered up the earpiece and said, “What do you need?”

“I just wanted to give you the VIN,” she said, “and I was hoping you could give me the owner’s name for our records.”

“No problem.” He placed the phone on the seat next to him, not hanging it up, and got on the computer sitting over the middle console of his car. She told him the VIN, and he typed it in.

“Okay,” he said, looking at the screen. “The first name is Beto and the last name is Escobar. My God, that is such a Mexican name.”

“And the address?” she asked, not really wanting to get into a conversation with him.

“Hang on,” he said. A few more keystrokes and he said, “It looks like it’s 162 Airport Road.”

She was busy writing it down when he said, “Huh. That’s weird. We’ve had three burned vehicles come back to that same address this year. All different names, and we don’t have stolen vehicle reports for any of them. Must be some Mexican insurance scam.”

Lucy didn’t comment on the unlikelihood of that. She was trying to keep good relations between their respective departments. So she said instead, “We also just wanted you to know that the car has some graffiti on it, like it’s been tagged. In case the gang task force wants to know.”

“Thanks. I’ll write it down,” he said, smiling. She noticed the phone still open on the seat next to him. It bugged her for some reason. Who was this person that would stay on hold this long? His mother? His kid? As far as she could tell, the guy really didn’t deserve “on-hold” devotion.

She was about to step away when he said, “Hey, I’ve got a joke for you. What do you call a Mexican shooting a Chinese outside a Starbucks? . . . A cap-a-chino.” He started laughing.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” she said, in her best you-are-a-moron tone. “So now you’ve told me two things about yourself. One, you’re racist, and, two, you can’t tell a joke.”

She walked away as he started to sputter out some swear words and went back to the ambulance just as Gerald came over, pulling off his helmet and fire-retardant hood.

She handed him a bottle of water before he could ask for it, and he downed it in one gulp.

“Man, that fire was hot,” he said, wiping the sweat off his face. He took off his heavy bunker jacket.

“Do you need anything else?” she asked him.

“Just some food,” he said.

“Hey, so stupid racist cop over there says that the guy who owns this car lives at the same address as two other owners whose cars got burned,” she said.

“Sounds like someone really doesn’t like the people at that house.”

“Oh, and none of the owners have ever filed stolen car reports.”

“Really? That seems odd. How else are they going to get them back or get paid by their insurance company?”

“Maybe they know who’s doing it and don’t want to get them in trouble.”

“What, like a teenage relative?”

“Could be. Or maybe the Mafia. Or it’s part of a voodoo ritual. And let’s not rule out aliens . . .”

“Only an idiot would rule out aliens,” Gerald said, laughing. “Can we please just go get breakfast?”

Gil stood outside the station next to his unmarked dark blue Crown Victoria. While he waited for Joe, he speed-dialed his phone.

A woman answered saying, “Hello?” She sounded almost as if she’d been woken up.

“Hi, Mom. How are you?”

“Hi, hito. I’m fine.”

“Bueno, you sound tired today,” Gil said, automatically lapsing back into the local mishmash of Old Spanish and English. A sort of colonial Spanglish.

“Ah, I didn’t sleep very good last night. The neighbors had a fiesta party.”

“You should have called me.”

“Oh, hito, it was late. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Mom, I could have taken care of it,” he said. His mom was always like this, never wanting to trouble him with anything until it was a problem. When it wouldn’t have even become a problem if she had just told him about it in the first place. Gil wondered if she had been like this when she was married to his father. Or maybe he just noticed it more now that his father was gone.

It had been more than ten years since his father died. A heart attack when Gil was only twenty-three. Gil dropped out of law school and found himself taking a crash course in property taxes, insurance bills, and mortgages. He was suddenly in charge of it all, but it wasn’t something he and his mom talked about. It was just expected that he would take up the reins. So his younger sister, Elena, stayed in
college and got her law degree while Gil did what was required. Now, more than a decade later, he still did.

“When is Aunt Yolanda coming to get you for fiesta Mass?” Gil asked. His mother was a former fiesta queen and was expected to go down to the Plaza to be part of the official ceremonies. His father had played the part of Don Diego de Vargas, the man who three hundred years ago had reconquered Santa Fe. It was how the two of them had met more than thirty-five years ago. When Gil was growing up, he always imagined that he would meet his wife the same way. Instead, he met Susan in college.

“She should be here by ten thirty or so,” she said.

“Okay, well, I’ll call you later, then,” he said, as Joe came out of the station and made his way over to the car. “Don’t forget to check your blood sugar.”

“Okay, hito. Have a good day.”

Gil hung up. “You set?” Joe said and got into the passenger seat, holding a palm-sized spiral notebook and a manila file folder.

“What have you got there?” Gil asked, nodding toward what Joe was carrying.

“Fisher’s original case notes,” Joe said. “I’ve been going over them since this morning. You know, to freshen up.”

“Good thinking,” Gil said as he backed the car out of the station and headed into town. “So what can you tell me about the family?”

“Well, you have Ashley, who is Brianna’s mom. She’s twenty now. She’s been on disability since this happened,” Joe said.

“She doesn’t work?”

“No. Then there’s Rose, Brianna’s grandma. That’s whose house we’re going to.”

“That’s where Brianna went missing?” Gil knew these details. His main goal in going over them was to cement them into his mind and see if there were any inconsistencies along the way.

“Right. Rose and Ashley live in the house with Ashley’s boyfriend.”

“What do you know about him?”

“His name is Alex Stevens, and he owns his own tow truck company.”

“They were all home when Brianna disappeared?”

“Yeah, and there were also two kids hanging out with them that day. One was Justin. He’s a cousin, who’s about fifteen. His house is just like a block away from the Rodriguezes’, so he is pretty much over all the time. Ashley babysits him after school. Then the other kid was Laura. I think she’s thirteen now. She’s Justin’s girlfriend.”

“So we have Ashley, Rose, Alex, Justin, and Laura who were there?”

“Yeah.”

“You keep referring to Alex Stevens as Ashley’s boyfriend and not Brianna’s dad.”

“Nothing gets by you,” Joe said, not sarcastically. “Brianna’s real dad has spent most of his time in jail since Ashley was pregnant. The guy pretty much has never been in the picture.”

“Okay, so five people were at the house the day Brianna went missing, and none of them have died or moved away since then.”

“Right, and as far as I know, Ashley is still dating Alex and Justin is still with Laura.”

“Everybody alibis each other?” Gil asked.

“Yep. They were all in the backyard together.”

“How many times have they been interviewed?”

“Before the lawsuit, probably around a dozen times each.”

“And the story never changed?”

“Never.” Meaning the family probably wasn’t involved. Cracks in the timeline would have shown up by now. Or they all had too much to lose.

“Fisher did all the interrogations?”

“Yeah, and he went after them every which way—soft, hard, alone, together. At the station. At home. Everything.”

Gil didn’t say it, but this was what he had feared—contamination so deep that the truth might never come out. Gil had known Fisher, of course. He had been a good guy who tried hard, but his interview skills were heavy-handed—and sloppy.

“Did anyone in the family take a polygraph?”

“By the time we got to that, there was the lawsuit.”

“Okay, so the family is out as an information source. What about suspects? Were there any?”

“No. We checked all known sex offenders, everything. There was never a viable suspect. That’s why we thought she drowned in the arroyo and her body just hadn’t been found yet.”

“Tell me about the evidence.”

“There wasn’t any. I mean, nothing. She was just gone.”

“What about fingerprints or footprints?”

“The only fingerprints were the family’s. As for footprints, it was monsoon season. It rained five inches in one hour. When I got there the arroyo was flooded and the backyard was soup.”

“All right. So tell me about what you did when you first arrived.”

“All right,” Joe said, shifting in his seat. “Umm . . . I got there a little after 2:00
P.M.
Ashley, the mom, answered the door.”

“How did she seem?”

“Freaked out. She said they were all in the backyard grilling when it started to rain. One second Brianna was there, the next she was gone. She said she looked for Brianna for about fifteen minutes before she called 911.”

“Then what?”

“I searched the house.”

“You didn’t call it in?”

“No, I was thinking about the JonBenét case where she was inside the house the whole time but they spent hours looking for her.”

“How long did it take you?”

Joe was agitated, shifting in his seat. “Too long. I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes.”