The Bone Fire: A Mystery (6 page)

“What was Ashley doing?”

“Helping me.”

“Where was everyone else?”

“Umm . . . the two kids—the cousin, Justin, and his girlfriend, Laura—were out walking around looking for her. I heard them yelling for Brianna across the arroyo. Rose, Ashley’s mom, was talking to neighbors, I guess, knocking on doors.”

“Is that everyone?”

“Alex, Ashley’s boyfriend, was driving around looking for her.”

“What did you see when you searched the house?”

“Nothing weird. In the kitchen they had food out for the barbecue. A few empty beer bottles. That’s it.”

“What about out back?”

“The grill was open and there was some food still out, soaked. I walked to the arroyo and it was overflowing, going a mile a minute.”

“When did you call for backup?”

“I called Garcia—he was the officer on duty that day—and everybody was there in just a few minutes. Fisher was the detective on call. So between all of us we started a ground search within about a half hour of her going missing. Turn here,” Joe said, pointing to the right. “It’s the third house on the left . . . That’s pretty much it,” he said as Gil pulled up.

Lucy sat at a booth in Denny’s and tried to listen to Gerald and the fire fighters across from her talk about hoses, as they had been doing for ten minutes, but her mind drifted as she gazed unfocused out the restaurant windows.

She looked down at her T-shirt, which read
PIÑON VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT
with an emblem over her left chest. Their department was a ragtag of volunteers, some who were firefighters only, some who were medics only, and some, like Gerald, who were both. Lucy felt bad that people might assume from her shirt that she was a firefighter when she was only a first responder. The lowest of the low on the totem pole of medics, with paramedics—referred to mockingly as para-gods behind their backs—at the top.

Since Gerald, sitting across from her and discussing hoses with zeal, was the paramedic in charge at her department, she guessed that made him her para-god. Lucy smiled to herself. Praise and glory to Gerald in the highest.

Lucy hoped her pager would go off again. She was exhausted but wired, and wanted something more interesting before she went into work.

She yawned and glanced around. Denny’s at 9:00
A.M.
was its
regular combination of elderly couples that didn’t look at each other and men in trucker hats who didn’t talk to each other.

Out the window, the Motel 6 on the other side of Cerrillos Road fluoresced in the morning light. The Quality Inn and the Floor Mart looked like they were just waking up.

Lines of cars drove along Cerrillos Road, avoiding the construction barrels that seemed to serve no purpose.

Cerrillos Road, the most cursed road in Santa Fe, was always under construction. It flooded like a river during the summer monsoons and cracked mercilessly after the winter snow. It seemed to be a giant five-mile-long strip mall of car dealerships and cheap motels.

It was an ugly road in a beautiful town. A scar on a perfect cheek.

When Lucy had first moved to Santa Fe a year and a half ago, she had no idea how to properly say words like “Cerrillos,” with all its double letters mocking her. During her first month in town, she had been laughed at by co-workers for pronouncing Acoma Pueblo like a combination of “a” and “coma,” and Pojoaque Pueblo like “po-jock” and “kay.” Her solution was to become a master eavesdropper. She data-mined conversations overheard at gas stations and grocery stores for the right way to pronounce the names of towns, streets, and mountains. She also picked up the walking-around Spanish words you had to know in order to have a conversation in English. She had learned that a porch was called a portal—with the accent on the second syllable—and that an exposed wooden ceiling beam was a viga. A santuario was a kind of church, and an arroyo was a dry riverbed. Now, she could almost whip out the right Spanish and Native American words like a local.

She took a final swig of her coffee and considered taking another bite of her breakfast. She had ordered Moons Over My Hammy based solely on the name, but the eggs had gone cold and the cheese looked pale. She poked at it with her fork, then decided to let it rest in peace.

She yawned again and shook her head to wake up, but she knew it was time to go. She had to be at the newspaper early today so she could go over her yearly review with her boss. She was not looking forward to it. She stood up and told the boys she was leaving. They
had started to say their good-byes when Gerald said to her surprise, “I’m going to take off, too.”

Suddenly, she was wide-awake—and curious.

The Rodriguez house was set in an open area marked with a few small juniper trees and cut by the arroyo going past the backyard. It was in one of those Santa Fe neighborhoods where there is no structure to the streets or property. The roads were dirt, and the houses and trailers seemed to be in no particular order. In fact, there was a reason why some of the city’s streets were not precise in their design. Many local families had followed the colonial property inheritance rules. Traditionally, a father would equally divide the property between his sons. Then the sons would divide it between their sons, so that generations later, extended family members lived in tight family clusters, minus the pieces that were sold off to developers over the years. Gil guessed that was what happened here.

The Rodriguez house itself was simple. It was small and boxlike with its flat Santa Fe roof. They had chosen a pale shade of beige exterior paint many years ago that had never been refreshed, but the paved pathway leading to the front door was free of weeds, and there were a few flowers near the porch.

Gil knocked on the door, which was opened by a young woman with big eyes and long dark hair who was hugely pregnant. This had to be Ashley.

“Hi, I’m Gil Montoya, and you might remember Joe Phillips, with the Santa Fe police,” Gil said as Joe gave a little wave. Gil purposely didn’t use their detective titles so as to keep her at ease. As it was, she frowned at them, but Gil said, “I was hoping we could come in.”

He could tell she was about to refuse, so he said quickly, “It is important that we talk, and I think it might be easier for you if we sat down.”

She opened the door, and they followed her into the kitchen, where she eased herself down on a chair. A woman washing dishes turned to look at them and said harshly, “Ashley, why are the police in my house?” The woman might have been in her forties, but her heavily lined face made it hard to tell. Her hair was dyed a hard
black, and she looked at them with suspicion. This had to be Rose, Ashley’s mother.

Gil introduced himself to Rose and asked her to join him at the table. She looked like she might say no but took a seat. Once the three of them were sitting, with Joe standing restlessly to the side, Gil turned to Ashley and said, “Look, I know you’ve a rocky history with us, and I’m not here to pretend that you haven’t, but we both want the same thing: to find out what happened. I know all of this has been incredibly hard on you all, but whatever has happened in the past is in the past. You and me are starting from a clean slate. Okay?”

“Okay,” Ashley said slowly, warily.

“Thank you,” Gil said. He took a deep breath and said evenly, “There have been some new developments today that we think could be related to Brianna’s case. I just wanted to come sit with you in person and talk about them, okay?”

“Okay,” she said again, less wary. Gil nodded. By repeatedly asking her permission to talk about the subject, he was trying to get her to feel like she was in control of the conversation. He knew she needed that control right now.

“Now, you’re going to hear things over the next few days, and those things may or may not be true, but I will always tell you the truth. I may not be able to tell you everything, but I will tell you as much as I can. Does that sound all right?”

She nodded.

“So, all of this means you’re going to have to trust me just a little bit. Do you think you can do that?”

She nodded again, looking scared. Gil took a deep breath to collect his thoughts. He could see Joe standing behind Ashley. His face was surprisingly tight with anger.

Gil turned his attention back to Ashley and watched her closely as he said, “This morning, we found a skull.”

He watched her for a moment as she tried to hold it together, looking anxious but okay, considering the situation, so he continued, “Now, it was in the ashes from Zozobra, and it was the skull of a child.” She nodded her head as she started to cry quietly, but she didn’t fidget. Mrs. Rodriguez looked down at her hands. Gil couldn’t
tell them everything. The newspapers would be calling the family shortly, looking for a comment. He would only reveal to them the basic facts that the newspaper would already know: that they found a skull in Zozobra. Period. End of story.

“You think it’s Brianna?” Ashley said, biting her lip to keep from crying.

“It’s possible,” Gil said. A few tears fell on Ashley’s cheek. “We won’t know until we can do a DNA—”

“But she drowned in the arroyo. How did she get there?” Ashley asked, clearly fighting to keep composed.

“I don’t—”

“Where’s the rest of her?” Ashley asked, looking at her mom, who got up from her chair with tears in her own eyes and went to hold her daughter. As they twined their arms around each other, Gil noticed a few faint scars on Ashley’s wrists.

“Did she get burned alive?” Ashley asked, as her tears, now freed, started to overwhelm her.

“No, we don’t think—”

“Oh my God, oh my God . . .” she said, looking wildly at her mom.

“Ashley—” Gil said.

“Who would put her there? Oh my baby, oh my sweet baby.” Her face was pressed hard into her mom’s shoulder, and she started to sob as if she were gasping for air. She popped her head up suddenly and said, “I think I’m going to be sick.” Gil jumped up to help pull her and her pregnant belly off the chair. Her mom escorted her to the bathroom down the hall.

As soon as the two men were left alone, Joe turned to face Gil and said, “What the fuck was that—”

The sounds of retching come from down the hall. Then running water.

“Okay, that’s gross,” Joe said, before turning back to Gil and saying, without lowering his voice, “What was all that shit about ‘whatever the cops did in the past I’m better than that’?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“That’s sure as hell what I heard,” Joe said.

“Joe, I never meant to insult you or Detective Fisher—”

“That’s a load of crap—”

“I was just trying to establish a rapport with her.”

Mrs. Rodriguez came back in the room, saying, “I think she needs to lie down.”

“I understand,” Gil said just as the front door open and someone yelled, “Tía, we’re here.”

“That’s my nephew, my sister’s son,” she said, looking stricken. “I forgot, Ashley’s babysitting them. They don’t have school because of fiesta.”

A boy and a girl came into the kitchen and immediately looked at Gil with disdain.

The boy had blond Chia Pet hair, sticking straight out from his head in a round fuzzy ball. It was a crew cut gone wrong on a boy who shouldn’t have had one. In Northern New Mexico slang, he would have been called a coyote—a person who is half white, half Hispanic. It wasn’t a racial slur, only a locally used description, like Anglo or Pueblo Indian.

Next to him, holding his hand, was his girlfriend. She didn’t look nervous, more like ready for a fight, but then she was used to this, too. The excitement of being interviewed by the police had probably worn off months ago. She had dark eyes and a distinctive nose that Gil’s father would have said made the girl a Southern Colorado Hispanic. Long ago, two enclaves of conquistador descendents separated—one group stayed in Northern New Mexico and the other went to Southern Colorado. His father insisted that the passage of time had given each group defining physical characteristics. In the north, they tended to be taller and thinner and have bigger noses. In the south, they were stouter and had flatter faces. This, his dad would say proudly, was where Gil’s height came from. Their northern relatives.

The girl wore the typical heavy black eyeliner sweeping on top of the lid. It had been a popular look for Northern New Mexico girls since he had been a teenager. His wife said it made the eyes look more almond shaped. He thought it just made them all look sinister.

“Are you Justin and Laura?” Gil asked. Neither one of them answered, but the girl said mockingly, “More cops, great.”

“They found something,” Mrs. Rodriguez said, trying to pacify them.

“Where’s Ashley?” Justin asked.

“She’s not feeling good,” Gil said.

“Is she all right—” Justin started to ask, before Laura interrupted. “She’s supposed to be taking us to the Plaza for fiesta.” Laura was wearing a short-cropped pink tank top and running pants with sneakers, looking like one of the Bratz dolls Gil’s daughter Joy used to like so much. She had the attitude to match.

“I don’t think she’s up to it,” Mrs. Rodriguez said.

“Fine,” Laura said.

“Can I talk to you guys for a second?” Gil asked.

“No,” Justin said sharply.

“C’mon, dude, it’s about Brianna,” Joe said.

Justin rolled his eyes—and in that expression, Gil saw how tired the boy was. Not just of the questions, or of the police, but of all of it. Of death, or the possibility of it.

Lucy left her money on the table and waited for Gerald to catch up with her by the front door. He was taking his time, shaking and reshaking hands and smacking a few backs. She looked down at the racks of newspapers. Her newspaper was there, the
Capital Tribune,
along with the competition, the
Santa Fe Times
. There were also at least three weeklies there called things like
Light Source,
which sounded like it should be about proper lighting techniques for your home, or
Heart Spirit,
which sounded more like a name of a Kentucky Derby winner. Actually both newspapers were about the same thing—alternative healing. Santa Fe’s million-dollar industry. The weeklies advertised tarot readings, energy work, past life regressions, and somatic polarity. Lucy had lived in Santa Fe for a year and a half, but she had yet to get used to the Weird White People Syndrome—an illness afflicting only the entitled rich who came to town to experience the “magical healing” of the area.