The Bone Fire: A Mystery (22 page)

“So that story you guys ran about the skull in Zozobra was pretty good, but I have to say ours was better,” Del said mischievously.

She shook her head, smiling at how he teased her. They worked at competing papers, so ethically they shouldn’t discuss their work, but it was a rule he liked to play with.

“I actually was at Zozobra,” she said. “It was really fascinating.”

“The whole thing is a little pedestrian for me,” he said, taking a bite of his burrito.

“I liked it,” Lucy said defensively. “I even wrote a note to put into the fire.”

“Really?” he said, laughing a little with a mouth full of food. “What did it say?”

Lucy hesitated. She had told Del most of the story about what had happened in January, when she had first met Gil, and how one of her offhand remarks led to a woman being killed. Del had laughed then, too, calling the whole thing “a joke by a humorless universe.” She wasn’t sure she and her guilt could take his teasing now. So she said instead, “Oh, it was just some resolution to have more sex,” thinking he would find that funny and let it drop. She didn’t wait to see if he would laugh before adding, “So what about you? What’s up at the
Santa Fe Times
?”

“I am so sick of it all,” he said. “I can’t stand the business anymore. The life has just been taken out of it with all the newspapers going under these days.”

“Why not find another job if you hate it so much?” Lucy asked. “You always thought about going to law school.”

“There’s an ego there that disturbs me,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“If I say I want to be a lawyer, does that mean I want to be a lawyer or that my ego wants to be a lawyer?”

Talking with Del could get like this. When she first met him, every conversation was so deep and meaningful. It made him sexy. His word-based intelligence was as much a turn-on as any washboard abs.

It always intrigued Lucy that their intellectual talks were more enjoyable than the sex. Maybe that was because their sex life was more about individual performance instead of togetherness. Del believed that a person was responsible for his or her own orgasms. That meant she got no individual attention from him where it mattered most. Still, she gave him what he denied her in the hopes that it would foster generosity in him, causing him to reciprocate.

As she thought about their conversations, she realized they were exactly like their sex life. She was often left out of the equation while at the same time she was expected to pay tribute to him and his big words.

Gil started making calls as soon as he left his mom’s house. His first was to the county detention center to check on both Rudy Rodriguez and David Geisler. He then asked to have them transported to the police station so they’d be there when he arrived. His next call was to Joe, but it went directly to voice mail. His third call also went to voice mail. It was to Chief Kline, telling him not to worry about getting the court order for the newspaper’s security camera tapes. Gil would try to figure out later how to explain that without involving Lucy.

His fourth call was to Liz, who answered on the first ring and launched immediately into an explanation. “About the fingerprints you sent me,” she said. “We’re doing our best to try to match them against what we found at the Guadalupe crime scene, but it’s going to take us a while to get everything analyzed. I’ll call you as soon as that’s finished.”

“Sounds good,” Gil said.

“Also, I did find out that the blood on the sword is human. Now, just try to stay with me while I explain the specifics,” she said. Gil let her condescension slide by. “I won’t know if it’s definitely Brianna’s blood until the DNA results come back, but if we look at blood typing I can determine in general if it might be hers. So, the blood on the sword is O positive.”

“Which is fairly common,” Gil said.

“Right. About forty percent of the population has it,” she said. “Now, we don’t know Brianna’s blood type, but I still have both parents’ blood samples and DNA that we took during the first investigation, so I did some more tests. It turns out her mom is O positive and her dad is O negative—”

“Oh, about that,” Gil said, interrupting.

“What?”

“I forgot to call you, but the guy we thought was Brianna’s dad—”

“Tony Herrera.”

“Right. He says he’s not,” Gil said.

“God damn it, Gil,” she said, clearly pissed. “Do you know how screwed we are now? I have to have both her parents’ DNA to prove that the bones and the blood are hers. I can’t do anything about a positive identification until we know who her dad is.”

“Liz,” Gil said hesitantly, trying not to make her any angrier, “I’m sorry.”

“Whatever,” she said. “I’ll call you later.” She hung up. Liz was prickly but always got the job done.

Gil next called Ashley’s cell phone. He wanted to check in to see if she had been released from the hospital, but also to find out if she could come down to the station to see if she recognized David Geisler. Plus, it might give Gil a chance to ask the one question he had to have answered: Who was Brianna’s father?

Mrs. Rodriguez answered, and she sounded exhausted as she explained that Ashley had started full labor. Gil knew this was bad news given how Dr. Santiago had explained the situation to them yesterday. He hesitated in asking Mrs. Rodriguez the next question but told her that they needed someone from the family to come down to the
station. Mrs. Rodriguez’s only answer was to say that they would talk it over. Gil wondered if the family’s help was coming to a close once again. They hung up, and Gil tried to figure out how they could get Ashley to make an ID. Short of just going to the hospital and showing her a photo—which had a high incidence of misidentification—he was at a loss.

Gil arrived at the station before the detention center van showed up. Before Joe, too.

Gil was researching the court cases about mentally ill suspects when Joe walked in holding a twenty-two-ounce Mountain Dew. “Hiya, brother. What’s up? How did you sleep? I think I actually had nightmares last night about those crime scenes.”

Gil had slept badly after the call with Lucy, but he wasn’t about to tell Joe that. He said instead, “The transport should be getting here soon with Rudy Rodriguez and David Geisler, so we need to get them set up in interview rooms.”

“Cool,” Joe said, taking a swig out of his Mountain Dew

“Oh, and one more thing,” Gil said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I found out that the security tapes from the
Capital Tribune
won’t do us any good. The cameras are broken.”

“Seriously?” Joe asked. “Then what was that guy’s whole crap fest about us needing a court order?”

“I don’t know,” Gil said, before changing the subject to his calls with Liz and Mrs. Rodriguez. He was just finishing updating Joe when three corrections officers came in with the prisoner transfers for the day, including Rudy Rodriguez, who was not handcuffed and looked disheveled but sober, and David Geisler, who was completely shackled and talking to himself in a low voice. Gil went over to them to sign the release paperwork while Joe got them both situated in interview rooms.

The two men met back up at Gil’s desk, where Gil said, “So the plan is for me to do an assessment of Geisler. More to judge his mental state. Then I’ll call the DA and see if we can legally interview him. After that, I’ll interview Rodriguez.” Gil sighed. He was going to have to get Rodriguez to confess to abusing Ashley in order to ask if he was Brianna’s father.

“Sounds like a plan, man,” Joe said.

Gil unclipped his paddle holster and locked it and his gun in his desk drawer, then grabbed a notebook and went into the interview room. Geisler sat in one of the two chairs in the room, rocking back and forth, constantly saying nonsensical words. He would occasionally laugh, always putting his hand up to his mouth and giggling.

“Hello, David, I’m Mr. Montoya,” Gil said. “Do you remember me from last night?”

Geisler just kept talking. Among the mumblings, Gil could only hear a few distinct phrases. “A right wall no matter dumb, dumb.”

Gil continued. “I need to get your age and address for the paperwork. Can you help me with that?”

Geisler looked up and said with an elfish smile, “Rarely heaven is dog symptom . . . move a consciousness my hip hip lock.” Then he started giggling again.

Gil sighed and said, “David, can you understand what I’m saying?”

Geisler got up suddenly and walked to the wall, facing it. There he fluttered his arms and started saying, “Giraffe spoiled drum pink.”

“Did you know Brianna Rodriguez?”

Geisler, still facing the wall, jumped on one foot and muttered.

Gil shook his head. He watched Geisler for another moment before getting up and leaving. He went to the room next door, which was the other side of the mirrored window. Joe stood in there, watching Geisler.

“I think he’s worse,” Gil said sadly.

“I agree with that,” Joe said. “Now what?”

“Now we call the DA and try to figure out what to do.”

Gil put a call in to the district attorney’s answering service and asked that the lawyer on call get back to him about Geisler. In the meantime, he would interview Ashley’s dad. They needed him to confirm two things: their suspicion that he had nothing to do with Brianna’s disappearance and that he was—or wasn’t—Brianna’s father.

Gil wasn’t looking forward to the interview. Sexual abuse was a delicate issue that needed lots and lots of interview time to even begin to break the suspect down and get at the truth. They just didn’t
have that kind of time right now, especially since they had no evidence to support the claim. In the end, the abuse charges would be turned over to the sexual offender detectives, who specialized in that kind of work. At the moment, it was the murder charges that concerned Gil. He had to know if Rodriguez had impregnated his daughter. Their blood evidence against Geisler now depended on finding Brianna’s father.

The complexity of the situation meant that Gil would have to break the interview up into pieces. The first part would be easy. Gil would only ask Rodriguez about Brianna’s disappearance and not mention Ashley’s abuse. It was the second part that would get ugly.

Gil grabbed a general interview form and went into the room. He introduced himself again to Rodriguez before sitting down in one of the two chairs. The chairs were the only furniture in the room by design. They called it an interview room, but it was really an interrogation room, devoid of distraction.

Rodriguez was definitely sober now, his polo shirt and pants wrinkled from the overnight accommodations. Gil asked him to confirm his name and address, which he wrote on the interview form. The form served no actual informational purpose. Instead, it gave Gil a baseline from which to judge the way Rodriguez responded to questions. It allowed Gil to check the man’s normal verbal and behavior patterns so that later, when asking the tough questions, Gil could determine if Rodriguez’s answers fit the baseline. Anything outside the baseline could be a lie.

Gil leaned forward in his chair before saying, “Rudy, what is your understanding of the purpose for this interview with me here today?”

“I don’t know,” Rodriguez said, looking confused. “To talk about Brianna?”

Gil didn’t respond to Rudy’s question and instead said, “As you know, we have recently found evidence that leads us to believe that Brianna is dead.” He stated this firmly with little intonation, following the basic interview script. It was the same method used by police across the country, and Gil found some comfort in staying within the rules of questioning someone. When it came to interviewing suspects,
he rarely colored outside the lines. Gil continued, “If you know anything about Brianna’s disappearance, our investigation will find that out. But if you had nothing to do with it, it will show that as well. If you know anything at all about it, you should tell me now.”

“I don’t know anything,” Rodriguez said in a rush. “I swear.”

Gil had been direct with his question on purpose. To throw Rodriguez off. Suspects rarely expected anyone to ask them directly if they committed a crime.

“Do you know who could have done this?” Gil asked.

“I’ve thought a lot about that, but I just can’t think of anybody.”

“Do you know anyone that you feel absolutely had nothing to do with it? Just your gut feeling?”

“Oh, there is no way Ashley or Rose had anything to do with it. Nobody in the family did,” Rodriguez said. He stopped to think for a second and then said, “It had to be a stranger.”

Gil nodded. Guilty suspects would usually be fast and furious when answering the question about who else could be to blame. They did not formulate thoughtful responses.

“You believe it was a stranger who took Brianna?” Gil asked.

“Yes, I do,”

Gil nodded again. It was a straightforward answer with no signs of deception. Rodriguez made no attempt to add on an improbable scenario, like Brianna had run away.

“When was the last time you saw Brianna?” Gil asked.

“About a month before she disappeared, when I moved out,” he said as he started crying, his bloodshot eyes becoming even redder. At that moment, he was every inch a grandfather who’d lost his only grandchild.