The Bone Fire: A Mystery (24 page)

“Joe,” Gil said sharply to make him stop.

“What, Gil? I didn’t tell her who the family member was,” Joe said, annoyed and whiny.

Lucy smiled and said to Joe, leaning over to touch his hand, “Gil is upset because you just confirmed to me that you think the skull is Brianna’s, and what Gil thinks is that I will use that information. I won’t. I promise.”

“Gil is such a safety dog,” Joe said to Lucy, shaking his head.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said, laughing. “He
is
 a total safety dog. On my honor, Officer Gil, I swear I will look both ways before crossing the street.” They were both laughing now.

“Anyway,” Gil said.

“Sorry,” Lucy said, as if she were apologizing to her dad or a teacher for acting up. “Anyway, there is no way a guy with hebephrenia would strike up a friendship with a two-year-old. Even on medication, he would barely to talk to anyone. At most, he would have possibly walked by her. Even then, he would have crossed the street to avoid her or anyone else. Your witness is wrong.”

“We have no reason not to believe him,” Gil said.

She shook her head again. “You guys have seen your suspect. Does he act like someone who just two days ago could get all the way downtown, put a skull in Zozobra, and then leave bones around town in the middle of the night? And yes, Gil, I know about the stuff at Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

Gil looked at her for a minute, wondering how she had found out about the displays, before saying, “We have other evidence besides the ID, but not only that, he fits the profile.”

“What you mean is, only a mentally ill person would make displays of Brianna’s bones.”

“Yes,” Gil said, not trying to sugarcoat it. She nodded, but Gil was sure she was not agreeing with him.

“We’ve really appreciated your help,” Gil said.

“Cut out the let’s-patronize-the-crazy-lady tone, Montoya,” she said, annoyed.

“Lucy,” Gil said, feeling like he needed to explain the situation more, “we are looking for a person exactly like him. Now all we need from him is a confession.”

She smiled bitterly and said, “It would be better for him and for
you if you thought of him as a little green alien. Someone or something that doesn’t even resemble us. Because that’s what he is.”

“That’s harsh,” Joe said.

“No, it’s not,” Lucy said, leaning forward in her effort to make them understand. “That’s his disease. Look, if he ever gets out of the word salad stage and goes back to simple schizophrenia and then you ask him if he killed Brianna, he might say yes, but he has no concept of what he’s saying yes to. If you asked him if the sky was pink, he’d say yes. None of this is real to him. His entire world is completely in his own brain. You have to accept that to him, only things in his world are real. Getting him to confess to a crime in our world means nothing to him.”

“It’s perfectly legal to interrogate a suspect who is mentally ill,” Gil said.

“But is it morally acceptable?”

That was the crux of Gil’s problem. It wasn’t that he believed Geisler was incapable of the crime, as Lucy suggested. In fact, Gil was convinced he was guilty. It was the immorality of coaxing a mentally ill person into confession.

Joe said, “We could ask the judge to make him go on drugs—”

“Those will take weeks to work, if they ever do—and if they do work, he’ll have no idea what he did while he was off them. Then after you ask your questions, he’ll go right back off his meds.”

“If he really wanted to get better he’d stay on his medication,” Joe said.

“No, no. You don’t get it. The meds are death to him. They take away everything he is. Everything in the world becomes the same color as beige,” she said, adding with a tilt of her head. “Of course, we’re in Santa Fe, so everything is already beige.”

Gil stood up to signal that they were done, and Joe followed suit. Lucy stayed in her chair.

She asked sadly, “Could you at least dim the lights for him to decrease the stimuli? It’ll make him calm down some.”

“Sure, I can do that,” Joe said as he went out the door, leaving Gil and Lucy alone.

She sighed deeply, then said, “The guy needs a case manager. Or
maybe his parents know the deal. And maybe put him on suicide watch. Also, a lot of hebephrenics smoke. I don’t know why. That might calm him down too. Honestly, he needs to be in the psych ward at the hospital.”

Gil just nodded, then asked, “Is schizophrenia genetic?”

Now it was Lucy’s turn to nod. She rested her head in her hands on the table.

“Does your mom or your dad have it?”

“My mom,” she said, not even looking up. “My dad left when I was a kid when she was really bad.”

“He left you alone with a schizophrenic mother?”

Lucy said nothing.

“Is your mother hebephrenic?”

“No. My brother is. She’s a paranoid schizophrenic. Her delusions were about a CIA conspiracy. It’s the paranoids who get violent.”

“What about you? Have you ever heard voices?”

She smiled sadly and said, “Not yet. Still voice free. But as a child and sister of a schizophrenic, I have a thirty percent chance of developing it.”

Now it was Gil’s turn to say nothing. They stayed in silence for a minute until Lucy said, “Every day I think that today might be the day I go crazy. That today maybe the little bit of OCD I have will become voices in my head.” She closed her eyes and took a deep, ragged breath.

Gil went to stand behind her. He was about to put his hand on her back in the only expression of comfort he could think of, but he let it fall back to his side when Joe opened the door.

Lucy, realizing she would be late to meet Andrea, said good-bye to Gil and was on her way out of the station when she heard someone say to her, “Leaving already?”

She turned, looking for the speaker, and had to peek into the conference room to see Joe sitting at the table, a mass of photos spread in front of him. On the wall behind him was a whiteboard with a list of motives and other case-related tidbits. She decided it was time to
make small talk with Joe and maybe memorize the whiteboard in the process.

“So you’re Gil’s partner,” she said with a smile as she walked around the table, taking a casual survey of the papers and photos while stealing glances at the board. “That must be fun times.”

“I’m actually learning a lot,” Joe said. “He’s a really good guy.”

“Is this your first case together?” she asked, picking up some photos in front of Joe and looking them over.

“Yep,” he said. “We make a good team if I do say so myself.”

“And what is it that you bring to the team that is so good?” she asked, teasing.

“I bring the heat, baby,” he said. Lucy laughed, but her mind was on something else. She had realized that the photo she had in her hand was of the crime scene of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. It showed the tower of the church in the background and the statue in the foreground, wearing a necklace that was hard to make out. She would really like to study the photo more.

“What do you do when you’re not working?” Lucy asked.

“Hang out at the bar and drink,” Joe said slyly.

“Actually, that is my favorite thing to do, too,” she said. She leaned in closer. “How about this? How about as soon as this case is done, we go do our favorite thing together?”

Joe smiled. He actually was kind of cute with his red hair and blue eyes. “Sounds good to me.”

“Why don’t you write your number here,” she said, flipping the photo over.

Joe wrote his information down on it and then said in a whisper, “I’ll need that photo back.”

She smiled. “Just call me and I’ll rush right over to give it to you.”

She walked away, holding on to the photo and knowing that Joe was watching her when she turned around to say, “Just one more thing. A kind of way to seal the deal, if you will. Just a small favor.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I was just wondering who made the ID of your suspect.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“Yes, I am,” she said, playfully. “About all things.”

He smiled wickedly and said, “It was Alex Stevens, Ashley’s boyfriend. Now you owe me.”

“Yes I do,” she said, laughing, with a sashay out the door of the police station.

“Lucy’s really convincing,” Joe said. He and Gil were back at the conference table, going over the case once again.

Gil smiled. “Yes, she is.”

“Are you two knocking boots?”

Gil rolled his eyes. “I’m married.”

“Hey, brother, that ain’t no thing.”

“Anyway,” Gil said, annoyed, “as far as I’m concerned nothing Lucy said changes the fact that Geisler is our guy—but if Lucy was so convincing about his problems, then imagine what a defense attorney will do with it.”

“Right.”

“We have to nail down our evidence more,” Gil said. “The most solid things we have are the ID from Alex Stevens, Geisler’s past behavior with kids, and the blood on the sword.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “We have to reinterview Geisler’s neighbor who made the complaint and the guy’s kids.”

“First I have to finish the interview with Rodriguez,” Gil said, not looking forward to it.

“Sounds good,” Joe said, then added uncertainly, “I have to say that before Lucy showed up I was gung ho about Geisler. I mean, I still think he’s our guy, but I kind of feel bad for him. I dunno. Everything is screwed up.”

Gil smiled. When Lucy was involved, that was the way of things.

Lucy was just outside the doors of the police station when the tears started. She wasn’t even sure why she was crying. She was just so frustrated. She fumbled with her car keys, trying to connect with the lock, but eventually got inside. She took a few deep breaths and then pulled out. She needed to meet Andrea in five minutes, but she needed something else more.

She had to have a beer. To calm her nerves. She pulled into an Allsup’s and grabbed a Budweiser tallboy, taking a moment to straighten the remaining cans so all the labels would be facing the customer.

As she waited in line, she noticed that a man in front of her was buying a fifth of vodka and cigarettes. The woman behind her was buying three candy bars and a Coke. Lucy wondered if the convenience store clerks ever got depressed because they were the supplier for so many people’s addictions. The sugar, the nicotine, the alcohol. Lucy showed her ID and bought the beer. In the car, she looked around to make sure no one was watching, then popped the top and took a big swig. The alcohol hit the back of her throat, and her tension level immediately dropped. She felt her mind slow down from revving its engine to quietly coasting.

She backed the car out and made it to Starbucks only a few minutes later. Andrea waited at the table.

Lucy ordered just plain black coffee and sat down. The two exchanged “good mornings,” then got down to work. With Andrea taking notes, they formulated a few questions to ask the residents of the apartment complex. The questions started out innocuous but eventually got to the point. Andrea would start by knocking on some doors and telling whoever answered that she had just gotten to town and was thinking of renting. She would ask about rental prices, the neighbors, the parking, and then ease her way into the “What kind of problems could I expect?” question.

Lucy’s suspicion was that one of the local gangs was shaking down other gang members who lived at the complex. She didn’t tell Andrea that—she didn’t want to scare her—but they did agree that Andrea wouldn’t go inside anyone’s apartment. She would stay where Lucy could see her. Just casually talking by the front door. If Lucy spotted trouble and honked the horn, Andrea would rush back to the car.

Lucy tried to teach Andrea how to do a cold undercover interview with people. How to smile, look slightly naive, generally be sweet. They sat for a few more minutes while Andrea talked at Lucy in Spanish. Lucy didn’t understand a word, but that wasn’t the point. Andrea was busy perfecting her cover.

They didn’t want anyone to suspect that Andrea was Puerto Rican.
They might wonder why a legal U.S. citizen would live on their side of the tracks, and suspicious people were closed-mouth people.

Andrea was going to do her best to dodge the citizenship question by disguising the way she spoke Spanish. She practiced saying a word’s final
s
, which wasn’t pronounced in Puerto Rican Spanish, and tried to talk slower, enunciating each letter and emphasizing the
r
the way Mexican Spanish was spoken. She eventually started to feel more comfortable disguising her accent. Passing as Mexican.

They went out to Lucy’s car, and Lucy panicked for a moment when she realized the beer can was still in the front seat. She got in but waited to unlock the passenger door for Andrea until she’d hidden the can in the backseat. She finally let Andrea in, and they set off toward the apartment complex.

Rodeo Road changed to Airport Road, and the signs changed from Applebee’s and Bank of America to taquerías and carnicerías. This was the immigrant side of town, so unlike downtown in its crouched-over oldness. Here there were bright lights and sprawling strip malls. Here there were burrito trucks and ice cream vendors pushing their carts for miles. Most of the signs were now in Spanish, and piñatas filled the windows of the grocery store. This part of town was new, built up quickly over the past ten years. It seemed to be tacked onto Santa Fe’s southern edge. Lucy pulled up in front of the Hacienda Linda apartment complex. It was a two-story bland beige structure with steel and cement exterior staircases and breezeways. The cars in front had license plates mainly from Chihuahua. Lucy pulled into an empty spot.

“You ready?” she asked Andrea.

“I think so.” Andrea got out as easily as she could given her tight jeans and clicked her way up to the upper level.

Lucy watched Andrea approach the first apartment and knock on the door. A young woman with a toddler at her feet answered. Lucy couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the woman smiled and scooped the toddler up into her arms. Lucy took it as a good sign that the woman hadn’t slammed the door shut. She could hear Andrea and the woman laughing. Then Andrea, without a look back, stepped through the front door, which closed behind her.