The Bone Fire: A Mystery (25 page)

“Oh hell,” Lucy muttered to herself.

Gil’s phone rang. It was Chief Kline. Gil let it go to voice mail; he didn’t want to get in another conversation about interviewing Geisler until he had a chance to talk to the DA, but the district attorney on call had yet to get back to Gil.

He decided he had stalled as long as he could. It was time to finally interrogate Rudy Rodriguez—and it would be an actual interrogation.

So far, every conversation Gil had had with the various people surrounding this case had been an interview, generally casual and relaxed. Interviews had a script for Gil to follow, but they allowed for a lot of ad lib. In an interview, you mostly played fair, but in an interrogation, you made whatever play would get you a confession.

An interrogation was less malleable. It was much like the work of an expert jeweler who starts with a rough stone, but a hundred small cuts later, that stone has the crystal brilliance of a diamond. Gil would be the one making those hundred little cuts. And they would be painful.

He grabbed a manila file folder off his desk and wrote Rodriguez’s name in the tab, then wrote the words
CASE FILE
followed by a random bunch of numbers. He grabbed some old police reports out of the recycling tray and then put the copier maintenance log and the printer manual in for good measure. When he was done, the folder looked packed full of incriminating information.

Holding the folder, Gil went back into the room with Rodriguez. “Are you ready for us to talk for a few more minutes?” Gil asked. Rodriguez nodded. This was part of the play. Ask the suspect’s permission to speak to allow him to feel in charge. Gil, who according to the script had to remain standing for the next part, said, “If you don’t mind, let’s change the focus of the interview, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Great. And thank you in advance for your cooperation,” Gil said, smiling. This kindness was a ploy as well, but a necessary one. A person confessed when he felt understood and respected. “It’s recently come to our attention that your daughter, Ashley, may have been touched inappropriately by someone close to her when she was younger.” Rodriguez started to talk, but Gil interrupted him with a raised hand. “I can guarantee you, Rudy, that our investigation will uncover the truth. In light of that, if you know anything about it, you should tell me now.”

“She’s my daughter,” Rodriguez said with a short laugh that was almost a bark. “Why would I do something like that?” He shifted in his chair and leaned back.

Gil sighed. Rodriguez had assumed that Gil was accusing him, and he had just given one of the most typical deceptive responses. If he hadn’t abused Ashley, he would have been emphatic and firm in his denial, not indirect.

Still standing, Gil moved his chair directly in front of Rodriguez to the recommended distance of four feet. It was close enough to ensure intimate conversation but not close enough to make the suspect feel crowded. Gil sat down slowly, the manila folder in his lap. He opened the folder. The copier manual opened to a page about built-in networking operations. Gil looked at it for a ten count, taking a moment to read about the connections necessary for a
secure network, then closed the folder. Rodriguez shifted in his chair, leaning back and folding his arms.

Gil took the opposite posture and leaned forward. He kept his facial features soft and sympathetic. “You know, Rudy, I just want to find the truth out about what happened to your granddaughter. I know you want that, too. I see how much you loved her, and I know you would have protected her if you could have . . . and I know you feel the same way about Ashley.”

People always thought interrogation was fireworks of accusations and threats, when in fact it was a calm journey of a thousand lies.

Lucy sat in her car, staring at the apartment. It had been fifteen minutes, but Andrea still hadn’t come out. Lucy had spent the first five minutes debating what to do, but she knew if a blond-haired Anglo suddenly knocked on the apartment door, it wouldn’t help the situation.

A large sign hanging on the side of the building read:
PARKING FOR RESIDENTS ONLY. ALL VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED AT THEIR EXPENSE
. Lucy laughed. The sign was a scare tactic. Nothing more. She had yet to meet anyone in Santa Fe who had had a car towed, even in the most egregious of situations.

Lucy looked again up at the apartment, but nothing had changed. She gave it another few minutes before texting Andrea.
R U All Right?
It took a minute, but the reply was a short
Yes
back. That relaxed Lucy a little, and she turned on the radio. The stations all had Western-sounding names, like the Range, the Peak, and the Coyote. She tuned in the public radio station that was playing its usual Northern New Mexico music of rancheros and mariachi. She flipped to the other public station, which was playing powwow music.

A man in a T-shirt and jeans walked past the car, and she quickly turned the station. She wasn’t sure that as a white girl she had the right to listen to Indian music. They might think she was one of the many who came to Santa Fe in search of their own tribe—and did peyote and talked of the gift of the Great Spirit while sipping latte.

She watched the man go into the apartment complex office and close the door. He must be the manager. They would have to talk to
him later, but only after they had secured a few interviews on the record. What Andrea was trying to get right now was simply information. They wouldn’t reveal she was a reporter unless they had to. Instead, Tommy would come back next week and interview the people on the record, hoping that they would talk.

The man in the T-shirt came back out of the office and locked the door. He started walking up the stairs to the upper level just as Andrea, in her laughing way, began to come out the upstairs apartment door. The last thing they needed was for the manager to see her. If he did, and he challenged what she was doing there, they would have to tell the truth. Such was the journalism code of ethics. Lucy swore and got out of the car. In one motion, she pulled her hair out of its ponytail and pulled her blouse down lower.

“Excuse me,” she called over to the man, who squinted at her in the sunlight. “I am so sorry to bother you, but are you the manager?”

“I am,” he said, checking her out slightly.

“I was wondering if you have any places for rent?” she asked, still smiling.

“I do,” he said hesitantly, “but I don’t think this would be a good fit for you.”

“Why not? What’s the rent?” With her peripheral vision, she could see Andrea clicking her way down the stairs. She just needed to stall him a little longer.

“I don’t think the element here would be your kind,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she said. Andrea was on the ground floor, out of Lucy’s peripheral sight, but Lucy could hear the clacking of the woman’s heels on the pavement as she made her way to the car.

“This place can get a little rough,” he said. Almost as a punctuation to his sentence, she heard Andrea slam the car door shut. They were in the clear.

“Well, okay,” she said. “I appreciate the heads-up.”

She joined Andrea in the car and said, “Well?”

“Okay,” Andrea said excitedly, “so all the cars weren’t stolen. They were actually taken away by a tow company.”

“Then ended up getting burned?” Lucy said. “I didn’t expect that. Maybe it’s something against the tow company?”

“No, no,” Andrea said quickly. “The tow company is the one burning them.”

Gil sat on the metal chair in the interview room, leaning forward in a show of concern—but it was a show, plain and simple.

“Every father wants to protect his daughter,” Gil said. “You know, I would kill anyone who ever touched my daughter. She’s sixteen and just so beautiful.” He would never mention his own daughters to this man. So he made up a fictitious daughter on the spot. “Being a father is all about love.”

“I’ve loved Ashley since the day she was born,” Rodriguez said.

“Sometimes,” Gil said, “people don’t respect how hard it is to be a dad. I think in a lot of ways that it’s harder to be a father than it is to be a mother.”

“They have it so much easier than us,” Rodriguez said.

“Exactly. They don’t have to put the food on the table,” Gil said, as Rodriguez nodded vigorously. “They don’t know about how a father always is thinking of his children, especially his daughters.”

“I think of Ashley every second of every day,” Rodriguez said.

“Right. I mean, sometimes I feel that my daughter is there for me more than my wife is. And my daughter is just there for me, not nagging, not wanting to know when I’m coming home. She is so easy to be with.”

“Ashley and me are exactly like that,” Rodriguez said with a satisfied smile.

“Like two peas in a pod,” Gil said.

“Right, just like that,” Rodriguez said.

Gil nodded. Inside, he was preparing for what came next.

There were levels to interrogation, and Gil rarely had to delve deep. Usually, he would just present the facts of the case in a certain order, tell a few small lies, and then explain that he understood why the suspect committed the crime, and he would have a confession. It was amazing how often that worked.

Gil had lines that he wouldn’t cross during the interrogation process even when other investigators did. He wouldn’t blame the victim to get a confession. He wouldn’t tell a murderer, “I know why you shot your girlfriend. She deserved it.” He wouldn’t say that because he saw the danger it posed to himself. He worried that if he went to that place of blaming the victim one too many times, he would forget his own morals. He would lose his way. He would become indifferent. He would start to blame the victims as much as the suspects. That way led to burnout. He had seen too many cops hit that point, and Gil had steered well clear of it so far. The burnout rate for interrogators was high—higher than for regular police officers. Gil wondered if that was because interrogators lost a piece of their humanity every time they blamed an innocent victim just to get a confession.

Gil could keep working on Rodriguez, and later today, possibly tonight, he would finally admit what Gil already knew—that he had sexually abused Ashley and could be Brianna’s father. Now, though, Gil didn’t have time for the long, slow conversations that process would require. He needed that information fast.

The only way to get it was to step over the line he had rarely crossed before.

He would do it. Because it was the only way.

Gil took a deep breath. “You know, I talk to a lot of men in my job, and it’s really helped me to see that a relationship with a daughter is special, but there is part of it that no one talks about,” Gil said, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “When a girl becomes a woman, it is such a beautiful thing. A lot of dads feel that way. You know what I mean?”

Rodriguez nodded but said nothing, forcing Gil to continue. “The girls know that you are looking. They are just tempting you, with their bodies. They want you to look.”

“Ashley had this little tank top that really showed off her figure, and I thought about all the boys looking at her, but then I realized that she was wearing it for me, because she wanted me to look.”

“I think it’s only natural for a man to look,” Gil said, “and you know that they want you to do more than look.”

Rodriguez just nodded, so Gil went on, “This one time, I was walking past my daughter when she was about twelve and I brushed her breast with my arm. I felt so alive because she was right there and everything was so new and sensitive. And I knew she liked it.” Gil thought his insides at that moment might be mistaken for dead if anyone had bothered to look.

“Ashley’s breasts got so big. It was like overnight she was a woman,” Rodriguez said, shaking his head in wonder.

“What were they like when you touched them?” Gil said. It no longer mattered what he said. He had gone so far over the line that he wasn’t even horrified by the words coming out of his mouth.

“So soft and sweet,” Rodriguez said.

Gil was so close now; he just needed an answer to the next question, and then he could be out of this cold, dead place. “And when you made love for the first time, what was it like?”

“So good,” Rodriguez said, clearly caught up in nothing but the memory, not realizing that he had just given Gil what he needed.

Gil almost breathed a sigh of relief. He had his confession. It would be useless for Rodriguez to protest now that he had never touched Ashley.

Gil knew that a part of him was now gone. He had offered it up as a sacrifice. To get to the truth. He hoped it wasn’t a part he might need later.

He wanted to get out of the room. He looked at Rodriguez, who didn’t seem human now. More a caricature of a human. Gil felt exhausted, but he pressed on. He didn’t want this nonhuman to get back out into the world.

“How old was Ashley when you started spending time together that way?” Gil asked, all business now, purposely being vague about the abuse so as not to spook him.

“She was just turning into a woman,” Rodriguez said, not noticing the change in Gil’s voice from thoughtful friend to interrogator.