The Bone Fire: A Mystery (26 page)

“So about when she was eleven or twelve?” Gil asked. Rodriguez nodded. “And how often did this happen?” Gil asked.

“A few times a month.”

“Did you have intercourse with her or just oral sex?”

“We had both—” Rodriguez stopped, finally sensing the change in tone. He looked up at Gil, who stared flatly at him and tried very hard not to let the hatred seep out of his eyes.

Rodriguez just looked defeated now. His lies were gone.

Gil had no sympathy.

The man was a moral coward like all sex offenders. They blamed the victim, while they themselves were guiltless. They believed they had done no wrong, even as those they abused went from happy people to decimated husks. To Gil, sex offenders were almost worse than murderers. A killer stole a life once. A molester stole a life over and over again. Gil agreed with the Catholic Church about the death penalty, except when it came to child molesters. The quicker they were dead, the better for everyone.

“Are you Brianna’s father?” Gil asked.

“No,” Rodriguez said. The first strong objection he’d made during the entire interrogation. “I’m fixed.”

“You had a vasectomy? When?”

“About ten years ago.” If it was true, then he wasn’t Brianna’s father.

“Do you know who Brianna’s father is?” Gil asked.

“Tony Herrera,” Rodriguez said, giving the same answer as everyone else. Gil could see that Rodriguez didn’t have much more information to offer.

“When was the last time you had intercourse with Ashley?” Gil asked.

“Last year when she wanted me to sign the papers.”

“Which papers were those?” Gil asked, thinking less about the question and more about getting out of the room so he could finally breathe.

“The papers about Brianna, you know,” he said.

“I’m not sure what you are talking about,” Gil said, his mind coming back to the conversation.

“The adoption papers that lawyer had us sign,” Rodriguez said.

Lucy zipped down streets and through traffic lights on her way back to Starbucks to drop off Andrea, who swayed and jostled in her seat, although she didn’t seem to notice as she told her story.

The woman Andrea had interviewed was Gladys Soliz Portilla. She had been the owner of the second car that had gotten torched. It had only taken a few questions to get Gladys to open up about it. The woman, who had come from Mexico with her young son a few months ago, had her Dodge Neon towed from the apartment parking lot. When she went to get it from the tow company, they told her she had to produce a lease showing she lived at the complex. Because of her undocumented status, she hadn’t signed a lease.

“Then,” Andrea said, getting into the story, “a man comes to her house and tells her that if she pays him eight hundred dollars, she can have her car back, but that’s like almost a month’s salary. She tells him that she’ll call the police. That’s when her car was torched.
I guess when the people couldn’t pay, their cars were burned to send a message.”

“This towing company sounds lovely,” Lucy said.

“It just pisses me off that anyone would take advantage of people like this,” Andrea said. Lucy smiled. Andrea was still too young to understand that it was human nature to pick on the weakest among us, and who is weaker than undocumented single mothers? The whole scam relied on the victim not feeling like she could go to the police. When the woman went outside her role as the victim and threatened to call the cops, they proved to her that they were untouchable by torching her car.

“She says that it’s happened to at least three of her neighbors,” Andrea said, speaking fast.

“What’s the name of the tow company?” Lucy asked.

Andrea checked her notes and said, “Ultimate Towing, but I bet you all the tow companies in town are in on it.”

“Wait a minute,” Lucy said. “We have no proof of that. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” She found it strange to be the one urging restraint.

“Okay, so we need some proof,” Andrea said. “We can go over to Ultimate Towing, and I can pretend that they took my car—”

“Hell, no,” Lucy said.

“Fine, then, we can stake them out—”

“No way,” Lucy said. “Listen to me. That’s not how it’s done. There is a bunch of documentation we need to get on them first—”

“I’ll be careful, I swear—”

“I don’t care about that. You’ll ruin the investigation,” Lucy said, not realizing how cold she sounded until the words were out of her mouth.

Andrea looked a little stung and a whole lot young. The girl was just excited about doing real journalism, and now Lucy was crushing her.

“Okay, look,” Lucy said, trying to make amends. “How about we go over to the county impound lot? That’s where they would have taken all the burned cars.”

Andrea clapped her hands, which Lucy took to mean that she was
up for it. What Lucy didn’t tell her was that they wouldn’t be going into the lot. It was a Saturday, so it was unlikely that anyone would be there to open the gate. Even if someone was, Lucy and Andrea were not official county personnel. They would never be let in. At best, they would be able to peek through the fence before they were scared away by a security guard.

Lucy drove out toward the grassy plains on the highway and turned down a dirt road where an orange sign full of bullet holes read:
ROAD PERMANENTLY CLOSED
. That never meant anything out here. There would be side roads and dirt paths that meandered out to nowhere. A bird squawked on a telephone line as they drove by.

They turned into the county impound lot, which was fenced with eight-foot-tall razor wire. They pulled up to the closed gate, and Lucy was about to explain to Andrea that they would have to just look through the fence when a little man in overalls wandered out of a small shack and opened the gate. He came over to them, looking at Lucy flatly, then over to Andrea.

“Hi,” Lucy said. She wasn’t sure what else to add. She hadn’t been prepared to make up anything about what her business there was.

He looked over the interior of her car and seemed to see something that made sense to him, because he said, “I’ll keep the gate open until you leave.” Then he walked away, never asking Lucy who she was or under what authority she was looking at the cars.

Mystified, Lucy glanced around the inside of her car, wondering what had made him decide she belonged there. It took a moment for her to realize that the man had seen her EMS radio firmly mounted on the dashboard and the large sticker on its side that read PIÑON FIRE AND RESCUE. Damn it. She had just inadvertently used her EMS credentials to get info on a story. Lopez would be so proud.

She maneuvered around the dirt lot, which was packed with county maintenance vehicles and cars that had been seized by the sheriff’s office during criminal investigations. Lucy drove slowly as they looked at the rows of cars, trucks, and vans. Andrea let out a squeal when she saw a burned car among some weeds. Lucy took it as her cue to stop.

“Okay,” Andrea said, getting out, her high-heeled shoes crunching on the dirt. “The woman said her car was a red Dodge Neon.”

“Do we know what kind of cars her neighbors drove?”

“Yeah, a Ford F-150. She said it was black. And then a blue Accord.”

They walked over to the burned-out car, but it didn’t match any of the descriptions. They kept walking in the maze of cars through what was all but a junkyard.

Behind a school bus, near some outer buildings, Lucy found one of the three. This was the blue Accord. Andrea clapped her hands in excitement.

They walked around it. The interior of the car was burned black, with jagged metal plates where the upholstery used to be, and the roof was charred a bright white. The back of the car was surprisingly untouched, and its cobalt blue paint glinted in the sun. The smell of burned plastic still hung around the area. Lucy took a few pictures of the car with her cell phone, then walked to the back of it to write down the plate. She was just starting to note the numbers when she saw a slash of red spray paint on the body of the car. She stared at the uneven paint, which had drip marks along its edges. Even with the bad application, it was possible to make out a few letters that hadn’t been eaten up in the fire. Actually, it was possibly a word. Maybe in Spanish, but all she could clearly make out was the beginning letters,
EL TIE
. The rest was lost to the fire.

Andrea came and stood next to Lucy, looking at the writing.

“What could that say?” Lucy asked.

“Maybe it’s ‘el tiempecillo’ or ‘tiempo.’ I don’t know.”

They walked farther into the lot. This time it was Andrea who found the next vehicle. It was the F-150. Or what was left of it. The windows had all splintered, and the dashboard had melted into the floor. The truck hadn’t been as lucky as the Accord—it was nothing more than a charred heap of metal.

“Two down, one to go,” Andrea said.

When they found the red Dodge Neon, it was sitting in remarkable condition at the edge of the lot. The windows were charred but
intact. Only the hood had been bent up in the fire. Whoever had set this fire hadn’t done as good a job. The red spray paint was easily visible on the side of the car, even over the endemic red paint. It read
EL TIEMPO DE PAGAR
.

“What does that mean?” Lucy asked.

“Time to pay.”

Gil left the interrogation room as quickly as possible. He went to the room next door, which was the other side of the mirrored window, where Joe was waiting for him.

Before Joe could start on his rant, Gil began one of his own.

“How the hell had we missed this? Ashley tried to have Brianna adopted?” Gil said loudly and uncharacteristically. “What is going on?”

He cursed Detective Fisher in his head. Maybe Fisher took his own life because he knew how badly he had botched the case from the beginning. Gil took a deep breath. He was starting to get crueler as this case went on. Maybe that piece of himself he lost was his compassion.

“No one ever said a word about this,” Joe said. “Not Ashley, not Mrs. Rodriguez. No one.” Joe paced to the edge of the room, then came back more urgently, saying, “I think this guy is full of shit. There is no way. He’s a lying alcoholic pervert who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.”

Gil attempted to calm himself but let Joe go on and on until he was worn out. Gil tried to think of how they missed it. They had checked all court records and every other conceivable type of official document. Maybe Joe was right. Maybe Rodriguez was lying.

Gil wanted so badly to be done with Rodriguez. The man was so far out of the realm of fatherhood. He was nothing more than a narcissist. He wanted something and he took it. The world owed him.

Gil knew he had to talk with Rodriguez again, though. He was the one who had the answers. He was also the only one who had ever mentioned an adoption. He hadn’t gotten whatever family memo had been sent around telling everyone not to talk about it.

Gil opened the door and went back in. He sat heavily back down in his chair and said as calmly as he could, “Tell me more about these adoption papers.”

“The lawyer said I had to sign them as a witness,” Rodriguez said, “but the whole thing must not have worked out.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, because Brianna came back,” Rodriguez said. “I guess if it had worked out my baby might still be alive . . .” His eyes got watery, making Gil want to get as far away from him as possible, but he needed Rodriguez to keep talking.

“Do you remember any names that were on the documents?”

“I know the lawyer’s name was Anna Maria, because that’s my sister’s name, but her last name was Roybal.”

Gil was confused. “Whose last name was Roybal?”

“The lawyer’s. I remember because she had pictures of her kids on her desk. A little boy and a girl. They looked so sweet.”

Gil got up and left before his revulsion finally got the better of him.

Ashley Rodriguez had tried to sleep during the night, but the contractions made it hard. At some point around 3:00
A.M.
, they decided that she was finally in real labor. Then the craziness began. They did more tests and gave her shots for the baby’s lungs. They talked about the chances of a vaginal birth since Ashley had already gone through a C-section. She heard the doctor say that Ashley should go through labor as long as possible so her body would release a hormone that was good for the baby. Ashley paid no attention. She was too busy just trying to make it though the contractions, which now made her yell in pain. Her mom was there, strangely quiet and asking lots of questions. Ashley even saw her take a few notes. She couldn’t even remember where her mom was when Brianna was born. Well, it had happened so fast. Her dad had been there, though. The thought made her dig her fingernails into the palm of her hand, the pain giving her a moment of relief. She brushed her fingers over the scars on her arms, where she had cut herself. A few were still fresh. She had told a nurse that they were from her cat.

Ashley had been twelve when she tried suicide for the first time. She was going to hang herself like she’d seen in a
CSI
episode. She had made the rope out of her clothes and thrown it around the bar in her closet. She cried for an hour before she finally decided that she wouldn’t kill herself then. Maybe tomorrow. She had been telling herself “Maybe tomorrow” for years. Her plan had changed over time, from hanging to a drug overdose to shooting herself with one of Alex’s guns. She never talked about it with anyone. She had always heard that people who threaten suicide are just doing it to get attention, but the last thing she wanted was attention. She just had a plan that she knew she would carry out one day. Then she would be free and safe.