The Bone Fire: A Mystery (39 page)

She heard a nurse say, “Don’t fight the pain. Work with it.” Ashley just wanted it over. She wanted it out of her. The contraction started to fall off, and Ashley lay back. She wondered momentarily why Alex wasn’t there, but it hardly mattered. There was no need for him to be there. Her mother stood in the corner looking pale. Ashley had a wild thought that maybe her father had come in during the contraction. She looked around the room,
peering at the faces of the two nurses and the doctor. She tried to study them; she had to make sure he hadn’t slipped in. The contraction started again before she could be sure, and the pain rose fast. She tried to fight it, but it was too strong. She couldn’t control it. She felt like her stomach was being crushed into a tight ball. She kept yelling until the pain stopped and she was panting on the bed.

Ashley tried again to look at the faces in the room. Her father wasn’t there. He wouldn’t be there. Thank God. She hadn’t seen her father since he moved out, always making excuses to her mother so she wouldn’t have to visit him.

The last time they were in the same room together was a few days after the actress’s lawyer had brought Brianna back. Ashley hadn’t missed Brianna as much as she thought she would. Of course, she missed the cuddles and the kisses, and every night Ashley would wake up because she thought she heard Brianna crying. There had been no real crying while Brianna was gone, though, and in the blissful silence, she could think.

Ashley had started dating Alex. She was thinking about getting her GED. She even thought about taking some college classes with the money she had gotten from the adoption. Then, five months after she left, Brianna was back. It was immediate. They called and twenty minutes later dropped her off. The lawyer said they didn’t want the money back. And that was that.

Alex was angry. She had told him about Brianna, but he hadn’t counted on ever meeting her. Her mother seemed fine with it, but then it was so hard to tell. It was her father who was the happiest. Ashley watched as he bounced the little girl on his knee and kissed her tiny face with his rough lips.

Ashley knew she had to do something. She would rather that Brianna die than go through what she had.

Ashley finally decided the best thing to do was write a note. She had taken a piece of paper and written,
If you don’t move out, I will cut your balls off while you sleep
. Then she tucked it under the windshield wiper of his car.

She was surprised how well it worked. He was gone the next day. Maybe he thought Alex had written the note. Or that Tony Herrera
had ordered it done from jail. Either way, he left. For the first time, Ashley felt a glimmer of safety in her own home.

That vanished along with Brianna.

The next contraction came on faster than she expected, and suddenly she was in a pool of water. The nurses laughed and said, “Your water broke,” as if it were something to celebrate. The doctor looked down between her legs, and suddenly everything changed. The doctor said something about a prolapsed cord. One nurse helped Ashley get on all fours on the bed as the other nurse called out to someone that they needed an OR. The baby was in trouble.

Lucy parked her car near an old adobe house with an attached sunroom that had a lovely garden clinging to the shady areas. Two dogs came running up to her as she got out. One was a black Lab mix, and the other was a three-legged collie who really needed to get her hair brushed.

Lucy walked closer to the house and yelled, “Hello?” No one answered, so she stepped through the open door of the sunroom and called, “Hello?”

It took her eyes a moment to take in her surroundings, and suddenly she thought she had entered hell. There were bones everywhere on the rough wooden tables. They were being bleached in the sunlight. A large glass aquarium held no water or fish. Instead it was filled with what looked to be beetles and the severed head of some large creature that still had most of its flesh. It could have been a cow. Or a deer. A large stone pestle and mortar sat on a bench, clearly being used to crush bone into dust. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn that she’d just walked into a serial killer’s house.

She did know better, though. She had gotten Tamara’s address from Peter, then done some research on the woman before she left the office. It had been easy enough to do. She was a world-renowned naturalist artist. Her work had been featured at the UN building in New York City. She had a master’s degree in biology from Stanford, but after graduating she found herself drawn more to art that represented the real, living world. She started with sculptures of the
interior of the intestines. She taught herself how to skin animals and process the tissues. She would make articulated puppet skeletons of bones from several different animals as a way to show how all of nature fits together. Her idol was Georgia O’Keeffe, who was famous for her paintings of bones. Tamara said in one article Lucy found, “Where Georgia O’Keeffe painted pictures of bones, I cut out the middle part and just use the bones as art.” The articles only referred to Tamara using animal bones. Never human.

“Hello,” called a female voice back to Lucy. A woman stepped out into the sunroom and smiled. She looked to be in her late fifties, with yellow curly hair. She was dressed in jeans and a tan linen vest over a white T-shirt. Around her neck, reading glasses hung from a red-beaded chain. She looked fit and happy. Like one of those older women who needed no makeup to help their beauty. She held paintbrushes in her hand and was wiping them with a rag.

“Hi,” Lucy said.

“Are you bringing me a dead cat?” the woman asked, smiling.

“Was I supposed to?” Lucy asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I was just teasing. A lot of times when strangers come to visit my studio they bring me roadkill for me to use in my work. Instead of flowers.”

“Sorry,” Lucy said. “No dead cats or flowers.”

“Why are you wearing an ambulance uniform?” the woman asked.

Lucy had completely forgotten once again that she was wearing her EMT clothes. “Umm . . . no reason,” she said, hoping that the subject would be dropped. “I actually just want to ask you a few questions. I’m with the newspaper.”

The woman’s face lit up, and her hands went up in the air in an expression of relief as she said, “Finally. I was beginning to think it didn’t work and I had spent all those hours for nothing.”

“What didn’t work?” Lucy asked.

“The publicity,” she said. “Here, come inside. Let’s sit down.” Lucy followed her though the sunroom and into the house, which had low viga-lined ceilings and Mexican tile floors. Out a huge picture window
was a sweeping view of the plains. “Do you want any tea? Or water?” the woman asked.

Lucy said no, and they sat in comfy light green chairs by a low coffee table painted with sea blue streaks. On the table was a sculpture of a face, but it was made completely out of small bones. Another example of her work.

“Now,” Tamara said. “Tell me everything. How were they found?”

“Umm . . . I’m not sure exactly what you mean,” Lucy said. “Can I just clarify a few things?” Lucy pulled the photo of the crime scene out of her purse and handed it to Tamara, who put on her glasses and looked at the photo, smiling.

“So,” Lucy said, “is this your work?”

“Yes,” Tamara said, before adding, “Oh shoot, it looks like the balloons I put on there are gone. I guess the wind took them away. There’s five dollars down the drain.”

“And this was publicity?” Lucy asked.

“Yes. It’s guerrilla art. Like my version of graffiti or flash mobbing,” Tamara said. “My publicist and I figured that I would do these outdoor installations as underground promotion. The only way to make it work was to do it anonymously. I thought you all from the media would have contacted me about them on Friday, and we would get some free publicity for the show I’m doing at the Clear River Gallery on Canyon Road.” Tamara reached over to the coffee table, picked up a slick brochure, and handed it to Lucy. On its sand beige cover was a cross made of two long bones with the words
I WAS DEAD AND BURIED
. Lucy guessed that was the name of the show. Catchy.

“You can imagine how nervous I’ve been since I set the installations up,” Tamara said, still smiling. “I’ve been pulling my hair out wondering how they were being received. Of course, the artist in me decided that the reviewers simply hated the work and that’s why no one was calling me for an interview.”

“You realize that you used human bones?” Lucy asked. She had been struggling with the idea that a respected artist like Tamara would use Brianna’s remains.

“Of course,” Tamara said, scooting forward in her seat in her eagerness. “That was the point. I wanted it to be shocking to show how our society’s physical treatment of people’s bones is hypocritical. We spend millions of dollars a year to put bodies into the ground and another million dollars digging up ancient bodies that have been deemed museum worthy. I consider myself an anti-archaeologist.”

“What’s an anti-archaeologist?” Lucy asked.

“I believe that archaeology itself is no longer a science,” Tamara said. “Think about it. Why do archaeologists dig up our ancestors and their homes when they have computer programs that can virtually do it for them? It’s because they want to be the next person to find King Tut’s tomb. It’s about glory for them.”

“Okay,” Lucy said. “I sort of get that. So why did you use the Mary statues?”

“Because the Catholic Church is one of the worst archaeological offenders,” she said. “Most churches, even our cathedral here, have human bones on display. Every church in Europe has a body part of a saint that it’s known for. A church in Siena, Italy, has the head of St. Catherine in a box, while her right thumb and a foot are in other churches. It’s like entertainment or a circus sideshow.”

“Where did you get the bones?” Lucy said, still confused and trying to speak slowly. She hoped Tamara’s answer wouldn’t include the use of any form of the phrase “I killed.”

“Where I get all my bones,” Tamara said, then looked back at the photo and asked, “Why is there crime scene tape around my installation?”

Gil’s phone rang as he was driving back to the station. He saw on the caller ID that it was Lucy and almost didn’t answer it, but picked up on the fifth ring.

“So, listen, Montoya,” she said loudly. He could tell she was outside by the wind whistling through the phone’s mouthpiece. “I figured out why all those bones were left around town.”

“What?” he said. “How?”

“You know, I don’t want to say too much about that at the moment,” she said. He said nothing, so she filled the space. “I take that
silence to mean that you think I’m crazy, but I swear I haven’t started to hear the voices yet. I really do know why the bones were left. I actually can tell you quite a lot about them now. For instance, I know that all of them were left before three different statues of Mary and that the skull in Zozobra had a lovely hat with plastic bottle caps attached to it.”

“It did?” he asked.

“Well, I was told it did,” Lucy said. “Maybe it came off in the fire.” Gil thought of the swirled plastic on the back of the skull that melted in the blaze.

“Where are you?” he asked. “Are you in any danger?” She must be with the killer. That would be just like her.

“Oh, it’s so sweet how you worry about me,” she said. “I’m fine. I just have someone that I want you to meet.” He heard her say to someone in the background, “Say hi to the nice policeman.” He thought he heard someone say “Hi,” but it was lost in the wind.

“So are you coming?” she asked. Gil agreed, and she gave him directions. As she was hanging up she said, “By the way, you might want to release the schizophrenic guy you’re holding, and you don’t need to bring any backup. It’s not what you think.”

Gil shook his head. With Lucy it never was.

They stood in the sunroom waiting for Gil, as Lucy nervously eyed the glass aquarium that held the beetles and the skull.

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said, “but can I ask what this is?”

“Those are my Beetle Boys,” she said. “They’re my little helpers. They clean my bones for me. They’re carpet beetles. They’ll have that deer skull cleaned for me in two days.”

Lucy poked at some fur on one of the tables and asked Tamara innocently, “Where do you get your bones from?”

“Oh, all over,” Tamara said. “I find them or people bring them to me.”

“Where did you get the bones used for your recent installations?” Lucy asked. She was trying very hard not to step into interview territory that Gil would want to cover, so she was fishing around the edges.

“Those of course came from the archaeological dig,” Tamara said.

“That’s where you got them?”

“Well, sort of. I found them pretty close to the dig, plus the bones had weathering on the surface that continued into the bone tissue. You wouldn’t see that on a more recent bone.”

“Really?” Lucy said doubtfully. “Is there any way bone that is, say, a year old could be mistaken for bone that’s a hundred years old?”

“I don’t see how. Bone weathering is pretty consistent when it’s buried underground, especially around here where the soil isn’t acidic. I’m pretty familiar with the concepts.”

“But it sounds like you didn’t find these bones underground.”

“Only because they washed down the arroyo from the site up on the hill,” Tamara said as she peered into the Beetle Boys’ aquarium. “Before that they were buried. The state has only been digging up there a few weeks.”

The woman had made an assumption. It was as simple as that. She had assumed that when she found pieces of a human skeleton, the only place they could have come from was the archaeological dig. She never considered that the body could be fresh. Any other person who had found the bones would have called the police.

Lucy saw a large freezer in the corner and opened it. She poked around, seeing if any human body parts poked back. She pushed aside a frozen ziplock bag full of tamales. Underneath was a plastic bag holding a foot-long fuzzy stick. Huh. A furry stick in a freezer. Weird. She pulled the bag out of the freezer and looked at it closer. At one end of the stick was something lumpy she couldn’t make out through the ice crystals. She mashed the bag around until she got a better look. The lump turned out to be a paw. She said, “Oh God,” without thinking. “Umm . . . Tamara? Can I ask what this is?”