The Bone Fire: A Mystery (40 page)

“That’s Esperanza’s leg.”

“Wait,” Lucy said aloud. “You mean the three-legged dog outside? This is her leg? Really? Why do you have your dog’s leg in the freezer?”

“I’m thinking about using it in a sculpture,” Tamara said.

“Okay,” Lucy said, the idea disturbing her. “How long ago did Esperanza lose her leg?”

“About four years ago, after she was hit by a car,” Tamara said.

“Hmm . . . Well, just FYI, I think Esperanza’s leg has seen better days, so you’ll have to figure out some way to incorporate a little freezer burn into your artwork.”

Gil stopped at the station to get Joe and then followed the directions Lucy had given him. Joe spent the drive asking questions that Gil couldn’t answer, like how Lucy had found the killer and why they weren’t calling in backup. A few minutes later Gil parked the car in front of a big house set well away from any main road and got out.

Lucy and another woman came out to the front of the house, followed closely by two dogs—or as closely as the three-legged one could manage with a hobble. The woman called hello to them and said, “I am so happy to see you. I’m Tamara.”

Gil looked over at Lucy and then back at Tamara, observing the entire situation before saying a word.

“Why are you happy to see us?” Gil asked carefully. He hadn’t known what to expect. He still wasn’t sure, but it was not this nice woman. Not this nice house.

“I’m so excited about being arrested,” she said.

“You think you’re getting arrested?” Joe asked.

“Of course,” Tamara said, all smiles. “I fully expect to be charged with desecration of a grave. I admit I did it. I even have my bail money ready to go.”

“Why did you do it?” Joe asked slowly.

“To show the hypocrisy of our archaeological system,” she said firmly. “We allow people who claim to be scientists to dig up people’s ancestors and display them, yet when I do the same thing, I get arrested. It was a part of my plan.”

Lucy interrupted, “It was for publicity.” She showed them the brochure of Tamara’s upcoming show. They read the line
I WAS DEAD AND BURIED
.

“Publicity?” Joe asked. “Seriously?” He turned and looked at Gil for what seemed like a full minute before he walked off a ways.

“He seems upset,” Tamara said.

“He’s always that way,” Gil said as he looked over the brochure.

“She got the bones from an archaeological dig,” Lucy said, trying to bring them back to the subject.

“Actually I found them in an arroyo just a few minutes’ walk away,” Tamara said. “They washed down from a new dig the state started. I guess they’re excavating another old pueblo or something. It’s just up on that hill over there.” She pointed at a mound off in the distance, about a quarter of a mile to the north.

“So, Officer,” Tamara said to Gil tentatively, “have you seen the art installations I did?”

Gil must have looked confused, so Lucy offered, “That’s what she calls the displays.”

“Yes, I have,” Gil said.

“Can I ask for a layperson’s point of view?” she asked, then, without waiting for an answer, said, “Did you get the symbolism of the jars I put in the cemetery installation? My idea was that I was speaking for the dead who are on display in our museums by printing on the cards the phrase ‘I was dead and buried.’ I meant the card to be like one of those explainer plaques you see at an exhibit but from the dead person’s point of view. Did that come across?”

“You know, I don’t think I got that,” Gil said.

“Please tell me that the coat of watches I made for the statue of Mary indicated our different measures of time,” Tamara said. “It was the idea that we all will be bones in the ground and ancient one day, and then we might end up in a museum.”

“I can’t say that I really understood that precise meaning,” Gil said, “but I am curious why you did the installations this weekend.”

“Because it’s fiesta,” Tamara replied. “Your Hispanic and Pueblo Indian ancestors have been some of the most exploited people when it comes to these digs. They are taking your grandparents out of their graves and putting them in glass cases. Did you know that there are more than a hundred and forty thousand archaeological sites
identified in New Mexico and that the state has millions of stolen artifacts in its warehouses? It’s a disgrace.”

Joe strode back over to them and stood directly in front of Tamara and asked, “So you’re telling me that you had no idea that those bones you used belonged to Brianna Rodriguez?”

“Who’s Brianna Rodriguez?” Tamara asked.

Hobbit piñon pine were everywhere as they walked, looking more like fluffy bushes than majestic trees. Cholla cactus lined the edges of the path, all spikes and tall, chubby arms.

Tamara turned off a fork of the main trail, and they walked until they were no longer following a path, more a suggestion of one. The sand between the clumps of vegetation made a patchwork maze where pink flower clusters and yellow star grasses grew unobtrusively. Ahead Lucy saw the dark green of arroyo trees.

They topped a rise, and the arroyo spread out below. It was at least three car lengths across with a drop-off that was a slope in some areas and a cliff in others. The arroyo bottom was gray-beige sand pocked with stones, driftwood, and nonnatural debris—plastic bottles, a lawn chair. It was mostly all trash that had gone downstream in the summer floods and ended up here when the river meandered out.

They stood looking over the riverbed as Tamara tried to find a way down. They could see the archaeological site just to the north, across the arroyo and off in the distance. Gil could see why Tamara thought the bones had come from there. The summer rains had created rivulets in the sand that led straight from the hill to the riverbed. The erosion patterns had misled her.

They walked slowly down to the bottom of the arroyo, picking their way carefully so as not to slide in the sand. Joe reached the bottom first, then put a hand out to help Lucy down. Tamara walked over to the other side and crouched down in the shade of a piñon tree. As they approached, she took a stick and pointed to the small bones. Gil saw ribs and a few vertebrae. Tamara dug a little with her stick and revealed other small bones beneath the film of sand. The water runoff from the summer storms had probably tumbled and
turned the bones many times, leaving them here to be buried by the desert.

The arroyo, which had been filled with nothing more than the sound of a meadowlark that morning, was now buzzing with activity.

Lucy had called Gerald Trujillo, who had been at the fire station, and asked him to look up the nearest dirt roads in their one-of-a-kind back-road map book. Gerald found an easy access road just a few yards down, and then people started to show up quickly.

The first had been Liz, who had been driving back up to Santa Fe to get a change of clothes and give her family a kiss. She got the call while she was on the interstate and was able to hit the right exit.

At the moment, Liz was bent over the bones with Tamara, saying, “The problem is that you didn’t account for the smaller bone size and density, which makes the weathering process happen more quickly. Bone weathering is all about the surface-to-volume ratio. The smaller the bone, the higher the surface-to-volume ratio and—”

“The quicker the weathering,” Tamara said, finishing her sentence. “I get it. Of course, I see where I made the mistake . . .”

Lucy sat in the shade of a cottonwood tree, just looking at the sky.

Joe came over to Gil, who was still watching Liz and Tamara. The two women had just shared a laugh about some concept of bone aging.

“So,” Joe said, in a low voice. “There never was any crazy person who was a serial killer pedophile with a mental illness and a guilty conscience.”

Gil said nothing. Their profile of the killer had been right, but they had created that profile based on an assumption—that the man who killed Brianna kept her bones in order to set up the elaborate displays. The problem had not been with the profile. The problem had been in that assumption. They never looked at the killing and the displays as separate events. David Geisler had suffered for it.

Gil looked down again at the map book in his hand. He had gotten it out of Liz’s car. It was the same book that all police and firefighters used to get around town. It had page after page of detailed
maps. If you leafed through the pages fast enough, it was almost like a flipbook, showing the heart of the city, then the residential areas, and finally the rural lands. Where they were now. Gil had used that continuity to check a theory he had.

“I guess Ashley didn’t sell Brianna to a psychopath, either,” Joe said. “Now we just have to figure out how the body ended up here.”

When Gil had looked though the map book, he had been following a dotted line. One single line. From page to page, he used his finger to trace that dotted line. He followed that line from behind the Rodriguez house to right where they were standing now. In the map’s legend, a dotted line indicated an arroyo.

“The answer to that is easy,” Gil said. “Brianna did go into the arroyo behind the house the day she disappeared—but she didn’t fall in and drown. Someone stabbed her and threw her in. The water carried her here.”

Gil looked up at the sky as a crow flew overhead, then said, “We just narrowed our suspect list down to the four people who were in that house.”

Rose Rodriguez sat in the hospital waiting room trying to will her sponsor to arrive. She had called the woman in a panic.

Rose wanted a drink. Badly. Painfully. In her head, she had already gone to her car and driven to the gas station down the road to get the vodka she knew they had behind the counter.

She started to cry. She wasn’t sure if it was the pain of the wanting or because her daughter had just gone into emergency surgery. That was why she wanted the vodka. Because Ashley was having such a hard time in labor, they had to do an emergency C-section.

The doctors said that the baby’s heartbeat had started to fade. Then, as a nurse looked between Ashley’s legs and said something about the cord, it seemed that everyone was suddenly in such an angry hurry. Rose was told to leave. Ashley started crying. Alex was nowhere to be found, and Justin and Laura were probably somewhere making out.

Rose now sat. Alone. Alex wasn’t answering his phone. She had yet to see Justin and Laura, and she honestly didn’t want to see them. What she wanted was killing her. She wanted alcohol. God help her, at the moment, she wanted alcohol almost more than she wanted Ashley to be okay.

She started to say the Serenity Prayer in her head. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” She couldn’t change what was happening to Ashley. That was all in the hands of her higher power. So how could she accept it? Rose was at a loss. Maybe it was through acknowledging that she had no control over the situation that she could accept it. She wasn’t sure.

She said the next line of the prayer, “the courage to change the things I can.” What could she change? She could change nothing about Ashley’s situation. But could she change how badly she wanted alcohol? If her sponsor didn’t arrive soon to hold her down, she would be in the car and on her way to the vodka. She said the last line in desperation, “and wisdom to know the difference.” She tried to consider that one. The wisdom to know the difference between the things she couldn’t change and the things she could.

When Rose had first entered AA, it had been out of guilt because of Brianna. That had been the very first thing she had to accept that she couldn’t change. Now, as she thought again of the day Brianna disappeared, Rose suddenly realized that there was something she could do to change that day. On the heels of that realization came dread. Intense and horrible. She prayed once again for her sponsor to arrive, because her desire to drink had now become unbearable.

As Lucy drove back to town from Tamara’s, she could see from horizon to horizon.

She had stayed on the scene with the bones for about a half hour until a uniformed officer gave them all a lift back to the house, with Gil in the front passenger seat and Lucy crammed in the back between Tamara and Joe. During the ten-minute ride, Joe had leaned over and whispered into Lucy’s ear, “I’ll need that photo back.” She looked up in time to see Gil glance at them in the rearview mirror. They got back to the house, and while everyone else stood around
debating whether Tamara should get arrested, Lucy went to her car to fetch the photo. She was able to slip the picture into Joe’s hand while Gil was busy explaining to Tamara how it would not be in anyone’s best interest to arrest her for desecration of remains. Lucy waved a merry good-bye to the group and went on her way before anyone could stop her, feeling the need to be alone.

Now she watched the clouds as she drove. As always, they were fabulously diverse. Towers of froth and masses of meringue. Off to the south, a thunderstorm dropped a sheet of gray down to the earth, but where she was, the sun was bright, the sky a robin’s egg blue. The shifting sun sent shadows scattering over the mountains, whose curves looked like a sheet draped over a woman.