The Bone Fire: A Mystery (10 page)

She had half of her makeup done—so the left and right sides of her face looked like before and after makeover pictures—when she heard a honk of a horn.

“Nat, the cab’s here,” she said.

“Okay, sure.” He didn’t move.

“So, let’s all go out to the cab now. Come on. It’ll be fun.” She made shooing motions with her hands at him.

He finally got up, and they went to the door. He hesitated in the door frame. It was only at that moment she realized he might try to kiss her good-bye.

“I’ll just see you out to the cab,” she said to forestall any such thing.

She walked the few feet outside to the cab door, opened it, and said a sunny “Bye-bye. See you later.”

“Umm . . . you know . . .” Nathan started to say, not getting into the cab.

“Look, I really need to go,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s just that, you know, I don’t have any cash.”

“You work at a bar. Don’t you have money from tips?”

“Not really. Last night was really slow. Plus I owed this guy some money . . .”

He tried to do his best cute-dog eyes, which worked since he was still wearing his spiked dog collar.

“Fine. Whatever.” She went back inside and got her wallet. Outside, she said to the cabdriver, “How much to take this guy home?”

“About fifteen dollars.”

“Swell,” she said. “Do you have change for a twenty?”

“You know, I just realized,” she heard Nathan say from the backseat of the cab, “I’m going to have to take a taxi back here to get my car.”

Lucy leaned her head against the roof of the cab and started laughing. What was supposed to have been a free and easy one-night stand was going to end up costing her thirty dollars in consequences. She pulled another ten out of her wallet and gave it to Nathan as he said, “I really appreciate it. I’ll call you—”

“Take care.”

“But how will I pay you back—”

“See you later.”

“If you—”

She walked away, shaking her head. God, but she was a moron. She had just paid a man to go away.

Joe followed Gil as they entered the cathedral to check for any additional signs the killer might have left inside. Joe stood back a ways, looking uncomfortable.

Gil crossed himself with the cool holy water as he went though the doors. The church was just over a hundred years old, young by Santa Fe standards, and had been built in the French-Romanesque style. The interior was bright with sunlight, and tall ceilings were crisscrossed with flying arches. The locals had added their own touches, too. The Stations of the Cross were made in the santero style, and the huge altar screen featured Native American and Mexican saints.

Gil walked over to the front of the altar and genuflected, crossing himself and kissing his thumb.

“What am I supposed to do?” Joe whispered. “Bow or something?”

“Just keep walking,” Gil said.

“Man, I hate churches. When can we go investigate something in a bar? Now that’s my scene.”

They went over to the chapel of La Conquistadora, which was to the left of the altar. This was the only part that remained of the adobe church that had stood here since the 1700s.

The back wall of the chapel was completely taken up by a huge, ornate altar screen, painted in gold, rose, and green. The star of the screen was the two-foot-tall La Conquistadora statue. She was perched on her own special balcony, with a spotlight on her stoic face. She held baby Jesus in her arms and a rosary in her hands. Her long brown hair was made of real human strands and flowed out from under a crown made of gold and gemstones—and this was only her replacement crown. Her original crown was too valuable to be left out in the open, so it was safely stored in the vault of a local bank. The statue had its own collection of 150 dresses and $200,000 worth of jewels, including emerald earrings, silver bracelets, and a turquoise squash-blossom necklace. Today she was wearing a gown of black velvet with tiny red roses embroidered on it and a mantilla of white lace surrounding her.

Between the adoring public and the altar screen was a tall wrought-iron fence to keep the worshippers from getting too close to the four-hundred-year-old statue. A line of votive candleholders, some with flames winking red in the semidark, stood in front of the fence.

“So that’s La Conquistadora?” Joe said. “She looks kind of pissed.”

“Actually, I’m not sure if this is her or if this is the traveling La Conquistadora. They switch the two of them around sometimes.” He stood back and looked more closely at the statue’s face. “No, I think this is the real one.”

“What are you saying? This statue has a body double?” Joe said.

“Pretty much. The other one is over at the chapel in Rosario Cemetery. That’s the one that gets used for processions out of town and other things that might be too hard on the original one.”

“Sounds like overkill to me,” Joe said.

“She’s the oldest statue of Mary in the U.S.,” Gil said. “You have no idea what a big deal that is to Catholics.”

“What, are they afraid someone is going to take her?”

“Actually, yeah,” Gil said. “She was kidnapped in the seventies.”

“No way,” Joe said.

“It was huge news,” Gil said. “The governor and everybody was involved. There was a ransom note, and a priest was told to ring the cathedral bells to make the exchange. It ended up just being a couple of teenagers who stashed her in an old mine.”

Joe seemed to look a little more respectfully at the statue as Gil put a dollar into the collection box and used a small stick to light one of the red votive candles. Then he crossed himself, saying a quick prayer for Brianna.

They left the chapel and did a quick sweep of the rest of the building but found no other displays. They were leaving when Joe asked, “Why did your Don Diego de Vargas dude haul the statue all the way up here from Mexico? I gotta say, it’s kind of weird that a grown man carries around a statute of a lady. I guess they didn’t have blow-up dolls back then—”

“Knock it off,” Gil said sternly, the way he did when he was telling one of his daughters not to back-talk. “Show some respect.”

“Sorry. It’s just that I don’t get all this stuff. I mean, you guys build this whole church for her and she’s not even here all the time . . . Come to think of it, my ex-wife was a lot like that.”

Outside in the sunshine, they watched the crime scene tech finish up her work. She was packing the cape made of watches into an evidence bag, causing Gil to look at his own watch. It was 11:10
A.M.
Just under a hour until fiesta Mass started, when hundreds of people would swarm the area on their way into church. They had to get this cleaned up soon.

His head started aching again as he thought through the case so far. Every turn they had taken today had offered nothing more than frustration. They still didn’t even know if this was a murder case, or if the bones were Brianna’s. Until they got either of those facts, they had little to do, except constantly slam their heads up against a wall of theories. Which seemed to be Joe’s method, and probably why Gil had a headache. To distract himself, he put a call in to Officer Valdez.

“Kristen, how is the search going?” he asked. “Anything so far?”

“Nothing yet,” she said, sounding a little stressed. “I had to let a couple officers respond to an accident on Cerrillos Road, so I lost some staff.”

“The cathedral is empty,” Gil said. “How are we doing checking other places with a Mary connection?”

“Well, we cleared the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, and I have someone going to Santa Maria de la Paz. Do you think we need to expand it to other places? How strong is the Mary connection?”

“Pretty strong.”

“How likely is it that there are more of these displays out there?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Gil said, considering the question for the first time. “If he decides to use all of the bones in displays, that could be a few more. So far, we’ve only collected a head, a femur, and toe and finger bones, and about a dozen other bones I couldn’t identify. How many bones are there in the human body?”

“The adult human has two hundred and six bones, but kids have more than that,” he heard Joe say behind him.

“Really?” Gil asked him, wondering how Joe ever had reason to know that information. “Okay. That leaves more than a hundred and eighty or so bones for him to keep putting around town.” He hadn’t considered the possible enormity of their situation yet. There was no way they could keep a lid on so many crime scenes. “Okay, Kristen,” he said, trying to get his head back in the game. “Let’s check that mural of Mary over on Alto Street. And I think there’s a cottonwood stump on Alameda that’s been carved into a statue.”

“Jesus, Gil,” she said. “If we start looking at all the images of Mary in town we could be at this for days.”

That was his new fear.

Gil had volunteered to check out the Rosario Chapel near downtown. It was only a mile or so away and situated back from the road, within the Rosario Cemetery.

“Let’s go lights and sirens,” Joe said as they got in the Crown Vic.

“No,” Gil said, starting to lose his patience. “You know the protocol. We can’t do that unless someone’s life is in danger.”

“You did it before when we went to the cathedral,” Joe said.

“That was under orders from the chief when we knew we were going to a crime scene.”

“There is going to be a crime scene right up here in this car if you don’t put the siren on.”

Gil ignored him, instead listening to the scanner to see if there was any chatter about other sites.

“You are such a safety dog, Gil,” Joe said, not letting the issue go.

“A what?” Gil asked, not sure what he was talking about.

“A safety dog. Like the guy who gets dressed up in a dog costume and goes to schools to tell kids to not play with matches or whatever.”

“I think that’s Smokey the Bear.”

“In my school it was the safety dog,” Joe said with conviction, “and that is so you, man. You always gotta follow the rules.”

Joe and Gil drove down a pine-tree-lined drive into the heart of the Rosario Cemetery. The gravestones were unmatched and uneven. Some were only hand-chiseled on a piece of rock, while others were full marble vaults. A few were written in Spanish from the early 1800s, and there was a scattering of brand-new ones. The names on the graves were from old Santa Fe families—Vigil, Gurule, Pacheco, Baca, and Ortega. In the middle of the graves was the Capilla de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, a small chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. To La Conquistadora, specifically.

The capilla had two small circular windows above an arched door, making the front of the church look like a surprised face. There were buttresses on either side of the front door, and a silver bell in the mission-style roof.

The church was built precisely on the spot where Don Diego de Vargas made his famous prayer. The chapel was permanent proof that Santa Feans kept their promise to honor La Conquistadora if she delivered the city to the Spanish. Gil knew the capilla would be closed. It was only opened during the fiesta procession that would take place on Sunday.

It wasn’t the capilla they were coming to see, though. They were coming to check the outdoor altar to Mary.

Gil parked the Crown Vic in the empty parking lot. He and Joe took a minute to steel themselves before getting out. Because they saw what awaited them.

They walked in silence over to the front of a permanent altar that had been erected by the church for open-air Masses. The chest-high altar, made of white marble, was on a dais up four brick steps. Behind the altar, a freestanding beige stucco wall rose up at least two stories. Nestled in a large cutout in the wall was a five-foot-tall white marble statue of the Virgin Mary. Where the other statues of Mary had been ornate, this one was unadorned. She was sculpted in simple flowing robes of white. Her hands were folded in prayer. Her beautiful face, looking down and etched in sorrow and grief, could have been reacting to the display on the altar below her.

This time the killer had been more intricate. Safely away from the prying eyes of the cars that passed by the gated cemetery, he had spent more time here. There was an array of glass containers, some empty and some with red liquid in them. Gil counted fourteen jars in all placed on the edges of the altar. As Gil got closer, he saw that some of the empty jars actually had bones in them. Placed next to each jar was a piece of heavy ivory paper, carefully cut out into a rectangle the size of a playing card and folded in half, like a seating marker at a fancy dinner. On each paper was written one sentence:
I was dead and buried.

Gil stood with his back to the crime scene, looking at a gravestone in front of him. The tombstone was of speckled marble. It was the final resting place of Henry, who had been born in 1909 and died in 1978. Next to his name was a space left for Virginia, who had been born in 1906. There was no final date for her. She had decided not to join Henry here in death. Gil wondered if Henry had forgiven her for that.

He heard Chief Kline calling his name behind him and turned around. The quiet cemetery had turned into a sparsely attended freak show, with a crime scene tech taking photo after photo as Kline, Garcia, and a few other officers peered curiously through the glass jars. Since the cemetery was off the main road, containment of this scene was fairly easily. It simply took one police cruiser parked in front of the main entrance.