The Bone Fire: A Mystery (9 page)

“When I was a teenager . . .”

“So you were normal once? Thank God. I was worried,” he said, taking a large sip of his coffee. “Now I want to point out two things. One, it’s been five minutes, and two, the take-home message from this conversation is that you have, in fact, seen porn.”

Gil chuckled as his phone rang. It was Dispatch telling him to get to the cathedral.

Gladys Soliz Portilla looked at the green liquid on the bathroom counter. It was a small amount, but she had no idea what it might be. Toothpaste? A spilled energy drink? She sighed and wiped it up, wondering yet again why the hotel didn’t provide them with latex gloves for protection, not only from unknown substances they found in the guests’ rooms but also from the toxic chemicals they used for cleaning. Not that she would ever complain. Her only goal at the moment was to keep out of sight. Maybe after she became a citizen, she would join the hotel workers’ union.

She sprayed the mirror with the cleaner and wiped, ignoring her own reflection. Even so, she could make out the uniform she was wearing. A green polo shirt and black pants. Her long hair tied carefully back. The green shirt made her skin look strange, but their uniform was still better than the ones at other hotels, where they had to dress in silly gray maid uniforms with white collars.

She looked over the small bathroom to make sure she was done
and then surveyed the rest of the room to see what else needed to be cleaned. In the closet, she saw hanger after hanger of little-boy clothes. She smiled as she touched them. They would look so cute on her son. As she made the bed, she saw that the boy had thrown his toys all around the room, so she picked them up and put them in a careful circle in the corner as if they were playing a game, thinking he would like that when he came back.

She locked the door of the room and pushed her cart to the next room. She knocked and called out, “Housekeeping,” in a loud voice. No one answered, so she let herself in. She started at the front of the room and quickly vacuumed the floor, watching the cord and making sure she didn’t run over the many clothes that were thrown around. She went out and got her dusting spray and her cloth. When she got to the desk, she began to wipe one corner, just visible under more clothes. She stopped the second she saw that her hand was right next to a stack of money. She froze, holding her breath, worried that any minute someone would come in and catch her staring at the pile of hundred-dollar bills. It was a big stack. Maybe about three thousand dollars’ worth. Her take-home pay at the end of the month was only about eleven hundred dollars, and her rent alone was seven hundred.

She quickly stopped dusting and went right to the bathroom, wiping vigorously. She felt the need to leave the room as soon as possible.

In a few minutes, she was done. As she locked the door behind her, she wistfully hoped that a person with that much money would leave her a tip. Guests never left her tips. She wasn’t even sure she would know what to do if she got one.

It had been a hotel worker who noticed the bones this time. He had been rushing to get to his front-desk shift on time and decided to cut through the church gardens. He stopped when something caught his eye. One of the statues—Our Lady of the Rosary—seemed to be cluttered with something colorful, but he was too far away to tell what it was. He debated going over to check on it. He was already late for work, but curiosity got the better of him. As he went closer,
he saw Christmas lights twining around the statue of Mary and over green vines clutching an arched trellis that formed a half circle over the statue. Hanging off the shoulders of the statue was a cape made of broken digital and old-fashioned watches, stitched together by thin silver wire. He thought it was a prank or some kind of weird art.

A mobile hanging from the arch swung in the breeze and clinked together, catching his attention. It had a white rod from which dangled more white pieces that looked ceramic.

He was the son of a Wisconsin hunter, who had helped his father dress many deer before he was old enough to shoot his own. He remembered his father once telling him that one of the only ways to tell a human femur from that of a deer was to look at the bone’s core. He wondered why that had occurred to him as he stared at the display. It took a moment for it to register—the white rod of the mobile swinging merrily in the wind was a tiny femur.

Gil and Joe arrived at the scene within minutes of the call. They had taken their food to go. While Gil drove to the cathedral, Joe ate his pancakes with his bare hands. Gil just left his food in the car. On the way to the church, Gil had called the officer on scene and told him to shut the area down, giving him the same instructions as he had the officer at the Santuario crime scene.

Gil and Joe were silent as they walked around to the side of the cathedral, into a cool, green alcove that smelled of earth and flowers. There was no crowd here, only two police personnel looking tense, holding a makeshift curtain to protect the scene from the public eyes. The cathedral, in the heart of downtown, would be much harder to secure than the Santuario. Here all the buildings were squished together, forcing locals and tourists alike to walk everywhere. When they shut down the streets, someone would notice. Then the media would notice.

Gil suddenly got an idea. He walked over to one of the officers and said, “Have the guys on the crime scene line tell people who ask that the road is being shut down for fiesta Mass.” That should stall questions for a while. Gil looked at his watch: 10:50
A.M.
It didn’t give them much time before noon Mass, when the mayor, the city
council, and other fiesta attendants, including his mother and Aunt Yolanda, would be arriving.

Gil walked over to the statue of Mary and stood in front of her. She was stark white and small, standing about three feet tall and set on a brick pedestal. This statue, unlike the huge, overwhelming one of Our Lady of Guadalupe, was elegant and refined. Under the cape of watches Gil could see the careful detail of her ornate robes, almost lost in the white-on-white stone. Mary’s face was not downcast this time but looking straight forward. She wore a large crown and held a rosary dangling in her hands. The flowered vines that covered the trellis hung sweetly over her head, but the Christmas lights twisting around the statue covered her beauty. The killer had tied Mary up with the green wires and dead lightbulbs of the holiday season.

Joe looked at a gold plaque placed by the church at Mary’s feet, then started to read aloud: “Mother of Life, intercede before your Divine Son for the victims of abortion, euthanasia, domestic violence, murder, capital punishment, abuse, genocide, warfare, and other manifestations of the culture of death.” He shook his head. “I think that’s what you call ironical.”

Gil wondered if Joe knew how true that statement was, because this statue of Mary was not only called Our Lady of the Rosary but had another name—La Conquistadora. Our Lady of the Conquest.

The statue was a stone version of a four-hundred-year-old wooden figure that had her own ornate chapel inside the cathedral. Her history was the history of Santa Fe. The history of fiesta. It was she who had conquered New Mexico for the Spanish.

The wooden statue of La Conquistadora, made of willow wood from Spain, had come to New Mexico with the first waves of colonists who settled the area four hundred years ago, and she escaped with them to Mexico, a hundred years later, during the Pueblo Revolt. When the colonists, led by Don Diego de Vargas, came back to try to resettle the land, she was there again, and it was to her that Don Diego prayed, asking that he be able to take back the city without bloodshed. Since that day, all Santa Feans have honored his prayer to La Conquistadora by holding fiesta. Gil wondered if it was
a coincidence that someone had put Brianna’s bones in front of a statue of La Conquistadora during fiesta weekend.

Gil clicked open his phone and called Officer Kristen Valdez, who had been at the office earlier for the meeting. “I need every available officer to check all religious sites in the city,” he said, “especially ones dedicated to Mary. Is that something you can coordinate from there? We’ll need someone with a map making sure we hit all the spots.”

“No problem,” she said. “What are they looking for?”

Gil gave her a description of what they had found so far and said, “Joe and I will check the rest of the cathedral property since we’re already here.”

Just as Gil was hanging up, Kline and Garcia showed up together again. Gil, with Joe tagging along, went to join them, and the four men walked away from the scene, making sure no one was in earshot. Gil told them about Valdez organizing the search and about the precautions they had taken at the scene.

“Sounds good,” Kline said. “Any ideas about what we’re dealing with here?”

“I think it’s a serial killer,” Joe said. “He’s playing with us.”

“A serial killer? In Santa Fe?” Garcia said. “That’s a new one.”

“Maybe someone who moved into the area recently?” Joe said. “Or maybe somebody who hates Catholics.”

“Maybe,” Kline said. “What do you think, Gil?”

Joe answered for him. “He thinks it’s a killer with a guilty conscience.”

“What do you mean?” Garcia asked, turning to Gil.

“Well, assuming these bones are Brianna’s, I think we can all agree that whoever killed her and set up this display is not your run-of-the-mill suspect,” Gil said. “I think he has a mental disorder and he’s feeling guilty for killing Brianna. He knows it was wrong and makes these displays to show God that he’s sorry. Mary is the main saint who intercedes with God on a sinner’s behalf.”

Garcia nodded, then recited a line from the Hail Mary, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners . . .”

“Exactly,” Gil said.

“Dude, all I know about the Virgin Mary is that she sometimes shows up on cheese sandwiches and tortillas,” Joe said to no one.

“So you’re thinking that the elaborate display is part of his disease presentation?” Kline asked, ignoring Joe.

“It might be,” Gil said.

“Just because the guy is nuts, that doesn’t mean he’s not a serial killer,” Joe said.

Gil sighed, tiring of this back-and-forth with him. “That’s true, but statistically serial killers make up only a fraction of all homicides. I think it’s more likely that Brianna’s killer is local and mentally ill and that this was his first kill. There was some recent stressor that made him do all this,” Gil said, gesturing to the statue.

“Could it be something to do with fiesta?” Joe asked, finally releasing his death grip on the serial killer idea. “It seems strange that it’s this weekend.”

“The whole fiesta thing is really about Mary,” Gil said, thoughtful.

“What about a cult?” Garcia asked. “We’ve a fair number of weird religious groups around here.”

“It’s something to consider until we have any other ideas,” Kline said, then added calmly, “I know we don’t have much experience with this kind of case. So if this is too much and we need more manpower, we can always call in the state police or the FBI.”

Lucy pulled up to her house and saw Nathan sitting on her front porch, going through her mail.

She rested her head on the steering wheel for a moment before getting out of the car.

“What are you doing here?” she said to him, annoyed. “Why are you opening my mail? Can you say federal offense?”

“Did you know they’re going to disconnect your electricity on Monday unless you pay nine dollars and five cents? Why wouldn’t you just pay that? Maybe if it was like two hundred, but nine dollars?”

Lucy grabbed the mail from him. “What are you still doing here?”

“I can’t find my keys. I must have dropped them inside.”

Lucy rolled her eyes and opened her front door.

He clumped in after her, saying, “I thought about trying to get in one of the windows, but I already have two B&Es and I don’t need a third strike, you know.”

“That’s the exact same problem I have with my prostitution charges,” Lucy said, throwing the mail down on a side table.

“Really?”

Of course she would pick up a felon with no sense of humor, who in broad daylight had really bad tattoos and some disturbing scars on his neck. She fished the licorice black rock out of her pocket and dropped it into a bowl by the front door. In the bowl were other candy-colored rocks and a few pottery shards. Lucy had taken to picking up pieces of the mishmash she saw on the desert floor, thinking they made an organic kind of potpourri.

They went into the bedroom to search for his keys, throwing aside dirty clothes. After fifteen minutes, they still hadn’t found them.

Lucy looked at her watch. It was 10:00
A.M.
She worked the night shift at the newspaper—usually getting in by around 2:00
P.M.
and getting done by 11:00
P.M.
—but today she needed to be in by 11:00
A.M.
so she could meet her boss for her first yearly review.

“Look, Nathan, I have to be at work in an hour. Do you have an extra set of keys or anything? I don’t think we’re going to find them here.”

“Yeah, back at my place. We can go over there to get them.”

“I can’t really do that. I have to get to work. How about I just call you a cab?”

He shrugged.

As they waited for the taxi, he sat on her bed. She needed a shower, but didn’t want any nakedness to happen until after Nathan left, so she put on her makeup. She would just have to avoid getting her face wet while washing her hair. She watched Nathan’s reflection in the mirror as she put on some cover-up. He was studying her bedroom in all its Goodwill furniture glory.

“Why do you have all these chairs in here?” he asked.

She looked at the walls lined with five wooden chairs that once matched a table, long since gone.

“It’s for when I play musical chairs with myself.”

“Really?”

She sighed. “No. I was trying to make a joke.”

As she patted on face powder, she realized the chairs were from a game of sorts. One she had played with her ex-boyfriend, Del Matteucci. The game had been called Let’s Move a Thousand Miles Away and Then Break Up. It wasn’t a very fun game, and she was definitely the loser. She had come to Santa Fe a year and a half ago to be with Del. She had wanted to stay in Florida, but he got offered a photography job at the
Santa Fe Times
. She had hoped to get a reporting job, but in the end, she took the only job she could find—night editor at the
Capital Tribune
. Six months later, they split up. The chairs, along with the rest of their joint possessions, became the playing pieces in the Break Up game. He won the coffeemaker and silverware, and she got the chairs.