The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter EIGHT

Friday Afternoon

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The Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center, located in the grassy plains beyond the outskirts of town, housed 682 inmates from nineteen jurisdictions. The front of the building was typical of many Santa Fe government facilities. It had big square pillars supporting a square roof over a porch while faux vigas jutted out from the sides of the building. The sliding double doors were even painted turquoise, New Mexico’s most-used color for trim. Gil and Joe went inside and signed in on the visitor’s log, then locked their sidearms as well as their BUGs—backup guns—in the gun locker. They were escorted to a small beige room with a metal table connected to metal chairs and then connected to the floor. In case of a riot, the table and chairs wouldn’t go anywhere. A few minutes later, Tony Herrera came in, wearing an orange jumpsuit. He was of slight build with a shaved head and a goatee. His arms were covered in blue prison tattoos of naked women and guns. On the back of his neck was tattooed ASHLEY in fancy script. He was considered only a medium security prisoner, so no handcuffs were necessary.
“Hey,” Phillips said to Herrera as the two men shook hands.
“Ah, dude, you’re back,” Herrera said. “What’s up?”
Gil wondered at their familiarity. Maybe Joe had come here with Fisher during the original investigation.
Joe introduced Gil, and the three of them sat down.
“You here about Brianna?” Herrera asked.
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Look, we found some bones . . .”
“Damn,” Herrera said, shaking his head. “I mean, I knew she was dead, but hell . . .” He trailed off, staring into space.
“You don’t seem too upset.” Gil said as Joe took a small pad of paper out of his shirt pocket to take interview notes.
“I’m crying on the inside, Holmes,” he said with a flash of a cruel smile.
“We’re talking about your daughter,” Gil said matter-of-factly, careful not to put any inflection or judgment in the sentence. He let it hang there in the air.
Herrera snorted lightly. It was a small noise, accompanied by an even smaller movement—a tightening around the eyes. It was derisive, dismissive.
“Have you talked to Ashley at all?” Joe asked, as Gil kept his eyes on Herrera’s face, studying him.
Men who have been incarcerated for years develop a strong ability to mask their facial expressions. This makes it hard to interview them because there is no truth. Everything they say and everything said to them is treated as a lie. Their only emotion is suspicion. Their faces are one-note, whereas the facial expressions of the people in the general public are a symphony. Gil was hoping that with a little careful observation, he could get beneath the one-note that was Herrera’s face and see down to the orchestra pit.
Herrera said he hadn’t heard from Ashley in years. “How’s she doing?” he asked.
“She’s pretty broken up,” Joe said. “You ever talk to anyone in here about Brianna?”
“In here?” he said. “No, man, nobody in here knows my business.”
Gil let them forget he was there. He faded as much as he could away from the conversation.
“So how’s your time going?” Joe asked.
“It’s going, man. You don’t do the time. The time does you, you know.”
“Are you doing that work release program?”
“Yeah, out picking up trash in my little orange jumpsuit.”
“What about the gang? Are you still in it?”
Herrera cocked his head. “Why do you have to go ask me that for? You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Look, Tony, we think that Brianna’s death might be gang related,” Joe said intently.
“No way, man. Who would do that? Nobody I know would go after a kid,” Herrera said.
“You don’t know anyone who has a beef with you?” Joe asked.
“Nah, man, I got no problems,” he said.
“How about Sure?o 13?” Joe asked. “Your West Side boys have been having some problems with them.”
“Yeah, I heard about that,” Herrera said, “but that’s got nothing to do with me.”
“How can you be so sure?” Joe asked.
“I ain’t doing that shit no more,” Herrera said. “I got out.”
“Why?” Joe asked.
“I got tired of the life, you know?” Herrera said, his eyes tightening again.
Gil knew that Herrera likely was scared straight by the inherent violence. Of the reasons members left gangs, the fear of death was the one most often cited, next to starting a family.
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” Joe asked.
Gil was about to interrupt, to tell Joe that no gang member would lie about his affiliation or lack of one, when Herrera rolled up the sleeve of his orange jumpsuit. His upper right bicep was sliced with scars where someone had clearly cut through the skin several times. The effort was made to stamp out the tattoo below, which was still slightly visible. It was a w.s. for West Side Locos.
“I did this myself,” Herrera said, proud of the scars he had inflicted. Joe was about to ask another question, but Gil knew he had the opening he had been waiting for.
“Where’s your tattoo for Brianna?” Gil asked. In New Mexico, where almost two thirds of people under twenty-five had tattoos, it was considered common to get inscriptions of your children’s names. Especially if you were in jail. Especially if the child had died. “Every guy in here has his kids’ names tattooed somewhere. Where’s yours?”
“I’ve been meaning to get one of those,” Herrera said with a flash of teeth.
“You know what else is strange? You didn’t ask how Brianna died,” Gil said, again without inflection. Perfectly modulated.
Herrera shrugged. “Whatever, it don’t matter. It is what is. Dead is dead.” Herrera’s eyes tightened again. That was what Gil had been watching for. He had finally seen beneath Herrera’s one-note emotion of suspicion, and what he had seen was something more sinister—a lie.
“You’re not her father,” Gil said. He felt Joe tighten up next to him.
Herrera started, “That’s not—” but he had paused too long before jumping in with the denial.
“Who’s the dad? Do you know?” Gil asked.
Herrera leaned back on his stool, his arms crossed in front of him, the blue tattoos on his arms indecipherable in their squiggles and turns. Gil saw those crossed arms and knew he needed a different tack.
He turned to Joe and said, “Why do you think he kept saying that Brianna was his kid when he knew she wasn’t?”
“I totally would have done it,” Joe said, catching on. “In a heartbeat. Ashley told everybody he was the dad. After Brianna went missing, all these people came in here to visit, the cops, family, you know. I bet he felt like a celebrity. Like even that cute blond TV reporter came here. She did like, what, two jailhouse interviews with you?” Joe said, turning to Herrera.
“More like three,” Herrera said with a sly smile.
“Exactly,” Joe said. “I would have said I was the dad of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer if it meant I could spend a few minutes alone with her.”
“When did you find out that Brianna wasn’t your kid?” Gil asked.
“A year or so after she was born,” he said.
“I thought you guys were dating when Ashley got pregnant,” Joe said. “How do you know you’re not the dad?”
“You gotta stick it in to get a baby to come out,” Herrera said with a laugh.
“You never had sex?” Gil asked.
“Just one time,” he said. “I totally had to force her to do it, and I know she didn’t get pregnant.”
“How do you know?” Gil asked.
“ ’Cause I ain’t stupid,” Herrera said. “Brianna was born exactly nine months after Ashley and I had sex.”
“But Brianna was born premature,” Joe said.
“Exactly,” Herrera said with a snort. “I can do the math. Ash got pregnant way after we had sex.”
“It must have made you angry that Ashley lied,” Gil said.
“Hell, no,” Herrera said, shaking his head and looking at the wall. “I was relieved. This way I didn’t have to pay no child support or nothing.”
“Where were you when Brianna went missing?” Gil asked, already knowing the answer thanks to Fisher’s notes. Still, it didn’t hurt to ask.
“I was in here,” he said, crossing his arms again.
“Did she ever tell you who the dad was?” Gil asked. This was the question he really cared about. The one he had to get answered.
“Nah. I never asked. She would have just lied anyway,” Herrera said. “The whole thing would have been just one more of Ashley’s games.”
“Were there any guys at the time paying special attention to her?” Gil asked.
“She had boobs, man. Every guy I knew paid special attention to her,” he said.
“But she was uptight about sex?” Joe asked.
“The one time she agreed to do it, she just freaked, crying and stuff,” Herrera said.
“Sounds frustrating,” Joe said.
“That was Ash, man,” Herrera said. “She would talk about giving her dad a blow job so he would let her use the car or something, but I never got anything like that.”
“She said that?” Gil asked. “That she had sex with her dad?”
“Not sex, man, just a blow job. But you know how girls talk,” he said, gesturing to Joe. “They’re always saying shit like that.”
“Yeah, not so much, dude,” Joe said. “That’s messed up.”
“Well, Ashley’s one messed-up chick.”
Lucy had to get out of the office to calm herself after the budget meeting, so she told Richards she’d be back in a half hour. She walked away from the building fast, hoping that with distance she would gain composure.
Fortunately, the newspaper building was in the heart of downtown, so she only had to go two blocks to reach the cathedral, which was her first stop. The late afternoon sun cast lemon yellow tones over the trees and the streets. She walked over to the church, but she didn’t go inside. What she was interested in was outside, right under her feet, really—a labyrinth.
When Lucy first heard about the labyrinth, she got excited. Thinking it would be like one of those English garden hedge mazes. Like something out of The Shining. Instead, it was just a flat wheel of footstones that wound in a tight little crop-circle pattern. It was like one of those puzzles that children do with a paper and pencil, helping the mouse to find its way to the cheese. The idea was to meditate your way through the bends and loops.
The center of the labyrinth was a brick clover, which mimicked the rose window above the door of the cathedral a few feet away. The actual path of the labyrinth was paved in rose stepping-stones, while the out-of-bounds were in gray-green granite. There was nothing preventing a walker from stepping on the gray-green stones. One misstep and the person would be in the world of gray. Lucy smiled. The world of gray was where she lived all the time now.
She walked the labyrinth several times a week, the turns and twists giving her a comfort that made no sense. She started the flat maze, trying to concentrate on the plodding forward of her feet, but her mind and eyes wandered, as usual. She could hear the sounds of a mariachi band coming from the Plaza, where fiesta celebrations were in full swing.
Here at the cathedral, only a few blocks away from the party, the final tourist holdouts of the season quietly went about their exploration. She watched an enamored visitor across the street take a picture of an ivy-strewn building of wood and faux adobe. The woman said to her friend, “It’s so pretty,” as she snapped another shot. Lucy wondered if the woman would still think that if she knew it was just a parking garage. Other tourists took pictures of the life-sized statues of the saints in front of the church.
Lucy realized she was halfway though the labyrinth. She spent the next few steps worrying that she had somehow gotten lost. But how do you get lost when the only walls are pretend and the path leads only one way? She could simply walk to the center of the maze instead of continuing to follow the brick pathway. It was just three steps away. It would be so easy. She sighed as the cobblestones twisted her away from the center yet again.
“What do you think?” Gil asked as he clipped his paddle holster back on his belt and snapped his ankle holster in place. They stood in the lobby of the detention center, the huge windows looking out over the endless grassy plain, giving incoming prisoners one last glimpse of the big, beautiful outside world. It was cruel, in a way. It would almost be kinder if the windows overlooked an industrial site.
“I think the gang idea just got shot pretty much to hell,” Joe said.
“Yeah, I agree,” Gil said.
“Okay, where does that leave us?” Joe asked.
“I think we have to go back to the family,” Gil said. “There’s a lot of questions I need to ask them.”
“That sounds good,” Joe said, getting into the car. “I’d like to know about this stuff with Ashley’s dad. And, oh yeah, ask her why the hell she lied about who Brianna’s father was.”
Gil headed the Crown Vic back toward town and dialed Mrs. Rodriguez’s cell phone. She answered and told him they were all still at the hospital. Gil said he would meet her there.
As they drove along Interstate 25 and then took the downtown exit, Gil asked Joe to look over Fisher’s notes for any mention of Ashley’s dad. Joe flipped through a few pages before saying, “Okay, here it is. Ashley’s dad is named Rudy. He and Ashley’s mom split right before Brianna disappeared, but they aren’t divorced. Umm . . . it looks like he works for one of the pueblo casinos.”
“How involved was he in the initial investigation?” Gil asked.
“I’m not sure,” Joe said scanning the pages. “It looks like Fisher talked to him but that it was just a notification. We could check for any prior arrests, but Rudy Rodriguez is a pretty common name around here. Without his age or address, I’m not sure it would do much good.”
“We can get that from Mrs. Rodriguez,” Gil said without pointing out that this was information Fisher should have written down.
A few minutes later, Gil parked the car at Christus St. Vincent Hospital. They went up to the labor and delivery floor and were walking down the hallway to the patient rooms when someone said behind them, “Excuse me, officers.”
They turned around.
“Hi,” said an Anglo man who looked to be about twenty-five, with light brown spiky hair. “Rose wanted me to wait out here until you came. She’ll be out in a minute.”
This had to be Alex Stevens, Ashley’s boyfriend and the father of the current baby—or soon to be baby. Gil introduced himself, noticing that Stevens’s hands were rough and had deeply cut scars. Then he remembered he was a tow truck driver. Joe just nodded a hello to the man. The two of them probably hadn’t seen each other since the family filed the lawsuit.
“How’s Ashley doing?” Gil asked.
“Who knows,” Stevens said. “I haven’t got a clue about all this stuff.”
“Well, good luck,” Gil said, trying to think of a polite way to ask Stevens if he knew the identity of Brianna’s father. He couldn’t think of a way around the awkwardness of the question, so he let Stevens leave to go relieve Mrs. Rodriguez. Instead, he would try to find out from Mrs. Rodriguez, who came out a few minutes later.
“How’s Ashley?” Gil asked, thinking she would have a better idea than Stevens.
“They have her hooked up to all kinds of machines and tubes,” she said. “She’s not even due for another month. I’m worried the baby will be early like Brianna.”
“We just have a few questions for you and then you can get back in there,” Joe said. They went to an empty waiting area and sat down. Joe sat next to Gil and studiously took out his notebook so he could write down the important facts of the conversation. He was supposed to be unobtrusive about it, but Gil noticed Mrs. Rodriguez looking for any movement of Joe’s pen.
“We’re making progress in the investigation,” Gil said, to distract her, “and we just needed to check in with you about a few things, okay?”
She nodded.
“So, first of all, our investigation seems to be pointing toward someone who has some mental problems,” he said. “Do you know anyone like that?”
She shook her head and said, “No. Not at all.”
“No neighbors or cousins?” Joe asked.
She shook her head again.
“Okay,” Gil said. “That’s fine. The next thing we need to check with you about is Brianna’s father. We just got done talking to Tony Herrera, and he says he’s not her dad. Do you know anything about that?”
“No,” she said, her forehead tightening into rows of confused wrinkles. “As far as I know Tony is Brianna’s father.”
“There is no one else who could be the father?” Gil asked.
“No. Ashley only has ever dated Tony and Alex, and she didn’t even meet Alex until Brianna was two years old.”
“Okay,” Gil said gently. “Now, the last thing we wanted to talk to you about was Ashley’s father. We’re probably going to be talking to him later, and we wanted to get your thoughts about him and his relationship with Ashley.”
“Like what do you mean?” she said.
“Were he and Ashley close?” Gil asked, forcing himself to become an observer of both the conversation and Mrs. Rodriguez.
“Oh yeah, they spent a lot of time together.”
“Did you ever think that he and Ashley might be a little too close?” Gil asked. He kept the words as innocuous as possible, hoping she would fill in the blanks.
“Well . . . I don’t . . . no, I don’t think so,” Rose said, looking away from Gil, considering, not really understanding his implication. Gil had been hoping that if Ashley had been abused by her dad, it had been something the family had already acknowledged, even if slightly. Gil had hoped that the father no longer lived at home because Rose had sent him packing after discovering the abuse.
That would have made the interview easy—he could ask Rose up front about it and get her thoughts. This would be harder. It was clear from her answer that Rose suspected something had happened, but it was also clear that she would never admit it freely. She was trapped, probably unconsciously, within her own guilt and inaction.
“Has Ashley ever had problems with her dad?”
“Only when she was mad, like any teenager.”
“What kind of things did she say?”
“Oh, you know—” She stopped and smiled weakly. “The usual things, like ‘I hate you’ and how she wanted to kill herself.”
“She said that?” Joe asked, too sharply, breaking the flow of the interview with just three words. Rose looked over at Joe and away from Gil. At that moment, Gil had never been angrier with Joe. This was not the annoyance over Joe’s endless conversations about breast size or his rants that reverberated with repetitive swear words. It was pure in its intensity. Gil forced himself to smile and spoke calmly to Rose. “How often would she say things like that?”
“Oh,” Rose said, her openness clearly faltering for a brief second, before her eyes went back to Gil and she said, “for a while there it seemed like every day it was about one thing or another.” She laughed. Gil smiled in response, mimicking her emotions.
“So she acted up a lot?” Gil asked. An abused girl would. It was classic behavior.
“Hijole, yes,” Rose said, shaking her head, smiling, remembering the bad times and rewriting them into funny little stories in her head. “She was drinking and smoking. And lying all the time. She got speeding tickets. I was at the courthouse so much they knew me by sight.”
“She took a lot of it out on her dad?” Gil asked.
“It was to the point that he couldn’t even look at Ashley without her screaming at him,” Rose said with a pitying look. Pity for her husband.
“How was Ashley after her father moved out?”
“She seemed the same,” Rose said. “Maybe a little less angry.”
“Is it possible that maybe she was more relaxed because her dad was no longer around?” Gil asked gently.
“Maybe,” Rose said. She seemed almost surprised she gave the answer with so little hesitation.
“It sounds like Ashley and her dad weren’t all that close,” Gil said.
“I think they were too much alike,” Rose said, agreeing. Contradicting herself. She seemed not to realize that the carefully constructed life that she presented to the world was falling apart under scrutiny. Gil did not point this out. It wouldn’t serve any purpose other than to humiliate her.
Gil took a deep breath to steel himself for the rest of the conversation. “Did you ever think that maybe as Ashley started to mature it was harder for her dad to relate to her?” Gil said. “Maybe that’s why they stopped getting along.”
Rose shook her head, but it seemed less of a negative answer to his question and more of a way to protect herself against what he was saying.
“You know,” Gil said, leaning forward, “it can be very hard for a father when his daughter starts to mature. She was this little girl, and now she’s this beautiful woman that all the boys are looking at.”
Joe started nodding in agreement, slightly redeeming himself from his earlier gaffe. She nodded as well. Gil leaned closer and said, “Rose, is it possible he did more than look?”
She nodded again. Gil felt some of the tension he had been holding on to leave him. “What makes you think that? Did something happen?”
“I don’t know . . . when Ashley was little, he would always tell her to pose sexy when he took her picture,” she said.
“And that bothered you,” Gil said. “That would bother any mother.”
“Then when she was older, he would buy her these tight shirts,” Rose said.
“Were there any other times?” Gil said. He was waiting for more, because he knew from experience there had to be.
“This other time, I came home and he was in the living room pulling his pants up and Ashley was sitting next to him,” she said. “He said he was just adjusting his belt, but you don’t pull your pants down to do that.” She looked up sharply, realizing that she had just described an awful scene in an almost nonchalant way. It was likely she had never told anyone that story. Certainly she had gone over it again and again in her head, cataloguing excuses for her husband and supplying logical explanations of how it was just innocent behavior. Now that she had told the story out loud, she could no longer pretend there was anything innocent about it.
Gil had one last question that he needed to ask before he could free himself from the conversation. “Rose, do you think your husband could have gotten Ashley pregnant?”
Lucy finished the labyrinth and then headed toward the sound of the music. She took the long way around, wondering why the street names downtown were so different than in the rest of Santa Fe. Here, there were no avenidas, calles, or caminos. It seemed strange that the oldest part of town was the one with the most Anglo-sounding streets. She dodged down Washington Street, trying to figure out what its original name had been. The road had already been in existence for a hundred years by the time Washington became president. Some long-dead conquistador captain was probably wondering what had happened to his street.
Lucy loved this part of town. When you stared at it, the history seeped out where the cracked edge of a building showed the adobe underneath. Every building was connected to the next with mismatched roofs and walls, and all of them were built in different architectural styles that were called things like “Territorial” or “Pueblo Revival.”
As she got closer to the Plaza, the music and noise from the crowd got louder, making Lucy hurry up a step. She had never been to fiesta. It held the title of oldest continual celebration in the country, but it was really about a people who made a promise three centuries ago to throw a party if they were given back Santa Fe. And party they have. Every year since.
Lucy suddenly found herself in the throng. This wasn’t like Mardi Gras or Carnival. There was no raucous celebration or purposeful nakedness. This was nice fun. Family fun. That’s probably why the party had continued all these years. Because it was about family, and what was the native Hispanic population of Santa Fe but one big, genetically isolated family? This was the biggest family reunion in the world.
Mrs. Rodriguez went back into the room to see Ashley while Gil and Joe went to find a doctor. It was time to question Ashley. Beyond time, really. Clearly she had never been interviewed properly, but it wasn’t as simple as just going into her hospital room.
Gil had been there when both of his daughters were born and knew the drill. There were two stages of labor before it was time to push the baby out: the early stage, when the contractions last about thirty seconds and come every twenty minutes, and the active stage, when the contractions are longer and come every few minutes. If Ashley was in early labor, she could hold a conversation, but, if she was anything like Susan, during the active stage she’d be screaming out the pain. Gil needed to know what stage Ashley was in, and for that he needed a doctor.
They found one standing at the nurses’ station. She introduced herself as Dr. Mariana Santiago. Gil explained the situation as best he could to the doctor, then said, “It’s very important that I talk to her.”
Dr. Santiago smiled and said, “I’m sorry. That’s not a good idea. Ashley has a history of premature birth, and right now, we are trying very hard for this baby not to be premature. I’m afraid that any stress could be very detrimental to her and the baby.”
“I really only have a few questions,” Gil said.
“Is it possible that those questions will upset her?” Dr. Santiago asked.
Gil didn’t answer. The questions he had to ask Ashley were probably some of the most stressful she would ever have to answer.
Dr. Santiago smiled again. “I just can’t allow it right now. Check back with me later. When she’s out of the woods, you can ask her whatever you want.”
As she walked away, Joe said softly, “If we just go into Ashley’s room, who is going to stop us?”
Gil shook his head. “Legally, her doctor has to okay it. We could get fired if we ignore her, and we could face civil charges if something happened to the baby. It’s just not worth the risk. Look, Ashley will probably be delivering in the next twelve hours or so. We can wait.”
Just as they were about to leave, Gil saw a nurse come through the door at the back of the nurses’ station. He saw her and smiled. She did the same. They both leaned over the counter and hugged each other.
“How are you?” she asked. She was Gil’s cousin Suzanne, the daughter of Aunt Yolanda.
“I’m good,” Gil said. “I’m here on a case. Are you working up here now?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I just came up here to get a chart. I’m still down in the psych ward.”
“Really?” Gil asked, getting an idea. She was exactly who he needed to talk to. He explained what he could about the case and then asked for a favor. When he was done she said, “Gil, what you’re asking me . . .”
“I know . . .”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.