The Bone Fire: A Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

washing machines and mattresses that had finished serving their purpose. Lucy kicked at pieces of plastic and china embedded in the dirt. The desert was where household goods went to die. People seemed to think they could throw away everything unwanted and expect the desert to eventually cover it with sand.
    Back east, especially in Florida, where Lucy grew up, plants and decaying foliage quickly reclaim the discarded junk of our lives. They pull it down into a warm, moist grave where it will stay forever hidden.
    The desert can’t be trusted, though. It has two faces. On its surface, it can hide nothing. Everything is exposed and vulnerable. Underneath and underfoot, it can hide whole civilizations. Ancient bones and long-forgotten ruins.
    The desert is always coy in what it hides and what it reveals. If what the sands reveal is a body, it will either be ripped apart by coyotes and vultures or mummified by the incinerating heat.
    A few years ago, a woman walking her dog in the outskirts of Albuquerque found a bone. Most locals would have thought little of it. It actually happens all the time. The bone could have been from a prehistoric site. A wayward inmate from one of the thousands of archaeological digs in the state. It wasn’t. After bringing in backhoes and shovels, the police found eleven bodies. They were not ancient bones but the remains of women dead only a few years. Likely it was the work of a serial killer who thought, like so many New Mexicans, that if you dumped your trash in the desert, no one would ever find it.
    Gil sat at his desk, waiting. Chief Kline had called in most of the other detectives for a meeting that was supposed to start ten minutes ago. Gil stared at the posters about rape and domestic violence thatlined the walls of the station. The flags waving out front cast rippling shadows that passed over the windows, like a soft strobe light. Gil glanced at the book open on his desk. It was a criminal behavior analysis textbook. Next to that was a piece of paper where he had written the words
fire
,
skull
,
child
, and
audience
, followed by a line of question marks.
    Joe came over to Gil’s desk and sat in the chair next to it, saying, “Can we get going already?”
    “Relax,” Gil said.
    Gil saw Kline go into the conference room, and he and Joe got up to follow. Inside was a group of a half-dozen detectives and a few officers who had hung back after the morning report to help with the new case. One of them was Officer Kristen Valdez, who had worked Zozobra last night but was back here this morning to help out. She must be exhausted, Gil thought, as he sat down at the long brown table with Kline at the head.
    “Okay, first I want to thank all of you who have volunteered to work a double shift this morning to lend a hand,” Kline said. “We’ve got ourselves a case that is going to take some doing. Gil, why don’t you get us started?”
    Gil pulled out his incident report and notebook. “At approximately six forty-four this morning we received a phone call from an individual who said he had found a skull at Fort Marcy Park. I was dispatched at six forty-seven and arrived on scene at seven oh two.” Gil told the rest of the story as the officers and detectives took their own notes—except for Joe, who stood in the back of the room, bouncing his leg. Gil’s report was over within less than five minutes.
    “Thanks, Gil,” Kline said. “Now, I know we are all thinking that this could be Brianna, but we just can’t assume that—”
    “Chief, I don’t—” Joe started to say as everyone turned to look at him.
    “Hang on. Just a second. We need to look at this case two ways—like it isn’t Brianna and like it is. So, for those of us tracking the idea that it isn’t her, we’ll look at all national missing kids cases and see if there is any way this could be one of them. Like do any ofthe suspects have ties to New Mexico? You know the drill. The rest of us will treat this like it is