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 of the suspects have ties to New Mexico? You know the drill. The rest of us will treat this like it is Brianna until we find out otherwise.”
Kline took a deep breath, knowing the next part would be hard to say and harder to hear. “With Fisher gone, we need to start at the beginning of the investigation—” Joe started to talk again, but Kline said, “Hold on. I am in no way saying that Fisher did a bad job, but he’s gone, and we need to have new eyes on this now that there might be a body. Even if this isn’t Brianna, we need to have a new detective take over her case. I’ve been putting that off for too long. So that’ll be Gil.” Gil nodded.
Kline continued, “We have to pull all the police reports from the afternoon she went missing, both city and county. Look for anything out of the ordinary; traffic stops where someone acted strange, any break-ins in the area. Do the sex offender checks. The usual.”
Kline went on to hand out individual assignments and dismissed everyone from the room, with the exception of Joe and Gil.
“Now for the tricky part,” Kline said. “We have to notify the family. We can’t wait until we get a positive ID. This is going to be all over the news in just a few hours, and the public is going to assume it’s Brianna no matter how much we say that we can’t be sure. If we don’t tell the family now, they’ll get blindsided. Let me call Robert here and see what we need to do.” Robert Sandoval was the police lawyer and the man who stood between the department and the Rodriguez family attorney.
The department had been four weeks into the investigation of Brianna’s disappearance when the family had finally decided they’d had enough and filed a harassment lawsuit. Looking at it from their perspective, Gil wasn’t sure he could blame them. For the first few weeks, there had been a police officer on duty at all times in the house and a car stationed across the street. All the family’s phones were hooked up to recording devices, and every single one of their movements was detailed. By the fourth week, the police, after considering every lead, unofficially decided that Brianna probably died in an accidental drowning.
That didn’t stop public pressure about the case. So the department kept pushing so they could tell the media that they had exhausted every possible lead. It was when the family was approached about taking polygraphs and the FBI showed up to take forensic samples from everyone that they decided to file the harassment suit. The family released a statement through their lawyer saying that they believed as the police did—that Brianna had drowned. Now they just wanted to get back to their lives and grieve for their little girl out of the public spotlight. A judge agreed that the family was under