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