huge, ornate altar screen, painted in gold, rose, and green. The star of the screen was the two-foot-tall La Conquistadora statue. She was perched on her own special balcony, with a spotlight on her stoic face. She held baby Jesus in her arms and a rosary in her hands. Her long brown hair was made of real human strands and flowed out from under a crown made of gold and gemstones—and this was only her replacement crown. Her original crown was too valuable to be left out in the open, so it was safely stored in the vault of a local bank. The statue had its own collection of 150 dresses and $200,000 worth of jewels, including emerald earrings, silver bracelets, and a turquoise squash-blossom necklace. Today she was wearing a gown of black velvet with tiny red roses embroidered on it and a mantilla of white lace surrounding her.

Between the adoring public and the altar screen was a tall wrought-iron fence to keep the worshippers from getting too close to the four-hundred-year-old statue. A line of votive candleholders, some with flames winking red in the semidark, stood in front of the fence.

“So that’s La Conquistadora?” Joe said. “She looks kind of pissed.”

“Actually, I’m not sure if this is her or if this is the traveling La Conquistadora. They switch the two of them around sometimes.” He stood back and looked more closely at the statue’s face. “No, I think this is the real one.”

“What are you saying? This statue has a body double?” Joe said.

“Pretty much. The other one is over at the chapel in Rosario Cemetery. That’s the one that gets used for processions out of town and other things that might be too hard on the original one.”

“Sounds like overkill to me,” Joe said.

“She’s the oldest statue of Mary in the U.S.,” Gil said. “You have no idea what a big deal that is to Catholics.”

“What, are they afraid someone is going to take her?”

“Actually, yeah,” Gil said. “She was kidnapped in the seventies.”

“No way,” Joe said.

“It was huge news,” Gil said. “The governor and everybody was involved. There was a ransom note, and a priest was told to ring the cathedral bells to make the exchange. It ended up just being a couple of teenagers who stashed her in an old mine.”

Joe seemed to look a little more respectfully at the statue as Gil put a dollar into the collection box and used a small stick to light one of the red votive candles. Then he crossed himself, saying a quick prayer for Brianna.

They left the chapel and did a quick sweep of the rest of the building but found no other displays. They were leaving when Joe asked, “Why did your Don Diego de Vargas dude haul the statue all the way up here from Mexico? I gotta say, it’s kind of weird that a grown man carries around a statute of a lady. I guess they didn’t have blow-up dolls back then—”

“Knock it off,” Gil said sternly, the way he did when he was telling one of his daughters not to back-talk. “Show some respect.”

“Sorry. It’s just that I don’t get all this stuff. I mean, you guys build this whole church for her and she’s not even here all the time . . . Come to think of it, my ex-wife was a lot like that.”

Outside in the sunshine, they watched the crime scene tech finish up her work. She was packing the cape made of watches into an evidence bag, causing Gil to look at his own watch. It was 11:10 A.M. Just under a hour until fiesta Mass started, when hundreds of people would swarm the area on their way into church. They had to get this cleaned up soon.

His head started aching again as he thought through the case so far. Every turn they had taken today had offered nothing more than frustration. They still didn’t even know if this was a murder case, or if the bones were Brianna’s. Until they got either of those facts, they had little to do, except constantly slam their heads up against a wall of theories. Which seemed to be Joe’s method, and probably why Gil had a headache. To distract himself, he put a call in to Officer Valdez.

“Kristen, how is the search going?” he asked. “Anything so far?”

“Nothing yet,” she said, sounding a little stressed. “I had to let a couple officers respond to an accident on Cerrillos Road, so I