smooth black rock. It had a stripe of white through its licorice black center.
She heard a loud pop and looked up. The car on fire across the road groaned as the metal warped from the heat. Two firefighters on the hose directed a stream of water onto the fire. With a few sweeps of the nozzle—and a sizzle and a vent of steam—the fire was out.
She stood next to the ambulance, waiting like she always did for someone to get hurt or exhausted so she could spring into action. Her job on fire scenes was to be everyone’s Jewish grandmother. She was constantly asking, “Are you tired? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Sit, sit, while I get you something.” She made sure everyone stayed refreshed and renewed. Because if one firefighter got too tired, then all their safety was at risk.
This had been drilled into her head by Gerald, who, at the moment, was handling the hose as other firefighters popped the hood of the car with a crowbar to make sure the battery—or was it the carburetor—wasn’t on fire. She wasn’t a firefighter and had little concept of what they did.
She dropped the black rock into her pocket. She would add it to her collection at home, which included rocks she’d picked up during other calls in this same place. For some reason this isolated spot—ringed with piñon pine and juniper—was a popular area for car fires. Why the car thieves, or whoever, kept dumping cars out here was a mystery. Why in their fire district? Why not a mile or so away, where La Cienega’s district started? Then they could get up at 6:00 A.M. to put out a car fire.
The area, with its remoteness, made for a fun secret getaway the whole family could enjoy—just not together. Here teenagers would gather to drink around late-night fires. Here parents would dump 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 that lined 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