Looking at the date again, I muttered, “Damn, if they’d only looked into this earlier… It’s way too late. Way past the cutoff.” I started to slip the photo back in the file so I could place it on top of one of the stacks. Then, I hesitated.
For some reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off Danny’s face. Suddenly I realized why: he reminded me of a kid in Dallas, one I’d encountered during my ten years as a cop there. That boy had been named Austin.
We’d been called in by protective services regarding a complaint made by a school nurse. Austin had arrived at kindergarten with a black eye and bruises. When the nurse examined him, she found older, faded bruises on his body. The day we rang Austin’s doorbell, we had a doctor with us who examined the kid. While he did, Austin’s parents swore up and down that their son’s injuries had come from a fall down the stairs. The doc ruled the cause undetermined. “I can’t say the parents did or didn’t do this.”
When I asked what had happened, how he got hurt, Austin said, “My daddy didn’t hit me.”
Having no evidence to move forward, we left. Two days later, Austin’s dad rushed him to the emergency room. The kid’s mother had beaten him to death.
I stared at Danny’s photo again and shook my head. “Nowhere to go with this,” I whispered. “It’s too late.” I’d nearly put the photo down when I reconsidered. I thought about how families tended to be large in Alber and I wondered: What if Clyde had other children he was mistreating? That didn’t seem far-fetched. And in that instant, I knew that despite the roadblocks, I had to find a way to get justice for Danny, and I had to make sure the Bensons’ other children were safe.
But how?
It took a few minutes to get Smith County’s district attorney, Jack Hatfield, on the phone. A former first assistant in the office, he’d taken over the top slot a few months earlier. Whispers pegged Hatfield as a straight shooter. So far, I hadn’t had a lot of firsthand experiences to judge him by, which was a good thing. We’d had the usual minor offenses in Alber: traffic citations, biting dogs, neighbors squabbling, a few minor thefts. But nothing more serious had happened in the five months since last November’s murders at the Johansson bison ranch. I still felt sick every time I thought of that crime scene: two women and two children slaughtered; three victims’ bodies underneath a bloody sheet; and in an upstairs bedroom, Laurel Johansson with her throat cut.
That Laurel was the daughter of Jeff Mullins, my lead detective, made the case even more haunting. But it was the gruesomeness of the scene that was imprinted on my mind. The stuff of nightmares, it popped up at times when I was half asleep at night. It came back when I drove through town and saw little kids with dark hair like Sybille and Benjamin. Every day for the rest of my life, I would picture their lifeless bodies on the cold ground.
People shouldn’t do bad stuff to kids; it just wasn’t right.
I glanced at Danny Benson’s photo again and thought of his dad, those big meaty hands of his, and I considered the damage they could do to a four-year-old. “How old is Danny now?” District Attorney Hatfield asked, after I laid out the allegations of abuse in the old file.
I rechecked the birthdate in the file. “He turned twenty last month, in early March.”
The DA sounded interested but concerned when he asked, “A lot of times, once they grow up, kids don’t want to revisit this old stuff. They’ve moved on. Does Danny want to press charges?”
Tough question. Hatfield had a point. I’d had child abuse and domestic violence cases where victims refused to cooperate with police. That so many years had passed made it even more doubtful. I had to be honest. I didn’t have an inkling of what Danny would want. “Haven’t asked him yet. I haven’t even talked to him. Before I do—if I do—Mr. Hatfield, I want to know what our options are, if we have any.”
Silence, as I assumed the prosecutor was thinking through the case.
“The photo looks pretty bad?”
“It does. And the report suggests this wasn’t an isolated incident,” I said.
Again Hatfield paused. A moment passed, and he said, “Chief, I’m sorry, but I don’t see how we can. It’s just too old.”
Disappointed, I thought about that. I’d expected the answer but didn’t like it. Something had been percolating in my brain, perhaps an unlikely but a possible option. “Well, you know, sometimes this type of recurring physical abuse of a child is tied to sexual abuse.”
Hatfield paused, as if considering. “That’s true, but there’s no indication in the file that—”
“Mr. Hatfield, hear me out. What if I find the kid, get him to talk, and try to find out if there was any sexual abuse. Then the statute of limitations is longer. Right?”
“Well, yes. But there’s nothing there that suggests sexual abuse, is there?” Hatfield asked.
“No, but it wouldn’t be out of the question. We both know that sometimes they’re related.”
I heard Hatfield sigh. “Well, it could be, Chief.”
“I’m just suggesting that—”
“But you need to be careful,” Hatfield cautioned. “You can’t nudge him to remember something that didn’t happen.”
“Of course not,” I said, not surprised at his warning but disappointed that he thought he had to say it. With childhood matters, there’d been studies about the dangers of implanting false memories. Cases had been tried, folks convicted, only to find out that there’d been no crime, only untrue recollections that came from suggestions made by unskilled therapists and cops. “I know how to question Danny, to find out what happened without tainting what he remembers. I’ve worked my share of child sex abuse cases over the years.”
“Okay. Good. No offense, Chief, but we have to be careful.”
“So you’re okay with that? I’ll track Danny down and needle around a bit, and if there’s a case there, you’ll take the charges?” I wanted to be firm that we both understood that I was prepared to take the case all the way to a jury if we had the opportunity.
“Right. Utah’s statute of limitations for sexual abuse of a minor is ten years after they reach adulthood. So Danny is well within that time frame,” Hatfield advised. “If Clyde sexually abused Danny and he wants to pursue it, we can file charges.”
I wondered how Danny would react when I showed up and poked around, dug up what had to be a painful past. But then I looked at the photo and thought about the hell the kid must have lived through. And again, I thought about the other Benson children and worried about what they might be enduring. “Okay. I’ll give it a shot. Seems like Clyde shouldn’t have gotten away with this. Seems like a guy like this might have done a lot more damage than what shows up in a picture.”
“Let me know,” Hatfield said, and then he hung up.
Just then our main dispatcher, Kellie, stuck her head in the door. In the past few weeks she’d given herself something of a style makeover. She hadn’t said why, but I had happened upon her in the breakroom engaged in a rather friendly conversation with one of our young cops, Bill Conroy. When Kellie had started at the station last fall, she’d showed up in baggy sweaters and jeans. Today she had on a tight pink T-shirt with a sparkly heart on the front, and she wore a pair of skinny black pants that showed off her delicate ankles above a pair of strappy heels.
“You busy, Chief?” she asked.
“Just finishing up. Do you need me?”
“You have two civilians in your office.”
“Who?” I asked.
Kellie smiled and said only, “You’ll see.”
I gave her a questioning glance, but she turned away and I heard her giggle as she rounded the corner.
“Mother doesn’t know that we’re here,” my sister Lily warned me. “You won’t tell her, will you?”
Both the girls had jumped up and rushed toward me, wrapped their arms around my waist. Lily had stopped in twice before, a month earlier, skipping the bus ride home after school and walking so our mother wouldn’t find out. On those afternoons, she’d fille
d me in on how our family was doing, told me about siblings I’d never met. This time she’d brought another sister with her, Delilah. They felt like heaven in my arms, like love and warmth and family. This was a pleasure I’d been denied for too much of my life. The two of them squeezed me so hard that the Colt in my holster bit into my hip.
It had been a long time since I’d looked like them in their long prairie dresses, their hair in curls falling from topknots. I glanced down and saw their socked feet strapped into thick sandals. With her dark hair and eyes, her pale complexion, Lily was a near-identical version of me at sixteen. I had only a few old photos of myself, having left everything behind when I fled, but I did have one to compare, and our resemblance was uncanny. In contrast, Delilah had our father’s chin, but she’d inherited her mother’s auburn hair and blue eyes. While Lily had begun to look more like a woman, at barely thirteen Delilah still had the innocence of a child. When I considered what had happened to her a year earlier, what the outcome could have been, it was remarkable that she appeared to have survived undamaged.
“Will Mother be looking for you?” As glad as I was to see them, I wasn’t sure how to answer Lily’s question. “I don’t want to get you two in trouble, but I don’t want Mother to worry either.”
Lily shook her head. “It’s okay. She thinks we’re stopping at the park on the way home. So she isn’t expecting us.”
I understood how protective my mother was. When you’ve seen what I have, it’s hard not to project the worst. At times, I drive down the streets and see little kids, on bikes all by themselves. I slow down, follow them, probably scare the heck out of them, but I keep on their tails until they get where they’re going. I know the names of too many children and teenagers who never showed up after school, women who disappeared off of lonely streets at night. And my sisters not telling our mothers what they were doing? That could be risky. “Lily, like I said last time, it’s not good to lie to our mothers. You girls need to make sure someone knows where you are, to keep you safe.”
At that, Delilah wrinkled up her freckled nose and gave me a knowing glance. “It’s okay, Clara. I told my mom we were visiting you.” She said it with just a hint of conspiracy in her voice. “But like Lily said, Mother Ardeth doesn’t need to know. Does she?”
The prospect that Delilah’s mother knew they’d come to visit me and hadn’t tried to stop them surprised me. “Mother Sariah knows you’re here? Really?”
“Well, Delilah said she told her, and—” Lily started, giving me a wary glance.
“But she said we can’t stay too, too long,” Delilah concluded, her voice firm, as if that brought the matter to rest. She looked wired, as if her adrenaline had kicked in with the thought of spending time with her renegade sister, the town’s chief of police. Looking at her, I broke into what had to be my first grin of the day. I’d wanted this for so long, any opportunity to reconnect with my family.
Still, I wondered. Mother Sariah had whisked Delilah away from me the last time I’d been brazen enough to drop in at our family’s trailer. Could she really be okay with a visit? I gave my younger sister a doubtful glance. “The truth, Delilah. Your mother knows that you’re here, and she didn’t mind?”
At this, she looked at Lily, looked at me, looked at Lily again. “Well, kind of.”
“In what way, kind of?” I pushed.
“I told her we were coming and that she couldn’t tell Mother Ardeth, that I was going to see you if she liked it or not,” Delilah said, sounding a bit embarrassed but at the same time proud. “I told her that you are my hero, and I needed to see you.”
Touched, I took a step back. My family didn’t condone children speaking up. Even teenagers were expected to bow to authority. “And Mother Sariah said…”
Delilah looked at Lily again, who took over the explanation. “Mother Sariah said that if we were coming, she was glad to know where we would be, that we weren’t sneaking off without telling her.”
“But she wasn’t happy about it?” I asked.
The girls grudgingly shook their heads. “Not really,” Lily said. “But it’s okay. We’ll probably get some extra chores tonight, but we can handle it.”
I didn’t argue. I couldn’t. After all these months of being home in Alber but still cut out of my family, it felt like a major victory, if not of the war, of a battle. Voicing no more concerns, I raided the vending machine for drinks and snacks and spent the next half hour listening while my visitors talked about school, their teachers, and one of our youngest sisters, Kaylynn, who it appeared at five was developing a devilish sense of defiance and driving Mother Naomi to distraction.
When I had an opening, I asked Lily, “Are you still helping Mother with her herbal potions and only going to school three days a week?”
To my disappointment she said that she was, but she didn’t seem to mind. “I’d like to go every day, but I’m keeping up by studying at home at night. And Mother really needs me, Clara.” Lily looked troubled, as if a cloud passed overhead that threatened a dangerous storm. “Mother looks kind of sick lately.”
I considered how, when I’d last caught a glimpse of our mother at the grocery store a couple of months earlier, she’d appeared to have aged over the winter. Her stoop had become even more pronounced, her hair whiter. Her skin had a tinge of yellow. Only in her mid-fifties, Mother could have passed for decades older. Life hadn’t been kind to her, and even in better times many of the women like Mother, those who’d had many children, didn’t seem to live to old age. Our family had already lost one mother, Constance, years earlier to cancer.
I wanted to ask more questions, but at that Kellie again poked her blond curls into the office and peered at me. “Chief,” she said, “can you come out here a minute?”
I smiled at the girls. “I’ll be right back.”
I joined Kellie a few steps from the door; I wondered why she hadn’t buzzed me, but then realized it must be something she didn’t want the girls to hear. Whispering, she bent toward me. “There’s a grave,” she said, her young brow rippled. “Mostly bones.”
“Where?” I asked. My pulse had kicked in as soon as she mentioned a buried body. I’d been looking for a teenage girl off and on since not long after I’d arrived home, someone I suspected had been killed by a serial killer. Since last August, I’d been digging up the forests and fields around Alber, searching for Christina Bradshaw without success. What if someone else had stumbled upon her grave? What were the odds that it would be her?
And if it wasn’t her, who was it?
“On the mountainside. Where they’re building the ski lift,” Kellie explained. “The construction foreman called it in and the sheriff’s department got the dispatch. The foreman said they uncovered a human skeleton.”
“Any other information? Male? Female? Height? Any details?”
“Just that it’s nearly all bone. The guy thinks it’s a woman because he can see some of what looks like a dress. Chief Deputy Max Anderson is on his way, and he called and asked me to notify you. He thought it might interest you, because of the Bradshaw girl. He suggested you meet him at the site.”
“Good,” I said, my pulse racing at the possibility. Perhaps this would be the day the last of the questions about that old case would be answered. Perhaps I could finally put it behind me. One less puzzle to wake me up in the middle of the night, then pick at my brain and keep me from falling back asleep.
“Get the location,” I instructed Kellie. “I’ll send my sisters on their way then head up there.”
“You’ve got it, Chief.”
As she walked away, I stepped back into my office. I didn’t want to rush Lily and Delilah off, but I had work to do. They were just finishing their sodas and snacks. When I told them something had come up and I had to leave, they both frowned. “Do you girls want a ride? I’m heading toward the mountain. I can drop you off close to home.”
Lily shook her head, adamant. “No, we’d better not. Someone might see us.”
“Sure, I understand,” I said, trying not to show the hurt I felt at being rejected by my own mother, so ostracized that my sisters had to hide that they’d seen me. Still, I didn’t have time for bruised feelings. I grabbed Danny Benson’s file off my desk and followed them out. They dropped their soda cans into the recycle bin, hugged me and turned to leave. As they marched toward the door, I thought of what Lily had said about my mother’s condition, how she didn’t look well, and I called them back.
“One thing.” I focused on Delilah and said, “Would you ask Mother Sariah to get in touch with me? Tell her I have something I need to talk to her about. Okay?”
Delilah scrunched her lips to the side and appeared apprehensive, as if this wasn’t a good thing. “Is it bad, like about us coming here, that we’re bothering you or something?”
“No!” I closed the distance between us and gathered them to me, grateful for one more embrace. “Absolutely not. Nothing like that. I love to see you. I hope you come again, and that someday I get to meet our other brothers and sisters, to have time, real time together.”
“Then what do you want to talk to my mom about?” She appeared uneasy, as if she suspected that I didn’t want to be upfront with her and Lily.
I hesitated, unsure. Delilah was right. I didn’t want to spell it out. In my experience with my mother, I knew how set in her ways, how unyielding she could be. She wouldn’t like what I had to say to Mother Sariah. I had greater odds of success if I could promise Mother Sariah that no one else knew what I asked of her, that there was no way my mother could discover what I planned. But I put on a smile, as happy a face as I could muster, and I assured Delilah, “I just want to say thank you, to tell her how much I enjoyed seeing you two. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”
That seemed to answer any questions for Lily, who’d been listening quietly. She grabbed our sister’s hand. “Come on, Delilah. Clara is busy, and we have to get home before my mom starts asking questions.” The girls linked arms and turned to leave, and Lily shot me a final glance over her shoulder.
The Blessed Bones Page 2
