The Blessed Bones

by Kathryn Casey

  “The ambulance is on its way,” Rachel said, when she ran in. “And two cars just pulled in, one sheriff’s department and the other a police car.”

  “Go get them,” I said. “Bring them down here. They can—”

  “Oh, oh God, oh.” Eden released another long, deep scream.

  “Tell them to hurry,” I shouted. “And get me clean towels. Boil some water.”

  Rachel ran from the room, and I turned to Eden. “I’ll be right back!”

  She grunted, her abdomen cramping down hard. “No! No! Don’t leave!”

  “I need clean hands.”

  I washed Clyde’s blood off my face, off my hands using a bar of soap in the laundry tub, then raced back, all the while trying to remember the one-day childbirth class I’d had more than a decade ago. I ran back into the room and found Eden holding onto the railings, grunting. There wouldn’t be time to wait for an ambulance, and I wondered again about the baby’s position, if Lori was right…

  Max and Stef sprinted into the room.

  “Did you call an—”

  “An ambulance? Yes. But this baby’s not waiting.”

  “What can we do?” Max asked.

  “Max, meet Eden Young,” I said.

  Eden grunted, then gave him a weak smile.

  “Well, I’ll be…” he whispered.

  “No time now,” I warned him. “This baby is coming.”

  On the floor at the foot of the bed, Clyde’s body blocked my way. I couldn’t get in position to help her. I technically wasn’t supposed to move him before the medical examiner and the crime scene folks arrived, but if I had to choose between sticking to the rules and saving Eden and her baby, there was no contest. “Get this body out of here,” I said. “Then wash your hands, Max. Stef, there’s a woman in the cellar at the back of the shelves. Go check on her. If she agrees to be quiet, you can take the gag out of her mouth, to make it easier for her to breathe. But leave her tied up until this is over.”

  Stef gave me a nod. “Got it, Chief.”

  Max and Stef yanked Clyde by his arms and pulled him out of the room. They abandoned him sprawled on the floor outside the door. Stef left to tend to Lori, and I heard Max at the utility tub washing his hands. When he walked back in, I turned to Eden, who was straining and pushing. “Eden, Max is going to help us.”

  She nodded, but said nothing, grunting, the contractions steady.

  “Max, support Eden, give her your hand to hold.” He did, and I tried to sound as in control as possible, ignoring the reality, that I had no idea what I was doing and feared I would do it all wrong. “Eden, steady breaths, relax, try to relax.”

  She nodded. “Can you see Josh?”

  “Josh?”

  “My baby.”

  Max looked over at me, sadness in his eyes. This wasn’t the way a baby was supposed to come into the world: two amateurs and possibly lethal complications.

  “Yes, he’s coming. I can see him.”

  Rachel walked back in carrying a stack of clean towels. I took a couple and laid them under Eden’s hips. She was crowning, and relief washed over me when I saw downy blond hair, more than peach fuzz—enough to understand that what I saw was the baby’s head, just where it was supposed to be, traveling down the birth canal.

  In safer territory, I urged, “Eden, push with the contractions, okay?”

  She nodded. The poor kid looked exhausted. Just worn out. “Once the shoulders come out, I can help the baby,” I said. “But you need to get it started.”

  “Owwwww!” A contraction, and Eden clenched her teeth and bore down. The baby slipped forward, its eyes and a tiny nose visible, a bit flat as if it had been smashed from being forced out into the world.

  Moment by moment, the miracle of birth unfolded in that terrible room in the cellar of that horrible house where so much evil had lived. Once the baby’s shoulders emerged, I did what I remembered the instructor describing, gently guiding this fragile and beautiful human being into the world. He had delicate hands with perfect fingers, eyes scrunched shut and nearly translucent ears. His lips looked like pink begonia petals. In the moments that followed, the baby glided out as I held my hands beneath him. His sturdy little legs bowed and his soft feet ended in ten tiny toes. Max glanced over at me, grinning, and I beamed back up at him. We’d both seen too much death, too much tragedy, but on this day, we were witnessing the miracle of a new life.

  “You do have a boy, a beautiful baby boy,” I said, and tears cascaded down Eden’s cheeks. Max’s eyes brimmed, and I felt my own grow watery. The bliss of that moment quickly passed.

  “Why isn’t he crying?” Eden asked, her voice hoarse with worry. “Is Josh okay?”

  “Sometimes it takes a minute…” Frantic but trying not to show it, I wiped off the baby’s face and gently rubbed his back. Seconds passed, an agonizing wait, and then his nose twitched, his mouth opened, and Eden’s son clenched those miniature hands of his into fists and let loose a wail to announce his arrival into the world.

  Eden cried harder, and Max shouted, “Yes!”

  I didn’t cut the cord, instead left that for the folks who knew how to do it the right way. When I looked up, Stef stood at the door.

  “That woman, Lori, okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I left her tied up, like you said.”

  “How far out is the ambulance?”

  “Five minutes,” she said. “They’re under lights and sirens.”

  “Good.” I used the boiled water which had cooled to warm to wet towels to wipe the child. Once I had him fairly clean, I slid over to Eden’s bedside. In a moment I would remember the rest of my life, one I would replay whenever my job weighed on me and I wondered what good I had done, I placed little Josh where he belonged, in his mother’s arms.

  Forty-Six

  Stef stayed with Eden and the baby while Max and I untied Lori, handcuffed her and hauled her upstairs. We deposited her on a wooden kitchen chair. I noticed my phone on a countertop, grabbed it and stuck it in my pocket. As the wail of sirens filled the air, Max fetched a digital recorder out of his squad. He returned with the EMTs following him. “She’s in the cellar,” I shouted.

  “Got it!” one of them called back.

  “Hey, put in a call to Doc Wiley for us. We need the ME. We have a body down there,” I shouted.

  Max said, “I already did. He’s on his way.”

  Minutes later, Lieutenant Mueller loped toward the stairs to oversee his team. He waved at us as he darted past. When I saw him, I shouted: “We moved the body.”

  Mueller backed up, did a double take, irritated. “Why the heck would you—”

  “So we could deliver a baby,” Max said. “The chief didn’t have a choice. The guy went down right at the foot of the bed.”

  Mueller grimaced and didn’t look happy, but he didn’t argue. His men followed him down the steps and then, to my surprise, Ash Crawford sauntered in right behind them. “I heard through a contact that you found one of the girls. I’m wondering—”

  “It’s not Amy,” Max said, and I gave him a curious look. He shot me one in reply that I interpreted as: I’ll explain later.

  “Ah, well. I…” Crawford appeared different, more subdued than he’d been, and he turned as if ready to leave, but then, instead, I saw him head down the stairs.

  I considered objecting but didn’t bother. Crawford would know enough to stay out of the way of the crime scene team. If he didn’t, Lieutenant Mueller would kick him out. At that moment, all I cared about was that Eden and her baby were well and that I had Lori and a long list of questions. After Max turned the recorder on, I recited Miranda, and then I started with, “How many?”

  Max shot me a curious glance. He, of course, didn’t know the extent of what I’d overheard in the cellar. Meanwhile, Lori tied her mouth up in a knot. I asked again: “How many girls have you kept here? How many babies have you taken and sold?”

  When she didn’t answer right away, Max, his eyes b
oring into her, pulled a chair up next to Lori’s. He positioned it with the back toward the woman and straddled it to get right in her face. “We’re going to find out. No question about that. What you need to do is talk to us, so we don’t tell the district attorney that you were uncooperative.”

  Lori didn’t look convinced.

  “Okay, we’re done,” I announced. “Let’s throw her in a cell and get the DA to draw up the indictments.”

  Max immediately understood my ploy and played his part. He shot me an exasperated glance, as if I were being unreasonable. “Chief Jefferies, give her a chance. Lori needs time to think it through.”

  “I don’t have the patience. First charge: assaulting a police officer. I’ve got a knot on the back of my head from this waste of DNA, and I see no reason to bargain with her.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. The best thing was to get her to talk and get a confession, so we weren’t scouting around for clues and trying to figure out what had happened in this hellhole from scraps of information. But there was no reason to let her know that. The only way most folks talked when their necks were on the line was if they thought they would benefit. And then she said it.

  “What do I get if I tell you everything?” Her attention shifted from Max to me, then back again. “I should get something out of it.”

  Max frowned, as if he were disappointed. “Not willing to help out just because it’s the right thing to do, huh?”

  Lori shook her head.

  “Well, maybe the chief here would be willing to help me, and we could both talk to the DA for you, if there were extenuating circumstances,” he suggested.

  Appearing to think about that, Lori bit her lower lip. “Well, Clyde was… he was mean. And I was his wife, told by the prophet to do as Clyde wished, so what was I supposed to do? I had to help him, didn’t I, or risk eternal damnation?”

  Listening to her, I thought about how my ex-husband had threatened me just a night earlier, saying he’d ban me from Heaven. I considered how beautiful faith could be, but also how a tiny minority, those who falsely claimed to be religious, sometimes tragically misused it to manipulate others. It brought to mind the Bible verse about wolves in sheep’s clothing.

  Max looked at me. “Chief Jefferies, are you okay with talking to the DA about what Lori just said, letting him know that she was following her husband’s orders? We’re not making any promises that it will help her, but it might make a difference.”

  As doubtful as I was that Lori had assisted her husband in his awful crimes purely to gain entry into the hereafter, not for the money it brought them, I played my part and acted as if every word she uttered were gospel. But then again, even if it were true, it wouldn’t have helped her. Not when she faced charges of kidnapping and murder.

  I smiled at her. “Yes. I’m okay with explaining Lori’s situation to the district attorney. I’ll explain to him that the prophet’s rules instruct a wife to obey her husband.”

  Lori looked pleased.

  “Now tell us: How many?” I repeated.

  She took in a couple of deep breaths and huffed them out, thinking, I guessed. “Well, it started about five years ago. There were a couple of girls in the beginning. We brought them here and delivered their babies, then Clyde sold the babies. He threatened the girls, said that if they ever told what we did he would kill them. He dropped the girls in Salt Lake. Told them to forget they ever had those babies. That was the first two.”

  “And after that?” Max prodded.

  “Three more. This one downstairs and the girl you found up on the mountain. We didn’t kill her, though. She died trying to have the baby.”

  “Did you administer the Pitocin?” I asked. If she admitted that she’d drugged the girl, gave her an overdose of the drug that killed her, it would establish guilt. Lori may not think she was a killer, but the law said that she was.

  “Yeah, I did, but—”

  “I see,” I said. “And you mentioned one more?”

  “A girl about, well, a month ago, a little more. Another girl from one of the polygamous towns named Samantha. She and Eden were really good friends.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “I brought her here like the others, and we delivered the baby. After what happened with that other girl, that we had to bury her, Clyde didn’t want any bodies to be found. And he didn’t want to let her go. He worried those first two girls would tell, and we’d get in trouble.”

  I felt my stomach cramping. The headache that had eased up came raging back, and I closed my eyes for a moment as Max asked, “Lori, what happened to Samantha?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I opened my eyes, leaned toward her. “If you want us to talk to the DA for you, you need to tell us everything you know.”

  Lori screwed her mouth into a nub, thinking. “Well, Clyde got rid of her.”

  “How?” Max questioned.

  “He put her in an oil drum and carted her away.” She said it as if it were the most normal thing for her husband to have done.

  I thought again about the jugs of lye, the drain cleaner, in the shed. If Clyde Benson wasn’t already dead, at that moment, I would have taken my gun and…

  I guessed that Max realized by looking at me that it wasn’t wise to let me ask the next question. It wouldn’t have been the kind that kept Lori talking. I must have appeared ready to attack. And we wanted her to talk. I looked down at the table and the red light beaming on the recorder. No way was I letting any of this slip through our fingers. I wanted a jury to hear every word.

  Max talked to the woman for a while, and I calmed down. I had one more question I had to ask. I needed to understand how my two cases had intersected. How had the girls ended up in that cellar room? “Lori, how did you and Clyde find the girls?”

  The woman’s lips curled up at the edges, as if proud. “I brought them home from work.”

  “Home from work?” I repeated.

  The woman smiled, and I looked at her scrubs and read her name tag again: Miss Lori.

  “I work as an aide at a shelter for unwed girls. Runaways and such. The man who owns it finds the girls at bus depots. Their parents drop them there when they get in trouble. At the home, they deliver the babies, tell the girls they put them up for adoption. Really, they auction them off. I told Clyde about it, and right away he said, ‘Lori, we could do that, too.’”

  I thought of what Sam Young had said, that Eden had run away. “How did this man you’re talking about find Eden?”

  “Like the others,” Lori said, staring at me as if I were trying her patience. “Her dad took her to the bus depot and left her there. He didn’t want her anymore.”

  “And you just brought them home with you?” Max asked.

  “Yeah. Kind of,” she said, turning her head to the side and squinting at me. “I look for the ones who want to keep their babies, and I offer to help them escape. Instead, I bring them here to the house and we make the money.”

  “What’s the name of the home?” Max asked. Lori said it didn’t have a name, but she gave him an address.

  “This is where you got the Pitocin from, isn’t it?” he asked her, and she nodded. Max turned to me and said, “I got this address this afternoon off the response to one of the subpoenas.”

  Max looked upset, and I understood why; he’d been so close and hadn’t realized it. He pulled out his phone and shot me a pained glance. “Keep tabs on her. I’ll be right back.”

  Max walked over to the corner, and I heard him talk to his boss, telling him what we’d just heard. “How about contacting the sheriff’s department in that county? They need to look into this unwed mothers’ home. Start an investigation into the place, find out what’s going on over there.” For a moment, he was quiet, listening. “Thanks, Sheriff. Yeah, we’ll have her at the jail shortly. I’ll book her myself.”

  As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t haul Lori off to jail. This case, none of it, was in Alber proper, my territory. It
was in the county, and Max had jurisdiction. As soon as Max turned back around to us, I asked, “You want to escort Lori downtown for more questions and to talk to the DA? I can stay here and help with the CSU and wait for Doc Wiley.”

  “Sure. I’ll do that,” he said. “But let’s put her in my squad. I need to tell you something, explain what’s up with our ex-US marshal.”

  I’d nearly forgotten.

  We stood outside the squad car, where no one could hear, and Max laid out what they’d learned at Crawford’s cabin from Ash and his wife, Justine. I listened, and I thought about Lori’s list of victims, the girls they’d lured to the farm. “What’s his granddaughter’s name?”

  “Amy,” Max said.

  I popped the squad’s back door open and said, “Lori, one more thing, were any of the girls named Amy?”

  Lori looked like she didn’t want to answer, and I thought she was going to shake her head, then she shrugged like she realized it probably no longer did any good to lie. “That girl you found up on the mountain, the one who died in childbirth. That was her name.”

  “Where did the man find her?” I asked.

  “She was different. Her man had been in some kind of trouble, and after he got killed, she was living on the streets.”

  There were so many things I wanted to say to her, but while they would have given me pleasure, I couldn’t mess up the case. So I made it a point to simply nod at her. Thinking about the one last mystery, the remaining girl who’d disappeared from the area, I asked: “What about Carrie Sue Carter? Is that name familiar?”

  This time, Lori appeared genuinely puzzled. “I don’t think so. I’ve never heard that name before.”

  I said nothing else, but I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Maybe there was a chance Carrie Sue was still alive somewhere. Maybe she’d truly run away and started a new life. I said nothing more. I simply slammed the car door and turned away from Lori, hoping I’d never see her again.