Bones ik-7

by Jan Burke

  Perhaps he noticed my reticence, because he put a determined smile on his face and said, “Come in, come in. I’ve thought so often of you. Is that your van out front? Frank picked me up at the hospital in a Volvo. And you used to drive — don’t tell me, now — yes! A Karmann Ghia.”

  “Right, but the Karmann Ghia is no more,” I said. “The van belongs to my cousin. He’s letting me borrow it while he’s out of town. I’m still in the process of shopping for a car of my own.”

  As soon as I said it, I realized that I had lied. I should have been looking for another car, but like a number of other things in my life, car shopping had been put off for another time.

  Newly’s house was spacious. If I had lived alone in it, as he did, I might have felt a little overwhelmed by its size. But as we ventured farther into it, I began to have the impression that he didn’t spend much time in most of the rooms. There were no footprints on most of the carefully vacuumed carpets.

  He took me to what was obviously his favorite room; a combination den and library. A few bookshelves stood along the walls, as did a stereo and a big-screen television. Across from the TV, two overstuffed chairs were positioned near a low table. Most of the books in the room were paperbacks, although one section held a lot of hardcover books. Popular fiction, for the most part. Not a weighty law tome in sight.

  “Have a seat,” he said, indicating one of the big chairs. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Thanks. A glass of water would be great,” I said.

  “Water? Nothing stronger?”

  It was two in the afternoon, but it could have been last call, and I would have answered as I did. “Just water, thanks.”

  He left the room to get it, and I began to look at the objects on the low table. They included his GPS receiver, a fancy mechanical pencil, a ruler, some loose papers on which some numbers had been scribbled, a handheld calculator, and beneath several small piles of books, a topo map.

  When I realized what type of map it was, I looked away from it, then, angry with myself, forced myself to pick up one of the stacks of books and read the map’s legend.

  Southern Sierra. The section where we had looked for Julia Sayre’s grave.

  I heard Phil returning, and set the books back down. It was then that I noticed the title of the hardcover on the bottom of the stack: Mindhunter, by John Douglas. I had heard of this book, a nonfiction work about serial killers, written by an FBI criminal profiler. There were other books in the stack by Douglas and several by Robert Ressler, another pioneering FBI profiler — if I remembered correctly, Ressler was said to have coined the term “serial killer.”

  I only had time to glance at the titles of the other books stacked on the table, but that was enough to see that they all had two things in common: they were true-crime stories, and their subject was serial killers.

  “I find myself caught up in a strange fascination these days,” Phil said, handing me a tall tumbler of ice water, then twisting open a bottle of beer as he sat in the other chair.

  “Oh?”

  “You’re a reporter, Irene,” he chided. “If you haven’t taken a look at everything on this table, I’ll be disappointed in you.”

  “Not a really good look,” I said. “And technically speaking, I’m not sure I’m a reporter at the moment.”

  “What do you mean? Aren’t you here to interview me about my most infamous client?”

  “No.” I explained what had happened at work.

  To my surprise, he laughed and said, “If only you had aimed more carefully at your boss! But nevertheless — oh, that’s great!”

  “Not really.” I explained that the consequences were that I was forced to take a leave of absence and seek counseling.

  “Hmm. I know that at times labor law and criminal law might seem to be natural extensions of one another, but I really can’t help you—”

  “I’m not here to see you as a lawyer, Phil. I understand that you’re closing your practice, anyway.”

  “That’s right,” he said, then took a long pull from the beer bottle.

  “A little young for retirement, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve made the money I need to make. I’ll probably sell this place, go to live near my sister, up north. She invited me to come up there after I broke my foot, and while I was there, I had a little time to think. As much as I love the law, I believe I’m through associating my name with those of people like Nicky Parrish.”

  “Nicky?”

  He smiled. “The diminutive helps me to see him on a proper scale.”

  “I’ve had trouble with that lately, too. I have to tell myself that he’s not invincible.”

  This gradually led to a discussion about our lives since that journey to the mountains; I was surprised to learn that Phil felt that his life had gone out of control since then, too. “It’s the guilt,” he said. “It eats at me.”

  “Guilt? What do you have to feel guilty about?”

  “I allowed him to talk me into pursuing that deal with the D.A.! If I had taken charge of the case as I should have done, as I would have done with anyone else—”

  “He would have fired you,” I said.

  “That’s what I tell myself, but instead look what happened! When I think of those men — when I think of their families, and you — and Ben Sheridan! My God, Ben!”

  “Ben’s doing very well,” I said.

  “I heard through the grapevine that he’s staying with you and Frank.”

  “He was. But now he’s in his own place and back at work.”

  “Already? He’s made remarkable progress, then!”

  I gave him the sunny version of Ben’s recovery. By unspoken agreement, that was the one that Ben, Frank, Jack, and I gave out to other people. It was so obviously the one Ben wanted other people to believe.

  I understood that attitude; Ben was not big on thinking of himself as a victim. “Please leave all pity shipments unopened and mark them, ‘Return to Sender,’ ” he once told me.

  “So he’s already up and walking?” Phil Newly asked me now.

  “From the day after the surgery, they had him standing. As soon as he had healed enough from the surgery to do so, he worked on learning to walk again. It hasn’t always been easy, and there have been problems here and there, but for the most part, he’s been making steady progress. Lately, he’s been justifiably pleased with himself. And he has this remarkable new foot. It’s a Flex-Foot Re-Flex VSP.”

  “A what?”

  “A Flex-Foot. It’s his prosthesis. Designed by an amputee. Ben loves it. He’s managed to get around much better since he got it. It’s this high-tech foot that’s made from a carbon fiber composite — same stuff that’s used on jets, so it’s lightweight, but strong.” I picked up his mechanical pencil and made a rough sketch on a scrap of paper.

  “It looks a little like — well, a piece from a charcoal-colored ski,” I said. “Flat and narrow like a ski, but much shorter — the length of a foot and part of a shin, in sort of a curved L-shape . . .” I looked up from my artwork and saw that I was losing him. “Sorry, Phil — I’ve become more interested in all of this lately.”

  “I can understand why. So Ben is living alone now?”

  “Yes, David left his house to Ben. I’m a little frightened for him, I have to admit. Not because of the injury — Ben will swear to you that he’s in better shape now than he was before the amputation — but because there was a break-in there a few months ago.”

  The color drained from Phil Newly’s face.

  41

  TUESDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 12

  Las Piernas

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” he said, shuddering. “I seem to always let myself think the worst these days. Undoubtedly someone read in the paper that David had died and decided to take advantage of that. It’s a sad commentary on life in these times, but it happens.”

  “Phil — don’t give me the ‘life in these times’ bit. I c
an’t take it from someone in your line of work.”

  He smiled, then said, “I understand you’ve made use of a defense attorney or two in your day.”

  I laughed. “Yes, it’s true what they say. You stop making lawyer jokes the moment you’re taken into custody.”

  “Was anything stolen at David’s house?”

  “No. Although now that you mention it, the break-ins occurred not too long after David’s name appeared in the first stories about — about Parrish’s escape.”

  “Break-ins? Plural?”

  “They hit Ben’s office, too.”

  “Hmmm. How about the other homes? Anyone else have similar trouble?”

  “No, not that I know of, but — I haven’t contacted their families, so I don’t know.”

  “The families!” he said. “They must hate me.”

  “I hope any hatred they feel is centered on Nick Parrish,” I said.

  He fell into a brooding silence, then said, “He’s my obsession, you know.”

  “Parrish?”

  “Yes. That’s why I have all of these books. It’s not healthy, I know, but I keep trying to understand, to see if there was something I should have spotted early on, if there had been some warning that things would end as they did, something I failed to recognize.”

  I tried to tell him it was useless to blame himself, but soon realized that I wasn’t going to be able to talk him out of this way of thinking.

  “Here—” he said at one point, pulling the topo map out, heedlessly spilling the stacks of books. “Look — I can’t even figure out where — where it happened.”

  Again I forced myself to look at his map. I hadn’t even studied the one I had used in the mountains. This one encompassed a larger area than mine, and so the scale was smaller. It gave a greater overview of the area, but in less detail.

  Newly had marked the clearing where his foot had been broken. “That’s the last place I recorded on my GPS unit,” he said, pointing. He moved his finger a short distance to another mark. “Here’s where the landing strip was.” He moved it once more, to a symbol some distance from the other two. “And this is J.C.’s ranger station.”

  It was odd to me, looking at the map now. Despite my initial misgivings, it was simply the earth’s fingerprint, whorls and contour lines and colors, shapes that — once you got the hang of reading topo maps — transformed themselves into a landscape of ridges and valleys, cliffs and slopes, lakes and rivers.

  A view so far above the burial ground could not harm me or upset me much. I had not seen the area from this perspective. “It happened in this section — here,” I said, using the pencil to point out the ridge between the two meadows. “The coyote tree was on this ridge.” I moved the pencil a slight distance. “Julia Sayre was buried in a meadow on this side of it. You can’t really see the detail of the meadow on this map. The other side of the ridge is where he set his trap.”

  Places. Just places, I told myself.

  Phil Newly was staring at the map in silence.

  “How many other bodies did they find there?” he asked at last.

  “You mean—”

  “Not members of our group, but buried. Women Parrish had buried there.”

  “In the one meadow, including the one he booby-trapped, ten. The others were all much farther down the meadow from the ridge. And Julia Sayre was the only woman buried in the other meadow.”

  “The only one?” he asked.

  “Yes. She was apparently special to him in some way. I’ve heard that he was more . . . that the things he did to her were more . . .”

  As I sought for a phrase, he said, “I think I know what you mean.”

  “Yes. Although there are signs in the victims in the other meadow that he was progressing — if you can call it progress — toward more and more sadistic treatment of his victims.”

  “None of the others had explosives rigged to them?”

  It was more difficult for me to recite facts when the word “explosives” came into play, but I managed it. “No. The new search teams proceeded very carefully all the same. They had bomb squad experts check out each potential site. It took a lot of extra time, but no other explosives were found.”

  “Did search dogs find these other bodies?”

  “Some of them. They were using lots of different methods by then — aerial photography, ground penetrating radar, you name it. Bingle had shown strong interest in that meadow, but the rigged grave was the first one he came to.”

  “Why?”

  “I think Ben found the answer to that. The question bothered him, too. So he studied the plastic that had been wrapped around Julia Sayre’s body, and some of the remaining fragments of plastic from the second body—”

  “Nina Poolman?”

  “Yes, both identifications were confirmed later.”

  “So what was of interest to Ben?”

  “There were two different types of holes in the plastic. Some of the punctures had been made by the probes the anthropologists used, but the others were made by some other object. The diameters and other characteristics of the punctures were different.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “We think he planned to be caught.”

  “Sooner or later, I suppose—”

  “No, I mean planned. He allowed himself to be caught so that the world would know what a genius he is. At some point before he killed Kara Lane, he must have gone up into the mountains and punctured holes in those plastic coverings, which led to further decay of the bodies. The bodies would have been protected by the plastic until then.”

  “And the decay gave off scent through these holes.”

  “Right. So those were the graves that were easiest for Bingle to find.”

  “My God. These other women — do the police know who they were?”

  “He buried most of them with some form of identification — usually a driver’s license — but it will take a while to verify that they are indeed those women. They’ve ordered dental records and so on.”

  “They can’t just tell—”

  “No,” I said quickly, shutting out the image of Julia Sayre’s body.

  “I’m sorry,” Phil said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m okay,” I said, then added, “Ben told me that driver’s licenses are notoriously inaccurate sources of identification information in any case — men often report themselves to be taller than they really are when they apply for a license, women report themselves to be shorter and thinner. And sometimes hair color or weight changes after the license is issued.”

  “But if the identifications match?”

  “I don’t have information on all of the women. A lot of other law enforcement agencies have become involved in this since we went up there, and so it’s not just a matter of going to the paper’s usual sources for information. But one of our reporters learned that nine of the women had criminal records — for prostitution.”

  “And prostitutes are always the easiest prey for a man like Parrish,” he said grimly. “Did these women all come from Las Piernas?”

  “Most, but not all. They’re from a number of cities in Southern California, but all of the cities have one thing in common.”

  “An airport?”

  I nodded. “Apparently Parrish had been using the meadow for years. There are a lot of questions that will only be answered after all of the forensic specialists have had a chance to do their work.”

  “Eleven. Eleven women!”

  “The police think there’s a twelfth one somewhere nearby, because there were a dozen coyotes on the tree. I think it might have been for Kara Lane.”

  “The woman whose murder led to his capture? The one whose body was found near the airport. Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Just a theory.”

  “And now he has killed a woman here, and these two women in Oregon!” he said.

  “Yes. The nurse and the receptionist.”

  “Did they ever find .
. . ?”

  “The receptionist’s legs? No.”

  After a long silence, he said, “He’s just getting started, isn’t he?”

  “Maybe.”

  He seemed more depressed than when I first arrived. I couldn’t bring myself to leave him in that frame of mind.

  “Frank asked me to thank you for helping him to find me. You have my thanks, too, Phil. You took a risk doing that, and for no other reason than kindness.”

  He looked at me with an expression so haunted, I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Do you really think of me that way — as someone who helped you?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m grateful to you. Not just for helping me to get out of there — you also probably saved Ben’s life. If he had spent many more hours up in those mountains without medical attention, the infection could have killed him. And the arrival of the helicopter probably frightened Parrish off before he had time to hunt me down in the forest. If you hadn’t helped Frank, he wouldn’t have found us so quickly.”

  He looked back down at the map and said, “Thank you. I don’t know that I did so much, really — Frank and his friends made the real difference. He was so anxious about you that day, so determined to find you, that he risked trouble with his department by coming to see me. It would have been inhumane not to help in some small way.”

  We talked a little more, but I still felt worried about him, so as I was leaving, I asked for his phone number. “I’d like to stay in touch, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Frank will want to talk to you, too.”

  “I’d like to talk to him again. Especially now that we won’t be opponents in court.”

  He wrote out the number and handed it to me. “Thanks for coming by, Irene.”

  “I should have done it months ago,” I said. “It was . . . helpful to me to see you today.”

  “For me, too,” he said. “Come by anytime.” He smiled and added, “I’m no longer such an expensive person to talk to — no billable hours.”

  Outside his house, as I was getting into the van, I saw a green Honda Accord drive off. I could have sworn that Nick Parrish was driving it. I took a deep breath, started the van, and pulled away from the curb.