Forgotten Bones

by Vivian Barz

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Sal said. “Of course, some of the bodies are far too decomposed to one hundred percent confirm that no sexual assault took place, but on the more current victims there’s absolutely no trace. Which is weird, right, because those old creeps typically get worse with age.”

  “So if he wasn’t doing it lately . . .”

  “He probably wasn’t doing it back then,” Sal said. “Of course, this is pure conjecture on my part. I’m really no expert. You’d need to talk to your FBI-profiler pals for that.”

  Fat chance of that happening , Susan thought. “Gerald was busted for child pornography, though, so maybe he used them in videos or something . . .” She felt sick even saying it. She swept the candy off her desk into the garbage can, wiped her hand on her pant leg.

  “I thought the same thing,” said Sal. “But there are absolutely no signs that any of the kids were even undressed . I haven’t seen a ton of child murders, but typically if there was any kind of sexual abuse, there’d be signs of it: pants bunched, underwear torn or inside out . . . buttons ripped off clothing, that sort of thing. But with these kids, there’s nothing. No internal trauma of any kind either. No pelvic or femoral fractures.”

  Susan considered the new information as she jotted down a couple of quick notes on the pad on her desk. She came up blank for a theory and wondered what the FBI profilers were making of the information. No wonder they seemed so edgy. Denton Howell, though always cordial toward her whenever they encountered each other around the station, was a walking ball of tension. The pressure was on to find Gerald Nichol, who might, it seemed, enjoy killing kids for the sheer sake of killing.

  “I don’t know how you can stand doing what you do all day, Sal,” said Susan.

  “You and me both,” Sal agreed. “But I try to remind myself that all the work I do will help put Gerald away. Hopefully.”

  “Right, hopefully . If we catch him.”

  Sal said, “I’m surprised he’s been able to stay hidden this long. Half of America is looking for the creep. You know how many vigilante groups are tweeting about him online? I can’t imagine what kind of scumbag lawyer would be willing to represent this guy once he’s caught.”

  “I think even the FBI are a little stumped. They’re running out of places to look. Ed mentioned that they might start having me help out today with interviews and weeding through tips. If they’re turning to the public, they must be getting desperate.”

  “Gerald Nichol might be one cunning motherfucker after all. Pardon my French.”

  “Stop apologizing for your filthy mouth and tell me the second bit of fucking information,” Susan said. It probably wasn’t appropriate, joking around while discussing dead children, but crappy bons mots sometimes helped dull the horror people like she and Sal had to contend with every day.

  “The only physical damage the kids show seems self-inflicted.”

  “Explain.”

  “I mean that they weren’t beaten, they weren’t shot, they weren’t poisoned, burned, choked, or stabbed. It’s the damnedest thing.”

  Susan frowned. “How did they die, then?”

  “It’s very difficult to determine, again because of decomp, but it is my medical opinion that they were asphyxiated.”

  “Like smothered with a pillow or something?”

  “No, we found no foreign fibers in the nasal cavities to suggest that type of smothering. It’s more like they were locked somewhere and ran out of air. It makes the most sense, given the self-inflicted injuries I mentioned.”

  “Which were what?”

  “This news isn’t so great,” Sal said. “Most of the kids had damaged hands. Broken fingers and split nails. Like they’d tried to punch or claw their way out of something. Probably in a panic as they were running out of air.”

  Susan shivered. “It makes me sick. Those poor kids.”

  “Yes,” Sal agreed. “Those poor kids.”

  Well, this is one way to start the morning , Susan thought as she hung up.

  After a contemplative moment, she reached into her bag and pulled out the printouts from Pepper’s blog. She found the page with Lenny’s photograph and studied it, thinking about the conversation with Sal.

  Finding the identities of the newer bodies was the priority; that was what the FBI wanted. Which meant that putting the true name to Overalls Boy was the least of the FBI’s concerns. Susan suspected they’d lose interest in the case fast once Gerald Nichol was apprehended and the accolades started rolling in for bringing a child murderer to justice. Never mind the victims, as long as there was a monster to string up.

  If the American public loved anything, it was seeing criminals pay .

  Susan knew how it would go: once the FBI left Perrick, the task of identifying the earliest victims would go straight to the back burner. Of course it would; it wasn’t like they didn’t know who the murderer was. Focus on identifying corpses decades old when there were so many kids coming up missing every day? Taxpayers would lose their minds.

  Overalls Boy might not even have any living relatives left, his murder having occurred so long ago—it wasn’t as if she knew that he was, indeed, Lenny Lincoln. She was only reaching, at best. If he wasn’t Lenny, there might not be anyone on earth left who cared to see that he was identified.

  Well, she cared, maybe because she’d been there when he’d been found, or maybe simply because she wanted to help identity a poor soul who might otherwise remain forever nameless. She wasn’t allowed to have direct involvement with the Death Farm case, but Susan couldn’t see the harm in doing a little digging on her own time, off the clock. Really, it would be like she was providing Perrick a community service by working for free.

  Her eyes drifted up to the clock on the wall and then down toward the stairway that led to the old records room in the basement. There was still a lot of time left before she started her shift. Perhaps, she thought, it wouldn’t hurt to have a quick gander at some old files, which would only back up her recently acquired hobby—wink-wink—of exploring Perrick town history.

  Susan took the stairs down to the basement with nonchalance she had to force. Unlike at larger, big-city stations, the records room at Perrick PD was not manned or even locked. She walked right in and discovered that she was entirely on her own, barring the few moth corpses that sat upturned on the ledge of the room’s single window.

  Though eerily noiseless and coated in a hefty layer of dust, the space was well organized. This probably had something to do with its lack of use, which gave Susan a small flare of hope. Less in and out meant fewer misplaced files.

  She counted twenty rows of metal shelving, each four levels high. Easy enough to follow. The records were kept in uniform cardboard boxes, dated chronologically. She walked to where the first box was kept at the very back of the room, not surprised to see that it was dated 1954, the year Perrick PD had opened its doors. Each year of the 1960s was marked by a single box—except, she saw, the year 1968, which had two. It must have been especially hot that year; nothing brings out a town’s naughty streak quite like intolerable heat.

  Right. So with the extra box, that gave her eleven boxes to sort through, 1960–1969. She figured she’d focus most on 1964, the year Lenny Lincoln had disappeared, but she still wanted to cover all the sixties, in case there was additional information that might offer clues.

  Susan sighed, already feeling overwhelmed. Best get cracking.

  She brought over the step stool that was by the door so that she could reach the first box that she needed, placed on the very top shelf of the third row in. She sneezed as she slid it off, crying out and nearly losing her balance as a papery daddy longlegs carcass dropped down onto her chest. She didn’t stop until all the boxes were down at her feet.

  The crimes from 1960 were, overall, petty. Stolen farm equipment. Noise complaints. Grade-schoolers shoplifting candy, high schoolers shoplifting booze. Disputes over property lines. Not a single report of child neglect or abuse, though this wasn’t
surprising. Here were archives from an era when children had been taught to be seen and not heard. Few children probably would have had the nerve to report their parents to the police if they were being beaten or molested. And even if they had, would help have come?

  After a while, Susan got a system down, and her sorting quickened. A few names she encountered in the files more than once. If she saw Ralph Combes, she knew it was going to be a complaint related to Neil Luchsinger’s livestock wandering into his yard (they liked to munch on his cabbage and tomato plants). If it was Louise McClatchy, it was the noise the mechanics made—swearing like sailors! —in the shop next door to her house. A man named Mel Bancroft filed no less than fifteen complaints about teenagers doing burnouts in the gravel lot behind his barn.

  Susan made a significant discovery about a quarter of the way through 1964. She’d been so fixated on the fact that she’d seen so few reports filed on children (other than for candy theft and their other bothersome habit, loitering inside the town’s only comic book store without ever buying anything), that she’d nearly forgotten the main objective of her search. Now, the hairs on the back of her neck were rising, and her skin was breaking out in gooseflesh as she scanned the reports on one little lost boy, Lenny Lincoln.

  Susan’s excitement brought her to her feet, pacing. Attached to the thick stack of files were several photos of Lenny, as well as his home address, right next door to Death Farm. She quickly read. On May 13, 1964, Lenny and his brother, Milton, were outside playing hide-and-seek when Lenny went missing. Ultimately, it was assumed that a wild animal—used to be lots of coyotes and mountain lions in the area—had run off with the boy. The body, as she knew, was never found.

  Susan frowned at what she initially dismissed as police ineptitude. How was it that the whole town had suspected Wayne Nichol of harboring unsavory feelings toward children, yet they’d never thought to arrest him when a child living right next door had gone missing?

  She soon found the answer: On the day Lenny had disappeared, Wayne, along with his wife, Mary, and son, Gerald, were away visiting Mary’s parents down in Fresno. Their alibi was airtight, investigated and confirmed. So it was claimed.

  Wayne Nichol’s death report was also at the very bottom of the box. An accidental poisoning, officially. Bad produce.

  So if Overalls Boy was truly Lenny Lincoln, how could it still be Gerald or Wayne who was culpable, given that they both had alibis for the day he’d disappeared?

  Susan pulled up the stool and took a seat, balancing the file on her knees. Okay, so if Gerald had skipped the Fresno trip with his parents and then murdered Lenny while he’d had the farm to himself, was it so far fetched to assume that his immediate family would lie to keep him out of prison?

  As Susan knew from experience, no, it wasn’t. People lied all the time, and it wouldn’t have been the first time a family had orchestrated a cover-up to protect their own. She’d observed dozens of civilians committing perjury on behalf of their relatives in ways she couldn’t have conceived, had she not seen it for herself. Parents lying about their offspring driving drunk, selling hard drugs from their very homes, sons beating wives and girlfriends nearly to death. Not too long ago, Susan had worked a statutory rape case that involved a middle-aged man and a fourteen-year-old girl. The man’s sister—his so-called “character witness”—had claimed that the victim was lying for attention, that she had never even heard of the girl. Yet there were the sister and the girl all over Facebook, celebrating the brother’s birthday together, arms linked over the liter of cheap vodka they’d been guzzling straight from the bottle.

  The strangest part about it was that many of the perjurers had appeared quite wholesome. Their houses were tidy, decorated with cookie jars shaped like teddy bears and embroidered Home Sweet Home plaques. Blood. People will do almost anything for their blood, even if it betrays their own principles, even if they risk sending themselves to jail in the process.

  Susan flipped through the file, not entirely convinced of the Nichols’ alibi. Had Wayne and Mary produced gas or meal receipts to verify the trip? Had testimony been given by anyone other than Mary’s family? There was nothing in the files to confirm or refute. Perhaps Mary had internally justified the lies to the police by later poisoning Wayne. Susan would have loved to ask Mary directly about the alibi, but she absolutely couldn’t. Not without alerting Ed and the FBI to her snooping.

  Susan studied the files spread out in front of her on the floor, shaking her head. There was the FBI with all their clout, all their flashy databases, all those Quantico credentials, yet she just might be closer than they to identifying Death Farm’s first victim after only an hour of digging through old boxes in the station’s basement. The FBI obviously hadn’t even thought about checking old records; it was evident that nobody had been in the records room in weeks, months. Her shoes had left footprints on the floor, there was so much dust.

  But.

  But she might be getting ahead of herself. She’d proved nothing yet.

  And there were problems.

  She drummed her fingers on her chin. Problem number one: If she was onto something, how was she going to justify to higher-ups coming across information she’d been forbidden to search for?

  Problem number two was a lot bigger: she’d need DNA to prove her theory, samples from both Lenny—assuming Overalls Boy was Lenny—and Milton, since he seemed to be the only living relative left.

  Problem number three: There was a lot of assumption happening on her part. She’d need something a lot more concrete than a flimsy alibi from the sixties before she could go to higher-ups with her theories.

  CHAPTER 23

  Eric began to have second thoughts about going to the authorities as he was mounting the steps outside the police station. He’d seen enough cop dramas on TV to know that it was typically attention seekers who went to the cops with so-called insider information they claimed would just blow the whole damn case wide open!

  Not that Eric was going to make such an assertion. He was merely going to provide what little information he had, despite how cryptic it was. He was beyond mortified and felt like a caricature of a schizophrenic, showing up at the station with his half-baked theories, but he didn’t know what else to do. He had to find a way to make his undead visitors go away before they incited a full-blown relapse.

  There was also the most pressing possibility that he could help save some poor kid’s life. Milton. The dead boy in his nightmare had said to find Milton , who might be suffering at the hands of that child predator, Gerald Nichol. Eric had thought more about it on the drive over, and it was what he ultimately had to assume—that his (visions? hallucinations? nightmares?) insights somehow related to Death Farm. It was the only thing that made sense, though it didn’t make much sense at all: the screaming he and Jake had heard near the field as well as the news report that had played itself out on his television both pointed to Death Farm. Why him , when he had absolutely no connection to the farm, or even to California, for that matter?

  The biggest obstacle Eric faced was getting the police to believe him about the potentially missing kid, particularly when he hardly believed it himself, if at all. Moreover, he had no concrete information to back his claims. It would have helped him greatly if the corpse-boy had told him where to find Milton or had given him a hint as to how long he’d been missing. An age. Physical description.

  There was also the sketchy way Eric had been delivered his information, via a dead child and condiments. The most plausible story he could cook up for the police was that he sometimes had visions while he slept—that his dreams occasionally provided valuable insight about important events. And that was the least nutty explanation he could come up with, though it sounded exaggerated even to him.

  Maybe they’ll buy it , Eric reassured himself.

  (Not a chance in hell.)

  No , Eric thought miserably, not a chance in hell .

  Though it was nippy out, a small cluster of sweat beads h
ad formed along his hairline. Eric stopped on the second step from the top and shot a longing look over his shoulder at his Jeep, parked less than fifty yards away at the end of the street. He cupped his keys inside his jacket pocket and gave them a jingle. If only.

  With a long sigh, he pulled open the station’s thick glass doors and stepped into a warmth far too balmy to be comfortable. He was sweating profusely, his shirt clinging to his back and armpits unpleasantly. It was very possible that he would faint. He gripped his keys, sharpness bringing the world back into focus.

  “Here goes nothing,” he muttered and then smacked his lips. He’d brushed his teeth twice, but he still couldn’t get the taste of sweet lemon out of his mouth. Which was funny, since he couldn’t recall having eaten anything containing lemon for weeks.

  The station’s interior was small, ugly, and packed. Stale, like an old house that hadn’t been aired out in decades. Its decor (if it could be called that) was industrial and outdated, gray and unwelcoming, though that was probably how police stations were supposed to look. Make things too nice, and the criminals just might keep coming back.

  Eric approached a surly woman manning the main desk—the only employee there, or he would have gone to someone else. She was very large and very solid, with drab brown hair pulled back into a bun so tight that her forehead shone. Like the station itself, she was the antithesis of approachable. Her name tag identified her as Terri, though it was unclear if this was her first or last name. She looked like a Terri. Terri-fying.

  “Yes?” She scowled without looking up, her eyes glued to paperwork she was pretending to shuffle through, her tone suggestive: Can you go away?

  Not too long ago, Eric had overheard an electrician in Philly say that the sturdy historical building he was rewiring was “built like a brick shithouse.” That was just like this woman, he thought, built like a brick shithouse.

  Terri was not an individual who seemed to take too kindly to waffling, so Eric just spat it out. “I’m here about the, uh, Death Farm.”