“Are you saying he came to you?”
DeMarco nodded.
“In a dream?”
“I don’t know. I guess it must have been. But I couldn’t hear anything he said to me. It wasn’t clear. And then in another dream he didn’t speak at all.”
“The language of spirit,” she told him, “is symbol and metaphor. It’s almost never straightforward. So you find a meaning in how you felt. That’s what’s important. How did you feel when you saw him?”
DeMarco shook his head back and forth. Some things were not for sharing. He had always hoarded his grief, his guilt. And now the beautiful sadness of seeing his son again. The joy, the aching loss. It was no one else’s burden to bear.
And the rest of it; the others. His father’s visit. Huston’s. And those thin girlish hands upon his shoulders and back, never pushing actually, but encouraging, maybe guiding. None of it had frightened him. None had been unwelcome.
“But why there?” he asked. “Why not all the other times back home?”
“Where did all this take place?”
He did not answer, but blinked at the cards.
“He’s wherever you are, my dear. You just have to get quiet enough to listen.”
DeMarco lowered his head, pressed a fingertip into the corner of each eye. He sniffed, his breath quick and shallow. He tried to hold his body still as the tears ran over his hands.
“Ryan?” she said. Then, “May I call you Ryan?”
He nodded.
“I have what—thirty years on you?”
“A little less,” he said.
“Even so…we’ve both had a lot of pain in our lives. A person doesn’t get to be our age without suffering a lot of pain. Would you agree?”
“I would,” he said.
“Fortunately, the older we get, the more pain we can take. The more we can live with. Because we have to. When we’re young, everything is still so new to us. Anything bad that happens is a catastrophe, the end of the world. But we get older…we suffer more losses…more heartbreaks. And, if we’re lucky, we eventually realize that there’s nothing we can’t endure.”
She moved her hand now, touched a finger to a card in the third set. “And if we’re truly lucky, we come to understand than even death will be transcended. It’s just one more hurdle to get over. One more hill to climb.”
She paused then, leaned closer, her voice little more than a whisper. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He nodded. “I think I do.”
Quietly then she gathered up the cards, slipped them into the velvet bag. Then she stood, stepped close to him, laid a small, brittle hand atop his shoulder. “Stay as long as you like,” she told him. “Come back anytime.”
Then she left the room, left him telling himself to be practical about this, be a realist. Yet the tears continued to fall, and the sobs shuddered through him, and he admitted to himself that he wanted the other reality more.
ONE HUNDRED FORTY
He said, “You know how we’re always referencing Occam’s razor?”
Jayme had just walked into the kitchen, eyes not yet fully open, cheek still lightly creased from her pillow, her body naked but for one of his T-shirts. Through the window she could see morning in full light, the kitchen’s overhead light also ablaze. DeMarco sat at the table with his case notes spread out across it, a yellow legal pad in front of him, an empty coffee cup atop a dried coffee ring. From his laptop came music so low she could not identify it. She squinted at him before proceeding to the cupboard for a mug.
“Who is?” she said. The pot was nearly empty. When she lifted it off the burner, the smell of burnt coffee rose into her face.
“Cops,” he said.
She emptied the pot into her cup and shut off the burner. “You going to want more?”
He turned then to look her way. She was standing with her back to him, leaning into the refrigerator for a carton of almond milk. When she turned to set her mug on the table and fill it from the carton, he was smiling at her.
“What?” she said.
“I think I could look at you like that every morning, and it will always seem new to me.”
She pushed a few papers aside and sat across from him. “Look at me half-asleep?” she said. “You know it’s only”—and she glanced at the digital readout on her grandmother’s range—“7:34? How long have you been up?”
“Since a little after five.”
“And you’ve had almost an entire pot of coffee so far?”
“I’ll make you a fresh one,” he said.
“This is fine for now. Three parts milk and one part coffee dregs. I should sell the recipe to Starbucks.”
He kept smiling, watching her sip from the cup, watching the way her breasts lifted and fell when she breathed, how her eyelids remained nearly closed, how her face still held the softness of sleep. “Times like this,” he said, “I wish I were a poet.”
“You could take an online course,” she told him. “So what’s this about Occam’s razor?”
He tapped a finger to the notepad. “There’s some strange kind of fuckery going on here.”
“Fuckery?” she said. “Did you just now invent a new word?”
“I think Amy Winehouse did.”
Her eyebrows rose. “You’re a fan of Amy Winehouse?”
“She was a huge talent.”
She leaned back in her chair. “You never cease to amaze me, Sergeant.”
“Nothing amazing about me,” he told her. “Just a trailer-trash boy from Youngstown.”
She thought her heart was going to break. She reached out to lay her hand atop his. “One man’s trash is this woman’s treasure,” she said.
He stood and crossed to her, bent down, and kissed the top of her head. Then he turned away and busied himself with the coffeemaker, emptying the used filter, replacing it with a new one.
She sipped her coffee. Then said, “Occam’s razor?”
“This case,” he told her. “Occam’s razor does not apply. So what would be the polar opposite of that?”
“Well…the polar opposite of the simplest answer would be the most complex or complicated answer.”
“The most convoluted?” he asked while filling the carafe with cold water.
“Sure. Why not.”
“So instead of a razor, what would we have? What’s a good metaphor for something convoluted and unpredictable?”
“You really expect me to think about this right now?”
“You’re up to it,” he told her. He emptied the water into the coffeemaker, set the carafe on the burner, and pushed the power button. Then he returned to his seat.
“How about a Möbius strip?” she said.
“Perfect. Because that’s what we have here. That’s what this case is.”
She leaned forward to look briefly at several of the papers scattered before her. Then she reached for his legal pad, slid it her way, turned it right end up. “You’ve been a busy boy.”
“Throwing dates at it is all. And I think I’m starting to see some connections. But I’ve also had way too much coffee, and tunnel vision might be setting in.”
She ran a finger down the list of notations. “You’re sure about this?” she asked. “The first vic disappeared less than a year after Friedl came to Aberdeen?”
“He told me so himself. The date he came to town, I mean. Which was more or less the same day Todd Burl went to work for him.”
“Caramba,” she said. Then, “That means, like, holy cow—right?”
“It can.”
She considered another notation. “This date for the last vic’s disappearance. This is from the stuff Vicente gave us?”
“Correct.”
She said, “Hand me your pen.” He did, and she wrote something on the legal pad, then pus
hed the pad and pen back to him.
He read what she had written: Friedl brought new wife to Aberdeen May 2005.
He nodded. “I thought that’s what you told me but I was waiting to be sure.”
“So no vics before Burl goes to work for Friedl, and none after Friedl’s wife comes into the picture. Double caramba,” she said.
She leaned back in her chair, coffee mug in both hands, rim resting against her lower lip. Her gaze went slantwise to the table but her eyes were unfocused. He waited, watching, until she looked up at him, eyes fully open now, fully alert.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“It’s not a very enlightened thought,” she told him. “From a feminist perspective.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“His wife is a sweetheart,” she told him. “That might explain everything or nothing, I don’t know. It’s just that…”
“Say it,” he said.
“I couldn’t help thinking, sitting there talking to her, why a millionaire Caucasian male chooses to marry a poor black girl who is confined to a wheelchair. She was only twenty-seven when they got married. He was in his sixties.”
“So explain it,” he said. “You’re the one with the master’s degree.”
“And that makes me an expert?”
“The closest thing to one in this room.”
“Were any of the victims in a wheelchair? Or have a spinal deformity of some kind? We don’t know that yet, do we?”
“There was nothing in Vicente’s notes about it. Forensics would have mentioned it. What we do know is that they were all small, light-skinned black girls. Same as his wife.”
“So the fetish might be…broader based than just the spinal deformity,” she said. “Fetishes usually take root around puberty. What do you know about Friedl’s childhood?”
“I know he had one.”
“Brilliant,” she said. “The last piece of the puzzle.”
He grinned at her. “You know you’re beautiful when you’re seminaked and sarcastic?”
She held out her cup. “Shut up and get me some decent coffee, Einstein.”
ONE HUNDRED FORTY-ONE
They spent the next two hours with their laptops, hopscotching from one site to another. Not much personal information could be obtained online about Friedl’s wife, other than her full maiden name, Diamond Cecilia Walker, and the date of her marriage to Friedl. The chiropractor, on the other hand, had been awarded several distinctions from various Rotary and civic organizations in the Gulf cities where his clinics were located, and had been profiled by a half-dozen different newspapers and two trade magazines. Father a general practitioner in Fort Myers, Florida; mother a homemaker and hometown amateur tennis champion; William Blaine Friedl their only child. Both parents now deceased.
“Listen to this,” DeMarco said, and read aloud from a profile in the Fort Myers News-Press:
“When asked why the son of a successful general practitioner chose chiropractic as his specialty, Dr. Friedl answered, ‘When I was eight or so, my mother hired a live-in maid named Idora. She had a daughter who was a year younger than me. Her name was Beatrice. I called her Bee. We became very close, and remained that way until she died at the age of sixteen. She spent most of her life in a wheelchair because of a terrible congenital disorder that causes, among other complications, deformities of the spine. Her condition touched me very deeply, and as it worsened over the years, I developed a naïve idea that I could figure out some way to cure her. I spent all my time studying bone structure and how the spine works and so forth. I was unable to save her, of course, but by that time, my life’s passion had already been determined.’
“Dr. Friedl’s eyes filled with tears as he told this touching story. It is small wonder why his patients and colleagues speak so highly of this intensely compassionate healer.”
When DeMarco stopped reading, Jayme said, “His friend’s name was Beatrice but he called her Bee. His wife’s name is Diamond and he calls her Dee.”
DeMarco looked up from the screen. “It doesn’t say the maid or her daughter was black, but what if she was? That would be a big, fat bingo.”
Jayme’s eyes were wide with the prospect of discovery. “That,” she said, “would be bingo bango bongo.”
ONE HUNDRED FORTY-TWO
He was standing in the shower, water pulsing down hard between his shoulder blades, just warm enough to be felt as it sheeted over his back, when a thought came to him. He slid the shower door open six inches and shouted so as to be heard downstairs, “Can you check Vicente’s notes again?”
Jayme’s answer was softer and closer. “I’m lying here on the bed waiting for you to stop using all the hot water.”
He spun the dial above the faucet and shut off the water. Stepped out, grabbed a towel, half dried his body before entering the bedroom. She lay there on the bed, looking more naked to him than ever because of the smile she offered, hands placed one on top of the other over her belly, right ankle over the left.
“You’re dripping,” she told him.
He tried to keep his eyes on her face, his erection pushing at the towel wrapped around his waist. “What exactly did the notes say about cause of death?”
“We talked about this.”
“My brain is on spin cycle now. Remind me, please.”
“Nothing definitive or common to all seven,” she answered. “Asphyxiation by strangulation or smothering are possibilities. As is poison. But only because of the lack of any other conclusive evidence.”
“There were two with a damaged hyoid bone, right?”
“One. Two with the bone missing. But most of them had several smaller bones missing. Why? What are you thinking?”
“I’m trying to line up Burl with the cause of death somehow. You remember when we talked to him and his wife at the park?” he said. “She was wearing that long skirt, looked almost Amish? Plus a short-sleeved turtleneck. It was yellow, I think.”
Jayme rolled onto an elbow and propped herself up. “You’re sure about the turtleneck?”
“Not about the color, but the turtleneck, yes.”
“I remember the skirt, but not the top she was wearing.”
“We were focused on other things. The little girls crying. But what if I’m remembering it right? Why would a woman dress like that on a night like a steam bath?”
“So you’re saying he’s a guy who likes to strangle women?”
“I’m saying what I’m saying. A woman wears a turtleneck in ninety-degree weather, she’s covering something up.”
“Maybe it was a hickey. Maybe the result of erotic asphyxiation. Maybe she just likes turtlenecks.”
He was silent for a moment, then blew out a breath. “You’re right. I’m struggling for connections where none exist.”
“They might,” she said, and swung her long legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “She and the girls should be alone in the house by now. He’ll be up at Friedl’s place.”
“Hmm,” DeMarco said, then shook his head. “We talk to her, what’s she going to do? Call her husband thirty seconds after we walk out the door. We’re not ready for that. Plus there’s another thing. The dates for the girls’ disappearances. They all took place when?”
“They all could have taken place anytime between September and early December of the given years.”
“The three that were certain,” he said.
“First two weeks of December.”
“What if they all actually disappeared the first two weeks of December?”
“What if they did?” she said.
“Give me a minute.” He hurried out of the room, downstairs, and to his laptop on the kitchen table. Clicked through the pages he had left open on several websites. Found the one he was searching for, and hurried back upstairs just as she was stepping into the shower.
/>
“December 19,” he said, out of breath.
“Okay,” she said. “Relevance?”
“Friedl’s birthday.”
She lifted her wet foot back to the bathmat, closed the shower stall door. Water pattered like a hard rain against the glass and tile. She said, “First you imply that Burl’s wife might have been hiding neck bruises. And now you pull in Friedl’s birthday. Evidence suggests that Friedl might have a fetish for black girls in wheelchairs. Those are awfully tentative connections, baby.”
“But they are connections,” he said with a grin. “Go ahead and get your shower. I’m going to check in with the sheriff.” He started to turn away.
“And then what?”
“Then we talk to the one person I know we can turn. And we turn him inside out.”
ONE HUNDRED FORTY-THREE
A few minutes shy of noon Jayme pressed the intercom button on the security gate and told Mrs. Friedl they had a few more questions to ask. Mrs. Friedl said, after a moment’s hesitation, “We’re just about ready to sit down to lunch.”
Jayme said, “This is important, ma’am.”
Twenty seconds later the security bar slowly rose, and Jayme drove forward onto the estate grounds.
Alerted by DeMarco’s finger tapping the passenger window, she slowed the vehicle as the llama barn came into view in the shallow valley ahead. Burl’s blue pickup truck was parked facing outward with the bed of the truck inside the barn.
“What now?” Jayme said.
“Stop up ahead where this road swings down toward the house,” DeMarco said.
“You don’t care if he sees us?”
“We’re talking to him next. Especially if I get what I need from Friedl.” He popped open the glove compartment, took out his holstered Glock and Jayme’s slim, subcompact Glock 42, waited till the vehicle stopped, and handed the .380 to her.
She took the handgun. “Where do you want me?”
“In the shade under the trees on your side,” he said. “If the truck leaves the grounds and heads away from here, call the sheriff’s department and have them pick him up. If he comes my way, let me know. Otherwise, just hang tight till I come back for you.”
Walking the Bones Page 35
