Blessed are the Dead

by Kristi Belcamino

  I turn on the TV, then turn it off. I get off the couch and start pacing. I’m itching to call someone—­Moretti or someone else who can confirm that the skull is Jasmine’s. I know I promised Donovan I would wait to hear from him. What was I thinking? Why did I do that? My relationship with him must be distorting my news judgment. I don’t know what to think about Donovan’s calling me his girlfriend.

  All I know is that for the first time in my life, I’ve put a relationship above my job, and it doesn’t sit right with me. Every instinct I have is telling me to grab my keys and head for Los Gatos. I bet I could find out where Donovan and the other investigators were if I made enough calls. But then I realize I should relax. These things take time. Sometimes, it takes a few days to track down dental records. And if they have to do DNA testing, it could take weeks before the skull is identified.

  But deep down, I know it’s her. I pace my apartment, then finally settle on my couch with The Art of the Chessmaster.

  The book likens chess to warfare, an analogy I love. The key to mastering chess and defeating your opponent lies in being the one who makes the fewest mistakes.

  “Chess involves two personalities engaged in psychological warfare.”

  I can’t help but think of Johnson when I read these words. We are in full battle. I’m trying to get him to confess his crimes, and he’s trying to string me along with just enough information to keep me coming back to see him.

  He’s smart, but I’m banking on being more strategic.

  This chapter is about one of my favorite chess themes, the Phoenix theme.

  Just like the phoenix rising from the ashes, a key piece that was sacrificed earlier in the game is resurrected when a pawn gets promoted.

  “The queen’s bishop willingly puts itself in danger to gain ground on the chessboard, knowing that a pawn will soon make it across the board and be promoted to a bishop. Meanwhile, the ranks of the white player have been invaded sufficiently to lead to mate in three.”

  I can’t help but think of Jasmine—­and maybe Caterina—­as pieces sacrificed in Jack Dean Johnson’s game. In their case, there is no hope of resurrection, but he must be made to pay for their sacrifice.

  As I read, I try to concentrate, but I keep checking my cell phone to see if I’ve missed any calls. Finally, I throw the book down. It served its purpose by temporarily distracting me from my dark thoughts. But the reality is, I’m trying to avoid facing what I know in my bones. Jasmine is dead. I don’t want to admit it, but I’m just waiting for Donovan to call and tell me it’s true.

  I walk around my apartment, drawing my curtains together and turning off lights. In the dark, I walk to the sliding-­glass door leading to my balcony and look over at the white spires of the church. Only the pointy tips are visible peeking out through the mist. The fog is rolling in from the water, creeping closer. It’s headed my way.

  Chapter 25

  THAT NIGHT MY dream of Jasmine metamorphoses into a nightmare. At first, she is still running and laughing on the playground. I watch her dress blowing in the wind as she twirls on rings, then skips toward the edge of the pavement bordered by woods. I watch her trip. Something on the ground catches her eye. She gazes at the ground. Then she screams. She stands with her mouth wide open, screaming and looking down at her feet. Suddenly, I’m watching her from high in the air above the playground as if I’m a balloon.

  Swiftly my view pans down closer and closer until I’m right above her head, seeing what she sees, almost through her eyes. At her feet lies a skull. Worms are spilling out of the eye sockets. Jasmine’s scream goes on and on.

  I’m breathing hard when I awake. The clock says six o’clock. I check my phone—­no messages. I want to be ready when Donovan calls in case the skull is Jasmine’s, so I head to the bathroom. I take a quick shower with my phone nearby on the bathroom sink. I’m drying off when it rings. It’s not Donovan. It’s Nicole.

  “Holy shit!” she says.

  “What?” I shout back.

  “Channel 10,” she spits out.

  I rush into the living room with a towel held to my chest and flip on the TV. The station is broadcasting a live shot from a hillside in Los Gatos. A TV reporter stands at the base of a brushy hill right in front of a string of yellow crime-­scene tape blocking off the wilderness behind her. At the bottom of the screen, the words “Possible skull of missing Rosarito eight-­year-­old girl found in Santa Cruz Mountains” scroll by.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “Yes, Bob,” the reporter says to the anchor back at the station. “From what we’ve been told by forensic experts, in the wilderness like this, it is possible that a body could be skeletal after only a few weeks. The environment and wild animals would contribute to that condition.”

  Unbidden, a shocking revelation occurs to me: Caterina’s kidnapper must have kept her alive until right before her body was found. When I peered into her casket, she looked like she was sleeping. If she had been killed and left in the wilderness for even a day or two, she wouldn’t have looked like that. No makeup artist is that talented.

  The television reporter’s voice snaps me back to reality. I don’t have time to think about Caterina. I flip through the channels, still holding the phone to my ear. Every once in a while, I hear Nicole curse. Then, on Channel 7—­pictures of the Los Gatos hillside. I flip the station again, and the same picture is on another channel. Then it gets worse.

  “Gabriella?” Nicole says in my ear. “Have you seen the Tribune?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I say, and hastily open my front door to grab the papers and flip open the Trib.

  I quickly scan the front-­page article under Andy Black’s byline and my eyes light on the one name I do not want to read in this story. “Detective Sean Donovan of the Rosarito Police Department confirmed that the skull was that of missing eight-­year-­old Jasmine Baker.”

  My heart sinks.

  “Fuck,” I say into my phone, and sink into a kitchen chair.

  “Weren’t you on a date with Donovan last night?”

  “God, you don’t want to know,” I wail. “We were at El Farolito, and he got a call about a skull. He made me promise to keep it under wraps. I made him promise to call me as soon as it was confirmed.”

  “Looks like you’re the only one who kept a promise.”

  A beep indicates that I’m getting another call. It’s Kellogg.

  “I know. I’m on my way,” I answer, grabbing my handbag and keys.

  I’m about to hang up when Kellogg uses my first name, “Gabriella?”

  Uh-­oh, it’s just like when you were in trouble as a kid, and your parents used your full name.

  “Evans wants to see you later today when you get into the office.”

  AS I DRIVE to the South Bay, I swear and punch my steering wheel and dash in frustration. I try to reach Donovan but keep getting his voice mail. Not only does the Trib scoop me because my own “boyfriend” gave them the story, but every TV station in the Bay Area is on the scene ahead of me. I pull into a parking lot where the cops and media have set up camp at the base of a hiking trail just as Donovan’s car is pulling out. Our cars are facing in the opposite direction. We both roll down our windows. Our faces are less than a foot apart.

  “I was just calling you.” He holds up his phone.

  “A little late.”

  “First chance I had.”

  “But you told me you would call when you knew it was her. When was that?”

  “Around 3 A.M. We confirmed it with her dental records.”

  “You didn’t have time to call me, but you had time to give the Tribune the scoop.” I’m gritting my teeth. A little bit of spit flies out of my mouth. “You talked to my competition, but you didn’t bother to call me?”

  Donovan’s eyes narrow a bit. “Hey, he showed up here in the middle of the night. All I kn
ow is that he called Roberge at home, then she called me and told me to go ahead and talk to him. It wasn’t a regular press conference or anything.”

  Like that matters. “You mean you didn’t have two seconds to call me? Really?” I know investigating a homicide in the first hours is grueling, but I’m supposed to be his girlfriend, for crying aloud. Instead, he gives the scoop to Andy Black of all ­people.

  He stares past my head for a minute. I see his knuckles turn white as he grips his steering wheel.

  “I’ve been up all night. I just helped bag a little girl’s skull for evidence. I wasn’t worried about your scoop. I was more interested in figuring out how I was going to catch the sicko that did this. That’s my job. It’s not worrying about your little newspaper games.”

  That does it. He’s mad, but I’m furious. How dare him mock my career?

  “I might lose my job over this. I risked everything to keep your confidence, to build up trust between us by not reporting it until you gave me the go-­ahead. I sat at home, confident that you would call when you knew something. That was dumb. This shouldn’t be so hard. I was right before. This”—­and here I make the same back-­and-­forth gesture he made in the restaurant last night—­“is a mistake.”

  He stares at me for a minute.

  “Maybe you’re right.” He drives away with a little squeal of his tires.

  Chapter 26

  FLESH-­COLORED BANDAGES CRISSCROSS Jack Dean Johnson’s face.

  “Some punks ambushed me in the canteen last night when they heard what I was in here for. No big deal. I’ve got plans for them.”

  Then he gives me a sly smile. “Did you hear they found her skull?”

  I swallow my revulsion. I’m here because maybe if he gives me something worthwhile, it will save my ass when I get to the paper later. My only chance is to get a confession or something from Johnson now, before the entire press corps sweeps in on him. Right now, I’ve got nothing. Well, I’ve got something, but it is only repeating what was already on the front page of the Trib this morning. I visibly cringe remembering how Donovan gave Black the scoop last night instead of me. Johnson notices me wince.

  “If you’re here to get me to confess or tell you about the skull, I’m not saying shit. Cops and FBI already dragged my ass out of bed last night. They’re coming back in a few I heard.”

  I ignore him.

  “Now that there is a body, they probably have evidence. What if it leads them to you?”

  “I ain’t worried about that happening, but let’s say hypothetically, worst-­case scenario? They send me to prison, and I get killed in a year. The sooner I die, the sooner I get back to my next life.”

  I’m a little confused. “What do you mean? Reincarnation?”

  “Yes. Do you know what the ultimate punishment would be for me? To come back as a woman.”

  He smiles at me. But his smile never reaches his eyes, which are blank. His left eye meanders off so far, I have to look away.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened to Jasmine, how she ended up on that hillside?” I ask.

  “I already told you, I don’t lie. I said I would tell you one day, but today’s not that day.”

  He’s going for a stalemate, but I haven’t given up on checkmate, yet.

  “I got an interesting call this week,” I begin, “From a woman named Jill. She says you picked her up in Monterey about five years ago and took her to your house.”

  I watch him carefully when I say “Monterey” and “Jill,” but his expression doesn’t change. I wait for him to answer.

  He lets out a long sigh. “Everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame, don’t they?”

  “That wasn’t you?”

  “Hell, I don’t remember. I picked up so many girls in my time, it could’ve been. Or maybe not. Who knows.”

  “She says you let her go when she didn’t want to have sex. Is that something you ever did?”

  He shrugs and his eyebrows lift. “Maybe. I don’t know. Although it’s not really my M.O. to take no for an answer.”

  “This is your chance to tell me your story about Jasmine. Once they charge you, you’re screwed. Your attorney’s not going to let you say jack about it. Nobody is going to hear your side of the story until you have your day in court. This is your one chance. Maybe she did something and died by accident while you had her, right?”

  He doesn’t fall for it. He gives me a skeptical look. “I got plenty of chances to talk whenever and wherever and however I want.”

  I’m not getting anywhere. I’ll let it go for now.

  “What about Caterina? Let’s talk about her.”

  “I’m not saying anything specific about her right now, I told you that. Ask me something else.”

  I glance at my watch. I need something, anything new to put in the paper tomorrow if I want to keep my job. Then I hit on it—­I can write a story about how the mind of a child predator works.

  “Tell me how you find the children you’ve taken. How many have there been?”

  “I can’t answer how many,” he says. “How do I find them? Easy. You have to continuously be alert, and the opportunities will present themselves. Go sit in a schoolyard, ice rinks, movie house, malls, playgrounds. Pay attention. Shut your mouth and open your eyes. You will hear parents who are refusing to give their kids things, then you offer to give the kid that: money, McDonald’s, a trip to Disneyland.”

  When he says this, I remember Jasmine’s little handwriting saying she wants a trip to Disneyland. It makes my heart lurch.

  “Is that what you did with Jasmine?”

  He sighs and rolls his eyes.

  “Okay, then tell me how you choose the kids?”

  “I told you already,” he says. “I have my standards. I’m going to talk to the kids who are unhappy at home, who don’t get what they want. They will want what I have to offer. They are innocent. They don’t play games. It’s the adults who are stupid.

  “In fact, I think kids are the only ones who get it. I can have conversations that are more meaningful with kids than any adult on this planet. They still have that sense of wonder and awe about the world. They are more in touch with God—­or a higher power or whatever you call it—­than any adult walking this green earth. The kids are the ones who get it. I like kids so much that I wanted to have a career working with them. If I hadn’t gotten in trouble as a teen and gotten a record, I would have become a counselor for kids.”

  Again, his crazy is shining through. “But you’re a . . . you prey on kids,” I finally manage. “Let’s say you’re telling the truth, and you love kids.”

  “I told you I don’t lie,” he interrupts.

  “Okay, so if you love them, how can you kill them?”

  I note that he doesn’t deny killing them but is only worried about justifying the murders.

  “I told you that ­people sometimes kill so they don’t get caught doing something that society doesn’t approve of. But you know after a while, you hate to see something you love suffering, and it’s often better just to put it out of its misery.”

  It sounds like he keeps his victims alive for some time. “What do you mean after a while?”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter how fucked up some kid’s home life is, eventually she’s going to miss her family. It’s just like when you don’t want to see cute little Rover suffering when he gets sick, so you take him to the vet and have him put to sleep. Same deal. We kill things we love all the time in this country. Look at Kevorkian, for example. ­People kill other ­people they love all the time. Maybe that’s what God or Buddha wants us to do?”

  “I doubt that.”

  “How do you know that I’m not releasing these ­people into Nirvana by what I do?” he says, lifting one eyebrow. “Maybe I’m saving them from their miserable little lives? How do you know I am not freeing th
em from pain and suffering? Unlike Chris­tian­ity, Buddhism has recommendations, not commandments. That’s the beauty of it, you can interpret it any way you like, but the basic idea is that you have the freedom to do what makes you happy.”

  “I think you are using it to justify your actions,” I say.

  “You can think that if you want. I like grilled cheese sandwiches, baseball games, and having sex. Does this make me a bad person?”

  “But you aren’t having sex with another consenting adult. That’s the problem.”

  “You don’t think kids are capable of saying what they like and don’t like? Believe me, they are. I told you that the kids are the only ones who get it. Maybe one day, I’ll tell you what Caterina liked.”

  I suddenly wish the glass wasn’t between us. The rage I feel inside at his words would probably give me the strength to kill him with my bare hands. He meets my glare with a smirk, as if he’s happy to have gotten that reaction.

  Just then the guard comes. I stand up and turn my back on him, not moving until the elevator door opens.

  Chapter 27

  ADELE IS STILL in her nightgown when I arrive. I usually try to visit her at least twice a week while I’m up in Rosarito talking to the cops or Jasmine’s parents.

  I want to be the one to tell her about Jasmine. If she hasn’t already heard.

  She hasn’t.

  “That’s a shame,” she says wearily, and sinks onto her sofa. “Just a damn shame.”

  “Are you feeling okay?” I say, taking in her unusually disheveled appearance.

  “I’ll be alright, dear. It’s my heart. It often troubles me, but it’s been going on for so many years that I’m quite used to it by now. I had to wait until the first of the month to get my heart medicine, and so that seems to have had some adverse effect.”