Twenty-Seven Bones

9

“Nobody dies.” Dawson had turned her face to the hut wall. “That’s what Leo said-those were his exact words.”

“We’re talking about…” said Pender. It was a question, but without the interrogatory rise at the end of the sentence.

“University of Wisconsin. Madison. August twenty-fourth, nineteen seventy. The Army Math Research Center in Sterling Hall. It was right after Kent State. We thought it was the endgame-that they were starting to kill students now. We waited until three in the morning. Final exams had been canceled on account of the riots-there wasn’t supposed to be anybody in the building.”

Pender searched his memory. He’d been a sheriff’s deputy in upstate New York at the time, but two of the bombers were still on the Ten Most Wanted when he joined the Bureau shortly afterward, and heaven help the special agent who failed to memorize that list every month. “A van full of fertilizer, right?”

“And jet fuel,” Dawson told the wall. “They found pieces of the truck on top of an eight-story building three blocks away. And the building hadn’t been empty. Robert Fassnacht, a grad student who’d been working late on a research project, left a widow and three children-a three-year-old son and a pair of twin girls who’d just turned…” Dawson’s voice broke. “Who’d just turned one.”

She recovered herself, ran the rest of it down for him-she’d kept track of, though not in touch with, her old comrades. Karl Armstrong picked up in Canada by the Mounties in ’72. Served seven years. Runs a juice stand three blocks from Sterling Hall. Dwight Armstrong picked up in Canada four years after his brother. Dwight served four years, drives a cab in Madison. Dave Fine was picked up in California. He only served three years-he’s a lawyer now, in Vancouver. “And they never caught Leo Burt.”

Hearing the names triggered Pender’s memory. “Or Karen Bannerman,” he said.

Dawson’s shoulders shuddered under the thin nightgown as if a whip had just come down across her back-she hadn’t heard that name spoken out loud for twenty years, she explained to the wall. Charlene Dawson was an identity the New York underground had fixed her up with in the seventies.

“You look more like a Karen than a Charlene,” said Pender.

“What happens now?” she asked the wall.

Pender was slouched back in the beanbag with his Panama tipped over his eyes. “I was thinking maybe a romantic candlelight dinner at Captain Wick’s tomorrow night, followed by me trying to figure out a way to get you into bed without you feeling like I’m blackmailing you or me feeling like I’m being bribed.”

Dawson’s spirits had been down to such depths, then risen so far so fast that she had the emotional bends. And she did so want to be held. So would she have slept with him if he weren’t a cop, just a good kisser? she asked herself. Or if she really were Charlene Dawson? She rolled over to face him. “Hey, Ed, you know what I think?”

He raised his head, tilted his hat back. He didn’t look quite so homely in the pleasant glow of the oil lamp. “What?”

“I think two ulterior motives cancel each other out.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.” She sat up, reached over, cupped her hand behind the glass chimney of the oil lamp, and blew out the flame.