Bone by Bone

14

That was Ad Winston on the phone." Hannah's wooden clogs clattered down the cellar stairs. "He says the reporters won't be bothering us today. They're all joining up with the sheriff's search party."

Approaching the table, she seemed pleased to find her last batch of laundry folded and neatly stacked by Oren and the judge. Smiling, she inspected their work. "From the kitchen window, I could see bits and pieces of a long line of trucks and cars moving uphill through the trees."

The housekeeper frowned at three stray socks with no mates, and Oren waited for the old magic that had made him Hannah's laundry slave when he was six years old. As she rolled the orphan socks, each one became a pair, and he never caught her pulling the mates from her pockets.

"I wonder what Cable uses for brains." She glanced at the cellar window. "He should've waited till morning. Not enough daylight left to search a whole mountain."

No problem. Oren knew it would be a short outing for all concerned, no bivouac, no campfires under the stars. The searchers would stumble upon the rest of his brother's bones long before dark.

William Swahn gripped his cane tighter. Some days, any weight on his twisted leg would cause him pain, and he had pills for that, but medication fogged his mind. He limped across the wide foyer, cursing his mistake in reconnecting the doorbell. Upon opening the center panel, he saw Sarah's redheaded daughter standing on the other side of the iron grille.

"Belle." What a happy and awkward surprise. How would he explain why he had not paid her a visit since her return to Coventry?

"Hello, William."

The door opened wide, and the pretty woman in blue jeans entered the foyer, lifting her face to receive a hello kiss. At their last meeting, she had been sixteen years old and had to stand on her toes to kiss him goodbye.

Stepping back a pace, she said, "So you remembered my name."

Isabelle's rebukes had never been understated.

He led the way into the library. "I remember every woman who ever proposed to me." And now he could see that this occasion had slipped her mind. "You were shorter then, only four years old."

"Olden days." Isabelle settled into an armchair. "Mom's school days. You were the youngest Latin scholar at UCLA."

"No, I majored in criminal justice." He sank down on the couch and laid his cane to one side. "But I did tutor your mother in Latin. That's how we met."

"You were her friend. How could you let her marry Addison?"

He laughed for the first time in ages. "I had nothing to say about it. I was a kid-only ten years older than you were."

"But you were so smart-a damn genius IQ. Mom listened to you."

"I was just a geeky little boy-an oddity on a college campus." And Sarah had not listened to him; it had been quite the other way around. She had been his mentor, passing on to him all of her wisdom on the survival of freaks-that woman of freakish beauty. Sarah had been the salvation of a lonely pimple-faced child with a monster-size brain. "Memories can be treacherous, Belle. I think I like yours better than mine."

"You loved my mother." He had worshipped her.

"You moved to Coventry so you could be close to her."

"No," said William. "That was Addison 's idea. He told me this was a good place to hide from the world, a place to lick wounds." However, in fairness to Isabelle's reckoning, he had looked forward to the reunion with Sarah and her little girl, the two people he loved best in all the world. And he had begun to heal in the early years-while Sarah was still at home to him when he came knocking on her door, while she continued to mentor him on the subject of their mutual freakdom. And what an odd pair they had made in those days, Beauty and the limping Beast.

Isabelle's smile was unsettling. "You used to come to the lodge once a week. You were the only friend of Mom's who ever came to dinner. Anything wrong with that memory? I know you stopped coming after Josh Hobbs disappeared."

She sat on the edge of the chair cushion, though not perched there, nothing like a bird but something rather more dangerous. How contrary was this quiet bomb exploding slowly. She continued to smile at him, but she did not breathe-she seethed.

Behind him a clock was ticking, ticking.

Isabelle bolted from the chair and yelled, "How could you abandon my mother! I counted on you!"

The slope owed its gentle incline to an outcrop of bald rock on the south face of the mountain. There might be two hundred people gathered here- if Oren did not count reporters as people. More volunteers were climbing out of vans and trucks parked along the fire road.

Deputies handed out maps while a young forest ranger addressed the crowd. The bullhorn was unnecessary, but the ranger was new to this part of the world so high in the air, where sound could carry from one mountaintop to another. He explained the process of a grid search, and the citizens of Coventry listened politely, as if they had not done this before and done it well, finding every lost soul-except for Joshua Hobbs. That boy had been their only failure, though this was not their fault, for he had been hiding from them, dead and buried underground. But today they had returned for him-the rest of him, the bones that had not yet been found. Their mission, said the ranger, was to locate a grave. The nameless stranger buried with the hometown boy was only a rumor to these people.

When the bullhorn was laid down, the crowd split into small groups and followed their section leaders off to different compass points. No search party had ever combed this part of the mountain so close to bald rock, reasoning that no one could be lost in an area between a fire road and a well-worn hiking trail, a high place with a view of the town below.

Cable Babitt nodded to a pair of late arrivals with cameras and microphones, and he handed each of them a map. "Stay with your group, boys. Don't wander off. We haven't got all day to go looking for strays."

Oren Hobbs pointed these two stragglers toward one of the search parties. When they were out of sight, he said to the man beside him, "Waste of manpower, isn't it, Sheriff?"

"You shouldn't be here, son. This place is crawling with reporters, and they all want a piece of you."

"Well, that's disturbing. If reporters can't find me while I'm standing right in front of them, how will they find a hole in the ground?" Oren looked down at his own copy of the map and made a pretense of studying it. "Damn. You forgot to mark the gravesite for them."

The sheriff's smile was strained but game as he let this pass for a joke.

Oren spread the map on the hood of his father's car. This copy still bore the stamp of a university geology department. The perimeter lines for the grid search were drawn in odd shapes and restricted to areas where the soil was rich in iron. "Lucky you just happened to know about these ore deposits."

"The coroner sent the-"

"You knew where to look before I reported the bones. I was there- standing in my front yard, when you pointed this site out to Dave." Oren folded his map. "I'll make sure you get credit for that."

The sheriff's smile faltered and died. He walked away, trailing behind a group of volunteers. There were no reporters assigned to this party, only townspeople spread out in a long line and walking abreast, eyes to the ground, looking for signs of disturbance in the earth.

Oren caught up to Cable Babitt. For twenty yards of silence, he watched the older man's face for signs of fear. "Sheriff, I hope you picked the search party that's headed straight for my brother's grave."

"It shouldn't take long to find," said Cable, ignoring the innuendo. "The iron ore is all narrow streaks, real short runs."

The fire road ran parallel to the path of the searchers marching ahead of him, downhill and deeper into the forest. And this was more evidence against the sheriff. In Oren's experience, even the best-concealed graves of murder victims had been found in close proximity to a road. The volunteers walked at arm's length from one another, some crab-walking sideways to avoid fallen trees and boulders.

As if opining on the weather, Oren said, "I know you're the one who left the bones on the judge's porch." And when the sheriff stumbled, then stopped-dead still-Oren added, "You figured that would bring me home-back to your jurisdiction."

"I never suspected you." Cable Babitt looked up at the sky, as if he gave a damn about the gathering clouds. "But your father was always at the top of my list. A few months ago, I found Josh's skull in my garage. It was sitting on the hood of my jeep. I thought the judge might've left it there. Guilt maybe. Who knows?"

"You knew right away it was Josh's skull?"

"Oh, yeah." The sheriff was silent until the last volunteer was no longer visible through the dense foliage. "I could tell by the overlap of the front teeth and a chip in one back molar. I've had the boy's dental records in my files for twenty years. And that skull was in real good shape, no predator marks. Between that and the soil stains-well, the boy didn't bury himself. You know the parents are always at the top of the suspect list. I had to rule out your father-or make a case against him."

"So you took a soil sample from the skull, but you didn't send it to a state lab." Oren held up the map with its telltale stamp of origin. "You had it analyzed by a university geologist."

The sheriff nodded. "Then I went looking for the rest of the bones on my own time. It took me a while to locate the grave-just a hole in the ground, not very big. And I dug up the-"

"Why would the judge kill Josh?"

"Oren, you know damn well I don't need motive. Who knows what goes on inside of that old man's head? The day you got home, you must've realized your dad had a few screws loose. The way he keeps that house. My God, he even stuffed Horatio." Cable hurried his steps to catch up to his own group of searchers. He glanced back over one shoulder to see Oren dogging him. "Son, you don't want to be here when they find that hole."

True enough.

In U.S. Army terminology, he had exploited too many such holes from Bosnia to Baghdad, gathering evidence of mass murders so cruel that some had encompassed whole villages, and bullets had not been wasted on babies to spare them the slow death of live burial. The graves had always yielded clues to the manner of murder, and he had no desire to be here when his brother's grave was found.

"You want me to go? Fine," said Oren. "Give me the keys to your office and that file cabinet."

Too late.

They ran toward the sound of the scream.

The elderly owner of the dry-goods store, Mrs. Mooney, had found the burial site by falling into it. After treading on a canvas tarp, camouflaged by windblown leaves and dry brush, she had fallen into the narrow trench beneath it. The canvas now covered the old woman as well, almost like a shroud, and possibly that had also been her own thought when she screamed. Her gnarly white hands reached out of the grave to be saved.

Oren dragged out the tarp, then climbed into the hole and gently lifted the old woman up and into the waiting hands of volunteers.

The last time he had stood on the floor of a grave, there had been so many bodies, fifty or more, and a plethora of clues to the cause of death: bullet holes and blindfolds still tied around the skulls, hands bound behind the backs of men and women. Some of the evidence collected for identification had been small toys taken from the skeletal hands of children.

This more barren grave was a greater assault on his mind. He was not ready for this. He stood frozen, looking down at a familiar belt buckle, a shred of his brother's rotted blue jeans and a freshly exposed shard of bone.

Part of a yellow plastic garment jutted out from the loose dirt, and this must belong to the stranger whose remains had been mixed with Josh's in the coffin. Oren and his brother had owned yellow slickers that same color, but both of them were back at the house, still hanging side by side near the kitchen door-exhibits in his father's museum.

The sheriff, to his credit, pretended no surprise at this find, and he called out to one of the deputies, "Get that body bag out of the trunk!"

"Not so fast." Oren kept his voice low as he climbed out of the hole. "You have to call the Justice Department. They'll find you a team for the excavation-specialists."

"No time for that, son." The sheriff slowly turned his head to stare in disbelief. A female volunteer, a tourist in an out-of-state T-shirt, stepped up to the edge of the grave to snap a picture of her summer vacation.

"That's enough of that!" Cable Babitt snatched the disposable-box camera, and a deputy led the souvenir hunter away. "Oren, the reporters must've heard that scream. They'll be here any second. Anyway, there's nothing in that hole but rags and bones."

And evidence of a grave robber." Oren took the camera from the sheriff's hands and snapped a picture of the hole. He raised his voice for an approaching deputy to hear. "See the ridges on the sides? The shovel had a nick in it. Almost as good as a fingerprint." He snapped another picture of that shallow wall of dirt, and then he heard the sound of running feet. The reporters were coming through the woods, and they were legion.

Almost here.

"You don't want to lose this evidence, do you?" Oren pushed the film forward and snapped a photo of Cable Babitt. There was no flash, but the sheriff blinked in surprise.

Unwilling to trust this man to follow any protocols, Oren barked orders, military style, to the nearest deputy. This woman never even glanced at Cable for confirmation, but ran to her jeep to radio a request for an evidence officer on the scene. Oren issued another order to fence off the site with crime-scene tape. "And get these people out of here! Now! No reporters within thirty feet of the hole!"

He turned his back on his brother's grave and walked uphill toward the turnout where he had parked the judge's car.

"Son? Wait up!"

"I'm in a hurry, Sheriff." Oren kept walking, making the older man run to catch up. "Lots of work to do. I have to check out toolsheds for a nicked shovel. Maybe just one shed-yours."

"You're not a cop anymore! You've got no authority to-"

"I think we're past that little technicality." Without breaking stride, Oren glanced over one shoulder to see deputies pushing the reporters back and others stringing yellow tape from tree to tree-all on the authority of a man who was not a cop anymore.

"Son, you only think you know what's going on."

"Well, you tell me when I get something wrong." Whirling around, he faced the startled sheriff. "You tampered with a crime scene." As Oren walked toward him, Cable Babitt stepped backward. "You hand-delivered evidence to the judge, a suspect at the top of your list. You spent six weeks playing ugly little games with my brother's bones. I bet you even know the day when my father bought Josh's coffin… and then you left him more bones. You son of a bitch."

The sheriff had his back against a tree. "I was working this case. I knew I wouldn't have much time before all hell broke loose."

"When you found Josh's skull in your garage, was it in a bag or a box?"

"A plain old cardboard box. No prints on it. I still got the box. I'll show it to you."

"You'll need to voucher it as evidence."

"Oren, you know I can't do that. It's gone too far. What with the search party and all those reporters-"

"Right. And how could you explain leaving all those bones for a grieving old man to find in the dead of night? Why couldn't you work this case the right way?"

"It was a favor to your father." The sheriff almost whined this line, and then he flinched, as if afraid that the younger man was going to strike him.

Oren only folded his arms and kept his silence-waiting.

"I wanted to see what the judge would do when I left that skull on his porch. It was like a test."

Oren saw it as an act of cowardice. The sheriff, a political animal, had not wanted to risk the wrath of an influential man by asking an honest question. "So you stayed to watch. Did my father cry?"

"No, he just sat there on the porch for the longest time. I hoped he'd call me, but he never did. He didn't do anything. A week went by."

"And you left him more of his son's bones. Did you think he wouldn't feel anything?"

"When Josh went missing, your father was a sitting judge, and he had a lot of clout, but he never pushed for results, never once asked me for an update. Not one damn call to my office." The sheriff lifted both hands to stay Oren's next words. "I know he got help from William Swahn. But I figure that man's job ended when he found you an alibi."

"The soil analysis led you to an open grave." Oren rolled one hand, motioning for the older man to continue that thought.

"Yeah. Like I said, the hole was a small one. No sign of digging anywhere near it. Whoever left me that skull knew right where to look and found it on the first try. I had to widen it some to dig up more bones."

"Did you put that sheet of canvas over the grave?"

"Well, yeah. I had to protect my evidence."

Ironical was not the word that Oren was looking for. Clown would fit the sheriff better.

"Son, if you don't happen to find a nicked shovel at my place, I can hold on to this case and see it through."

"Don't call me son." And now-a little payback, a little fear. "You sent my brother home one piece at a time. For six weeks, you drove the judge crazy with those bones. Why should I help you?"

"Because I need more time to clear your father. Just something to think about, Oren. If I lose this case to the state, they'll tear into that old man. He'll be at the top of somebody else's list. You have to help me."

"While I'm thinking that over, I need the name of the woman who gave you my second alibi." He watched the sheriff's eyes as the man weighed a nicked shovel against this old bit of evidence.

Cable Babitt shrugged. And now it was obvious that it had never occurred to this man that one of the false alibis could have been made by a witness to a murder-or a killer.

"I suppose it hardly matters now," said the sheriff. "Nobody in this town would've believed her. I wish she'd never come in. I had Evelyn's story to clear you. But two alibis, well, that just-"

"Alibis you said you never wrote down, statements never signed. You've got nothing. Now you can explain that and the shovel to the reporters… or you can give me a name. Who was my second alibi?"

After being turned away from the gravesite, Ferris Monty was outraged. His bile spilleth over with indignation, and he poured it into the telephone. The California Bureau of Investigation was remarkably nonchalant about homicides north of Sacramento. However, they did have a CBI agent billeted in Saulburg on special assignment.

Ferris drove to the county seat, where he marched into the local headquarters of the Highway Patrol and demanded to speak with Special Agent Polk.

Following a wait of thirty minutes-another outrage-he laid out his case in the office temporarily assigned to the CBI agent. "Oren Hobbs was giving the orders," said Ferris. "I heard him. You know this isn't right. He's a civilian for God's sake. Why would the sheriff let him take charge like that? And another thing-if that grave is on state land, it's your jurisdiction."

Sally-call me Sally-Polk was years younger than Ferris, and yet this investigator reminded him of his mother, though he could not say why. Perhaps it was the rounded maternal shape, the gray in her hair-the plate of warm cookies on the desk.

"Sweetheart, is your tea too hot?" she wanted to know.

It was peppermint tea. Every article ever written about him had mentioned his love of this variety. He would swear this was even his brand.

How preposterous.

He had imagined this scene in advance of his arrival, and nowhere in that scenario did a cop call him sweetheart like she really meant it, and there was no damned tea or cookies. Adding to his disappointment, the atmosphere of Polk's office was all wrong, and it hardly seemed like a temporary accommodation for the visiting CBI agent. Cheery potted plants abounded in this sunlit room. The photographs of relatives were not discreetly placed on the desk. Oh, no. Her devotion to family was advertised on every wall. He had envisioned this meeting with a savvy, hardened detective, a man who would hang on every word of Ferris's theory. Reality was a dumpy hausfrau in a flowered sack that passed for a dress, a woman with a limited attention span, so easily distracted by any small plant that needed watering.

He raised his voice. "Why was Oren running that crime scene when he was always the prime suspect-the only suspect?"

The woman clearly did not care. Her back was turned to him as she stood before the window with a view of the parking lot. "So that's the famous yellow Rolls-Royce. Was it really owned by Al Capone?"

It was all too apparent that he would have to lead this fool woman by the hand. "Oren was the last one to see Joshua alive. I know that for a fact. I've interviewed a lot of people in Coventry. Of course that was twenty years ago."

"When you were writing a book? Isn't that what you said?" She left the window to stand by his chair. "A book about murder in a small town, I suppose." Not waiting for a response, she pressed on. "Well, how prescient. Until recently, Joshua Hobbs was only a missing person. But all those years ago, you decided that he'd been murdered." She placed one soft hand on his shoulder. "That's odd. I mean the boy might just as well have died in a fall out in the woods." Now he had her attention.

"I never said my book was about murder. I said it was about a tragedy in a small town. The effect it had on the-"

"But that's not your style, is it, dear? You write the gossip behind the headline news, and I think you're damned good at it. I make a point of reading your column. Call me a fan."

"Thank you, but I wasn't always a gossip columnist. I began my writing career as a serious novelist. Now here's another point to consider. Oren's father was an active judge in those days. And he came from an old California family-lots of money. He could've used his influence to get Oren out of town and beyond the reach of the sheriff."

This information about Henry Hobbs seemed to make no impression on her. She gave him a kindly smile as she sat down behind her desk. "A novelist? You don't say. Well, I thought all your books were nonfiction- true crime. What sort of novels did you write? Murder mysteries?"

Oh, God. He imagined that crime genre must be her idea of literature.

"I only published one novel," he said, teeth on edge. Stupid woman. "And it didn't have a single murder." And now he intended to lead her back to the matter at hand, the stuff of his current book. "I think it's obvious that Cable Babitt cooperated-no, he conspired to send Oren away."

Sally Polk pushed the plate of cookies across the desk. "Joshua Hobbs was only fifteen years old." Her eyes gleamed with genuine interest. "Were there lots of young boys in that old novel of yours?"

Apparently, the sheriff had called ahead to warn his people off. No one took notice of Oren when he entered the private office alone and locked the door behind him. He pulled Cable Babitt's keys from his pocket and opened the credenza to plunder the man's files.

The pile of old case folders made less than an hour's read-a waste of time, mostly rumor and hearsay. William Swahn had done a more thorough job of interviewing the people of Coventry. Oren had already formed an opinion of the sheriff's incompetence, but there must be more evidence than this. Turning back to the credenza, he opened the lower drawer to thumb through unrelated files, looking for something out of place, and he found an unmarked red folder.

Revelation.

The sheriff had lied to him about never committing the old alibi statements to paper.

There had been no formal interview with young Isabelle Winston, perhaps because Cable Babitt was, at core, a kind man. The teenager had submitted her four-page story in longhand, a schoolgirl script of curlicues and rampant sex in the deep woods with Oren Hobbs. Its content was the stuff of romance novels and bad movies. The wording described nothing more than a young girl's lack of experience, and it inadvertently exposed her as a virgin. Twenty years ago, the sheriff had probably slipped this statement into a drawer and smiled as he let her go unpunished for lying.

Oren moved on to alibi number two, a more official document. Evelyn Straub's statement had been transcribed from a taped interview, only one page of words neatly typed. He recognized her signature below the final line.

EVELYN STRAUB: Usually, I screwed the boy at the hotel. There's always an empty room to use. There was only one time at the cabin. I never took anyone there for sex. It was special. But that day, I made an exception.

SHERIFF BABITT: Why? I need something I can believe in, Evelyn.

EVELYN STRAUB: Too many birthdays, Cable. I'd just broken every mirror in that cabin. And then I looked through a back window and saw Oren out there on the trail. I needed him. I just needed him.

SHERIFF BABITT: And what about Josh?

EVELYN STRAUB: He went on ahead. He took that old hiking trail that runs past the cabin.

SHERIFF BABITT: So Josh goes up the trail by himself-believing God knows what-and Oren was fine with that?

EVELYN STRAUB: I think Oren stayed with me that day because I was crying. And my feet were bleeding.

She went on to describe the details of her crime: the carnal knowledge of a boy.

To make her lie more credible, Evelyn had told the truth. Except for the mention of Josh, she had perfectly described a memorable day. He recalled those broken mirrors-her fear-the bloody cost of vanity. He had carried her up the stairs to the bedroom so that the broken shards could not cut her soles anymore. After laying her down on the bed, he had washed her bleeding feet and bound the wounds with strips of old sheets. At the end of a day in that bed, their names were still Hey Boy and Mrs. Straub. They had seen the moon sail past the bedroom window, and the light of the sun had awakened them in the morning. But he had been sixteen years old on that day, not seventeen. And she had described their first time together-not the last.

A full year would pass before Josh was lost and Oren was banished. On long nights in far-off New Mexico, he had sometimes lain awake and wondered if the mirrors had gone after her again and left her bleeding.

The next page was another interview. Though the sheriff had led him to believe otherwise, apparently William Swahn-another man without an alibi-had made a formal statement.

All of the previous coroners had been funeral directors. Dr. Martingale, DDS, was the first dentist ever elected to that county office. At the burial site in the woods, the new coroner posed for a photo opportunity with the press, and he smiled broadly, knowing that fame was only as far away as the dinner hour and the evening news.

The sheriff's evidence officer had no need of a dentist's skills in the excavation of bones, but the reporters had used Dr. Martingale as a human shield when they broke through the line of yellow crime-scene tape.

And now, at the request of a cameraman, the coroner obligingly jumped into the grave. "More bones," he said, holding one high for the camera.

An angry deputy yelled, "Get the fuck out of there!"

The press corps salivated. Though the obscenity would be bleeped for the television audience, four-letter words were the finest kind. Cameras whirred and still photographs were snapped as the humiliated Dr. Martingale climbed out of the hole.

State troopers arrived en masse to herd reporters back behind the enemy line of the fallen crime-scene tape. The next people to cross the line carried screens and trowels, soft brushes and other tools for unearthing the dead. Reporters identified them as university students and their archaeology professor. The group's official escort was a gray-haired middle-aged woman in a shapeless flowered dress. "Call me Sally," said the agent from the California Bureau of Investigation.

A reporter yelled, "I thought this case belonged to the County Sheriff 's Office! Is this a turf war?"

"Oh my, no," said Special Agent Polk in a folksy tone of Perish the thought, "We're just here to lend a hand."

The county sheriff was not available for comment. According to his deputies, he had left the scene on a matter of urgent business elsewhere.

Cable Babitt was hard at work in his own backyard. He squatted before the open door of his toolshed, swinging a hammer and bringing it down on the edge of his shovel-clang-obliterating a distinctive nick, the mark of a grave robber.

When he was done with this chore, he entered the shed and unlocked a tin cabinet. He stood there for a while, eyes adjusting to the poor light, and then he opened the small metal door to expose a most precious object. It had been protected by dusty plastic and darkness these past twenty years. He unwrapped the knapsack. Marred by only a few spots of old dried blood, it was still as green and bright as the day Josh Hobbs had dropped it in the woods.

Where would he hide it now?