Bones

SATURDAY, EARLY EVENING, MAY 20

Las Piernas

The walk to the hospital wasn’t a long one, but it did me some good; my muscles had grown a little stiff and sore, and I was glad for the chance to stretch. We walked in companionable silence, but caused a commotion when we neared the hospital lobby, for which I was sorry.

There was a group of reporters standing just outside the hospital, smoking. One of the smokers recognized me, and she tried to quickly make her way over to us before the others saw our arrival. No luck. Rarely can one reporter move off from a group of other reporters without being seen. Anyone who has ever dropped a bag of popcorn near a flock of pigeons might have some idea of what this is like — you are not going to feed just one bird.

We made it into the lobby slightly ahead of our unwelcome entourage, only to run into a slightly larger group — restless people who had grown tired of waiting in the large room the hospital had set up for the press, and who were no doubt devising plans to get up to Ben’s room or, failing that, a chance to talk to his nurses, an orderly, or anyone who might have glimpsed him after his arrival there.

With no respect for nearby patients or their families, they started shouting questions at me, hurrying nearer.

Frank shielded me from the pushier ones, and fortunately, he was recognized by the officers who were providing the first line of security. We got through with only a little jostling, then made it into an elevator without much more trouble.

On Ben’s floor, there were guards posted outside the elevator, and along the hallways. I had seen them the night before, but I didn’t feel especially comforted by their vigilance. I realized that in some part of my mind I was now convinced that no guards would ever be able to stop Parrish — he was some combination of Houdini and the Terminator. He had escaped, and would be back. Not everyone in local law enforcement believed that Parrish would return to Las Piernas — most seemed to think that he would seek refuge where he was less well known — but there seemed to be universal agreement that Ben needed protection from the press.

Jack sat on one of a group of chairs near the nurses’ station, reading a travel magazine. He looked up as we arrived, tossed the magazine down on the low glass table in front of him and invited us to have a seat. “There are a couple of doctors in with him now,” he said.

There were a water fountain and some foam cups nearby. Frank, keeping in mind the orders I received from the doctors about fluid intake, filled a couple of cups and brought them back. “See if you can drink me under the table,” he said.

We heard the bell of the elevator and saw a young woman step out. She looked as if she was in her early twenties. She was of medium height, slender and tanned, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. Her eyes were dark brown, and she had short, straight blond hair. She was wearing jeans and carried a blue canvas daypack on her back. She spoke to the officer at the elevator, apparently identifying herself to him. She turned and studied us for a moment, frowning, then went to the nurses’ desk. There was a solemnity in her that made me wonder if one of her relatives was being cared for on this floor. Then I heard her clearly say the name “Ben Sheridan.”

The three of us glanced at one another, then watched as the nurse nodded toward us.

The woman hesitated, then walked over to where we sat. “The nurse tells me you’re waiting to see Dr. Sheridan.”

“Yes,” Frank said. “Would you like to wait with us?”

She blushed and said, “Thank you. I’m Ellen Raice. I’m one of Dr. Sheridan’s teaching assistants.”

We introduced ourselves and she said, “Oh. You were there — I mean, you rescued—”

“We were there,” I said, looking down at my hands.

We fell into an awkward silence. She looked from the floor to the ceiling to the table, hummed to herself, drummed her hands on her thighs for a few minutes, then stood up and got a cup of water.

When she came back, Jack and Frank began to make small talk with her; she told them that she had known Ben for six years.

“I took a physical anthropology class from him — physical, not cultural — you know the difference? I took the class just to meet a general ed requirement,” she said, tearing little chunks off the lip of the now-empty foam cup. “Before the first midterm, I changed my major. A lot of his students end up doing that — maybe not so quickly,” she added, blushing, then rushed on. “He’s a fantastic teacher. The two best teachers in the whole department are Ben and David Niles—” She stopped, drew in a sharp breath, set the cup down, and pressed her fingers to her eyes. She murmured, “Excuse me,” and stood up and paced.

She apparently won her struggle not to cry. When she decided to sit down again, Jack asked, “Do you know who Ben’s other friends are?”

She frowned, then said, “He has some friends at other universities. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of time for a social life. He — everybody thought he was going to get married, but it didn’t work out — I don’t think Camille really understood, you know.”

“Camille?” I repeated, remembering that Ben had spoken this name during his delirium. “Her name was Camille?”

“Yes, they lived together,” she said, smiling, and seeming relieved that I had finally decided to enter the conversation.

“What didn’t Camille understand?” I asked.

“About his work. The amount of time he devotes to it. And — and it gives some people the creeps, I guess. Too bad, really, because . . .” Her voice trailed off, then she said, “I probably shouldn’t be talking about his personal life this way.”

“I’m not trying to make you tell his secrets,” I said. “I’m just concerned about him.”

“Of course you are!” she said. “Even though you’re a reporter . . . I mean . . .”

She went back to tearing at the cup.

“How long ago did he split up with his fiancée?” I asked.

“Camille? I don’t know that it was ever actually an official engagement,” she said.

I waited.

“It’s been a while now,” she said, scooping up the cup fragments and standing up again. “Back at the beginning of last semester — so this past January.”

Jack, Frank, and I exchanged looks. “But that’s only a few months ago,” I said.

She shrugged, then said, “Yes, I guess it is only a few months.” She walked to the trash can. When she came back, she stayed standing, staring at the door to Ben’s room. She took off her daypack, opened it and took out a thick stack of bluebooks. She held them out to me and said, “Would you please do me a favor and give these to Ben?”

“What are they?”

“Final exams.”

“I don’t think he’s in any condition—”

“Of course not. But — he should decide what he wants to do. I think I’m going to go. Please tell him I came by.”

“Wait!” Frank said, as she set them on the table. “Don’t you want to see him?”

“Yes,” she said, “but while I was sitting here, I think I realized that Ben won’t want to see me.” She frowned again. “Maybe I should put it this way — he won’t want me to see him. Not until he’s had a little time to get used to the idea of — he’s had a transtibial amputation, right?”

At our puzzled looks, she clarified, “Below the knee.”

We nodded in unison, all fairly dumbfounded.

“Well,” she went on, “I don’t know everything there is to know about Ben, but I do know that he’s not crazy about appearing vulnerable, and that he would really hate it if anybody pitied him, but it would make him stark, raving batshit to see someone he teaches pitying him.”

More softly, she added, “I feel so sad about David and everything else that happened, and I’m afraid that Ben might mistake that for pity, and the truth is, I’m not sure what I will feel if I actually see Ben lying there hurt, or missing his foot, and so — so I think if you give him these papers to grade, it will help him — because, you know, he can do this without a foot — but I’d better not be here.”

And before any of us could recover from hearing this speech, she was gone.

“Because he can do that without a foot?” I asked blankly.

Jack started shaking with silent laughter, and Frank held up a hand to hide a grin, then made a little snorting sound. When I scowled at them, and said I was sure she meant well, Jack laughed harder, wheezing with it, really — and in the way hilarity will strike when you least want it to, we all lost it then.

At that moment, Ben’s doctors — a man and a woman — came down the hall to talk to us. We sobered instantly.

“No,” the woman said, “don’t worry.” She was tall, dark-haired, smartly dressed. Both doctors appeared to be in their early fifties. “Laughter helps to let a little of the tension out,” she said with a reassuring smile.

They introduced themselves as Greg Riley, Ben’s surgeon, and Jo Robinson, a clinical psychologist.

“Have a seat,” Dr. Riley said. “Let’s talk for a minute.”

When we were seated, Dr. Robinson said, “Ben has given us permission to discuss his case with you, but Ms. Kelly, knowing what you do for a living, of course I have to tell you that—”

“I’m not here as a reporter,” I said. “Nothing you say to me will end up in the newspaper.”

Riley nodded. “I appreciate that. The hospital administrators are going to have my hide if I don’t get downstairs and help them conduct a press conference, so I’m going to leave a little of the job I’d normally do to Jo. She’s heard everything I’ve had to say to Ben, and if you have any other questions, call my office — I’m in the book. I’d give you a card, but I don’t have one on me at the moment.”

For all their efforts to put us at ease, I realized I had tensed up from the moment I saw them. I had to own up to a fear of seeing Ben awake and in this altered state, of reacting in the wrong way, of doing or saying something that would hurt him. What if Ellen Raice had been the smartest one of us all?

Dr. Riley laid out a set of statistics in what was obviously a speech he had given to other patients’ family and friends on other occasions. Most of them went right past me. “It has been estimated that every week, about three thousand people in this country undergo an amputation,” he was saying now. “But as high as that number is, awareness about limb loss is shamefully low. As far as Ben Sheridan is concerned, of course, there’s only been one such surgery. And he’s right, because each case is unique.”

After a pause, he said, “Let’s just talk about Ben’s case.”

He started by listing the things Ben had going for him. Ben was young, healthy, and intelligent. He had knowledge of anatomy — even of amputation. He was in experienced hands, at a hospital that had an excellent record of success with cases like Ben’s. “And because he works for the college, he has good insurance coverage — insurance coverage, I am sorry to say, makes a great deal of difference in what we can do in terms of prosthetics, physical therapy, and other aspects of post-operative care and rehabilitation. Ben is already benefiting from that, because we were able to immediately fit him with a prosthesis.”

“Immediately?” Jack asked. Not wanting to get the nurse who had let me see Ben in trouble, I kept my mouth shut.

“Yes. As soon as the sutures were closed, a prosthetist was able to fit him with the first one he’ll wear.”

“Psychologically,” Jo Robinson said, “this approach makes some difference. He awakened from surgery and saw two feet at the end of the bed; even though he knows one is a prosthesis, he has a chance to make a more gradual adjustment to the change in his body image. And later, it will help him to develop his walking pattern.”

“So he will be able to walk again?” I asked.

Dr. Riley looked at me and smiled. “Ms. Kelly, with this type of amputation and the prosthesis we have in mind, he should be able to run, jump, swim, ride a bicycle, play soccer — you name it. So, barring any unforeseen complications, there are few if any activities Ben was doing before the surgery that he won’t be able to do again.”

I thought of Ben’s work and had my doubts. “Hiking over uneven ground?”

“An amputee recently climbed Mount Everest,” Dr. Riley said. “If Ben puts his mind to returning to an activity, or taking on new ones, I wouldn’t bet against him. I’m not saying he will be able to achieve all of this immediately — he has to heal from the surgery, and adjust to this change in his body. There will be pain, and a period of adapting to the use of the prosthesis. I don’t want you to think I am minimizing any of that. I’ll leave the rest to Jo, but as I say, if any of you have questions later, feel free to contact me.”

“Perhaps it would be best if we went in to see Ben before he falls asleep again,” Jo said as Dr. Riley left. “Then we can talk later, if you’d like.”

I picked up the stack of blue books and we followed her down the hall.

He had dozed off, but as we came in, he awakened, and mustered a smile for us. “I see you found Nellie Bly and Company for me,” he said to Jo.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I’m so loaded up with morphine, I’m not feeling much,” he said drowsily. “How about you? You weren’t looking so good yesterday.”

“I’m okay now.”

“Frank and Jack — I didn’t get a chance to properly thank you.”

They both disclaimed any need for thanks.

“How’s Bingle?” Ben asked.

I started to give a cheery little answer, then changed my mind. “To be honest, I think he’s depressed. Jack got in touch with the man who’s keeping Bool, and we thought a visit might perk him up a little, but then we were afraid that if they were separated again, it would be hard on him. The man who’s keeping Bool doesn’t mind having another bloodhound around, but he thinks Bingle is . . .”

“Obstreperous?”

I nodded. “His exact word for it, in fact.”

“Yes, that handler’s favorite word for Bingle.”

“But Bingle’s not ill-mannered! He’s just — spirited.”

Jack laughed. “Ben, he’s got Frank and Irene’s dogs bowing and scraping to him.”

“I’ll bet he does.”

“The cat hasn’t been converted yet,” Frank said. “I’m afraid Bingle was a little taken aback at Cody’s unwillingness to be chased.”

“Good for Cody,” Ben said. He smiled, but he seemed to be wearing down. “Irene, you’ve done so much for me already, but—”

“Name it.”

“I rode with David to the airport; my car is still in the driveway — an old Jeep Cherokee. Under the left rear bumper, there’s a spare house key in a magnetic holder.”

Frank rolled his eyes at this; since he had made me take a similar key holder off my own car, I knew he thought of them as one of those “first things a thief will look for” items. I was grateful that he didn’t say anything to Ben.

“If you would please use it to go into David’s house,” Ben went on, “there are some of Bingle’s toys in the garage. David keeps — David kept a separate little toy chest for each dog — not that he spoiled them, you understand. You’ll also see a cabinet with his food in it, and instructions for feeding him — David put them there for me.”

“Anything else you need? Can I get anything for you?”

“Maybe later.” He hesitated, then added, “For now” — he gestured toward the prosthesis — “they’re waiting on me hand and foot.”

Frank, Jack, and Jo Robinson groaned.

“Hey,” Ben said, “it wasn’t so bad, considering it was my first post-op amputee joke.”

We were halfway down the hall when I realized I still had the bluebooks in hand. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

Just as I walked back into his room, I heard Ben moan. It wasn’t loud, and it wasn’t — as I briefly suspected — because I had returned. When he realized I was in the room, he looked embarrassed.

“Not enough morphine after all?”

“I thought I was alone,” he snapped.

“Ah, now there’s the Ben Sheridan I’ve come to know and love. I think I would have left here wondering what they had done with him.”

To my shock, he began crying.

“Ben . . .”

“I don’t know what the fuck they did with him either,” he said, wiping at his face. He drew in a halting breath and said, “Shit. Ignore this little display, please. It must be the drugs.”

“Or maybe it’s that part of your body has been taken from you.”

“Not now, okay?” he said angrily. “Christ. Not now.”

“Okay.” It wasn’t hard to capitulate.

“Why did you come back?”

“Ellen Raice.”

That brought him back under control. “What?”

“She came by. I won’t even try to repeat everything she said.”

“She told you to, you know — say ‘get well soon,’ ” he said, imitating her voice and mannerisms perfectly. It made me laugh. He smiled and said, “Not very kind of me, was that?”

“No, but that’s the great thing, Ben, you don’t have to pretend to be kind around me. I know you’re an asshole, remember?”

“Too true, I’m afraid. Now I just realized.what you have there. She brought the damned final essays in, didn’t she?”

“Well,” I said, not able to resist, “as she put it, it’s something you can do without a foot.”

His jaw dropped, then he gave a shout of laughter. “I wish I thought you were making that up.”

I shook my head. “Shall I take them back to the college for you?”

He hesitated, then said, “Oh, what the hell. She’s right. Maybe I’ll actually be able to bear reading them. I’ll end up devising excuses to be loaded up with morphine at the end of every semester.”

I set them on the nightstand next to his bed.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Ben,” I said, heading for the door.

“Irene — wait.”

“Need something else?”

“You might — you might think about talking to Jo Robinson — no, don’t make a face. I mean it. What happened up there — no one expects you to be a little tin soldier, marching on with life. Not after something like that.”

“I’ll be okay.”

He acted as if he was going to say more, then seemed to change his mind. “Yeah. Well, see you tomorrow.”

“Are you going to be all right? I mean, here alone?”

“Yes. Actually, I think I need a little time to myself.”

“Call if you need to talk before tomorrow.”

I caught up to the others in the waiting area. “Sorry about that. I forgot to give him the bluebooks — although I suppose Dr. Robinson would say there are no accidents.”

“No, and I’ve never been to Vienna, either,” she said lightly. “I’m sorry we won’t have a chance to talk, I have an appointment this evening. Your husband and Mr. Fremont can fill you in on what I’ve said about Ben.” She handed me a business card. “Call me if you have any questions.”

I thanked her, stuffed the card into my purse without looking at it, and turned to Frank. “Think there’s a way to take a few things from David’s house without getting into trouble?”

But although I didn’t want to admit it, I was already in trouble. Plenty of trouble.

33

SATURDAY EVENING, MAY 20

Las Piernas

The first time I saw Nicholas Parrish in Las Piernas was early that evening.

Jack, Frank, and I left the hospital, then met up again at our local grocery store to buy the ingredients for dinner. I wasn’t much help; I was too lost in thought. At some point, I realized that I wasn’t letting Frank out of my sight — I was cowering. Despising that fact, I made myself move away from him. “I’m going to get some bottled water from the other aisle,” I said, and when Frank started to move off with me, added, “I’ll be right back.” I ignored the glance Frank and Jack exchanged.

I had just bent to pick up a six-pack of spring water when I saw Parrish out of the corner of my eye, moving past the far end of the aisle. He was wearing a dark green shirt and some sort of baseball cap. I caught no more than a glimpse of him, but I let out a sharp cry and ran in the opposite direction.

Frank had apparently heard me — I nearly bowled him over as I turned the corner.

“He’s here!” I shouted. “He’s here in the store!”

Frank knew I didn’t mean Elvis — and opened his jacket to have better access to his gun.

I hurriedly described the shirt and cap.

“Stay here!” he said, leaving me with the cart, while he and Jack moved in opposite directions, cautiously peering down each aisle, and yet keeping me within sight. Other shoppers were beginning to give us curious stares; a woman became alarmed when Frank sharply ordered her to “Keep back!”

I saw Frank tense, then relax. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “Could I ask you to come this way for a moment?”

He guided a man who wore a cap and a dark green shirt into view. He was about Parrish’s height and build, had Parrish’s hair color, and looked nothing at all like him otherwise. “Is this the man you saw?” Frank asked.

I nodded.

“Thank you,” he said to the man, who looked at me as if he suspected I was out on a weekend pass.

“What’s this all about?” he asked warily.

“Nothing,” I said, my mouth dry. “Forgive me, I thought you were someone else.”

I took that first Monday morning off — much to John’s annoyance — and went with Frank and Bingle to David’s house. As we drew closer to David’s neighborhood — one of Las Piernas’s older neighborhoods, with small but well-maintained homes on large lots — Bingle began sticking his nose out the windows, sniffing and snorting; by the time we turned onto his street, he was whining and pacing anxiously in the backseat, his tail wagging rapidly.

When we pulled up in front of the house, he began barking — sharp, short barks.

“Tranquilo,” I said.

I saw an old woman part the curtains in the front window of the house across the street.

Bingle behaved himself as we walked to the front door, but it obviously required effort. Once we stepped inside, Frank unsnapped the leash, and the dog bounded through the house.

The big living room had little furniture — a sofa and chair, a television and VCR, and a bookcase. This latter held a number of videotapes, books about dogs and anthropology, and titles by Twain, Thurber, and Wodehouse.

Bingle distracted me from taking in much more of the decor. He was hurrying from room to room at an anxious trot, whimpering. Several times he came back, looked up at me, and whined. I began following him.

“What’s he up to?” Frank asked.

I felt my throat tighten. “I think he’s looking for David.”

In one bedroom, Bingle jumped up on the unmade bed, and rubbed his face against the sheets and pillows; in the closet, he put his nose into each of the shoes and then rolled in a pile of laundry; in the bathroom, he sniffed at hairbrushes, a toothbrush, drains, and the toilet seat.

I tried talking to him, but he just hurried out into another bedroom, one with a single dresser and a neatly made bed. He took a quick look around, nuzzled the pillow and whined, then went out into the kitchen, where Frank had started gathering his food, feeding instructions, and dog toys. Bingle ignored him.

Bingle moved to a door off the kitchen and scratched at it. I opened it; it led to the garage. There were stacks of cardboard boxes here; he gave them a cursory sniff and made his way to a back door, frantically pawing at it. He started barking.

I opened it, and followed him out into a large fenced yard, with two dog runs. Bingle looked into one of these and barked again. The one marked “Boolean.”

There was no lock on it. I unlatched its gate, which creaked as I opened it. Bingle went inside, sniffed around, and again looked back at me. It was as if he were willing me to answer some question. I knelt down, and answered the one I thought he might be asking.

“They’re gone, Bingle,” I said, wishing I had never brought him here.

He sat down, studied me silently for a moment, then raised his head back and howled — not the high, crooning note he had playfully sung for David, but a low, primal and plaintive lament, a sound to beckon ghosts.

Three nights later, I sneaked Bingle into the hospital. I know an ornery nun on the staff at St. Anne’s, and with her help and the cooperation of a couple of guards, we arrived on Ben’s floor not long before the end of that evening’s visiting hours. I had given the dog the command to be silent, but he already seemed to sense that he was part of a clandestine operation. He was at his most charming with Sister Theresa and the guards. He padded along quietly at my side. While I could see that his nose was working overtime, he didn’t insist on checking out any of what must have been a multitude of intriguing scents.

Ben was expecting us; the visit was his suggestion, although I don’t think he thought I’d be able to pull it off. Bingle wasn’t eating. “I regret bringing him to David’s now,” I told Ben, “but I think part of what’s depressing him is that everyone who is familiar to him is gone from his life now — David, Bool, and as far as he knows, you.”

Ben’s doubts that Bingle missed him were put to rest by the dog’s reaction to seeing him. Bingle’s ears came up, and his tail wagged furiously. He approached the bed quickly, but carefully, and after giving a little “rowl” of excitement, gently nuzzled and kissed Ben.

Bingle’s presence wasn’t such bad medicine for Ben, either. They both looked the happiest I had seen them in days.

It was during this reunion that the door to Ben’s room opened and a nearly illegally gorgeous blonde walked in. She was tall and thin, had large, long-lashed, sea green eyes, high cheekbones, a lovely nose, and any number of other features that made me wonder how many women had to take an extra ration of ugly so that God could make this one turn out so beautiful. She was wearing a conservatively cut beige business suit and carried flowers — a cheery bouquet in an elegant ceramic vase — a personal touch, I thought, not your standard issue green glass from the florist.

“I seem to have come at a bad time,” she said.

“How did you manage to get past the guards?” Ben snapped.

Was the man crazy? I knew how she got past them.

“A really bad time,” she said, and started to back out.

“No, wait,” Ben said, but I noticed he was holding fast to Bingle. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. Come in, Camille.”

So this was the ex-girlfriend.

She glanced at the end of the bed and her eyes widened in surprise.

“Can you spot the fake?” he asked.

She blushed but said, “I didn’t think they’d fit you with a prosthesis so quickly.”

“It’s just temporary,” he said. “Let me introduce you to my friends. You’ve met Bingle.”

The dog wagged his tail; she nodded nervously.

“Irene Kelly, Sister Theresa, this is Camille Graham.”

“Hello,” she said. We said hello back.

Nobody said anything else for a moment.

“You can put the flowers on that dresser if you like,” Ben said, then unbending a little, added, “if they’re for me.”

She smiled. “Yes, I thought—”

“Thanks,” he said.

She set them down, then stayed near the dresser. She glanced at me and Sister Theresa.

“Maybe we should be going,” I said.

“No, stay,” Ben said quickly. “Please. I’ve missed Bingle.”

Camille folded her arms. There was a brief silence, then he said, “So how have you been?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Still seeing—”

“No. But I think you know that.”

“Yes. David told me. Sorry things didn’t work out.”

She shrugged. “How long will you be here?”

“In the hospital? About two more weeks.”

“Only two more weeks? Two weeks after . . .”

“Yes. I’ll probably be in a wheelchair at first, but I’m already getting up on my feet — or should I say foot?”

“Ben—”

“By the middle of summer,” he went on, determinedly ignoring her pitying look, “I’ll have my prosthesis. Then it will be feet.”

“If you need a place to stay—”

“I won’t.”

“Where will you live?”

He hesitated, then said, “David’s lawyer came by yesterday. It seems I’ve inherited a house.”

“But who will take care of you?”

He petted Bingle. “I’ll be fine.”

She glanced at Sister Theresa, turned red, but said to him, “If you want to move back in—”

“Absolutely not.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t,” he said.

A silence stretched. I wanted out of there, and thought Sister Theresa might be feeling uncomfortable, too. But a quick look at her made me realize that she was enjoying the hell out of herself.

“Your work,” Camille said. “You obviously can’t continue—”

“And why not?”

“Be realistic, Ben. What are your plans?”

“Realistically? To go back to the work I’ve always done.”

“But—”

“You think I won’t be capable of doing it?”

“No,” she said with resignation. “You can do whatever you set your mind to, Ben.”

“You just don’t approve of my choices.”

“True, I’ve never liked your work, but after what’s happened, I would think you’d consider changing your career.”

“If anything,” he said fiercely, “I’m more determined to do whatever I can to stop people like Nick Parrish. Irene — other than those of our own group, how many bodies have the searchers found up there now?”

“Ben!” Camille said angrily.

“Irene?”

“Ten women — last count,” I answered. “They think there are more.”

“They’ll be working up there for months, Camille. Because of one man. And every family who has a missing daughter will want to know if she’s one of them.”

“We’ve been over all of this before,” Camille said. “I don’t know why I came by.” She moved toward the door. “Silly to think you might need my help.”

“I’m not a charity case,” he said, his anger returning in force. “And I’d have to lose more than a leg to—”

“Don’t,” she said quickly. “I get the message.”

She opened the door, stopped, and said, “I was sorry to hear about David.”

He was silent.

“Take care, Ben,” she said.

“You too, Camille. Thanks for coming by. I mean that.”

She turned back toward him.

He smiled. “Really. I know your intentions were good. You’ve just forgotten what a” — he glanced at Sister Theresa — “what an old bear I am.”

“No, I haven’t,” she said. “It’s one of the things I like about you.”

He laughed.

As if she couldn’t resist saying it one more time, she added, “Please think about finding some other kind of work.”

His smile faded. “Maybe you should do the same.”

She left.

There was a collective release of breath as the door closed behind her.

Bingle imitated it with a loud sigh of his own.

“Sorry,” Ben said to the dog, “that probably ruined your visit.”

“I have the feeling he thinks he’s spending the night,” I said.

“Much as I’d like it, Bingle, I think we’ll have to take a rain check.”

Just before we left, I asked, “Ben, how will you manage after you’re released?”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. Probably hire someone to help out.”

On an associate professor’s salary? I thought. He must have seen my doubts, because he said, “I’ve got to take it one step at a time.” He grinned and added, “Having only one foot—”

“Oh, for God’s sake—”

He laughed.

“I’m serious.”

“Too serious. Take care of Bingle — that’s plenty for the time being.”

We slipped Bingle back out and I said good night to Sister Theresa and our co-conspirator guards. As I walked across the darkened parking lot, I saw other visitors leaving. I was unlocking the door to the Volvo, trying to manage leash and keys and purse when I saw Nick Parrish. He was sitting in the next car over, watching me. I dropped the keys and opened my mouth to scream, stumbling backward and tangling myself in Bingle’s leash. Parrish would catch me!

That’s when I saw that I was wrong. It was not Parrish. Just a man, waiting in a car.

I got into the Volvo with Bingle. I rolled the windows down and petted the dog while I waited to stop shaking. Bingle sat patiently, not fussing or barking. Twenty minutes later, I had calmed down enough to start the car.

“You need to stop thinking about Parrish,” I told myself. “You need to find some distractions.”

I pursued that idea with a vengeance.

34

THURSDAY NIGHT, MAY 25

Las Piernas

It was late when I came home that evening, but I found that Frank, Jack, Stinger, and Travis had waited for me.

“You didn’t eat dinner?” I asked.

But there was only one dinner anyone was concerned with, and I wondered if Bingle had ever before received applause for chowing down.

“It worked!” Travis said. “Was Ben happy to see him?”

“Oh, yes.” As we sat down to our own dinner, I told them what had happened at the hospital, with the exception of my scare in the parking lot. Stinger asked me if I thought Camille Graham might go for a more mature type of gentleman, prompting Jack to ask him where he was going to find one.

“She sounds nice,” Travis said, and blushed when that made the other men laugh.

“I think she is,” I said. “But Ben seems to be a long way from accepting any offers of friendship from her — which is too bad. I think it might have been good for him to let her help him out. Without David, I don’t know how he’ll manage.”

“Maybe he should stay with me,” Jack said.

“You aren’t really set up for houseguests,” Stinger said. “I speak from personal experience. A few more nights on that couch of yours, and I’ll need surgery myself.”

“That can be remedied,” Jack said.

“Damn straight,” Stinger said. “I’m going back home.”

Travis cleared his throat and said, “I’m going with him.”

“What?” Frank and I said in unison.

“Travis here has a notion he’d like to learn how to fly a helicopter,” Stinger said. “And I said that seeing as he has already made out his will, I’ll teach him.”

“I won’t let another twenty-odd years go by before I come back,” Travis said quickly, knowing my first concern. Until recently, family misunderstandings had separated me from my cousin, and I wasn’t willing to lose track of him again. “I’m just going to spend a little time trying something new,” he said. “I think I’ll probably set up a place of my own when I do come back, though.”

The men were looking at me, waiting for a response. “If it’s what you want to do,” I said, “that’s great. Just don’t become a stranger.”

He became animated, telling me about how much he had enjoyed riding up in the cockpit of the helicopter with Stinger, about Stinger’s desert retreat, about the work Stinger did with the helicopters.

“Any word on Parrish’s whereabouts?” Jack asked Frank.

Frank shook his head. “We’re getting reports from all over the place, some in town, some as far away as Australia. Not too uncommon to have this kind of stuff going on when there’s a serial killer on the loose. People feel afraid, they start seeing him everywhere.”

And how, I thought.

As soon as dinner was over, I told them I was going to bed early, that it had been a long day, and I was tired. It was the truth — perhaps not the whole truth, but the truth.

But when I lay down, I couldn’t sleep. I was tense, and felt an unhappiness, the cause of which I couldn’t name.

On the contrary, I had nothing to be unhappy about, I told myself. I was home safe and whole, unlike everyone else who had traveled to the mountains with me a week ago. I could not rid myself of visions of their faces, and found myself thinking especially of Bob Thompson, whom I didn’t even like, which for some reason made it seem worse to me, trying to remember him kindly when I felt so little kindness toward him.

Bingle came in, and put his head on the bed next to me. I petted him until I heard him flop to the floor in a heap and sigh. Cody came in and pointedly ignored him, but curled up in the crook of my knees and purred.

I don’t remember dozing off, but that night I dreamed I was standing in a field of pieces of men — not the mess of reality, but nice neat whole body parts: heads and torsos and feet and hands and arms and legs — all bloodless and clean, more like disassembled mannequins than men. It was up to me to reassemble them, and I felt that it was urgent that I should do so, but the mixture of parts wasn’t right, and I kept making mistakes. I’d put the wrong foot on a leg and couldn’t get it off again, the wrong neck on a head. And then I began to smell the stench of the real meadow, the death smell, growing stronger and stronger — the parts were going bad, because I wasn’t assembling them fast enough. Some of the heads were angry with me; they were dying because of me, they said, and started yelling my name, making an angry, protesting chant of it.

After a time, I realized that it was Frank, not yelling, just gently saying my name, holding me, stroking my back. I was shaking, and for the longest damned time, I couldn’t stop.

“Do you smell it?” I asked.

“What?”

When I didn’t answer, his hands went still for a moment, and then he said, “The field?”

“Yes. You do? I think maybe it’s on my clothes or something I brought back — or maybe Bingle—”

“Irene . . . no, I don’t smell it.”

I looked into his eyes, saw that he was serious, and said, “I have to get out of the house.”

“Okay,” he said, having plenty of experience with my claustrophobia.

We got dressed, gathered all three dogs, and went down to the end of the street. It was after midnight, and the cops who had been assigned to keep watch at the top of the stairs leading to the beach weren’t too crazy about our plans, but let us go past them.

The moon was up, and although it wasn’t full, it was bright enough to light our way. I took in great breaths of the salt air, and other scents receded. The sight of the endless silver stretch of moonlit water, the sounds of the advance and retreat of the waves, the soft give of the sand beneath my feet, all were so different from the mountain meadow of my dream. The terrifying images gave way, and I began to relax.

More aware, then, of Frank’s big warm hand holding mine, I said, “Sorry, you probably need some sleep, and here I am dragging you down to the beach.”

“I’ve had my share of bad nights, too. You can’t go through this stuff and expect that now that you’re home, you’ll just pick up where you left off.”

“No.” After a moment, I said, “This time — I don’t know how to come back from there, Frank. It’s with me. It frightens me.”

He put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Maybe you should talk to somebody.”

I didn’t answer. Two nights ago, I had told him everything that had happened in the mountains. He had listened patiently, and although he had been upset by how Parrish had terrorized me, and probably didn’t approve of my trying to draw Parrish away from Ben, he didn’t criticize me or blame me for what happened. The perfect listener, as far as I was concerned. So I knew that when he now said “talk to somebody,” he meant a therapist.

“Just a thought,” he said after a while. “I’m not trying to push you.”

“I know you aren’t,” I said, but felt relieved.

“And you can always talk to me.”

I pulled him closer to me. “Yes, I know. Thanks.” We walked a little farther, and I said, “I guess that’s why I don’t worry about needing a therapist. I’ve got a great husband, I’m surrounded by family and friends — I have a support group. Ben — I get the distinct impression that he’s not so lucky.”

“The other day at the hospital, that’s what Jo Robinson said. She was going to try to contact Ben’s sister and some of his friends, but in the meantime, she thought Ben could use whatever emotional support we could offer — although she’s concerned that you won’t take care of yourself.”

“Where does his sister live?” I asked, choosing to steer the conversation away from Jo Robinson and her concerns.

“In Iowa.”

The dogs came by and shook water on us, making us swear and laugh all at once. For a time, we simply walked and watched them.

Bingle was enjoying himself immensely; today he had definitely been the happiest I had seen him since we brought him home. It occurred to me that with his level of training, David must have spent many more hours working with him than we did with our dogs. How often each day was this dog used to being walked? Would he lose skills if we didn’t work with him?

The three dogs were getting along well together, engaging in harmless but rowdy play — dodging one another’s charges, tumbling dramatically in the sand, chasing one another into the water, then running up onto the beach.

Frank said, “I’ve been thinking about the front steps.”

I stopped walking. “The front steps?”

“I think I can get Pete and Jack to help me build a ramp. We’ll need to make some changes in the bathroom, too, maybe get one of those handheld shower goodies, and a seat. Dr. Riley can probably give us a list of things that we wouldn’t even think about on our own.”

“Frank—” I swallowed hard. “You’ve had to live with my twenty-five-year-old cousin . . .”

“Like most guys his age, Travis has had better things to do than hang around the house. You know I haven’t minded having him stay with us. I like him.”

“But Ben — he’s going to have problems, Frank. In fact, he had problems before all of this happened. This is not a great time in Ben Sheridan’s life.”

“Do you dislike him?”

“Last week, the answer would have been ‘yes.’ ”

“Now?”

“I guess I see things differently. The situation forced me to spend some time with him when he should have been at his worst. Instead it seemed to bring out the best in him.”

We turned around and headed back. Frank said, “I found you up there before Parrish did because Ben — even though he was obviously half out of his mind with pain — came up with the idea of sending Bingle with me to look for you.”

“You would have found me anyway.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But who knows? With Parrish on the loose, it’s not a chance I would have wanted to take. The other thing is — you know the old bit about saving someone’s life?”

“And then becoming responsible for it? You aren’t going to convince me that you’re suggesting Ben should stay with us because of that.”

“No, but there’s some link between the two of you now, just because you survived this together.”

“A link? Frank, maybe I should make something clear—”

“No need to,” he said firmly. “I don’t suspect that at all.”

“Why not?” I asked, and he laughed.

“Don’t worry — I have no doubt that you’re attractive to other men.”

“So you think Ben is gay?”

“No, I think Miss Ellen Raice would have blurted that out to us right off the bat.”

“True.”

He smiled. “And you didn’t just invent Camille Graham to be cruel to Stinger, did you?”

“No. So what is it?”

“I trust you,” he said. Then with a mischievous look, he added, “Besides, there are certain advantages to marrying girls like you, who never quite get over being Catholic — I would have seen the guilt from a mile away.”

I opened my mouth to protest, shut it, then muttered, “You’re right,” which made him laugh again.

So we decided that it would be good for Ben to stay with us. It was not so easy to convince Ben.

Frank proceeded to make the changes to the house anyway, saying that it would make it easier for Ben to visit. We both kept hoping that Ben would change his mind.

The sister in Iowa called Ben once, said she was sorry to hear about his trouble, but there was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t afford a trip out to California, and since she was seeing a man who might pop the question at any moment, strategically, this was not a good time for her to leave Iowa. He told me the phone call was more than he had expected from her.

He was moved to another section of the hospital, and began grueling physical therapy sessions. During those two weeks, he got many calls from friends across the country, but he always told them not to bother coming out to see him.

Those were busy weeks for me, just as I had hoped they’d be. Other members of the news staff, sick of hearing from John about my productivity, started hinting to me that I could slow down anytime.

No, I couldn’t.

I was on the run, after all — as surely as I had been in the mountains. Parrish seemed to be everywhere. Seated at other tables in restaurants, walking past me on a crowded sidewalk, going down the stadium stairs at a ball game. He came out of a bookstore as I walked in, stood in the shadows at a bar when I had a drink after work with friends, stood on the pier, staring at me, when I ran on the beach. He was at the back of the bus when I rode it, he drove past me when I walked. I once saw him get into an elevator ahead of me — I took the stairs, four flights up.

I don’t do well with elevators anyway.

Although each time was as terrifying as the first, I learned not to screech or run or point — and eventually, not to tell anyone what had made me suddenly turn pale, not to tell anyone anything about it at all. This, even though I knew that Frank wouldn’t belittle me if I told him of every incident. What did that matter? I was too ashamed not to belittle myself.

When I wasn’t working, I was visiting Ben or making preparations for his release from the hospital. I went back to David’s house without Bingle, cleaning it up just in case we lost our argument with Ben. I asked Ben if he wanted me to do anything with David’s belongings; he said no. “Except — could you bring some of those training tapes in? I think Sister Theresa is going to get a VCR in here for me.”

“Bribing nuns?”

“You should talk, dog smuggler.”

“What training tapes?”

“The ones of Bingle and the SAR group. The group videotapes some of the training exercises so that they can study the way the dogs work, the way the handlers work with them. David used to watch the tapes all the time. They’ll be on the bookcase.”

“So you’re going to take up SAR and cadaver dog work?”

He glanced down at his left leg, then with a determined look, said, “Yes. If Bingle decides he doesn’t want to work with me, fine. But David put a lot of time into training him, and the least I can do for David and Bingle is to give it a try. And no one can better teach me how to work with Bingle than David.”

At first, watching the tapes upset Ben, as they did me. This was David at his best, his happiest, and the tapes served as a reminder of who it was we had lost. Seeing Bingle work with him, it was clear that they communicated superbly, that he made the best of the dog’s intelligence and abilities.

Since David’s death, I thought, Bingle must have believed himself to be in the company of dullards.

At one point, Ben paused the tape. I heard him choke back a sob.

“Do you want to wait and watch these when you’re feeling better?” I asked.

He shook his head. “There’s no feeling better about David’s death; only getting used to it.”

He hit the play button again. He was watching a tape made in the summer. At the end of it, there was some footage of a hilarious swimming party that had included the dogs. I was laughing with Ben at Bingle’s antics in the pool when I saw something that made me draw in a sharp breath.

Ben heard it and paused the tape again. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry — I didn’t know.”

He looked at the screen, and saw what had startled me. “His back, you mean? The scars?”

“Yes.”

“The worst were from a radiator.”

“An accident?” I asked hopefully, knowing it wasn’t so.

“No. David was abused.”

I couldn’t speak.

“He must have been very comfortable with the people in this group,” Ben went on. “He didn’t usually take his shirt off around others, and unless he came across someone else who was abused, he certainly didn’t speak of his childhood.” He paused. “Please don’t mention this to anyone else.”

I promised I wouldn’t. “I begin to understand why he didn’t think Parrish’s childhood excused him.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “We used to argue about that. David was an obvious example of the fact that not all abused children go on to become twisted souls, that many overcome the horrors of their childhood. But I used to tell him that not everyone was made up of the same stuff he was, not everyone was as strong. Not everyone could overcome what he did.”

I thought of Nicholas Parrish. “Perhaps there are a few who don’t want to overcome it.”

“Maybe.”

He hit the play button again, and went back to watching David.

35

TUESDAY, EARLY AFTERNOON, MAY 30

Las Piernas

The Moth stood still, watching, listening.

The door at the back of the garage was well concealed. There was a high fence, and a row of trees to shade the dog runs. The dog runs were empty, but clean.

A neighbor’s dog was barking, but no one seemed to pay any attention to it. On a weekday, at this time of day, most of the residents were at work, and their children in school.

There was an old woman across the street who might have chanced to look out her window at the dead man’s home, but if she had, she would be hard put to describe the person she had seen going into the backyard. A repairman, she probably would have guessed, judging by the large toolbox (mostly empty), the dark coveralls and boots, the leather work gloves, the billed cap pulled low over the Moth’s face. She might have noticed a limp.

The Moth stooped to open the toolbox, then paused for a moment to handle a set of trophies there — drain plugs.

Not everyone would have thought of these fuel-coated bits of metal as treasures, and Nicky would probably be angry to know the Moth kept them. But Nicky wasn’t here, was he?

In their intended place, these little darlings belonged beneath helicopters. By taking them, the Moth had ensured that the Forest Service Helitack units nearest to the meadow stayed on the ground.

The newspaper had even included a separate article about the cleverness of the ploy — an article the Moth had read every morning, almost as if it were a morning prayer — it was not a prayer, of course, but a wonderful tribute, even if Nicky had been given the credit.

Nicky had taught the Moth this method of disabling a helicopter, after all, and other methods as well. Still, the Moth had made choices. The Moth had succeeded.

The Moth was proud of this accomplishment not only because it had worked perfectly, but also because it was really a very considerate sort of sabotage, which gave it a subtlety the Moth liked. The removal of a drain plug could keep a helicopter on the ground without destroying it.

The renewed barking of the neighbor’s dog reminded the Moth of the business at hand. The drain plugs were returned to the toolbox. The Moth removed a pry bar and, within seconds, entered the garage.

The Moth propped the toolbox against the door from the inside, to hold it closed, then flipped the light switch and listened to the soft “chink-chink-chink” and then hum of the chain of fluorescent lights overhead.

The garage was clean and orderly. A group of cardboard boxes was stacked along one wall, labeled with the names of rooms — KITCHEN, BEDROOM, BATHROOM, GARAGE and — the largest number of boxes, STUDY. Curious, the Moth inspected them more closely. The top of each box had a small address label on it, of the type that is sometimes mailed with a request for a donation. These had American flags on them. There were two names on the labels: Ben Sheridan and Camille Graham. The address wasn’t this one.

Ben Sheridan. The Moth knew that Nicky was angry about Ben Sheridan. He thought he had killed Ben Sheridan, but he had only wounded him.

Only wounded for now, thought the Moth. Sooner or later he would have to leave that hospital. And poor Nicky, who couldn’t go to a hospital! The Moth had wanted to comfort him, but wisely refrained. Nicky had been too angry to accept any coddling. Actually, the Moth thought, you really couldn’t coddle Nicky. He didn’t need anyone. Not even his Moth.

Frowning, the Moth picked at the address label on one of the boxes marked STUDY. It came off easily. The Moth carefully pocketed it. Using a utility knife to cut the tape which sealed it, the Moth opened the box and studied its contents. Books. Not even the books the Moth had hoped for — ones about forensic anthropology, which might have photos of dead bodies in them — but stupid, stupid books, by Jane Austen and James Baldwin and Charles Dickens and Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor. Poetry by Auden, Dickinson, Eliot, Housman, Hughes, Neruda, Poe.

Tired old books that any kid in high school might be made to read! Why, any public library had these books in it — why buy them? And what did any of them really have to say about life in these times? Nothing! Had the writers ever met the likes of Nicky and the Moth? No, never!

Disgusted, the Moth folded the box closed and proceeded into the house.

The door between the house and the garage was not locked. The Moth stepped into the kitchen, then stood motionless.

Someone had already been here. The Moth could tell that the house had been opened, aired out. The Moth drew in a deep breath, tried to allow the scent of the house to tell the story, as Nicky might have done.

There was still the smell of dogs. If you allowed dogs to live indoors, even house-trained dogs, there would be their doggy scent. Trying not to allow that to interfere, the Moth continued through the house. In the kitchen there was the scent of cleaning products — chlorine and something with lemon in it. The Moth opened the refrigerator. The shelves were pristine; there was no milk or meat or any other thing that might rot. There were only a few jars and an open yellow box of baking soda.

The trash had been taken out; there was a new white plastic bag in the kitchen trash can — the only object in it was a crumpled paper towel, smelling of window cleaner.

As the Moth walked slowly through the house, it became clear that someone had been here in the time since the owner died. Who? Did the dead man have a maid? No — no, he only taught at the college. He had no money to hire someone to clean his house.

The Moth knew this, and all sorts of other things about the dead man, things most people didn’t know. The dead man’s mother had died when he was two; his alcoholic father had abused him terribly throughout his childhood — if there had been larger pieces of him left behind in the Meadow, investigators might have seen the scars.

The dead man’s father had always marked him in places that could be covered by his clothes. These facts might have shocked another person, but they had quite a different effect on the Moth. The Moth knew all about hidden scars.

Like many abused children, David Niles was a good student, a child who tried to please. His father died when he was a teenager. He had been sent to live with his mother’s sister, an old maid who raised dogs in New Mexico. He loved dogs. He loved his aunt. She put him through college, where he met Ben Sheridan, who was a year or two ahead of him.

The Moth knew that it was Ben Sheridan’s enthusiasm for physical anthropology that led David Niles to change his major. Niles’s graduate studies were interrupted when he took care of his aunt before her death. She had already found homes for her dogs when she became too ill to care for them. No one would take care of her except her nephew. After her death, he went back and finished his doctorate, then — with Ben Sheridan’s help — obtained a part-time teaching position at Las Piernas College. Just before he died, he had been promoted to a full-time position.

The Moth also knew that David Niles — no, the Moth decided, call him the dead man — had inherited a little money from his aunt, and had used that to buy this house, build the dog runs, and cover the expenses of buying, training, outfitting, feeding, and otherwise caring for two large search dogs.

The Moth knew a great deal about every member of the group that went up to the mountains with Nicky, but knew more about this dead man than the others. This one had been the Moth’s special project, which was how it came about that this search of the dead man’s home was necessary.

In the living room, the Moth detected an odor of lemon furniture polish and, in the carpet, the scent of the dogs.

Not nearly as well as Nicky would have done. Nicky could distinguish scent better than any human alive. The Moth firmly believed this to be true.

Nicky would have been angry to know that the Moth had overlooked one small, small detail. But the Moth was about to take care of it, and Nicky need never know.

The Moth thought about the drain plugs in the toolbox and wondered why keeping secrets from Nicky was so exciting.

Before long, though, the Moth was feeling not excitement, but panic. What the Moth sought should have been in the living room, but it wasn’t. And suddenly, what seemed like a very small detail loomed very large.

Why, of all things, should this be missing?

Did the police know? Had they already made the connection?

There was a knock at the door. The Moth froze, then moved as quietly as possible to one of the bedrooms, and hid in the closet. Would the Moth have to kill the person at the door? Nicky would be furious — the Moth wasn’t here at Nicky’s bidding. Nicky would have planned for this, would have foreseen this! What if the person at the door went around to the garage and found the toolbox?

Long moments passed, in which the Moth thought of the toolbox and the drain plugs, and felt sick, absolutely sick.

The doorbell rang.

The Moth curled up into a little ball.

There was a long silence, then the Moth found the courage to stand up and leave the closet.

The Moth made a quick search of the two bedrooms and of the bathroom, as silly a place as it would be to hide what the Moth wanted.

The neighbor’s dog began barking again. Losing any remaining courage, the Moth left the house, picked up the toolbox in the garage, and hurried away from the dead man’s house.

Driving away, the Moth didn’t take time to look at the old woman’s house, to see if she was spying at her window. The Moth’s thoughts were consumed by a single idea, a notion that was becoming something of a Moth mantra:

Don’t tell Nicky!

Don’t tell Nicky!

Don’t tell Nicky!

36

WEDNESDAY MORNING, MAY 31

Las Piernas

Ellen Raice called me at work to tell me that someone had broken into Ben’s office by prying off a basement window latch.

“Was anything taken?”

“Not that I can see. If I hadn’t tried to lock the window, I might not have even noticed that someone had been in here. But when I saw that, I looked around, and I could see that things had been moved, you know, looked through. Especially on some of the shelves, and in the desk drawers.”

“Campus police know about this?”

“Yes. But I don’t believe the officer understands the implication.”

“That this is connected with Nicholas Parrish.”

“I knew you’d understand! Will you talk to your husband about it?”

I called Frank. A detective and a crime lab technician were sent out to the college, and a patrol car to David’s house — there had been a break-in there, too. At the house, it was apparent that someone had jimmied the back door of the garage. I let Ben know what was going on, and told him I would go to the house to see if I noticed anything missing.

Frank met me there. It was the sort of case that might have otherwise merited a patrol car — if that — but because Nick Parrish might be connected to the break-in, the mobile crime lab was already at work when I arrived.

“Any fingerprints?” I asked Frank.

“No, but they’re hoping they’ve picked up some tool marks on the door here and the latch of the window at the campus.”

“Not likely that Ben would suffer a break-in at both the office and at home on the same day, is it?”

“No, especially unlikely that he’d have two break-ins and nothing stolen from either place. There were valuables here and in the office that weren’t touched.”

“What could Ben have that Parrish wants?”

“We don’t know that this was Parrish.”

I stared at him.

“Yes, I’m with you — but we have to stay open to other possibilities,” he said. “You mentioned this ex-girlfriend of his.”

“Camille. And don’t even pretend you’ve forgotten her name.”

He laughed. “Okay, Camille. There was some rancor between them, right?”

“Some,” I admitted. “But I have a hard time picturing this woman in her silk power suit breaking in through a basement window.”

“Just the same, I think I’ll call Ben and ask for the name of the place where she works. I’d like to have a talk with her.”

“I’ll bet you would.”

The detective handling the case approached us just then. “Neighbor across the street says she saw a repairman of some sort over here earlier. Either of you know if Dr. Sheridan had arranged for any repairs?”

“No,” I said. “He hasn’t.”

“The neighbor said the repairman came directly into the backyard. She knows Dr. Sheridan is in the hospital, so she got suspicious and came over and knocked and rang the bell. There wasn’t any answer.”

“What time was that?” Frank asked.

“Early afternoon. She was watching a soap opera that comes on at one o’clock. She came over on a commercial break, so she didn’t stay around too long.”

“Any description of this repairman?”

“Not much of one, unless you call ‘a white guy wearing a cap’ a description. She has no idea regarding height or weight — changed her mind about three times on that one.” He paused, then said, “At first, before she figured out that he would have used the front door, she thought Sheridan might be home from the hospital. She said this repairman limped.”

Frank raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah,” the detective said. “Exactly what I was thinking. Flights from San Francisco on the hour.”

“Who’s in San Francisco?” I asked.

“Phil Newly — north of there, really, but not too far from the city. He’s visiting his sister.”

“Lady across the street said she thought it looked like a fake limp, but then, she can’t remember which leg the guy was limping on.”

“There’s someone else we may want to talk to,” Frank told him.

“It’s not Camille,” Ben insisted. “Impossible. She’d never do anything like that. Besides, I have nothing she’d want.”

“Just the same, I’d like to follow up on this,” Frank said.

Ben grudgingly gave him Camille’s work and home addresses. “If, for some unimaginable reason, she did this, I’m not pressing charges.”

“You parted amicably?” Frank asked.

After a long silence, Ben said, “No.”

“Thanks for being honest about it,” Frank said. “As you say, it probably wasn’t her.”

Frank called me at the paper to tell me that Camille Graham hadn’t been into work that day. “In fact,” he said, “she’s quit working there. We caught up with her at home, where she claims she’s been holed up for the last few days with a summer cold. She did seem to be a little congested.”

“You saw her?”

“Yes,” he said, amused. “She’s a looker, but I prefer brunettes.”

“Even though classes are over for the term, can you imagine a woman who looks like Camille crossing a campus undetected? Don’t young frat boys have radar for such women?”

“Why, Irene! I think that might have been a sexist remark,” he said.

“You know what I’m trying to say, Susan B. Anthony.”

“Anything is possible — of anyone. That’s all I’m asking you to keep in mind.”

We were getting nearer the day when Ben would be released from the hospital, and he was still claiming that he didn’t want to impose on us, but he wasn’t protesting quite so much. He was having problems with both phantom limb sensation and phantom limb pain, and was feeling discouraged.

Dr. Riley had warned him that both were common phenomena, especially in the period of time just after surgery.

The phantom limb sensation made Ben “feel” the missing lower portion of his left leg, including his left ankle, foot, and toes, as if they were still there. One morning, half asleep, absolutely convinced that his left foot was still there, he fell trying to get out of bed. Although he bruised his hip and shoulder, fortunately, he didn’t do further damage to his leg. On another occasion, his left toes itched maddeningly. I even tried scratching the prosthetic foot to relieve it — to no avail. He had to live with the itch for three torturous hours before the sensation went away on its own.

This “presence” of the missing limb was a weird sensation, Ben said, but not necessarily bad. Phantom limb pain was another matter. Not long after surgery, Ben’s left foot and ankle cramped. Because they weren’t there, though, he couldn’t figure out what the hell to do to relieve it.

Sometimes, one of the nurses came in and massaged his “residual limb,” as they referred to what remained of his lower left leg. It was very sensitive to touch, and still swollen from the surgery, but the massage seemed to help.

He told me that he felt phantom pain more often late at night, when he was alone, and in specific regions of the missing limb — sometimes it came as a sharp, stabbing pain in his calf, other times he felt as if he had been given an electric shock through his heel. Occasionally, only strong, painkilling drugs would bring relief — which, he told me, made him wonder if he was doomed to become a morphine addict.

Those were his worst days at the hospital. On the whole, though, he seemed to have a determined outlook.

“I want to be able to manage on my own,” he said, whenever the subject of staying with us arose.

“We want the same thing,” I said. “You aren’t invited to move in forever. I don’t even know if you should still be there after six months.”

He laughed.

“We’ll stand by you either way. You know that?”

“Yes,” he said.

“The difference is, this way you don’t have to clean up the house before we come over.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

It was the day we got the news about Oregon that he made up his mind to stay with us — not because of his own fear of Nicholas Parrish, he told me, but because of mine.

37

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, JUNE 1

Eastern Oregon

The receptionist, Parrish decided, would have to go.

Whenever she thought he wasn’t looking, she stared at him.

Idiot. He was always looking.

She was afraid of him, he knew. He had lost his temper with her once, the first time he was here. She had been living strictly on his sufferance ever since.

A nurse opened a door and smiled at him. “Mr. Kent?”

Fat cow. What the hell was there to smile about? Maybe she’d go, too. Maybe there wouldn’t be a woman alive in the state of Oregon by the time he left it. Entirely possible, he thought. He was smiling by the time the woman was taking his blood pressure.

She finally left him alone to wait for the sorry excuse of a doctor to get around to seeing him. Doddering old fart probably wouldn’t have made it in a big city, Parrish thought. He passed the time waiting for the fool to appear by fantasizing a story about the physician’s past, one in which he had performed back-alley abortions, lost his license, and run away to this little burg — where no one knew enough to question his phony diplomas and licenses. Parrish convinced himself so thoroughly, he was carefully studying the engraved parchment on the wall when the doctor walked in.

“Ancient, but real, just like me,” the doctor said. “Let’s have a look at that shoulder, Mr. Kent.”

Oh, let’s.

“It seems to be healing nicely now,” the doctor said. “Scar tissue can’t be helped, but you were lucky not to face worse. Well, I won’t lecture you about ignoring puncture wounds — you’ve heard it all from me before.”

Yes, indeed he had. He studied the doctor, considered adding him to his list — but suddenly the old man was regarding him with an unwavering stare. Parrish looked away and said, “In the future, I won’t delay getting treatment.”

Screw the old bastard, he thought, glancing up at him surreptitiously. God was going to call the stupid quack’s number any day now, anyway. No use wasting the effort on him.

He wondered, briefly, if any of them had recognized him. But although only two weeks had passed, he was no longer the hot topic of news. He would be on the front page again, of course, but for now he looked nothing like the photographs, which no one would have seen for over a week now. He had dyed his hair blond and was wearing tinted contact lenses. Probably not even necessary in this little backwater.

That night, as he worked, he thought of Irene Kelly, who had made his shoulder stiff and sore. He did not like scars. He did not like pain. He chuckled a little at this thought. Not my own, he added silently, and pleased to find his sense of humor returning, went back to the matter at hand.

The next morning, he drove slowly past the clinic, smiling as he saw close to a dozen people waiting outside its door, their expressions varying from anger to puzzlement. One of them, hands cupped and pressed to the glass, was trying to see in.

“Some-bod-y’s laaa-te to worr-rrk!” Parrish sang, a little child’s taunting song. “The patients grow impatient!”

He found this remark such a heartening indicator that his true, clever self was making a comeback that he laughed all the way to the highway, ignoring — whenever he braked or took a curve — the occasional thump in the trunk made by shifting dead weight.

38

MONDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 11

Las Piernas

I looked out the window of Jo Robinson’s second-story office, idly wondering what other troubled souls might have shared this view, watching the rain plaster red and gold leaves to the black asphalt of the parking lot below. Autumn. I had almost managed to hold out until autumn.

“So Ben spent the summer with you and Frank,” she prompted. I had been trying to tell her what had happened since the last time I had seen her, outside Ben’s hospital room.

“Yes,” I answered her, still watching the rain. If it hadn’t ever rained again, I thought, I might have been all right.

What a lie.

“Ben and Bingle have moved back to David’s house. He’s doing fine there. Bingle, too.”

“And you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“ ‘To know, love, and serve God so that I may be happy in the next life,’ ” I replied.

She waited.

I glanced back at her. “Sorry — knee-jerk Baltimore Catechism response to that question. But you know why I’m here.”

“You tell me.”

“I’m here because I broke something at work.”

“Really? I’d think a hardware store could be of more use to you, then.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“Tell me what happened.”

So I told her how, coming into work one day, I had been told to report to Winston Wrigley III’s “God office,” which is how the staff refers to the glass enclosure near the newsroom. Wrigley deigns to visit the God office when he wants to view his minions in action, or, more accurately, to spy on whatever young, new female employee he has added to the roster.

There hadn’t been any new additions lately — sexual harassment laws were severely cramping WWIII’s style — so his current visit had the rumor-fueled newsroom aflame with gossip. These flames were fanned by the fact that he had two elegantly dressed couples with him, who joined him around the conference table at one end of the room. Before John Walters summoned me, I had heard that the paper was being sold to a big chain, that there were going to be layoffs, and that John was going to be fired for letting Morry mouth off to Wrigley before Morry left for Buffalo.

I didn’t have a chance to hear any of the rumors that circulated after I got called in, but later Lydia told me that one of the best was that I was going to be asked to replace John after he was fired for letting Morry vent.

As I approached the God office, I was already tired and tense; I hadn’t slept well lately, and the previous three nights, hardly at all.

Until three days earlier, the Oregon killings had provided the last solid leads on Nick Parrish’s whereabouts. In June, the discovery of the bodies — one a legless torso — of two clinic workers had launched Parrish back into the headlines. The search for him intensified, but the rest of the summer had passed without any sign of him. I began to hope that he had been hit by a car.

But three days before I was summoned into Wrigley’s glass domain, the LPPD had received a report that Nick Parrish had been sighted not far from Las Piernas.

Despite the fact that these sightings of Parrish were usually unfounded, the police checked out all leads. But this call led to the discovery of a woman’s body in a trash container.

I’ve since wondered how things might have gone if Frank had been the one to give me the news. But on the day she was found, Frank was in court, giving testimony on another case. So I learned about Parrish’s newest victim at work, on a day when there wasn’t any way to contact my husband.

By the time Mark Baker arrived in the newsroom to file the story, there was already a buzz among the other reporters about it. I had already heard that Parrish had left another body somewhere. That news alone made me feel as if someone were sandpapering the ends of my nerves.

Mark had been in to talk to John, and John beckoned me in to join them. Looking grim, John said, “You should probably know about this before the others start asking you about it.”

“Asking me about it?”

So Mark gave me the details. “This Jane Doe’s fingers and toes were severed and missing. She was a blue-eyed brunette. Her name is not yet known, but your name was carved into her chest.”

I felt my stomach lurch; I quickly excused myself, ran into the bathroom, and got sick.

I washed up, then, looking into the mirror with a measure of detachment, studied my tense, too thin face and the dark circles under my eyes. Detachment was becoming one of my favorite emotional states. It was constantly being disturbed, though — this time, when the door opened, causing me to jump.

It was Lydia. She asked if I was all right.

“No,” I said.

“Maybe it isn’t him,” Lydia said. “It could be a copycat.”

“What a relief that would be,” I replied, and later wondered how much more of my sarcasm she could take.

“This happened three days before you were asked to see Mr. Wrigley?” Jo Robinson asked.

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

I turned back to the window.

When I entered the God office, Wrigley was smiling and holding an unlit cigar. (California’s anti-smoking laws were second only to sexual harassment suits in making his life miserable.) I grew more wary; Wrigley’s halo is always perched on his horns. He introduced the two couples with him as friends of the family who were visiting the area, who had stopped by the office today especially to meet me.

“To meet me?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re the one who escaped from Nick Parrish, right?” one of the men asked.

I looked at Wrigley. He’s known me for many years, which is why he stopped smiling. His guests didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh! It must have been so horrible!” one woman said, but she made the word “horrible” sound a lot like the word “thrilling.”

“What is he really like?” she went on. “They say he’s probably killed more women than Ted Bundy did. They say he’s just as handsome as Bundy.”

“He’s not handsome,” I managed to say. “Excuse me, I have to get back to work.”

“Not especially handsome,” the other woman corrected, “but charming. They say that’s how he lures women.”

“Don’t run off,” one of the men said, seeing me edge toward the door. “After all, you’re here with the boss, right, Win?”

Win? I had never heard anyone call him that before.

“Right,” Wrigley said. “Irene wasn’t taken in by his charms,” he added, trying to recover. “She’s a professional, through and through. Why, she nearly killed him!”

This elicited gasps from the female members of his audience.

“And she was the only one up there who had the sense not to get herself killed or wounded!” he said, warming to his subject. “She saved the life of this one idiot who ran into the field after the shooting started — can you imagine anyone doing anything so stupid?”

“Mr. Wrigley—” I began angrily, but he must not have heard me over the combination of exclamations of disbelief and laughter.

“He’s crippled now, but really, it’s his own damned fault. Irene has been taking care of him. In fact—”

“Yo, Win!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.

All laughter and conversation ceased.

“Yo, Win,” I said quietly. “Go fuck yourself.”

I walked out. But as I did, I heard them start to laugh again — nervously, at first, and then one of the men made some crack I couldn’t hear, and they all laughed loudly.

“What happened then?” Jo Robinson prompted.

But I was frozen, watching a man walk across the parking lot.

It’s him.

Panic replaced the blood in my veins, pumped through me, tensed every muscle in my body.

He’s found out that I’m here alone. When I leave here, he’ll . . .

In the next moment, I saw it wasn’t him.

Just like every other time, it wasn’t him.

“Irene?” Jo Robinson’s voice, breaking through to me. Had she noticed?

“I was near Stuart Angert’s desk,” I said, forcing my mind back to the events of that day. “I seemed to go into this — this altered state. I heard this rushing in my ears, and then, after that, nothing. It was almost like being underwater, without the water — no sound, not even the sound of my own thoughts. I didn’t see anyone, feel anything.

“But I saw Stuart’s computer monitor, and I pulled the connections out of the back of it. Lydia tells me Stuart asked me what I was doing, but I didn’t hear, didn’t notice him. I pulled it off his desk with both hands — it’s a big monitor, but I didn’t notice its weight, either. I hurled it through one of the glass windows of the God office. I heard the glass breaking — that was the first thing I heard.”

“And after that?”

“They stopped laughing.”

She waited, and when I turned back to the window, she said, “Do you remember what happened after they stopped laughing?”

“I was forced to take a leave of absence and told I couldn’t come back until I had sought counseling.”

“I meant, immediately after you broke the glass panel.”

I frowned, then said, “Not really. There was a lot of shouting and — I’m embarrassed to admit this, because I should have been making a speech or something at that point, you know, a grand exit — but instead, I sort of fainted.”

“Sort of fainted?”

I came back to one of the chairs near her, and sat down in it. I looked down at my hands, clasped in front of me. “I didn’t really pass out, but all of a sudden I couldn’t stand up, and the next thing I knew, Stuart and — I don’t really remember, but a lot of people were around me, shielding me from Wrigley and his friends, or so it seemed to me, and Wrigley and one of the women were yelling and John was yelling back and Lydia and Mark and Stuart — Stuart, of all people! He never yells at anyone. Stuart was yelling. And the woman was saying, ‘I want her fired!’ as if she were anybody at the paper. It was close to a damned riot.”

She poured me a glass of water.

“Thanks,” I said, accepting it. “I still can’t . . .”

“Can’t what?”

“I often feel thirsty,” I muttered, and drank before she could ask anything more.

“Pretty crazy, huh?” I said. She refilled the water for me.

“Being thirsty?”

“No, you know, smashing things at work. Launching expensive electronic equipment through glass walls in rooms where people are seated.”

“Do you think you’re crazy?”

“No — yes — I don’t know.”

“A, B, C, or all of the above?” she asked.

“I feel,” I said, my voice shaking, “out of control. It scares me.”

She waited a moment before asking, “Aside from this incident at work, what’s making you conclude that you’re out of control?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s that . . . I can’t concentrate. I don’t sleep much. Maybe that’s what causes the lack of concentration.”

“Did you have trouble concentrating before you went to the mountains?”

“Not really.”

“Trouble sleeping?”

I hesitated. “Sometimes. Not often.”

She waited.

“When I’m under a lot of stress, I sometimes have nightmares.” In a few words, I told her about my time of being held captive in a small, dark room in a cabin, of the fear and injuries I suffered there, of the occasional bouts with nightmares and claustrophobia I have suffered since. Only a few people know the details of that time. I don’t usually talk about it very freely, but I found myself thinking that maybe if I could interest her in that, she would not ask about more recent events.

She asked a few questions about my life in general. Again, I considered this safer ground, and was fairly relaxed, even when describing situations that had been traumatic at the time they occurred.

“You’ve been through a lot lately,” she said.

I shrugged. “Other people have been through worse.”

“But you survived. All of that, and what happened in May in the—”

“I don’t want to talk about the mountains,” I said quickly. “I’m tired of talking about what happened there.”

“Okay,” she said. “I won’t ask you to talk about those events just now.”

I felt a vast sense of relief.

“In the time since you’ve been back in Las Piernas, and except for Ben, have you spoken to any of the other people who were in the group?”

“I thought you weren’t going to ask—”

“Since you’ve been back,” she said calmly.

“They died,” I said, unable to keep the edginess out of my voice. “All except Ben and Bingle.”

“Everyone?”

“Yes. Unless you mean — the original group that hiked in?”

“That’s who I mean.”

“J.C. came by to see Ben several times. And so did Andy.”

“To see Ben,” she repeated. “Did you talk to them?”

I lifted a shoulder. “They were there to cheer him up.”

“So. . . ?”

“So I didn’t talk to them.”

After a moment, she said, “There were two others, weren’t there?”

I thought, then said, “There was a cop, Houghton. He was Thompson’s assistant, you might say. Frank told me he resigned on May nineteenth.”

“The day you returned from the mountains. When everyone learned what had happened there.”

“Yes. Maybe he felt bad about not being there. But it wasn’t his fault.”

“Maybe. Or he might have felt lucky,” she said. “Sometimes, in battle, for example, a soldier will see the man next to him die, and feel lucky that it wasn’t him. But even though that’s a natural reaction, later, he might feel bad about having felt it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Let’s see,” she said, “there was one more, person up there, right? The lawyer.”

“You mean, Phil Newly?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Disappeared for a while.”

“Why do you think he disappeared?” she asked.

“He said his sister was taking care of him while he recovered from his injuries. Parrish broke Phil’s foot.”

“So, there are four other people who went up into the mountains with you, but you haven’t talked to any of them since then?”

“Right.” I thought for a moment and said, “You think they might be having a hard time, too?”

“Do you?”

I hesitated only slightly before saying, “Yes.”

“How could you find out?”

“Talk to them.”

“Let’s make that your first homework assignment.”

“Homework!”

“Did you think therapy was going to be easy?” She laughed.

“No,” I answered honestly.

“Just those four people. A phone call, a visit — just contact them. Okay? Now, let’s talk about sleep and nutrition . . .”

39

MONDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 11

Las Piernas

Parrish was humming to himself as he worked. Being in a garage workshop was not quite as wonderful as having his own hangar to himself. The neighbors were a little closer, more caution was required.

But it was just so darned great to have his hands on some real tools again! He revved up the circular saw and listened to the high-pitched sound of the motor, smiled at how little resistance it met until it got to the bone.

He wondered if Ben Sheridan had been in the hands of so fine a surgeon — he doubted it was possible — and began to sing “Dem Bones.” There was a little burning smell as the saw did its work. He took a deep breath, and sang another chorus. When the saw zinged to a finish, he was at one of the “connected to” phrases. He stopped singing and smiled.

“Not anymore!” he said aloud, and had to put the saw down until he could stop laughing.

He methodically continued his work, but was disturbed to note that he was subject to a certain degree of distraction. He kept thinking about Ben Sheridan.

Ben Sheridan had tricked him!

No, no, such a thing wasn’t really possible. A trick implied cunning, and Sheridan had been acting in a ridiculously sentimental fashion when he charged into that meadow.

By pure luck, the man had escaped being killed by the bullet — little higher, Parrish thought, touching the bone he was working on — a shot in the femur, through the femoral artery and — glub, glub, glub — in no time at all, the man would have bled to death. Actually, he thought, if he had hit an artery, maybe it would have sprayed blood all over the place. The image was exciting to him, and he stayed with it for a moment, savoring it, pleasantly surprised by it.

He was constantly evolving, he knew, into a more perfect, higher being. He must embrace these changes in himself.

After all, Sheridan was on his mind almost as much as Irene. He had even thought of using the knife on him! His knife, which had never been used on male flesh.

Except for one of his early kills — the childhood bully Merrick had caused him to remember — he didn’t bother much with killing males. They were obstacles: accidental witnesses and the like. For men, he used guns. He shot them, got it over with. But maybe he was missing out on something.

He smiled, doing a little detail work around the knee joint of bone, thinking of the pain Ben Sheridan must have suffered. Did he scream, he wondered? Did he cry? Perhaps he would cause Ben Sheridan to weep, and lick the tears from his face.

He felt an impulse to even the man out, to take part of the other leg. Sheridan was so asymmetrical now. It was displeasing to him to see such a thing; it disturbed his sense of orderliness.

“I’m a sawbones, after all!” he said aloud, and snorted with laughter.

He made plans. She was a tricky one, this Irene. She was no longer working. Did his little engraved announcement — oh, that was a good one! — of his arrival in town frighten her away? Had she quit or had she been fired?

When he had called to see if she had received his other little message to her, he was transferred to her voice mail. But a recording said the voice mailbox was full, and the imbecile at the switchboard claimed she didn’t know when Ms. Kelly would be in. He considered and rejected killing the switchboard operator. He hardly had time to kill every ignorant nobody on this earth, now did he?

He must concentrate on more important matters. He went back to making plans for Irene Kelly.

But while making these plans produced rather lovely sensations, thinking of her brought him to an entirely different state, made him taut with desire. He was a patient man, but he knew that he would not deny himself much longer.

He finished working on the bone, and laid it gently aside. The bone scent was so stimulating!

He must bring himself under control — there was a great deal of work to be done.

He bent to pick up the other leg, and put it on the workbench. As he did so, he said in a little puppet voice, “Hey, pal, thanks for the leg up,” and enjoyed a good bit of amusement over that. Unable to resist another moment of fun, he held it as if it were a rattle and said, “Shake a leg!”

He recovered his composure and went back to work, fastening the leg between two vises.

For short while, he distracted himself with thoughts of the Moth. The Moth was hiding something from him. Did the little fool think he didn’t see that? He was beginning to tire of the Moth. One or two more tasks to fulfill.

He turned the saw on again. This workshop wasn’t nearly as large as the one he would be moving into. Neither one was as big as his hangar, but he supposed it would be quite some time before he would be able to work on airplanes again.

The sacrifices he was willing to make were phenomenal.

He thought of all of the unworthy hands that were now disturbing the remains from the meadows. That this defilement should be the price of his fame angered him.

And close to anger was passion.

The little bone-burning smell came to him.

He was almost there . . . almost, almost there.

Simply volatile.

40

TUESDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 12

Las Piernas

Standing outside Phil Newly’s door, I seriously considered bailing on my assignment from Jo Robinson.

Some perverse impulse made me decide to tackle the toughest visit first. I had already had some contact with Andy and J.C., but I had avoided Phil Newly. I hadn’t had much contact with Houghton before he left the group, and because he no longer worked for the LPPD, it was going to take me a while to track him down. But I didn’t have any ambivalent feelings about Houghton. My feelings about Newly were mixed.

He had been associated with Parrish, in a role that made him Parrish’s champion. At the same time, Phil had made it clear that he didn’t like Parrish personally. After all, Parrish had attacked him.

Although I wasn’t proud of myself for thinking it, it had crossed my mind more than once that Phil Newly was fortunate to have his foot broken; a painful injury, but unlike Ben, he still had two feet. Because of that broken foot, he hadn’t faced the same terrors; he had escaped before the worst of the journey began. He hadn’t even seen the coyote tree. Afterward, he had cleverly dodged all efforts of the media to interview him; once it was clear to everyone that he had not been present at the excavation of either of the graves, there was little interest in him.

The police didn’t seem to suspect him in the break-ins at David’s house and Ben’s office. They said his alibi had checked out. Still, while his sister backed up his claim that he had never left her San Francisco home during the day of the break-ins, a devoted sister might say anything to protect her brother.

But I couldn’t think of anything he might have wanted at the house or university, let alone any reason for him to risk a lucrative law career to become a burglar. In fact, although I didn’t know Phil well, I had never had any reason to believe he was dishonest.

I also felt grateful to him — Frank had told me about the ways in which Phil cooperated with him while I was in the mountains; he contended that without Phil’s help, it would have taken him much longer to find me.

My mixed feelings stayed mixed.

I rang the doorbell.

I could hear someone approaching on the other side of the door, then there was silence.

I had called his office; I reached a recording that said the offices were closed and that he was not accepting any new clients. A little checking around led to the discovery that he had referred all of his current cases to other lawyers, and had told those attorneys that he was retiring from the practice of law.

It was already old news that a judge, considering the injury done to Newly by his client, had released him from the burden of defending Nick Parrish; a new attorney would be assigned if and when Mr. Parrish was ever back in custody. But no one had expected that Newly would end his lucrative law practice so suddenly and completely.

I didn’t have Newly’s home phone number, but Frank had dropped him off at this address.

Just as I was wondering if I’d get credit from Jo Robinson if Phil refused to see me, he opened the door.

“Irene,” he said, “what a pleasant surprise.”

It must have been etiquette lessons instilled from childhood that made him use the word “pleasant.” He looked distinctly unhappy to see me. He peered nervously out at the street, and beckoned me in. I found myself almost reluctant to cross his threshold, but stepped inside.

Perhaps he noticed my reticence, because he put a determined smile on his face and said, “Come in, come in. I’ve thought so often of you. Is that your van out front? Frank picked me up at the hospital in a Volvo. And you used to drive — don’t tell me, now — yes! A Karmann Ghia.”

“Right, but the Karmann Ghia is no more,” I said. “The van belongs to my cousin. He’s letting me borrow it while he’s out of town. I’m still in the process of shopping for a car of my own.”

As soon as I said it, I realized that I had lied. I should have been looking for another car, but like a number of other things in my life, car shopping had been put off for another time.

Newly’s house was spacious. If I had lived alone in it, as he did, I might have felt a little overwhelmed by its size. But as we ventured farther into it, I began to have the impression that he didn’t spend much time in most of the rooms. There were no footprints on most of the carefully vacuumed carpets.

He took me to what was obviously his favorite room; a combination den and library. A few bookshelves stood along the walls, as did a stereo and a big-screen television. Across from the TV, two overstuffed chairs were positioned near a low table. Most of the books in the room were paperbacks, although one section held a lot of hardcover books. Popular fiction, for the most part. Not a weighty law tome in sight.

“Have a seat,” he said, indicating one of the big chairs. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Thanks. A glass of water would be great,” I said.

“Water? Nothing stronger?”

It was two in the afternoon, but it could have been last call, and I would have answered as I did. “Just water, thanks.”

He left the room to get it, and I began to look at the objects on the low table. They included his GPS receiver, a fancy mechanical pencil, a ruler, some loose papers on which some numbers had been scribbled, a handheld calculator, and beneath several small piles of books, a topo map.

When I realized what type of map it was, I looked away from it, then, angry with myself, forced myself to pick up one of the stacks of books and read the map’s legend.

Southern Sierra. The section where we had looked for Julia Sayre’s grave.

I heard Phil returning, and set the books back down. It was then that I noticed the title of the hardcover on the bottom of the stack: Mindhunter, by John Douglas. I had heard of this book, a nonfiction work about serial killers, written by an FBI criminal profiler. There were other books in the stack by Douglas and several by Robert Ressler, another pioneering FBI profiler — if I remembered correctly, Ressler was said to have coined the term “serial killer.”

I only had time to glance at the titles of the other books stacked on the table, but that was enough to see that they all had two things in common: they were true-crime stories, and their subject was serial killers.

“I find myself caught up in a strange fascination these days,” Phil said, handing me a tall tumbler of ice water, then twisting open a bottle of beer as he sat in the other chair.

“Oh?”

“You’re a reporter, Irene,” he chided. “If you haven’t taken a look at everything on this table, I’ll be disappointed in you.”

“Not a really good look,” I said. “And technically speaking, I’m not sure I’m a reporter at the moment.”

“What do you mean? Aren’t you here to interview me about my most infamous client?”

“No.” I explained what had happened at work.

To my surprise, he laughed and said, “If only you had aimed more carefully at your boss! But nevertheless — oh, that’s great!”

“Not really.” I explained that the consequences were that I was forced to take a leave of absence and seek counseling.

“Hmm. I know that at times labor law and criminal law might seem to be natural extensions of one another, but I really can’t help you—”

“I’m not here to see you as a lawyer, Phil. I understand that you’re closing your practice, anyway.”

“That’s right,” he said, then took a long pull from the beer bottle.

“A little young for retirement, aren’t you?”

“I’ve made the money I need to make. I’ll probably sell this place, go to live near my sister, up north. She invited me to come up there after I broke my foot, and while I was there, I had a little time to think. As much as I love the law, I believe I’m through associating my name with those of people like Nicky Parrish.”

“Nicky?”

He smiled. “The diminutive helps me to see him on a proper scale.”

“I’ve had trouble with that lately, too. I have to tell myself that he’s not invincible.”

This gradually led to a discussion about our lives since that journey to the mountains; I was surprised to learn that Phil felt that his life had gone out of control since then, too. “It’s the guilt,” he said. “It eats at me.”

“Guilt? What do you have to feel guilty about?”

“I allowed him to talk me into pursuing that deal with the D.A.! If I had taken charge of the case as I should have done, as I would have done with anyone else—”

“He would have fired you,” I said.

“That’s what I tell myself, but instead look what happened! When I think of those men — when I think of their families, and you — and Ben Sheridan! My God, Ben!”

“Ben’s doing very well,” I said.

“I heard through the grapevine that he’s staying with you and Frank.”

“He was. But now he’s in his own place and back at work.”

“Already? He’s made remarkable progress, then!”

I gave him the sunny version of Ben’s recovery. By unspoken agreement, that was the one that Ben, Frank, Jack, and I gave out to other people. It was so obviously the one Ben wanted other people to believe.

I understood that attitude; Ben was not big on thinking of himself as a victim. “Please leave all pity shipments unopened and mark them, ‘Return to Sender,’ ” he once told me.

“So he’s already up and walking?” Phil Newly asked me now.

“From the day after the surgery, they had him standing. As soon as he had healed enough from the surgery to do so, he worked on learning to walk again. It hasn’t always been easy, and there have been problems here and there, but for the most part, he’s been making steady progress. Lately, he’s been justifiably pleased with himself. And he has this remarkable new foot. It’s a Flex-Foot Re-Flex VSP.”

“A what?”

“A Flex-Foot. It’s his prosthesis. Designed by an amputee. Ben loves it. He’s managed to get around much better since he got it. It’s this high-tech foot that’s made from a carbon fiber composite — same stuff that’s used on jets, so it’s lightweight, but strong.” I picked up his mechanical pencil and made a rough sketch on a scrap of paper.

“It looks a little like — well, a piece from a charcoal-colored ski,” I said. “Flat and narrow like a ski, but much shorter — the length of a foot and part of a shin, in sort of a curved L-shape . . .” I looked up from my artwork and saw that I was losing him. “Sorry, Phil — I’ve become more interested in all of this lately.”

“I can understand why. So Ben is living alone now?”

“Yes, David left his house to Ben. I’m a little frightened for him, I have to admit. Not because of the injury — Ben will swear to you that he’s in better shape now than he was before the amputation — but because there was a break-in there a few months ago.”

The color drained from Phil Newly’s face.

41

TUESDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 12

Las Piernas

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Sorry,” he said, shuddering. “I seem to always let myself think the worst these days. Undoubtedly someone read in the paper that David had died and decided to take advantage of that. It’s a sad commentary on life in these times, but it happens.”

“Phil — don’t give me the ‘life in these times’ bit. I can’t take it from someone in your line of work.”

He smiled, then said, “I understand you’ve made use of a defense attorney or two in your day.”

I laughed. “Yes, it’s true what they say. You stop making lawyer jokes the moment you’re taken into custody.”

“Was anything stolen at David’s house?”

“No. Although now that you mention it, the break-ins occurred not too long after David’s name appeared in the first stories about — about Parrish’s escape.”

“Break-ins? Plural?”

“They hit Ben’s office, too.”

“Hmmm. How about the other homes? Anyone else have similar trouble?”

“No, not that I know of, but — I haven’t contacted their families, so I don’t know.”

“The families!” he said. “They must hate me.”

“I hope any hatred they feel is centered on Nick Parrish,” I said.

He fell into a brooding silence, then said, “He’s my obsession, you know.”

“Parrish?”

“Yes. That’s why I have all of these books. It’s not healthy, I know, but I keep trying to understand, to see if there was something I should have spotted early on, if there had been some warning that things would end as they did, something I failed to recognize.”

I tried to tell him it was useless to blame himself, but soon realized that I wasn’t going to be able to talk him out of this way of thinking.

“Here—” he said at one point, pulling the topo map out, heedlessly spilling the stacks of books. “Look — I can’t even figure out where — where it happened.”

Again I forced myself to look at his map. I hadn’t even studied the one I had used in the mountains. This one encompassed a larger area than mine, and so the scale was smaller. It gave a greater overview of the area, but in less detail.

Newly had marked the clearing where his foot had been broken. “That’s the last place I recorded on my GPS unit,” he said, pointing. He moved his finger a short distance to another mark. “Here’s where the landing strip was.” He moved it once more, to a symbol some distance from the other two. “And this is J.C.’s ranger station.”

It was odd to me, looking at the map now. Despite my initial misgivings, it was simply the earth’s fingerprint, whorls and contour lines and colors, shapes that — once you got the hang of reading topo maps — transformed themselves into a landscape of ridges and valleys, cliffs and slopes, lakes and rivers.

A view so far above the burial ground could not harm me or upset me much. I had not seen the area from this perspective. “It happened in this section — here,” I said, using the pencil to point out the ridge between the two meadows. “The coyote tree was on this ridge.” I moved the pencil a slight distance. “Julia Sayre was buried in a meadow on this side of it. You can’t really see the detail of the meadow on this map. The other side of the ridge is where he set his trap.”

Places. Just places, I told myself.

Phil Newly was staring at the map in silence.

“How many other bodies did they find there?” he asked at last.

“You mean—”

“Not members of our group, but buried. Women Parrish had buried there.”

“In the one meadow, including the one he booby-trapped, ten. The others were all much farther down the meadow from the ridge. And Julia Sayre was the only woman buried in the other meadow.”

“The only one?” he asked.

“Yes. She was apparently special to him in some way. I’ve heard that he was more . . . that the things he did to her were more . . .”

As I sought for a phrase, he said, “I think I know what you mean.”

“Yes. Although there are signs in the victims in the other meadow that he was progressing — if you can call it progress — toward more and more sadistic treatment of his victims.”

“None of the others had explosives rigged to them?”

It was more difficult for me to recite facts when the word “explosives” came into play, but I managed it. “No. The new search teams proceeded very carefully all the same. They had bomb squad experts check out each potential site. It took a lot of extra time, but no other explosives were found.”

“Did search dogs find these other bodies?”

“Some of them. They were using lots of different methods by then — aerial photography, ground penetrating radar, you name it. Bingle had shown strong interest in that meadow, but the rigged grave was the first one he came to.”

“Why?”

“I think Ben found the answer to that. The question bothered him, too. So he studied the plastic that had been wrapped around Julia Sayre’s body, and some of the remaining fragments of plastic from the second body—”

“Nina Poolman?”

“Yes, both identifications were confirmed later.”

“So what was of interest to Ben?”

“There were two different types of holes in the plastic. Some of the punctures had been made by the probes the anthropologists used, but the others were made by some other object. The diameters and other characteristics of the punctures were different.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“We think he planned to be caught.”

“Sooner or later, I suppose—”

“No, I mean planned. He allowed himself to be caught so that the world would know what a genius he is. At some point before he killed Kara Lane, he must have gone up into the mountains and punctured holes in those plastic coverings, which led to further decay of the bodies. The bodies would have been protected by the plastic until then.”

“And the decay gave off scent through these holes.”

“Right. So those were the graves that were easiest for Bingle to find.”

“My God. These other women — do the police know who they were?”

“He buried most of them with some form of identification — usually a driver’s license — but it will take a while to verify that they are indeed those women. They’ve ordered dental records and so on.”

“They can’t just tell—”

“No,” I said quickly, shutting out the image of Julia Sayre’s body.

“I’m sorry,” Phil said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m okay,” I said, then added, “Ben told me that driver’s licenses are notoriously inaccurate sources of identification information in any case — men often report themselves to be taller than they really are when they apply for a license, women report themselves to be shorter and thinner. And sometimes hair color or weight changes after the license is issued.”

“But if the identifications match?”

“I don’t have information on all of the women. A lot of other law enforcement agencies have become involved in this since we went up there, and so it’s not just a matter of going to the paper’s usual sources for information. But one of our reporters learned that nine of the women had criminal records — for prostitution.”

“And prostitutes are always the easiest prey for a man like Parrish,” he said grimly. “Did these women all come from Las Piernas?”

“Most, but not all. They’re from a number of cities in Southern California, but all of the cities have one thing in common.”

“An airport?”

I nodded. “Apparently Parrish had been using the meadow for years. There are a lot of questions that will only be answered after all of the forensic specialists have had a chance to do their work.”

“Eleven. Eleven women!”

“The police think there’s a twelfth one somewhere nearby, because there were a dozen coyotes on the tree. I think it might have been for Kara Lane.”

“The woman whose murder led to his capture? The one whose body was found near the airport. Yes, I suppose so.”

“Just a theory.”

“And now he has killed a woman here, and these two women in Oregon!” he said.

“Yes. The nurse and the receptionist.”

“Did they ever find . . . ?”

“The receptionist’s legs? No.”

After a long silence, he said, “He’s just getting started, isn’t he?”

“Maybe.”

He seemed more depressed than when I first arrived. I couldn’t bring myself to leave him in that frame of mind.

“Frank asked me to thank you for helping him to find me. You have my thanks, too, Phil. You took a risk doing that, and for no other reason than kindness.”

He looked at me with an expression so haunted, I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Do you really think of me that way — as someone who helped you?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m grateful to you. Not just for helping me to get out of there — you also probably saved Ben’s life. If he had spent many more hours up in those mountains without medical attention, the infection could have killed him. And the arrival of the helicopter probably frightened Parrish off before he had time to hunt me down in the forest. If you hadn’t helped Frank, he wouldn’t have found us so quickly.”

He looked back down at the map and said, “Thank you. I don’t know that I did so much, really — Frank and his friends made the real difference. He was so anxious about you that day, so determined to find you, that he risked trouble with his department by coming to see me. It would have been inhumane not to help in some small way.”

We talked a little more, but I still felt worried about him, so as I was leaving, I asked for his phone number. “I’d like to stay in touch, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Frank will want to talk to you, too.”

“I’d like to talk to him again. Especially now that we won’t be opponents in court.”

He wrote out the number and handed it to me. “Thanks for coming by, Irene.”

“I should have done it months ago,” I said. “It was . . . helpful to me to see you today.”

“For me, too,” he said. “Come by anytime.” He smiled and added, “I’m no longer such an expensive person to talk to — no billable hours.”

Outside his house, as I was getting into the van, I saw a green Honda Accord drive off. I could have sworn that Nick Parrish was driving it. I took a deep breath, started the van, and pulled away from the curb.

When I got home, for the first time since I had returned from the mountains, I took out my larger-scale topo map. Even though the features of the terrain were shown in finer detail than on Newly’s map, I wasn’t as upset by this view of the area as I had thought I would be. It made me a little nervous to see where I had marked off the cave, the coyote tree, the graves. But again, it was from a distance.

Considering distance, I realized I couldn’t see the ranger station on my map. I felt a knot tightening in my stomach. Distance. How did Parrish cover that distance?

It was a question I normally would have asked myself months ago, I realized. But for the last few months I had made a conscious effort to avoid all thought, all reference to what had happened during the week of May fourteenth. I helped Ben, I worked long hours, and exercised three large dogs. I did my best to end the day too exhausted to worry or dream. I tried to forget that I had ever boarded that plane.

Oh, it worked like a charm. I saw Nick Parrish leaping out at me everywhere I went. I had horrific nightmares about the meadow. I threw computers through glass walls.

And I didn’t ask questions I should have asked.

So I called Ben Sheridan. When I got him on the line, I asked him for J.C.’s phone number.

“I’ll give it to you,” he said, “but J.C.’s right here.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Sure.”

I exchanged greetings with J.C., then asked, “How long did it take you to get to the meadow from the ranger station?”

“Driving?”

“You could drive the whole distance?”

“No. I took a dirt road — a mud road, at that point — part of the way, and hiked the rest. Let’s see, I left about an hour after dawn and got to the meadow in the early afternoon. It was foggy when I left; I drove as fast as I dared under those conditions, which was not all that fast.” He paused, then said, “I wasn’t really thinking very clearly that morning, Irene, so it’s hard for me to judge time. It seemed like forever. Once I reached the end of the road, I think I hiked for about four hours, but again, I’m not sure. Why do you ask?”

“I’ve just started wondering about a few things. You and Ben have dinner plans?”

“Not yet.”

“If Ben can stand our company again, why don’t you come over for dinner? I have a theory to talk over with you. Tell Ben to bring Bingle, too.”

They agreed to come over at seven. I called Frank.

“Hi,” he said. “Must be ESP. I just talked to a friend of yours. Gillian Sayre called.”

A wave of guilt hit me. I hadn’t contacted her since the day she came by the Express, asking about her mother’s remains. “Gillian? Why were you talking to her?”

“She was trying to reach you at the paper, but I guess your voice mailbox is full and the Express isn’t telling anyone anything about your leave of absence. She even waited outside the building for you, but when she didn’t see you for a couple of days, she decided to give me a call.”

“Oh.”

“I told her you were just taking a much-needed vacation.”

“Thanks, Frank. I know I should have called her before now, but . . .”

“She wasn’t calling to nag you. She saw the articles about the Jane Doe in the trash bin and was worried about you. And she said she never had a chance to thank you for talking to her on the day after you got back.”

“I’ll call her,” I said again. “I haven’t even tried to get in touch with her or Giles since those first days back.”

Frank knows me too well not to have heard my reluctance. “Take it easy on yourself,” he said. “You’ve had a lot to cope with. This might not be the best time to talk to the Sayres.”

“Maybe you’re right. I just don’t know. I don’t want to cower.”

He laughed. “Like you cowered before Wrigley?”

“Look what that got me.”

“Yeah — a few days off for yourself, instead of running your ass ragged for the paper. Wrigley’s had the work of three reporters out of you lately, and he knows it. By the way — how’d things go with Newly today?”

“Fine,” I said, “which reminds me why I called.” I warned him that I had destroyed his chances of a peaceful evening at home.

“I get the sense that this is a meeting, not a dinner. What’s on the agenda?”

“I think someone helped Parrish, Frank. I’m almost sure of it.”

“So are we. He couldn’t have managed to get out of that area unless someone gave him a ride. Idiotic thing for the driver to do, but that was undoubtedly before Parrish’s name and description were all over the news.”

“No, I don’t mean that a stranger gave him a lift. Why would he plan everything else out and leave something like that to chance?”

There was a silence, then he said, “I’m sure they’ve considered that.”

“I know you aren’t allowed to work on any cases that have even the vaguest connection to me—”

“Which is every case in those two meadows,” he said.

“Yes, but you talk to the other guys, right? The ones who are working on them?”

“As much as possible. To be honest, our resources are strained at the moment. All of Bob Thompson’s cases had to be picked up by other people; since I can’t work on the mountain cases that are connected to Las Piernas — and those are plentiful — guess who gets most of Thompson’s other cases?”

“You.”

“We’re all running around ass-deep in alligators, as Tom Cassidy might say, and I don’t hear as much about the Parrish cases as I’d like to. But let’s talk about your theories tonight — if I can’t get anyone to buy them, Ben might be able to — he’s consulting on some of them.”

So I was able to talk to Frank, Ben, and J.C. that night, which is why I had my husband and two friends with me when I received a gift from my not-so-secret admirer.

42

TUESDAY, LATE AFTERNOON,

SEPTEMBER 12

Las Piernas

In preparation for the evening’s gathering, I drove downtown to a map store. I purchased several topo maps of the area Parrish had used as a burial ground. Coming out of the store, just as I reached the van, I saw the green Honda again. It was speeding away.

I don’t know what made me feel so sure that it was the same car I had seen outside Phil Newly’s house. I couldn’t make out the license plate or clearly see the driver, but as the car turned left onto Elm, a one-way street clogged with traffic, I decided to settle the matter by following him.

I might have lost him already, of course. He could have turned down an alley and doubled back, or reached another intersection and turned, or pulled into a garage and parked.

I had to know. I had to at least try to find that car.

As I drove, I became convinced that I could smell bones; that the scent of bones was somewhere in the van, that if I looked in the rearview mirror I would see skeletons stacked like cordwood behind me, drying marrow their last perfume.

I watched the road, but I broke out in a cold sweat.

Find the Honda. Don’t think about . . . but I smelled bones.

Stop the van. Call Jo Robinson. Tell her to reserve a room with rubber walls for you.

How could there be bones in the van? I asked myself, gripping the wheel. There couldn’t be, could there?

It was possible, an inner voice argued.

I might not have locked the van; in fact, the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I had not locked the van when I bought the maps, that Parrish had been inside it, that he had put the bones of some of his victims in the van.

Up ahead, I saw a flash of dark green and drove faster.

Bones.

I felt ill. I rolled down all the windows. There was not enough air.

I forced myself to look in the rearview mirror.

I saw the camper fixtures — cabinets, the small sink, stove and refrigerator, a fold-up table and seats that could be made into beds. I stared and stared, but there were no bones.

It was a huge relief and no relief at all.

I looked back at the road just as an old man with a hat on pulled his Dodge Dart out into my lane without looking; I swerved and narrowly missed him. He had the nerve to honk at me.

What the hell did I think I was doing? Even if it was Parrish in the Honda, what was I going to do? I wasn’t armed.

I’ll see if it’s him. If it is, I’ll get the license plate number.

Fine.

There! In the far left lane, stopped at a light and two cars back from the intersection, a dark green Honda Accord waited. I couldn’t see the driver. The light turned green, but I was delayed by a driver trying to turn left. The Honda was getting away!

Finally the car turned and I sped to the next intersection. I put the van in park, opened the door, and stood on the door frame, trying to get a look at the green Honda’s driver. A man — a man who could be Parrish. I couldn’t see the Honda’s plates.

The driver of the car behind me honked and flipped me the bird. The light had changed. More horns honked. I got back inside the van and moved forward, signaling a lane change, trying to get over to the left lane, desperate to keep track of the Honda.

But the driver in the lane next to mine was the fellow who had given me the finger. Still angry at me, he refused to let me pass. Red-faced, he shook his fist at me, and promptly rear-ended the car in front of him, which then came into my lane. I slammed on the brakes.

I was boxed in.

Through my open windows, I heard the red-faced finger flipper shouting that it was my fault. When I looked for the Honda again, it was gone.

Ignoring Red Face, I asked the guy who had been rear-ended if he was okay. He was. He turned to Red Face, told him to shut the hell up, and to my surprise, was obeyed.

The story provided amusement over dinner — that is, the part of the story I told, which was very little of it, after all, and had nothing to do with Hondas or bones.

The subtle scent of bones had plagued me even after I reached home. I took a long, hot shower, and my thoughts returned again and again to the events of the afternoon.

There could be bones in one of the cabinets inside the van. There were many little cubbyholes and crannies to search, I thought.

But what if I searched and there weren’t any bones?

If you’re scared and there’s nothing to be scared of and you prove to yourself that there’s nothing to be scared of and you’re still scared . . . Added to vanishing Hondas and false Parrishes, ghostly bone scent became too much to contemplate. If there were no bones, I really was crazy.

The longer the warm water washed over me, the more it seemed to me that a search itself would be the act of a truly crazy woman. I made a vow to ignore the scent.

So somehow I made the story of buying maps and the red-faced man and a rear-end collision funny, and if my own laughter was a little brittle, no one but Frank seemed to notice.

When I saw that Frank also noticed the trembling of my hands when I spread out the topo maps, I hoped that he ascribed it to the area shown on the maps, and not what happened when I had purchased them.

I focused on the maps. It required concentration. My mind cleared.

Beginning with the largest-scale map, we tried to find the fastest and easiest routes a man could take from the cave — where evidence of Parrish’s stay had since been found — to the ranger station and Helitack unit.

There were other ways to get in and out of the ranger station without using the dirt road, but J.C. had definitely chosen the quickest method of reaching us.

“The road you took looks closer to the meadow than the airstrip,” I said.

“It is, but the hike in and out is rough and steep.” He showed us the route he had taken. “It would be extremely difficult to carry a body out over it, and I’m not sure every hiker in that group could have managed that trail.”

“We had lots of different levels of experience,” I agreed. “If he hadn’t set the trap, your idea of sending a helicopter to the meadow would have been the best one.”

He made a harsh, low sound, as if I had hit him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Instead,” he said bitterly, “my brilliant idea got David and Flash and the others killed.”

“What?!” Ben and I said in unison.

He told us his version of how decisions had been made on the ridge near the coyote tree. He felt sure that everyone would have continued safely to the plane if he had not suggested using the helicopter.

Ben and I countered with our claims that other factors, and not his offer of the helicopter, had led to the decision to look for the second grave.

He seemed unconvinced, until Frank said, “By the time you were all standing on that ridge, I think Parrish had Bob Thompson’s number. If not everyone else’s as well.”

Seeing he had our undivided attention, he went on. “I can’t get over the feeling that Parrish planned even more thoroughly than we’ve said he did — that he anticipated the reactions of certain key people in this scenario he devised. I think he knew he could get someone to take him up there, sooner or later.”

“You mean that he intentionally allowed himself to be caught?” I said. “Yes, I think everyone agrees that he left Kara Lane’s body where it would be found.”

“Exactly. The trap was already waiting by the time he was taken into custody. He might not have known who would be on the trip up there, but once he started spending time with all of you, he studied you, figured out how to push your buttons. I suppose I shouldn’t speak ill of Bob, but it was never hard to figure out where he was coming from.”

“Ambitious,” Ben said.

“Right.”

“J.C.,” I said, “have you ever stopped to think that you saved Andy’s life?”

“Saved Andy’s life?” he repeated blankly.

“Yes. Parrish undoubtedly wanted all of us to be down there. I think he planned to have me survive to — to chronicle his greatness.” For a moment, I couldn’t say more; there was an invisible nine-hundred-pound weight on my chest. Frank reached over and took my hand; I held tightly to it. “By separating from us,” I went on, “you saved two lives, J.C. — yours and Andy’s. It undoubtedly upset Parrish to have you spoil any part of his perfect little plan.”

J.C. was quiet, staring at the maps. After a time, he said, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“You probably had him worried that you’d have a helicopter in there taking him back to prison before old slow-digging Ben here uncovered the body. You nearly ruined his whole setup. The rain was the only thing that allowed him to get away with it — otherwise, your helicopter would have picked us up.”

“Yeah, maybe,” J.C. said quietly.

“So let’s look at these maps and try to see if Parrish had time to disable those helicopters,” Ben said.

There was one other unpaved road that ended within a few miles of the far end of the meadow, but this road came into the forest from a different direction. J.C. would have had a much longer drive from the ranger station just to get to the road itself; from there he would have been doubling back in the same general direction he came from, and once he parked the truck, the hike from that road to the meadow would have been worse than the one he made from the other road. It would have been almost entirely uphill and over steep terrain.

“You were in the Forest Service truck,” Frank said. “Parrish was on foot. It’s ludicrous to think he would have hiked that longer, steeper route to and from the ranger station.”

J.C., much more familiar with the area than the rest of us, said, “I agree. And I think Irene is right about his having a partner. It’s not impossible that he sabotaged the helicopters alone, but think about it — he would have been hiking in a downpour, after dark. He would have been risking some really nasty falls.”

“Parrish is an experienced hiker,” Ben said. “But he isn’t in the kind of shape you’re in, J.C. — you can cover ground faster than any of us, including Andy. He’d have had to hike quite a distance overnight in the rain, disable the helicopter, hike back, and then have the energy to chop down a tree that next day.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “Was anyone in our group carrying an ax up there?”

“Yes,” Ben said. “There was one in the camping gear the police brought.”

“Oh.”

“You seem disappointed,” Frank said.

“I hadn’t seen anyone use it,” I said. “If it wasn’t in our group’s gear, that would argue for an accomplice — someone who brought the ax to Parrish.”

“Who would help a man like Parrish?” J.C. asked.

“His lawyer,” Ben said.

“His lawyer was injured,” Frank said.

“Unable to drive?” Ben countered.

Frank shook his head. “No, he could walk if he needed to. But Phil had nothing to gain and everything to lose if his client escaped.”

“Did Parrish call anyone while he was in custody?” I asked.

“No,” Frank said. “If we’re right about this, though, he didn’t need to make calls. He provided the destination for the group, so his partner — or partners — would know where he was going. And the date of departure was well publicized.”

“Don’t serial killers usually work alone?” J.C. asked.

“Usually, but not always,” Frank said. “The Hillside Strangler — Kenneth Bianchi — and his cousin, Angelo Buono, tortured and killed together. In Houston, Dean Allen Coryll killed at least twenty-seven young men with the help of two friends — they knowingly brought his victims to him.”

“Killers don’t have to be loners,” Ben agreed. “And apparently some women are excited by the idea of being with a killer. There’s even a matchmaking Web site now where women can ‘meet’ the prison inmate of their dreams.”

“But that’s different, isn’t it?” I said. “A woman who marries her prison pen pal after he’s caught isn’t necessarily in the same league as someone who’d help him torture and murder his victims.”

“No,” Frank said, “but there are plenty of examples of couples who’ve worked together before capture. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka teamed up for torture, rape and murder — the first time, she helped him rape and kill her own sister. In Nebraska, Caril Fugate went along with her boyfriend for a monthlong killing spree that started with her parents and her two-year-old sister.”

“Charles Starkweather, right?” Ben said. “They made a movie about them.”

“Yes. There are others. Coleman and West, the Gallegos, the Neelleys—”

“Why do they do it?” I asked.

“The age-old question, right? Sexual obsession, greed, power — you name it. Sometimes these women are dominated by violent male partners, other times, they clearly participate willingly. It’s not just women — in addition to husband-and-wife teams, there are male partnerships, groups, and families that are serial killers.”

There was silence around the table, then Ben said, “We’re back to the question J.C. asked. Who would help a man like Nick Parrish?”

They threw out suggestions: debating the possibility of Phil Newly again; wondering if Parrish had a contact who also had an airplane or a helicopter; arguing over whether he was more likely to have a girlfriend or a boyfriend; speculating over the likelihood of a relative who was his Angelo Buono.

While this went on, I studied the small-scale topo map.

“We don’t have enough information to know who his partner is,” I said, which earned me a you’re-no-fun-at-all look from every single one of them. “Maybe the FBI guys can help out with their profilers. I don’t know. But I think I do know where his partner met Nick Parrish that day — it was at that other road.”

They focused their attention on the map.

“Yes,” Frank said. “It wasn’t a good route to get to the ranger station, but he wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere near there once his partner had disabled the helicopters.”

“And it’s a downhill hike from the meadow,” J.C. said. “The airstrip would be the most convenient way out, but he probably expected that law enforcement might be using it by the time he hiked to it.”

“Right,” Ben said, sighing. “I wish we had come up with this sooner. The mud would have been perfect for casting any footprints or tire marks on the road and near the helicopters.”

J.C. shook his head. “If they didn’t take any casts at the time, they’re probably gone. Summer months are the busiest for Helitack. Our helicopters are primarily used for firefighting. There have been all kinds of people around there.”

They decided to call the lead investigator on the team that was coordinating the mountain cases. I went out to get some fresh air in the backyard, where Bingle was engaging in playful antics with Deke and Dunk.

Ben joined me after a while. Bingle checked in with him, then went back to the other dogs. “I think Bingle misses them,” he said. “Do you want to let them run on the beach together?”

I hesitated. I knew Ben could manage in lots of environments, but he hadn’t conquered walking in soft, deep sand with a prosthesis yet. His prosthetist had told him that many amputees found walking on a soft beach difficult. Ben was still working on it.

“Yes, I miss walking on the beach,” he said, reading my thoughts. “I miss lots of things. But the list is getting shorter, and the items that stay on the list, well, I’ll learn to live without them. But there’s no reason Bingle should have to forego his pleasures because of me.”

Frank stepped out as he was saying this, and hearing it, said, “Tell you what — if you don’t mind a public struggle to the boardwalk, we’ll get you over to it. It’s not far from the stairs at the end of the street, and it runs parallel to the water until you get to the pier. You and Irene can stroll along there while J.C. and I herd these four-legged hooligans.”

He thought about it for a moment, but apparently the desire to be closer to the water won out over potential embarrassment, because he agreed to the plan.

He went down the long set of stairs from the cliffs to the sand on his own. From there, the four of us put our arms across one another’s shoulders, in a line, so that no one person was left out — or singled out. J.C. started singing some silly camping song that made us laugh, so most people probably thought we were well into an evening party. Between Frank and J.C., Ben was able to get to the boardwalk without a fall.

Bingle kept running back and forth between us and the other dogs, but if Deke and Dunk followed him at high speed toward Ben, he herded them away from his new handler. “He won’t allow other dogs to bump into me,” Ben explained. “A service I sometimes miss when he’s not around. But I’m learning to keep my balance a little better these days.”

“How’s the Spanish coming along?”

“I’m getting better at the dog commands,” he said. “The rest still needs lots of work.”

“Why did David train Bingle in Spanish?”

“Two reasons. Bingle was originally owned by an old man who spoke only Spanish, and David had learned Spanish after we did some earthquake recovery work in South America. We’d been frustrated by the language barrier, and he thought it would be useful to be able to speak it for cases here in Southern California, too. Anyway, this old man loved the dog, but he was having trouble keeping up with Bingle. He told David that ‘Bocazo’ — that was his name for Bingle — deserved someone who was more energetic for a partner.”

“Bocazo?” I laughed. “That’s Spanish for ‘big mouth.’ ”

Ben smiled. “He established his rep early on, I guess.”

“So what was the second reason?”

“It wasn’t something people expected. I mean, here’s this Anglo college professor speaking Spanish. When he was doing search and rescue work or cadaver searches, it often won them over. They would be in these horrible situations — waiting for him to search a building that had collapsed in an earthquake in South America, for example — and even though Spanish has many dialects, they understood what he was saying to the dog, and so it took one level of anxiousness away. The two of them made great ambassadors for the rest of us.”

“It certainly helped that Parrish didn’t know Spanish.”

“Why?”

I realized that I had never told him what happened after I left him to cross the stream.

When I first came home from the mountains, I had told Frank everything that had happened there, but no one else, and I had steadfastly avoided the subject since. Now I wondered if Frank, who had often urged me to talk things over with Ben, had gone ahead with the dogs and J.C., hoping I would do exactly that.

So make the effort, I told myself. It’s the perfect time to talk it out.

“Parrish didn’t understand Spanish, so when I told Bingle to go to you, to guard you, Parrish thought I was just commanding him to go away.”

A single sentence. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.

“I don’t understand,” Ben said, stopping and staring at me. “Your story in the paper — you didn’t mention being so close to him again. You made it sound as if he tripped over that trap you made for him and ran off wounded. That you ran and hid after that, and just waited for the rescue.”

Panic struck. In my mind, Parrish was holding my face down in the mud; for a few seconds, it might as well have been happening again.

“Irene!” Ben said sharply. “Irene, what is it?”

“Another time, okay?” I said. I realized I had tears on my face, although I couldn’t remember when I had started crying.

There had been this easiness with tears between us for some time now. Frank and Jack and I had been allowed to see his. I don’t think many other people did.

When he had stayed with us, lots of people got to see “how brave Ben is” — although he absolutely despised any comments of this sort. Ben showed the world a determined face. It wasn’t an act — it just wasn’t the whole story.

There had been a nearly constant stream of visitors at first — friends from the university, colleagues who worked with him on the DMORT team and others. There was also a demanding schedule of recovery and rehab appointments, both at home and in other offices — doctors, nurses, his physical therapist, his prosthetist, Jo Robinson. There was work to be done learning how to balance and walk, to desensitize the residual limb, to strengthen Ben’s upper body, and more.

Ellen Raice came by with projects and questions, sometimes bringing bones that had been brought to the lab for help with identification or other determinations. Ben seemed glad to have the work and distraction.

Sometimes Ben had been abrupt with Ellen or other visitors, who knowingly smiled at me as they left, saying, “He seems to be having a bad day.” But they didn’t know the meaning of a bad day with Ben.

At first, almost every day was a bad day at some point. Even Ellen didn’t get to see that side of Ben. Ben tired of appointments and exercises that seemed designed to torture him. Ben in agonizing pain, taking bruising falls. The irascible, impatient Ben. Ben discouraged and grieving. Ben who wondered if women would be repulsed by him, who feared that his sex life was at an end at thirty-two, that he was doomed to a life of loneliness. Ben trying to get used to what he saw when he looked in a full-length mirror.

During that summer, whatever waking hours I could spend away from work, I spent with Ben. Frank and Jack covered the hours I couldn’t. He allowed the three of us to see him at his most vulnerable, but we were also first on hand for the victories. He was one of the most blessedly stubborn people I knew, and if he had setbacks, he didn’t let them stop him.

It was that stubborn determination that I saw on his face now, as I tried to regain my composure.

“I think,” he said, “that I just might die happy if I can kill Nick Parrish with my bare hands before I go.”

“It wouldn’t be worth it,” I said. “Besides, if you go, who . . .”

“Who will you have to talk to about it?” he finished.

I nodded. “I’ve told Frank. I’ve told him everything, but you — you were there.”

“And yet, you haven’t really talked to me, have you? Shielding the poor cripple?”

“Screw you, Ben,” I said wearily. “You know that’s a crock.”

“Sorry. Just what you needed, right? More abuse. You’re right. A crock. God, no wonder you don’t talk to me — I should start a company, ‘Cranky Assholes, Inc.’ ”

“I know the CEO’s position is taken, but could I at least have a vice presidency? I’m good at throwing things. Any glass-paneled offices?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh,” I said guiltily, “I guess I haven’t filled you in on my news.”

“It seems to me that there’s a hell of a lot you haven’t filled me in on. What is this, Irene? I move out, and you think I stop caring about you and Frank and Jack?”

“You wanted to be out on your own. Why should I burden you with—”

“Burden me! You burden me! Christ, that’s a laugh.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Tell me what happened at work,” he said.

I told him about my monitor shot put into Wrigley’s office. I did so with trepidation, figuring that he was bound to start feeling a little wary about being left out on the beach with a madwoman. But that wasn’t how he reacted at all.

“My God,” he said, looking at me with such concern, my tears threatened again. “You’ve really been having a rough time of it, haven’t you?”

“A little,” I said.

He laughed.

“Yes, a rough time,” I admitted.

“I feel like such a selfish bastard!”

“Don’t,” I said fiercely.

He didn’t say more, but I could see that he was angry. At himself, at me — I wasn’t sure who else was on the list.

By then Frank and J.C. had rejoined us. Frank took one look at me and put an arm around me. I returned the favor. Ben steadfastly ignored me, and sensing the tension between us, Frank let Ben and J.C. move ahead with the dogs.

“You okay?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Long day, that’s all.”

He gave a little snort of disbelief but didn’t push me to unburden my soul right at that moment. I was grateful.

At the end of the boardwalk, we again helped Ben across the sand to the stairs, but this time, he seemed embarrassed. We let the dogs go up first, then J.C. and Ben. When we reached the top of the stairs, J.C. and Ben were watching Bingle, who was lifting his head, making chuffing noises. The other dogs tried to follow his lead. He looked back at Ben, ears swiveled forward, and barked.

“Jesus,” Ben said, “he’s alerting.”

“Talk to him,” I said, tightening my hold on Frank.

I was impressed. Ben flawlessly spoke a series of encouragements in Spanish. Then, giving a hand signal, he said, “¡Búscalo!” Bingle focused on Ben much as I had seen him focus on David, and then hurried down the street, head high and sniffing, moving in a fairly straight line.

Within a few houses of our own, Bingle started barking again. He waited for Ben, then, crooning, he veered close to the van, then passed it by and hurried toward our porch.

“Oh no,” I said. “Please no.”

J.C. was saying, “It looks as if someone sent you roses.”

“Late in the day for a flower delivery,” Frank said.

But there was indeed a long golden box with a red bow on it, waiting on the steps.

“Everybody get back,” Frank said suddenly. “Ben, call the dog—!”

But Bingle had already pawed at the box, and it rolled down the steps and spilled open — ten, long-stem roses tumbled out, as did two long, dark bones.

We all stood frozen — until Frank shouted at our dogs, who obviously thought Bingle had made a capital find and were venturing closer to see if he’d share it with them. Hearing the unexpected sharp note in Frank’s voice, they immediately came to his side.

Ben called to Bingle and remembered to praise him in Spanish, then without needing to step nearer to the bones said to us, “Femurs.”

“Leg bones?” I asked weakly, but I already knew the answer. I suddenly didn’t feel as if I could rely on my own.

43

WEDNESDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 13

Las Piernas

“The bones were those of the receptionist?” Jo Robinson asked during my appointment the next morning.

“It seems likely, but the bones were . . . altered. Parts of her legs are still missing, and these bones weren’t even whole femurs. Someone had cut them. Ben knows someone who specializes in identifying toolmarks on bones who’ll be studying them, but for now, Ben thinks it might have been a power saw. They’re going to run DNA tests to be sure the bones belong to the receptionist. Those tests take a while.”

“You seem quite calm about this now.”

“It’s an act.”

She smiled.

“I guess you knew that.”

She kept smiling, but said, “I’m not a mind reader. So tell me, what’s your real reaction?”

“At first, fear. But now I’m just angry. No, that’s not true. I’m both angry and afraid.”

“What do you suppose he was trying to do?”

“To scare me. To let me know that he knows where I live, to tell me that he’s around. He succeeded — I am afraid. More afraid.”

I considered telling her more, but I wanted to go back to work, and I was convinced she’d never give me the release if I told her everything. If I could go back to work and stay busy, I wouldn’t have so much time to dwell on memories of people in little pieces in a meadow or photographs in graves.

“I think most people would be afraid if they found leg bones in a box on their front porch,” she was saying. “What are you doing in response?”

“Doing?”

“About your personal safety.”

“Oh. That’s the other problem. Frank has worked it out so that I’m never alone. If he can’t be with me, then someone else is. Our friend Jack is in your waiting room as we speak.”

“Does that seem unreasonable under the circumstances?”

“No, but I saw Parrish take out seven men in about three minutes flat, so I’m not comforted, either.”

“Is that what bothers you about it?”

I didn’t have to think long about that question. “No. It bothers me because it’s confining.”

I have to admit that she was very slick. She managed to get me to talk about my fear of confined places, and somehow that led to talking about being in a tent, which led to talking about the expedition and what had happened on it.

Jack had a long wait.

After a while, she asked, “Before you left for this journey, you were uneasy being in the mountains. You struggle with claustrophobia, yet you agreed to be part of a group that would be sleeping inside tents for several days. Detective — Thompson, was it?”

“Yes.”

“Detective Thompson had been unpleasant to you on a number of other occasions, yet you decided to become a member of the expedition he was leading.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t have any say over who would lead it.”

“Why did you agree to go on this journey to the mountains?”

I shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a glutton for punishment.”

She waited.

“I went for work,” I said testily. “It was a good opportunity for the paper.”

She kept waiting.

“My hour was up a long time ago,” I said, picking up my purse.

“Why did you go?” she persisted.

“Julia Sayre!” I snapped.

She didn’t respond.

I set my purse down. “No, not Julia, really. Her daughter, and her husband and son. For years, they’ve wondered what happened to her. I was trying to help them resolve their questions about her disappearance.”

“A good purpose.”

“At a damned high cost.”

“Yes, but you didn’t set that price, did you?”

“No.”

“In fact, it cost you much more than you bargained for.”

I shook my head. “Other people paid much more.”

“What can you do about that?”

“Nothing.”

“Have you talked to any of the families of the men who went up there with you?”

“God, no.” I felt myself color. “No. I feel terrible about that, but when I think of facing those people . . .”

“What will happen?”

“I don’t know. They might ask — just after I came back, Gillian asked about her mother. I couldn’t tell her. I can’t — I can’t talk about what I saw. Not to the families. Not yet.”

She poured a glass of water, gave it to me. She waited for me to calm down a little.

“You talked to Gillian before her mother’s body was released to the family?”

“Yes.”

“But by now, the families have already been through funerals, right?”

I nodded.

“I doubt they’ll have questions of that type, but if they ask,” she said, “and you politely tell them that you’d rather not talk about that just now—?”

“They’ll still be angry, even if the subject never comes up. They must hate me.”

“Because you survived?”

“Yes. And because media attention was probably one of the reasons Parrish killed all of those men. You’re looking at the only reporter that went up there.”

“Did you go up there to glorify Parrish?”

“No. I suppose any attention from the media could be construed as glorifying him, but that wasn’t my plan.”

“So you think the families will be angry with you because he tried to use you for a purpose other than your own?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“People aren’t always reasonable. They’ll see me as a reporter. Some days, I think it would be easier to tell people that I’m an IRS auditor.”

“Do you have any evidence that this particular group of people — the families of the victims — will be unfair to you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Perhaps you should find out how they feel. Visit one or two of them. You have a little carving to give to Duke’s grandson?”

“Yes,” I said, awash with guilt over not having brought it to Duke’s widow.

As I started to leave Jo Robinson’s office, I said, “I want to go back to work.”

“I think you will be able to do that fairly soon.”

“I mean, this week.”

“Soon,” she said. “Try something entirely new — be patient with yourself.”

She held the power to keep me from my job at the Express for as long as she liked. I was more than a little angry about that, and she undoubtedly read that in my face. She continued to calmly regard me.

I wondered if a woman reporter who had thrown a large object through the glass wall of her editor-in-chief’s office could get a job an another paper. I wondered if I should go back to my friend and former boss at the PR firm I’d left a few years ago to ask if my old job was still open. I knew he’d hire me, but the thought of being forced to write cheerful, upbeat copy for the rest of my life truly depressed me.

Instead, I did my homework assignment.

Two days later, I completed the last of my visits to the widows and families of the officers who had died in the mountains. I was exhausted. No one had asked about remains. None of them had failed to welcome me; all had thanked me for taking the time to come by. There had been plenty of tears at each stop along the way.

Duke’s widow thanked me profusely for the little wooden horse, and would hear no apology for my delay in getting it to her. It was the same with each of them — lots of remembrances, a few regrets, but no recriminations. All anger, all blame was focused on Nicholas Parrish.

The last visit had been to the parents of Flash Burden, the youngest of the men who had died in the mountains. They had gathered their son’s belongings from his apartment, and today, from cardboard box after cardboard box, they showed me trophies he had won — mostly for photography, but another boxful from amateur hockey. They proudly took me into a room which served as a gallery for photographs he had taken. These included stunning shots of wildlife, but also glimpses of city life that showed him to be a keen observer with a sense of humor. Frank had told me that he had liked Flash, and had liked working with him, but thought he was wasting his skills on police work. Seeing these photographs, I had to agree, and found myself wishing that Flash had never come along with us to the mountains.

As I was thinking this, his mother said, “These weren’t his favorites, of course. He was happiest if one of his photographs helped solve a crime or convict a criminal.”

I regretted none of these visits, but emotionally, each was a run through a gantlet flanked by grief and remorse, by terrifying memories and lost chances. Each renewed my anger toward Parrish, but also made me aware of how much I feared him. When I said good-bye to the Burdens and walked back out to the van, I was a little unsteady on my feet, and hoped Jack wouldn’t notice.

I found him cleaning out the van’s refrigerator.

“The secret life of millionaires,” I said.

He took one look at my face and put an arm around my shoulders.

“Sorry to make you wait out here so long,” I said, when I could talk. “You must wish you hadn’t agreed to do this.”

“Tough assignment, huh?”

I wasn’t ready to talk about it, so I changed the subject. “What possessed you to start cleaning the refrigerator?”

He wrinkled his nose. “There’s some kind of weird smell in the van.”

My eyes widened. “You smell it, too?”

“Not very strong, and not all the time, but yeah — something strange. I don’t mind it much, but . . . hey, why are you crying?”

So I told him about smelling bones after my visit to the map store. That led to telling him about imagining that I was seeing Parrish. “Christ, I’ve even made up a car for him to ride around in!”

He handed me a packet of Kleenex. I used every last one of them. When I had calmed down a little, he said, “Have you told Frank?”

I shook my head. “He worries enough as it is. He doesn’t need to walk around wondering if the bughouse will take Visa.”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re crazy.”

I didn’t reply.

“What do bones smell like?” he asked.

“Sort of a subtle, dry, sweet smell. I can only smell it if the bones are what Ben calls ‘greasy.’ ”

“You know about it from the burials up in the mountains?”

“No. Those weren’t just skeletons — there was adipocere and other tissue, and a really overpowering smell of decay. But I’ve visited Ben at his lab at the university on a day when they were working with bones.”

“I’ve been smelling something that’s kind of a sweet, waxy smell. Do bones smell like that?”

“Could be described that way, I guess.”

“So let’s search the van.”

I hesitated, looking back at the Burdens’ house. “Let’s drive away from here to do it, okay? I don’t want to upset them if we do find something.”

He climbed into the driver’s seat, a big grin on his face. When I took the passenger seat, I asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Not funny — just pleased that I’ve finally convinced you that this could be a product of something other than your imagination, or you wouldn’t want to move down the street.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I warned. I looked in the mirror on the visor. The most horrifying thing in that van had to be my face — eyes swollen and nose a lá Rudolph. Still looking in the mirror, I opened the glove compartment and reached for my sunglasses.

My hand went into a pile of small objects before the smell hit me.

I screamed.

Jack slammed on the brakes.

Little bones spilled out of the glove compartment, onto my skirt, my feet, everywhere.

44

WEDNESDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 13

Las Piernas

“The glove compartment,” I said. “I should have known.”

I was at home, sitting on the couch, being held by my husband. He was stroking my hair. Maybe I wouldn’t go back to work, I thought. Maybe I’d just stay home and sleep and wait for Frank to come home and stroke my hair. I sighed. Not likely.

I had opened the van door and leapt out into the street, a shower of small, straight bones falling all around me. After he managed to calm my hysterics a bit, Jack had used his cellular phone to call Frank.

The van was impounded to collect the fingerprints Nick Parrish blatantly left in it, and also to collect the remaining small bones of Jane Doe’s toes and fingers.

Ben showed up at the police department, with Jo Robinson in tow. I don’t know who had called him, but he had called Jo. My resentment didn’t last long.

I ended up talking to her about vanishing Parrishes, and I learned that people who had been attacked often had this experience of “seeing” their attacker, especially in times of stress or in public places.

When I was no longer shaking, she set up an appointment with me for the next day. For the first time, I looked forward to it.

The police checked out records of stolen dark green Honda Accords, hoping to establish Jane Doe’s identity.

When Frank couldn’t leave right away, Ben agreed to take Jack and me home.

Wondering how I was going to break the news about the van to Travis, I asked Ben why it should take so long to collect ten fingers and ten toes. “Ten? On each foot, it takes fourteen phalanges to make toes — and just the toes, mind you, not the whole foot. On each hand, fourteen to make fingers. That’s fifty-six bones if we find them in whole pieces.”

Trying to tease me into a better mood, Ben noted that he himself was able to get by with forty-two, which did indeed snap me out of thinking about the little bones of Jane Doe’s fingers, wondering what work those fingers might have done, and if they had ever stroked a cat or touched a lover or held something as fragile as they were.

On Ben’s behalf and hers, I let my anger toward Nick Parrish burn away a little more of my fear of him.

But as the evening wore on, even anger gave way to weariness. I was asleep when Frank came home, but woke up to talk to him while he made a late dinner for himself. Afterward, we spent time curled up on the couch.

“You know you can talk to me,” he said, “Yes.”

“Sorry. No more reprimands.”

“I deserve a reprimand for that.”

“No,” he said, pulling me closer. “No.”

In another regard altogether, it actually ended up being yes.

We did sleep then, a solid, deep, and renewing sleep that lasted through the night.

“You’re looking well today,” Jo Robinson said.

“Slept better,” I said, detecting a certain knowing quality in her smile.

At the end of this session, she said, “Your visits to the families of the men who were killed seem to have gone well. Better than you expected?”

“Much better.”

“Have you tried calling Officer Houghton?”

“Jim Houghton is the one survivor I can’t seem to track down. He quit police work altogether, and moved out of state. But a friend of mine who’s an investigator is going to try to find him.”

“You’ve made a good effort. I hope it works out. In the meantime, though, perhaps you should try to talk to the Sayres again.”

I won a struggle with an impulse to object. “Will you let me go back to work if I do?”

“Hmm. You want to make a deal, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, doesn’t work that way.”

I studied my hands.

“However,” she said, “aside from any deal you have in mind, I was going to suggest a gradual return to work.”

“Gradual? What does that mean?”

“Part-time.”

“I’m not sure the Express will go for that.”

“Leave that to me. Between now and next time, I want you to think about Parzival.”

“Parzival?”

“Yes. Why do you suppose you chose the story of Parzival?”

“Ben asked for that one. I’d been telling it in installments.”

“No, I meant, why did you choose it the first time?”

“In the mountains?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Because I had I read it recently, I suppose.”

She waited, but this time she waited in vain.

“Give it some thought,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, standing up.

“Not so fast — about the Sayres . . .”

I tried calling Gillian first, since she had been trying to contact me, but she hadn’t left a number when she talked to Frank, and the one I had for her was disconnected. I didn’t have any luck with the boutique she had worked in, either.

“The media, man,” the owner said.

“The media?”

“Yeah, she didn’t come into work after all those dudes got whacked in the mountains — you know, the guys that were looking for her old lady? So finally she calls me and says she ain’t comin’ in and she’s gonna look for new digs, ’cause the media is, you know, making her crazy. They were always tryin’ to interview her and shit, you know?”

Yeah, I knew.

I called Mark Baker at the Express and asked him if he had been in contact with the Sayre family since Julia’s body had been brought back.

“I saw Gillian once, a couple of weeks later,” Mark said. “I had asked the owner of that shop she worked in to tip me off if she called to say she was coming in for her final paycheck. I wasn’t the only one waiting — the guy must have called half the press in the area, hoping to get free publicity, I guess. She met all the reporters outside, said that she wished we’d look for Nick Parrish as hard as we had looked for her. And that was it.”

Despite my pointing out my recent poor track record with vehicles, Ben loaned me his Jeep Cherokee, saying he would use David’s pickup truck in the meantime. Jack did the driving. We nearly drove past the Sayres’ large home — it used to be gray and white; it had been painted peach since the last time I had seen it.

I thought back; that had been just after Gillian had told me that Nick Parrish had lived on this street. I had spent a fruitless day interviewing neighbors — either they said he was pleasant but kept to himself, or they said they had always thought he was an odd duck. No one in this latter group could say why — leading me to believe that they had been influenced by what they had already read about him. No one in the neighborhood had any real insight into Nick Parrish, or could say where he had lived next, or what had become of his sister.

During the first year after Julia disappeared, the Sayres and I had seen one another fairly often. I had met Jason, and Giles’s mother, a woman who was clearly not prepared to cope with a rebellious teenager like Gillian. I was shocked to realize that although I had spoken to Gillian in person on any number of occasions since then, and had seen her father a few times as well, I had never again talked to her brother or grandmother.

Months earlier, when Parrish had first made his offer to lead police to Julia Sayre’s grave, I visited Giles at the company he owned. The moment I had arrived, he said, “He’s told them where to find Julia, hasn’t he?”

In the privacy of his office, I told him what I knew. He took it calmly, but asked, “Is there a chance he might be lying? A chance that it isn’t her?”

Yes, of course there was, I said, having seen this sort of denial before. He asked me to keep him informed.

“Have you told Gillian?” he asked.

Dismayed, I said, “No, I thought I’d leave that to her father.”

He fidgeted.

“She told me Parrish used to live on your street,” I said.

“Did she?” he said absently. “I don’t know. I never have kept track of the neighbors. The police did ask about it. I suppose that’s how they were able to bring pressure on him.”

“Did Parrish know Julia?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, frowning.

“She never complained to you about someone staring at her?”

“Perhaps she did,” he said vaguely. “Listen, Gilly doesn’t have much to do with us these days. I think she’d rather hear this news from you.”

Reluctantly, I agreed to be the one to tell her.

But Gillian, in her usual manner, had revealed nothing of her feelings to me. She simply said, “Have you told my dad yet?”

I told her I had.

“He doesn’t like to deal with anything unpleasant. Was he the one who asked you to tell me?”

“Yes.”

She smiled, not at all cheerfully, but in the tight-lipped way a person smiles if she’s right about something she doesn’t want to be right about.

“You’ll go with them, won’t you?” she asked. “To find out if this woman in the grave is my mother?”

In one minute flat, she had broken down the resistance that neither the D.A. nor my bosses had been able to breach.

I rang the doorbell of the Sayres’ house. To my surprise, it now played “Dixie.” I heard someone scampering down the stairs, shouting, “I’ll get it!”

Jason pulled the door open, seemed taken aback, then looked sullen. His hair was now cut fairly short and dyed a mix of black and blond. He was wearing a long, loose T-shirt and very baggy pants. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Jason, honey?” a voice called from upstairs. A voice too young to be his grandmother’s.

Jason rolled his eyes. He was thirteen now, and much taller.

He seemed to make a sudden decision, quickly shut the door behind himself and said to me, “Let’s go.”

“Go where?” I asked, startled.

“Just go!” he insisted in his half-man, half-boy voice. He started moving off the front porch. “That your Jeep?”

“The one I’m using, but—”

He came to a halt when he saw Jack sitting in the driver’s seat. “Who’s that?”

“A friend of mine.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Looks kind of old, but cool,” he said, starting to move toward the jeep again.

“It’s all relative,” I said. “The age part, I mean. Look, Jason—”

“Jason!” a voice screeched from an upstairs window.

“Oh, shit!” he said, glancing back at the house, then running toward the Jeep.

“Who is that?” I asked, running to keep up.

“Jason!” the voice screeched again.

He yanked the back passenger door open and jumped into the Jeep. “Dude!” he said to Jack. “Get me out of here!”

“Don’t even turn the key, Jack,” I said. “We are not going anywhere until he tells me who the banshee is.”

“What’s a banshee?” Jason asked.

“I’ll explain that as soon as you tell me who this is that’s coming out the front door of the house,” I said, indicating a stylishly dressed, thin blond woman in her mid-fifties, whose noticeable efforts to turn back the hands of time hadn’t even bent its pinky.

“That,” Jason said grimly, “is Mrs. Sayre.”

45

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 14

Las Piernas

“Jason, are you trying to kill your father?” the new Mrs. Sayre called out.

Jason’s back went rigid.

Not noticing, she went on. “Do you know what he’d say if he knew you were getting into a Jeep with total strangers?” She stood back a little from us, eyeing Jack’s scarred face, leather outfit, earring, and tattoos with disapproval.

“They aren’t strangers,” Jason protested. “This is Irene Kelly, from the newspaper.”

“And what did he tell you about talking to reporters?” she asked. “Get out of that Jeep this instant! When your daddy gets home, you are going to get your smart little behind whipped!”

He reached toward his rear pocket, not to shield it, but to remove a slim black object. He flicked his wrist, and I saw that the object was a cell phone. A thirteen-year-old kid with a cell phone — in the Sayres’ upscale neighborhood, I supposed every kid who was old enough to read a keypad had one.

“We’ll see what my dad says,” Jason said, and pushed a button.

“Yes, we will!” his stepmother said, sure of her ground.

“Hi, it’s Jason,” he said into the phone. “May I please speak to my dad?”

“More manners when you’re talking to his secretary, I see,” Mrs. Sayre complained.

“You should know,” he sneered, causing her to turn red. In a more pleasant tone he said into the phone, “Hi, Dad, it’s Jason. Ms. Kelly came over to talk to me and You-Know-Who is causing problems.”

He looked toward me as he listened, his expression apprehensive, and then he smiled. He extended the phone toward his stepmother, who snatched it out of his hand.

“Giles, if you are going to undermine my authority with the boy every time I turn around—” She fell silent, and watched me. “And how on earth was I to know that? I see two strangers luring your son into a car, one of them looking like a Hell’s Angel—”

She listened again, her expression darkening. She held the phone away from her ear while Giles was still talking, and pushed the off button. She snapped the phone shut, tossed it none too carefully to Jason, who made a fumbling catch.

“Mrs. Sayre—” I said, the name sounding strange to me, but she had already pivoted on her heel and marched back toward the porch.

At the door, she turned and called out, “If you do plan to kidnap him, please don’t bother to send a ransom note.” She slammed the door shut.

“Now can we go?” Jason said.

“Jack Fremont, meet my impatient friend, Jason Sayre.”

“Hi — can we go?”

“Just where is it you’re so anxious to get to?” Jack asked.

“Anywhere! Just get me away from her,” he said.

Jack smiled at me and said, “Better get in, Irene. Buckle up, Jason.”

Jason leaned back with a sigh when we finally pulled away from the curb.

“The park okay?” Jack asked.

“Sure,” I said, then turned to Jason. “Is that all right with you?”

“Finally,” he said dramatically, “someone asks me what I want!”

“Well?”

“Yeah, I like the park.”

“When did your dad get married?” I asked.

“To Susan?”

“Is that your stepmother’s name?”

He nodded. “She wants everybody to call her Dixie, but that’s a crock — she isn’t even from the South. She’s lived with us since Gilly moved out. My dad was at her place before that.”

“So she’s not your father’s wife?”

“She is now. They got married just after you found my mother.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking away from me, down at his hands. “The day you came and told him about that killer, he called Susan up and told her it looked like they could finally get married.”

Dumbstruck, I looked over at Jack. He kept glancing in the rearview mirror, not at traffic, but at Jason.

“As long as they couldn’t find my mother, he had to wait seven years,” Jason went on, kicking out his feet as if straightening his legs, but the look on his face said he wished his Timberlands were connecting with someone.

“Oh,” I said, understanding dawning. “Because legally, your mother had not been declared dead?”

“Right. Susan thought my dad could have made the courts hurry it up, but Dad said it would be really bad for his business because people would be mad at him — because you had written all those stories and everything. So he had to wait to get his little hottie. Wait to get married to her, anyway. She wanted him to marry her the day after they said the body was my mom’s. He made her wait a week.”

“She used to be his secretary?” I asked, remembering the comment that had made her blush.

“Yeah.”

We stopped at a corner market and bought some fresh fruit and a soda for Jason, bottled water for Jack and me. We drove to the large park that forms part of the eastern border of the city, found a shady spot, and began an impromptu picnic. Jason’s cell phone rang; he spoke briefly to a friend and hung up.

“I guess it beats two tin cans and a wire,” Jack said.

I laughed, but Jason asked what we were talking about, so we explained a little something about the olden days.

“And that really works?” he asked.

“We’ll set up a demonstration a little later,” Jack said.

He picked at the grass, then without looking up, said, “Did you find out something more about my mom?”

“Oh — no, I’m sorry. That’s not why I stopped by to see you.”

“It’s not?”

“No. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Oh.”

When he didn’t say anything more, I added, “I also wanted to apologize for not coming by sooner.”

He shrugged, frowned down at the piece of grass he was pulling on. “Why should you? You never even knew her.”

“But I know your family.”

He leveled a flat, cynical gaze at me. “Do you?”

I thought of today’s revelations. “Not very well, perhaps — but enough to know that what happened to your mom has been hard on everyone in the family.”

He laughed. “Hard on everyone? No way. I’m the only one who really loved her.”

“I don’t think that’s true—”

“Who then? My dad? Oh, pul-eeeze. He was getting it on with old Suze. He probably thinks my mom’s murder was the best thing that could have happened.”

“Jason, I’ve seen—”

“His tears? He’s a phony. And you know who’s a bigger phony? Gilly. Learned it from him — only she’s even better at it than he is. She even fooled you. She hated my mom. Hated her.” He shook his head. “They hated each other.”

“When she first met me, Gillian admitted that she had trouble with your mom, that there were arguments.”

“Trouble? Arguments?” he said angrily. “You think it was all some teenage thing?”

It had seemed exactly that way to me, and to everyone I had talked to at the time Julia Sayre disappeared.

“So why did Gillian hate her?” Jack asked.

“How should I know?” he said, but with less hostility than he had shown me. “She’s cold. She doesn’t care about anybody or anything.”

“For four years,” I said, “Gillian has been the one to call me, to ask if there has been any news of your mother. In that time, other people have gone missing, but no one took the trouble your sister took to find the person she loved.”

“Don’t say ‘loved,’ ” he snapped. “She didn’t love my mother. She hated her. She was mean to me. She’s mean to everyone. She’s a user. She even used you, and now you’re talking to me like that was something good. She just wanted attention. You gave it to her.”

“When’s the last time you talked to her?” I asked.

“Years ago. She moved out a long time ago.”

“Do you miss her?”

“No.”

“She hasn’t been back to visit you since she moved out?”

“No. It doesn’t matter. She’s still weird. I see her every now and then — I mean, you know, see her when she’s hanging out in different places. I saw her here once,” he said, vaguely pointing toward another part of the park. “Didn’t even say hello to me. Which is fine,” he added quickly. “I don’t want her to come anywhere near me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t realize that you were so angry with her. Or with me.”

And everyone else on the planet, I thought. But he said, “I’m not mad at you. Gilly fools people all the time. So does my dad.” He sighed. “I wish I didn’t live in Las Piernas.”

“Why not?”

“Everybody knows what happened to my mom. Kids at school, it’s like, the only thing they know about me. They either want to ask me about it — like, if it’s true my mom’s finger was cut off, shit like that — or they’re all freaked out about it. I can’t just be a normal person.”

“They’ve acted like that for four years?” Jack asked.

“No,” he acknowledged. “Just when it first happened. And now.”

“So they might get over this?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Maybe they’re just scared that the same thing might happen to their moms,” Jack said.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I still hate living here.”

“Where would you like to live?” I asked.

“With Grandma,” he said. “I miss her. I wish I could go live with her.”

“Have you asked your dad if you could?” I asked.

“He says he would miss me too much. I think he’s just worried about what people will think.”

“Do you remember when Nick Parrish lived in the neighborhood?”

He shook his head. “I was little when he moved. Gilly remembers him. I think she used to go over there to see the lady or something.”

“The lady? His sister?”

“Yeah.” He hesitated, then said, “I knew it was Nick Parrish a long time ago. Before the cops knew.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t know his name,” Jason said, “but I had seen him.”

“When?”

“Before my mom was killed. He was staring at our house one time when Gilly was baby-sitting. I was kind of little then, too — well, a third-grader, is all — but it scared me.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“I told Gilly. She went out and looked for him. But by then there wasn’t anybody there.”

“You didn’t tell the police?”

“I didn’t get too good a look at him,” he admitted.

“What did you see?”

“I just saw this man in a car. But later, I figured it out — you know, when Gilly remembered he used to live on our street. It was too late,” he said sadly. “Besides, who’s going to believe a kid? It’s like Gilly said, no one would take a kid seriously.”

He reached into the bag of fruit and picked out an orange. He studied it in his hand, then hurled it hard against a tree trunk, where it landed with a pulpy thunk, then managed to cling to the tree for a few seconds before dropping to the ground. When I turned to look at Jason in surprise, he ducked his head, but not before I saw that his face was twisted up — in anger, but not anger alone.

“The other day, I threw something hard like that,” I said. “I thought it would make me feel better, but it didn’t, really.”

“What did you throw?” he asked, talking to his ankles.

“A computer monitor.”

He looked up, eyes damp but wide. “Get out!” he said admiringly. “A computer monitor?”

“Yes. Really stupid thing to do. Someone could have been seriously injured by what I did. I ended up feeling worse than I did before I threw it.”

“So why did you throw it?”

“I was angry. Angry and blaming myself for things that had gone wrong, I suppose.”

“Things that were your fault?”

“Some of them. Some were things that I really could have changed, could have done better. But a lot of it probably would have turned out the same way no matter what.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for example, I thought I should have figured out what Nick Parrish had planned up in the mountains.”

“How could you? Even the cops didn’t know. A bunch of them died.”

“Yes, and maybe that was my fault, because I suspected Nick Parrish of being up to no good. Sort of like you suspected the guy in the car of being up to no good.”

“But maybe if I had told my dad instead of Gilly . . .”

“Was your dad home?”

“No.”

“So maybe the man in the car would have been gone by the time your dad got home. Even if your dad had called the police that night, they would have said, ‘Is the man in the car doing anything?’ and if your dad said, ‘No,’ that would have been that. Maybe it wasn’t even Parrish out there that night.”

“Maybe,” he said, without conviction.

“It troubles you anyway, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“I kept hoping that the thoughts that were troubling me would just go away. They didn’t. So now I’m trying to talk about them a little more. It’s hard.”

“Really hard,” he said, looking back at his shoes.

“Who do you talk to when you’re upset?”

He didn’t answer for a long time, but he finally said, “My grandmother, sometimes.”

“Maybe you should call her a little more often. Maybe talk to your dad about visiting her for a while.”

“Okay.”

We picked up our trash — including the smashed orange — and left the park. Before taking him home, Jack stopped at a hardware store to buy a length of wire. Next he drove us to an Italian restaurant where he was apparently well known. Although the dining room was empty at this late afternoon hour, we were welcomed back into the kitchen, where Jack talked the busy cook into giving him the other essentials for a tin can telephone. The cook even washed out the cans, and added supervision to Jason’s efforts to assemble the parts.

When it was finished, the cook urged Jason to take one end into the dining room while he held the other end in the kitchen. What they whispered back and forth, I’ll never know, but it caused a great deal of amusement on both sides.

With some difficulty, and only with promises to return soon, were we able to leave without eating a meal. Jason was quiet on the way home, and when we pulled up in front of the house, he said, “Don’t tell Gilly what I said about her, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, relieved to see some sign of brotherly affection in him after all.

Jack told him that he’d ask Giles if Jason could go with him to the Italian restaurant some time.

“That would be fun,” he said, but he seemed subdued, perhaps not believing Jack would follow through.

He thanked us and said good-bye, taking the tin can phone with him. As he walked into the house, I saw him speaking into one end, while holding the other to his ear, absorbed in some private conversation with himself.

46

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 15

Las Piernas

Nicholas Parrish surveyed his new workroom with pride. A vast improvement over the last one.

Again, he had to give his little Moth credit. His Moth had seen that he was hampered in his work, and had suggested this alternative. This was infinitely more suitable to his needs. The workbench was larger, there was a sink nearby, and even — to his delight — a freezer.

The dwelling itself was more comfortable than his last, but that was of little matter to him. He was not a soft man, after all. Like any other artist, he was most concerned with the space in which he would do his creative work. He had spent several days getting this place shaped up to his satisfaction — emptying the freezer of its previous contents and so on — and now — voilà! Perhaps it was not a studio worthy of his masterpieces — Alas, could there ever be such a place? — but he would be able to carry on very well here.

He could not help feeling a sense of pride in the way things were going lately. Irene was actually seeing a shrink! Obviously, he had her on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Delightful! What good were shrinks when one’s terrors were real? She was terrified, all right! Just as he had promised.

Witness the woman’s reaction to those bones! It made him wish he had stayed around to see what had happened when she got the roses.

He frowned, remembering Jack Fremont’s arm around her. She was too free with her favors, to say the least. The woman was a real whore. Ben Sheridan, Jack Fremont, and God knows who else. Probably her own cousin.

He sat musing over what he might have to do in order to purify her of such defilement.

He stopped himself before the richness of those imaginings caused him to become overly excited. There was a great deal of work to do.

He studied his maps, mentally going over the routes he had already driven, considered once more all the possible hazards along the way.

He changed the plates on the Honda, and chose a blond wig for today’s disguise. He had already called the newspaper, had already filled out the vacation hold form for the post office. The tools he would need for the first phase of his work were already in the trunk of the car.

He looked again at the small piece of paper the Moth had given him and felt a frisson. How had this information been obtained? The Moth was up to something. He did not believe the story the Moth had given him about this.

He disliked having to expend energy thinking about the Moth, especially at a time like this. He must stay focused.

He looked again at the markings on his map. Most were in blue. His eye was drawn to the single red mark.

He knew its exact address: 600 Broadway.

The Wrigley Building.

Home of the Express.

47

SUNDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 17

Las Piernas

I hesitated outside the front door of the Wrigley Building. The arrangements Jo Robinson had made were not even close to what I had in mind when I had asked for a “return to work,” and my pride was smarting. I knew Frank was watching from the Volvo, waiting to make sure I got safely inside. For a good ten minutes or so, I seriously contemplated going back to the car and asking him to drive me straight back home. Then I’d get Jo Robinson and Wrigley on a conference call, and tell them both to shove it.

Wrigley gave me twenty hours back at the paper, all right. He scheduled me to work a part-time graveyard shift, from ten at night until two in the morning on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday — after deadline. To add a little additional punishment, I was also scheduled to work Saturday and Sunday from seven to eleven in the morning. That meant that on Friday nights, I had exactly five hours off before I’d have to report the next morning.

John gave me less than forty-eight hours of warning, saying my first shift was going to be the next Sunday morning. “I guess Wrigley assumes I have no plans?” I said. “That I’m just sitting here waiting for him to invite me to take complaint calls at the Express?”

“Do you have plans?” John asked.

“Yes, but not until later on Sunday,” I admitted.

A phone call to Giles’s office had finally resulted in getting Gillian’s new number — his secretary had to find it for me — and Gillian had agreed to meet me on Sunday afternoon. Gillian was working as a waitress now, at a small café that served breakfast and lunch. “Just part-time,” she had said. “I’m off after two o’clock.”

“So you can come in?” John asked me.

“Yes, I’ll be there. I guess he’s determined to make me grovel.”

“I don’t like it, either, Kelly, but up until now, the fight has been to keep him from firing you. It’s going to take some pressure from the board to get him to ease off on the hours. You know I’m doing whatever I can for you.”

Knowing that John and others were making efforts on my behalf made me decide to go ahead and push the front door open that Sunday morning.

The building was all but empty, which, I decided, was not so bad. I didn’t look forward to facing everyone who had seen me go haywire.

I could hear the phones ringing before I reached the top of the stairs. You work a Sunday morning, you listen to people bitch. They don’t check to see which number is the one for circulation, which one for the city desk. So they dial whichever number they see first, and whoever sits in the newsroom takes complaint calls.

The calls were being picked up on the second or third ring though, and soon I heard voices. So I wouldn’t be alone after all.

I stepped into the newsroom to see Mark Baker and Lydia Ames answering phones. I was puzzled. Neither of them should have been working that morning. Lydia waved me to a seat next to her.

Another line rang. I answered a call from a man who claimed that the guy who delivered his paper that morning had tossed it into a mud puddle. The man went on at length, never seeming to need to come up for air; the only thing making it bearable was watching Lydia and Mark comically gesturing and rolling their eyes as they each answered another call.

I finally managed to end the call with Mr. Mud Puddle just as Stuart Angert entered the room with a box of breakfast rolls and four cups of hot coffee.

“Welcome back!” he said.

“Thanks, but what are the three of you doing here at this ungodly hour on the Lord’s day?” I asked.

“John told us what Wrigley was pulling,” Mark said, “so we decided to change a few schedules of our own — with John’s approval, of course.”

“We didn’t want to miss your first day back,” Lydia said.

“You shouldn’t be sticking your necks out for me like this,” I said. “What if Wrigley decides to stop by?”

“He won’t show up,” Mark said. “He’s scared to death of you.”

Another round of calls came in. By nine o’clock they had slowed enough to allow us to talk to one another for more than two minutes at a time. I apologized to Stuart for wrecking his monitor.

“Feel free to use any of my other desk equipment the next time you want to launch a missile,” he said. “I love the new computer monitor. Everybody’s jealous of me.”

“No, we’re jealous of Irene. We’d all like to know how it feels to throw something at Wrigley,” Lydia said.

“Not as wonderful as you’d think,” I said.

This led to some all-too-serious “How are you really?” talk. I was evasive. They got the hint, and acting against journalistic instinct, let up.