Guilt

CHAPTER 15

Milo cursed. “Geniuses. They give a witness info then let her leave the scene before I have a chance to talk to her.”

“It could work in your favor,” I said. “Hard to keep secrets with that level of professionalism, so Maxine Cleveland’s squeeze play may be exposed. You ever touch base with that reporter?”

“We keep missing each other, wink wink. Meanwhile, no one’s reported my vic missing.”

“Maybe she hasn’t been gone long enough.”

“Always the optimist,” he said. “The prelim from the coroner just came in. She’s had good dental care, maybe orthodontia. Her blood’s clean, no booze, drugs, or disease, and her body’s free of needle marks, scars, iffy tattoos, or any other sign of a rough life. Dr. Rosenblatt said she looked like someone who shouldn’t have ended up on his table. And yeah, I know that’s politically incorrect but truth is truth, right?” He pounded his hand with his fist. “Someone has to be looking for her.”

He gulped a big chunk out of the egg bagel I’d just turned down. A bag that had once held a dozen mixed leaned against his computer. The crumbs of the jalapeno and the onion that he’d finished littered his desktop. “In terms of LeMasters, it’s all I can do not to call her and leak but when the air turns brown and the fan gets filthy, you know who the brass will be chasing down.”

“Want me to call her?”

“Oh, yeah, that would be subtle. So little Heather and her girlfriend got spooked by a dark SUV-not a Porsche-no info on the tags, no view of the driver. That narrows it to half the vehicles on the Westside.”

“Even without more info, it’s interesting, no?”

“Somebody casing the park? Hell, yeah.”

The egg bagel disappeared down his gullet. He washed it down with cold coffee from the big detective room. We were in his office, the tiny space humid from poor ventilation and discouragement. I’d arrived just before noon, honoring his early-morning request for a “sit-down.” He’d sounded anxious. I’d been there for a quarter hour, still had no idea exactly what he wanted.

He brushed crumbs into his wastebasket. “One pass by the SUV might not mean much but coming back a second time’s a bit more ominous. But ominous doesn’t mean it’s connected to my murders, there are all kinds of night-crawlers out at that hour. And showing himself that openly doesn’t fit an offender who picks up his casings, leaves nothing serious behind.”

“Or he used a revolver and got lucky.”

“Hey,” he said, “you’re supposed to see the good in everyone. Yeah, that’s possible but the overall picture’s organized, you said so yourself. Someone like that’s planning a shoot-and-dump, he’s gonna advertise his presence the night before to a coupla jumpy girls?”

“True,” I said.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Agree so readily. It scares me.”

“Keep living, you’ll have plenty of opportunity for terror.”

He grinned, stretched, pushed lank black hair off his mottled forehead, sank as low as the chair would allow. “This guy’s an exhibitionist, right? Showing off his work, look how clever I am. Having a grand old time.”

“He could be bragging,” I said. “Or his message is something not so obvious. Specific to his mode of thinking.”

“He’s crazy?”

“Not to the point where he can’t function, but his mind’s probably a scary place. Whatever his motive, it’s personal.”

“Woman and child, a family thing? Yeah, I know we talked about that but I’m having my doubts, Alex. I just can’t see a father processing his own kid’s bones then strewing them like garbage. Speaking of which, Liz Wilkinson called me just before you got here, totally beating herself up. Apparently, there’s a technique for cleaning bones that she missed.”

He pulled two sheets of paper out of his printer. One contained a pair of split-frame photos: on the left, half a dozen small, glossy, hard-shelled brown insects, to the right a single, spiky, caterpillar-type creature.

The second sheet was an order blank for “high-grade, mite-free dermestid beetles” from a lab supply company in Chicago.

I said, “Flesh-eating bugs?”

“Flesh, hair, wool carpeting, any sort of animal matter, wet, dry, or in between. Not bone and teeth, because the little buggers’ jaws can’t handle anything that hard, but anything short of that. The adults like to snack, but it’s the larvae-the ones with the whiskers-that are the serious gourmets. Set ’em loose and they can munch a bear skull sparkling clean within twenty-four hours, inflict no damage on the skeleton. Which is exactly why taxidermists and museums and scientists use ’em to spruce up specimens. Liz called it anthro for dummies, said two babies in a row probably clouded her judgment.”

He swung his feet onto the desk. “Does the use of creepy-crawlies spark any ideas?”

I said, “Set the beetles, then wax and buff? It’s starting to sound ritualistic.”

“Beetles and beeswax,” he said. “Maybe I should be looking for a deranged entomologist.”

“Or one of those guys who like to mount heads over the mantel. Her I.D. was missing, same for jewelry, if she was wearing any.”

“Trophy-taking.”

“Maybe not in the sense of a sexual sadist evoking a memory,” I said. “If that was his aim, he’d have held on to at least some of the bones. Family or not, this one’s rooted in intimacy and specific to these victims. Can purchasers of the beetles be traced?”

“If only,” he said. “They’re legal and not protected like toxic chemicals so anyone can buy them. No way could I get a subpoena that broad.”

“You could narrow the search,” I said.

“How?”

“Order your two geniuses not to leak the information then sit back as the tips pour in.”

He started with laughter, ended with a coughing fit. When he recovered, he said, “How do you see the first bones fitting in, if at all?”

“Reading about them could have been the trigger that got our bad guy to dump his bones nearby.”

“And shoot and dump the woman the same night. What, he got a message from God? Time to take out the garbage?”

“Or hearing about the first bones jelled things for him,” I said. “Maybe he’d been holding on to them, trying to achieve mastery by transforming them. That didn’t work. Or it did. Either way, he had no further use for them.”

“I still can’t get past a father doing that to his own kid.”

“We could be dealing with a stepfather or a boyfriend. Maybe even someone who thought the baby was his until he learned differently and grew enraged. Infanticide’s not that rare among primates and that includes us. One of the most frequent motives is eliminating another male’s offspring. Our offender may have believed that getting rid of the baby would solve his problems, he’d be able to forgive her, move on. That didn’t happen so he got rid of her, too. Flaunted both victims as a final flourish: Now I’m the master of my own destiny. And by leaving the bodies in proximity he made sure they were connected: This is what she did, this is why she died.”

“So why not leave her right next to the bones?”

“Don’t know,” I said.

“Guess.”

“By placing his kills at opposite ends of the park he could’ve been symbolically laying claim to the entire area. Or I’m over-interpreting and it was a simple matter of expediency: He got distracted or alarmed by someone.”

“You guess pretty fast.”

“Used to get into trouble in school for that.”

“Thought you were Mr. Straight A.”

“That annoyed the teachers even more.”

This time he produced a complete laugh. “A stepdad, yeah, I like that. But holding on to the bones and fooling with them, you see Mommy going along with that?”

“Who says Mommy knew?”

“She has a baby one day, next day it’s gone?”

“What if he forced her to give it up for adoption? As a condition of staying together. Told her he’d handle it and took care of business in a horrible way. Even if she suspected, she could’ve been too passive or guilty or frightened to do anything about it. Back when I worked at the hospital I can’t tell you how many cases I saw where mothers stood by as stepfathers and boyfriends did terrible things to their children, including torture and murder. Any word on the DNA?”

“Maria Thomas emailed an hour ago, wanting me to know she got it prioritized. Like I’m supposed to feel grateful for her allowing me to do my job. Looks like under a week for basic analyses but fancy stuff will take longer.”

He took out a cold cigar, propped it between his index fingers. “You ever feel you’ve had enough of the garbage I send your way?”

“Nah, keeps life interesting.”

“Does it?”

“Why the question?”

“Just wondering.” He got up, opened the office door, stood gazing out to the corridor, his back to me. “What about Robin? She’s okay with it?”

All these years, first time he’d asked.

“Robin’s fine.”

“And the pooch?”

“Perfectly content. So are the fish. What’s going on, Big Guy?”

Long silence.

Then: “What you did for me … I’m not gonna forget it.”

That sounded more like complaint than gratitude.

I said, “Let’s not forget the times you saved my bacon.”

“Ancient history.”

“Everything ends up as history.”

“Then we die.”

“That, too.”

We both laughed. For lack of anything else.