Night Moves

Chapter 52

Even with Trisha Bowker’s hand-drawn map, it took a while.

After two days of searching, Jacqueline Mearsheim’s partial skeleton was found under four feet of rich agricultural soil in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara. Private land, the failed vineyard of a music industry honcho who’d long given up on Pinot Noir. Getting his permission had involved calling the Cayman Islands.

Per Bowker’s self-cleansing account, she and Mearsheim had visited a nearby winery during a weekend when Jackie languished in bed with the flu. Spotting the abandoned estate, Paul had made a mental note and returned months later at night with her body in the trunk of his car. Entering the estate by snipping barbed wire, then digging unmolested near a windbreak of blue-gum eucalyptus.

Unable to get Bowker to talk about additional victims, Milo called Sheila Braxton and gave her the basics.

She said, “Time to look at all the missings around here. How’s he doing?”

“Well as can be expected.”

“Give him my best, maybe I’ll come by to see him.”

Milo and I updated Cory Thurber, still hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai four days after his rescue. Rick Silverman had been off duty the night Cory was ambulanced to the E.R. but Milo’s call brought him in. He tended to the boy’s immediate health issues and called in a hand surgeon to see what could be done for Cory’s mangled fingers.

Milo said, “He’s a piano player.”

The surgeon said, “Fuck,” and walked away.

This morning, Cory was able to talk through cracked lips, his hand a bandaged mitt.

Milo introduced me.

“Someone thinks I’m crazy?”

Milo explained. Cory said, “Okay,” but he avoided looking at me.

“So,” said Milo. “Anything you feel like telling us?”

“What I told you yesterday,” said Cory. “She’s the one who did it.”

Milo said, “She hit you with the hammer.”

“She laughed while she was doing it,” said the boy. Amazed; as if reciting a weird factoid. “He taped me up and held me down but she hit me. She was laughing. He was a pussy. That’s why she killed him.”

“Because he was...”

“A total pussy,” said Cory Thurber. “She gave him the shotgun, told him to shoot me. He said, ‘Not again.’ She started yelling at him.”

His eyes shut. “After she hit me like two times, three, I passed out. When I woke I was...” Staring at the mitt.

When brown irises reappeared, I said, “What was she yelling about?”

“He had to shoot me. He was saying if it was so easy, she should do it, the last time made him sick. They must’ve gone into another room because the yelling got softer but it kept on. Then she said, ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’ Then there was this noise.”

“What kind of noise?”

“Something hitting the floor,” said Cory. “Like a person. Then it got quiet and she came in all covered with blood. I thought she was going to come in and shoot me but she didn’t have no gun. She kept saying, ‘Fuck.’ Then the door knocked and she left and she was talking to someone else.”

“That was us, Cory.”

“Good.” The boy’s eyelids fought gravity, lost.

He stayed asleep.