The Blessed Bones

by Kathryn Casey

  “I’ll get in touch if I find any possible matches in the files,” I whispered, my voice raspy and soft. Refusing to be quieted, my pulse pounded as I reached for the door.

  “Call me later, one way or the other,” Max said, eyes steady on mine. I had a hard time concentrating when he looked at me like that. “After eight thirty, Brooke will be in bed. You can fill me in on what you found out. After we talk about the case, maybe, for a little while, we can talk about us.”

  “Max, I…”

  Max’s expression turned serious. “Clara, I want your voice to be the last thing I hear tonight.”

  I took a deep breath. I couldn’t bring myself to admit it, but I wanted that, too. “Sure. Of course.”

  I stood with my hand on the open car door. Max watched me, and his eyes filled with such affection that if anyone had happened upon us, they would have instantly known our secret. I traced his familiar face with my eyes, considered the turn of his cheek and the slight dimple in his chin. But then the image of the Second Coming Ranch rushed through me, and I remembered that in a few minutes I would have to drive past it again as I returned to Alber. I flinched as the old man’s voice assaulted me, aged and harsh, cruel and terrifying.

  “Clara, are you okay?” Max asked, his brow creased with worry. “The way you’re looking at me, it’s as if I’ve frightened you. Did I say or do something wrong?”

  “No, of course not, it’s just…” This wasn’t the place, the time. He wouldn’t understand. I couldn’t explain. “I’ll call later. We’ll talk.”

  Nine

  The road to the construction site disappearing behind me, Stef came on my radio. “Chief, you there?”

  The sky was darkening, and I followed Max’s brake lights as we approached the turnoff on to the highway. I thought about highways in Dallas, where I’d trained as a cop: six, eight, a dozen lanes, some more, bordered by skyscrapers downtown, in the burbs, shopping centers, and outside the city gas stations and rest stops. In Smith County our highways were four lanes of asphalt with a stripe down the center, farmland on either side, cattle grazing and no need to pass because I hardly ever encountered another car.

  “I’m here, Stef. What’s up? Did you find Danny Benson?”

  We hit the intersection and Max took a left to Pine City, to head home for pizza with Brooke. I hung right. Up ahead, the Second Coming leered back at me. I briefly considered stopping. I wondered if my sister-wives had heard of my return last August. As isolated as Alber was, the ranch was even more insular. Rarely did the wives leave the compound. The children were all homeschooled through ninth grade. From the beginning I’d been an anomaly. My father had used his stature in the community to pressure my husband to allow me to go to college. It cost nothing, since I’d earned scholarships. My husband had grudgingly agreed. But later, when I got the teaching job in Alber, he’d confiscated all my paychecks, then told me that allowing me to get my degree had been his biggest error in judgment.

  “Women should be home, cooking, cleaning, working the ranch and having babies.” His sneer had exposed chipped, yellowed teeth. His rheumy eyes sank deep into their sockets, giving his head the outline of a skull.

  “Chief, here’s the deal,” Stef explained, bringing me back to the present. “I ran all the checks on Danny Benson. There’s no birth certificate for the kid. Maybe this is a sham? The kid doesn’t exist?”

  As I saw the Second Coming ahead, the headlights on a truck approached from the opposite direction. “Well, in Alber, that’s not unusual,” I explained, fighting to ignore the distractions and keep my focus on the phone call. Stef wasn’t from a polygamous community. Her family had moved to the area just a couple of years earlier, bought a goat ranch outside town in an auction. She lived there with her parents. She had one dad and one mom, which, for our area, was still fairly unusual. “Danny would have been delivered by a midwife, and they often don’t fill out paperwork. It’s entirely probable that he wouldn’t have a birth certificate, did you check—”

  “School records? Yup. Nothing there either.”

  “Could be that the Bensons homeschool, too.” I considered, not for the first time, how the secrecy of polygamous families made them so much harder to investigate. “Danny should be twenty now. Done with his studies by a long shot. If he’s working, then there’s the chance that he has a Social Security card. But some folks don’t get one. He could be working off the books, doing day labor or something, but it’s worth a shot. Or maybe he was forced out of Alber.”

  “A lost boy, like Chief Deputy Anderson?”

  “Yes, like Max,” I said. “I explained to you how the system works. How the church hierarchy forces out the boys they don’t want to keep. Makes their parents abandon them. Maybe that explains what happened to Danny.”

  “Well, that makes sense, but it’s going to be tough to find him then, right?”

  The pickup drew closer as I approached the Second Coming on my left. I took a deep breath. At the driveway into the ranch, the truck crawled to a near stop. Someone must have hit a button, because the wrought-iron gate slowly opened. My eyes were drawn to the truck’s cabin. Two men were inside. Even in the shadows, I recognized them both, and the sight of them sent a shiver through me, like jumping into a winter lake.

  “How do I find Danny if he’s a lost boy?” Stef asked.

  I kept my eyes on the truck, the men, and the driver glanced over at me. I couldn’t see him well in the dark, but I knew the outline of that face. Long ago, a terrible night had imprinted it on my memory. While my sister-wives led a sheltered life, the men in the family had always kept abreast of everything that happened in Alber. I had no doubt that they recognized me in my official car, the insignia on the side—how could they not?

  “Chief? You there?”

  “Yeah, Stef, sorry. Listen, find the sister. What’s her name? The one who signed the report.”

  “Lynlee?”

  “Yes, Lynlee. She should be in her late twenties now. Probably married. See if you can find her. Once you track her down, we can ask her about Danny. They may have kept in touch. She was protective of him at one point.”

  “Okay, got it,” Stef said. “You heading back to the station or calling it a day?”

  “On my way in. I have some research to do.”

  “See you then, Chief.”

  The phone cut out. Behind me the truck had entered the gate and in the rearview mirror I saw it heading toward the fortress-like ranch house. Later, I thought. Don’t think about them. Not now. You have work to do.

  I kept driving, slowed my breathing, whispered to myself that this too would pass. Then, ten minutes down the road, on another lonely stretch of highway, I saw the gas station with “BENSON’S BODY SHOP” on the sign. For a brief moment, I thought about Danny’s battered face in the photo out of the Tombs. Although it was growing late, Clyde’s car was still there and the “OPEN” sign was lit. I considered stopping and asking him about his son, demanding answers. But that wouldn’t help my investigation. So, I drove past. Before I questioned Clyde, I needed to know where the kid was. I needed to know what we were looking at, and whether we had any hope of moving forward. Sixteen years had passed since the report was taken and buried. Maybe I didn’t have a case at all.

  Coming up on seven, the police station’s lot was unusually full. I noticed a couple of squads parked in a far corner under a tree. One had Stef’s number on the back, the other Officer Bill Conroy’s. He was just starting his twelve hours on night shift, but he should have been out driving the town, patrolling, not hanging around the office. I didn’t see the night dispatcher’s ride—a beat-up VW bus—but Kellie’s car remained where it had been parked all day.

  Walking in the back door, I saw no one but heard voices, murmurs. I paused, then came around the corner slowly. A big kid in his twenties, Conroy had thin lips and a pallid complexion. Kellie stood behind him rubbing his shoulders, and Conroy was sitting in her chair, his head back, moaning softly in appreciatio
n. His sandy-brown hair was mussed. A light on the phone console blinked red.

  “Someone on hold?” I said, deadpan.

  Kellie jumped and brought her hand up to her chest so that it covered that sparkly heart on her shirt. “Oh, Chief, you frightened me.”

  “Yeah,” Conroy said. While Kellie looked surprised, my young officer flushed with embarrassment. Rightly so, I’d say. I had no issue with the two of them getting close, but not on my time.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be gone by now, Kellie?” I asked.

  “Gladys is running late,” she said. “One of her kids had a ball game, and her husband couldn’t take him.”

  “She’s been late a lot recently,” I said, and Kellie and Conroy didn’t comment. Our night dispatcher, Gladys Malcolm, had nine kids. When I hired her, she said her sister-wives—Gladys had quite a few of them—would pitch-hit at home. It rarely seemed to work that way.

  “When will Gladys be in?”

  “Pretty soon,” Kellie said.

  This time instead of just asking, I pointed at the phone with the blinking light. “Who’s on hold?”

  “Oh, gee, Chief. I was going to call you about her,” she said, “It’s—”

  Just then, the station’s door swung open and a woman shuffled inside.

  “It’s her on the phone,” Kellie said, her face blanching as if a poltergeist had floated through the door. Instead of talking to me, she turned to the newcomer. “I’m so sorry. I forgot to get back with you.”

  The previous fall, Christina’s older sister and I had talked often. A tall woman with a rawboned face, Jessica seemed to habitually smell of fresh-cut hay and the ranch she lived on with her sister-wives a bit of a drive outside of Alber. I figured she’d been working in the fields all day, maybe with the livestock. I rather appreciated that about her. She wore her prairie dresses with a proud bearing, but she hadn’t bowed to the pressure to hide who she was. I’d always thought she had something of a hard glint in her clear blue eyes.

  “Clara, you didn’t call me,” Jessica said, plainly displeased. “And my parents heard that there’s a body. A woman. Is it Christina?”

  “Let’s go in my office,” I suggested. Without objecting, Jessica fell in behind me. I turned to lead her when I had another thought, and swiveled back to Conroy. “Time to start that patrol, Officer Conroy. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes, Chief,” he said, jolting out of his chair and running his hands over his hair to calm his disheveled mop. “Absolutely.”

  Moments later, seated across from me in my office, Jessica had a grasp on the button tab on the front of her dress, as if she needed something to hold onto. “Is it Christina?” she asked again. “Did you find my sister?”

  I considered how to answer. I didn’t want to give her false hope, and I didn’t want to shut her down either. But folks often don’t react well to a cop simply saying they don’t know, even if it’s the truth. That they’re going to have to wait for answers. I, however, didn’t see that I had a choice. “Jessica, it may or may not be Christina. I have no way of knowing. The autopsy is tomorrow. We’ll need to wait for DNA, for the lab work to come in. It may take a while.”

  “How long?” she asked. “My family… all of us… well… we’re pretty upset about this. We need to know soon.”

  “I understand. If she were my sister…” I started, then I thought of the sister I had lost the previous year and how I would feel if it could be Sadie’s remains found buried on the mountainside. I’d want answers, too. And I’d want them without delay. I thought of Ash Crawford and wondered if I did need to be grateful. “Jessica, we’re putting a rush on this. I can’t give you an exact time frame, but I’m thinking, if we’re lucky, we’ll have a reconstruction of the face for you to look at, if not the DNA, later this week.”

  “That’s a long time to wait when we’re wondering like this,” she said, not truly complaining but more acknowledging the toll it would take. “Is there any way you can hurry it up?”

  “That is hurrying it up. We have someone talking to the lab for us, to move it to the top of the list. These types of cases, where we don’t have an ID, take time.” I hesitated before saying more. I didn’t want to sound like I was blaming Jessica’s family, but there was no way around it. With so many of the folks in our town not believing in traditional medicine, not seeing dentists or doctors, we didn’t have the usual tools. “If we had dental records, we could move faster. Since Christina hadn’t been to a dentist, we—”

  “I know. You’ve said this before.” A scowl ribboned her forehead, but I knew it wasn’t directed at me, rather at the reality of the situation. “There’s no other evidence, jewelry or something I could look at?”

  “No. No jewelry. Nothing like that. Jessica, the body we found…”

  “Yes?” Her eyes narrowed; she was concerned, I knew, about why I’d stopped.

  “The woman was pregnant, quite far along.”

  “Pregnant?” She was quiet for a moment, then said, “I guess, I mean, Christina’s been gone long enough. That could have happened. But you have nothing to use to identify her? Nothing to show me?”

  I thought about the photos on my phone, ones I’d taken at the scene. I only had one thing she might be able to identify, but the photos weren’t pretty. “Just what’s left of a dress. But are you sure you want to see it? The condition of the body… the remains… they’d been out there for a long time. Buried. There’s not a lot left to…”

  Jessica’s head dropped, and she squeezed her eyes shut. I almost wished I hadn’t said anything. But then, if it was Christina we’d found, eventually Jessica would have to be told about the state of her sister’s body. When Jessica again locked her eyes on mine, her determination had taken control. “Show me.”

  I flicked through the photos of the skeleton on my phone, checking for the least grisly. I found one, a shot of the dress from the collar down to the waist, the only visible bone an inch or two of neck and one skeletal wrist. The tendons had contracted as they’d dried, and the hand was clenched in a fist. “Okay,” I said. “This was how she was found, in this dress.”

  I handed my phone to her, and Jessica stared at the photo. Before I realized what she was doing, she’d thumbed to the next and the next. As the gruesome images flicked past, photos of stained bone, muscle, tissue and strands of skin cured a leathery amber, Jessica’s face registered the unfolding horror. Still, she kept going. I wanted to grab the phone from her, but I knew from other cases that my impulse was wrong. Folks react to these situations in odd ways. Some don’t want to see or know anything. Others need to see everything, all the photos and evidence, to hear all the answers to their questions, no matter how painful.

  I waited, quiet, gauging the impact, and before long the hand that held the phone shook ever so slightly as she returned it to me.

  “I’m sorry. I know that must have been upsetting for you.”

  Jessica cleared her throat. “It was my choice. I needed…”

  I gave her a moment, long enough to regain some composure. “Anything look familiar?”

  A sad headshake, a long pause, her chest heaving ever so slightly as if she were trying to catch her breath. “I wish we’d taken her to a damn dentist,” Jessica murmured. “If that’s her…”

  “I know,” I said, meaning it. “You can’t decide whether to hope it is or isn’t her. Either way, it’s not good.”

  Jessica clenched her mouth tight and gave me a slight nod. “You’ll let me know as soon as you can?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Before she walked out my office door, she stopped, her eyes solid on mine: “Thank you.”

  Once Jessica left, I sat down in my desk chair. I logged on to my computer and NCIC, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database, then started a search for missing women in Utah. There’d been some strands of brown hair still clinging to the skull, so I added that to the filters. I didn’t know the race for sure, so I left that blank, but I noted t
hat she was pregnant.

  At that moment, as the database churned through tens of thousands of entries, Stef popped her head in. “Is it Christina? Jessica’s sister? I saw she was here. Did you call to notify her?”

  “We don’t know who it is yet. We probably won’t for at least a couple of days, maybe much longer, so we can’t speculate,” I said. “But what about you? Did you find Danny’s sister?”

  Stef puckered her lips. “Another odd situation.” She slumped into the chair across the desk and explained, “No records of a Lynlee Benson to be found. Not anywhere. I looked and looked.”

  “Social Security, driver’s license, school, bank, phone records…”

  “Nowhere,” Stef insisted. “She’s not a lost boy. It’s not like Danny. Shouldn’t we have some records on her?”

  I took a deep breath and thought it through. Sometimes in polygamous households the women were hidden—usually we found some small mention in a record somewhere, but not always. “Maybe not. Let me think about this.”

  “You want me to put out feelers?”

  I knew Stef wanted to help, that she had the urge to run with this, but I kept thinking about what DA Hatfield had said, that we needed to proceed cautiously. I thought of Hannah Jessop, my friend, and that she’d been such a good source since I’d returned home. Hannah had converted the rambling mansion in the center of town where our jailed prophet, Emil Barstow, had lived with his many wives and scores of children, into a women’s shelter called Heaven’s Mercy. It was where I rented an upstairs bedroom. I thought about how Max had been urging me to put down roots by renting a small house. There were some available in town. I couldn’t quite get there. I no longer had one foot in town and one on the highway back to Dallas, but leasing a house? That felt like a step toward commitment.