The Blessed Bones

by Kathryn Casey

  An hour or so later, I took my search further by logging on to NAMUS, another government database of missing persons. I scouted around for a while, used different parameters to change things up, and gradually, it happened.

  I found two more who could have been our girl.

  I kept expanding the timeline, working ahead, looking for other girls who might have been in the same condition, and found another.

  By the time I finished, I’d printed off seven profiles—the most likely candidates. All were in the right age range, had brown hair and, based on the dead woman’s prairie dress, they’d disappeared from or near towns populated by fundamentalist Mormon polygamous sects. I felt uneasy looking at their photos, wondering if they’d left voluntarily, where they were and what might have happened to them.

  Once I finished with the official websites, I took one more step. Sometimes cases don’t get reported as they should, so I started a general Google search of missing girls in the Utah area. Nothing showed up that I didn’t already have until I happened upon a search result entitled ‘MISSING EDEN YOUNG.’ I clicked on it, and landed on a photo of a girl, one who had enough similarities to make it possible that she matched our bones. The problem: the information on the site, an amateurish offering begun by an aunt, was scarce. There was no date for Eden’s disappearance, no description of where she’d last been seen, or any information on how she’d vanished. Nothing. It seemed odd that her parents weren’t the ones looking, and that no one had filed an official report to show up on NCIC or NAMUS. Also interesting, the girl had disappeared from a ranch in Max’s jurisdiction, Smith County.

  After I printed off a copy of that final photo and what little information there was on the website, I sorted all the potential matches into a binder. None of the profiles mentioned anything about a pregnancy. Just to be certain, I expanded the search again and added two more girls to my binder, ones who’d been missing for longer periods of time. Finally, I clicked onto the file on Christina Bradshaw. Nothing Doc had said had ruled her out, so she belonged in the mix. I ran off more blow-ups of the photos of all eleven girls and carried them into the conference room, where I had a large magnetic whiteboard. Starting on the top left, I arranged the photos by order of disappearance and ended on the lower right-hand corner with the most recent. I didn’t have a date for Eden Young’s disappearance, so I decided to place her last.

  While I stood back and looked at all the photos, a terrible thought percolated in the back of my mind: what if the girl found on the mountain wasn’t an isolated case? What if two or more of these missing girl cases were related? The crime scene team had scoured that part of the mountainside and hadn’t found any other graves, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more somewhere. And I wondered if, even now, other girls could be in danger.

  Staring at the photos, I felt ill.

  Yet while it seemed possible, I had no clues suggesting a link. And with nothing to work with, there was nothing more I could do. Not yet. Not until we had something to go on. Our best bet was the sketch the lab was making, based on the dead girl’s skull. Until I had that, I had to put the case away.

  As I straightened up and tried to shake off the feeling, Stef stuck her head in my door. Her usual cornrows were gone, and she had her hair pulled back with a headband into an afro. I liked it.

  “Chief, have you got a minute?”

  “Sure, did you go by the school?” Stef nodded, and I asked, “Did you find anything on Lynlee Benson?”

  Out of a blue folder, Stef pulled a small pile of papers. The first sheet was a blow-up of Lynlee’s school photo the last year she attended the local school, sixteen years ago. Behind it was a report with attendance records. I checked the dates. “So now we have a timeline. Now we know for sure when she disappeared. How close is this to the day she talked to the police about Danny’s beating?”

  Stef pulled out the report from the Tombs. “Lynlee’s last day of school was two weeks to the day after she filed that report.”

  I thought about the power fathers had over their families in closed communities like ours, and, also, how few options the abused had. Alber didn’t have a social worker or therapist for a victim to ask for help. Until Hannah opened the shelter, we didn’t have anywhere for an abused woman or child to run.

  “Did you read her school record through?”

  “Yes, Chief. I didn’t find anything surprising. Run-of-the-mill stuff. Lynlee had good grades, no behavioral problems, nothing to suggest she’d run away.”

  I considered my stop at the body shop. I didn’t know a lot about Clyde, but he didn’t strike me as a touchy-feely, forgiving kind of guy. I could easily see him losing his temper with a daughter who reported him to the police. And I thought about the Alber cops and how for decades they ignored domestic violence and child abuse cases. “I bet the reporting officer or the chief at the time told Clyde about Lynlee’s allegations, and it didn’t go well for her and Danny. That’s why two weeks later, they disappeared.”

  “I’m thinking the same thing,” Stef said.

  I thought again about my talk with Clyde that morning, how he’d never mentioned Lynlee and Danny. It was as if they’d simply never existed. We had to find out what had happened to them. The next step seemed obvious: we needed to question the parents.

  The plan came together quickly. I instructed Stef to drive out to the Bensons’ house to talk to Clyde’s wives. “Ask about Lynlee and Danny. Collect whatever information you can. Bring xeroxes of the kids’ photos with you and Lynlee’s school paperwork, so if they play dumb and try to tell you the kids didn’t exist, you can call them on it.”

  “Sure,” Stef said. “What if Clyde shows up? It could get ugly fast.”

  “He won’t. I’ll take Conroy with me to the garage, and we’ll make sure that he’s not an issue. We’ll ask Clyde the same questions, try to pin him down.”

  Stef glanced at her phone, checking the office schedule. “Conroy won’t start for another couple of hours. Not until three. He’s got an evening shift today because he worked last night, remember?”

  “It’ll take a while for you to find the Benson house. He moved years back, and I’m not sure where. Run it down through the tax rolls,” I explained. “Once you get there, stand down until I let you know we have Clyde contained. Then make your move.”

  “You’ve got it, Chief.” Stef started toward the door.

  “Oh, and tell Kellie to ask Conroy to come in early and check in with me as soon as he arrives,” I called out after her. “Actually, ask her to give him a call and see if he can come in ASAP.”

  Stef gave me a thumbs up and was gone.

  I checked my email on the off-chance that the facial reconstruction had arrived. It hadn’t. So while I waited for Conroy, I built a timeline on Lynlee and Danny Benson, going through the girl’s school records. I was pleased when Conroy rushed in only half an hour after Stef walked out the door. His hair was wet, like he’d just gotten out of the shower, and he looked excited. I didn’t know if it was about logging in some overtime or helping me. My young officer had a good attitude; he seemed to enjoy each new case that came his way. “What’s up?” he asked.

  I grabbed the folder with copies of Danny’s and Lynlee’s photos inside and my old brown leather bag off the coatrack. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  This time, Clyde was hard at work on the Chevy when we drove up. He stood under the lift with a wrench in his hand trying to tighten something on the undercarriage. He didn’t appear pleased to see me. “You can’t need more gas,” he called out. “I filled that Suburban of yours to the brim. Unless you’ve been driving the whole time. Is that what cops do for entertainment?”

  His eyes narrowed on me when I said, “No gas this time, Clyde.”

  Conroy stood directly behind me. On the way, he had told me that Clyde was related to him through one of his six mothers, although they weren’t close and hadn’t spent any time together except at big family gatherings. Conroy didn’t rememb
er Danny or Lynlee, doubted that he’d ever met them, but he’d heard rumors through the family that Clyde had a mean streak.

  “Howdy, Clyde,” Conroy said with a grin. That appeared to put the older man at ease at least a bit, and he grabbed that oil-stained rag out of his coverall pocket and wiped off the wrench as he meandered toward us.

  “Hey, Bill. What can I do for the two of you?”

  We had decided during the drive that Conroy would initiate the conversation, try to set it up as nonconfrontationally as possible, keep the threat level low. I wanted Clyde to talk, not tell me to hightail it off his property.

  “The chief here has a few questions,” Conroy said, that grin growing ever wider. “Just trying to pin something down that came up at the station.”

  Clyde’s hazel eyes darkened, and he came down hard on that wad of chew. “What would that be?”

  “Just a little family history,” I said. “Hoping you can clear something up for me.”

  “If it don’t take too long, Chief.” Clyde sucked in a deep breath and motioned back at the car on the lift. “Like I told you earlier, I got the owner waiting to pick up that old Chevy.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Shouldn’t take long at all.”

  I came to a stop a few feet from Clyde, close enough that I could smell onions on his breath, maybe from a late-lunch burger. I noticed that he was sweating on what was a temperate spring day. It’d be a couple more months before summer set in and brought any real heat. I looked at his coveralls and didn’t see any sweat stains. Maybe the perspiration had begun collecting on his brow when he saw me for the second time in one day.

  “You know when I was here before and I asked about your family, Clyde?”

  He had his eyes full on me. Parted his lips and sneered slightly. “I do.”

  “Well, after I left, I thought about which kids of yours I remembered, and a daughter came to mind, one who should have been older than Elizabeth.”

  “Yeah, say so?”

  “The chief here was telling me that she remembers a daughter of yours named Lynlee,” Conroy said, that grin that showed off his grill still on his face. The kid was good at this, acting as if everything was nonthreatening, but under that coat of sweat Clyde paled.

  “Lynlee? Now why would you be asking about her?”

  “You know, I just thought it was odd that you didn’t mention her.” I kept my voice even, made sure there wasn’t anything accusing in my tone.

  A long pause, and I assumed Clyde was considering his response. “Well, she run off a long time ago. I don’t talk about her no more. Never mention her name, because she done what you did, Chief.”

  I thought about how he looked so calm, but the sweat kept building a sheen on his forehead. “She did, did she?”

  “Yeah, Lynlee disgraced her family when she defied me and took off.” At that Clyde kept his eyes on me while he spit what was left of that slimy wad of tobacco into one of his greasy hands and threw it into a trash barrel between the pumps. As he wiped his hands on the rag, he said, “You know how Elijah’s People feel about apostates. You know what the prophet teaches.”

  “I do,” I said, thinking about how he must be enjoying this, for the first time telling me what he truly thought of me. “That was Lynlee in that photo earlier, the girl I pointed at, right?”

  He didn’t look certain about answering but then nodded. “That was her, but like I said, she’s gone. Disappeared a couple of years after that photo was taken. I haven’t talked about her since.”

  “Danny, either?” I asked.

  Clyde’s round cheeks rose and squinted his eyes, wrinkles forming webs around them. The chew gone, he folded in his lower lip and bit down on it, all the while watching me. “Now why would you be asking about Danny?”

  “We heard in town that they disappeared about the same time,” I said.

  For a moment, no one spoke. In the distance, I heard a bird let loose a long, sharp caw, maybe calling its mate, and the susurrus of nascent leaves from a stand of scrawny canyon maples. The air smelled of dust and motor oil, and that noxious onion. Clyde kept half that lower lip sucked in as he sized me up, I figured wondering what, if anything, I knew.

  “Clyde, we’d like you to do us a favor,” Conroy said, that gentlemanly smile of his pasted across his face. “The chief here ran a check for records on Lynlee and came up with some old paperwork. We’re hoping you’ll come downtown and look at it with us, go over this report that’s in our files and explain it to us.”

  “A report?”

  “Old paperwork on a report Lynlee filed,” I said. “We’d like to show you.”

  “About Danny and Lynlee?”

  I wouldn’t have described Clyde’s demeanor as panicked—more concerned. Then I fed him the line that almost always works with sociopaths. It fits into their overwhelming world view: that they can talk their way out of pretty much anything. “We figure if you look at the report, you’ll be able to tell us what all this is about and talk us through it, clear it up.”

  Clyde slumped and dropped his right shoulder. I didn’t know if we had him. I started to think maybe not. But then: “Sure, I’ll follow you there. Just give me a minute to lock the place up.”

  Conroy escorted Clyde Benson into interview room number one, while I flicked the switch on the video equipment. I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I wanted to make sure we had a record of everything that was said. Early on, when I was a rookie cop in Dallas, I’d thought I was interviewing a guy about a dog found gutted on a neighbor’s porch. While grisly and disappointing, cruelty to animals wasn’t a major crime, and I didn’t turn on my tape recorder. I learned a lesson when halfway through the interview the guy confessed to conspiring to kill the dog’s owner as well. My chief at the time had read me the riot act.

  “So, Clyde, I’m recording this to make sure I don’t misremember anything. That okay with you?” I asked when I walked in the room. Clyde nodded and I took a seat across from him, Conroy between us at the end of the table. When I’d walked in, Conroy had been talking family with our suspect, trying to put him at ease, but Clyde appeared on edge. His right knee bounced with nervous energy.

  “Okay, so I want to explain statutes of limitations to you first.” I then launched into a brief synopsis of the law, and I explained that the statute on physical child abuse was only four years. “Clyde, this report I’m about to show you is sixteen years old.”

  Clyde gave me a curious glance. He looked as nervous as a raccoon trapped in a tree with a bear climbing up the trunk. “So you can’t prosecute, no matter what I say?”

  “Charges for physical child abuse, like I said, can only be filed within four years of the offense,” I repeated. “Got that?”

  “Yeah.” He slumped back into the chair, hauled one knee up, held it in his hands while he took a few slow, even breaths. Just what I wanted to see; he was calming down.

  “Okay then.” On the table between us, I laid out the photo of Danny with the black eye and a copy of the never-pursued police report. “What happened here, Clyde? Lynlee told the officers you beat the kid up. That true?”

  Since I’d laid the groundwork, explained that we couldn’t prosecute him for the kid’s black eye, it didn’t take long. “I got carried away,” he said, a sheepish nod. “You know how it is. Sometimes kids get on your nerves.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s good. Thanks for being honest.”

  “So, we done now?”

  “You know, what we’re curious about, the reason we brought you in here…”

  “Yeah, I was wondering about that,” he said, suddenly miffed at the thought that we’d torn him away from the body shop to ask questions. “Why’d you take me away from my work for something like this that happened all those years ago?”

  “We want to know where Lynlee and Danny are. We need to find them. Just to talk to them, to be sure we’ve got the whole story here.”

  Clyde scrunched his shoulders up to his ears. “Hell if I
know.”

  Conroy and I worked him, asking from every direction, taking every tack that occurred to us, trying to get information on the whereabouts of two of his children. The guy was a rock. He never budged off his story that the two of them had left together, even when I pointed out that Lynlee, the older of the two, was only twelve at the time.

  “Someone must have helped them,” he insisted. “You find out who and you’ll find them, I bet. I’ve got no doubt they’re somewhere living in sin in the Gentile world, turning their backs on their faith. I got no use for them, two apostates who’ve disgraced the family and our prophet, so I’ve never gone looking.”

  It became clear that we were making no progress, and before long we gave up. Conroy drove Clyde back to his body shop, and I waited to hear from Stef. When she called in, she gave me the blow-by-blow. The younger wife hadn’t been in the family at the time, and she had little to offer. But Clyde’s first wife laid out an account that matched what their husband had said: that Lynlee took off with Danny and neither one had been heard from since. Like Clyde, she speculated that the kids had help, but she couldn’t, or didn’t, say from whom.

  “So, nothing. No other information?”

  “Sorry, Chief. I guess we’ve hit a dead end.”

  I considered trying to get a search warrant for the Bensons’ farm, but then wrote that off. We didn’t have any probable cause. The judge would never agree. “There must be something we can—”

  Another call beeped in. It was Doc, and my thoughts immediately jumped back to the girl on the mountain. Did we have a sketch of her face? I felt a surge of nervous adrenaline anticipating that we might finally have something concrete to follow up on. “Stef. I’ve got another call. I have to go.”

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “Keep working the Benson case. We need to find those kids, figure out what happened to them. I don’t like that they just disappeared. It’s possible Clyde did something to them. I’ll check in with you later.”