Maybe I thought tattooing over it would make the memory fade. In hindsight, I understood that while my broken arm had healed, despite the camouflage I still bore the scars of my painful past.
I dressed and threw the dirty uniform into a laundry bag and left it outside the door. I’d made an arrangement to pay one of the women who lived in the shelter to wash and press my clothes. Running down the stairs while buckling my holster, I saw Hannah carrying a load of towels. “Clara, how’s your mother?”
I waited until we were close enough to talk without others hearing. “She’s stable. They’re bringing her out of the coma today.”
“Oh, you should be there. You should see her when she opens her eyes.”
“No.” Hannah looked confused, perhaps because I bit the word off with such intensity, but I didn’t explain. I couldn’t talk about it. Not yet. I was still thinking through what Doc had said, that stress could cause another stroke. Mindful of our troubled relationship, what if my being in her room sent Mother’s blood pressure soaring? “I have work to do. I’ll talk to Sariah later and find out how Mother is.”
“Oh, okay, well, you know what’s best,” Hannah mumbled.
At that, I thought about Lynlee and Danny, and what Clyde had insisted about his children: that he believed someone had helped them flee. Hannah Jessop, this dear woman looking at me with such concern, was the one who’d aided me nearly eleven years ago. At my lowest point, I feared that if I didn’t escape, some night I’d disappear and my body would never be found. My husband had threatened that so often, boasted about how powerful he was as the brother of the prophet and that no one would question if I had simply vanished.
“Hannah, back a while, say sixteen years ago, was anyone in Alber helping children escape abusive parents?”
Her eyes flashed with surprise, and I saw something there, a glimmer. She took me by the arm and walked me into the parlor, to the farthest corner where no one could hear us. “Why do you ask?”
“Clyde Benson says someone must have helped Lynlee and Danny when they fled. They were too young to have left on their own.”
Hannah hesitated. “Clara, there are things I can’t tell even you.”
I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. Hannah and I were close, and I couldn’t imagine anything about herself she couldn’t tell me. Then I realized that this involved another person, someone who might not want to be exposed.
“Hannah, I need to find out where the Benson kids are. I need to know if their father is telling the truth or if it’s all a lie and he’s done something to them. You need to tell me what you know.”
Hannah appeared to consider that. She’d been so willing to help during my months back in Alber that I almost didn’t believe what I was hearing when she said, “No. I can’t. But I will make inquiries with certain people. Does that work?”
If I’d been honest, I would have said no. I wanted that information, not just for this case but if something like it popped up in the future. I more than wanted it; I needed it. “Hannah, tell me the name. Is this someone you’re close to?”
Hannah surprised me again, this time by physically pulling back, putting distance between us, and looking at me as if I were pushing too hard. It seemed evident that this was something very delicate, a deep secret. “I can’t answer that. I can’t tell you anything. These are things that no one talks about. And they involve confidences I can’t divulge. But I can try to find Lynlee and Danny Benson for you.”
At a dead end, I didn’t really have any other options. I didn’t try to hide my disappointment when I said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Ash Crawford had his long legs crossed as he slouched in a waiting room chair when I arrived at the station. Kellie handed me a pile of message slips as I walked past her. She had on a skimpy royal-blue T-shirt and a pair of body-hugging satiny black jeans along with those same strappy heels. I turned to Ash. “Go ahead to the conference room. It’s straight ahead behind the windows. I’ll grab the files and meet you there.”
He nodded and took off.
“Okay, what’s going on with you and Officer Conroy?” I asked Kellie as soon as we were alone.
She blanched. “Nothing, Chief.”
“Uh-huh.” I thought briefly that I sounded a little like my mother. “Listen, we can’t have distractions. If you two date, you can’t let it get in the way here at the office. Understand?”
“Well, we’re not serious, at least not yet, but…”
“And those jeans and that shirt may be great for a date, but not in the office. Got it?”
Kellie didn’t look pleased, but she nodded.
In my office, Ash Crawford read through the meager files, then again eyed the photos of Carrie Sue Carter and Eden Young. Carrie Sue’s photo was full-face, and he lined it up with the sketch, took a good look and announced: “I can see a slight resemblance, but there are differences, like the lips. I don’t know. It could be, but…”
He then turned his attention to Eden Young. In that case, we had a problem: the only photo I had was copied off the website, and it was taken with her head partially turned away from the camera, at an angle, making it difficult to compare with the face-forward image in the sketch.
“It could be Eden, don’t you think?” I asked.
“They are a little similar, but…” Deep grooves creased his forehead as he considered, then he said, “I’m going to run out to the truck to get my laptop.”
Waiting for Crawford to return, I flipped through the message slips Kellie had handed me. Only one caught my eye. A few minutes before I’d walked in the door, Doc had called about toxicology. The results were in. I considered whether or not to call him and let Crawford listen in. Despite giving him some access to the case, my instincts said not to. I decided to wait and call Doc later.
Moments passed and Crawford shuffled back into the room. He turned his computer on and pulled up a scan of the skull from the CT. Then he went to the website, copied the photo of Eden—the same one I’d just shown him—and enlarged it. “Let’s see if she could be our girl.”
On the screen he opened a facial recognition program, one I’d read about but had never used, mainly because we didn’t have money in the Alber PD budget to pay for what the town council would label a luxury. It was another reminder that Crawford had resources Max and I lacked. The ex-marshal uploaded both images into the program and put them on a split screen. He then rotated the skull, lining it up so that the angle was approximately the same as the photo. He hit a command, and the program superimposed the face over the skull. The program locked in various anchor points: the arc of the nose, the top of the forehead, the cheekbone and the chin. The result was a ghostlike image of a translucent face with the hard-white lines of the skull beneath it.
To my eyes, it looked as if they were fairly similar. “What do you think?”
“Well, give me a minute.” Unhappy with the resolution, I gathered, he adjusted the image slightly. When he finished, Ash leaned back in the chair and stared at the screen. Then he grimaced and shook his head. “It could be her, but there are some differences. It’s hard, even with the computer, to get them exact.”
Ash logged off the program and handed me the files. “So we’re at a dead end. What are we going to do about it?”
I’d been thinking about that since the evening before, when we’d been run off by Sam Young. “I’m going to talk to the aunt. She’s the one who filed the report. Get her to take a look at the sketch and find out what else she knows about Eden’s disappearance.”
“Good idea.” Crawford cocked his head to the side and smiled at me. “But you must have other cases to look into. I could track her down for you. We could move on this faster if I were more involved.”
I felt taken aback by the suggestion. I’d opened up a bit, let him see the files because he had resources I didn’t. But it had to end there. While I appreciated his eagerness to help, what he suggested crossed a line. “Not gonna happen. You’re not law enforceme
nt. You retired. You can consult, but nothing more. No interviewing witnesses.”
Crawford’s eyes turned dead cold. Furious, he grabbed his cowboy hat off the conference room table, picked up his laptop and shoved it under his arm. “You’re a hard woman, Chief.”
I gave him a stern look, considered how to respond and landed on, “And you’re no longer a cop. Get used to it.”
I had every intention of doing what I’d told Ash. But first, I put in a call to Hannah. I wanted to get Stef back working on the Benson case, and I needed a break in it to know what to tell her to do. “Any luck on Lynlee and Danny?”
“You’re a pushy one,” Hannah said, with a short laugh. “Actually, I was just about to call you. I have made inquiries, and I should have an answer for you today. Not sure when.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you one.”
“Actually, a few,” Hannah said, and, of course, she was right. The most important thing: my freedom. Without her, I never would have had the courage to leave Alber all those years ago. But for the past eight months she’d also been a valuable source of information. “Not that I’m keeping track.”
I chuckled. “Okay, absolutely. So, what can I do for you?”
“Make time for lunch today,” she said. “I’m beginning to worry that you’ll keep shrinking until you disappear.”
I had been losing weight, not by design, and I felt touched that she noticed and worried. “Will do.”
“Talk to you later.”
As soon as I hung up, I called Doc. Before I inquired about the lab results, I asked, “How’s my mother?”
“Ardeth is starting to come around. We’re monitoring her condition.”
“No indication yet of how much damage the stroke caused?”
“Not yet. I’ll update you when I know more. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “So, what’s the tox report say about our girl?”
“Well, it’s somewhat inconclusive. There’s just too much deterioration. The body was buried too long for most of the tests to come back with any real insight. But they found no traces of poisons, no arsenic, lead or other heavy metals. Those were ruled out.”
“That’s it?” It was disappointing news. Without some idea of cause of death, we had little to go on.
“Well, we did find one thing that’s pretty unusual, but maybe not entirely based on the girl’s condition.”
“Her pregnancy?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m referring to.”
“What did they find?”
“This isn’t definite, Clara. The lab is doing more tests to verify. A tech found faint remnants of oxytocin, the hormone that brings on labor. But what’s really odd is that it’s a synthetic oxytocin.”
“Synthetic oxytocin. Why would they find that?”
“It appears that our girl was injected with Pitocin, the drug that’s administered to induce contractions, most likely not long before she died. And for there still to be any in the tissue, someone gave her a mammoth dose.”
“Huh,” I said, as I thought this through. “What happens when there’s an overdose of Pitocin?”
“It can cause fetal distress, a drop in the heart rate, and infant death.”
“And for the mother?”
“Improperly administered, Pitocin can overstimulate the uterus and cause it to rupture,” he explained. “Untreated, that can also lead to death. The thing is: there’s no way this high a dosage could have been given by accident. It’s carefully administered through an IV.”
“So such a high amount of the hormone would cause the death of both the mother and her child?”
“Absolutely.”
I’d known from the moment I saw the girl’s shallow grave, the bones of her unborn child, that this case was suspect. Neither Max or I believed that it would turn out that they’d died of natural causes. The next thing Doc said confirmed our suspicions: “Clara, these are murders.”
Twenty-Four
Not understanding how long she’d been asleep, Violet woke to the baby shifting inside her womb. She’d begun thinking of him as a boy and given him a name. “Josh,” she whispered. “Hey little guy. Hang in there. Hang on!”
Her eyes opened, and she found no one in the room with her. The television had gone silent, the most recent movie not even a memory. The scant sleep she’d managed had come between intense contractions that left her feeling bruised and battered. She ran her hands over her sore, bulging abdomen and her eyes filled with unspent tears.
“If only I could change it all. Start over. Then I would…”
Footsteps on the stairs, and the wood creaked. Her pulse skyrocketed as she prayed, “Please, don’t let it be him.”
As she waited with dread to see who would walk through the door, the girl thought back to the terrible weeks after Samantha vanished, the room she’d been in on the third floor empty. When the girl had asked for her friend, Nurse Gantt had snickered and said, “She’s gone.”
“Where?”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” the head nurse insisted as she handed Violet a juice box along with a small white paper cup with vitamins inside.
But Violet had worried. She’d thought of little else besides what the man and Nurse Gantt would do to her baby. She hadn’t forgotten how they’d talked of auctioning off the infants and getting rid of those who weren’t perfectly formed or healthy enough to be sold. When she’d pondered what to do, Violet didn’t believe Nurse Gantt would simply let her walk out the door. So she’d fantasized about ways to escape, but she’d never landed on any ideas that seemed even remotely possible.
With Samantha gone, the aide, Lori, had become Violet’s only friend. The girl often thought back to the day she’d run down the staircase, and Lori had covered for her. Lori seemed to instinctively understand the girl’s turmoil. One afternoon in the living room, she’d leaned close to Violet and whispered: “If you want to keep your baby, I know a way.”
“You do?”
“If you stay here, you won’t have any choice but to give the baby away,” Lori had warned. “But, if you want me to, I can help you.”
The girl’s chest had swelled with gratitude; she’d beamed at Lori, believing she’d found a savior.
But that day when Lori had offered to help lay in the past.
Tied to the bed, Violet trembled, as the heavy footsteps on the stairs grew closer.
Twenty-Five
“Hannah Jessop on line one, Chief,” Kellie announced over the intercom.
Seated behind my desk, I hit a button and answered: “I’ll take it. Thanks.”
“Well, she’ll talk to you,” Hannah said. “I didn’t think she would. I figured I’d have to act as the intermediary. But she said it’s okay. She’s trusting you because we’re friends.”
Pleased, I asked, “Does this person have a name?”
Hannah chuckled. “Dolores. She’s the woman who ran kind of an underground railroad out of Alber.”
As much as I knew about my hometown, I felt surprised. I’d read about the underground railroads, a secret network of volunteers and safe houses who helped runaways escape the horrors of slavery in the early to mid-1800s. It was more evidence of how repressive our culture had been under the prophet’s rule that someone had felt it necessary to run a similar operation in Alber to aid those who fled violence. “There was an underground railroad in Alber? When was this?”
“It went on for thirty years,” Hannah explained. “I would have thought you would have heard something about it as police chief.”
“Not a word.”
At that, Hannah laid out the basics: Hiding her activities even from her own husband and family, Dolores orchestrated escapes for abused women and children. She made the plans, set them in motion, and delivered her charges to folks who transported them to safe houses in Salt Lake City, where men and women, most of them mainstream Mormons, aided them in building new lives.
“Rather like you did for me,” I pointed out.
I’d never considered that someone had shown Hannah the ropes. “Does Dolores remember Lynlee and Danny Benson?”
“She does. She wants to talk to you before she decides if she’ll help you, though.”
Eager to get the information I needed, I asked when the woman would reach out to me.
Hannah sighed. I had the feeling she’d grown weary of my insistence. “Dolores has your phone number. It will come through as an unidentified number, so pick up. She’ll call when she’s ready.”
The search for the Benson kids progressing, I called Stef to tell her I was working an angle and I hoped that I’d get back with her soon. After I hung up, I thought over what Doc had told me. Someone had administered a massive overdose of a drug to the girl and her baby found on the mountainside. We had a murder on our hands, and I needed to find out who was responsible.
Max picked up on the first ring. “Chief Jefferies. Glad to hear from you.” In a lower voice he whispered, “I’m still thinking about last night.”
I was glad he wasn’t in the room with me to see me blush. “Max, I’m calling about work: the pregnant girl on the mountainside.”
“That’s a coincidence, or maybe not so much. I guess Doc called you, too. I just hung up with him. Pitocin, huh? What do you make of it?”
We knocked it around, repeating many of the things Doc had said, that the girl and her baby had been given an overdose that ended both their lives. Max agreed that gave us an angle to work. “I’ve been thinking about who could have done this, and, of course, the first possibility that came to mind is a doctor. The thing is, we don’t have a lot of them in the area. Only a handful. And I can’t see any of them burying a patient. If they lost a mom during childbirth, even from a medical mistake…”
The Blessed Bones Page 16