A Conspiracy of Bones

by Kathy Reichs

  The impact of the helmet told me what my ears had been trying to explain. Stars exploded in my vision. Pain roared from my forehead down through my vertebrae.

  I must have loosened my grasp. Kimrey bounced up as though spring-loaded. I scrambled after, unsteady but dogged.

  Kimrey had two options. Crank up the cycle. Run for the trees. The woods would do him little good. He had to rely on his wheels.

  He was muscling the bike upright when I leveled him with his own trick. Using all the power I could muster, I swung the helmet by its chin strap and roundhouse-clocked him on the side of the head. He dropped and lay still, stunned but conscious.

  I felt blood, hot and thick, trickle down my face.

  Through the open door, I heard Slidell barking into his phone.

  “Need help here!” I bellowed.

  I was about to call out again when Spano rounded the corner of the house, barreling fast. With one efficient move, she rolled Kimrey to his stomach and cuffed his wrists.

  “Can you understand my words?” Spano asked.

  “Fuck you,” Kimrey replied.

  “Are you in need of medical attention?” Less warmly.

  “Kiss my ass.”

  Disgusted, I turned away. My eyes fell on the open garage door. On the wheelbarrow with its blanket and dirt-crusted spade. I gazed toward the backyard and the woods beyond, overcome with sadness, facing one thought. April Siler could be out there. Other missing kids.

  I was backhanding blood and sweat from my face when Slidell appeared in the doorway, an odd look crimping his wildly flushed features. Eyes locking onto mine, he shook his head slowly.

  What? I raised both palms.

  Slidell crossed to me.

  “Just got a call about April Siler.” A deep breath. A pause filled with the confusion of contradictory emotions. “They found her.”

  Despite the heat, my body went cold. I must have faltered. Taking one arm, Slidell led me up to the Kmart bench.

  “You need water,” he said.

  Before I could protest, he hurried into the house. Buying time before having to say the unthinkable?

  Minutes passed. My pulse and breathing eased toward normal.

  Slidell was crossing the stoop, plastic tumbler in one hand, when a CMPD transport vehicle pulled into the cul-de-sac. Two uniforms got out, one tall, one short. As Tall opened the rear door, Slidell strode to them.

  Spano walked Kimrey to the van and helped him climb in. Short disappeared into the house, emerged moments later with a manacled Unger, left eye swelling shut, and added him to the cage.

  Torrance was escorting Body across the lawn, hands cuffed behind him, when a burgundy Kia Optima turned into Pine Lily and pulled to a stop behind Unger’s Jag. Everyone present went to DEFCON 1.

  The Optima’s passenger door opened, and a girl hopped out. She wore sandals, a yellow dress dotted with smiling suns, silver seahorse earrings. Her hair was black, her lips glossy pink, her eyes cornflower-blue. I put her age at twelve or thirteen.

  I looked at Slidell. His attention was laser-focused on the kid.

  The girl was beaming, revealing teeth only possible in the very young. Pressed to her chest was a plastic trophy topped with a swimmer poised to go off the block.

  The girl began skipping, sunny dress swinging to the rhythm of her gait. As the scene registered, she slowed. The van. The cops. The handcuffed man in urine-stained pants.

  The cornflower eyes widened as the day’s joy turned to nightmare. She stopped. The glossy lips trembled. Reshaped to form one word.

  “Daddy?”

  36

  SUNDAY, JULY 15–TUESDAY, JULY 17

  I thought and read a lot about the human brain that summer. About the complex three-pound organ containing a hundred billion neurons branching out to more than a hundred trillion synapse points. About the brain’s one hundred thousand miles of blood vessels. Neuroanatomists have named the fissures and sulci and lobes: cerebrum, cerebellum, hypothalamus, medulla oblongata. They’ve dissected the parts, traced the neural pathways, analyzed the electrical and chemical properties. Still, no one fully understands how the sucker works. I was definitely at a loss concerning mine.

  The skirmish at Body’s house exists in my memory as a hodgepodge of sensory input. Sight. Sound. Smell. Pain. Lots of pain.

  And one crystal-clear snapshot.

  A child’s terrified cry. Daddy! Body turning on the beat of that word, a look of devastation on his face. The same look mirrored on hers.

  At the station, Body, Unger, and Kimrey were allowed to see that Yates Timmer was also enjoying the hospitality of the CMPD. Each was hosted in a separate interview room. All that day and the next, I observed the questioning, shifting from window to window as Slidell moved up and down the hall.

  The four “persons of interest” stonewalled briefly, eventually turned on one another. But gently, not with the save-your-ass savagery we’d expected. More like playground snitches sharing benign crumbs. Some info came out. Not what we’d hoped.

  The child with the trophy was Body’s daughter, AvaLeigh Tayman. AvaLeigh’s mother had left Body years earlier, subsequently remarried. Needless to say, the divorce decree included a monster nondisclosure clause. Thus, their names never surfaced in any of my online searches.

  AvaLeigh made occasional visits to the fenced property in Cleveland County. The teeth and pink sneaker were hers. She was probably the child Duncan Keesing saw driven through the gate. The child whose face he’d painted on his barrel.

  The house at Lake Wylie was a sales office for Timmer’s inventory of abandoned military silos and bunkers. And a clubhouse for local “homeowners” in his two underground condo complexes. Rah-rah promotional pitches were made there. Social events were held. Movie night. Steaks on the grill. Cocktails cruising the lake.

  According to Body, his motive for investing with Timmer was purely financial. According to Timmer, his partner’s reasons were more complex. Fearing he carried the mutation for Huntington’s, Body planned to retreat underground if symptoms appeared.

  DeepHaven I was a legitimate success. As Unger had stated in his earlier interview, the twelve-story subterranean complex was complete and fully sold out. Timmer told the same story. Documents confirmed it was true.

  And an unexpected zinger. Six years back, during her series of on-air conversations on Body Language, Margot Heavner purchased a small unit, the million and a half price significantly discounted in exchange for inside morgue information, especially on cases involving kids.

  To me, an underground getaway seemed out of character for Heavner. I’d have guessed her spare bucks would go for Botox or Jimmy Choos. Struck Slidell that way, too. When he questioned her, Dr. Morgue admitted that money, not survival, was her motivator. She planned to flip the unit for a profit but to date had found no taker.

  Guess Heavner’s ethics were even lower than I suspected. Her desire for wealth even stronger.

  DeepHaven II was a different situation. The project was hemorrhaging money, and no one was buying. According to both Timmer and Unger, propaganda about missing kids had worked with phase I. Unclear why. People purchase bunkers for a lot of reasons: fear of financial collapse, a race war, a nuke strike, a plague. A survival home is an option that remains empty most of the time. When the big one comes, you can head underground. So why acquire one out of fear of losing your children?

  Rightly or wrongly, Body believed the trend was real, so a similar campaign was implemented to boost sales for phase II. Body was using his blogs and podcasts to create panic among his reading and listening public. His defense was repulsive. What the hell? No law against spreading a little alarm.

  Each time I listened to a session with the loudmouthed carnival barker, I had to fight back my incredulity. And revulsion. Body wasn’t a defender of the little guy, as he portrayed himself. The blustering bully was in reality a middle-aged cokehead up to his eyeballs in debt. He didn’t live in the little cookie-cutter house on Pine Lily
but in a sprawling estate in an area of sprawling estates near Weddington, south of Charlotte. A property titled to another holding company and mortgaged far beyond its value. Not as heinous or dangerous a profile as I’d suspected. Still, the great Oz was a fraud on so many levels my instincts still insisted there was something else there.

  Over the years, Felix Vodyanov had been tasked with researching many topics, the Estonia tragedy and missing and murdered children being but two. Nothing sinister. Nothing violent. No kid was ever harmed by anyone involved with Body Language or DeepHaven. On that point, all four held firm.

  ITO was the brand name of a tie sold in Japan in the mid-nineties. The company, started by an entrepreneurial high school kid, manufactured a very limited run before going bankrupt. The ties, quite rare, were now worth a fortune. Vodyanov had scored one, liked the name, and used it for one of his many aliases.

  The apartment in Ramos’s building was leased primarily for storage of files Body wanted kept off-site and hidden. Felix had lived in the house on Pine Lily Court. Otto Schneller was a Vodyanov cousin. Wanting to safeguard his and his brother’s anonymity, Body had gotten Schneller to agree to put the title in his name in exchange for a trip to the States. Little risk, it seemed. Otto was eighty-seven and living in Minsk.

  Again, my gut told me there was more to it. Why such security? Such secrecy? Something reeked like week-old trout.

  Everyone agreed that Vodyanov had left the Hyundai at Art’s garage. That he’d written the directions to help locate the car, probably as a reminder to himself. He’d jotted the message in code, as was his habit. Perhaps he’d visited the area several times while planning his final goodbye.

  One of the numbers indented into the notebook was for a burner briefly owned by Holly Kimrey. None of the four knew why Vodyanov had listed my mobile on the same page. Or the reference to Jahaan Cole. So they said.

  That unconnected dot came from Yuriev. And an explanation of his reaction upon hearing Jahaan Cole’s name during our conversation in his car. When pressed, the good doctor admitted that Vodyanov had once spoken of an interview given by a forensic anthropologist named Temperance Brennan on the fourth anniversary of Cole’s disappearance. Hence, Vodyanov’s choice of me as the person to contact.

  * * *

  Yuriev’s link to Body and Vodyanov was through a chess club favored by Russian expats. The doctor had nothing to do with Vodyanov’s suicide, had tried to argue his patient back from the edge. In the end, he gave up, knowing Felix’s future held nothing but misery. He’d supplied no drugs. Though Kimrey denied it, Body and Unger both implied the fentanyl came from him.

  Why taphophobia? Yuriev and Vodyanov found the paradox amusing.

  Kimrey was doing a drug run to the bunker the day I found the folder. He was sure Vodyanov had chucked it in the dumpster, speculated Felix was cleaning house before offing himself. He’d seen Vodyanov burning the contents of other boxes, probably those he’d kept at Ramos’s building. Not knowing who I was or what I intended to do with the file or the teeth pouch, Kimrey nicked both. Plus, he was freaked that I’d breached security due to his carelessness, didn’t want his boss to learn he’d left the gate unlocked.

  Based on details grudgingly pried loose from all four interviewees, a picture of Vodyanov slowly emerged. A man devoted to Nick Body yet always in his younger brother’s shadow. A man crafting the appearance of a lifestyle he couldn’t afford—secondhand clothes, imitation art. A man facing his own physical and mental decline, stumbling, falling, writing notes to himself to keep his thoughts organized. To access passcodes he couldn’t remember. A man tortured by some of his actions, seeking to make amends before ending his life.

  But no one was involved in harming kids. No way. Never. Inconceivable. Either the four were telling the truth, or their performances were superb.

  By Monday afternoon, Body, Unger, and Timmer had all lawyered up. Simultaneous with Slidell’s interrogation, slowed now by endless interruptions from counsel, searches of the Pine Lily house and Body’s home in Weddington were carried out, and another was begun at the bunker. All day, Slidell’s mobile buzzed. Each time, he grabbed it and stepped out of the room. Each time, the news was discouraging. Nothing was turning up to tie any of the men to any missing or murdered child.

  Slidell also ordered an investigation into Body Language. Although the site generated some revenue via advertising, he was curious about how Body earned sufficient income to maintain his lifestyle. As expected, records were convoluted and far from transparent.

  By Monday night, neither the tossing nor the grilling nor the financial digging had produced evidence of any criminal activity. Rising up like a small swarm of angry wasps, the lawyers demanded that Slidell release their clients.

  My fingers curled into fists as I watched the smarmy trio walk free. The little voice in my hindbrain bellowed hopeless opposition.

  Holly Kimrey wasn’t so lucky. The tail bag on his bike had yielded a full catalog of pharmaceuticals, so Body’s dealer would continue as a guest of Mecklenburg County. In addition, the district attorney was preparing charges related to the B&E and fire at my townhouse. A search of Kimrey’s apartment had produced items suggestive of arson, not sure what that means. And my phone. No confusion there. Enough to convict, but the DA hoped Kimrey would flip and finger Body as the person behind the plot.

  At seven thirty, tired and discouraged, I headed home.

  A few hours with the Pasquerault file, then I fell into bed. Of course, I didn’t sleep.

  The faceless man refused to let go of my mind.

  Why had Felix Vodyanov sought me out? Phoned my mobile? He’d seen the interview, knew my role in the Jahaan Cole case, but how had he learned where I live? Found my number? What was it he’d wanted to say or ask before dying?

  He’d written Jahaan Cole’s name in his notebook. Maybe posed as a cop to talk to Cootie Clanahan. Clipped and saved articles on Cole and Timothy Horshauser. Did he have information on one or both? Had he been involved in harming them?

  Why had Vodyanov written that one Russian word?

  Finished Ended. To what was he referring? The Latvian book from which the scrap had been torn? His complicity in trafficking his brother’s hateful vitriol? In harming kids? His life?

  Pete had skimmed the volume, reported that it was published in 2003 to promote the theory that the Estonia was purposefully sunk.

  Felix Vodyanov. A spy? An assassin’s target? Crazy as a bag of rats?

  A child molester? A killer?

  What was real? What was not?

  In 1983, the mutation for Huntington’s was mapped to a location on chromosome 4. Diagnosis is now possible via submission of a small blood sample. Body refuses to be tested.

  Nick Body. A blowhard and scammer? An HD sufferer? A man needlessly living with dread?

  A child molester? A killer?

  What was real? What was not?

  Had I really made a trip to that underground bunker? Or was the experience simply a migraine-induced hallucination? Had my own three-pound arrangement of electricity, chemicals, circuitry, and cells conspired to take me down? Had my unruly arteries sent my own blood thundering against me?

  Had I been drugged? Had Kimrey laced my tea with Molly or LSD?

  What was real? What was not?

  Had Kimrey torched my home? He denied any involvement. Was the fire simply the result of a faulty wire delivering just enough spark to a chemical-soaked rag? If so, why the print by my window?

  What was real? What was not?

  * * *

  I slept badly all night. Repeatedly woke, checked the clock. I tried deep-breathing exercises, inhaling slowly, then spreading the warm harmony into my fingers and toes. Nothing worked. I really suck at letting the peace in.

  When I was awake, a movie titled Vodyanov and Body played in my head. Or on the ceiling. Or in the darkness between. Again and again, the scenes led me back to the same conclusion. Body had to be dirty. Otherwise, why such security?
Why order the fire at the annex? If it had been arson. Why discourage witnesses from talking to me? If not child abduction, what was his sin? I was convinced Body was into something far more sinister than simply gaslighting the public.

  Body’s podcasts also looped in my brain, increasing my agitation. My anger at seeing the bastard walk free, the viper smile on his face.

  By dawn, I was convinced there had to be some clue buried somewhere in all of those histrionics. Vowing to find it before leaving town, I got up and headed downstairs.

  A mug of coffee and a bowl of Raisin Bran later, I booted my laptop. Once online, I went directly to Body Language and, as before, paid the required fee, this time with an untraceable prepaid card purchased in a Spy vs. Spy moment with cash at a Walmart. Then I answered the nonoptional profile questions, presenting not as myself but as a forty-two-year-old white male. Not sure why. To assure myself I could be cyber-sneaky, too?

  The page opened. There were the tabs offering links to podcasts, blogs, the general store. All as I remembered. I decided to go with the archived audio files. Started plowing through, beginning with the most recent and working my way back in time.

  By ten, my head was ready to explode. Much as I wanted to nail the oily prick, I needed a break. A fill-up on coffee, then I returned to Body’s home page and, lacking a better idea, linked over to check out the merchandise for sale.

  Stared.

  Blinked.

  Blinked again.

  The page looked, what? Off?

  I felt the familiar adrenaline-fueled dread. Were the irksome cranial vessels conspiring for action? Was a headache barreling in?

  Take the meds?

  No. Not yet.

  I closed my eyes. Waited. Opened them. Focused on the screen.

  This wasn’t the usual aura—the flashing-fizzing-black-hole optical display heralding an upcoming migraine. My vision was fine. The page was sharp and clear. It just looked wrong.