EQMM, Sep-Oct 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Guilt?"

  "For not being able to protect his only child, his baby."

  "You going to start with that one, then?"

  "I don't know yet. Nothing works so far."

  "You'll find a way."

  "Maybe I'll just make something up."

  "Markie, no! Don't even say that! Even apart from the ethics of the thing, we don't know what Darren knows about them. I'm betting he knows enough to spot it if we invent lives they didn't live."

  "Oh hell,” Markie said, whirling around to return to his side. “You're no fun."

  He wouldn't have done it. I was pretty sure he wouldn't have done it.

  We finished two chapters and I delivered them into Betch's hands, praying he wasn't any kind of judge of quality. Holding my breath, I watched him leaf through the pages. When he looked up, he said, “Erin Belafonte is buried one mile to the east of the first one you found."

  Is buried. As if he'd had nothing to do with it.

  But he told the truth. She was buried there.

  He'd buried her purse with her, too.

  When I returned to see him after that, he said, “Now we go back to our original bargain. You finish the book, I give you the rest of them."

  I dreaded finding out what he meant by the rest of them.

  * * * *

  Fortunately, from our point of view, we were working in a county where the coroner had to be a licensed physician, which gave me more confidence in the report we got from her office than I might have had from a coroner in a county where literally anybody could do the job.

  Susan had been stabbed and strangled, as had Erin Belafonte.

  But then, we already knew that, because Darren Betch had told us so.

  What we hadn't known until Detective Cannistre had a deputy deliver a copy of the coroner's report to us was that the first victim was 5'5” tall, thin, 110 pounds, with dark hair cut to shoulder length. A pair of prescription eyeglasses had been found in the grave with her. From her reluctant mother, Markie had learned that she was an only child. She had been a child-care worker at a day-care center, and a high-school graduate with no college. When those facts and a few others got put up on the wall under her name, the four of us stood back and looked at what we now had about all four of Betch's known victims.

  Our heads swiveled back and forth from one section of white paper to another as we took it all in.

  For a while, there was silence.

  Then ... “Uh,” said Peter.

  "Marie?” said Deborah.

  "Yes, I see it,” I told her.

  "We've got a problem,” Markie said, sounding disgusted.

  "No.” I reached for the motel telephone. “The cops have a problem. What we have is a more interesting book.” When I got through to Luis Cannistre, I said, “I think you'd better get over here."

  * * * *

  It was all on the walls, clear as the North Dakota sky outside our rooms.

  Now that there were four victims we could finally see that two of them fit together in a pattern and two of them clearly did not. Susan and Erin Belafonte: both around 5'5", both about 110 pounds, both with dark hair worn straight and shoulder-length and with bangs that touched their eyebrows, both child-care workers, both high-school educated with no college, both wore eyeglasses, both only children. The last two victims, the two friends, weren't anything like that portrait: They were older, for starters, blond hair, red hair, short hair, curly hair, a master's degree, a bachelor's degree. Both had siblings. Neither wore glasses or even contacts. One was a saleswoman for a national car-rental company; the other worked for an advertising firm.

  Markie Lentz said, “Two killers."

  "But Darren Betch confessed!” Peter exclaimed, in tones of outrage.

  "He may have done it to protect himself,” Cannistre said, looking like a man who wanted to kick himself from there to California. “Think about it. Here was a guy who had gone around pretending to be Native American and he was facing going into a prison where there's a big Indian population. They were not going to appreciate that. He knew how unlikely it was that he'd ever get out on appeal. He was there to stay, and he had a more immediate concern. He had to worry about staying alive. One murder made him ordinary. Three murders made him a very bad guy that the other inmates were a whole lot less likely to mess with."

  "But he still uses the Indian thing,” Deborah said.

  "And by now they probably all believe it,” Cannistre said.

  Confession or not, our walls showed there was more evidence to suggest that Darren killed the first two but somebody else killed the other two. Betch had tossed Susan Lerner's purse into the grave he dug for her, and he'd done the same with Erin Belafonte's purse. Jessica Burge's purse, on the other hand, had been found at her apartment, along with her friend Caroline Meyers's purse. Not only that, but both Susan and Erin had hundreds of dollars taken from their checking accounts right after they disappeared. Jessie's and Caroline's accounts were untouched. It appeared to be two completely different M.O.'s, perpetrated against two completely different pairs of girls.

  The first time I had spoken to Luis Cannistre, I had asked him if he had a favorite suspect. Now I found myself asking him again. “If Darren didn't kill the last two women, then who's your most likely suspect?"

  Markie Lentz interjected his own list of possibilities:

  "There's the abusive fiancé, the parents with the rough business partners, the suicidal father who felt ‘guilty,’ the sponge of a brother."

  "No,” Cannistre said, looking thoughtful and unhappy, “none of those."

  "Wait.” I walked closer to Markie and Peter's side of the walls, wishing now I had paid more attention when they were gathering information about the friends and families of the victims. What I now saw there made me turn around and ask the detective, “When we met with the families in my room ... why did you say, ‘Typical'?"

  * * * *

  Divers found them, or rather a watch that one of them had worn and other jewelry the other had worn, at the bottom of the biggest lake outside of Bismarck.

  There are no lakes in Tucson, Arizona.

  Jessica Burge's mother and father had moved to the desert, as far away as they could get from reminders of what they'd done, or rather failed to do. They had not murdered their child and her friend, but they had kept everyone from finding out how the girls had died.

  "What made them your favorite suspects, after Darren?” I asked Cannistre.

  "They never cooperated the way the others did. Everybody else took lie-detector tests, but not them. They claimed they didn't trust us, didn't trust the system, didn't trust anybody. At the time it looked suspicious, but then we arrested Darren, and everybody assumed he had killed them all, so we let it go. And then Darren confessed to killing them. I never thought about it again."

  They'd had their 36-foot cabin cruiser out on the lake and they had Jessica and her friend Caroline with them. It had been a spontaneous trip. Nobody knew they went. They towed along the little motorboat they used for water skiing. The girls, who had been drinking beer all afternoon, took it out to ski. Jessie lost control of the boat while Caroline was up on the skis, running over her friend. Panicked, drunk, Jessie overcompensated at the wheel and the boat turned over.

  From the cruiser, Jessie's parents saw it all. They too were drunk.

  They were afraid of being charged with negligent homicide.

  They were afraid of being sued by Caroline's parents.

  Knowing there was already one girl missing from the city, they went back home and two days later called in their own missing-person report, leaving Caroline's family to report her gone, as well.

  They allowed the other family to grieve for twelve years without knowing what had really happened to their daughter.

  * * * *

  "Why'd you do it, Darren?” I asked him. “Why did you take the rap for two murders you didn't do?"

  His trademark smirk was in place. “I don't have to tell you everyt
hing."

  "All right.” I had a feeling that Detective Cannistre had the correct theory on that, which meant there was no way that this man's overweening pride was ever going to let him say, I pretended to be an Indian, and I was afraid of what the real ones might do to me in here, so I had to look tough. “Well, here it is,” I said, pushing a pile of pages across the table at him. “Here's your book. Or some of it."

  "What do you mean, some of it?"

  I looked into his eyes. “Our deal was that I'd finish the book and you'd give me the other bodies. But we already found them, didn't we? So what do we need you for?"

  "But that just makes it a more interesting book,” he said, grinning.

  It was exactly what I had said to Markie and our assistants.

  Darren wasn't getting it, he wasn't understanding, so I got up and started to leave.

  "Wait a minute,” he called out from behind me. “You're going to finish it, right? Where are you going?"

  I turned back to look at him. “I'm going home."

  "Not yet, you aren't. You've got to finish it. We've got to talk about publicity, all that stuff."

  "There's not going to be any publicity, Darren."

  His eyes narrowed, his jaws stopped chewing his gum, and he stared at me.

  "There's not going to be any publicity,” I said, “because there's never going to be a published book."

  He stood up, but then sat down again fast when it caught the guard's attention.

  "We have a deal!"

  I shook my head. “We're done. There never was going to be a book. Did you really think I'd let you blackmail me into publishing a book for you? Did you really think you could play those kinds of awful games with me, and win?"

  "You have a contract with your publisher!"

  "Who agreed to tear it up."

  And Markie was being paid a lump sum for his contributions.

  I could admit to myself, even if to no one else, that there had been moments when I'd been tempted. Markie had even tried to persuade me. We both knew it would have been a big seller.

  I turned again to leave.

  "There were other girls,” he blurted.

  My heart sank. I believed him. But I turned around and said coolly, “There are other writers, too."

  * * * *

  At the airport, Markie and Peter's plane left before mine.

  I thanked them and said, “Maybe we'll work together again."

  "No way.” Markie gave me his last shot. “I'm the rabbit, you're the tortoise."

  "Which means I win in the end,” I pointed out.

  He grinned and hurried off toward his gate with Peter running behind him.

  Luis Cannistre flashed his badge so he could walk Deb and me to our gate.

  Once there, I held out my right hand and he took it.

  "You don't fly your own plane?” he asked with a smile, taking up where we had left off in our original conversation.

  "No, but I sign my own books.” I turned to Deb and she handed me an autographed copy of the new one that wasn't even in the bookstores yet. I handed it to him.

  "Well, thank you,” he said, looking pleased. “For everything."

  He gave Deborah one of his wry smiles and winked at her. “But I'll bet that's the last time she answers her own phone."

  Copyright © 2006 Nancy Pickard

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CRY BEFORE MIDNIGHT by Donald Olson

  That a caterpillar could turn into a butterfly seemed a less remarkable feat of nature than the transformation of the girlhood friend Anna so fondly remembered into this willow-thin, middle-aged woman, brown as a gypsy, with a mane of strawlike hair which looked as if it had been trimmed in a windstorm with a pair of pruning shears.

  "My dear, I swear to goodness I wouldn't have known you,” declared Anna as they drove toward the lake under a brooding late-autumn sky.

  She had prepared herself for a certain shock of unrecognition when she picked Maureen up at the airport. Although Maureen had dutifully kept up her end of the correspondence, unlike Anna she had never sent so much as a single snapshot to record the inevitable change in appearance over the twenty-five years since they'd last seen each other. Consequently, Anna still carried in her mind the image of a seventeen-year-old girl inclined to plumpness, with excitable brown eyes and feather-cut raisin-colored hair.

  It was of their childhood days that Anna chattered all the way to the house, as if wanting to forestall the questions Maureen must have been dying to ask ever since receiving Anna's urgently worded telegram.

  "I'm impressed, girl,” said Maureen as they climbed out of the car. “You did yourself proud."

  Anna pursed her babyish lips. “A prison, that's what it's been.” Though undeniably an imposing one: a tree-girdled red-brick colonial, all massive chimneys, creeping ivy, and black shutters, with a sweeping stone-balustraded terrace overlooking the lake, slate-colored now under a dull metallic sky.

  Anna helped Maureen with her bags. “A hatbox? Don't tell me women wear hats in the wilds of New Mexico."

  Maureen smiled. “I don't use it for hats.” In the foyer she unstrapped the lid and carefully lifted out a heavy receptacle. “One of my replicas of a Cochiti polychrome storage jar.” Globe-shaped, with a short tapering neck about as wide as a fist, it was decorated with a bird motif between bands of brilliant black and red. “The perforated stopper's my own concession to modernity, so it can be used for a variety of purposes."

  Anna gushed over the workmanship but when she would have examined it more closely Maureen stopped her with a laugh. “No, no, mustn't touch. It's a gift for Carter."

  "For Carter?"

  "Oh, I have something for you, too, but I thought Carter might be less antagonistic—if I brought him something special. You wrote about his passion for rock candy. Well, the jar's full of rock candy."

  Anna bit her lips and looked worried. “How sweet of you, but I'm afraid Carter's gone."

  "Gone?"

  "Come into the living room. I'll fix us drinks before you unpack. I'm dying to tell you everything."

  "Things can't possibly be as desperate as your telegram implied.” In the other room Maureen fished the telegram from her snakeskin bag and read it aloud: "Something terrible has happened. Need you desperately. Don't fail me. Come at once."

  An endless flow of long, intimate letters had kept the friendship alive, Anna's far more emotionally extravagant than Maureen's, but it was probably that difference in temperament that helped account for the youthful bond between them. After high school Anna had married well, moved to Porthaven, lost a baby in childbirth. Neurotic complications had ensued, contributing to the gradual erosion of the marriage while Anna poured out her misery and self-pity in effusively indiscreet letters to her friend across the continent.

  Maureen, the loner, the artist and dreamer, had eventually settled down near one of those historic Pueblo ruins in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains south of Taos, New Mexico. There she had established her own pottery, eking out a modest legacy from a deceased aunt by selling her works in shops around Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Her descriptions of the solitary life had filled Anna with horror; she could not conceive of such an existence, without even a phone or running water, but she'd had the good taste not to express her distaste, for that flow of letters had become as essential a lifeline to her as blood transfusions to a hemophiliac. Without you I would go insane became a recurring theme in her letters to Maureen. Anna's husband Carter, as much a victim of the doomed marriage as Anna, regarded the correspondence with sardonic disapproval, using words like “unhealthy” and “pathological."

  Now Maureen regarded the other woman with a faintly sceptical look, as if the telegram couldn't have been dispatched by the same person who sat facing her with no sign of mental distress in her heavy-lidded, protuberant blue eyes. “You always did have a talent for hyperbole."

  "I meant every word! It was the last straw. The final crisis."

  "You're talk
ing about Carter."

  "Who else?” Over the years Anna's voice had acquired an habitually carping tone.

  "So why didn't you leave him? You never did give me a straight answer in your letters. And all that rubbish about planning to kill yourself. Really, girl."

  "I meant that, too. I even changed my will, just as I told you. Everything I have goes to you."

  Maureen lifted her hand and with the fingernail of her pinky scratched delicately at the corner of her eyebrow. “There are less drastic ways of ending a marriage."

  "How could I leave Carter? At my age? What would I do? Where would I go? We had a frightful row the other night, the very worst."

  "That's when he left?"

  "Yes.” Anna's lips quivered, her gaze falling away from Maureen's intense scrutiny.

  "So I should think your problem is solved. It's what you wanted, isn't it? To be rid of Carter?"

  "If it were only that simple."

  "You mean he's not gone for good?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  "Girl, what is it you're not telling me?"

  Anna flung her hands apart. “Oh, so much. I could tell you anything in a letter, but now ... I thought it would be so easy.” Indeed, pouring out her soul to the visionary Maureen, the distant mother confessor, was quite different from exposing herself to this flesh-and-blood Maureen with her piercing, cynical way of cutting through Anna's flabby defenses. “Give me a little time,” she pleaded. “Let's get you settled first. You must be exhausted. I'll show you your room and you can have a rest from me while I prepare dinner."

  Back in the foyer, Maureen said: “So much for my gift for dear Carter."

  Anna looked wistfully at the painted jar. “I'm afraid candy is strictly forbidden in my case. I've been diabetic for years."

  "I know."

  Anna looked a bit shamefaced. “I wonder if there's anything about me you don't know."

  "Thanks to your letters, I could probably write the definitive biography of Anna Lyman, complete with footnotes."

  "Carter always said I didn't know the meaning of the word restraint."

  "And such a memory. I'd all but forgotten many of the little escapades and secrets we shared."

  Anna sighed. “Such happy times. At least I had a carefree childhood. Anyway, the jar is lovely. I'll put it in Carter's study for now."