by Jan Burke
From our earlier hike through this area I remembered that the woods were denser here than those near the meadow where Julia Sayre had been buried. Farther in from this meadow, there was a stream; beyond that, a small pond.
Flash, Ben, and I set up one of the smaller tents in the woods, to give Duke and Earl a place to catch up on their sleep. If necessary, we would set up camp there. While sheltering under a single tree, or even a small stand of trees, would be extremely dangerous in a bad storm, a forest of this size would be safer than the meadow. We would no longer be the tallest objects.
It wasn’t long before we heard Bingle crooning.
We hurried to the meadow, where David was praising the dog. “¡Qué inteligente eres! ¡Qué guapo eres!”
“Yes, he’s handsome and intelligent,” I said, “but what did he find?”
David commanded Bingle to stay, and walked with us to a place another few yards away. “A little newer, I suspect.”
The plants here were shorter and sparser than growth nearby. This time, it was not so difficult to see the oval shape formed by the edges of the grave; the fill soil within the grave had settled, so that the surface of the grave was slightly concave. The edges of this depression had cracked, outlining it.
“Great!” Bob Thompson said. “You did it! We’ve got the bastard now!”
“Detective Thompson,” Ben said coldly, “there is nothing to celebrate here — on any count. We don’t yet have any idea who or what is buried here, let alone who’s responsible for burying it.”
Thompson’s mood was not easily suppressed. Even though I disliked him, I recognized that he was not rejoicing over a victim’s grave, but over the opportunity to see Nicholas Parrish face the death penalty.
Parrish, who must have known what this new find would mean to his chances of avoiding that sentence, looked almost serenely at us. His eyes came to rest on me. He smiled.
“Soon, my love,” he said, “soon.”
Bingle’s hackles went up, and he began barking at Parrish.
A warning we should have heeded.
16
THURSDAY MORNING, MAY 18
Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains
Ben and David soon began the next phase of their work, and with the same painstaking care they had taken at Julia Sayre’s grave. Duke and Earl decided to get a little shut-eye, but made Thompson promise to wake them if the anthropologists found anything.
Merrick and Manton took their prisoner some distance from the grave, where Thompson tried to question him, but Parrish was unwilling to say anything about this victim. That is not to say he was silent.
“Do you know why those coyotes died?” Parrish asked, staring at me again.
“No, tell me,” Thompson coaxed.
“For disturbing the peace,” he answered, not so much as glancing away from me. “Now, look at Dr. Sheridan and Dr. Niles. Are they any better than coyotes?”
“What do you mean?” Thompson asked.
“Requiescat in pace.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ask Ms. Kelly. She grew up hearing Latin — at least on Sundays.”
Thompson turned to me.
“It means ‘rest in peace,’ ” I said. “The R.I.P. on old gravestones.”
“You see?” Parrish said. “Do you know the habits of coyotes, Ms. Kelly?”
I didn’t answer.
“They rob graves. They will steal bones and gnaw on them.”
“Coyotes aren’t the only animals that will do that,” Thompson said.
“I don’t like coyotes,” Parrish said, smiling.
I walked away, headed back toward the grave.
Bingle was pleased to see me, and David as well. “Would you mind dog-sitting again?” he asked. “He’s especially restless for some reason.”
I had already realized this. Bingle had been dividing his time between trying to sneak closer to David and turning to bark fiercely toward Parrish.
“Duke and Earl must be ready to kill me,” David said. “They probably managed to fall asleep just in time to have him wake them with all his racket. I don’t know what his problem is.”
“With J.C. and Andy here yesterday, he could command more of your attention.”
“He’s had to sit quietly while I worked on other cases. He’s not usually so unruly. And he seldom reacts to anyone the way he has to Nick Parrish.”
“They should make him a judge,” I said.
David laughed. He showed me that they had already reached a layer of large stones, and could see green plastic in some places. “If this grave wasn’t made by Nick Parrish, he has an imitator,” he said.
“David,” Ben said, on a note of exasperation. He was in one of his crankier moods, and had been frowning throughout the time he had been working on the grave. He didn’t scold me for getting too close to it, though. Progress, I supposed.
Bingle decided to bark at Parrish again.
“Maybe I should take Bingle for a walk,” I said. “Get him away from Parrish for a while. God knows, I’d like to get away from him.” And the smell of decomposition, I thought, but didn’t say so.
“That would be great!” David said. He stopped working and went to get a leash from the dog equipment bag.
“A good idea, Ms. Kelly,” Ben said, carefully scraping soil off the plastic. “I’d prefer to work without curiosity seekers this time.”
“Curiosity seekers?” I said, outraged. “I’m a professional here on a job. If you could just get that idea through your thick skull—”
“What a profession. You profit from other people’s suffering—”
“Excuse me, Saint Ben of the Bones, but—”
“—you’ll peddle the details of another person’s misery to anyone who’s willing to drop a coin at a newsstand—”
“Ben,” I heard a voice say behind me. “Please.” David was back with the leash.
Ben looked away, but couldn’t hide the effort required to keep his anger in check. He scowled at his gloved hands for a long moment, then went back to scraping soil.
David leashed Bingle and made sure that the dog would heel at my command, then he walked with us toward the forest. He seemed preoccupied.
“Bingle won’t stay with me without a leash?” I asked.
“Hmm? Oh — no, sorry. He understands that when I give his lead to someone else, he has to stay with that person. Otherwise, I couldn’t depend on him not to take a notion to come and see what I was up to. He might run off and leave you in the middle of the woods.” He smiled. “I could probably make him find you, of course, but it’s easier on everybody if we just give him the message ahead of time.”
“I see — so the leash is to make sure I don’t get lost.”
He laughed. “Exactly.”
I thought he would stop at the edge of the forest, but he continued a little way into it. “About Ben,” he said suddenly. “He has this problem with reporters. I know he can be abrupt—”
“Abrupt?”
“Rude.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, rude,” he admitted. “But you shouldn’t take it personally. I know that outside of your profession, he thinks you’re okay.”
“I’ll have to remember to congratulate myself!”
“I’m not doing a very good job with this, am I?”
“You’re doing fine. Sorry. I shouldn’t take my anger at him out on you. If you’re going to tell me that he’s good-hearted, I already know that.”
“You do?” he asked, incredulous.
“Yes, and not just because Parrish is here to hold up for comparison. I think I first really noticed it when Ben asked you to have Bingle sleep with me — on a night when I think he had come to borrow the dog to ease his own nightmares.”
David nodded.
“Besides, Judge Bingle likes Ben,” I said.
David went down to eye level with Bingle, and caressed the dog’s ruff and ears. Bingle lowered his head, butted it against David’s chest, and h
eld it there, making soft, low sounds of pleasure. “Bingle’s a good judge,” David said. “He likes you, too.”
“The feeling is mutual. But I suspect you were going to try to make a few excuses for your other friend?”
“Not excuses, really. I just thought if you knew — he has his reasons for mistrusting the press.”
“Such as?”
“Just this year, he—” He halted, shook his head, then thought for a moment before saying, “A couple of years ago, when he was working on a plane crash, a TV reporter overheard Ben talking to someone — using one of those spy-type microphones.”
“A parabolic mike.”
“Yes. She went on the air, and misquoted him. That happens to all of us, but this was misinformation that led the victims’ families to hope that they’d be — that the remains would be relatively intact. Do you know what really happens — in a high-impact crash, I mean?”
“Yes,” I said. “The physics aren’t in anybody’s favor.”
“Right. Most of the time, we make identifications on fragments.”
“So the families were upset with him.”
“Yes. I don’t think the thing that bothered him most was that the families were angry with him. He just hated seeing them tormented. People who were grieving, already unable to really accept what had happened, and then this expectation — Ben said it amounted to a form of public torture. I think he was right.”
“So this one incident has tarred all reporters with the same brush?”
“I wish I could tell you it was one incident. There have been photos taken in temporary morgues by hidden cameras. Misinformation about missing persons — you can’t imagine how painful that is for the victims’ families!”
“If you want me to say that I’m proud of everyone in my profession—”
“No, no, of course not. I can tell you about colleagues of ours who make us shake our heads. I’m just trying to help you understand Ben, I guess. Like I said, I don’t want you to take it personally.”
“I don’t,” I said. “But over the long run, Ben won’t be doing you any favors if he’s so openly hostile to the press.”
“There’s more to it than — well, I don’t have any business talking about him in this way, I suppose. I should get back to help him out.”
“Wait a minute, David — please.”
He gave me a questioning look.
“I could take or leave most of the rest of these guys,” I said, “but you and Andy have gone out of your way to be kind to me. I’m grateful for all the time you’ve spent talking to me about your work. So if you tell me that I need to give Ben Sheridan another chance — another dozen chances — I will.”
He smiled at me. “Thanks. Ben has seen me through more than one rough patch. It’s not hard for me to have a little patience with one of his.” He gave Bingle’s fur one last ruffle and said, “Take good care of her, Bingle.”
“I’ll take good care of him, too,” I said.
“Oh, I know that!” he said, laughing as he walked away.
I took my time on the walk. Clouds continued to darken the sky and it rained a little, but not enough to discourage either of us. Bingle enjoyed flopping into a mud puddle before I could stop him, but otherwise, he was content to go wherever I wanted to wander. He was curious about any number of sights and scents and sounds along the way, and some of these, I allowed him to investigate. But if I wanted to keep moving, he never resisted or yanked on the leash or failed to display anything but the best manners.
At some point, I had to own up to the fact that I was escaping. I didn’t really want to see another green plastic bag opened up, another set of decomposing remains. I most especially didn’t want to see what might be at the bottom of that grave.
But as I had told Ben, I had a job to do, and all the arguments I presented to myself about why it was unnecessary for me to be at the site failed to ring true. I made my way back through the woods.
When we were within sight of the meadow, I halted, still not quite ready to leave the quiet of woods behind, to rejoin the men. Bingle lifted his nose, sniffing the air, but otherwise sat quietly beside me.
Flash was standing near the grave, running the video camera. Merrick and Manton were still guarding Parrish, but apparently Duke and Earl had been awakened by Thompson. Like David, the two guards and the detective wore masks and gloves, and knelt at the grave’s edge. David talked to them, giving them instructions. Ben Sheridan was missing from the group.
I knew that I should move closer, should try to think like a reporter, should just get the story and worry about my reactions later. If Parrish stayed true to form, I’d soon be able to see photographs of the victim. That was the important thing here, I told myself — finding out who was in the grave. I should be like Manton, who was moving closer, trying to get a better look. “On the count of three,” I heard David say.
I was distracted from the proceedings by a distinctive splashing sound. I turned toward it just as Ben realized I was nearby.
“Oh, Christ!” he said, hurriedly tucking himself in and zipping his fly.
“One . . .” I heard David call.
“I — I’m sorry!” I said. “I didn’t know you were here!”
Ben was beet red with embarrassment. “I suppose that will be in the paper?”
“. . . Two. . .”
“Yes, of course it will,” I said, my own embarrassment turning to anger. “The headline will read, ‘Who Shrank the Forensic Anthropologist?’ ”
To my utter surprise, he started laughing.
“Three!” I heard David call.
The sound came at us like a prizefighter’s punch — a thundering, out-of-nowhere explosion that shook the earth and nearly deafened us.
I stood frozen, unable to comprehend what had happened. A cloud of dust and debris suddenly billowed over the meadow as the echoes of the explosion continued to rattle and roar through the mountains, until soon the sound seemed to come from every side. There were other sounds, too — screams and the quick crack of shots fired. Bingle gave a yelping cry of distress and charged toward the dust cloud, pulling me off balance; I fell face first onto the ground; he dragged me forward a few feet, but still I held on tightly to the leash. If he had not further tangled it up in the brush between us, I doubt my weight alone would have been enough to stop his progress.
Ben ran ahead. I called to him, but he was already gone, soon halfway across the meadow, answering their screams with his own, even as one by one they grew silent. He was shouting David’s name, shouting, “No!”, shouting words I could not understand as he ran and then — and then Nicholas Parrish emerged from the dust, struggling to keep his balance as he used Merrick’s corpse as an obscene shield. Parrish’s still-chained hand raised a gun — the dead man’s gun — and the dead man’s arm rose with his, Ben too far into the meadow to take cover, suddenly not shouting, not making any sound, just falling.
He did not get up.
17
THURSDAY, EARLY AFTERNOON, MAY 18
Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains
I stayed where I was. Bingle kept barking, revealing our location to Parrish. For one terrifying moment, fear paralyzed me — it was as if any Spanish words I knew had been taken from me, and I could not think of the command to quiet the dog.
“¡Cállate!” I finally remembered, and had no sooner said it than Bingle fell silent. Hoping to God Parrish didn’t hear me, I whispered, “Ven acá, Bingle. Ven acá.”
Bingle obeyed, crouching low as he came back to me, panting fast and hard, his ears pressed flat, his tail curled between his legs. Afraid.
“Muy bien,” I whispered to him, my voice unsteady.
I moved closer to him, until I was lying next to him. He was trembling. So was I. I ran an unsteady hand over Bingle’s coat.
“Cálmate, tranquilo,” I said into his ear.
I tried to watch Parrish, to stay aware of where he was. I saw him sink down into the grass, still holding the dead
guard.
Long moments passed. We did not move from our hiding place. Soon I saw him stand again, free of his gruesome burden, calmly using a key to unlock the one handcuff still attached to his wrist. It dropped away from him and hit the ground.
The air was still thick with smoke and the smell of scattered flesh and blood. Now there was a silence, as unsettling as the screams had been. Impossible, I thought wildly, to conceal my trembling from him in that silence — my fear would be felt across the meadow, telegraphed to him through the ground itself.
The smoke began to clear. The wind picked up, and he laughed into it, raising his arms to the darkening sky, shaking his fists triumphantly, as if calling on the gods to behold his victory.
He stopped and stared into the woods. I felt certain he could see us. Suddenly he started to run — right toward us. I felt Bingle’s hackles rise and whispered, “Quieto.” The dog remained silent.
Parrish kept coming closer, heading for the trees, and my mouth went dry. I reached into my daypack and pulled out my knife and opened it. Not much of a weapon against a loaded gun, but even being shot to death would be better than meeting Julia Sayre’s fate. But then I saw that Parrish was moving at an angle — veering away from us.
He was going to the camp.
I strained to hear his movements, fearing that at any moment he could double back behind me, attack from some unexpected direction. I would have to trust the dog to react to any approach by Parrish.
Before long Parrish was making plenty of noise in the camp, not bothering with any attempt at stealth.
It began to rain again.
I fought off a temptation to despair over this. Yes, the helicopter might have to wait for the weather to clear, but J.C. and Andy had probably made it out. You can make it out, too, I told myself. One way or another, someone will be coming back to this meadow. You just have to avoid him for a few hours. It’s not even raining hard — the helicopter might be able to fly in this weather. I had no sooner thought this than I heard the distant rumble of thunder.
I was still shaking. I told myself it was the damp.
I had my poncho with me, and I decided to risk making noise to pull it on. The poncho’s dark camouflage colors would blend better with the surrounding forest than the rest of my clothing.