by Jan Burke
“He said he’s been hiding. He’s been afraid of Parrish. He said after you got those bones and roses, he knew that Parrish was back in the area, and he took off. He rented a beach house down the coast, didn’t even tell his sister how to get in touch with him. He heard the news reports tonight and decided to come home.”
“So why call me?”
“He was expecting a hostile reaction from the police, and he thought you might help him meet with me before things got out of hand. I didn’t tell him that you were the one that kept insisting we check him out. He’s hired a defense attorney of his own, but agreed to meet with us tomorrow.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You found a bloody circular saw and more at his house, right?”
“Right.”
“And those leg bones in the roses might have been cut with a saw, right, Ben?”
“Right.”
“I met with Phil, and that same night the bones showed up on our doorstep. If he left after he heard about the bones, he left after they were worked on in his garage. If he’s innocent, he must also be deaf — because he must not have noticed an awfully loud noise in his garage. Not to mention missing the peculiar sight of a bloody workbench while he was pulling his car out.”
“Not necessarily,” Ben said. “You’re relying on news reports based on secondhand sources.”
“Ben Sheridan—”
“No, I’m not trying to start a fight about the media. Frank, you were in Newly’s garage and saw it with your own eyes. Was the workbench bloody?”
“Yes.”
“If there was any blood, it probably came from Camille’s body.” He looked away for a moment, then said, “Or perhaps from the Jane Doe in the trash container. No matter what, that blood did not come from the Oregon woman’s femurs.”
“Wait a minute—” I protested.
“He’s right,” Frank said. “In general, dead bodies don’t bleed, because the heart isn’t pumping. You can drain blood from a body shortly after death, but the Oregon women were killed several weeks ago. Parrish removed the receptionist’s legs where he left the bodies — a long way from Phil Newly’s house.”
“I examined those femurs,” Ben said. “They weren’t sawed when the bodies were fresh.”
“So you think he’s innocent?” I asked.
“I’m not saying he’s guilty or innocent,” Frank said. “So far, we haven’t found any fragments at Newly’s house that were an obvious match to the femurs. But we haven’t even had a dozen hours to look around. Newly isn’t in the clear. You don’t find this kind of evidence without raising questions about the owner of the house. Newly still has lots of explaining to do.”
When we got down from the ladder, I saw a familiar figure standing away from all the action, looking dejected. I walked over to him.
“Leonard? What’s wrong?”
“I let you down,” he said, glancing nervously at Frank, and then down at his shiny black shoes. “He pulled the oldest trick in the book on me, and I fell for it.”
“What are you talking about?”
He sighed all the way from those shoes and said, “Parrish. Started a trash-can fire on the loading dock. When I went to investigate, he must have gone up the stairs.”
“Any losses from the fire?”
He shook his head.
“Well, then, that’s good, right?”
“I told you I wouldn’t let him in here, and I did.”
“He’s been slipping past the whole department for months,” Frank said, causing Leonard to look up at him. “No one would expect a lone officer to be able to stop him.”
I formally introduced them then, and Frank went on to thank Leonard. “Knowing you were keeping an eye on things made me feel a lot better about her being here at night.”
“It did?” Leonard asked, then quickly added, “I do my best, sir.”
“All anyone asks,” Frank said.
“Lone officer?” I said later, when Leonard had strutted his way out of earshot.
“I was afraid he was going to throw himself over that railing.”
Once John Walters vented his anger over our wild chase on the rooftop occurring after deadline, he asked me to write a story for a special morning edition. I agreed to do it, over the protests of my entourage of protectors, because I wanted to prove to Wrigley that I wasn’t going to be denied a place on A-1 just because he gave me post-deadline hours.
Frank, Ben, Travis, and Stinger refused to let me stay alone in the newsroom. Jack came over with a bottle of champagne and in spite of Leonard’s warnings about explicit company rules forbidding alcohol on the premises (“I am not here, I am not seeing this,” he said), we drank a toast to good friends, present and remembered. John joined us.
Parrish, we learned by taking a look at security tapes, had come into the building from the loading docks, wearing a baseball cap, carrying a toolbox, and moving purposefully past men who were caught up in the problem of delivering papers that were coming off the presses late. He started the fire near another camera, so that Leonard would be certain to see it.
I learned that he then spent some time making sure that it was going to be damned difficult for anyone to follow us up to the roof. He had barricaded the final interior doorway to the roof access stairs and put a heavy-duty locking bar on the door to the roof itself.
I called the hospital for an update. Nicholas Parrish was in critical condition with severe injuries, especially to his head and neck. If he died, I wondered if anyone other than his helper would mourn his passing.
“Ben,” Travis asked, “with all of his weight on your prosthesis, why didn’t the whole socket just pull off sooner?”
“It’s held on by suction,” he explained. “Unless I roll it off, it’s not coming off. For obvious reasons, the socket is designed to stay on until I want to take it off. Which, to be honest, I’d love to do as soon as possible.”
I filed the story and we left. Stinger stayed with Jack, Travis slept on the couch, Ben in the guest room with Bingle.
Frank and I didn’t sleep much at first, but not because of nightmares. There was some drive in both of us that Dr. Robinson probably has some fancy name for, a syndrome or something, but we didn’t need to name it. We had to be a little quieter than usual with such a houseful, but that was no big deal — we had already learned on a previous occasion that Bingle felt inclined to raise an alarm when he heard certain noises issuing from behind a bedroom door.
“I wonder if that’s what first earned him the name Bocazo?” I asked Frank now.
“Who knows?” Frank said, concentrating on other matters. We slept just fine after that.
But the next morning, I awakened with an unwelcome idea in my head, a suspicion I despised and yet no matter how I tried, I could not rid myself of it.
“Frank,” I finally said, “I have a terrible favor to ask of you.”
60
WEDNESDAY, LATE AFTERNOON,
SEPTEMBER 27
Las Piernas
The staff at St. Anne’s had been wary of me at first. After all, I was the person who had put their patient here. But they had been reading about their patient for several months now, and knew who he was, so that when, after two hours, I had not tried to suffocate him, I began to overhear remarks about my amazing capacity for forgiveness.
A mistaken diagnosis if I’ve ever heard one.
I held a copy of Parzival, but I wasn’t reading it. I was thinking about a search that was carried out that morning.
It hadn’t taken me as long to convince Frank of my ideas as it had taken me to convince myself. While Frank made some calls, and Travis made breakfast, I scanned videotapes of Bingle and David working with their SAR group. I found what I was looking for, and showed it to Frank, which resulted in a few more calls. I made one of my own.
Ben woke up and joined us for breakfast; I asked him what time he had to teach his first class.
“I have a lab at two o’clock, but Ellen might be able to cov
er it if you need my help. What’s up?”
“Frank received a report about a house where remains may be hidden. Can you bring Bingle?”
“Yes, of course. But we should have more than one dog to confirm it.”
“Can you get Bool’s new owner to join you?”
“I can try.”
“If he can do it, here’s the address where you’ll meet.”
“You aren’t coming with us?”
“No, I have to be somewhere else this morning.”
I could see that he wanted to ask more questions, but he seemed to sense my mood, and held off. He called Ellen Raice, and the bloodhound handler. This second call took a while, and when he hung up, he was smiling.
“What?” I asked.
“He said he’s been meaning to call me. He thinks he may have been wrong before, and that Bool does miss ‘that obstreperous shepherd’ after all. He’s having second thoughts about keeping him.”
“Something tells me you’ve missed Bool, too.”
“I have,” he said. “In a lot of ways he’s just a big silly dog, but he’s very affectionate. A great tracker, too. David always said, ‘If it’s there to be found, then Bool will find it.’ This handler said he’d teach me how to work with Bool if I wanted him back.”
Frank called me at the hospital to say that the initial search with the dogs had been successful, and that they’d probably do a more thorough search that afternoon.
“One other thing,” he said. “As soon as Ben gets the dogs settled in together, he’s going to be coming by to see you there.”
“He’s upset?”
“Yes. I told him it was up to you to tell him what was going on.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
He laughed. “I’ll come by as soon as I can.”
“What are you doing here?” Ben half-shouted at me when he came into the ICU room where I sat next to Parrish.
“Lower your voice, Ben,” I said. “They’ll think you wish to harm poor little Nicky here.”
“I do! I want to unplug the bastard!”
I sighed and closed the book. “You, Ben, are far more merciful than I am.”
“Merciful?!”
“Think about it. He’s trapped in the ultimate prison.”
Ben’s look of rage changed in an instant. He looked at Parrish and said, “He’ll live?”
“Yes, it seems he will. He won’t be able to move, or speak. They think he can hear and understand us, and he can open his eyes. He makes gurgling noises every once in a while. I like to think he’s trying to say something.”
“You like to . . .”
“Yes. Cruel of me, isn’t it? I’m a little surprised at myself. Maybe someday I’ll stop being angry at him for what he’s done, and, like you, I’ll wish him dead.”
He took a seat, studied me. “You won’t convince me that you’re here to gloat.”
“No,” I said. “But as long as I have to be sitting next to him, I find I don’t mind saying terribly mean things to him.”
Parrish made a gurgling sound. Ben, hearing it, made a face.
“Awful,” I agreed.
“Why are you here?” Ben asked again.
“I’m waiting for somebody.”
“Who?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Irene—”
He was distracted by a slightly different sound from Parrish, a sort of a humming noise.
“What do you suppose he’s trying to say?” Ben asked, looking at him warily.
I set the book down, stood up, and looked into Parrish’s eyes. “What was it, Nicky?”
“Mmmaaah.”
“Maybe he’s calling for his mommy,” I said, and sat down again.
Ben stared at me, then said, “Have you thought of calling Jo Robinson?”
I laughed. “I’ll probably need a long session with her later. But don’t worry, I’m not here to hurt Nicky or anyone else.”
“Do you mind if I wait here with you?” he asked.
“No, at least — well, no, not at all. Mr. Nick’s conversational abilities are rather limited.”
Ben glanced at him, then said, “I wanted to have that conversation we keep putting off, but I don’t want to talk about it in front of him.”
“What’s he going to do about it?” I said wearily. “Fantasize? Let him. He’s finally in a condition where it’s safe for him to do so.”
“Irene—”
“Sorry, Ben,” I said. “I’m feeling a little cynical today. Let me ask you about something else entirely — if you don’t mind talking about this in front of Nick, here.”
“What?”
“You said that David sometimes talked about—” I glanced at Parrish, and amended what I was going to say. “You said that he rarely talked about certain aspects of his childhood.”
“That’s right,” he said, a little stiffly.
“Except to others who might have experienced the same thing.”
“Right.” He glanced toward Parrish.
“Did David ever tell you the names of people he talked to?”
“No. He would talk to me in general terms, or tell me about someone without mentioning a name. He felt that while . . . such a background should not be a source of shame, he worked hard to gain their trust, and so he would not betray their confidences. He had this ability to identify people who might have been through similar things, but David approached people gently, slowly. He didn’t push them to tell him things. He earned their trust first.”
He paused, then asked, “Why do you want to know about people he talked to?”
“I’m trying to understand someone I know,” I said. “But maybe I won’t ever be able to do that.”
“You are in a cynical mood.”
“Sorry, yes I am. Started when I woke up thinking of a song by the Boomtown Rats called, ‘I Don’t Like Mondays.’ Do you know it?”
“Yes.” He sang a little bit of the chorus.
“Exactly. It triggered a memory. The inspiration for that song was a shooting in San Carlos — that’s in the San Diego area. A sixteen-year-old girl named Brenda Spencer decided to point a rifle at a schoolyard and embark on a sniping marathon. This was in 1979, when it wasn’t so common for shots to be fired in elementary schoolyards.”
“Definitely cynical. I do remember this story, though. She fired from inside her house toward the school for several hours, right?”
“Yes. And during that time, she killed two people and wounded nine others. When they asked her why, she said, ‘I don’t like Mondays.’ ”
“Jesus.”
“She said, ‘I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.’ ”
“And this song reminded you of something else?”
“Yes,” I said. “I like the song. Lots of people do. But it was written in the year of the shootings — a couple of decades ago, now. So until recently, it had been a long time since I had heard it.”
He was about to say something when the officer outside the door stepped in and said, “Ms. Kelly? You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be — thanks,” I said. “Ben, I’m going to have to ask you to wait in the other room with Frank.”
“Frank’s here?” he asked, looking around.
“Yes. Don’t worry. You’ll be able to hear everything we say,” I said, and reached behind my back.
“You’re wearing a wire?” he asked in disbelief. “I’m not sure I—”
“Please, Ben,” I said, “Frank can fill you in on everything.”
He folded his arms.
The officer’s radio crackled.
“Now or never, Mrs. Harriman,” he said.
Ben didn’t budge.
“Ben, if you trust me at all, get out of here now.”
Reluctantly, he left with the officer.
I flipped a switch, gave my name, the date, time, location and said that Nick Parrish was present.
Parrish made his “Mmmaaah” sound.
I looked outsi
de the glass wall toward the nurses’ station. A person who was dressed exactly like a nurse but who wasn’t taking care of any patients nodded to me. In another room, the reel-to-reel was turning. In my mind, wheels that had been whirling all day kept right on spinning.
The elevator door opened.
61
WEDNESDAY, LATE AFTERNOON,
SEPTEMBER 27
Las Piernas
I wiped my palms.
She approached cautiously, tentatively. She was dressed in a business-style woman’s suit, the skirt at the most conservative length I had ever seen her wear. She carried a stylish leather handbag. I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that she looked like a child playing at being a grown-up.
There was the slightest sign of surprise on her face when she saw me, but then she came into the room. “Hello, Irene.”
“Hello, Gillian.”
“I — I’m relieved to see you here, Irene. I’m a little afraid to be in here alone with him.”
“Why come at all, then?”
“I had to.” She looked back at me. “Did they search your purse when you came in here?”
“Yes,” I said. “They’ve searched everyone.”
“Why?”
“Someone might want to harm him. At this point, they’re letting God get all the vengeance.”
“Not just God — you, too. I heard about what you did.”
I tried not to let that unnerve me.
“Maybe you’ll think I’m some kind of freak for saying this,” she went on, “but I had to see him. I had to see the man who did those things to my mother. Four years, I’ve waited.”
“But you’ve seen him before,” I said.
Her eyes widened a little.
“He was your neighbor, right?”
“Yes,” she said, creeping closer to the bed. “But that was a long time ago.” She leaned over, and looked into his eyes.
“Mmmaaah,” Parrish said. She turned white and shrank back from the bed.
“Here,” I said, putting an arm around her shoulders, “have a seat. He’s not so scary once you get used to him — although I imagine he looks very different from the last time you saw him.”