Bone Maker: Will Finch Mystery Thriller Series Book 1

by D. F. Bailey

“Look, this is a personal question and you don’t need to answer it, but how long had you and Ray been together?”

  “You mean joined at the hip?” A wry look crossed her face. “That’s the expression that Franklin used after he discovered our affair. About three months. Just long enough to make it count for something,” she said as if little in her life counted for anything before her intimacy with Toeplitz.

  Finch thought about the implications as he ate another piece of seafood. Then he remembered the exact words she’d used in the afternoon to describe Toeplitz’s departure. He leaned forward and spoke to her in a clear, precise tone. “Gianna, you also said that your brothers drove him out of there. Do you mean they got into his car with him?”

  “One of them did. Evan, I think. And Justin followed in his own car. Why?” She shrugged, wondered how this could be relevant.

  “It’s just for the record. I always try to get all the facts, so I can understand the context of the stories I write.”

  “Of course.” She ate a prawn, chewed at it and then saw Finch’s cellphone. “I forget that you’re a reporter. Franklin hates that, by the way.” She laughed. “Maybe that’s why I’m telling you all this.”

  “That’s up to you. Don’t tell me anything you want left off the record.”

  “Fuck it,” she said and waved a hand. “Ask me anything. If I don’t want to answer, I won’t.”

  “If there was so much tension before he left, why did Ray let Evan into the car with him?”

  “Yeah. That was ridiculous.” She took another sip of her Margarita. “Ever since he’d come up here, since 2006 or 07, he always said he wanted to hike up to Saddle Mountain. It’s off route 26 on the way into Portland. They gave him this big story about how they’d been promising to take him up there, and now you know, better late than never.”

  “That seems so … staged.”

  “Yeah, but that’s part of Asperger’s. Inability to decode social situations.” She waved a hand again, this time in a short, angry chop. “When I saw what was happening I was so pissed at Franklin and my brothers. And when I realized Ray couldn’t even hug me goodbye, I just left the room.”

  “And that was … the last time.”

  Gianna gazed through the window at the river. A tear slipped from her eye and she brushed it away.

  Finch thought about his own world, the world in which he didn’t grab Buddy from Bethany and refuse to let her drive him to the baseball game. “You know,” he said after a moment, “it would be a mistake to blame yourself for this.”

  Her face tightened and another tear escaped from her eyes, then two more. She dabbed them away with her thumbs.

  “That would be magical thinking,” he continued. “When you think you can control people’s fate.” He’d learned the hard way what a self-destructive lie that was, the delusion that you can control someone else. “It’s difficult just to manage yourself, don’t you think?”

  She nodded at the obvious. She could barely suppress her tears.

  Despite the tension, Finch realized that he had to press on. “So Ray got into his car with Evan and Justin followed them.”

  She waited until she could take an even breath. “Yes.”

  “You saw them? What time was it?”

  “From my bedroom window as they drove off. Around noon.”

  “And they got back, when?”

  “About 10:30 that night. I was lying on my bed, awake, planning how I’d make it all up to Ray, realizing I had to make a break from my family. I had to choose between Ray and the Whitelaws. Then I heard Justin’s car drive up the gravel road to the garage.”

  “Did you get up to see who it was?”

  “No, but I heard them talking as they walked toward the house after the garage door went down.”

  “Could you hear what they said?”

  “No. They were talking over one another. Not in an argument, but serious.”

  “You’re sure it was them?”

  She snarled in disgust. “I’ve been listening to my step-brothers since they were babies. Yeah, it was them.” She finished off her Margarita and glanced around the room. Brenda walked past and they smiled to one another.

  Finch wondered if she had more to reveal. “And then?”

  She shrugged, picked at her salad and then set her fork aside. “And then the next day we heard the news. And … about the bear.” She looked at Finch and spotted his cellphone again. “Can you turn that off now?”

  “Of course.” He tapped the STOP button and slipped the phone into his pocket.

  “So we’re off the record?”

  Finch heard a commotion at the front desk and turned to see what was happening. Four or five staff walked to the front window and peered at the marina. Two of them were pointing toward the waterfront. He couldn’t make out anything unusual.

  “Yes. Everything’s off the record now.” He smiled.

  “Good. Because I have something else to confess.” Her tongue slid back and forth between her lips. “Can I have a sip of your Perrier?”

  “Sure.” Pleased to see that she was shifting gears, he filled an empty wine glass with some water and passed it to her.

  “I’m not really an alcoholic. Not a serious one, at least.”

  He shrugged, a gesture to let her know that her habits were none of his business.

  “I think I just needed a few drinks to stiffen my nerve.”

  “Your nerve?”

  She glanced away. “Okay. So … I didn’t just bump into you here.”

  “No?” A look of surprise crossed his face.

  “Oh right. As if you didn’t know it too.” She shook her head with an expression that revealed they were both in on the game.

  “Well, I wondered.”

  “You were easy to find, you know.”

  “Really.” A statement, not a question.

  “Uh-huh. Brenda’s sister works in the sheriff’s office.” She raised her eyebrows. “Gruman’s been keeping an eye on you.”

  “Are you serious?” Finch felt his stomach tighten. He didn’t suspect he was on anyone’s radar. “Why would he do that?”

  “That’s just Gruman.” She frowned. “He’s a control freak. The exact opposite of your theory. He thinks he can control everybody.”

  ※

  Outside the restaurant Will and Gianna leaned against the waterfront railing. The night air was calm but a chill rose from the water and washed over them. She shivered. Finch wondered if he should put an arm around her, but hesitated. When reporters mix professional conduct with romance, disaster is never far behind. Sources always have to be protected — in every conceivable sense. He’d seen more than one story collapse because a key source revealed too much when she (or he) was emotionally vulnerable. It’s easy to mistake vulnerability for need, and then misinterpret need for love. Inevitably those missteps lead to denial, and then on-the-record interviews are disputed long after their stories are published. Next, the offended party begins to utter the word “libel.” A day or two later the law suits begin to fly.

  “You know, something’s going on over at the marina,” she said. She wrapped her hands over her bare arms and pressed her body against Finch’s chest to warm herself.

  All right, he thought and inched his chin above her head toward the distant flash of ambulance lights. He inhaled her perfume. Intoxicating. “I think I’m going to drive over to see what’s up. You want to come?”

  Gianna thought a moment. “No.”

  “Okay.” He looked at her. “You know, I don’t think you should drive. Not for another hour or two.”

  She felt herself sinking into a funk. Was it the Margaritas? Ray’s horrible death? Her family? “I’m going back inside.”

  “You are?” At first Finch felt an undefined worry, then complete relief. He followed her back to the hostess desk.

  Brenda had a puzzled look on her face. “Forget something?”

  “No,” Finch said. “She needs a pot of strong coffee, a quiet
table, and a copy of People Magazine.”

  Gianna forced a laugh. “Right. And more than anything, I need a slice of that dessert you mentioned last week.”

  “The chocolate bête noir?” Brenda raised her eyebrows.

  “Whatever.” Gianna leaned over and kissed Finch on the cheek. With her mouth next to his ear, she whispered, “And I’ll see you at the Prest later tonight.”

  He pinched his lips together in a frown. Maybe he couldn’t maintain the on-going denial. He wanted her as much as she needed him. But the risk was extreme. If they had a fling she could destroy his career in minutes.

  “That’s really not a good idea, Gianna,” he said. “In fact, it’s a very bad idea. Besides, I still have work to do.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  A police barricade blocked the entrance to the wharf and two squad cars were parked bumper-to-bumper to obscure the view looking down into the marina. As Finch pushed forward he could see an ambulance back toward the mouth of the ramp that led onto the pier. The dusk was broken by the pulse of flashing lights: blue-red, blue-red. After Gruman’s deputy turned Finch away, he waited ten minutes at the sidewalk to assess what was going on.

  A fisherman laden with wet netting waddled up from the wharf and through the line of emergency personnel controlling access to the scene below. Finch followed a few steps behind and then overtook him before the old man stepped off the curb.

  “Looks like quite a fuss,” he said.

  “It is.” The fisherman studied Finch a moment and nodded. “The Osprey’s Nest just came in. They pulled a boy up from somewhere past the spit. All tangled up in some line.”

  “A buoy?” Still puzzled, Finch glanced back at the marina.

  “Some kid.” He shook his head. “Happens every year. The sheriff says it looks like another accident. Now it’s up to them to figure out who he was.” He waved a hand at the squad car with a look of relief that this was one job he didn’t have to handle.

  Finch waited another few minutes then made his way back to the Prest Motel and opened his laptop. Depending on how he wanted to proceed, there might be three stories to write. The first would report the death and necropsy of the black bear. The second would reveal the news of Toeplitz’s last meeting with the Whitelaws. The third story he would simply sketch and store on his laptop for now. Ultimately he knew it would be a long feature story describing how Whitelaw’s twin boys escorted Toeplitz from their lodge up to Lookout Point on Saddle Mountain where he’d died. With so many unverified elements to the third story, he knew he would have to tread carefully to confirm the damning details. But substantiating testimony would emerge from someone, sometime.

  Before he settled down to work he scanned the messages on his phone, cleared the daily text from Bethany (“call me”), checked his laptop for email and searched the online pages of the eXpress for any news that Fiona Page might have published. He had a dozen new emails, most of them pro forma notices from the management team: staff scheduling for the pending Memorial Day weekend, a reminder to label your food if storing it in the staff refrigerator. Nothing from Wally and no new message or any news stories from Fiona, except for her on-going coverage of shortages in the Mission district food banks. In other words, all quiet on the home front. He sent Wally and Fiona a joint email: We have the bear. I sat in on the necropsy. Will file the story within an hour. Also interviewed Gianna Whitelaw today. Toeplitz definitely up here for a meeting. Toeplitz spent his last day at the family lodge and allegedly was escorted into the hills by the Whitelaw boys. The implications are huge.

  He purposely underlined allegedly, a word that signified to any journalist that the facts were still disputable. Despite Gianna’s recorded testimony, he’d like a second source to verify the twins’ culpability before he could claim that they’d escorted Toeplitz to his final destination. Still, Finch believed every word that Gianna had confessed to him and her disclosure pushed the story in a new direction. But even when he added her confession to the other possibilities, the picture of Toeplitz’s death seemed unclear.

  Furthermore, only a report from the forensics lab could verify that the nine-millimeter slugs and brass were a match — and therefore prove that Toeplitz had been murdered before the bear consumed him. And Jennie Lee wasn’t expecting their assessment until tomorrow afternoon. Finch shook his head. That meant delivery sometime late on Sunday, and if the work pace at the forensics lab ran on the typical casual weekend schedule, it could push the report delivery into Monday. For the first time since he’d arrived, he wondered how much longer he could spend in Astoria. He hadn’t seen any signs or ads for a local jazz club where he could lose himself for the night. Worrisome.

  For the next two hours he set his personal concerns aside and dove into his work. He wrote the report on the bear necropsy from a frontline, I-was-there perspective. Wally used to dismiss this sort of prose as journalistic narcissism, a vestige from the era of Hunter S. Thompson’s manic world-view. But Wally’s new mantra — “find the human dimension, not just the facts” — opened the door to first-person feature stories. Finch ripped this story from his memory of the necropsy and put everything onto the page including his collapse on the floor. He considered omitting this bit of personal humiliation, but decided that if readers could feel the visceral heat of the experience, the story would be more powerful. However, he did omit the discovery of the two slugs. That he would save for another day when he could establish a link between the slugs and brass casings.

  The second story took considerably longer. Once more he reviewed the sequence of Toeplitz’s last days:

  • May 4 at 2 PM in San Francisco the DA announces that he’ll depose Toeplitz to support the prosecution in the case of Whitelaw, Whitelaw & Joss

  • May 5 or 6, Toeplitz departs from SF in his Mercedes GLK

  • May 7, Toeplitz arrives in Cannon Beach, spends one night at the Whitelaw Lodge

  • May 8, a Saturday, Toeplitz dies in the switchbacks below Saddle Mountain.

  • May 9, the Argyles come across Toeplitz’s corpse.

  He then painted a picture of events building the story paragraph by paragraph until he’d written something that seemed both coherent and gripping. He pointed to the many unanswered questions, a vacuum that the reader could only wonder at. Is this really death by misadventure? Or was foul play involved?

  When he was done he scanned the notes he’d made about the Whitelaw twins escorting Toeplitz up Saddle Mountain. Finally he sent the first two stories to Jeanine Fix, stood under the shower for ten minutes, and then climbed into bed to read a few pages of a novel he’d picked up in the motel lobby, Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man.

  Seconds later his phone rang: Fiona Page.

  “Hi. I just got your email about the bear.”

  “Working Saturday night, are you?”

  “Just surfing the net. I got Alexander into bed an hour ago, so….” Her voice hesitated just enough to reveal that she wondered if calling Finch might be a bad idea.

  “I’m glad you called,” he said. “I just got into bed. What a day.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If things shape up the way I think they will, this story is going to explode.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Finch paused a moment. “Look, you’ve been terrific digging out the background on this story. But I need to trust you. Completely.”

  Fiona knew exactly what Finch was driving at. They’d both been burned by fellow colleagues. Finch by a new reporter who claimed not to understand workplace boundaries. Fiona by a gin-soaked veteran who uncovered a memo on her desk and scooped an entire story before she could blink. So much for journalistic ethics. Professional standards were universally proclaimed when it came to maintaining public trust. But protecting your partner? Not so much.

  “If you want me to be honest, I can tell you there’s no one here I can confide in.” She offered this in a low voice, as a kind of confession. “If you need someone to trust, and I mean someone to trust
completely, then yes. But only if it can go both ways.”

  He shrugged. No surprise. He’d realized years ago that he couldn’t fully trust anyone at the old print paper. Except for Wally.

  “What about Wally Gimbel?”

  “Maybe. If it weren’t for his ego. Which is the size of the building.”

  “True enough. But egos are just like mothers. Everybody has one.”

  “I guess.”

  “So do you trust him?”

  “… Yes,” she hesitated. “He’s the managing editor after all. But I don’t know that if he’d promised me something and then if the Parson brothers confronted him — I don’t know if he’d back me up.”

  “I’ve never seen him break his word,” Finch assured her. Wally had always helped Finch when he most needed it. But perhaps Fiona was right. If the Parson brothers, joint proprietors of the Post and SF eXpress applied enough pressure, would Wally crack?

  A moment of silence followed and then Fiona continued.

  “So, bottom line: you can tell me anything you want and I will treat you as a protected source. I’ll never divulge anything for as long as you live.”

  He laughed. “Impressive, I never thought of myself as a protected source before.”

  “So tell all,” she said.

  “All right.” Over the next twenty minutes Finch spelled out the details of his visit to the Whitelaw lodge, the bear necropsy, the discovery of the slugs and their possible match with the brass he’d found. He told her about his dinner with Gianna and her revelations about Toeplitz.

  “So is she good-looking?”

  “Gianna? Not bad.” Now he wondered how much to hold back, especially after divulging the most embarrassing details of the necropsy.

  “Blonde? Brunette?”

  “Brunette.” He hesitated. “But she’s grieving.”

  “Therefore in need of a mind-numbing sympathy fuck, I suspect.”

  Odd. Both woman fixated on sympathy. And sex. “Maybe.” Finch laughed and wondered if Gianna would knock on his door anytime soon. He checked the clock. Eleven forty-five. Back at the restaurant he’d said it would be a bad idea. But she seemed to be the determined type. “Look, kiddo, when you’ve been in this business as long as I have” — he laughed again, this time at his preposterous, avuncular tone — “you learn never to mix a story source with a fuck of any kind, least of all out of sympathy.”