Old Bones, page 9
A twin bed sat to the right of the door, its covers twisted up in a ball at the foot. A figure sat on the bed: a man, or rather a boy, wearing torn black jeans, black low-top sneakers, and a jean jacket with metal studs in it. His hair was long and spiky, and it flopped over his face, concealing the features. His knees were drawn up and he was hugging them to his chest with two tattooed arms. His eyes flickered up toward her a moment before drifting back down to stare again at nothing.
The volume of the music had been too high for her to process it before, but now she recognized it: “The Wanton Song,” by Led Zeppelin. Judging by the bass riff that had been shaking the apartment since her arrival, the kid had been playing it over and over. And now she noticed, on the scuffed table, a decent-looking sound system, with an amp and speakers and—to her surprise—a turntable with a stack of vinyl records next to it.
She turned to the youth on the bed. “Hey!” she shouted. “Would you mind if we turn it down for just a minute—”
In response, Parkin picked up a set of headphones and slid them over his ears.
Swanson took a seat beside the desk and began rotating it slowly back and forth, looking around. She knew that to Parkin, she must look like just another government drone, with her slacks and blue blazer, making negative assumptions about him. What the kid didn’t know was that she could easily have been him six years ago, right down to the ripped jeans and the little network of red lines on the inside of his arm where he’d practiced cutting himself. He couldn’t guess that his costume had been her costume, too, and that the blazer she was now wearing happened to be one of only two she could afford, a blue and a black, and that she was carefully rotating them until the next good sale. And he couldn’t guess that, as a result of all this, she might have a clue to what he was feeling—and how he was reacting—right now.
Parkin wasn’t in a gang—the tattoos weren’t right, and they were too professionally done. The record player, in place of some streaming Bluetooth device, indicated he cared enough to search out and curate a collection of music. Despite the smell of weed, he didn’t look like a big-time user, and according to Porter’s rap sheet the crimes this “shitbag of a brother” was suspected of were two accusations of shoplifting from big-box stores, the charges dropped in both cases. He’d been a decent student, too—until three years ago, when the plane with his parents disappeared into the ocean.
She reached over to the old Marantz receiver and slowly turned down the volume knob until the music was background noise.
The kid pushed the headphones down around his neck and glowered at her. “Hey, what the fuck? Turn that back on. I already told the others I don’t know anything. So leave me alone.”
Instead of answering, she reached over to the turntable, removed the record, and returned it carefully to its torn white sleeve. “I like your rig,” she said, putting the sleeve back in the record jacket. “Interesting taste in music, too. I mean, the way you’re rocking it old school. You know what? I’ve tried to get into hip-hop—I really have. But I’ve more or less given up. To me it sounds like a bunch of bragging and ranting and bitch-slapping, chanted over the beat of a dime-store drum machine. And then when they do condescend to sing a little—like, during the hook, maybe—the voices all sound so clinical and similar, Auto-Tuned up the ass.” She shrugged and nodded toward the door. “Of course, those characters out there don’t even know Merle Haggard’s dead. Don’t tell them—you’ll ruin their day.”
Parkin didn’t say anything during this monologue. But he didn’t curse at her again, either; just looked at her with curiosity. Now she took a moment to replace the album atop the stack. “I was more into dark ambient, but I always did like Zep,” she said. “They took even older material and respected it, made it relevant. Made it their own. That’s how the best music endures. By the way, my name’s Corinne—Corrie to my friends.” She paused and then, because she had to go by the book, added, “FBI.” She touched the lanyard on which her ID was strung.
But this didn’t seem to faze the kid.
“I know you’re Ernest. Do you mind if I—?”
The kid watched as she began to look through his records. Swanson had already gotten what she’d come to Scottsdale for—it wasn’t much, but it was all she could hope for—and now she was just confirming her instincts. “In ninth grade,” she said, “I used to carry around a Les Paul—a knockoff, anyway—totally broken, no pickups or anything, but I didn’t care. I wore it low slung, practically down to my knees, like Page.”
Her fingers stopped on another album, with a cover showing nude figures creeping up a slope—presumably toward a sacrificial altar. “This is it!” she said. “Houses of the Holy. There’s a song on here—‘The Ocean’—that totally changed my musical perspective. That opening guitar riff…I mean, it comes out of nowhere, breaks all the rules of rhythm, seems to start over again even before the end of the second bar. Here, I’ll play it.” She took off her jacket and let it drop on the dirty chair—pretending to be unaware her shoulder holster was in plain view—pulled out the record, flipped it to side B, set it on the platter, moved the needle to the last track, and cranked the volume back to where it had been before.
They listened for all four and a half minutes of the song. Then a second time, and then a third. And then Swanson put the tonearm back on its stand. There was a moment of silence, broken only by a faint hum from the speakers.
“What do you want?” Parkin finally asked.
Swanson didn’t answer immediately. She was winging it and had been ever since she stepped into the kid’s bedroom. There was nothing like this in the book, and Morwood would probably shit a brick if he saw her. This wasn’t her case—but she understood this frightened and lonely youth better than any of the cops outside did.
“I want you to know I’m not here because of you,” she said. “Your sister’s only been gone for—”
“Don’t bullshit me, you know she’s dead!” Parkin said, suddenly sitting up straight on the bed, face flushing, tendons showing in his neck. “Dead! And those motherfuckers out there, hanging around, doing nothing to find her…they might as well be jacking off. They obviously think it was me—hope it was me. That would make their lives easier, wouldn’t it? Fuckers.”
“Is that why you won’t talk to them?” she asked.
Parkin’s answer was to lean back again and turn his face to the wall.
Exactly what she would have done in the same situation. Not if her mother vanished—that would be cause for a Kansas state holiday—but if her father had. He had left, truth be told…but not suddenly, like this. Not with apparent violence. She could just imagine it: cops crawling all over their double-wide, Sheriff Hazen concluding right away that it was her—hell yes, she’d have reacted just like Parkin. Except he had it worse. It was obvious that things had fallen apart for him after the death of their parents. His sister, several years older, had weathered it a lot better than he had. She’d gone on with her life, found a job, found someone to date—even if he was married. Meanwhile Ernest had just drifted.
And now, this.
“Why do you say she’s dead?” she asked as casually as possible.
Parkin answered without turning away from the wall. “All that blood in there—didn’t you see it? Her car in the garage. Her purse, her cell phone, still here. And she wouldn’t just go away without telling me. Not even with that asshole.”
“You mean Damon? The one who came in, found the bloodstain?”
Parkin may have nodded; in the dark, it was hard to tell.
“Ernest, I have just one more question. Why weren’t you the one who discovered she was missing? Why did it take until six PM the next day for someone to come looking for her?”
“I came home late,” he muttered, “like usual. I was quiet—she hated me waking her up. Her door was closed, as always. She doesn’t want me touching her stuff. So I went to bed. And I slept in. She goes to work long before I get up. I didn’t hear anything.”
Suddenly, he shifted on the bed and began pounding the wall violently with his fist. “Fuck!” he yelled. “Fuck, fuck!”
She jumped out of her chair just as the cop outside opened the door. She gestured for him to leave and he withdrew.
“Ernest,” she said in a low voice. “Hey. Don’t hurt yourself. You don’t know for a fact she’s dead. You need to hope for the best.”
He started to weep.
* * *
She found Lieutenant Porter still in the kitchen.
“Get anything out of him?” he asked.
“He says he came home late, slept late. Didn’t hear anything. It’s not surprising he didn’t notice she was gone or see the blood. If you ask around, you can probably find out where he was and secure him an alibi.”
“If you say so.” Porter made another notation on his tablet.
She turned to face him. “Lieutenant, I sincerely want to thank you for your time and courtesy. I wouldn’t presume to tell you your business. But if this woman turns up dead, I’d bet you my car that kid had nothing to do with it.”
“Yeah? What kind of car?”
“Um, a 2002 Camry LE.”
The lieutenant merely shook his head and laughed.
* * *
On her way back, she got stuck behind a jackknifed tractor-trailer on I-40 and didn’t get home until long after midnight.
13
May 4
THE MORNING HAD dawned in crystalline perfection, an ideal send-off for their expedition, Nora thought as she loosely held the reins of her horse. They were following a mountain stream that burbled among smooth rocks, the banks lined with alders and willows. Birds chirped in the thickets and a golden eagle soared overhead, making a whistling noise. Burleson had been right: they were less than a mile from the ranch, but it already felt like they’d entered another world. Ahead, above the trees, she could see mountains upon mountains rising in the distance, their peaks patched with snow.
Burleson led the group, riding a seventeen-hand gelding named Blackie. Nora followed, riding a brown-and-white paint called Stormy, although his docile demeanor didn’t seem to live up to his name. Clive rode behind her, and Nora couldn’t help but notice the easy way he handled his horse, his back straight as a preacher’s. She would have to ask him where he’d gotten his riding experience.
Maggie brought up the rear of the train with Jason Salazar and Bruce Adelsky. Salazar seemed comfortable enough with horses, but Adelsky was another matter. He had actually put the wrong foot in the stirrup and started to get on the horse backward, to the great hilarity of Maggie. Behind the train, Wiggett and Jack Peel led the five pack horses carrying their supplies and equipment in plastic panniers and buckled-on top packs. Among the supplies was a padlocked strongbox carried on a mule, to hold any jewelry or other valuables that would be discovered during the dig, but also to store the legendary gold—if it existed…and if they found it.
Nora could hear Maggie telling Salazar and Adelsky a story, punctuated by gusts of laughter, about a disastrous expedition she’d been on the year before. Nora could only catch parts, but it seemed to involve drunken idiots falling off horses, a man shooting himself in the foot, a helicopter rescue, and a bill for twenty thousand dollars.
The trail started out well used, but about five miles in it began to peter out. At a certain point Burleson stopped. He and Clive consulted a map.
“This is where they got off the trail,” said Clive. “They should have gone left, but for some reason—probably confusion caused by the snow—they went right.”
The fateful right turn started up a broad canyon between gray cliffs. The going was easy at first, but then the canyon walls began to narrow and loom higher above them until they were riding in shadow. The air was increasingly chilly. In a few places—passing through deep woods, or in shady spots at the bottom of rocky cliffs—Nora could still see patches of snow. Amazing how quickly they’d left civilization behind and entered a primeval landscape.
They stopped for lunch near a pile of fallen rocks. The pack train had fallen behind, but Burleson was in contact with Peel over walkie-talkie. Nora checked her cell phone and found that, as expected, they had gone out of cell range. For the next month they’d be relying on the sat phone Nora carried in her saddlebag—with Skip hopefully manning the other end.
Nora munched on a roast beef sandwich while Burleson finished his conversation with Peel over the walkie-talkie. He pulled out his own sandwich and took a deep breath, looking around. “I love these mountains,” he said. “Every time I come up here, I feel renewed.”
“So you just gave up a lucrative career as a lawyer, quit the rat race to come out here?”
“A divorce lawyer. Not a fun line of work, representing some bloodsucking young woman intent on breaking a prenup and prying money out of some rich old bastard of a husband. Or vice versa. You rarely meet good people in a business like that, either as clients or opponents. The decision to get out wasn’t entirely mine; I became crosswise with the California Bar Association and was given a nice, unfriendly push out. Every time I’m up in these mountains, I send them my silent thanks.”
“Crosswise?”
Burleson laughed. “I’m not a good rule follower. Perhaps I represented my clients a little too well, you might say.”
Nora was pleasantly surprised by his candor. She had done some basic searching on Burleson before hiring him, but none of this had turned up. It was probably one of those things that didn’t reach the level of news, she thought.
They mounted up after lunch and rode past yet another scree slope of gray rocks, spilling down a steep ravine and into a dark forest of towering fir trees, with more snow in the shadows. As evening came on, the trees gave way to a meadow surrounded by cliffs.
“Those Donners were really lost,” said Maggie, looking around.
“Here we are, at our first campsite,” Burleson said, dismounting.
Nora halted her horse. It wasn’t a particularly welcoming place—a bedraggled field cut by the stream—but she reminded herself they would be here only a couple of days. When they found the Lost Camp, they would move closer to that location.
The others dismounted. Burleson and Drew Wiggett went around, helping here and there, unsaddling horses and hobbling them in the meadow. As they returned, Peel arrived with the pack train. He parked it at the far end of the field, and he and Wiggett began unpacking, lining up the boxes in rows.
“Fire’s going here,” said Maggie, indicating a raised spot on the verge of the meadow. She pointed at Nora and Clive. “You all gather up some wood. Birch, alder, and oak—none of that fir or spruce! Jason and I are going to build a fire pit. Jason, let’s put some muscle on those arms of yours! You, too, Bruce.”
“Sorry, not in my job description,” said Adelsky with a grin as he settled down on a fallen tree, fumbled in his pocket, removed his vape, and fired it up. He leaned back and issued a stream of smoke. “I’ll watch you work.”
“Bum,” Maggie said. “By the way, Arizona recluse spiders just love to lay their eggs in dead trees like the one you’re squatting on.”
Adelsky leapt to his feet and brushed frantically at his jeans, vape falling to the ground, while Maggie’s belly laugh echoed across the field.
Nora and Clive headed into the trees at the edge of the meadow and started collecting wood.
“So far, so good,” Clive said. “Burleson seems to know his business. Interesting, though, that he gave up a lucrative practice to start this outfit. It makes you wonder if there isn’t more to his backstory than we’ve been told.”
“It’s quite an eccentric crew he’s put together,” Nora said. “Maggie, who talks a mile a minute; Peel, as silent as the grave; and Wiggett. He’s hard to pin down but he looks, well, hungry.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, the kind of person who’s never satisfied, always looking for greener grass.”
“Nothing wrong with ambition. And you seem to be a striver, too, right?”
“I hope it’s not too obvious.”
“Why not be obvious?” He paused and gave her a big smile. “Isn’t that why we’re here, as partners? Ambition, thirst for knowledge, wanting to make our mark.”
Nora knew he was right but felt odd hearing it put so baldly. “There is one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you. I’ve been wondering why, when you first told me your story—out there at my dig—you never mentioned the gold. I have to admit…that kind of bothers me.”
Clive chuckled. “I knew you were going to ask me that. First, Jason was there and I didn’t want him to hear it. But more than that—I wanted to see what kind of interest you had in the project before you heard about the gold.”
“So you waited until that meeting with Fugit to spring it on me.”
“Look at my position. It could screw up everything if word got out there was twenty million in gold lying around, just waiting to be found. Also…well, I wanted to make sure you had the—forgive the expression—stones for the job.”
Nora frowned in surprise. “What are you talking about? You know my credentials. You searched me out. This isn’t my first brush with controversy. I’ve even dealt with cannibalism before.”
“I know,” Clive said, picking up a piece of wood. “But this goes beyond even cannibalism.”
Nora straightened. “How so?”
“I’ve tried to deflect idle talk about some of the more salacious stories about the Lost Camp, as you might have noticed—but the fact is something truly strange and awful happened there.”
“What could be worse than cannibalism?”
Clive paused a moment, looking out over the meadow. “I mentioned that one person managed to escape and make it back to the Donner camp at Alder Creek—an itinerant preacher named Asher Boardman. He ran off, he said, because madness overwhelmed the Lost Camp. He later died of starvation—but not before Tamzene wrote down his story. When the lone rescuer, a man named Best, finally reached the camp, he found only one person still alive—Peter Chears. He was singing songs and playing with a pile of human bones, gore stuck to his cheeks and matted into his hair. Best hauled the man out with the last of Tamzene’s camp. Chears survived the trip back to civilization, but died soon after, hopelessly insane.”
