08-A Thousand Bones, page 37
“Augie,” she said, standing over his console, “do you know what people do when they shut down old wells?”
“Wells?” he asked.
“Yeah, wells like you’d use to get water. What happens to them when they’re not used anymore?”
“They’re supposed to be filled in with dirt,” Augie said, “but most folks here just put something over the top and cover it with a layer of sod.”
She hurried to Mike’s office. He looked up, startled.
“Look at this,” she said, thrusting the photo at him.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“The Collier backyard and the well,” she said.
“What?”
“The well,” she said. “It’s not there anymore.”
He studied the picture. Then his eyes came up again. He still didn’t see it.
“What if that’s where Roland put the rest of the bones?” she asked.
“Joe, we searched that yard,” he said.
“We did a surface search,” she said. “And most of the search was concentrated in the trees, away from the shed and the well.”
He rose slowly. “You think he put them all in one place?”
“Why else didn’t we find more than one or two bones from each girl?”
Mike reached for his jacket. She hurried back to her desk to get hers. She was halfway out the door when she spun back to Augie. “Augie,” she said, “radio Holt, and have him meet us at the Collier cabin.”
They took shovels from the shed and used the photograph as a guide to determine where to start digging in the two-foot drifts of snow. It was slow going, moving the snow and then chopping at the frozen ground for evidence of something underneath.
About thirty minutes in, Holt radioed another officer to bring them a thermos of coffee. Finally, after two hours, Holt hit metal. Mike’s and Joe’s heads snapped up when they heard the dull clang. Holt dropped to his knees, clawing at the hard dirt with his gloved hands. Mike stepped in and started chopping with his shovel.
Twenty minutes later, they stood looking down at a square of wet, rusted metal. Mike wiped his brow and looked at Joe.
“You ready?” he asked.
She nodded. Mike and Holt worked their fingers under the edge of the metal, and in sync, heaved it up and over.
The well was a small dark hole, finished around the upper rim with crumbling concrete. The concrete sides of the well were visible for eight or nine inches before everything turned to black. The three of them stepped to the edge and trained their flashlights down into the hole.
From the stark beams of the three white lights came the ivory glint of bones.
Despite Kellerman’s objections, the Leelanau County sheriff’s office retained possession of the bones. Kellerman had insisted they didn’t have the capabilities, but the county put out a call for help and got it.
The experts came from all over the state, some paid, some volunteers, everyone from retired doctors to gravediggers. They brought their equipment, microscopes, and chemicals, and the day after the well was discovered, boxes of bones began arriving at the high school gymnasium to be sorted out. The students were still out on vacation, and it was the only place big enough.
The process began with the laying of eleven black tarps out across the polished parquet of the basketball court. With nowhere else to start, they began with what they knew.
The jawbone was placed on tarp number five in the same position a head would have been. A paper was placed nearby that said, ANNABELLE CHAPEL, FEB. 2, 1969.
Of the ten skulls found in the well, only one showed any sign of trauma—a deep, jagged gash that punctured the bone. It was assumed that belonged to Ronnie Langford, killed with a drywall hammer in the Inkster basement. Her skull rested now on tarp number one: VERONICA LANGFORD, FEB. 19565.
The other skulls had been placed on tarps according to the expert’s estimated date of death, which was vague at best. Papers rested at the foot of each, a different year written on each one, from 1965 to 1975.
Stainless steel tables were set along the recessed bleachers to hold the bones for examination after they came out of the locker room, where they had been carefully cleaned. Other tests were being performed on the opposite side of the gym, three medical examiners from the state trying to find the slightest variation in size, gender, or race and looking for any scars, breaks, or diseases that might indicate a possible link to another bone.
But except for an occasional exact match in height, there was little to help them link any one bone to another. The only conclusion was that all the victims were girls, all Caucasian, and all between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. It appeared all had been relatively healthy.
By the end of the second day, Joe stood near the double doors to the gym, her eyes locked on the small, incomplete skeletons, so stark against the black tarps.
She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.
They had found no clothing in the well. But they did find other things. One pair of hoop earrings and one pair of silver studs. A class ring from a high school in Battle Creek, no initials. One shriveled contact lens. A gold barrette with the name robin. Ten fake nails, all painted red, all broken. But it was the hair that still gave a churn to Joe’s stomach.
Clumps of it. Blond. Brown. Curly. Straight. A few strands dyed bright pink. One intact braid, tied with a moldy white ribbon. All of it was being meticulously separated, strand by strand, on a third set of tables.
“You okay?”
Joe looked up. Mike was standing next to her. His uniform was starched and neat, but his face held the ragged look of a man fighting both sleep and demons.
“I will never forget what I am looking at right now,” Joe said softly.
Mike nodded but said nothing.
They stayed near the gym doors, watching. A man in a white coat was kneeling by tarp number three, comparing the bone in his hand to one lying on the tarp. He measured it in every direction, and finally, with a subtle shrug of his shoulders, he set it down next to the other.
“The mothers are coming back,” Mike said. “And Mrs. Newton is outside now.”
“Oh, God,” Joe sighed. “How can we show her this?”
“We can show her the jewelry and…the hair.”
Joe shut her eyes again.
“I’ll do it if you like,” Mike offered.
“No,” Joe said. “I will.”
Joe turned and walked to the small lobby outside the gym, past the trophy cases. She saw Dorothy Newton standing on the icy sidewalk, her blue coat pulled around, her head wrapped in a flowered scarf. Joe pushed open the door and waved her past the officers.
Dorothy Newton pulled off her scarf when she got inside. “Is Natalie in there?” she asked, pointing to the gym.
“We don’t know,” Joe said. “I’m sorry, but there’s so little to go on. We only have a few pieces of jewelry, and even if you could identify that, we don’t know which bones are hers.”
“The newspaper said you think you have eleven girls.”
“Yes.”
Dorothy Newton’s face suddenly softened with a strange kind of peace, as if she already knew her daughter was in the next room, warm and cared for now, already on her way to coming home.
“I want to see my daughter,” she said.
Joe couldn’t find her voice even to say no.
“Please, Deputy Frye.”
“I have to prepare you,” Joe said.
“There’s no need. I know I will only see bones.”
Joe took her arm and led her back to the gym. Dorothy Newton stopped a few feet inside the door, and Joe stayed behind her, prepared to react if she darted from the room. But she didn’t. She put her scarf in her coat pocket and started toward the long row of black tarps.
But then Joe saw her stop, her gaze going to the table with the clumps of hair, and she went to it.
“Oh, heavens,” Dorothy Newton whispered.
Joe came up behind her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Newton,” Joe said. “Please—”
Dorothy Newton held up a hand to silence her and bent to look at the piles of hair. The technician looked at Joe but then stepped back.
Dorothy Newton picked up some long strands of brown hair, laying them across her palm and smoothing them with her fingers. Her eyes came up to Joe. “These are hers.”
Joe had no idea what to say.
Dorothy Newton turned and, taking the hair with her, moved to the tarps. All of them held bones now. Most just a few, one with nearly half a skeleton. She saw the signs with the years on them and walked slowly down to the tarp labeled 1968. She looked down at the bones for a long time, then she knelt, reaching out to touch one.
Joe started to tell her not to, but she couldn’t get the words out, afraid she’d sound harsh. But before she could say anything at all, Dorothy Newton turned to her.
“This is Natalie,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“These bones are slightly bowed,” she said. “So were Natalie’s legs. She inherited it from her father. She had to wear leg braces for a year when she was ten.”
Joe didn’t see any bend to the legs, but she drew a marker from her pocket and knelt down and picked up the sign. Under the 1968 date, she wrote Natalie Newton’s name. She laid the sign down by the leg bones.
Dorothy Newton leaned forward and set the long strands of brown hair near the skull. Then she placed a soft kiss on her fingers and gently touched them to the skull.
“I’ve missed you,” she whispered. “And I’ll see you soon.”
She rose slowly and turned to Joe. She was a blur, and Joe had to blink her into focus.
“I’m so sorry we don’t have more of her,” Joe said.
Dorothy Newton’s fingers touched Joe’s.
“There are two hundred and six bones in the human body,” she said. “Natalie was born with only two hundred and five. Missing that one bone did not make her any less my daughter than missing a hundred now.”
Joe blinked against tears.
“This is enough, Deputy Frye. So thank you for what I do have.”
Joe wiped her face, her gaze drifting again to the black tarps and steel tables. Dorothy Newton’s voice brought her back.
“I’m going home now,” she said. “I have arrangements to make. Will you let me know when I can come back and get her?”
Joe cleared her throat. “Would it be okay if I brought her down myself?” she asked.
“You would do that?”
“I’d be honored.”
“I’d like that,” she said. “You have my number in Indianapolis?”
“Yes.”
Dorothy Newton gave her a small hug and walked away. Joe stayed where she was for a moment, then went back to Mike. He held out a handkerchief. She pressed it to her face and dropped back against the wall.
She felt a nudge. “Joe,” Mike said softly.
Joe looked in the direction Mike was pointing.
Rafsky.
He was standing just inside the far door, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, scanning the room. When his eyes found hers, he started over to them.
Mike pushed off the wall and stood almost at attention. Joe stuck the handkerchief into her pants pocket. Rafsky’s walk was stronger, and there was no bandage on his shoulder. But his right arm seemed to hang a little limply.
He stopped in front of them. “Hello, Sheriff,” he said. “Deputy Frye.”
“Detective,” Mike said.
Rafsky glanced at the bones. “Congratulations,” he said. “Case solved, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Mike said, ignoring Rafsky’s sarcasm.
Rafsky’s eyes moved to Joe. They were filmed with lingering disapproval. And it made her wonder, if he still felt so strongly about what they had done, why had he stayed silent? She was about to ask him, but he spoke first.
“If you’re about to thank me for not saying anything, please don’t,” he said.
She was quiet.
“I made a choice about what I could more easily live with,” he said. “Letting you get away with what you did or sending three young…decent cops to jail.”
“He was going to die anyway,” Mike said.
Rafsky started to say something but just gave a small shake of his head. “And you had an obligation to try and prevent that, not bring it on sooner,” he said. “And not make it any more horrible than it would have naturally been.”
Mike’s eyes were steady on Rafsky. “I can live with what I did,” he said.
Rafsky turned to Joe. “What about you?”
The ice-blue eyes were steady but with an odd sadness that told her he somehow knew the answer and she did not.
“I wanted—” she began.
Rafsky waited.
“I needed…”
He was quiet, giving her time to finish her thought, and when she didn’t, he looked to the tarps. She could tell from his expression that he didn’t want to be here anymore.
She slowly stuck out her hand. “Goodbye, Rafsky,” she said.
He took her hand, his fingers closing around hers. “Goodbye, Frye.”
She watched until he disappeared through the gym doors, then turned to Mike. He was talking to a technician, a small piece of paper in his hand. When the technician left, Mike turned to her.
“They’re done,” he said. “The well is empty. There were nine hundred and sixty-seven.”
She leaned against the wall, staring at the tarps. Nine hundred and sixty-seven. Fewer than half of what they should have for eleven victims. And they knew they had eleven victims with the ten skulls and Annabelle’s jawbone.
“Why do you think we have so few?” she asked.
Mike shrugged. “We have one victim from the dunes,” he said. “That means at some point, he changed his territory, and we have no idea where else he might have gone. The rest of the bones could be scattered all across the north.”
Joe shook her head, and they fell quiet for a long time. Then Joe sighed, still staring at the tarps. “Nine hundred and sixty-seven,” she said softly.
“No,” Mike said. “Counting the twenty-seven little bones in the red glove, the two we found in the dunes, and those four we found last fall, we have an even thousand.”
Joe looked at the tarp labeled NATALIE NEWTON, 1968.
“It’s enough,” she said.
54
Natalie Newton and Annabelle Chapel were the first girls to go home. Less than two weeks after the discovery of the bones in the well, Arthur Chapel took possession of his daughter’s remains and left Echo Bay. A few days later, Joe made the drive to Indianapolis and stood by Dorothy Newton’s side in a cemetery much like Beechwood as Natalie was put to rest.
Over the next few weeks, three more girls made their own journeys.
Susie-Q, whose hand bones were discovered in the red glove near the Collier cabin. Robin, who had left a personalized barrette in the well as the one link that would eventually bring her parents to Echo Bay, her dental records in hand. And a young girl named Mariah, pictured in her family portrait with long, thick braids tied with white ribbons.
By the end of March, four more were identified and sent home. But as the winter began to wane, so did the trickle of relatives searching for their daughters. Eventually, only two sets of bones remained unidentified, and as the final snow of the season fell, the two skeletons were moved from the county morgue storage vault and turned over to Witherspoon’s Funeral Home for burial. The sheriff’s office made the decision to bury both girls together.
A pearl-colored casket was donated by the mayor’s family. The plot was paid for by the citizens of Echo Bay who had begun contributing to Theo’s burial fund back in the autumn when the first bone had been discovered. The headstone was purchased by the deputies of the Leelanau County sheriff’s office. The inscription read, “Somebody’s Daughter.”
In the spring, just after a warm April shower, two hikers happened upon some bones in the woods west of Bass Lake.
They were white, cleaned by crystals of ice and sanded smooth by the Michigan winds. There weren’t many. A few finger bones. An arm and three small knobs from the toes.
The sheriff’s office went out to investigate. In their search, they picked up other pieces of evidence. Shreds of a green parka. A boot. A few tufts of brown hair, hundreds of pellets of buckshot, and a single .22-caliber bullet.
The bones were determined to be those of a Caucasian male, age twenty-five to thirty-five.
They sent all the appropriate flyers to neighboring agencies, asking for help in identifying the victim. They did not send one to the state.
The buckshot was stored and logged as unrelated to any possible homicide, more likely from hunters.
The .22 bullet was never matched to any weapon.
No one came forward to identify the victim.
His cause of death remains unknown.
EPILOGUE
Captiva Island, Florida
December 1988
The sun was starting its descent into the gulf as Joe finished. She had talked, told her story, the entire time she and Louis had walked. They had walked all the way down to Bowman’s Beach, where the inlet narrowed to separate Sanibel Island from Captiva. They had walked back, bare feet in the surf’s foam, weaving between the shell seekers and the sandpipers.
Louis had not said much during her recital. Just asked a few questions when she faltered. When the words faltered, not her memory. Thirteen years, and the memories were still clear. But finding the words was hard, because she had never talked about the whole thing before. Bits, pieces, police statements, shards of nightmares. That was all it had been before now.
But now. Now she had given it a shape it never had before, given her experience and pain a context that had come only through the distance of years. And through the love of the man who was looking at her now.
She could trust him.
She knew that now.
She could trust him to understand her job. She could trust him with everything bad and wrong and defective about her soul, and he would still love her.
