Old Bones, page 8
“What about snakes?” Adelsky asked.
“What about them?” Burleson replied.
“He’s got a phobia of snakes and spiders,” Nora said, glancing at the graduate student.
“We’ll probably see a few rattlers, despite the altitude. As for spiders, just shake out your boots in the morning before putting them on.” Burleson slapped his hands on his knees and stood up. “Now let’s see that map of yours,” he said to Nora. “I’ve only got a general idea of where we’re going.”
“Sure thing.”
Adelsky, who was holding the tube, handed it to Nora, who slid the map out of it and spread it over a nearby table. It was a USGS topo map on which she and Clive had worked out their planned search area. Burleson weighted down the corners with coffee mugs. He bent over and examined it, muttering under his breath.
“So this is where you want to go?” he said, pointing to the markings.
“The Lost Camp is somewhere up one of those canyons,” Clive told him.
Burleson frowned.
“You familiar with that country?” Clive asked.
“No, and I daresay few are. That’s true high-country wilderness. Rough, remote as hell. Not like Winnebago Central down here.”
Clive pointed at the map. “The probable location of the Lost Camp is along one of these creeks—Sugarpine, Poker, or Dollar Fork. Tamzene’s map only shows one creek, but she drew it from a description given by a dying man and she never saw the camp herself. She mentions a couple of landmarks, but the crucial one is this: from the Lost Camp, you could see the profile of an old woman on a rocky cliff to the north. Tamzene noted it was like New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain, except an old woman with a hooked nose.”
Burleson nodded. “That must be pretty unique. I’ve never seen anything like that up here.”
“The plan is to make our first camp up in here somewhere—” Clive pointed to an area of less dense topographical lines— “and use it as a base camp. We’ll conduct the search from there, concentrating on the three streams that flow into Hackberry Creek. The Lost Camp must be in one of those canyons.”
“Hellacious country. Why did they go up that way? There’s no way out.”
“The simple answer,” said Nora, “is they got lost.”
“Here’s what apparently happened,” said Clive. “The emigrant train was spread out as they entered the mountains. A group fell behind—eleven individuals. As the snow began falling, they missed the trail over the pass and drifted northward into that maze of ravines. Then they went up one of these side canyons, where they became snowbound. A few months later, a single person managed to reach the Donner camp at Alder Creek, only to die of starvation not long after. But it was from him Tamzene got the information about the Lost Camp, including its location.”
“Was anybody rescued from the Lost Camp?”
“One person. A single rescuer got up there and found everyone dead save a man named Peter Chears, who was babbling and died raving mad shortly thereafter. What that rescuer saw at the site was pretty awful. He gave a short description to someone who committed it to memory, but the rescuer never spoke of it again.”
“What do you expect to find?” asked Burleson.
“Human and animal remains, personal effects, abandoned supplies and equipment from the original wagons. Crude shelters. The most important thing is to extract DNA from the human remains, so we can identify them by name. It will help us reconstruct exactly what happened in that camp.”
Nora said nothing about the stash of coins; her own two assistants had been told of it in strict confidence, but she and Clive had agreed that it would only complicate things if Burleson’s party knew a fortune in gold might well be hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the Lost Camp.
Maggie Buck put down her coffee cup. “What about the legends? You know, the Donner Party ghosts? The ones who went mad before they died—or, maybe, after?”
There was a brief silence. Then a sprinkling of uncomfortable laughter went around the room.
12
AS THE LAUGHTER at Red Mountain Ranch was dying away, Agent Corrine Swanson was entering the front hall of a three-bedroom condo in the well-groomed suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona. She flashed her shield at the cop standing at the door, unsmiling and wearing the kind of blue-mirrored sunglasses currently popular with thirtysomething males below a certain income bracket.
“Is Lieutenant Porter on the scene?” she asked.
The cop nodded. “In the kitchen.”
From the front hall she could see the kitchen situated at the far end of a carpeted hallway. She moved toward it, noting the blond wood walls, the recessed lighting. A deep, thumping bass made the air tremble slightly around her. The entrance to the living room was to her left, and she could see even in her peripheral vision that it was expensively furnished. To her right, a yellow strip of crime scene tape had been strung, almost as an afterthought.
Lieutenant Porter was a tall, youngish man in a tan suit, leaning against a kitchen counter and drinking coffee. He shook her hand. “Agent Swanson.”
“Lieutenant Porter. Thank you so much for this opportunity.” This was not mere politeness: Swanson was, in fact, grateful to the lieutenant for providing her access to a scene where the feds had no clear jurisdiction. Just as she was grateful to Morwood for letting her chase this lead of hers, despite his being highly skeptical and giving her only one day to run it to earth.
So far, despite her best efforts, she’d been unable to develop any solid case out of the Glorieta battlefield killing. They’d identified the dead gravedigger as Frank Serban, a small-time thief, drug dealer, and grifter whose red hair had given him the nickname of “Bricktop” and in turn explained the tattoo. And the body in the iron coffin—the bottom half of it, anyway—was indeed Florence P. Regis, unlikely casualty of the Battle of Glorieta Pass. Thanks to the rain that night, they’d been able to determine that two vehicles left the cemetery around the time of Serban’s death. One—Serban’s—had been found abandoned a few miles away. She hadn’t been able to trace the other vehicle. Larsson, to his credit, had recovered two 9mm slugs after a meticulous search. Rifling marks indicated they had been fired from a noise-suppressed gun, most likely an exotic, integrated model like a Maxim. Beyond that, they had collected a lot of incidental forensic material that she feared would yield nothing.
Just as troubling as the lack of crime scene evidence was the question of motive. Other than the fact that she’d been a woman combatant in a historic battle, Florence Regis was unremarkable. Was it possible some crazy collector wanted her remains as a trophy? But then why kill Serban, whose role had been just to do the manual labor? It would have been much easier to take Regis’s body, refill the grave, and leave the site looking undisturbed: nobody would have been the wiser. No, Serban had to die so no witnesses would be left, and that implied the stakes must be high.
I’m eager to hear what your budding forensic expertise makes of it all, Morwood had said. So far, “it all” was damn little to go on.
Until—maybe—today.
The one item of interest Swanson had learned in the course of her widening digital searches had to do with Florence Regis’s maiden name: Parkin. Almost seven months ago, in Paris, a grave in the Cimetière du Montparnasse had been violated and a corpse—part of a corpse, at least—stolen. The missing remains belonged to one Thomas Parkin, an American expatriate painter who had died in 1943 during the Nazi occupation. And then, this February, another Parkin corpse had gone missing—Alexander Parkin, a schoolteacher from the tiny town of Nelson, New Hampshire, who died of old age in 1911 and was buried in the town plot. He had rested in peace for over a century until somebody yanked his long-cured carcass out of the ground and, no doubt, gave the hamlet of Nelson something to talk about for the next century.
Three Parkins, their deaths spanning eighty years, but all dug up within six months of each other. And now, this…
She glanced at her watch: quarter to one. Even though she’d started out at dawn, Phoenix was a good six-hour drive from Albuquerque. She’d be lucky to get home before midnight.
“Sorry I’ve made you keep the crime scene open,” she said.
Porter shook his head. “Team’s just wrapping up. Want to talk to them?”
Even with her inexperience, Swanson understood how the hierarchy worked. “That’s not necessary, thanks. Why don’t you give me the details, if you can spare the time, and then maybe I can take a look?”
“Sure. Given the amount of blood, our coroner tells us whoever it came from would be mighty incapacitated and quite possibly dead.” He cleared his throat, consulted a tablet. “Rosalie M. Parkin, twenty-seven, unmarried, newly minted lawyer from U of A Law School, now an associate at the Pritchie and Wilkins firm over on McDonald Drive. Both parents dead—that Airbus A380 that went down over the Pacific a few years back, some malfunction, no survivors, maybe you remember it?”
Swanson said she did.
“Well, they were on it. Returning from a vacation in Singapore. The father was a banker, left enough for Ms. Parkin and her brother to live comfortably. For a while, anyway.”
“Brother?” Swanson asked.
Porter nodded. “The little punk’s in there,” and he nodded across the kitchen, past a hallway with a guest bathroom, to a closed door. It was this room, she noticed, that was the source of the thumping bass. Another uniformed cop stood outside that door.
Swanson was still adjusting, not only to being an active FBI agent—walking around with a firearm hidden under her blazer—but to the ballet among different law enforcement agencies. She decided to keep her questions brief, neutral, and to the point, and to betray no opinion or judgment of her own. After all, these people, whatever their jurisdiction, had a lot more time on the job than she did.
“Would you mind giving me the background?” she asked.
Porter nodded again, pleased to be given free rein. “Ms. Parkin was due in court yesterday at ten AM. She never showed up. By lunchtime, the firm got worried, had a paralegal call her cell. No answer. So around six, one of the partners came over. When nobody answered, he let himself in.”
“How?”
“He had a key.”
“And who was this?”
“Ken Damon.”
He had a key. “Did he and Ms. Parkin have, um, anything going on?”
“Ken Damon’s forty-one, married, with two kids.” The expression on Porter’s face told Swanson, Yeah, they had something going on.
“Then what happened?”
“When Damon found no sign of Ms. Parkin, he called us.”
“Okay. Thank you. I’d like to see the scene now, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.” Porter led the way back out of the kitchen, made a left, and stopped at an open door marked with the crime scene tape she’d seen earlier. Beyond lay a large bedroom with expensive new furniture, the kind that a young woman with money and a promising career might favor. Everything was in its place and spotlessly clean. A walk-in closet and a private bathroom lay beyond. The bathroom looked equally clean, nothing out of place except a bath towel that appeared to have been tossed to one side, ready for the hamper.
Porter lifted the tape for Swanson and she stepped inside. The room was unoccupied except for one member of the CSU team, obviously finishing up. There were pins and flags in various places, along with a couple of chalk scrawls. But the thing that immediately caught her attention was the huge pool of blood in the middle of the room. It had been soaked up by the plush carpeting, but even so, she guessed from the deep color and the glistening sheen that at least a liter of blood, maybe two, had been spilled here.
Near the stain was a Turkish rug of embroidered black and red, one end flipped back.
“And this bloodstain is the only physical evidence so far?” she asked.
Porter nodded. “No blood spatter anywhere, no signs of a struggle, no droplet trail from a body being dragged or carried. Nothing broken or missing that we can determine. Of course, we only have the one person familiar with the place, so it’s a little hard to be sure.”
“You mean the brother?”
“No. Mr. Damon. The brother refuses to talk to us.”
She looked at the room again, taking it in now with a more critical eye. It was as the lieutenant had said. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. If the rug hadn’t been lifted to expose the stain, nobody would have been the wiser. The way Porter referred to the brother, and given the cop on guard outside his door, it seemed he might be their number-one suspect.
She pointed to the carpet. “Who pulled it back like that? Mr. Damon?”
“No. But he knew that carpet was usually located in the hall. That’s why he called us.”
Smart, Swanson thought. Not only was he boning his young associate, but he knew the apartment well enough to see when a rug was out of place—and not to touch it. “Any idea when this happened?”
“Based on the blood chemistry, they’re saying around thirty-six hours ago. The blood type is hers. We’ll be confirming that with DNA.”
Thirty-six hours. That would have been one, maybe two o’clock on the morning of May 2. “Fingerprints?”
“Her fingerprints everywhere, of course. And Damon’s, in the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, the bedroom.”
“And the brother?”
A pause. “We haven’t printed him yet. But there don’t appear to be any prints from a third party in the bedroom, and no sign of wiping down.”
“Got it. Any idea who was last in contact with her?”
“According to her phone records, she called a few friends on the night of May first. She called Mr. Damon around twelve thirty on the morning of May second.”
“Twelve thirty?”
A flicker passed across Porter’s face. “Damon confirms it. He says the call was in regard to their court appearance at ten AM yesterday morning.”
“And I suppose Damon has an alibi for the rest of the night.”
A brief pause. “He was in bed with his wife, and she confirms.”
Half a dozen snarky observations came to mind, and Swanson bit them all back. “Anything else of interest? Controversial cases she was involved in? Drug problems? Past history? Enemies?”
“Nothing we know of. And there’s no body—which adds investigative and legal complications. There’s no indication of forced entry or exit from either the apartment or the building. Unlike her shitbag brother, she wasn’t under suspicion for anything, so it’s doubtful she fled—no items of clothing are missing that we know of, no sign of packing. Nothing’s been stolen, again as far as we can tell. Her car is parked in its assigned spot downstairs. No eyewitnesses. There hasn’t been any activity on her credit cards. As for enemies, you might want to ask him.” And he nodded in the direction of the brother’s room.
“Why’s that?”
“Because more than once neighbors have complained of disturbances. The two argued frequently. The brother also showed signs of physical aggression. One morning, he ran after her as she was driving away from the building and hit the trunk of her car with a hammer. She refused to press charges.”
As Porter spoke, Swanson was taking one more look around the room. But she could already tell there was nothing to see here—not, at least, without a microscopic investigation. She tried to empty her mind of outside influences, such as her opinion of Ms. Parkin’s taste in furniture or her curiosity about the expensive-looking porcelain figures in the glass cabinet on the far side of the room. Let the room speak to you, one of her instructors had said.
Three other people with the same last name had been dug up, their bodies stolen over the last six months. Now, a fourth—a living Parkin, this time—had gone missing. No indication of forced entry or a struggle; nothing stolen or missing. Except the woman herself. Nothing strange—besides, of course, the massive quantity of blood, hidden casually beneath a Turkish rug.
Swanson’s mind went back to the Glorieta Pass cemetery, and the hole in which Frank Serban died. That was a professional job. And this one was looking professional as well. Nothing disturbed, nobody seen, nothing heard. In her mind, she visualized two figures in black entering the bedroom. One grabbed Rosalie Parkin and hauled her from the bed, hand over her mouth. He dragged her to the middle of the room. The other one took careful aim and stabbed her with a blade, cutting a major vein—maybe the subclavian or the vena cava. That would spill a lot of blood, but at a low pressure, like 20 mmHg, so it would flood rather than spurt and not splatter the perps. As Parkin’s ability to resist dropped, they bound her hands and taped her mouth, and maybe bundled her into a waterproof bag that would contain additional bleeding. Then they pulled over the rug to cover the stain, to buy a little more time.
She glanced at the nearest window, which looked down onto a back alley. If they parked there, they could be in and out without anybody noticing. Even the brother.
The brother.
Shaking away this scenario, she turned toward the lieutenant. “What’s the brother’s name?”
“Ernest,” Porter said, handing her the tablet. “Feel free to talk to him; he’s been Mirandized. I hope you can get more than we did.”
Swanson made her way through the apartment in the direction of the thumping. The cop outside the brother’s door stepped aside and nodded as she approached. She tried the knob, was surprised to find that it turned, then realized the mechanism was broken—perhaps by the cops. She opened it and was almost physically pushed backward by the wall of heavy metal music.
She quickly stepped in and closed the door behind her. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she began to make out details: black plastic over the windows to keep out the light; a battered desk with a large Buck knife jammed into its top; an Ibanez flying-V guitar lying in a pile of stomp boxes next to a Fender amp. Posters on the wall displayed thrash bands like Slayer and Metallica, along with cult films such as Audition and The Relic. A smell of weed and unwashed socks lingered in the air.
