Vanished in the Night (16 page)

“What’s up? Are you all right?” He sounded like she called every day.

“Could I . . . I mean, would it be okay if I went to my dad’s house now? I thought I’d look for some paperwork or something.”

There was a pause. “You don’t have to do that right away. Why don’t you give yourself a day or so?

“I need something to do. I can’t sleep.”

“Yeah. I know how that feels. Go ahead. I can’t imagine you’ll hurt anything. Like you said, your prints are all over that house. And Veronica?”

“Yes?”

“For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry.”

She could barely get the phone hung up before the tears came.

“The bones are old. They’re brittle and damaged. It took a while to sort out what happened close to the time of death, and what happened after the bones were dug up and moved.” Dinsmore shoved a stack of papers across the table at Zach and Frank. “These bones tell a story. I’m not sure it’s one that anyone
wants to hear, but they’re screaming it as loud as they can.”

“And?” Frank asked, barely glancing down.

“And you’ve got a variety of breaks that occurred throughout this kid’s lifetime.” Dinsmore shoved his glasses up on his forehead and looked at the two detectives. “People started kicking the crap out of this kid when he was pretty young. They kept it up steadily until he was dead, and then some.”

“Starting how young?” Zach asked.

“I’m guessing the first break—that would be the spiral fracture to his left arm—happened when he was about six or seven. It went untreated.”

Zach winced. Spiral fractures were one of the most common child abuse injuries. They generally occurred when someone bigger and stronger twisted a kid’s arm up behind his back. They didn’t always get treated; trips to the doctor for broken bones brought questions that nobody wanted to answer. “Any hospital records on that one?”

Dinsmore shook his head. “Not that I could find.”

“What else?” Frank asked.

“There were a couple of cracked ribs that had healed over pretty well.” Yet another abuse injury that often went untreated. “Then there was the stuff that happened right before he died. I’m guessing that’s what you’ll be most interested in.” Dinsmore slapped some
X-rays up on the viewing stand. “These breaks here in the arms were antemortem.”

Zach stood up to look more closely. “Defensive wounds?”

“Quite likely. They’d be consistent with someone holding their arms up to protect their head while blows rained down on them.”

Zach’s stomach clenched. The kid had been what, seventeen? Eighteen? How bad could he have been, to have received that kind of beating? “What else?”

“Well, you’ve got these breaks to the ribs. They’re also antemortem, but not by much. They’d be consistent with someone lying on the ground and getting kicked.”

Zach flashed on the boot marks on George Osborne’s torso, and looked at Frank. “There’s our connection. It looks like we’ve got a kicker.”

All fighters have their favorite moves. Muhammed Ali’s was the jab. Felix Trinidad favored the left hook and Micky Ward was infamous for his double-hook. Bullies were no different. There were slappers and twisters and hair pullers, and there were most definitely kickers.

“I don’t care for kickers,” Frank said, his face serious.

Neither did Zach. Kickers tended to go for a guy when he was already down. Their victims would be lying prone, unable to defend themselves other than
by curling into a ball and praying for it to end. That’s when the kicker did maximum damage, whaling away on some poor guy who had already conceded the fight and was just trying to survive.

Max hadn’t survived.

“Cause of death?” Zach asked.

Dinsmore shook his head. “It’s not entirely clear. Based on the patterns of the injuries, I would guess internal bleeding. It would have taken a while, and it would have been painful.”

Zach closed his eyes. Sometimes he hated knowing what people were capable of doing to each other. There were days when he dreamed about some job where the rancid underbelly of the human condition wouldn’t be shoved in his face on a daily basis. On the other hand, he didn’t think anyone could stay completely insulated from it all the time. Inhumanity reared its ugly head in everyone’s life at some point. At least he had the opportunity to even the score a bit.

Dinsmore was still talking. “He was definitely dead before he was buried, though.”

Fabulous. At least no one had buried the kid alive.

“And he wasn’t buried down here in the valley. I’m guessing probably somewhere in the Sierras.”

“Can you be any more specific than that, Doc?” Frank asked.

The Sierras. As in the Sierra School for Boys.

Dinsmore shrugged. “Not really. I could probably match soil samples if you brought me something to match it against, but I can’t be any more specific with what I’ve got.”

Frank looked over at Zach. “You ready to head up and talk to your buddy Stoffels? Maybe we could get some dirt for Dinsmore here. Kind of like an early Christmas present.”

Yellow crime-scene tape still ringed the house, but there weren’t any cops around. It wasn’t the kind of crime where you’d need to post guards at the scene.

She ducked under the tape and pulled her keys out of her purse.

“Veronica, is that you?” a woman’s voice asked.

Veronica turned. It was Mrs. Masi from two doors down. Mrs. Masi was in her seventies, but in great shape. She gardened and went for a walk every morning, rain or shine. She had a penchant for elastic-waisted Capri pants and polo shirts in pastel colors. Back when Veronica was a little girl, Mrs. Masi’s hair had been brunette. These days, she kept it light ash brown. She had a few more wrinkles around her eyes, but otherwise she was pretty much unchanged. “Hi, Mrs. Masi. Yes, it’s me.”

“Oh, dear. Is what they’re saying true?” Mrs.
Masi hadn’t spoken directly to Veronica for at least three years. It had apparently begun with Mr. Masi asking Veronica’s father to trim back a tree that was overhanging the street. Things had progressed rather quickly to what was, according to the police report, an operatic explosion of profanity on her father’s part, including but not limited to some rather pointed suggestions about things to do to Mrs. Masi using tree branches.

“What are they saying?” Veronica answered.

Mrs. Masi trotted up the driveway. “They’re saying your father’s been murdered,” she whispered, as if saying the words out loud might make the murderer pop out of the hedge.

“I’m afraid so.”

Mrs. Masi put her hand on Veronica’s arm. “How terrible. It’s not a fit ending for anyone,” she continued, and Veronica mentally added “even for your father, miserable scrap of humanity that he was.”

“If there’s anything I can do, anything you need, I hope you’ll let me know.” Mrs. Masi gave Veronica’s arm a pat and went back down the driveway.

Veronica stared after her. It seemed like a genuine expression of sympathy. Wow. Things changed fast, didn’t they? She would have bet that yesterday Mrs. Masi would have been all in favor of someone pushing her father down the stairs. Then again, maybe she
was the one who’d had it wrong these past few years. A little nonplussed, Veronica let herself into the house.

She’d thought she had mentally braced herself sufficiently for the mess in the entryway, but she had been wrong. She reeled back, took several shallow breaths through her mouth, and then, skirting the mess, went upstairs to the room her father used as an office—Max’s bedroom, originally.

Veronica sat down in front of the old metal desk and ran her hand over its surface. The desktop was relatively clear. There were a few bills and a bank statement, but Veronica wasn’t looking for the recent day-to-day stuff. She opened the big filing drawer on the bottom-right side of the desk. There were tax returns going back way further than was necessary. Ditto with bank statements. There was a file for the car, and another one with owner’s manuals for the refrigerator and washer and dryer.

She didn’t see anything conveniently titled “will” or “open in case of death.” She opened the drawers of the nearby filing cabinet. More bank statements; they seemed to go back forever. In the bottom drawer, she found a file with birth certificates for her, her mother, and her father, and several copies of her mother’s death certificate, but no will.

Maybe he hadn’t made one. Come to think of it, she wasn’t sure her mother had had a will, either. She
hadn’t thought about it at the time of her mother’s death; she’d simply assumed that everything would go to her father. But now what? What happened if her father died without a will? She’d have to look it up online.

She pushed back from the desk and bit her lower lip. Maybe there was a will filed with a lawyer. Didn’t they keep copies of those things? She could look through some of the bank statements and see if her father had ever paid a lawyer anything. At least then she’d have a name and a place to start.

But there was folder after folder of bank statements. Where should she start? She pulled the statements from the year her mother died. It would make sense to make a new will after your spouse died, right? Not that she could count on her father to do the sensible thing, but it seemed like the right place to start.

Her father’s bank statements were reassuringly boring. Money went in, mainly from jobs, occasionally from unemployment. Money went out to the mortgage company, PG&E, AT&T, and a few other sets of letters. There were pretty routine cash withdrawals and debit card charges at gas stations and grocery stores.

It stayed that way over the years from her mother’s death until the present, so she started working backward. It didn’t seem likely that her mother would have
had a lawyer, but Veronica had long ago stopped expecting her parents to do what she expected. Their logic confounded her. There was a period of time when she assumed they were doing it just to screw with her head. Then she realized that she was simply not that important to them. They were erratic and that was pretty much all she could count on them to be.

The bank statements before her mother’s death were pretty much the same, with the addition of a lot of medical bills. Those had eaten through her parents’ savings pretty rapidly, though they’d had a tidy little nest egg set aside. Much more than she would ever have credited them with having.

She’d gone back ten years now. There were payments of all kinds, to doctors and credit card companies and car financiers, but no lawyers. She should probably just shut the drawers and walk away.

But what should she do then? She’d spent an hour and a half so far; what was another hour and a half?

She pulled another stack of file folders out of the drawer. They really did go back forever. Of all the strange things to keep . . . She didn’t come across a single birthday card or Father’s Day card, although she’d been dutiful about giving those. She didn’t find one piece of personal correspondence. Just bank statements and tax returns.

She leafed through, watching her parents’ nest egg
grow in reverse. It was like running a movie backward, watching buildings go back together instead of being blown up, or milk flowing up out of a glass into a carton.

Then abruptly, the bank account bottomed out again. She leafed forward. One minute there was no money, the next there was a bunch. Where the hell had that come from?

She slowed down. There were six payments that came over a six-month period that weren’t from her father’s job. Each one was for $9,500. The deposits had been made in cash. Where the hell had her parents gotten close to $10,000 in cash even once, much less six times?

She couldn’t come up with a scenario that made any sense. Then again, she didn’t even know what year she was looking at anymore. She flipped the folder closed. The year was 1991.

The year that Max disappeared.

12

“So Mohammed decided to come to the mountain,” Stoffels said, motioning Zach and Frank into his house from his wheelchair. “Just as well; I don’t travel as well as I used to.”

Zach stepped into the log cabin and tried to keep his jaw from dropping. The ceiling of the great room soared twenty feet above their heads. A huge stone fireplace dominated one wall. The floor plan was open and airy, with the kitchen and dining area all in the big space. To the left, a spiral staircase went up to a loft area over what Zach assumed were bedrooms.

“Nice, huh?” Stoffels said, turning to admire his own house. “I built it myself, back when I was more mobile.”

“It’s incredible,” Zach said, not exaggerating in the slightest.

Frank looked stunned. “You built it yourself? With your own two hands?”

Stoffels nodded. “On weekends and holidays and vacations. This is what I did.”

Frank turned slowly around. “Now, this . . . this is a man’s work.”

“Oh, don’t get him started.” Stoffels’s wife came out of a back room and into the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She smiled at her husband, though, and came to stand next to him. “Do you boys want something to drink? Some coffee maybe?”

Zach shook his head. “No, thanks. We don’t want to be any trouble.”

“Well, at least sit down and make yourselves a little more comfortable.” She gestured toward the dining area and they all sat down around the large plank table.

“We were hoping to talk to you about Max Shelden. Do you remember the case?” Zach asked Stoffels as he wheeled up to the table.

“Janice told me that was what you wanted to talk to me about. Have you met her?”

Zach shook his head. “We opted to come here and meet with you first, sir. She knew that we were coming, though.”

Stoffels nodded. “I figured as much. If you get a chance, you should stop by and meet her. Never did I think that she would be able to make it here. Not
that she isn’t a fine cop; she is. Came with all kinds of credentials. But she’s a woman and there’s still a fair bit of chauvinism up here.”

Zach could only imagine. He knew how much “chauvinism” there still was down in Sacramento. In his experience, the farther you got away from the city, the worse those things got, and they were pretty damn far away from the city up here. You wouldn’t know it was only a day trip.