Bones (2 page)

"Not my mom."

"I'm just saying that she hasn't been gone for twenty-four hours yet. Don't assume that she's--" I stopped myself just in time. "Don't assume that she's been harmed."

"Then I need you to help me find her," she said. "No one else will take me seriously. They're like your friends." She nodded in the direction Stuart and the others had walked. "Think I'm just a kid--no need to listen to a kid."

I pulled out my notebook and said, "You understand that I don't get to decide if this story runs in the paper, right?"

She smiled.

Once I argued my editor into letting me pursue the story, I drove over to the Sayres' home, a large two-story on a quiet cul-de-sac. Giles answered the door after scooping up a yapping Pekingese. He handed the squirming dog off to Gillian, who took it upstairs. Jason, he told me, had been taken to stay with his grandmother.

When I first approached Giles Sayre, I thought he might resent Gillian's recruitment of a reporter for help with what could turn out to be an embarrassing family matter. But Giles heaped praise on his daughter, saying he should have thought of trying to enlist the Express himself.

"What am I going to do if anything has happened to Julia?" he asked anxiously.

Like Gillian, he was tall and thin and had pale blue eyes, but his hair was a much more natural color, a dark auburn. He had not slept; his eyes were reddened from tears which, by this point, could come easily, and which he didn't try to hide.

He hurried to hand me several recent photographs of his wife. Her hair was dark brown, her large eyes, a deep blue. An attractive, self-possessed woman, she appeared to be perfectly groomed in even the most casual photographs. Gillian did not resemble her so much as her father, but Jason, I saw from a group photo, took a few of his features from each--her dark hair and aristocratic facial structure, his pale blue eyes.

"Which of these is the most recent?" I asked.

Giles selected a photograph taken at a Junior League event.

"Can I keep it? I can try to get it back for you, but I can't make any promises."

"No, that's all right, I have the negative."

This level of cooperation continued throughout the day. He met my involvement with a sense of relief, anxious to do whatever he could to help me with the story. The benefit was mutual--I gave him a chance to take action, directed some of the energy that up until now had gone to pacing and feeling helpless; his help made much of my job easier. It occurred to me that his anxiousness to spread the word was not something you'd be likely to find in a man who fears he has been cuckolded.

So I talked to neighbors and friends of Julia Sayre. I talked to other members of her family. The more I heard about her, the more I was inclined to agree with her daughter--Julia Sayre wasn't likely to disappear of her own volition. Julia seemed fairly content with her life, content with just about everything except her relationship with her daughter. The universal opinion on that matter was that Gillian's hellion phase was bound to come to an end soon--according to friends, no one was more sure of that than Julia.

If she was conducting an extramarital affair, Mrs. Sayre had been extremely discreet about it. I still hadn't ruled out the possibility that she had left Giles Sayre for someone else, but it was no longer my pet theory.

I asked Gillian to tell me again what her mother had been wearing. A black silk skirt and jacket, she said. A white silk blouse, a pair of black leather pumps and a small black leather purse. Her only jewelry had been a simple gold chain necklace, a pair of diamond earrings, and her wedding ring.

"Not her wedding ring, really," Giles said. "On our fifteenth anniversary, we had new rings made." He held his up. "Hers is gold, like this one, and it has three rubies on it."

He drove me to the mall where she had last been seen. With his help, I got the Nordstrom manager to look up the time of the transaction. Julia had used a MasterCard to purchase a black slip at 4:18 P.M. the previous afternoon. We thanked the manager and left. Giles called the MasterCard customer service number on his cell phone as we walked from store to store in the mall, showing Julia's photo to clerk after clerk, none of whom had seen this lady yesterday. Eventually, he got his answer from the MasterCard customer service rep, and asked her to repeat the information to me. She confirmed that Julia Sayre hadn't used the credit card since making the Nordstrom purchase.

I called an overworked missing persons detective in the LPPD and told him I was writing a story about Julia Sayre's disappearance. He wouldn't comment for the story, but--off the record--told me he'd try to get some action on the case.

When Julia Sayre's Mercedes-Benz was first spotted on an upper floor of the Las Piernas Airport parking garage, the two patrolmen who found it thought the woman might have decided to escape her marriage after all. But then the detectives called to the scene made a discovery, a discovery that had my editor--overjoyed that we had beaten the competition to the story--praising my instincts, while it tied my stomach into knots.

Julia Sayre's left thumb was in the glove compartment.

** CHAPTER 2

Four weeks ago, when the Kara Lane story first broke, I had expected another of Gillian's "try to find out" calls. Over the years following Julia's disappearance, I had heard from Gillian whenever certain events were reported in the Express. If a Jane Doe was found, Gillian calmly asked me to try to find out if the unidentified body might be her mother's, never failing to recite the details of her mother's height and coloring and clothing and jewelry. Was the victim a blue-eyed brunette? Was the victim wearing a gold ring with three rubies?

If a man was arrested for killing a woman, she wanted me to interview him, to try to find out if he had killed her mother, too. If a suspected serial killer was arrested in another state, she wanted me to try to find out if he had ever been in Las Piernas.

I quit the paper once, and went to work for a public relations firm. She tracked me down and called me there--O'Connor, my old mentor at the Express, was a soft touch for a missing persons case, and told her where to find me. When I told her that she should ask O'Connor to follow up on these stories, she quoted him as saying it would be good for me to remember what it was like to have a real job.

I could have refused her, of course, but even at an observer's distance, I had allowed myself to become too close to the Sayres' misery over those years.

I seldom saw Giles, and never away from his office; he apparently worked long hours to distract himself from his grief. His mother moved in with the family to help care for the children. Two months after Julia disappeared, Giles told me that he didn't know whether or not to hold a memorial service for her. "I don't even know what's involved in having her declared dead," he said. "My mother says I should wait, that people will think I was happy to be rid of her. Do you think anyone will think that?"

I told him that he should do what he needed to do for his family, and to hell with everybody else. It was advice he seemed unlikely to take--the opinions of others seemed to matter a great deal to him.

Jason got into trouble at home and in school on a regular basis. His grandmother confided to me that his grades had dropped, he had quit playing sports, and had become a loner, having little to do with his old friends.

Only Gillian seemed to continue on with her life. She gave her grandmother as much grief as she had given Julia. She dropped out of high school, moved out and got a small apartment on her own, supported herself by working at a boutique on Allen Street--Artsy-Fartsy Street, my friend Stuart Angert calls it. And spent four years quietly and persistently reminding the police and the press that someone ought to be looking for her missing mother, her determined stoicism shaming us into doing what little we could.

On the day the Kara Lane case first made headlines, Gillian waited for me outside the Wrigley Building, home of the Express. She seemed to me then as she had seemed from the first day I met her: no matter how likely it was that she would meet with disappointment, Gillian simply refused to acknowledge defeat. This affected me more than tears or hysterics. Nothing in her manner changed; she was often brusque, but she was never weak. Her clothing, hair, and makeup styles might be a little extreme, but her feelings--whatever they were--were not on display.

So I made calls, I followed up. There was never any progress. Until Kara Lane disappeared.

By then, I wasn't allowed to cover crime stories--a result of my marriage to Frank Harriman, a homicide detective. But my marriage is more than worth the hassles it causes me at the Express and Frank at the LPPD.

As it happened, Frank was part of the team that investigated the Lane case. I learned details about it that I couldn't tell the paper's crime reporter, let alone Gillian. But before long, almost all of those details became public knowledge.

Kara Lane was forty-three, dark-haired, blue-eyed, a divorced mother of two teenage daughters. She had gone to the grocery store at eight o'clock one evening, and when she had not returned by eleven, her daughters became concerned. Too young to drive, they called a neighbor. By midnight, after a search of local store parking lots, the neighbor called Kara's ex-husband. After another search of the stores, the ex-husband called the police. The search for Kara Lane began in earnest early the next morning.

Several factors caused the police to search for her more quickly than they had Julia Sayre: Kara was a diabetic who needed daily insulin injections--and she had not taken her medication with her; she had never before left her daughters alone at night; and during the morning briefing, Detective Frank Harriman noticed that in height, age, build, and hair color Kara Lane resembled Julia Sayre--a woman whose daughter pestered his reporter wife every now and then. He suggested to his partner, Pete Baird, that they take a look at the Las Piernas Airport parking lot.

Kara Lane's aging VW van was parked in exactly the same space where Julia Sayre's Mercedes had been left four years earlier. Not long after they called in their discovery, the van was carefully searched. Kara's left ring finger was found in the glove compartment.

At this point, the department called Dr. David Niles, a forensic anthropologist who owned two dogs trained for both search and rescue and cadaver work, and asked him to bring them to the airport. The results were remarkable--so remarkable that when Frank and Pete told me about it that evening, I was fairly sure they were exaggerating.

"One of his dogs--Bingle--is so smart," Pete said. "He can find anything. I mean, he makes these mutts of yours look retarded, Irene."

"Wait just a minute--" I said, looking over at Deke, mostly black Lab, and Dunk, mostly shepherd, who were sleeping nearby.

"Our dogs are smart," Frank said, trying to head off an argument, "but Bingle is--well, you'd have to see him to believe it. And he's highly trained--"

"And don't forget Bool," Pete said. "His bloodhound. He works with two dogs. If one acts like he's found something, he gets the other to confirm it."

"Bingle has even located bodies underwater," Frank said.

"How is that possible?" I asked. "You put him in a little scuba outfit?"

"Very funny," Pete said.

"The dog can do it," Frank said. "It's not as miraculous as it sounds. The bacteria in a decomposing body cause it to give off gases. The scent rises through the water, and the dogs smell it when it reaches the surface. They can take Bingle out in a boat and cross the surface of a lake, and he'll indicate when he smells a body below."

"All right," I said, "that makes sense. But--"

"Let us tell you what happened," Pete said.

The gist of the tale was that Bingle led a group of men at a fast clip over a weaving trail out of the parking structure and across the grounds of the airport. Then he headed toward an airplane hangar.

"He went bananas," Pete said, moving his hands in rapid dog-paddle fashion.

"He was pawing furiously at one of the back walls," Frank explained.

It took the police some time to get a warrant, and to locate the owner of the building, but they gained access. At first, nothing seemed amiss. The hangar was leased by Nicholas Parrish, a quiet man, the owner said; a man who paid his rent on time, never caused any problems. An airplane mechanic. The police ran Parrish's name through their computers--he had no outstanding warrants. In fact, he had no criminal record at all.

David Niles brought out Bool and let the bloodhound sniff an article of Kara Lane's clothing. Bool, who needed this "pre-scenting" in order to track, traced a path almost identical to the one Bingle had followed.

Frank suggested getting a crime scene unit to check the hangar with luminol, a chemical capable of detecting minute traces of blood, but the skeptics in the group were starting to grumble, especially Reed Collins and Vince Adams, the detectives in charge of the Lane case.