Bones (53 page)

"He'd rather have Nick Parrish in his newsroom?"

"I don't think he, uh, exactly believes the suggestion that Parrish is hanging out around here. Maybe he doesn't want to believe it."

I took Jack up to Cafe Kelly that night. When Stinger, Travis, and Leonard learned what had happened to Bingle, I thought Stinger just might go on a house-to-house hunt for Nick Parrish, with Leonard and Travis riding posse.

I asked him about Aunt Mary, and his mood changed immediately. "If I was twenty years younger, I'd ask her to marry me," he said with a grin.

When I got home, I discovered Cody had stretched himself out on Frank's chest, but the dogs were nowhere in sight. "They're in with Ben," Frank said sleepily.

I don't know if a dream awakened me, or if I heard Ben go outside. Either way, at about four in the morning, I knew I wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep. I dressed and went out to the patio, where Ben was sitting, already dressed and drinking coffee, petting Deke and Dunk.

"I called the vet," he said. "They say Bingle got up and he's barking. They think he's going to be fine."

"Great news," I said. "If he's barking, he must be getting better."

"Yes. I told them how to say 'be quiet' in Spanish. They said I could pick him up at eight."

"So here you are with a mere four hours to wait."

He smiled. "Right. At first I was too worried to sleep. Now, I'm too relieved. Ridiculous, isn't it?"

"No. You know I'm one of Bingle's biggest fans. And if anything happened to one of these guys, or Cody, I'd be a basket case. What's your schedule tomorrow? Can you catch up on sleep?"

"I'll be okay as far as sleep goes. I did sleep a little tonight--as much as I need. I'm supposed to be your . . ."

"Bodyguard?"

"How about--companion? What's your schedule?"

"I have an appointment with Jo Robinson in the afternoon. Then I'm working from ten at night until two in the morning, but I think Frank is planning to relieve you from duty before then."

We sat in silence for a time. I thought about my assignments from Jo. I hadn't done too badly, but there was this Parzival business.

"Ben?"

"Hmm?"

"Before Parrish escaped--"

"Before the others were killed," he insisted, always annoyed at my attempt to avoid saying it.

"Before the others were killed," I conceded, "even before we found Julia Sayre, something was bothering you."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, Ben--to quote good old Parzival--'What's wrong with you?' "

He looked away from me.

"I have a feeling it has something to do with reporters."

He didn't answer.

"Or was it an instant dislike of me, personally?"

"Of course not."

"Then what troubled you? What made you so angry? Why couldn't you sleep at night?"

"Many things," he answered softly.

I waited. He tried to fob me off with a list of the mass disaster cases he had worked recently.

"David told me about them," I said. "And while I'm not saying that I'd have the fortitude to work one of those cases, let alone as many as you have, David hinted there was something else going on with you."

"He did?" he said. "I'm surprised. David was usually better at keeping confidences."

"Don't try to make this about David. Unless you had some particularly awful experience with a reporter on one of those disaster cases, I don't think that's what made you snap at me from the moment I joined the team."

He hesitated, then said, "I'm tempted to make something up. It would be easier than telling you the truth." He sighed. "But after all you've done for me, the least I can do is be honest."

"You don't owe me anything. Tell me because we're friends, or don't tell me at all."

He looked out at the garden. In a low voice, he said, "It has a rather sordid beginning, I'm afraid. The end of a relationship. You remember Camille?"

"Yes--the blond bombshell who visited you at the hospital."

He nodded. "Camille is bright and funny, loves the outdoors, and yes, when we dated, I knew that every guy who saw her on my arm was green with envy."

"So what went wrong?"

"Me, I guess. She finally realized that I wasn't going to change in the ways she hoped I would."

"What was she hoping would change?"

"My work, mostly. She didn't mind dating an anthropologist, but she hated everything about the forensic work--the demands on my time, the thought of what I was doing, the smell of my clothes when I came home. She kept hoping that I'd weary of it, and take a position with a museum. I finally made it clear to her that I'd never leave forensic work, that it was important to me. She asked me if it was more important than she was, and I'm afraid I answered with my usual lack of tact."

"So you ended up moving out."

"Yes. I missed her a lot at first, but on the whole, I knew we were better off apart. I enjoyed living with David and Bingle and Bool. And I needed David's support not long after that."

He was silent for so long, I began to think he had changed his mind about talking to me. Eventually, though, he went on.

"A few weeks after I had moved out, Camille asked me to meet her for lunch. She said she had some things to give me, things I had left behind at the house--a few CDs and an old alarm clock. So we met and she gave them to me. She told me that she was seeing someone new. That hurt--my pride mostly, I suppose--but I lied and told her I was happy for her.

"Then she asked me what I was working on. I had no business telling her anything, but I was working on a case that had received a lot of attention. Five years ago, two young high school students had gone hiking in the desert and had disappeared. One partial set of remains was found, and it looked as if it might be one of the boys. I had been asked to work on it. I did, and I was close to making an identification.

"I was telling her what made the identification difficult--the passage of time, exposure to weather, animals damaging the bones, and so on. I said that I was going back to where the bones had been found and taking a team with me to see if we could recover more remains."

He shook his head. "Then she asked, 'Which boy do you think it is?' And--and I don't know why, but I guessed. I told her more than once that I wasn't at all sure. It doesn't matter. It was something that I never, ever should have done."

"She told someone."

"Oh, she told someone, all right. In all my self-involvement, I had failed to ask Camille who her new boyfriend was, what he did for a living. I believe the phrase he used in the first television newscast--which took place on the front lawn outside of the home of one of the families--was, 'Sources close to forensic anthropologists working on the case . . .' He was a damned sight closer to the source than I was at that point."

"Nasty thing for her to do to you--but 'hell hath no fury' and all of that. More than a little sloppy of him not to verify the information with someone other than your ex. But I can promise you, Ben, you are not the first man to leak something to the press by way of a girlfriend or spouse. Think of John Mitchell back in the Watergate days."

He looked at me and sighed. "If that was all there was to it, Irene, I'd be thanking God and counting it as a lesson learned."

"I don't understand."

"It was the wrong boy."

"You mean--"

"Yes, I mean a man and a woman and their two younger children, people who had waited for five years to learn what had happened to their son, their brother--those people had a reporter on their front lawn, asking them on camera if they had heard the news from the police yet, that their boy's remains had been found in the desert over a week ago, and that an announcement of positive identification was imminent."

"Oh, God."

"He also made statements about the condition of the remains that were almost word-for-word what I had told her."

"Making you feel worse."

"Not any worse than the family must have felt."

"How did you find out about it?"

"The coroner called and said they'd been asked to verify that an identification was about to be made. Carlos Hernandez, you know him?"

"Yes."

"He had seen it live on the five o'clock news, and told me to watch it at six." He shook his head. "Their faces as that reporter told them! Jesus! I'll never forget that as long as I live. By six o'clock, they had invited him into their living room and were showing him photos of the boy. Worst of all, I also knew that they would also feel a sense of relief and resolution after years of worry and wonder, and I'd have to tell them that it was all a mistake, that their son hadn't been found at all."

"And you figured you were the one who was torturing them, not that guy?"

"It was my responsibility! The coroner had trusted me with those remains. Trusted me to keep my mouth shut. Do you know where that trust comes from? From families like that boy's. They give it to Carlos, he extends it to me, and I betrayed it--and over what? A need to brag to a former girlfriend? Pathetic!"

"Human. And Carlos is fair-minded, Ben. He must have--"

"Oh, he was more than fair to me. I told him what had happened, fully expecting it was my last case for his office. He tried to help me--to help me! He gave me advice on how to handle the inevitable media frenzy that would follow. And it did. I must have said 'no comment' about a million times. The campus police had to keep reporters away from the lab where I do my work. There are no windows in the lab itself, but we had to have someone guard the door after one of the photographers tried to get a shot of the bones. Eventually, the media gave up."

"Ben, sometimes--"

"No, that isn't the last of it. The media gave up, but that didn't change anything for that family. They were naturally very angry. They asked to meet with Carlos and me. The press had told them their boy had been found, and we wouldn't comment one way or the other. They thought we were torturing them. But all we could say was that we were not prepared to make any identification at this time, and then promise them that they would be the first to know if we had any news."

"Which naturally made them think they were being given the brush-off."

"I felt terrible the whole time, but Carlos had made me promise that I wouldn't say more than that to them. They told Carlos that the reporter said I was the one that leaked the story. He told them, quite honestly, that neither of us had ever talked to that reporter, and no one that worked with either of us had ever mentioned the case to him. They weren't entirely satisfied, and spoke of getting an attorney, but fortunately things never reached that point. Carlos deserves the credit for that."

"What else did you do?"

"What?"

"I haven't known you all that long, Ben, but I know you well enough to realize that you wouldn't just say 'no comment' and wait for things to blow over."

"I would have, if it weren't for David. He got Ellen and some of the other graduate students together, hauled me out of bed in the middle of the night and said, 'Bool and Bingle want to go looking for bones in the desert.' We searched for six consecutive weekends. We found more of the first boy's remains. We were just about to give up when Bingle finally found the second boy's tibia--some distance from the first boy's. After that, we made a more intensive search and recovered more."

"Didn't that make you feel better about it?"

"Not really. It was better for the family, but I still felt miserable about what I had done. The outcome isn't the issue. Breaking that code of confidentiality was no more honorable on my part, just because we had found the second boy. It was just as likely that we could have searched and searched and never found him."

We sat in silence for a while before he said, "Although the blame is mine, really, for behaving unethically in that situation--"

"Ben, aren't you being a little hard on yourself?"

"Let me finish. I wanted to say--I do have a negative attitude toward the press. I was unfair to you. I apologize for that."

"Apology accepted. We aren't all as rotten as that idiot."