Dead Man's Bones (11 page)

“What’s that?”

“I felt bad that the forensics man lost the first case.” Her mouth went hard, her look was accusing. “But I’m willing to bet that the murderer’s defense attorney—the woman who convinced the jury to acquit—felt a whole helluva lot worse.”

I doubted it. When you’re a defense attorney, you disconnect your brain from your heart. You’ve got to, or you won’t survive. You know sometimes that your client is innocent, and if he’s convicted you feel like a failure for not saving him. And sometimes you know that your client is guilty as sin, and when you get him off, you feel like a criminal. To keep from feeling rotten all the time, you have to stop feeling, period. I’d bet that defense attorney just chalked another one up to experience.

I looked at Alana. “It’s time I called it a night,” I said. I hesitated, balancing the obligation I felt against the risk of offending her yet again. “I wonder—maybe you’d like a ride home.”

She regarded me blurrily. “Think I can’t drive, do you?” She hiccupped, then giggled.

“I think,” I said, suppressing my anger, “that you don’t want to risk losing your license. The cops around here keep a close watch.” Sheila takes a very hard line when it comes to drunk drivers.

“You’re just trying to scare me,” she said. She pushed back her chair and stood, wobbling. “But maybe I’ll take you up on the offer.”

As we went together out the door, Bob gave me a rueful grin and a high sign, and somebody else laughed. I had the feeling that this wasn’t the first time some good Samaritan had driven Alana home.

She fell asleep the minute after she gave me directions. I had to wake her up to get her into her apartment—not an easy job, since it was on the second floor, and by this time she was leaning on me, dragging her feet and muttering something incoherent. I steered her to the bedroom, dumped her on the bed, pulled off her shoes, and found a blanket.

I stood for a moment, watching her face as she slept, letting myself feel the anger I’d kept out of my voice a little earlier. This woman had career recognition, challenging and rewarding work, people who believed in her, a bright future. What was driving her to drink? I thought of my mother, Leatha, who had been an alcoholic until just a few years ago. I’d been angry with her, too, until I began to understand that she suffered from a genetic tendency to addiction, and that her need for drink had been kindled and stoked by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy and imperfection, especially where my father was concerned. Leatha could never meet his expectations, could never measure up to his standards.

Was it something like this that kindled Alana Montoya’s need for drink? Or was it a failed marriage, or the competitions that came with being a Latina in an Anglo world, a woman in a man’s field?

But there were no answers to these questions. I watched her a minute more, feeling the anger soften and dissolve into a kind of perplexed pity. Maybe she was drinking out of frustration at the delay in getting her program started. Now that I thought about it, that delay didn’t make any sense, either. CTSU had hired her with fanfare; a Latina added to the faculty is one more politically correct plus in a column that used to be called Affirmative Action. (God only knows what it’s called now.) And the program was needed, too. So why wasn’t the department putting more muscle, more money, behind it? Why were they dragging their feet?

I made a mental note to ask McQuaid about this. I turned off the lights, locked the door, and left Alana to sleep it off.

I went home, crawled into bed beside McQuaid, and dreamed of bones.

In my dream I am lost in a dark labyrinth deep under the earth, have been lost for hours, days, weeks, maybe a century. In the dark, time is meaningless, my breath and the hard pounding of my heart the only measures of moments passing. I have a flashlight in my hand, but it keeps flickering out, the fragile light fading, brightening, dimming, finally dying altogether. I am totally wrapped in the smothering dark, my mouth dry as dust. I am so frightened, I can hardly catch my breath.

Then, through the utter blackness, I glimpse a phosphorescent glow, faintly, eerily green, far away down the pitch-black, rock-strewn corridor in front of me. As I grope my way forward, the glow becomes brighter, and I realize that it emanates from a heap of broken, splintered bones piled on the dusty floor. On the top of the heap sits a grotesquely grinning skull, vacant-eyed and ghastly, its one gold tooth glinting. Somewhere far beyond, in the deathly silence of the cave, I hear a child’s anguished weeping, the crystal echoes breaking around me like the rising and falling of distant music.

But there is something more. Beneath the sound of weeping, I realize that the skull is speaking to me, whispering my name, telling me something important, something I need to know. Something about the bones themselves, who they belong to, how they got there. But more, I realize that these bones know the way out of the labyrinth, the way to the entrance, the way to safety, to the light. Desperate to hear, I lean forward, lean close, lean closer, my eyes on the empty-eyed skull, listening, so intent on hearing the words that I don’t realize that someone is creeping up stealthily behind me, until suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulders, shoving me forward, and I am falling into the bones; falling, falling—

“Hey, China,” McQuaid said urgently, shaking me. I was lying half off the bed. “Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”

I sucked in my breath, marooned halfway between the fearful cave of my dreams and the familiar comfort of our bedroom. “Oh,” I breathed, and scooted back on the bed, grabbing for McQuaid’s hand. “Oh, wow.”

“Yeah. Some dream.” McQuaid squeezed my hand, gave me one last pat, and rolled over, already half-asleep. “Must’ve been Bob’s barbecue,” he said drowsily. “It’s potent stuff.”

But I didn’t go back to sleep, not right away. I lay on my back, watching the twiggy tree shadows on the ceiling. I was still thinking about bones. Broken bones, buried bones, bones that lay in limbo, waiting to be discovered. Bones that talked. And people who listened.

“THAT was some dream you had last night,” McQuaid said again, the next morning. “It took a long time to wake you up.”

Brian had already gulped his cereal and orange juice, grabbed his book bag, and galloped out the door to catch the bus to school. Howard Cosell, his morning duties done, had flopped onto the porch step, where he would wait for the school bus to bring Brian back again. And McQuaid and I were enjoying a quiet cup of coffee together before we separated and went off in different directions.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was dreaming of bones. A glow-in-the-dark skull. It had something to tell me, but you woke me up before I could find out what it was.” I shuddered, not wanting to remember that vast dark emptiness under the earth, the eerily phosphorescent bones, the whispers I couldn’t quite make out. “It wasn’t the barbecue that brought on that dream, though,” I added. “It was Alana.” Alana, the bone doc.

“Montoya?” Something in McQuaid’s tone caught my attention, and I looked up.

“Right. I ran into her when I went to Bean’s for supper. We had quite a talk.”

He was studiedly casual. “Personal stuff?”

“Oh, maybe a little. She said she’s divorced—but I suppose you already know that, since you were on the committee that hired her.” I frowned. “How come the Anthropology Department has been so slow in implementing her program?”

“Dunno.” He stirred coffee. “Maybe they’ve got other priorities.”

“But that doesn’t make sense, McQuaid. They hired her to develop the new Forensic Anthropology degree, but they haven’t given her money for lab equipment or pushed her courses through the approval process. What’s going on?” Now that I thought about it, it seemed to me that there was something fishy here. “Is somebody deliberately holding up the process?”

“I said I don’t know, China.” His voice was sharp, and he made an effort to soften it. He leaned back. “Was that all you talked about? Just the program?”

I shook my head. “Mostly, we talked about bones. Brian’s caveman.” I summarized what she had said, adding, “She also told me how she decided to go into forensic anthropology.” I shuddered. “Two women, beaten to death by the same man. The first woman was dug up by a backhoe. The second one—her daughter saw it all.” I pulled in my breath. “A ten-year-old girl, McQuaid.”

“The world’s an ugly place,” he said, but not without sympathy. “That shouldn’t be news to you, after your courtroom career. You specialized in dirt, didn’t you? It didn’t seem to bother you then.”

McQuaid was right, although that wasn’t exactly the point. I had spent a great many years in a dirty world, full of crime and corruption, and I’d had to grow callouses over my conscience just to do the ordinary stuff that had to be done to defend people who might or might not be guilty of the crimes with which they were charged. Which is maybe why I love what I do now. The shop is sometimes hectic and stressful, especially when it’s not making money, but while I may get my hands dirty, my conscience is clean. I—

“What?” I asked, realizing that my thoughts were taking me on a detour and I’d just missed something. “I’m sorry. I was thinking about the opposite of ugliness.”

“I asked,” McQuaid said, “whether she mentioned anything about her undergraduate work.”

“Undergraduate work?” I asked blankly.

He was patient. “The university where Montoya got her degree.”

“Oh, that. Mexico City. National something university. But you know all that.” I frowned, thinking that I had not told him about Alana’s getting drunk, or my taking her home and putting her to bed. Was I afraid it would affect his opinion of her, professional or otherwise? Was I protecting her? Why?

“Oh, sure,” McQuaid said carelessly. “I was just wondering.” Then he got serious. “Listen, China, I’m seeing a couple of new clients this morning, somebody you know. Maybe you can give me some background on them.”

New clients. Hey, that was good news. At least one of us was bringing in money. “Somebody I know? Who?”

He paused for effect. “Jane and Florence Obermann.”

I stared at him in astonishment. “Jane Obermann is hiring a private detective? What in the world for?”

“She says she’s afraid that someone plans to kill her and her sister. She wants me to keep it from happening.”

“Kill them?” I laughed grimly. Why was I not surprised to hear this? “Kill her, you mean. Florence is a sweet old lady who looks like she might fall apart any minute, but Jane is a genuine fire-breathing dragon. Don’t get too close, or she’ll scorch you.”

With a chuckle, McQuaid picked up both our cups, went to the coffeemaker, and poured. “I don’t know yet whether there’s been an actual threat—I’ll find that out when I see the women today. And I don’t know whether the threat, if there is one, has anything to do with the theater association. But there’s a chance that it might.” He brought our cups to the table and sat down. “I know you’ve been doing some landscaping at the theater. I was wondering whether you might have picked up something—a bit of gossip, some information, maybe—that could help me.”

“What I have picked up is that Jane Obermann is the very devil to work with,” I replied. “She won’t give you the information you need. Whatever information you give her, she’ll find something wrong with it and probably refuse to pay you for it. And if somebody does succeed in bumping her off, she’ll come back from the dead and sue you for malfeasance.”

McQuaid chuckled. “The client from hell, huh?”

“Laugh now,” I retorted. “You won’t be laughing later.”

His eyebrows were amused. “You’re not serious.”

“I’m serious.”

“Well, if she’s that kind of person, maybe she’s got something to worry about, after all.” He pulled a scrap of paper toward him and turned it over to the blank side. “Who might have it in for the old lady?” He took a pencil out of the ceramic cup where the writing implements live when they’re off-duty. “Why?”

“Who? Why?” I began counting off on my fingers as McQuaid made notes. “Well, you could start with Lance Meyers, who was forced to resign as president of the theater board because he refused to stage Miss Jane’s play. Or Marian Atkins, the current president, who told me a couple of days ago that if she’d known what the board was getting into, she never would’ve accepted the offer of the theater. And then there’s Jean Davenport, the director, who has to put up with Jane’s constant meddling. And Duane Redmond, who got fired from his role as leading man because he didn’t meet Jane’s expectations. And her sister, who seems innocuous enough but has probably been carrying a grudge for decades. And—”