One Through the Heart (6 page)

‘I won’t drag you along.’

‘So now your answer is you’re going to go off on your own. You want to know a truth, Ben? You like to work alone.’

‘I like working with you.’

‘But you do it your own way almost every time. I’ll have to answer for the complaint she makes just the same as you and I’m not staring retirement in the face. I can’t just quit if I get angry enough, and I am angry because I didn’t get any say in this. That sucks.’

‘She’s not going to file any complaint and she’ll think it through and decide to cooperate.’

‘You aren’t listening to a single thing I’m saying. I stood in that bomb shelter this morning and screamed because we had to do it your way. Now you’re picking a fight with her. I don’t get it.’

They hit traffic driving back and Raveneau got a text that absorbed him. He was quiet then turned to her.

‘I just got a text from Brandon Lindsley. That’s the guy that appeared on the mountain. He’s offering to set up a meeting with some people he knows who are completely into Ann Coryell’s writings. He says there’s a chat room they go to.’

‘So what?’

Raveneau glanced at her and then started to text Lindsley back. It angered her that he was not listening, not willing to have any real conversation about how they worked together. For a moment she considered asking for a transfer, asking for a new partner today.

Instead, she said, ‘Give me his name again.’

‘Brandon Lindsley.’

‘What do we know about him?’

‘So far, I haven’t found much. No criminal record, valid California driver’s license, lives in Mill Valley.’

‘Tell me again how he just appeared.’

‘I was down where Coryell’s remains were found and that’s a pretty good distance down the slope and away from any trails. When I started back he was waiting by a tree. He followed me down there.’

‘Maybe he’s telling the truth and you’ve got it wrong. What were you doing there anyway? Why would a homicide inspector be out at a site that’s a decade old? There’s nothing to see.’

Raveneau ignored that and said, ‘I think it’s as you said when we found the iPhone case. It’s game on. We’re dealing with people who want to engage us. Now he’s setting up this meeting.’

‘That’s a lot strung together.’

‘It is.’

‘Sometimes you suspect everybody.’

‘This is one of those times.’

‘I think you’re being paranoid.’

Raveneau went quiet now, went dark, went back to being the man alone.

‘When is this meeting he’s setting up?’

‘I don’t know yet. Look, let’s not go back to the Hall yet. Let’s go get a coffee and talk. I hear you, I know what you’re saying, and I know how I can be. Let’s go sit somewhere and talk.’

T
he next morning Raveneau called a county sheriff in Missouri named Jennie Crawford. She put him on speakerphone and sounded skeptical that he was a San Francisco homicide inspector. Raveneau heard a low murmur, a male voice in the background.

‘Who all is in the room, Sheriff?’

‘Deputy Carlson is here with us. Say hello, Jim.’

He did and Raveneau asked, ‘Why are we on speakerphone?’

‘Deputy Carlson has worked on our investigation and I want him to hear this.’

‘He’s not working mine and some of what I’m going to tell you isn’t public information yet.’

‘There’s no issue with things leaking out of our office. They don’t leak, they pour out. I gave up ten years ago on trying to keep anything secret around here.’

‘OK, but how about taking me off speakerphone and letting me talk to you first?’

She did that and now her voice was more immediate and rich and warm. He put her at forty-five or fifty and hardened, but with a real sense of humor.

‘We have two partial skeletons and fourteen unidentified skulls primarily from elderly individuals. We’ve gone out to NamUs with this, but our forensic anthropologists guesses they came out of a graveyard.’ NamUs was the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System and he assumed the sheriff was familiar with it, but maybe she had no reason to be. He paused a moment as he thought about how to communicate with her without saying too much about the homicide investigation. ‘Sheriff, I read about the graveyard that flooded and I understand you’re looking for some missing skulls. How many are you looking for?’

‘Fourteen, and eleven are from older individuals, all relatives of local families. This wasn’t some forgotten graveyard the river turned up. A levee broke.’

‘Must have been a nightmare.’

‘It was.’

‘Sheriff, these skulls are part of a murder investigation, a victim killed here about a decade ago.’

‘What’s the name of your victim?’

‘Ann Coryell.’

‘Spell that for me.’

He did, and as she repeated the letters he guessed Deputy Jim was searching the Net for Ann Coryell articles. Computer keys tapped. He heard the squeak of an old monitor being turned, probably so the sheriff could read what he was finding.

Sheriff Jennie Crawford was in Lewis County in the town of Cagdill on a bluff above the Mississippi River in the northern part of the state. Raveneau checked out the town before calling her. He drove down Main Street on Google Earth and found the red-brick building she was probably in right now. But more importantly he found the road along the river and the story of the levee break and the cemetery washout. She was too quiet, conferring with her deputy he guessed.

‘These could be yours,’ he said. ‘If they are I’ll FedEx them home to you, but I’ll need a credit card and I should tell you we have a no-return policy.’ He gave her a moment before asking, ‘Do you want all fourteen, and will that be Visa or MasterCard?’

She didn’t miss a beat, said, ‘Visa,’ and then laughed a good laugh, the right kind.

‘What is it you and the deputy are looking at while I sit here holding the phone?’

‘We were looking you up.’

‘Did you find me?’

‘Yes.’

‘So can we talk more now and can you tell me how you lost the skulls?’

‘The levee breached, and then it broke and flooded part of the town and the graveyard. We evacuated people as the water came in. The caskets washed out in a sea of mud. It was awful. It made me think of the End Times they like to talk about around here. Sometimes I think they hope for it, but I won’t go there right now. Caskets ended up on both sides of the highway. We marked them with red flags and we couldn’t get our vehicles up there, so we had to tromp through the mud in waders to put flags on them. A grave robber opened half of those caskets that same night. He took skulls, jewelry, and some bones. We figured it was skinheads.’

‘I didn’t know there were any left.’

‘They all moved here.’

‘Any arrests?’

‘None.’

‘Any leads?’

‘None that have been worth a damn.’

‘I’m going to get both our medical examiner and our forensic anthropologist to call you.’

‘What are their names?’ He listened as she wrote the names down. ‘I would love to get this solved, but if they’re ours how did they get all the way to California?’

‘They probably got a ride with whoever opened up the caskets. That’s if they’re yours.’

She was quiet a moment then said, ‘Well, I’m really interested. There’s an old farmer named Jacobs who saw the grave robber and is sure it was a man, but that was before dawn and he wasn’t all that close.’

‘I’d like to hear all about that. I’d like to get a telephone number on him if this starts to look real. Do you have any dental records?’

‘A few.’

‘Have you reburied them without their skulls?’

‘We had to rebury them. We were paying an undertaker for storage and it just wasn’t working out. It was costing too much and people were getting upset about Grandma Millie in storage without her head, so I gave them the option of reburial or waiting. No one wanted to wait and we ran into a wall with the investigation. But we’ve got castings of tires tracks and boot prints. The castings are good but a boot print in that river mud isn’t worth much.’

‘Did you keep anything with DNA?’

‘We did but don’t tell the families.’

‘I won’t. How many did you keep DNA from?’

‘All of them.’

‘How many have dental records?’

‘Nine, and the records are scanned. We can get them to you today, and I’ll tell you this, if there’s a case I’d like to solve it’s this one. Some of the relatives cross the street to avoid me and high school kids show up at my door on Halloween in skeleton suits. I know an older widow whose husband’s skull was taken and whenever she sees me she makes the sign of the cross. I hear about it every day.’

‘Let’s do it this way – I’ll get our ME to call and he’ll coordinate the forensic anthropologist. He’ll email you photos of all of the skulls. There’ll be frontal and side shots and someone should be able to work with the photos and the dental records. If it looks like there are any matches you can send us your DNA samples and we’ll get them run. How does that sound?’

‘Sounds fine, but you haven’t told me where you found them. Where were these?’

‘In a bomb shelter. Go to sfgate.com. It’s local news now. If you’re old enough to remember the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields and the photos of skulls taken there, that’s what comes to mind.’

‘I do remember. I was a little girl, and I remember looking at
Time Magazine
and getting the feeling they weren’t people anymore. There were too many bones. They became things.’

‘That’s what these look like.’

Raveneau gave her his cellphone number before they traded emails. A few minutes after they hung up he sent her a photo he took inside the bomb shelter before anything was moved. That wasn’t like Raveneau, especially with someone he didn’t know. But he wanted her to know something about who they were looking for, and how she spoke of the skulls the Khmer Rouge left behind had reached him. He probably shouldn’t have let a case photo go out, but he had. In the photo the candles were still there, the skulls stacked and leaning back against the dank wall.

‘I
nspector Raveneau, my name is Cecelia Nance. I’ve known Marion Coryell since we were girls in Nebraska, and that’s quite a while. I turned seventy-one last week. If Marion knew I was making this call I don’t know if she would ever speak to me again.’

Raveneau reached and shut the door to the Cold Case office. Now he could hear her better. Her voice was quiet but firm. He pictured a woman who was careful about her dress and appearance and whose weeks were checkered with appointments and routines. That conjured the image of Marion Coryell with blue jay feathers tied into her hair and how unlikely that had seemed.

‘Marion is one-eighth Oglala Sioux. She still has family at the Pine Ridge Reservation, mostly second and third cousins, and I don’t know how much you know about the Oglala, but they are a very proud people, even in their current condition. Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, do you know those names, Inspector?’

‘Sure.’

‘People know their names but they don’t know who they were anymore. I heard on TV the code name for bin Laden was Geronimo. Geronimo wouldn’t give up the Apache land. He was a terror to the settlers but he was fierce and brave. I don’t understand giving his name to a bin Laden, but maybe that’s just me.

‘Marion couldn’t stand the drinking, not the members of the tribe who drank or those in Whiteclay who were there only to sell them liquor, so she left. That’s the real reason she came to California. She moved in with me and found a job and married the man I was going out with at the time. We used to laugh about that. I’m telling you this so you understand that she’s strong-willed when she wants something. She wanted Ann to be different than she was. Ann had characteristics Marion wanted to change. Ann was different than her mother and Marion was at times very hard with her. That’s what happened that night. Ann was frightened and Marion wouldn’t let her come home. I think you know she called her.’

‘Yes.’

‘You may not know everything.’

‘I know of three calls.’

‘Yes, but I don’t think you know that Ann told her mother she was coming home anyway and Marion said no. Marion told her to stay and be stronger than her fear, and then Ann said she was going to call you. She used your name and Marion remembered it. Ann was going to call you and if she couldn’t get you she was going to walk to her car and drive home. When she wasn’t able to reach you, she may have left the cottage on her own. Marion should have told that to the police then, but I guess she just couldn’t do it. I didn’t know until yesterday. I don’t think she’ll ever forgive herself and I’m worried about her. She talks about moving away from here, going back to Nebraska or somewhere else, but there’s nowhere else for her to go.’

Ann Coryell’s car was found four blocks away though the keys to it never turned up. In the cottage there were no signs of struggle and it could be that there in the night she was hurrying to her car. It was so possible it turned his gut.

‘There’s more. Ann told her mother that if she wasn’t home in an hour she should call the police, and Marion told her no. She told her stay where she was and not to leave that cottage. I believe Marion thought she would stay.’

‘She told you this yesterday.’

‘She did. That was after you visited her. Your visit upset her. She asked me to come over and sit with her. Marion was never the same after Ann disappeared and I always knew there was something else that she blamed herself for. I think she and Annie had a very bad argument that night and Marion said things she wishes she could take back. She couldn’t have known it was the last time she would ever talk to her. Even when the Missing Person Report got filed I don’t think she believed Annie was gone. That’s why she didn’t do anything for days. She may have thought Ann was angry and hiding to make her feel guilty. I know she kept waiting for her to call, even a month, two, three months later.’

Raveneau remembered. Marion Coryell insisting that her daughter was staying with friends and working on her thesis. She couldn’t say where or why she would hide, though, and the police view was the mother was unable to face the other possibilities. It wouldn’t become a homicide case for more than a year, and he guessed Marion was thinking now what he was, that Ann may have been alive in those first days after she vanished. Alive in the bomb shelter and alive in a way he would never let her mother know.