— 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
