“Wait a minute,” I said. “You found a bloody circular saw and more at his house, right?”
“Right.”
“And those leg bones in the roses might have been cut with a saw, right, Ben?”
“Right.”
“I met with Phil, and that same night the bones showed up on our doorstep. If he left
“Not necessarily,” Ben said. “You’re relying on news reports based on secondhand sources.”
“Ben Sheridan—”
“No, I’m not trying to start a fight about the media. Frank, you were in Newly’s garage and saw it with your own eyes. Was the workbench bloody?”
“Yes.”
“If there was any blood, it probably came from Camille’s body.” He looked away for a moment, then said, “Or perhaps from the Jane Doe in the trash container. No matter what, that blood did not come from the Oregon woman’s femurs.”
“Wait a minute—” I protested.
“He’s right,” Frank said. “In general, dead bodies don’t bleed, because the heart isn’t pumping. You can drain blood from a body shortly after death, but the Oregon women were killed several weeks ago. Parrish removed the receptionist’s legs where he left the bodies — a long way from Phil Newly’s house.”
“I examined those femurs,” Ben said. “They weren’t sawed when the bodies were fresh.”
“So you think he’s innocent?” I asked.
“I’m not saying he’s guilty or innocent,” Frank said. “So far, we haven’t found any fragments at Newly’s house that were an obvious match to the femurs. But we haven’t even had a dozen hours to look around. Newly isn’t in the clear. You don’t find this kind of evidence without raising questions about the owner of the house. Newly still has lots of explaining to do.”
When we got down from the ladder, I saw a familiar figure standing away from all the action, looking dejected. I walked over to him.
“Leonard? What’s wrong?”
“I let you down,” he said, glancing nervously at Frank, and then down at his shiny black shoes. “He pulled the oldest trick in the book on me, and I fell for it.”
“What are you talking about?”
He sighed all the way from those shoes and said, “Parrish. Started a trash-can fire on the loading dock. When I went to investigate, he must have gone up the stairs.”
“Any losses from the fire?”
He shook his head.
“Well, then, that’s good, right?”
“I told you I wouldn’t let him in here, and I did.”
“He’s been slipping past the whole department for months,” Frank said, causing Leonard to look up at him. “No one would expect a lone officer to be able to stop him.”
I formally introduced them then, and Frank went on to thank Leonard. “Knowing you were keeping an eye on things made me feel a lot better about her being here at night.”
“It did?” Leonard asked, then quickly added, “I do my best, sir.”
“All anyone asks,” Frank said.
“Lone officer?” I said later, when Leonard had strutted his way out of earshot.
“I was afraid he was going to throw himself over that railing.”
Once John Walters vented his anger over our wild chase on the rooftop occurring after deadline, he asked me to write a story for a special morning edition. I agreed to do it, over the protests of my entourage of protectors, because I wanted to prove to Wrigley that I wasn’t going to be denied a place on A-1 just because he gave me post-deadline hours.
Frank, Ben, Travis, and Stinger refused to let me stay alone in the newsroom. Jack came over with a bottle of champagne and in spite of Leonard’s warnings about explicit company rules forbidding alcohol on the premises (“I am not here, I am not seeing this,” he said), we drank a toast to good friends, present and remembered. John joined us.
Parrish, we learned by taking a look at security tapes, had come into the building from the loading docks, wearing a baseball cap, carrying a toolbox, and moving purposefully past men who were caught up in the problem of delivering papers that were coming off the presses late. He started the fire near another camera, so that Leonard would be certain to see it.
I learned that he then spent some time making sure that it was going to be damned difficult for anyone to follow us up to the roof. He had barricaded the final interior doorway to the roof access stairs and put a heavy-duty locking bar on the door to the roof itself.
I called the hospital for an update. Nicholas Parrish was in critical condition with severe injuries, especially to his head and neck. If he died, I wondered if anyone other than his helper would mourn his passing.
“Ben,” Travis asked, “with all of his weight on your prosthesis, why didn’t the whole socket just pull off sooner?”
“It’s held on by suction,” he explained. “Unless I roll it off, it’s not coming off. For obvious reasons, the socket is designed to stay on until I want to take it off. Which, to be honest, I’d love to do as soon as possible.”
