Bones

Monday Afternoon, May 15

The sensation of being watched had been almost constant on this journey, and now I was feeling it again. I tried to ignore it, to concentrate on the paperback I was reading, but my efforts were useless. I lifted my eyes from the page and looked toward the prisoner, three rows up, expecting to see him staring at me again. He was asleep. How he could manage it over the loud drone of the plane’s propellers, I’ll never know. How Nicholas Parrish could sleep at all — but I suppose that’s one of the advantages of being utterly without a conscience.

So if Parrish wasn’t the one eyeing me, who was?

I glanced around the cabin. Most of the men — even those who were not sociopaths — were sleeping. Two of Parrish’s guards were awake, but not looking at me. The other two napped. I turned to look behind me. Ben Sheridan, one of the forensic anthropologists, was looking out the window. David Niles, the other, sat across the aisle, reading. There, sitting next to him, was the starer.

He wasn’t staring so much as studying, I decided. No hostility there. Actually, of the all-male group with me on the small plane, he was the only one who didn’t object to my presence. While most of the others snubbed me, he had taken an immediate liking to me. The feeling was mutual. He was handsome, intelligent, and athletic. But then again, nothing excited him more than discovering a piece of decaying flesh.

He was a cadaver dog.

Bingle — named for his habit of crooning along whenever he heard his handler sing — was a black-and-tan, three-year-old, mostly German shepherd dog, trained to find human remains.

And that was what this expedition into the mountains was all about: finding human remains. A very specific set of them.

I looked into Bingle’s dark brown eyes, but my thoughts had already turned to a blue-eyed girl named Gillian Sayre; Gillian, who had spent the last four years waiting for someone to find whatever remained of her mother.

Four years ago. One warm summer day, the day after her mother failed to come home, Gillian was waiting outside the building which houses the Express. I was with a group of coworkers on our way to lunch. I saw her right away; she was tall and thin and her hair was cropped short and dyed the color of eggplant. Her face was pale; she was wearing dark brown lipstick and lots of eye shadow, which only accentuated the nearly colorless blue of her eyes. Her lashes and brows were thick and dyed black and her left brow was pierced by a small silver hoop. Seven or eight pierced earrings climbed the curve of each ear. Her pale, slender fingers bore silver rings of varying widths and designs; her fingernails were short, but painted black. Her clothes were rumpled, her shoes clunky.

“Are any of you reporters?” she called to us.

Never slow to grasp this sort of opportunity, my friend Stuart Angert pointed at me and said, “Only this lady here. The rest of us just finished an interview with her, so she’s free to talk to you.”

The others laughed, and the words “call for an appointment” were on my lips, but something about her made me hesitate. Stuart’s joke had not gone over her head — I could see that she was already expecting me to disappoint her, and she looked as if she was accustomed to being disappointed.

“Go on,” I said to the others. “I’ll catch up to you.”

I put up with another round of chiding and some half-hearted protests, but before long I was left standing alone with her.

“I’m Irene Kelly,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“They won’t look for my mother,” she said.

“Who won’t?”

“The police. They think she ran away. She didn’t.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“Since four o’clock yesterday — well, that’s the last time I saw her.” She looked away, then added, “She went to a store. They saw her there.”

I figured I was talking to a kid who was doomed to learn that her mom was throwing in the towel on family life. But as I let her talk, I began to feel less certain of that.

Julia Sayre was forty years old on the night she failed to come home. Gillian’s father, Giles Sayre, had called his wife at a little before four that afternoon to say that he had obtained a pair of coveted symphony tickets — the debut of the symphony’s new conductor was to take place that evening. Hurriedly leaving their younger child, nine- year-old Jason, in Gillian’s care, Julia left the house in her Mercedes-Benz to go to a shopping mall not five miles away from her affluent neighborhood, to buy a slip.

She had not been seen since.

When he came home that evening and discovered that his wife hadn’t returned, Giles was more anxious about the possibility of being late to the concert than his wife’s whereabouts. As time went on, however, he became worried and drove over to the shopping center. He drove through the aisles of the parking lot near her favorite store, Nordstrom, but didn’t see her blue sedan. He went into the store, and after questioning some of the employees in the lingerie department, learned that she had indeed been there — but at four o’clock or so — several hours earlier.

When Giles Sayre reported his wife missing, the police gave it all the attention they usually give an adult disappearance of five hours’ duration — virtually none. They, too, looked for Julia Sayre’s car in the shopping center parking lot; Giles could have told them it wouldn’t be there — he had already made another trip to look for it.

“Sometimes, Gillian—” I began, but she cut me off.

“Don’t try to give me some bullshit about how she might be some kind of runaway, doing the big nasty with somebody other than my dad,” she said. “My folks are super close, happily married and all that. I mean, it would make you want to gack to see them together.”

“Yes, but—”

“Ask anybody. Ask our neighbors. They’ll tell you — Julia Sayre only has trouble with one person in her life.”