Bone by Bone

Well, Swahn never mentioned a girlfriend in the year they'd been riding together, but Jay Murray thought the kid was just inept with the ladies.'

'What about the dispatcher who sent him out on that bogus call?'

'Oh, she disappeared. The woman never made it home from work that night. Now I figure that's just cops being tidy. But Swahn still won his settlement. I suppose it helped that Ad Winston was his lawyer. And those two stayed tight. I know it was Ad who put him onto this house.'

They had come full circle. The jeep rolled to a stop beside William Swahn's mailbox on Paulson Lane. The sheriff leaned across Oren to open the passenger door. 'Go back in there, son. Get what you can. Kiss him on the mouth if that's what it takes. Just bring me something useful.'

Oren kept his seat, disinclined to follow any orders from this man. 'You think Swahn's a likely suspect in my brother's murder. Why?'

'You know how this works. I can't-'

'You can't even tell your own people, can you? That's why there are no copies of the files. You've got what-five, six detectives countywide? One of them should be interrogating William Swahn. But you want me to break your suspect.'

The sheriff had bungled something badly, or he had stepped outside the law; one of these two things must be true. Cable Babitt needed an outsider who would not mind working in the dark, someone with something to lose-a good soldier who would ask no questions.

But Oren was not in the Army anymore.

And now he planned to finish this man off, to knock him down with a civil tone. 'Oh, and that old alibi of mine-the one you're holding over my head? Screw that.'

A few seconds passed before the older man appeared to understand that he was not in charge here-he never had been-and there was cause for worry.

'I need leverage.' Oren climbed out of the jeep and issued his first order to the sheriff. 'Find out when Swahn's ex-partner left the force. And I need to know if Jay Murray got any part of his pension. Don't call the LAPD.

I don't want rumors. Use your niece in State Revenue. She can get that off Murray 's tax records.' Walking away without turning back, he barked his final order. 'Call me here as soon as you've got facts!'

Oren pressed William Swahn's doorbell, but there was no sound. Evidently the loud ringer had been disconnected for the sake of peace. He knocked and then banged on the door with his fist.

The small square panel opened behind the grille. This time, the householder was the first to speak. 'You've got ten seconds of my time.'

'Josh Hobbs was my brother.'

'I already knew that. You look like him.' The panel closed. The ten seconds were gone.

Oren shouted, 'My brother's bones were found today!'

He heard the click of a lock being undone, a bolt drawn. The front door opened wide, and Oren was ushered inside with the wave of a silver-handled cane.

This sunlit house was far from the cave-like hermitage he had once imagined for the old woman who had died here when he was a boy. At the far end of the vast foyer, a marble staircase tapered up to the second-floor landing, where a large window framed blue sky and treetops. On the parlor floor, the rooms had pairs of ornate wooden doors built to the scale of giants.

Oren saw only the back of William Swahn's denim shirt and jeans as his host led the way in stocking feet. The man was tall with a slender build, the iron gray hair of middle age-and that cane was no prop. He leaned heavily on it and walked with a gait slightly out of control, as if his house pitched and tossed upon a roiling sea. This stirred an old memory in Oren, but he could not connect that signature limp to a face. Perhaps this man was someone he had, once or twice, seen around town and then only from a distance.

They entered a corner room, large and airy, filled with light from tall, arched windows, and it housed more books than could be found in the town library. The built-in shelves lined every bit of wall space. More volumes lay open on an antique writing desk, and others were stacked up on the floor.

William Swahn turned to his guest and used his cane to point to an armchair. 'Sit down, Mr. Hobbs.'

Oren remained standing, staring, unable to look away.

8

Oren had come face-to-face with the subject of his brother's finest photographs. This was the Letter Man. The scar was not gruesome, but faint, and just as Josh had described it-a jagged A carved into the left cheek. The scar had not been visible in pictures taken of the man's profile, for Josh had captured the ordinary side of William Swahn. None of his brother's work had ever been titled, and so it had been the boy's secret pun to sell the Letter Man portraits to the postmaster.

'What fascinates you, Mr. Hobbs? Could it be my mutilation?' Swahn's dark eyebrows arched with anticipation, probably awaiting the guilty shift of feet or the blush of a gawker caught in the act.

'No, sir. I recognized you from the photographs in the post office.' Oren wondered if that trio of pictures was still hanging there after all these years. My brother never knew your name, and neither did I-until just now.'

Swahn settled into an armchair and laid the cane across his legs. 'I understand you're with the Army's Criminal Investigations Division.' This was said with contempt, a virtual announcement that the two of them would never be close friends, for a cop was a cop, and this man's hatred of police was old and very precious to him.

'No, sir. I left the Army.' Oren stared at the cane, the symbol of a life derailed-all that they had in common.

'I'm told that CID agents wear street clothes during an investigation, and they don't have to salute superior officers. That must've given you quite a sense of power.'

'Mostly, I just liked the idea of wearing my cowboy boots on duty.' And now the pleasantries were officially over. 'I know you investigated my brother's disappearance. The sheriff thinks my father hired you.'

'Judge Hobbs?' A puff of air escaped Swahn's lips in a mild show of incredulity. 'How much sense would that make?'

'None at all. He would've hired a first-rate agency before he'd use an ex-cop with only one year on the job. For all I know, my father did hire somebody, but it wasn't you.'

Swahn's nod was almost imperceptible, the small acknowledgment of a glove thrown down, a contest begun. 'Judge Hobbs never hired an investigator. I would've noticed that kind of activity in a small town. And he never asked for help from the state Justice Department-even though he had the political pull to call them in.' The man addressed the handle of his cane. 'Don't you find that odd?' He raised his eyes to Oren's. 'By that, I mean your father's lack of interest.'

'Josh was a missing person. There was no evidence of foul play.'

'Of course there was.' Swahn's tone said, Liar. 'Everyone knew that boy didn't run away. Your brother had a bank account, but he left his cash behind. He didn't take any clothes, either. And we both know he wasn't lost. This town has a wonderful reputation for finding people who lose their way in the woods. They always found you, didn't they?'

Oren ignored the question, knowing better than to fall into this old trap of turnabout, the interrogation of the interrogator. He had to wonder about Swahn's inside information; no newspaper account would have mentioned an abandoned bank account. And how would this man know that Josh had not packed any clothing? His brother's knapsack had never been found.

'Now,' said Swahn, 'if I wanted to bury an investigation, I'd do what your father did. I'd leave it in the hands of the County Sheriff 's Office.

That department is a joke, and I'm sure that made it easier to whisk you out of town-out of the sheriff's jurisdiction.' He raised his cane to point it toward Oren's chest, his heart. 'When Judge Hobbs sent you away that summer, did he suspect you of killing your brother?' The tip of the cane settled to the floor, and Swahn rested both hands on the silver handle as he leaned forward. 'Or do you think that venerable old man murdered his own child?'

The next shot belonged to Oren. He sat down in an armchair and leaned back into the plush upholstery. Outwardly, he was unrattled, a man in repose and almost drowsing. 'Hard to believe you were a cop.' He let that settle in as a blunt insult and then added, 'You don't talk like one.' His adversary's accent made him a transplant from the world of upscale Bostonians, possibly uprooted in childhood, for the geographical marker was faint. This and the advanced college degrees would have been enough to alienate William Swahn from his brother officers; he was so obviously not cut from the same blue cloth. 'You sound more like a college professor.'

'I'm a guest lecturer at Berkeley. My area is criminology, but I'm sure the sheriff told you that.'

What else had Cable Babitt failed to mention about this man?

'How well did you know my brother?'

'I never met him.'

This could be true despite the evidence of the Letter Man photographs in the post office, three shots taken at close quarters. His little brother had been a thief of sorts, stealing people's images and running off with them. Sometimes a subject would hear the click of the camera and turn to see an empty space where a boy had been standing.

Oren rose to his feet and turned to the shelves, pretending interest in the titles on the book spines, while he considered the source of Swahn's inside information. 'Let's talk about your client.'

I told the sheriff-several times-no one paid me to-'

'I didn't ask who paid you.' Oren faced Swahn, wanting to see the man's eyes when he said, 'Hannah Rice was the client.' Satisfied with the reaction, he pressed on. 'Hannah couldn't afford the day rate of a PI, but then-you're not a licensed investigator.' He turned back to the shelves and trailed one finger from book to book, as if this matter meant very little to him. 'And you don't need money, do you? That's why she picked you.' He glanced back over one shoulder. 'Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe you thought she came here because you were so smart?'

Swahn's eyebrows rose in a subtle touche, and the man almost smiled with approval-almost. 'I don't pretend to know how Miss Rice's mind works. She's the only walking enigma I've ever met. And there's something about her speech. She's not from this part of the country, is she? Sometimes, when she's tired, I think I hear the ghost of a southern accent.'

That touch of the Southland in Hannah's voice had begun to die off in the early years of Oren's childhood, along with idioms and odd words. He shrugged and splayed his hands and said, 'As far as I know, Hannah's always lived in Coventry.'

This evidently passed as truth, for the older man seemed disappointed.

When billeted in the state of Tennessee for the duration of a manhunt, CID Agent Oren Hobbs had gotten a taste of the food and the regional dialect. He had realized then that Hannah Rice must have hailed from there, and this had led to another revelation: He knew every vital statistic in the life of the runaway soldier he hunted; he knew nothing about the woman who had raised him.

As a boy, he had been comfortable with the notion that the housekeeper had sprung to life on the day his mother was buried. At the age of three, Oren had been too young to remember Hannah's arrival in Coventry, but he knew the story told a hundred times: The judge had laid his dead wife to rest in the family plot and returned to his house in the company of neighbors, whose extra arms were needed to carry casseroles and baby Joshua. Oren had played the little man that day and walked everywhere on his own two toddler's legs, bumping into everything, '-blinded by tears, and batting away every hand that offered comfort.' Those were his father's words.

Judge Henry Hobbs had always told the tale in the same way, word for word. 'So we come back from the cemetery, and there's young Hannah- a stranger and a trespasser-standing on my front porch like she owns the place.' The story had been repeated until the children's eyes had glazed over, and this segment of oral history was burned into their little brains. 'Real brassy for a runt housebreaker,' the judge would always say.

The young stranger, Hannah Rice, had greeted the funeral party and served them a feast made from scratch materials found in the pantry. Her bite-size bits of finger food-with three flavors apiece-lingered for years in the memories of all those present on that long-ago afternoon, but the fine coffee had been enough to ensure Hannah's legend in the neighborhood.