upset. Mostly she sounds interested and relieved to be talking about something that has dominated her life for most of it. “When people do things like this, no telling where they’ll stop. Well, there’s no limit. Other people would have gotten hurt. Including you.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted anybody else to get hurt,” I reply, and I feel worse if what she’s saying is that I was silent out of fear for my own safety. I was afraid of a lot of things and a host of people I couldn’t see. I was afraid of other people dying, of people being wrongly accused.
“I hope you understand that when I read the death certificate and autopsy report, not that I understand most of the medical terms, well, one would think the findings are yours,” Mrs. Pieste says.
“They absolutely weren’t, and they are false. There was no tissue response to the injuries. All of it was postmortem. In fact, hours after the deaths, Mrs. Pieste. What was done to Noonie and Joanne occurred many hours after they had died.”
“If there wasn’t a test for drugs, then how can you be sure they were given something?” her voice goes on, and I hear the sound of another phone being picked up.
“This is Edward Pieste,” a man’s voice says. “I’m on, too. I’m Noonie’s father.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss.” It sounds weak, perfectly insipid. “I wish I had exactly the right words to say to both of you. I’m sorry you were lied to and that I permitted it, and although I won’t make excuses…”
“We understand why you couldn’t say what happened,” the father replies. “The feelings back then, and our government secretly in collusion with those who wanted to keep Apartheid alive. That’s why Noonie was making that documentary. They wouldn’t let the film crew into South Africa. Each of them had to go in as if they were tourists. A big dirty secret what our government was doing to support the atrocities over there.”
“It wasn’t that big of a secret, Eddie.” Mrs. Pieste’s voice.
“Well, the White House put on the good face.”
“I’m sure they told you about the documentary Noonie was making? She had such a future,” Mrs. Pieste says to me as I look at a picture of her daughter that I wouldn’t want the Piestes to ever see.
“About the children of Apartheid,” I reply. “I did see it when it aired here.”
“The evils of white supremacy,” she says. “Of any supremacy, period.”
“I missed the first part of what the two of you have been talking about,” Mr. Pieste says. “Was out shoveling the driveway.”
“He doesn’t listen,” his wife says. “A man his age shoveling snow, but he’s the hard head.” She says it with sad affection. “Dr. Scarpetta was telling me Noonie and Joanne were drugged.”
“Really. Well, that’s something.” He says it with no energy in his tone.
“I got to the apartment several days after their deaths and did a retrospective. It was staged, of course; their crime scene was staged,” I explain. “But there were beer cans, plastic cups, and a wine bottle in the kitchen trash, a bottle of white wine from Stellenbosch, and I managed to get the cans, the bottle, and cups along with other items, and have them sent back to the States, where I had them tested. We found high levels of GHB in the wine bottle and two of the cups. Gamma hydroxybutyric acid, commonly known as a date-rape drug.”
“They did say there was rape,” Mr. Pieste says with the same empty affect.
“I don’t know for a fact that they were raped. There was no physical sign of it, no injuries except staged ones inflicted postmortem, and swabs I had tested privately here in the US were negative for sperm,” I reply, looking through photographs of the nude bodies bound to chairs I know the women weren’t sitting in when they were murdered. I look at close-ups showing a livor mortis pattern that told me the women were lying in bed on rumpled sheets for at least twelve hours after death.
I go through photographs I took with my own camera of hacking and cutting injuries that barely bled, and ligatures that scarcely left a mark on the skin because the brutes behind all this were too ignorant to know what the hell they were doing, someone hired or assigned by government or military operatives to spike a bottle of local wine and have drinks with the women, possibly a friend or they thought the person was friendly or safe, when, of course, he was anything but, and I tell them that serology tests I had done after I got home indicated the presence of a male. Later, when I had DNA testing done, I got the profile of a European or white male who remains unknown. I can’t say for a fact it is the profile of the killer, but it was someone drinking beer inside the apartment, I add.
As much as one can reconstruct anything, I tell the Piestes what I think happened, that after Noonie and Joanne were drugged and groggy or unconscious, their assailant helped them to bed and smothered them with a pillow, and I based this on pinpoint hemorrhages and other injuries, I explain. Then for some reason this person must have left. Maybe he wanted to come back later with others involved in the conspiracy, or it could be that he waited inside the apartment for his compatriots to arrive, I don’t know. But by the time the women were bound and cut and mutilated so savagely, they had been dead for a while, and it couldn’t have been more obvious to me when I finally saw them.
“Up here we got about four inches already,” Mr. Pieste says after a while, after he’s heard enough. “That on top of ice. Did you get the ice down there in Cambridge?”
“I guess we should complain about this to someone,” Mrs. Pieste says. “Does it matter how long it’s been?”
“It never matters how long it’s been when you’re talking about the truth,” I reply. “And there’s no statute of limitation on homicide.”
“I just hope they didn’t lock up someone who shouldn’t have been,” Mrs. Pieste then says.
“The cases have remained unsolved. Attributed to black gang members but no arrests,” I tell them.
“But it was probably someone white,” she says.
“Someone white was drinking beer inside the apartment, that much I can say with reasonable certainty.”
“Do you know who did it?” she asks.
“Because we would want them punished,” her husband says.
“I only know the type of people who likely did it. Cowardly people all about power and politics. And you should do what you feel, what’s in your heart.”
“Eddie, what do you think?”
“I’ll write a letter to Senator Chappel.”
“You know how much good that will do.”
“Then to Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. I’ll write everyone,” he says.
“What will anybody do about it now?” Mrs. Pieste says to her husband. “I don’t know that I can live through it again, Eddie.”
“Well, I need to go clear the walk again,” he says. “Got to stay on top of the snow, and it’s really coming down. Thank you for your time and trouble, ma’am,” he says to me. “And for going ahead and telling us. I know that wasn’t an easy decision, and I’m sure my daughter would appreciate it if she was here to tell you herself.”
After I hang up, I sit on the bed for a while, the paperwork and photographs back in the gray accordion file they’ve been in for more than two decades. I’ll return the file to the safe in the basement, I decide. But not now. I don’t feel like going down into the basement and into that safe right now, and I think someone has just pulled into our driveway. I hear snow crunching, and I’m not in a good state of mind to see whoever it is. I’ll stay up here for a little while longer. Maybe make a grocery list or contemplate errands or just pet Sock for a minute or two.
“I can’t take you for a walk,” I tell him.
He is curled up next to me, his head on my thigh, unperturbed by the sad conversation he just overheard and having no idea what it says about the world he lives in. But then he knows cruelty, maybe knows it better than the rest of us.
“No walks without a coat,” I go on, petting him, and he yawns and licks my hand, and I hear the beeping of the alarm being disarmed, then the front door shuts. “I think we’re going to try boots,” I tell Sock as Marino’s and Benton’s voices drift up from the entryway. “You probably aren’t going to like these little shoes they make for dogs and are likely to get quite annoyed with me, but I promise it’s a good thing. Well, we have company.” I recognize Marino’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. “You remember him from yesterday, in the big truck. The big man in yellow who gets on my nerves most of the time. But for future reference, you have no reason to be afraid of him. He’s not a bad person, and as you may be aware, people who have known each other for a very long time tend to be ruder to each other than they are to people they don’t like half as much.”
“Anybody home?” Marino’s big voice precedes him into the bedroom as the doorknob turns, and then he knocks as he opens the door. “Benton said you was decent. Who were you talking to? You on the phone?”
