Jayne straightened up and saw that Steelie’s eyes were troubled despite her light tone. She closed the door of the fridge and leaned on it, overwhelmed with the desire to lie down and go to sleep.
DAY FOUR
Friday
ELEVEN
Eric drove fast into the parking lot beneath the FBI building on Wilshire. He forced himself to slow down once in the dark, cramped space but he undid his seatbelt even before he’d turned off the ignition. Taking his briefcase from the back seat, he locked the car and headed for the elevator, which seemed to be running slower than usual this morning. Once inside the elevator, he hit 4. Nothing happened. He hit the ‘Door Close’ button several times in quick succession. The doors crawled shut.
When they opened again, Eric turned sideways to get out shoulder first before the doors had finished their slow retraction. He unlocked the door to the hall that led to his office. Lance, the office administrator, wasn’t in yet and neither was Scott. Eric unlocked their office and his eyes immediately went to the printer. Nothing. He sat down at the NCIC computer just in case something had come in from an Arizona police department or the California Highway Patrol responding to the BOLO on the gold van. Nothing.
‘Damn.’
His cell phone rang. When he answered, he could hear the road noise in the background and greeted his partner. ‘Yeah, Scott.’
‘Anything?’
‘No.’
‘OK, I think I have something. We know the perp’s got body parts frozen in the back of the van, right? If he drove out to Arizona at this time of year, he might’ve done it at night because of the daytime heat. Now, unless he had a generator, he would have needed an electrical hook-up for the freezer if he stopped along the way. Following me?’
Eric was pulling a notepad toward him. ‘Oh yeah.’
‘We should check out campgrounds with hook-ups between here and Arizona, see if they had a visit from this guy during the week.’
‘Going along I-Ten?’
‘Let’s start with that. It would make a long drive even longer if he was using blue highways and they’re less likely to have places for hook-up. So, you on top of this?’
‘Yes. What’s your ETA?’
‘Twenty minutes.’
They signed off and Eric started looking up campgrounds along Interstate 10. The phone on his desk rang and he glanced at the caller identification. It was a Los Angeles area code but he didn’t recognize the number. He picked up and identified himself.
‘Hey, Eric, it’s Steelie Lander.’
Eric relaxed and his eyes went back to the computer screen. ‘Hey, Steelie. Where are you calling from?’
‘My house. Why, you can you see the number?’
‘Yeah. How you doing?’
‘Not bad but I wondered, would you and Scott have some time for us today? We’d like to run something by you.’
Eric was scrolling down the list of campgrounds on the screen.
Steelie added, ‘In your professional capacity.’
‘That shouldn’t be a problem. It might be late in the day. Can I ask what it’s about?’ He clicked on a web link.
‘Bugging, speaking generally.’
Eric’s eyes fixed on the information that had just come up on the screen. ‘Well, that sounds mysterious enough. I’ll call you as soon as I can.’
Eric barely registered Steelie’s thanks before he signed off with her and began dialing an outside line.
Sitting next to Steelie in the lab, Jayne felt groggy from lack of sleep and the after-effects of stress. Steelie’s sofa bed was not the most comfortable and she had been awake too long thinking about the wire in the plant tubs. She tried to re-focus on the conference call she and Steelie had just accepted from Thomas Cullen’s parents.
Donald and Patricia were each talking over the other. Patricia’s sniffles were audible.
Donald was saying, ‘We’ve heard from a coroner in Alaska – here dear, take the whole box. And they said that—’ He was interrupted by Patricia, who seemed to have regained her composure.
‘They said that information you gave them about Tom was what made the difference and—’
Her husband leapfrogged again. ‘We’d like to thank you, very much.’
‘And we wondered if the doctor told you how Tom died?’ Patricia sounded hesitant and hopeful.
‘Wasn’t he able to tell you anything?’ Steelie had to tread carefully, unsure of how Chuck Talbot would have worded things or if there was any mention of the earlier gunshot wound that left the bullet in their son’s head.
‘Well,’ Donald began, ‘he said they couldn’t tell how he died. Now, we didn’t think that was possible, but we get most of our information from TV. Is it possible to just not know?’
Jayne answered, ‘Yes, sometimes it can be difficult to tell how someone died, if the body hasn’t retained enough traces. If you’re concerned, you can have an investigation done by a private pathologist, although they’re expensive and may still not give you any answers.’
‘Yes, well, I don’t know if we’ll go to those lengths,’ he said hurriedly. ‘But we thought that before the funeral, we’d make a decision about any more . . . investigation.’
‘Right now, we’re just glad to know where he is and to have him back. Thank you – both of you. We never expected answers so quickly.’ Patricia sounded on the verge of tears again.
Jayne sat silently watching Steelie as she hung up the phone and wrote a note about the call to add to the Cullen file. Feeling like a sleepwalker, she followed Steelie to the front of the building where Carol was gathering her things for her usual early departure on Fridays.
Steelie asked, ‘Did you speak with the Cullens before you put their call through?’
‘Yes,’ Carol paused in her actions.
‘Thanks. They seemed to be in a good place, despite the fact they’ve just learned their son’s been dead for years.’
‘Well, we talked about moving past things we can’t change, whether it’s related to anger at the police for not finding him sooner or anger at themselves for not being able to prevent what happened.’
Jayne turned from where she was staring absently out the front window. ‘Did you get a sense of how they’re going to cope with not knowing exactly how Thomas died?’
‘I think Patricia is finding it difficult. She told me that she’s a statistician and is used to mining information for as long as it takes to turn it into meaningful data but . . .’ Carol waggled her hand from side to side. ‘She can’t really apply that to this situation. I think it’s shaking her entire foundation for life, work, everything.’
As Carol left, Steelie handed all her notes related to the Cullen case to Jayne. Jayne stood at the window a minute longer, listening to Steelie walk away, and then she turned into her office. She filed the notes in the folder labeled ‘CULLEN, Thomas, (Tom)’ and then took the whole folder to the cabinet that held closed cases. Opening the drawer reminded her of Gene’s visit to the office and how unimpressed he’d been by the Agency’s completion numbers.
So far, every missing person who’d been found using an Agency 32/1 profile had been found dead. There was no way of telling how many of the missing people were alive or whose bodies had been hidden by killers in the hope they would never be found. She wondered if the killers realized that they harmed countless others by this practice? That it was a further injury?
As she slotted Thomas Cullen’s folder in the drawer, she found herself thinking about the bodies she’d helped to exhume from the mass graves near Srebrenica, the steep slopes of Kigali. She thought about the attempts made by the killers to hide the identities of the dead. How it stunted survivors’ attempts to grieve, to move on through the healing rites of washing the deceased’s body, a funeral followed by cremation or burial, the therapeutic ritual of
