Synopsis:
Hannibal Lechter clone Nick Parrish is the hideous “star” of Burke's latest Irene Kelly mystery. Parrish, arrested for the torture-murder of Julia Sayre, promises to show the cops where he’s buried Julia’s body in the mountains above Las Piernas. Journalist Kelly has followed the Sayre case since it began, and the police grudgingly allow her to come along the gruesome trip to Julia’s grave. True to his word, Parrish leads the group to the decomposing body, then offers to show them the graves of other victims he claims he’s killed. But Parrish has booby-trapped the graves, and once the bomb goes off, he escapes in the ensuing confusion. A heart-stopping chase through the mountains, with Irene as Parrish’s intended victim, would provide a fitting climax for the story, but Burke has more suspense in store. Irene is rescued, but Parrish is still loose, and over the following months he stalks Irene relentlessly. Gruesome “gifts” and a campaign of physical and psychological terror would turn most folks into basket cases, but Parrish’s tricks only make Irene more determined to track him down. Burke’s latest is very impressive — deviously plotted, cleverly crafted, full of screw-tightening suspense. This may be the book to take Burke to the top tier of literary and popular suspense in the genre.
BONES
Jan Burke
The seventh book in the Irene Kelly series
Copyright © 1999 by Jan Burke
To Judy Myers Suchey and Paul Sledzik
and the AFIP Forensic Anthropology Faculty for their compassionate work and for teaching me to see more than bones
and
in memory of Shadow and Siri
The gate was open and the drawbridge down.
He galloped across, but when he got to the end of the drawbridge, someone yanked the cable so abruptly that Parzival was nearly thrown, horse and all, into the moat.
Parzival turned back to see who had done this to him. There, standing in the open gateway, was the page who had pulled the cable, shaking his fist at Parzival. “May God damn the light that falls upon your path!” the boy cried. “You fool! You wretched fool! Why didn’t you ask the question?”
“What do you mean?” Parzival shouted back. “What question?”
—PARZIVAL: THE QUEST OF THE GRAIL KNIGHT
by Wolfram von Eschenbach,
as retold by Katherine Paterson
He paid cash for the book, as he had all the other books on this subject. He spoke to no one, did nothing that would make him memorable to a clerk or customer.
There were many customers in the store when he made the purchase; he always chose times when he knew the bookstore would be busy.
Even if the store had been empty, he would have had little to worry over. When he chose to hide his powers, he was a nondescript man in a world full of people who could seldom describe more than what they saw in the mirror each morning.
Oh, perhaps they could also describe close friends, their own children, their spouses, people they worked with every day. At a stretch, their neighbors. But not quiet strangers in bookstores. Not a stranger who had never been there before, who would never come in again.
He found mild excitement in buying these books, knew this was how some men felt when buying pornography. Seeing it sitting in the bag on the car seat on the way home, he knew the book’s subject matter would arouse him, Not as much as the real thing — nothing ever excited him as much as the real thing.
This one was about Dahmer.
We don’t share the same appetites, he thought to himself, and was hard put to control a little fit of hilarity at the joke he had made.
When he had finished reading and rereading the book, he would place it with all the other books about his brethren. Books about Bianchi and Speck and Bundy; about earlier ones — Mors and Lucas and Pomeroy — and others; books about killers and their minds, about killers and their victims, about killers and those who hunted them.
At first, he had read the books because he wanted to understand the drive, the need that he feared would consume him. But now it was merely entertainment of a sort. By now, years after he had begun his little library, he knew he understood all there was to understand: he knew that only a man of his genius could cope with the demands of his desire.
He did not lack daring or creativity. Every new aspect, every heightening of the experience, merely confirmed what he already knew: he was unique in history.
Thinking of this, he was a little sad that he wouldn’t be caught, because he knew he was going to miss that one additional thrill — the only one that eluded him. The acknowledgment.
Notoriety beckoned. He dreamed of it, fantasized about it almost as much as the killings.
Why did he kill?
Everyone would want to know.
Why did he kill?
Everyone would ask.
And he would speak — quietly, and with authority — and all would hear the answer.
1
FOUR YEARS LATER
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.