“Wait just a minute—” I said, looking over at Deke, mostly black Lab, and Dunk, mostly shepherd, who were sleeping nearby.
“Our dogs are smart,” Frank said, trying to head off an argument, “but Bingle is — well, you’d have to see him to believe it. And he’s highly trained—”
“And don’t forget Bool,” Pete said. “His bloodhound. He works with two dogs. If one acts like he’s found something, he gets the other to confirm it.”
“Bingle has even located bodies underwater,” Frank said.
“How is that possible?” I asked. “You put him in a little scuba outfit?”
“Very funny,” Pete said.
“The dog can do it,” Frank said. “It’s not as miraculous as it sounds. The bacteria in a decomposing body cause it to give off gases. The scent rises through the water, and the dogs smell it when it reaches the surface. They can take Bingle out in a boat and cross the surface of a lake, and he’ll indicate when he smells a body below.”
“All right,” I said, “that makes sense. But—”
“Let us tell you what happened,” Pete said.
The gist of the tale was that Bingle led a group of men at a fast clip over a weaving trail out of the parking structure and across the grounds of the airport. Then he headed toward an airplane hangar.
“He went bananas,” Pete said, moving his hands in rapid dog-paddle fashion.
“He was pawing furiously at one of the back walls,” Frank explained.
It took the police some time to get a warrant, and to locate the owner of the building, but they gained access. At first, nothing seemed amiss. The hangar was leased by Nicholas Parrish, a quiet man, the owner said; a man who paid his rent on time, never caused any problems. An airplane mechanic. The police ran Parrish’s name through their computers — he had no outstanding warrants. In fact, he had no criminal record at all.
David Niles brought out Bool and let the bloodhound sniff an article of Kara Lane’s clothing. Bool, who needed this “pre-scenting” in order to track, traced a path almost identical to the one Bingle had followed.
Frank suggested getting a crime scene unit to check the hangar with luminol, a chemical capable of detecting minute traces of blood, but the skeptics in the group were starting to grumble, especially Reed Collins and Vince Adams, the detectives in charge of the Lane case.
“Collins is starting to make remarks about wasting precious time and his partner is making noise about wild goose chases,” Pete said, “when all of a sudden, Bingle lifts his head and sings.” Pete crooned a single high note that brought both of our dogs to their feet, heads cocked. “David gives another command and the dog takes off again.”
This time the dog headed across the Tarmac, to a field beyond the nearest runway. When he stopped, he pranced and bounced around, pawing furiously at the earth, crooning again — actions which Pete, getting into his story, performed for us. Quite a workout.
David moved ahead, to the place where Bingle had alerted, and called back, “I think he’s found her.”
The others soon caught up. They saw the shallow grave, the freshly turned earth, and a woman’s shoe protruding from something shiny and green — plastic sheeting. Frank got on the radio, telling the officers in the hangar that they should secure the area, call out a crime scene unit, and put out an APB for Nicholas Parrish.
“The whole time he’s on the radio, I’m moving a little closer,” Pete said, “and I see what the dog was digging at, what he uncovered. It’s her hand — you know, the left one, the one that’s missing the finger.”
I looked at Frank. “Gillian Sayre will—”
“You can’t tell her yet,” he said firmly. “Nobody. Not any of this. Not yet.”
But by the next morning the Kara Lane case had made the front page, and Gillian was standing outside the newspaper, looking a little more anxious than usual. When I was within a few feet of her, she held up a creased copy of the Express and pointed to Parrish’s photo. “He’s the one who took my mother.”
“It looks as if the cases have a lot in common,” I agreed.
“No. I mean, I know he’s the one. He used to live on our street — a long time ago.”
“What? How long ago?”
“Before my mom disappeared.”
“Have you told the police?”
She shook her head. I wasn’t surprised. Whatever faith she might have once had in the police had been damaged when the LPPD delayed searching for her mother, and was utterly destroyed when they had failed to find her. Gillian and I shared a dislike of Bob Thompson, the Las Piernas Police Department homicide detective who handled her mother’s case. Once or twice she had talked to other homicide detectives when a Jane Doe was found, but usually she relied on me to make contact with the police on her behalf.
“I thought maybe you could tell your husband,” she said now.
“Yes, sure,” I said, still reeling. “Parrish lived there alone?”
“No. I think his sister owned the house.”
“You ever see anything strange going on there?”
“No, not really. They were quiet. She moved away — don’t remember exactly when. I don’t know where she lives now. She wasn’t friendly.”
“Was he?”
She shrugged. “He kind of kept to himself. I guess he was nice to everybody — you know, smiled and waved. But he used to stare at my mom.”
Now, as I held fast to the armrests of my seat while the plane jolted in the choppy air above the southern Sierra Nevadas, I watched the killer awaken not far from me. It was not difficult for me to imagine Nicholas Parrish stalking his prey, staring at Julia Sayre as she left the house to run errands, or as she worked in her garden, or came home from the store. Staring at her, while she imagined herself safe from harm.
Staring at her, much in the same way he was staring at me now.
3
MONDAY AFTERNOON, MAY 15
Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains
After a bouncy landing on a rough patch of ground that served as the airstrip, there was a wait before we were allowed to disembark. Bob Thompson addressed one of the guards as “Earl” and muttered some order to him. Earl was the first to exit; he returned shortly and, giving an “all clear,” worked with the other three guards to remove Parrish from the plane. Thompson was next, followed by a quiet young man who seemed to be his assistant — though not his partner. Thompson and Phil Newly, Parrish’s attorney, were the only members of the group that I had met before that day. A few years back, I had covered some crime stories, and had seen Newly around the courthouse.
Thompson and I had known each other for close to ten years. The contempt was both strong and mutual.
I figured that made me the show horse in the race to capture the hostility of the other passengers. Parrish was first by a length, followed by Newly. As a member of the press, I was a distant third.
Newly and Bill “Flash” Burden, an LPPD crime scene photographer, stepped off after the guards; then the pilot came back into the cabin and stood in the aisle. “Rest of you wait until they get Parrish settled,” he said, then left the plane. Minutes passed.
“Do you know who’s meeting us from the Forest Service?” I heard David Niles ask.
“J.C.,” said Ben Sheridan, the other anthropologist. “Andy is coming up with him.”
“Andy who?” I asked.
Sheridan eyed me coldly, then turned back to the window, frowning. After a moment’s silence, David Niles said, “Andy Stewart, a botanist who works with us sometimes.”
“Thank you, Dr. Niles.”
“Call me David.”
Sheridan sighed loudly. This only seemed to amuse David, but he didn’t say more to me. I had known that we would be meeting a couple of people at this airstrip; men who were being flown in from another location, but Thompson had only said they were “part of Sheridan’s team.”