Involuntarily flexing my fingers, I felt a metal button beneath them. The locking pin release. I pressed it.
I heard a click and watched Parrish’s bloodied face register a look of horror as the socket and Flex-Foot separated.
He made wild, futile stabs at the air as he fell backward onto the rooftop with a thumping crack.
He didn’t move after that.
59
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1:55 A.M.
Las Piernas
Ben pulled himself up onto the ledge. I sat up, dizzy after hanging upside down. We were both winded.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded. “You?”
“Yes. Sorry about your foot.”
“It’s probably okay. But after all that work to get up here, hell if I’m going back down there to find out if it’s damaged.”
“I think someone will bring it to you,” I said, pointing to where the helicopter was landing.
At the same time, we heard a loud bang that made us jump — the SWAT team had made its way through the door to the roof. In no time at all, Parrish was surrounded. When he didn’t move, they edged toward him.
“Irene!”
I turned from the scene directly below to that best-loved voice. Frank was stepping out of the helicopter, running toward us.
I waved and yelled, “We’re okay!”
His face broke into a big smile and he ran faster.
Three members of the SWAT team made it up the ladder before Frank did.
“We’re okay,” Ben told them. “Is Parrish dead?”
“No,” one said, “but damned close to it. Looks like he broke his neck. We’re going to take him over to St. Anne’s. It’s just down the street.”
Frank came up the ladder, carrying Ben’s Flex-Foot.
“Thought you might need this,” he said, handing it to him.
“Thanks,” Ben said. “I was wondering how I was going to get down from here without it.” He looked it over and decided that although it was a little scraped up, it wasn’t badly damaged.
“I don’t think my cell phone fared as well,” I said. When I told him how I’d used it, Frank laughed and took me in his arms. “Parrish just didn’t know what he was up against, did he?” But he was holding me tight, as if needing to reassure himself that I was okay. I held him, too. It felt good, the safest I had felt in a long time.
“Oh!” I said, coming out of that spell of comfort. “I just remembered something! Phil Newly called me, and it was forwarded from my desk to the cell phone. Can you find the number from the cell phone records?”
“No need to,” Frank said. “Newly called us.”
“The police?”
“Yes. That’s how I found out you were here. Newly said he tried calling you, and you told him you were up here with Nick Parrish and were scared and asking for the police.”
“Where has he been?”
“He said he’s been hiding. He’s been afraid of Parrish. He said after you got those bones and roses, he knew that Parrish was back in the area, and he took off. He rented a beach house down the coast, didn’t even tell his sister how to get in touch with him. He heard the news reports tonight and decided to come home.”
“So why call me?”
“He was expecting a hostile reaction from the police, and he thought you might help him meet with me before things got out of hand. I didn’t tell him that you were the one that kept insisting we check him out. He’s hired a defense attorney of his own, but agreed to meet with us tomorrow.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You found a bloody circular saw and more at his house, right?”
“Right.”
“And those leg bones in the roses might have been cut with a saw, right, Ben?”
“Right.”
“I met with Phil, and that same night the bones showed up on our doorstep. If he left after he heard about the bones, he left after they were worked on in his garage. If he’s innocent, he must also be deaf — because he must not have noticed an awfully loud noise in his garage. Not to mention missing the peculiar sight of a bloody workbench while he was pulling his car out.”
“Not necessarily,” Ben said. “You’re relying on news reports based on secondhand sources.”
“Ben Sheridan—”
“No, I’m not trying to start a fight about the media. Frank, you were in Newly’s garage and saw it with your own eyes. Was the workbench bloody?”
“Yes.”
“If there was any blood, it probably came from Camille’s body.” He looked away for a moment, then said, “Or perhaps from the Jane Doe in the trash container. No matter what, that blood did not come from the Oregon woman’s femurs.”
“Wait a minute—” I protested.
“He’s right,” Frank said. “In general, dead bodies don’t bleed, because the heart isn’t pumping. You can drain blood from a body shortly after death, but the Oregon women were killed several weeks ago. Parrish removed the receptionist’s legs where he left the bodies — a long way from Phil Newly’s house.”
“I examined those femurs,” Ben said. “They weren’t sawed when the bodies were fresh.”
“So you think he’s innocent?” I asked.
“I’m not saying he’s guilty or innocent,” Frank said. “So far, we haven’t found any fragments at Newly’s house that were an obvious match to the femurs. But we haven’t even had a dozen hours to look around. Newly isn’t in the clear. You don’t find this kind of evidence without raising questions about the owner of the house. Newly still has lots of explaining to do.”
When we got down from the ladder, I saw a familiar figure standing away from all the action, looking dejected. I walked over to him.
“Leonard? What’s wrong?”
“I let you down,” he said, glancing nervously at Frank, and then down at his shiny black shoes. “He pulled the oldest trick in the book on me, and I fell for it.”
“What are you talking about?”
He sighed all the way from those shoes and said, “Parrish. Started a trash-can fire on the loading dock. When I went to investigate, he must have gone up the stairs.”
“Any losses from the fire?”
He shook his head.
“Well, then, that’s good, right?”
“I told you I wouldn’t let him in here, and I did.”
“He’s been slipping past the whole department for months,” Frank said, causing Leonard to look up at him. “No one would expect a lone officer to be able to stop him.”
I formally introduced them then, and Frank went on to thank Leonard. “Knowing you were keeping an eye on things made me feel a lot better about her being here at night.”
“It did?” Leonard asked, then quickly added, “I do my best, sir.”
“All anyone asks,” Frank said.
“Lone officer?” I said later, when Leonard had strutted his way out of earshot.
“I was afraid he was going to throw himself over that railing.”
Once John Walters vented his anger over our wild chase on the rooftop occurring after deadline, he asked me to write a story for a special morning edition. I agreed to do it, over the protests of my entourage of protectors, because I wanted to prove to Wrigley that I wasn’t going to be denied a place on A-1 just because he gave me post-deadline hours.
Frank, Ben, Travis, and Stinger refused to let me stay alone in the newsroom. Jack came over with a bottle of champagne and in spite of Leonard’s warnings about explicit company rules forbidding alcohol on the premises (“I am not here, I am not seeing this,” he said), we drank a toast to good friends, present and remembered. John joined us.
Parrish, we learned by taking a look at security tapes, had come into the building from the loading docks, wearing a baseball cap, carrying a toolbox, and moving purposefully past men who were caught up in the problem of delivering papers that were coming off the presses late. He started the fire near another camera, so that Leonard would be certain to see it.