“Detective.” He had given his name the Spanish pronunciation. Loueese Cahneestray, with a trilled r. As a native of south Florida, my tongue wrapped around it easily. Or maybe it was just that I had drunk enough Cuban coffee in my time that I had finally assimilated the language along with the café con leche. “No, we’ve got the right man,” he said.
“Okay, well, if you’ve already got him, then what—”
“We’ve got him. We don’t have them.”
“Them?”
“The victims.” He cleared his throat and told me more. “There was enough evidence to convict him without the bodies, including blood in his car and ATM and grocery-store video of him with one of the victims after she disappeared. But twelve years later and the son of a bitch — pardon my language — still won’t say where he put any of them. The families suffer, Ms. Lightfoot. All these years and all they want to do is bury their loved ones. And I can’t stand to retire without knowing they can.”
“I take it these were your cases.”
“Yes, ma’am, they were. Still are, the way I feel about them.”
“And I come into this how, Detective?”
“He’s a big fan of yours.”
“Who?”
“Darren Betch. The man who killed them. He is pretty much obsessed with any true-crime book, but he is a fanatic for yours.”
I wasn’t surprised. I’m a big hit in prison libraries. For those guys it’s akin to reading trade journals. I’m like Business Week for serial killers. They can read about the masters of their trade. I work very hard, however, at not giving them ideas about how to do it better, and to make the lawmen the heroes.
“If Darren could get you to write his story it would be like getting on the cover of Time magazine to him. He’d think he was ‘da man’ of the year.”
“I don’t write to glorify these guys,” I said, a shade defensively.
“But it does, in their minds.”
I didn’t say anything.
“If you saw the fan mail he gets,” Cannistre said, “the proposals of marriage—”
“Yeah, well, some women are nuts.”
“Imagine how much more nuts they’ll be if he’s the hero of one of your books—”
“Not hero,” I said firmly. “Villain. Bad guy. Killer. Not hero.”
“Ms. Lightfoot, I’m not trying to offend you. Hell, I love your books, myself. We’ve got off on the wrong track here and it’s my fault. Let me back up and tell you why I’m really calling.”
Again, I kept silent. He had dug a hole for himself with me.
While I waited to see if he could recover ground, I picked up half of the lobster-salad sandwich that sat on a plate on my desk, and nibbled at it. He had interrupted my lunch, which suddenly seemed like another strike against him even though I wasn’t all that hungry.
“The thing is,” he said, “twelve years have gone by and it’s finally sinking in with Darren that he’s never going anywhere. He spends most of his time reading true crime. He particularly loves your books, and he’s an arrogant SOB who gets off on publicity, and I think if you wrote a book about him he might tell you where the bodies are buried.”
I inhaled sharply — nearly choking myself on the bite of sandwich I had been swallowing when he said that. “You’re not serious,” I said when I could talk again. “You really think that’s possible?”
“I think it’s worth a try and I’d try anything to help these families. Wouldn’t you?”
“Detective, of course I’d like to help the families, but do you know what you’re asking? You’re asking me to write a book about this guy. Do you think I just whip those out over a spare weekend? It can take me a couple of years to write one of my books, a year to research and another year to write and rewrite. Not to mention that I’m already in the middle of one. I’d like to help, I really would, but I don’t think you know what you’re asking.”
“It’s a fascinating story. It would make a great book, Ms. Lightfoot.”
“Maybe, but it’s not my book. I have my own work I’m doing.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t have to write anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe you could just make him think you are going to.”
I went silent again. I had no idea if such a thing could work, but the idea made it harder to turn him down completely.
“Like I told you,” he said persuasively, “the families just want to know.”
Damn the man. How could I go back to my other book when guilt was now calling my name? Grudgingly, I said, “I guess we could talk about it, at least.”
“Great! Any chance you can come here?”
“You don’t want much, do you?” I said, and he laughed a little.
I dumped the book off my lap and sighed. “All right, Detective Cannistre. Where? When?”
Luis Cannistre picked me up at the Bismarck Airport five days later.
He turned out to be a tall, lanky man in his late forties. He wore a white dress shirt, bolo tie, black suit, and hiking boots. A pungent scent of cigar smoke lingered in his car, but I didn’t mind: Being from so close to Miami, I’m nearly as accustomed to cigar smoke as I am to café con leche. He wore his metal-gray hair in a flattop. It had been a long time since I’d seen a grown man in a flattop, but it suited him. Me, I was dressed for business and prison: black slacks, black shirt, short black jacket. No bolo tie. Also no pockets that would need to be emptied, no underwire bra to set off the metal detectors, and no jewelry to take off.
As we drove east from the airport, he glanced over at me and said, “Most people, the first thing they say about Bismarck is that it’s flat.”
I smiled out the car window at the proof of that. “Hey, I’m from Florida. We invented flat.”
The Missouri River was behind us. The North Dakota State Prison was ahead of us. There was nothing but flat all around us. I felt right at home, give or take a few palm trees and an ocean or two.
“We have a nineteen-story skyscraper,” he said with wry braggadocio.
“And you can see it from four counties.”
He laughed. “Just about.” Then the smile faded and he glanced at me with a sober expression on his deeply tanned and weathered face. “I expect you’ve done some homework since the last time we spoke.”
“Erin Belafonte,” I said, staring at the highway and clicking into my memory. “Twenty-two. Jessica Burge, thirty-one. Caroline Meyers, thirty-two. Those two, Jessie and Caroline, were best friends. Nobody knows for sure if they knew Erin, but a lot of people felt sure they had at least been acquainted, because they tended to hang out at the same TGIF parties in the condo complex where Darren Betch worked maintenance. He showed up at the parties. The guys liked him. The girls thought he was hot.”
“A few of the men did not like that,” Luis commented drily.
“I’ll bet. Betch never arrived with anybody, but he sometimes left with someone. Never the same someone, apparently. The last woman who was seen going out the door with him was Erin Belafonte. That was also the last time she was seen by anybody who knew her. She was captured on videotape at an ATM machine two days later and then on a grocery-store camera that night.”
I went silent, because so had Erin Belafonte, and my heart suddenly hurt for her.
“She looked terrified,” I said, and then cleared my throat.
“You all right?” Cannistre asked.
I nodded, but turned to the window so he couldn’t see the tears that had come to my eyes. “I write about a lot of them. If I don’t feel it, I can’t write it. Just now, at that moment, that’s the first time since you brought up this case to me that I felt anything about it.”