“My parents can’t be here,” he let me know.
“Typical,” Detective Cannistre muttered behind me, but there wasn’t a chance to turn around and ask him what he meant.
The brother explained, “They moved to Tucson. But if there’s anything they should know—” He held up a cell phone.
“They know about this meeting?” I asked him.
“Oh yeah. They know as much as any of us do.”
The implication was: which isn’t much, and what the hell is this about?
The final three people to arrive, though even they got there a few minutes before six, were Caroline Meyers’s parents and the lawyer they brought with them. Like Jessica Burge’s fiancé, Billy Sterson, they had a healthy and prosperous appearance, all three of them. Mrs. Meyers had on what looked to me to be a St. John suit, a kind of fashion that costs a fortune, wears like steel, and looks classic for a lifetime. Large gold earrings and a gold bracelet matched the buttons; her pumps were the same rich pink color as the suit. Mr. Meyers and the lawyer were both in business suits. He had French cuffs with gold links that looked as if they might have been bought at the same place that supplied his wife’s jewelry.
“Love your books,” the attorney whispered to me when we shook hands at the door. “I wish I had the time to write.”
Don’t we all, I thought, and turned to follow them into my motel room.
As they settled into their places, I tried to get a feel for the mood of the room. I thought I detected curiosity, dread, hope, and not a little fear. The fear was understandable. People who’ve lost loved ones to murder are often a lot more fearful all their lives after that; there’s nowhere that ever again feels quite safe to them.
Luis Cannistre dropped our bombshell fast rather than make them suffer through a preface to it. “The son of a bitch has offered to tell us where he buried one of the girls if Marie, here, writes a book about this case. He hasn’t said which one he’ll tell us about. He claims that as soon as she shows him proof she’s going to write it, he’ll direct us to a... grave. He says she has to finish the whole damn book before he’ll tell us the rest of it.”
Both women gasped at the end of the first sentence.
They all looked stunned at the end of the detective’s brief announcement.
Sam Burge broke the paralysis. “How fast can you write?” He was already on his cell phone. We stared as he listened to his parents on the other end.
When he looked up at us again, I asked him, “What do they say?”
“They think you’re on a wild-goose chase—” He made an apologetic gesture — “but go ahead and do it, anyway.”
“Are you kidding?” Billy Sterson, the man who had been engaged to marry Jessie Burge, shot to his feet. Beneath his golfer’s tan his complexion darkened even more. “Are you out of your minds? I can’t believe we’d give this guy anything he wants. Ever.”
“It may lead us to Jessie’s body,” Luis Cannistre said with brutal frankness.
“So what?” The fiancé came back with equal brutality. “It won’t bring her back, will it? It’ll just make him famous all over again. The only thing any of us will get out of it is heartbreak.”
“Heartbreak?” Her brother’s tone was scathing. “Oh yeah, right, like you were so heartbroken when you married somebody else three months later! You’ve got a wife and three kids, and what have my parents got? Nothing! This may be their best chance to find Jessie, and you don’t have any right to try to stop them.” Sam Burge looked as if he could spring across the motel bedroom and assault the other man. “You can just shut up. You treated her lousy when she was alive and now you’re trying to cheat us out of finding her body?” His voice rose in pitch and volume. “You shouldn’t even be here. I don’t even want to be in the same room with you. What the hell are you even doing here anyway?”
“I invited him,” Cannistre interjected. “He was like family then.”
“Well, he isn’t like family now,” Sam Burge said hotly. “And he shouldn’t get any say in this.”
“I agree,” Mr. Meyers said, and his wife and the lawyer nodded.
The fiancé clamped his mouth shut, and stepped back. He sat back down on the edge of the dresser where he had been leaning, and folded his arms in front of his chest. He looked furious, but he also looked as if he knew he’d been put in his place, and that place didn’t include a vote in these proceedings.
Over in a corner, seated in one of the chairs, Erin’s mother began to cry.
“Yes,” she said, as the tears rolled down her face and she struggled to find a tissue in her purse. “I vote yes. Let’s do it. I don’t care what happens to him or what it does for him, I just want to know where my daughter is.” Her eyes, when she looked from one to the other of us, were pleading. “Please, oh please, all of you say yes.”
Across the room from her, Mrs. Meyers grabbed her husband’s hand.
Her husband said, “Absolutely. God, yes.”
“What if he’s lying?” their lawyer said. “And he doesn’t give us the other two?”
“He will!” Erin’s mom said tearfully, fiercely. “He has to!”
But of course, he didn’t have to. There was nothing riding on it for Betch. If he reneged, what were they going to do, give him another life sentence?
I looked at them all, people I had never met until half an hour ago, and wondered if I could possibly do what they expected of me.
That night my editor faxed a new contract, already signed by the publisher, to my agent, who looked it over to make sure it said everything they had agreed on by telephone, and then she overnighted copies of it to me. At nine the next morning I signed the copies in the presence of Darren Betch.
By eleven, men with shovels were gathered at a leaf-strewn spot in the woods north of Bismarck. The weather had turned chilly, the sky was pewter gray, the air smelled of wood fire burning somewhere. I felt the mood within and around me as one of almost unbearable suspense. Had Betch told me the truth about where she was? And if he had, was his memory good enough to guide us correctly to the place?
“Who are we going to find?” I had asked Betch that morning.
“You need to leave me some surprises,” he had told me, smirking.
The body in the hidden grave was a surprise, all right.
“It’s not any of our girls!” Cannistre yelled, even as he was walking up the hillside to tell me. He looked stunned, distraught. “It’s somebody else. My God, how many women did that son of a bitch kill?!”
The three original families were devastated.
So was the new family... the family of Susan Mae Lerner, who had been twenty-three years old when she met a guy that nobody knew, in Minnesota, and who told her friends she was going out with him one night and never was seen again. It was easy to identify her. Betch had buried her purse with her.
“You lied to me.”
“No, I didn’t.” One hour later, back in the visitors’ room at the prison, with children running wild around us and other inmates talking, arguing, laughing with their wives, girlfriends, lawyers, Darren Betch had a crooked smile on his face. He didn’t sound defensive; he looked amused. “I never said you’d find the Belafonte girl. I only said you’d find the first one.” He paused, lengthening the moment for dramatic effect. “And you did. You really did. You found the first one.”
I wanted to slap him hard enough to leave a permanent mark on his face.
“Games. No. I’m not playing with you.”
“Sure you are.” His smirk widened into a grin. “You’re already a player. You think you can quit now? What do you think you’re going to tell those families? That they’ll never know where their girls are, because you’re too pure to play with me?”