He laughed, this young man with a calm demeanor and a lot of intelligence in his eyes. “Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
By that evening we had our double suite lined with sheets of white butcher paper tacked to the walls. My assistant, Deborah Dancer, had been out ever since she arrived taking photos of anything and anybody we might want to describe. From the victims’ homes to Darren Betch’s apartment, from the TGIF party condo to the prison and the road to the grave, Deb had snapped locales and the people in them with her digital camera. Then she transferred the photos to her laptop computer and from there made enlarged color prints for us to tack up. We had wall sections for each “character” in the book, with lists of their habits, jobs, education, ages, physical traits, personality traits, everything we knew about them, detailed below. We had a flow chart of Darren’s process through the North Dakota legal system, along with names and titles of everybody who had prodded him along its path.
We had a chronology of the Bismarck victims:
Erin Belafonte is reported missing.
A county-wide search ensues.
Ten days later, Jessica Burge and Caroline Meyers are reported missing.
Darren Betch is arrested for the murder of Erin Belafonte; he denies it.
He is convicted, at trial, after which he confesses to all three homicides, and goes to prison.
A lot of this I would have done anyway on any of my books — only slower, as Markie Lentz loved to point out — but he added some idiosyncratically efficient ways of doing things that I vowed to steal and use in the research for my own books. For instance, he had Peter and Deb using different colors of Magic Marker for each person, so we could see with a mere glance at the walls where they turned up in the story.
“Did Jessie’s family go to the sentencing?”
“Just her brother and fiancé — it’s on the wall.”
“Who made the actual arrest?”
“Cannistre.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“It’s on the wall, Markie.”
On Day Two, he suddenly appeared at my shoulder. “Hey, Lightfoot. We got a problem at our end of the room. We’re having a hell of a time trying to give these families the old sentimental twist.”
“Why?”
“You know how Caroline’s folks drag that lawyer around with them like he’s their pet dog? Turns out they have good reason for never leaving home without him. It seems Caroline’s parents have run a few financial scams in their time and now and then they’ve made the mistake of crossing some tough customers. I don’t know if they’re afraid of getting sued or if they just want a witness when they get shot.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Right,” he said sarcastically. “Like we have time for joking around.”
I smiled. Markie always had time for joking around. We were all working nearly nonstop, fueled by coffee and by food that we sent the assistants into town to pick up for all of us. But that didn’t stop him from needling me every chance he got about how slow I was. As payback, I constantly ragged on him for being sloppy.
Neither was true. I was working like a demon. He was careful, a pro.
“You said ‘families,’” I reminded him.
“Yeah, Jessica’s fiancé, Billy Sterson? He beat up on her a couple of times. Her brother Sam is a real winner, too. You want to know why his parents say they moved to Arizona? Because Sam’s a leech of the first order. And when they don’t let him squeeze them, he gets nasty about it. They moved to get away from their own son, if you can believe that.” Markie cracked a cynical smile. “I think they miss their boat more than they do Sam. Aren’t many lakes in Tucson, apparently.”
I sighed. “Ozzie and Harriets, one and all.”
“That first girl, the real first one, the one from Minnesota? Susan Lerner? Mother married five times, father’s whereabouts unknown. It was all I could do to persuade her mother to send me a photo and even that is so old you can’t tell what she looked like the year she died. Which leaves us with only one family sob story, which is Erin Belafonte’s family. You know how her dad died the year after she went missing?”
“Yeah?”
“Suicide. His wife says it was guilt.”
“Guilt?”
“For not being able to protect his only child, his baby.”
“You going to start with that one, then?”
“I don’t know yet. Nothing works so far.”
“You’ll find a way.”
“Maybe I’ll just make something up.”
“Markie, no! Don’t even say that! Even apart from the ethics of the thing, we don’t know what Darren knows about them. I’m betting he knows enough to spot it if we invent lives they didn’t live.”
“Oh hell,” Markie said, whirling around to return to his side. “You’re no fun.”
He wouldn’t have done it. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have done it.
We finished two chapters and I delivered them into Betch’s hands, praying he wasn’t any kind of judge of quality. Holding my breath, I watched him leaf through the pages. When he looked up, he said, “Erin Belafonte is buried one mile to the east of the first one you found.”
Is buried. As if he’d had nothing to do with it.
But he told the truth. She was buried there.
He’d buried her purse with her, too.
When I returned to see him after that, he said, “Now we go back to our original bargain. You finish the book, I give you the rest of them.”
I dreaded finding out what he meant by the rest of them.
Fortunately, from our point of view, we were working in a county where the coroner had to be a licensed physician, which gave me more confidence in the report we got from her office than I might have had from a coroner in a county where literally anybody could do the job.
Susan had been stabbed and strangled, as had Erin Belafonte.
But then, we already knew that, because Darren Betch had told us so.
What we hadn’t known until Detective Cannistre had a deputy deliver a copy of the coroner’s report to us was that the first victim was 5'5" tall, thin, 110 pounds, with dark hair cut to shoulder length. A pair of prescription eyeglasses had been found in the grave with her. From her reluctant mother, Markie had learned that she was an only child. She had been a child-care worker at a day-care center, and a high-school graduate with no college. When those facts and a few others got put up on the wall under her name, the four of us stood back and looked at what we now had about all four of Betch’s known victims.
Our heads swiveled back and forth from one section of white paper to another as we took it all in.
For a while, there was silence.
Then... “Uh,” said Peter.
“Marie?” said Deborah.
“Yes, I see it,” I told her.
“We’ve got a problem,” Markie said, sounding disgusted.
“No.” I reached for the motel telephone. “The cops have a problem. What we have is a more interesting book.” When I got through to Luis Cannistre, I said, “I think you’d better get over here.”
It was all on the walls, clear as the North Dakota sky outside our rooms.
Now that there were four victims we could finally see that two of them fit together in a pattern and two of them clearly did not. Susan and Erin Belafonte: both around 5'5", both about 110 pounds, both with dark hair worn straight and shoulder-length and with bangs that touched their eyebrows, both child-care workers, both high-school educated with no college, both wore eyeglasses, both only children. The last two victims, the two friends, weren’t anything like that portrait: They were older, for starters, blond hair, red hair, short hair, curly hair, a master’s degree, a bachelor’s degree. Both had siblings. Neither wore glasses or even contacts. One was a saleswoman for a national car-rental company; the other worked for an advertising firm.