Markie Lentz said, “Two killers.”
“But Darren Betch confessed!” Peter exclaimed, in tones of outrage.
“He may have done it to protect himself,” Cannistre said, looking like a man who wanted to kick himself from there to California. “Think about it. Here was a guy who had gone around pretending to be Native American and he was facing going into a prison where there’s a big Indian population. They were not going to appreciate that. He knew how unlikely it was that he’d ever get out on appeal. He was there to stay, and he had a more immediate concern. He had to worry about staying alive. One murder made him ordinary. Three murders made him a very bad guy that the other inmates were a whole lot less likely to mess with.”
“But he still uses the Indian thing,” Deborah said.
“And by now they probably all believe it,” Cannistre said.
Confession or not, our walls showed there was more evidence to suggest that Darren killed the first two but somebody else killed the other two. Betch had tossed Susan Lerner’s purse into the grave he dug for her, and he’d done the same with Erin Belafonte’s purse. Jessica Burge’s purse, on the other hand, had been found at her apartment, along with her friend Caroline Meyers’s purse. Not only that, but both Susan and Erin had hundreds of dollars taken from their checking accounts right after they disappeared. Jessie’s and Caroline’s accounts were untouched. It appeared to be two completely different M.O.’s, perpetrated against two completely different pairs of girls.
The first time I had spoken to Luis Cannistre, I had asked him if he had a favorite suspect. Now I found myself asking him again. “If Darren didn’t kill the last two women, then who’s your most likely suspect?”
Markie Lentz interjected his own list of possibilities:
“There’s the abusive fiancé, the parents with the rough business partners, the suicidal father who felt ‘guilty,’ the sponge of a brother.”
“No,” Cannistre said, looking thoughtful and unhappy, “none of those.”
“Wait.” I walked closer to Markie and Peter’s side of the walls, wishing now I had paid more attention when they were gathering information about the friends and families of the victims. What I now saw there made me turn around and ask the detective, “When we met with the families in my room... why did you say, ‘Typical’?”
Divers found them, or rather a watch that one of them had worn and other jewelry the other had worn, at the bottom of the biggest lake outside of Bismarck.
There are no lakes in Tucson, Arizona.
Jessica Burge’s mother and father had moved to the desert, as far away as they could get from reminders of what they’d done, or rather failed to do. They had not murdered their child and her friend, but they had kept everyone from finding out how the girls had died.
“What made them your favorite suspects, after Darren?” I asked Cannistre.
“They never cooperated the way the others did. Everybody else took lie-detector tests, but not them. They claimed they didn’t trust us, didn’t trust the system, didn’t trust anybody. At the time it looked suspicious, but then we arrested Darren, and everybody assumed he had killed them all, so we let it go. And then Darren confessed to killing them. I never thought about it again.”
They’d had their 36-foot cabin cruiser out on the lake and they had Jessica and her friend Caroline with them. It had been a spontaneous trip. Nobody knew they went. They towed along the little motorboat they used for water skiing. The girls, who had been drinking beer all afternoon, took it out to ski. Jessie lost control of the boat while Caroline was up on the skis, running over her friend. Panicked, drunk, Jessie overcompensated at the wheel and the boat turned over.
From the cruiser, Jessie’s parents saw it all. They too were drunk.
They were afraid of being charged with negligent homicide.
They were afraid of being sued by Caroline’s parents.
Knowing there was already one girl missing from the city, they went back home and two days later called in their own missing-person report, leaving Caroline’s family to report her gone, as well.
They allowed the other family to grieve for twelve years without knowing what had really happened to their daughter.
“Why’d you do it, Darren?” I asked him. “Why did you take the rap for two murders you didn’t do?”
His trademark smirk was in place. “I don’t have to tell you everything.”
“All right.” I had a feeling that Detective Cannistre had the correct theory on that, which meant there was no way that this man’s overweening pride was ever going to let him say, I pretended to be an Indian, and I was afraid of what the real ones might do to me in here, so I had to look tough. “Well, here it is,” I said, pushing a pile of pages across the table at him. “Here’s your book. Or some of it.”
“What do you mean, some of it?”
I looked into his eyes. “Our deal was that I’d finish the book and you’d give me the other bodies. But we already found them, didn’t we? So what do we need you for?”
“But that just makes it a more interesting book,” he said, grinning.
It was exactly what I had said to Markie and our assistants.
Darren wasn’t getting it, he wasn’t understanding, so I got up and started to leave.
“Wait a minute,” he called out from behind me. “You’re going to finish it, right? Where are you going?”
I turned back to look at him. “I’m going home.”
“Not yet, you aren’t. You’ve got to finish it. We’ve got to talk about publicity, all that stuff.”
“There’s not going to be any publicity, Darren.”
His eyes narrowed, his jaws stopped chewing his gum, and he stared at me.
“There’s not going to be any publicity,” I said, “because there’s never going to be a published book.”
He stood up, but then sat down again fast when it caught the guard’s attention.
“We have a deal!”
I shook my head. “We’re done. There never was going to be a book. Did you really think I’d let you blackmail me into publishing a book for you? Did you really think you could play those kinds of awful games with me, and win?”
“You have a contract with your publisher!”
“Who agreed to tear it up.”
And Markie was being paid a lump sum for his contributions.
I could admit to myself, even if to no one else, that there had been moments when I’d been tempted. Markie had even tried to persuade me. We both knew it would have been a big seller.
I turned again to leave.
“There were other girls,” he blurted.
My heart sank. I believed him. But I turned around and said coolly, “There are other writers, too.”
At the airport, Markie and Peter’s plane left before mine.
I thanked them and said, “Maybe we’ll work together again.”
“No way.” Markie gave me his last shot. “I’m the rabbit, you’re the tortoise.”
“Which means I win in the end,” I pointed out.
He grinned and hurried off toward his gate with Peter running behind him.
Luis Cannistre flashed his badge so he could walk Deb and me to our gate.
Once there, I held out my right hand and he took it.
“You don’t fly your own plane?” he asked with a smile, taking up where we had left off in our original conversation.
“No, but I sign my own books.” I turned to Deb and she handed me an autographed copy of the new one that wasn’t even in the bookstores yet. I handed it to him.