A view so far above the burial ground could not harm me or upset me much. I had not seen the area from this perspective. “It happened in this section — here,” I said, using the pencil to point out the ridge between the two meadows. “The coyote tree was on this ridge.” I moved the pencil a slight distance. “Julia Sayre was buried in a meadow on this side of it. You can’t really see the detail of the meadow on this map. The other side of the ridge is where he set his trap.”
Places. Just places, I told myself.
Phil Newly was staring at the map in silence.
“How many other bodies did they find there?” he asked at last.
“You mean—”
“Not members of our group, but buried. Women Parrish had buried there.”
“In the one meadow, including the one he booby-trapped, ten. The others were all much farther down the meadow from the ridge. And Julia Sayre was the only woman buried in the other meadow.”
“The only one?” he asked.
“Yes. She was apparently special to him in some way. I’ve heard that he was more . . . that the things he did to her were more . . .”
As I sought for a phrase, he said, “I think I know what you mean.”
“Yes. Although there are signs in the victims in the other meadow that he was progressing — if you can call it progress — toward more and more sadistic treatment of his victims.”
“None of the others had explosives rigged to them?”
It was more difficult for me to recite facts when the word “explosives” came into play, but I managed it. “No. The new search teams proceeded very carefully all the same. They had bomb squad experts check out each potential site. It took a lot of extra time, but no other explosives were found.”
“Did search dogs find these other bodies?”
“Some of them. They were using lots of different methods by then — aerial photography, ground penetrating radar, you name it. Bingle had shown strong interest in that meadow, but the rigged grave was the first one he came to.”
“Why?”
“I think Ben found the answer to that. The question bothered him, too. So he studied the plastic that had been wrapped around Julia Sayre’s body, and some of the remaining fragments of plastic from the second body—”
“Nina Poolman?”
“Yes, both identifications were confirmed later.”
“So what was of interest to Ben?”
“There were two different types of holes in the plastic. Some of the punctures had been made by the probes the anthropologists used, but the others were made by some other object. The diameters and other characteristics of the punctures were different.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“We think he planned to be caught.”
“Sooner or later, I suppose—”
“No, I mean planned. He allowed himself to be caught so that the world would know what a genius he is. At some point before he killed Kara Lane, he must have gone up into the mountains and punctured holes in those plastic coverings, which led to further decay of the bodies. The bodies would have been protected by the plastic until then.”
“And the decay gave off scent through these holes.”
“Right. So those were the graves that were easiest for Bingle to find.”
“My God. These other women — do the police know who they were?”
“He buried most of them with some form of identification — usually a driver’s license — but it will take a while to verify that they are indeed those women. They’ve ordered dental records and so on.”
“They can’t just tell—”
“No,” I said quickly, shutting out the image of Julia Sayre’s body.
“I’m sorry,” Phil said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m okay,” I said, then added, “Ben told me that driver’s licenses are notoriously inaccurate sources of identification information in any case — men often report themselves to be taller than they really are when they apply for a license, women report themselves to be shorter and thinner. And sometimes hair color or weight changes after the license is issued.”
“But if the identifications match?”
“I don’t have information on all of the women. A lot of other law enforcement agencies have become involved in this since we went up there, and so it’s not just a matter of going to the paper’s usual sources for information. But one of our reporters learned that nine of the women had criminal records — for prostitution.”
“And prostitutes are always the easiest prey for a man like Parrish,” he said grimly. “Did these women all come from Las Piernas?”
“Most, but not all. They’re from a number of cities in Southern California, but all of the cities have one thing in common.”
“An airport?”
I nodded. “Apparently Parrish had been using the meadow for years. There are a lot of questions that will only be answered after all of the forensic specialists have had a chance to do their work.”
“Eleven. Eleven women!”
“The police think there’s a twelfth one somewhere nearby, because there were a dozen coyotes on the tree. I think it might have been for Kara Lane.”
“The woman whose murder led to his capture? The one whose body was found near the airport. Yes, I suppose so.”
“Just a theory.”
“And now he has killed a woman here, and these two women in Oregon!” he said.
“Yes. The nurse and the receptionist.”
“Did they ever find . . . ?”
“The receptionist’s legs? No.”
After a long silence, he said, “He’s just getting started, isn’t he?”
“Maybe.”
He seemed more depressed than when I first arrived. I couldn’t bring myself to leave him in that frame of mind.
“Frank asked me to thank you for helping him to find me. You have my thanks, too, Phil. You took a risk doing that, and for no other reason than kindness.”
He looked at me with an expression so haunted, I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Do you really think of me that way — as someone who helped you?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m grateful to you. Not just for helping me to get out of there — you also probably saved Ben’s life. If he had spent many more hours up in those mountains without medical attention, the infection could have killed him. And the arrival of the helicopter probably frightened Parrish off before he had time to hunt me down in the forest. If you hadn’t helped Frank, he wouldn’t have found us so quickly.”
He looked back down at the map and said, “Thank you. I don’t know that I did so much, really — Frank and his friends made the real difference. He was so anxious about you that day, so determined to find you, that he risked trouble with his department by coming to see me. It would have been inhumane not to help in some small way.”
We talked a little more, but I still felt worried about him, so as I was leaving, I asked for his phone number. “I’d like to stay in touch, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Frank will want to talk to you, too.”
“I’d like to talk to him again. Especially now that we won’t be opponents in court.”
He wrote out the number and handed it to me. “Thanks for coming by, Irene.”
“I should have done it months ago,” I said. “It was . . . helpful to me to see you today.”
“For me, too,” he said. “Come by anytime.” He smiled and added, “I’m no longer such an expensive person to talk to — no billable hours.”
Outside his house, as I was getting into the van, I saw a green Honda Accord drive off. I could have sworn that Nick Parrish was driving it. I took a deep breath, started the van, and pulled away from the curb.
When I got home, for the first time since I had returned from the mountains, I took out my larger-scale topo map. Even though the features of the terrain were shown in finer detail than on Newly’s map, I wasn’t as upset by this view of the area as I had thought I would be. It made me a little nervous to see where I had marked off the cave, the coyote tree, the graves. But again, it was from a distance.