“Five billion years from now…”
Fawk.
I tried hard not to smirk. “You mean, like… when the sun swallows us up?”
“Exactly. This Baars has convinced his followers that the world is more than five billion years older than it is. And that it’s about to end.”
I rubbed my face in an attempt to wipe away a marvelling grin. I looked at them both, each desolate in a different way, gouged not only by loss but by disbelief. That something so absurd, so stupid…
I nodded gravely. “I see what you mean.”
I’ve seen more than my fair share of absurdities in my time: Christ, this job throws them at you like rotten fruit at a burlesque gone wrong. Tragedy astounds people no matter what, sure. The big things are just too heavy to be caught in human nets. But life also has a nasty habit of dishing up calamity as the punchline of a joke as well, and with a regularity that’s nothing short of perverse. We keep waiting for something Shakespearean to happen, when most of the world is just an annex to the Jerry Springer show. Squalid. Cheap. Mean-spirited.
So few people die pretty.
I glanced at the photo of Jennifer Bonjour leaning against my faux art deco lamp. An unopened bill lay askew just below it, and I glimpsed my name and the top third of my address through the plastic window. DISCIPLE MANNING, stamped across some law of perspective. The chill of sudden conviction dropped through me… The first of many such chills, as it turned out.
I’m not sure how I knew she was dead, but somehow I did-and I suspected the grieving couple before me knew as well.
I pressed them for details of the police investigation, expecting to hear the Bonjour version of what I’ve come to call the Authority Rant. Most everybody who comes to me has a grudge against the authorities, either because they have something to hide or because they’ve been let down in some manner. When it comes to cases like the Bonjours’, they almost always have a tale of official indifference, incompetence, or, if they’re really mad, outright malfeasance. Personally, I had nothing against The System. I understood the kinds of limitations that cops faced: the politics, the fatigue individuals were prone to, the constraints of policy and procedure, the ways bureaucratic machinery could generate irrational outcomes.
I’ve worked in factories before. I know the score.
As it turned out, so did the Bonjours. The story they told was one of a local police chief who meant well but was hopelessly out of his depth when it came to this case. Caleb Nolen, his name was. Chief Caleb Nolen. From what they described, he did everything by the book, and a few things above and beyond. According to the Framers (Nolen had interviewed all twenty-seven of them), Jennifer left the Compound with another cult member named Anson Williams at around 8:30 P.M. to walk into town to a bar called Legends, where the two liked to dance. The walk was a long one, at least two and a half miles, much of it through Ruddick’s largely abandoned industrial park, but apparently the two enjoyed the air, exercise, and the opportunity to talk. They were close friends but not lovers. Witnesses placed the two of them at the bar, dancing and drinking, until approximately 11:30 P.M., when the doorman said Jennifer left muted but not otherwise distraught. According to Anson, she had been nursing a headache most of the evening and finally decided to return home to sleep. He claimed that she agreed to call a cab at his insistence, but the doorman said that she left on foot, headed in the direction of the Framer Compound.
She never arrived.
According to cellphone records, Anson called her twice, once at 12:03 A.M. and again at 12:17 A.M. She didn’t answer. He then called the Compound, asking whether anyone had seen her. When he learned from the doorman that she had walked, he struck out on foot after her, calling her name and searching the verges of the road. Evidently, he feared she had been hit by a passing car. He found nothing. At 1:33 A.M., Xenophon Baars himself called the police department, expressing his concern. At approximately 2 A.M., one of Nolen’s deputies embarked on a cursory search of the route and the surrounding brown lands- apparently the area is mazed with abandoned steel and assembly plants, a creepy place for a young woman to be walking alone, but so familiar to the locals that they thought nothing of it. When she failed to turn up the next morning, the Chief wisely said to hell with procedure and pulled out all the missing-person stops. By mid-afternoon they had some eighty-plus volunteers combing the ruined structures and surrounding ravines. There was no sign of her. None. They tried again the next day, this time with State Police dogs. Again, nothing.
The Bonjours got the call from Nolen’s office that morning, and I could see the catastrophe on their faces as they described it: the little girl they had loved, nurtured, and even suffered on occasion was missing. Gone.
They fell silent after that.
I asked them about going to the media. They said the police department had already issued a public statement, that two of the Pittsburgh television stations and the main paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, had aired or printed stories along with photos of their daughter-so far to no avail.
“One reporter told us they purposefully bury stories like ours,” Amanda said with more than a little animus. “‘JonBenet fatigue,’ he called it… But what he meant was that missing pretty white girls are out of fashion.”
“No,” Jon Bonjour said. “It’s because of all the criticism the media received, you know… for being too Hollywood.”
“Hollywood?” Amanda fairly cried.
“The way they pick victims like casting directors, stories like movie prod-”
“So what are you saying, Jon? That our daughter is too blond, too beautiful? That political correctness is what’s keeping her buried on the back page? Keeping her… lost…”
Lost? Was that what they really thought?
I glanced at the glossy on my desk, at the dead girl’s almost smiling eyes. I could already see the crime scene photographs, the grisly before and after. Naked. The limbs bent in poses the living would find excruciating. The skin purple-grey-white. That was when I started thinking of her as “Dead Jennifer.”
Sounds horrible, I know. What can I say? I’m a freak.
I shook my head and pinched my eyes. I did what I always do when my thoughts take an errant turn: I asked a question. “How would you characterize your relationship?”
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Bonjour asked.
“Your relationship with Jennifer. Was it loving or, ah… troubled?”
“He wants to know whether the cult was just an excuse to escape us,” her husband said with spousal wariness. Jonathan Bonjour, I realized at that moment, wasn’t simply a lawyer, he was a good lawyer.
“Troubled,” Mrs. Bonjour said stiffly. “Troubled.”
“Not abusive,” Mr. Bonjour interjected. “There’s troubled and then there-”
Something flashed across his wife’s face. “I’m sure Mr. Manning re-”
“I just didn’t want him to get the wrong idea!”
They both looked to me in expectation-funny how some couples turn every third party into a marriage counsellor-so I held them in suspense for a thoughtful moment. “And what idea would that be, Mr. Bonjour?”
“Jon slapped her,” Mrs. Bonjour said in a clear, broadcasting tone. “The last… fight we had. Jon slapped… her.”
“I… ah…” Jon Bonjour croaked through his sinuses as though ready to spit a la NASCAR, swallowed instead. He wiped tears from his eyes with a fat thumb. “I… I don’t know what to say.” These last words were pinched through a sob. His face flushed red beneath the hood of his hand.
“Jonny blames himself,” Mrs. Bonjour said blankly. “He thinks all of this is his fault.”
“I appreciate your honesty,” I said as professionally as I could. “Most people try to doctor the story, believing they’re better served if they come out looking like angels. But the only thing that serves in these situations, the only thing, is the truth.” I leaned forward, placed my elbows against the desktop. Very Remington Steele. “You do understand that?”