Per Bowker’s self-cleansing account, she and Mearsheim had visited a nearby winery during a weekend when Jackie languished in bed with the flu. Spotting the abandoned estate, Paul had made a mental note and returned months later at night with her body in the trunk of his car. Entering the estate by snipping barbed wire, then digging unmolested near a windbreak of blue-gum eucalyptus.
Unable to get Bowker to talk about additional victims, Milo called Sheila Braxton and gave her the basics.
She said, “Time to look at all the missings around here. How’s he doing?”
“Well as can be expected.”
“Give him my best, maybe I’ll come by to see him.”
Milo and I updated Cory Thurber, still hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai four days after his rescue. Rick Silverman had been off duty the night Cory was ambulanced to the E.R. but Milo’s call brought him in. He tended to the boy’s immediate health issues and called in a hand surgeon to see what could be done for Cory’s mangled fingers.
Milo said, “He’s a piano player.”
The surgeon said, “Fuck,” and walked away.
This morning, Cory was able to talk through cracked lips, his hand a bandaged mitt.
Milo introduced me.
“Someone thinks I’m crazy?”
Milo explained. Cory said, “Okay,” but he avoided looking at me.
“So,” said Milo. “Anything you feel like telling us?”
“What I told you yesterday,” said Cory. “She’s the one who did it.”
Milo said, “She hit you with the hammer.”
“She laughed while she was doing it,” said the boy. Amazed; as if reciting a weird factoid. “He taped me up and held me down but she hit me. She was laughing. He was a pussy. That’s why she killed him.”
“Because he was...”
“A total pussy,” said Cory Thurber. “She gave him the shotgun, told him to shoot me. He said, ‘Not again.’ She started yelling at him.”
His eyes shut. “After she hit me like two times, three, I passed out. When I woke I was...” Staring at the mitt.
When brown irises reappeared, I said, “What was she yelling about?”
“He had to shoot me. He was saying if it was so easy, she should do it, the last time made him sick. They must’ve gone into another room because the yelling got softer but it kept on. Then she said, ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’ Then there was this noise.”
“What kind of noise?”
“Something hitting the floor,” said Cory. “Like a person. Then it got quiet and she came in all covered with blood. I thought she was going to come in and shoot me but she didn’t have no gun. She kept saying, ‘Fuck.’ Then the door knocked and she left and she was talking to someone else.”
“That was us, Cory.”
“Good.” The boy’s eyelids fought gravity, lost.
He stayed asleep.
Chapter 53
Two days later, I sat by Cory’s bed in the surgical unit, polishing a custody report on my iPad as I waited for him to emerge from anesthesia.
The first of many operations had ended an hour ago. Results were “as well as can be expected,” per the surgeon. She was donating her services. So was Rick. The hospital was working with Medi-Cal to recoup whatever it could.
By three fifteen, Cory’s eyes had cleared. A few minutes later, he focused on me and managed a nod. I’d been in and out of the room, yesterday, pouring water and soda for him, avoiding anything remotely therapeutic. It’s what I taught my interns and fellows when I worked oncology: Patients whose diagnosis isn’t psychiatric hate anything shrinky, so don’t make matters worse and just be a nice person.
By day’s end Cory had relaxed.
Now he gave a goofy smile, licked parched lips. I went over and held a cup of water to his barely open mouth.
He croaked, cleared his throat. Moments later: “Thanks, Doc.”
His eyes closed and opened. “You’re here... a lot. Have a lot of time?”
“For you, I do.”
“Because I’m screwed up?”
“Because you’ve been through hell and I want to help.”
“That’s why you did the GoFundMe?”
“That was Lieutenant Sturgis’s idea.”
“It came in super-fast,” he said. “After that big donation in the beginning.”
Part of this year’s tax deductions. I said, “People see it as a worthy cause, Cory.”
“Hmm... all the time, since my mom disappeared, only a few people have been cool with me. Like Miss Edda, without her...” Trying to raise his hand, he failed and winced.
I said, “More water?”
“Um... don’t want to be bratty, Doc, but I’d kind of like 7UP?”
“What a demanding guy,” I said, reaching for the can.
He smiled.
Half a cup of soda later, he was talking.
“I always knew he did it. I thought from the way the police were that they knew but they never admitted it. Probably figured I was a stupid kid, I shouldn’t know. But I knew. I wanted to go up and tell I knew but I was scared shitless. He left anyway. That made me happy even though I didn’t know what was going to happen to me by myself. You know what happened, right, Doc?”
“You got put in fosters.”
“A lot of ’em... that was okay. I told myself to stop thinking about it. About Mom. I stopped for a while. Then, I couldn’t. Especially when I was older, working, the thoughts just kept coming back, like songs would do that, like opening up a window in my brain. I got angry. Went looking and found where he was.”
“How’d you do that, Cory?”
“It wasn’t so hard, Doc. He used to work for the school district doing computer stuff so I called, said I was his son, just got out of the army, was away for a long time in Iraq, needed to find him. I lied about that because it was part true, I tried to join the army, even the Coast Guard, but there was something with my spine, a fused bone. So I used that and they looked him up and said he’d transferred to the school district in L.A. I called them and told them the same thing.”
Pushing lank, pale hair off a pimpled forehead. “I added another lie. I’d been shot in Iraq. They gave me the address.”
“On Evada Lane.”
“Yeah. The other one I found by following him.”
A glance at his damaged hand. “Maybe that’s why it happened, huh? Lie about a bad thing that doesn’t happen and you get one that does happen?”
I said, “I could get all moralistic with you, Cory, but I seriously doubt that.”
“You don’t believe in karma?”
“Not literally.”
“How do you believe in it?”
“Sometimes the things we do bring direct consequences, sometimes stuff just happens.”
“And people get away with it.”
“I’m afraid they do, Cory.”
He looked at his empty cup. I poured soda and helped him drink. When he finished he let out a puff of air, then a burp. “ ’Scuse me... it actually doesn’t hurt that bad. Probably the dope they put me on.” A beat. “I never did real dope, just some weed. Like when I was playing at The Carpenter, there was all kinds of pills and shit around. I never did that, didn’t want to screw up my playing.”
“The other musicians offered.”
“How’d you know?”
“I used to play in a band, went through the same thing.”
“When?”
“When I was about your age.”
“Before you were a doctor.”
“Way before, to make money to pay for college.”