LC 02 - Questionable Remains (33 page)

"I made the first rosary. I can make another, and it will be
sacred, too. I thought he needed it on his journey."

Piaquay nodded. Roberto thought he seemed to understand.

"It is time for you to make a choice, my friend," Piaquay told
Roberto. "Which path will you take?"

Lindsay was right. Jennifer and Ken had disappeared. She
gave them a pretty good chance of not being found. Those
two knew how to plan and be patient. The next morning she
drove home. Derrick wanted to drive with her, but she
knew he needed to get back to his site, and she told him she
would be fine.

"And, Derrick," she said as she started to get into her
Rover, "perhaps we can talk after you get back."

"Perhaps we can," he said and kissed her. He watched
her drive away. In the rearview mirror she saw him get in
his jeep and start off in the other direction.

Her trip home was uneventful. She was thankful for
that. Susan had returned to Lindsay's house with
Mandrake.

"The calls stopped, so I decided it would be all right to
come back," Susan said. "Mandrake's fine."

"You went above and beyond in taking care of my place.
Thanks."

"That's all right. That was a strange end for Denny
Ferguson."

"Yes. If it weren't for Mr. Kim and his family, I could
almost feel sorry for him."

Lindsay wrote Susan a check and paid her extra for her
time and effort. Susan tried to decline, but Lindsay insisted.
"It meant a lot to me to have you take care of things."

It was good to be home. Everything in the house was as
she had left it. It was familiar. Susan had left her kitchen
stocked, and Lindsay made herself a taco salad for dinner,
watched some TV, and went to bed early. She took the
phone book before she turned in and looked at the listings
for plastic surgeons. She was not vain, but she didn't want
to look in the mirror every day and think about the cave. Or
maybe she was vain, she thought to herself; there's nothing
wrong with looking good.

In the morning she called and made an appointment with
a plastic surgeon she had heard about from another faculty
member. She was lucky. There had been a cancellation, and
they would fit her in the next week.

Lindsay parked at the medical building and followed the
directions given to her over the phone. She still had misgivings about coming. Her scrapes might not warrant such dramatic treatment, she thought as she walked down the long
hall, passing the doors of other medical professionals.
Timothy Scott, M.D., P.C., Pediatric Medicine, one said.
Where had she heard that name? Oh yes, Kelley Banks's
boyfriend. Kelley Banks, thought Lindsay, was having a time explaining to the authorities how her client ended up
being misidentified as her uncle.

Terence Wilson, D.D.S., P.C., Dentist, the door past
Timothy Scott's said. Lindsay passed it, stopped, and
looked again. Side by side. What a coincidence. The dentist
whose name was on Denny Ferguson's x-rays had an office
next to Kelley Banks's boyfriend. She walked on down to
the end of the hall to her appointment. While she waited,
she tried out different scenarios in her mind.

Kelley went to visit Denny in jail about his appeal, told
him that it wasn't going well, reminding him what an injustice had been done to him, how he deserved to be free-that
she had a plan that would free him.

Drink this. It will give you bad stomach pains and they
will have to take you to the hospital. You can escape from
there. After we have you out of jail, I'll have a dentist look
at your teeth. That was how you got caught the first time.
Crooked teeth.

Kelley's boyfriend, Timothy Scott, was probably friends
with the dentist next to him-the dentist may have been in
on it. Anyway, it would have been easy for Scott to pop in
and out of his friend's office. Perhaps he purloined a key. He
could make a file, change the label on the x-rays. Ken may
have gone to this dentist before. Maybe made a point of it so
that he would have a file there. It would have been much
easier for Scott to have altered the records than for Kelley to
have done so. The unidentified print on the false x-ray,
whose was it? Sloppy for a dentist. How about a pediatrician not used to developing dental x-rays?

Lindsay guessed that Kelley's tuition had been expensive
and she had massive loans. Agent McKinley hadn't verified
it with her, but he wouldn't. She wasn't really in on the
investigation anymore. Lindsay wondered if Timothy Scott
was Kelley's boyfriend before or after the scheme was concocted. She imagined he had some pretty hefty expenses
himself, opening up a practice. Lindsay was so lost in thought the nurse had to call her name twice before she
heard it.

The plastic surgeon, Dr. Lacey, told Lindsay that she
thought there was a good chance her facial injuries would
heal without much scarring, but it would be a simple outpatient procedure if she needed anything done. Dr. Lacey
was a competent woman, and Lindsay liked her. She and
her nurse were riveted by Lindsay's explanation of how she
came by the wounds.

"Have they caught the guys who did that to you?" asked
her nurse, a young black woman who looked to Lindsay as
if she was sixteen. I am definitely getting old, she thought.

"No. There are leads, but so far they haven't found anyone," she told them. They shook their heads at man's inhumanity to man.

She left, still deep into her thoughts as she walked back to
her Rover. It could be a coincidence, she thought. After all, it
was a coincidence that she picked this plastic surgeon to
consult. She wondered who had done Ken Darnell's plastic
surgery. She couldn't imagine the nice Dr. Lacey being
involved in this, but then, the surgeon didn't have to know
Darnell's intentions. But this is too close to home, she thought.
Colorado. It popped into her head. Of course, he would have it
done out of town; he probably really did go visit Colorado. She
must have said it aloud, for she heard a voice say it back to
her.

"Colorado? Hello, Lindsay."

Lindsay looked up and was startled by Dr. Timothy Scott.
Apparently, his car was parked next to hers. He was getting
out of it.

"Oh, hi," she said. "How are you?" Fear ran down her
spine. She dropped her keys on the ground and hurriedly
picked them up.

"Visiting me?" he asked.

"No. Dr. Lacey, the plastic surgeon. I may have some scarring on my face."

"Yes. I heard what happened to you. But it doesn't look
too bad from here."

For some reason that made Lindsay angry. She smiled
tightly at him, got in her Rover, and drove off. She was
right. It was him, she thought. There was something about
the careful way he talked to her, the measured calmness in
his voice, that convinced her. It was him. She drove to her
office.

There was no one in the lab. Students were still off on
their summer vacations. She unlocked her office and went
in. It was as she had left it. Familiar, comfortable, like her
house. There was a package lying on her desk. She sat down
at her desk and opened it. It was the knife from the
Lamberts' field, the one Joshua traded his tooth to Marilee
for. The note said that it was French, not Spanish, the kind
used by French soldiers who were battling the Spanish conquistadores for a foothold in the Americas. They wrote a
long report on it. Lindsay laid the pages on the table and
examined the knife. It looked as though it had once had a
handle, but only a thin metal hilt remained. The blade had
been relatively thick. The restorer had done a good job with
it. It was gray and heavily pitted but had a slight sheen. She
thought Joshua Lambert would be pleased with it.

She looked up when her door opened. Timothy Scott was
standing in the doorway. She gripped the knife and put her
hands in her lap. He came in, closed the door, and locked it.

"You know, don't you?" he said.

"Know what?" she asked.

"Let's not play games. I doubt if either of us has the mental strength for it. All this is a strain, isn't it?"

"Why did you do it?" asked Lindsay.

"Money." He was very calm. "Look, Denny Ferguson was
a waste to society. He won't be missed by anyone but his
mother and a few odd relatives."

"What about Blaine Hillard? What had he done?"

"He was just a poor guy worth more dead than alive. Besides, I didn't kill him. Roy Pitt did. I didn't even know
about all this then."

"Who was Roy Pitt?" Lindsay asked.

Scott shrugged. "Some loner friend of Ken's. The two of
them came up with the idea together."

"But Ken stuck a knife in his back instead," said Lindsay.
Two methods of murder, two murderers, she thought. Scott nodded his head. "Then I guess the problem was to find a body
to substitute for Ken." She wondered if she could make it
past him or if she could grab the phone and punch in a number. No, he would have her before she could do that. Keep
him talking, she thought, while she made a plan. "And along
came Denny Ferguson. What did you do-have Kelley give
him a drug to simulate appendicitis, help him escape, then
take him to the dentist whose office is next to yours?"

"I knew that's why you were there, checking up on your
theories."

"No. I was really there to see Dr. Lacey."

"Oh." That seemed to disconcert him. "But you saw the
names on the offices, and you figured it out, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"You're too smart for your own good."

He's starting to get hostile. Ready to to do-what? she wondered. Keep him talking.

"Did Kelley know?"

"About Ken's fraud? Yeah, she knew. She was desperate
for money, too. And crazy about her uncle. He generated
loyalty like that, in women anyway."

"What about killing Denny? I have a hard time seeing her
go through with that."

"I told her that the dentist had to put Ferguson to sleep to
pull a bad tooth. I said he died and that, rather than turn the
body over to the authorities, we should just put it to good
use. She bought it. Ken had already approached me about
finding a body to substitute for him. Denny was perfect."

"You killed him?" she said.

"Yes. I told him I had dental training. I got into Dr.
Wilson's office at night. Denny-stupid bastard-thought it
was neat to sneak in and use the equipment to make the xrays. Thought he was going to get a dental makeover. It fit
into his criminal sensibilities. It was pretty easy. Dr. Wilson
and I have adjoining doors. I took the x-rays, labeled them,
and put them in Ken's file. Wilson was Ken's dentist. Neat,
huh?"

"Yes. Neat. How did you kill him? Lethal injection of
some kind?"

"Yes, very fitting, don't you think?"

"You killed him at the Lamberts', didn't you? Told him he
could hide out there while they were on vacation. When he
was dead, you decomposed the body in their shed. You
even killed the neighbor's calf and pretended it caught its
head in a broken wall of the shed so you could mask the
odor. Everyone would think any telltale odor was the
decomposing calf." Lindsay watched the surprise on his
face as she talked.

"You are very clever. How did you work that out?" he
asked.

Lindsay shrugged. "I'm an archaeologist. We have to be
very clever and look for all the clues to be able to generalize
behavior from the skewed data we dig up."

He smiled slightly with one side of his mouth. "You're
right, of course. And you know how easy it is to decompose
a corpse in the summer if you have the proper place and can
get the right bugs. Inside that shed at the Lamberts' place it
gets up to 120 degrees every day when it's closed up. There
was nothing much left but bones inside of two weeks."

"Too bad about the neighbor's calf."

"Yes. Another sacrifice for the cause. But they would have
just killed it and eaten it anyway."

"It must have been hard to put clothes on a skeleton."

He laughed. "That's true. I had to stuff the bones in the
pants, hoping they weren't in too much disarray. It was not easy. I was afraid the crime scene would look too staged.
See, we read a lot about what we were doing and knew that
some crime scene professionals could detect things like that.
Staging and posing and all that." He laughed again. "But
after all, this was just small-town stuff; we really didn't
expect to deal with an expert crime unit. Jennifer was a big
help. You've met detail-oriented people? That's Jennifer.
She doesn't miss a thing. You'd have thought she was decorating her living room. She arranged for Dr. Ballinger to
identify the bodies, too. She knew he operated on Blaine,
and dropped the suggestion to the coroner, who jumped on
it. He got Ballinger to ID the others, too. Ballinger himself
sent off for Ken's x-rays from Dr. Wilson, so it all seemed on
the up-and-up. No one had a clue until you turned up on
the scene. That was a real scare. We knew if you ever saw
that mouth-"

"You and Ken put me in the cave?"