The Keepsake (13 page)

“I take it she’s in a secure location?” said Zucker. When no one immediately answered him, he looked around the table. “I’m sure we all agree she could be in jeopardy. Where is she?”

“That’s an issue we’re trying to clear up right now,” admitted Jane.

“You don’t know where she is?”

“She told us she was going to stay with an aunt named Connie Pulcillo in Burlington, Vermont, but we can’t find any listing with that name. We’ve left messages on Josephine’s voice mail and she hasn’t responded.”

Zucker shook his head. “This is not good news. Have you checked her Boston residence?”

“She’s not there. A neighbor in her building saw her leave Friday morning with two suitcases.”

“Even if she’s left Boston, she may not be safe,” said Zucker.

“This unsub is clearly comfortable operating across state lines. He doesn’t seem to have geographic boundaries. He could have followed her.”

“If he knows where she is. Even we can’t find her.”

“But she’s
his
only focus. She may have been his only focus for some time. If he’s been watching her, following her, then he may know exactly where she is.” Zucker leaned back, clearly disturbed.

“Why hasn’t she answered her phone? Is it because she can’t?”

Before Jane could respond, the door opened and Frost came back into the room. She took one look at his face and knew instantly that something was wrong. “What is it?”

“Josephine Pulcillo is dead,” he said.

His stark announcement sent a jolt through the room as shocking as the voltage from a stun gun.

“Dead?”
Jane shot straight up in her chair. “How? What the hell happened?”

“It was a car accident. But—”

“So it wasn’t our killer.”

“No. It was definitely not our perp,” said Frost.

Jane heard anger in his voice, and she saw it as well in his tight mouth, his narrowed eyes.

“She died in San Diego,” said Frost. “Twenty-four years ago.”

SEVENTEEN

They’d been driving for half an hour before Jane finally brought up the painful subject, a subject they’d managed to avoid during the flight from Boston to Albuquerque.

“You had a thing for her. Didn’t you?” she asked.

Frost didn’t look at her. He stayed focused on his driving, his gaze fixed on the road where the blacktop shimmered, hot as a griddle under the New Mexico sun. In all the time they’d worked together, she’d never felt such a wall between them, an impenetrable barrier that she could not seem to chip through. This wasn’t the good-natured Barry Frost that she knew; this was his evil twin, and any minute now he was going to start speaking in tongues and his head would demonically spin around.

“We really need to talk about this, you know,” she insisted.

“Give it a rest, why can’t you?”

“You can’t keep kicking yourself over this. She’s a pretty girl and she pulled the wool over your eyes. It can happen to any guy.”

“But not to
me.
” He looked at her at last, his anger so raw that it silenced her. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it,” he said and focused, once again, on the road. A moment passed, and the only noise was the air conditioner and the sound of their car slicing through the heat.

She had never traveled to New Mexico before. She’d never even seen the desert before. But she scarcely noticed the landscape flying past their windows; what mattered to her now was healing this rift between them, and the only way to do it was to talk it through, whether Frost was willing to or not.

“You aren’t the only one who’s surprised,” said Jane. “Dr. Robinson had no idea. You should have seen his face when I told him she’s a fraud. If she lied about something as basic as her own name, what else did she lie about? She took in a lot of people, including her college professors.”

“But not you. You saw through it.”

“I just got a funny feeling about her, that’s all.”

“Cop’s instinct.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“So what the hell happened to
mine
?”

Jane gave a laugh. “A different instinct was operating. She’s pretty, she’s scared, and wham-o. The Boy Scout wanted to save her.”

“Whoever the hell she is.”

They still did not know the answer; what they did know was that she was not the real Josephine Pulcillo, who had died twenty-four years ago when she was only two years old. Yet years later, that dead girl managed to attend college and graduate school. She managed to open a bank account, get a driver’s license, and land a job in an obscure Boston museum. The child had been resurrected as a different woman, whose true origins remained a mystery.

“I can’t believe I was such a moron,” he said.

“You want my advice?”

“Not particularly.”

“Call Alice. Tell her to come home. That was part of the problem, you know. Your wife’s been gone and you got lonely. You got vulnerable. A pretty girl wanders onto the scene and suddenly you’re thinking with a different brain.”

“I can’t just order her to come home.”

“She’s your wife, isn’t she?”

He gave a snort. “I’d like to see Gabriel try telling
you
what to do. That wouldn’t be pretty.”

“I can be reasoned with and so can Alice. She’s been visiting her parents way too long and you need her back. Just call her.”

Frost sighed. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Alice and I—well, we’ve been having problems. Ever since she started law school, it’s like I can’t talk to her. It’s like nothing I say is worth listening to. She spends all day with those smart-ass professors and when she comes home, what’re we supposed to talk about?”

“What you did at work, maybe?”

“Yeah, I tell her about our latest arrest and she asks me if police brutality was involved.”

“Oh, man. She’s gone to the dark side?”

“She thinks we
are
the dark side.” He glanced at her. “You’re lucky, you know? Gabriel’s one of us. He gets what we do.”

Yes, she was lucky; she was married to a man who understood the challenges of law enforcement. But she knew how quickly even good marriages could fall apart. Last Christmas, she’d watched her parents’ marriage collapse over dinner. She’d seen their household destroyed by one stray blonde. And she knew that Barry Frost was now standing on the threshold of marital disaster.

She said, “My mom’s annual neighborhood barbecue is coming up soon. Vince Korsak will be there, so it’ll be like a team reunion. Why don’t you join us?”

“Is this a pity invitation?”

“I was planning to ask you anyway. I’ve invited you before, but you hardly ever took me up on it.”

He sighed. “That was because of Alice.”

“What?”

“She hates cop parties.”

“Do you go to her law school parties?”

“Yeah.”

“So what the hell?”

He shrugged. “I just wanna keep her happy, you know?”

“I really hate to say this.”

“Then don’t, okay?”

“Alice is kind of a bitch, isn’t she?”

“Jesus. Why’d you have to say it?”

“Sorry. But she is.”

He shook his head. “Is there anyone who’s on my side?”

“I
am
on your side. I’m looking out for you. That’s why I told you to stay a million miles away from that Josephine woman. I’m just glad you finally understand why I said it.”

His hands tightened on the wheel. “I wonder who she really is. And what the hell she’s hiding.”

“We should hear back about her fingerprints tomorrow.”

“Maybe she’s running from an ex-husband. Maybe that’s all this is about.”

“If she were running from some creep, she would have told us that, don’t you think? We’re the good guys. Why would she run from the police unless she’s guilty of something?”

He stared at the road. The turnoff to Chaco Canyon was still thirty miles ahead. “I can’t wait to find out,” he said.

After merely ten minutes of standing in the New Mexico heat, Jane vowed she’d never again complain about summer in Boston. Seconds after she and Frost had stepped out of their air-conditioned rental car, sweat was blooming on her face, and the sand felt hot enough to sear right through her shoe leather. The glare of the desert sun was so painfully bright that she was squinting even behind the new sunglasses that she’d bought at a gas station along the way. Frost had picked up matching sunglasses, and with his suit and tie, he could have passed for Secret Service or maybe one of those Men in Black, were it not for the fact his face was flushed an alarming shade of red. Any minute now he would keel over from heatstroke.

So how does this old guy manage?

Professor Emeritus Alan Quigley was seventy-eight years old, yet he was crouched down at the bottom of the excavation trench, patiently digging through the stony soil with his trowel. His Tilley Hat, battered and filthy, looked nearly as old as he was. Though he worked in the shade of a tarp, the heat alone would have felled a much younger man. In fact, the college students on his team had already broken off work for the afternoon and were napping in the nearby shade while their far older professor just kept chipping away at the rocks and scooping loose soil into a bucket.

“You get into a rhythm,” said Quigley. “The Zen of digging, I call it. These young kids, they attack it full-bore, all that nervous energy. They think it’s a treasure hunt and they’re in a rush to find the gold before anyone else does. Or before the semester ends, whichever comes first. They exhaust themselves, or they find only dirt and rocks and they lose interest. Most of them do, anyway. But the serious ones, the rare ones who stick with it, they understand that a human lifetime is just a blink of the eye. In a single season, you can’t dig up what took centuries to accumulate.”

Frost pulled off his sunglasses and mopped the sweat from his forehead. “So, uh, what
are
you digging for down there, Professor?”

“Garbage.”

“Huh?”

“This is a trash midden. An area where refuse was discarded. We’re looking for broken pottery, animal bones. You can learn a lot about a community by examining what they chose to throw away. And this was a most interesting community here.” Quigley rose to his feet, grunting with the effort, and swiped a sleeve across his weathered brow. “These old knees are about ready for replacement again. That’s what goes first in this profession, the damn knees.” He clambered up a ladder and emerged from the trench.

“Isn’t this a magnificent spot?” he said, gazing around at the valley, where ancient ruins studded the landscape. “This canyon was once a ceremonial site, a place for sacred rituals. Have you toured the park yet?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Jane. “We just flew into Albuquerque today.”

“You come all the way from Boston, and you aren’t going to take a look at Chaco Canyon? One of the finest archaeological sites in the country?”

“Our time’s limited, Professor. We came to see you.”

He gave a snort. “Then take a look around you, because this site
is
my life. I’ve spent forty seasons in this canyon, whenever I wasn’t teaching in the classroom. Now that I’m retired from the university, I can devote myself entirely to digging.”

“For trash,” said Jane.

Quigley laughed. “Yes. I suppose one could look at it that way.”

“Is this the same site where Lorraine Edgerton was working?”

“No, we were over there, across the canyon.” He pointed to a tumble of stone ruins in the distance. “I had a team of students working with me, both undergraduate and graduate level. It was the usual mix. Some of them were actually interested in archaeology, but some were here just for the credits. Or to have a good time and maybe get laid.”

That was not a word she expected out of a seventy-eight-year-old’s mouth, but then this was a man who’d lived and worked for most of his career alongside randy college students.

“Do you remember Lorraine Edgerton?” asked Frost.

“Oh, yes. After what happened, I certainly remember her. She was one of my graduate students. Thoroughly dedicated and tough as nails. As much as they wanted to blame me for what happened to Lorraine, she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself.”

“Who wanted to blame you?”

“Her parents. She was their only child, and they were devastated. Since I was supervising the dig, of course they thought I should be held responsible. They sued the university, but that didn’t bring their daughter back. In the end, it probably caused her father’s heart attack. Her mother died a few years after that.” He shook his head. “It was the strangest thing, how the desert just swallowed that girl up. She waved goodbye one afternoon, rode off on her motorbike, and vanished.” He looked at Jane. “And now you say her body’s turned up in Boston?”

“But we believe she was killed here, in New Mexico.”

“So many years ago. And now we finally learn the truth.”

“Not all of it. That’s why we’re here.”

“There was a detective back then who questioned us. I think his name was McDonald or something. Have you spoken to him?”

“His name was McDowell. He died two years ago, but we have all his notes.”

“Oh, dear. And he was younger than me, too. They were all younger than me, and now they’re dead. Lorraine. Her parents.” He looked at Jane with clear blue eyes. “And here I am, still hale and hearty. You just never know, do you?”

“Professor, I know it’s been a long time, but we want you to think back to that summer. Tell us about the day she disappeared. And about the students who were working with you.”

“Detective McDowell interviewed everyone who was here at the time. You must have read his notes.”

“But you actually knew the students. You must have kept some field notes. A written record of the excavation.”

Professor Quigley shot a worried look at Frost, whose face had flushed an even brighter shade of scarlet. “Young man, I can see you’re not going to last much longer in this heat. Why don’t we talk in my office, at the Park Service building? It’s air-conditioned.”

Lorraine Edgerton stood in the last row in the photograph, shoulder-to-shoulder with the men. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, emphasizing the square jaw and the prominent cheekbones of a deeply tanned face.

“We called her the Amazon,” said Professor Quigley. “Not because she was particularly strong, but because she was fearless. And I don’t mean just physically. Lorraine would always speak her mind, whether or not it got her into trouble.”

“Did it get her into trouble?” asked Frost.

Quigley smiled as he gazed at the faces of his former students, who would now be well into middle age. If they were still alive.

“Not with me, Detective. I found her honesty refreshing.”

“Did the others?”

“You know how it is in any group. There are conflicts and alliances. And these were young people in their twenties, so you have to factor in the hormones. An issue I try my best to stay away from.”

Jane studied the photograph, which had been taken midway through the dig season. There were two rows of students, the front row crouched on their knees. Everyone looked trim and tanned and healthy in T-shirts and shorts. Standing beside the group was Professor Quigley, his face fuller, his sideburns longer, but already the lanky man he was today.

“There are a lot more women than men in this group,” Frost noted.

Quigley nodded. “I find it’s usually that way. Women seem drawn to archaeology more than men, and they’re more willing to do the tedious work of cleaning and sifting.”

“Tell me about these three men in the photo,” said Jane.

“What do you remember about them?”

“You’re wondering if any of them could have killed her.”

“The short answer would be yes.”

“Detective McDowell interviewed them all. He found nothing to implicate any of my students.”

“Nevertheless, I’d like to know what you remember about them.”

Quigley thought about it for a moment. He pointed to the Asian man beside Lorraine. “Jeff Chu, pre-med. Very bright but impatient sort of boy. I think he got bored out here. He’s a doctor now, in Los Angeles. And this one’s Carl something-or-other. As sloppy as they come. The girls always had to pick up after him. And this third fellow here, Adam Stancioff, was a music major. No talent as an archaeologist, but I remember he played the guitar quite well. The girls liked that.”