Island of Bones (12 page)

Louis paused outside the library entrance, watching a Fort Myers police cruiser pass by.

Damn. Mel Landeta. He had almost forgotten that Landeta had called him earlier, asking him to come by the station after seven. He was two hours late.

He drove back to the station on the hunch that Landeta would still be there. Inside, he paused outside Landeta’s closed door. The lights were on. He knocked.

The door swung open quickly. The bright fluorescent lights made Landeta’s head gleam like a cue ball.

“You’re late,” Landeta said. “I have better things to do than sit here waiting for you.”

“I was busy at the library, talking to one of Frank Woods’s employees, a girl named Holly Russell.”

“Our guys already talked to her and went through the whole place,” Landeta said, turning away.

“Well, they missed these,” Louis said,
holding out the envelope.

“What’s that?”

“Four more missing girls, I think. From the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Frank cut their pictures out of newspapers and taped them to index cards.”

Land
eta took the envelope and slipped the cards out. He looked at each carefully. “Where’d you find these?” he asked.

“In a copy of Virgil’s
Aeneid
.”

Landeta glanced up at him then back at the cards. “So with the first clipping, the one of...”

“Emma Fielding,” Louis said. “From 1953.”

“That makes five girls in four decades,” Landeta said.

“Right. Shelly Umber makes six.”

Landeta began to carefully stack the index cards together. “
Did you get anything new out of the girl you spoke to?”

“Holly,” Louis said. “Yeah, she said Frank Woods was weird.”

“Weird? You can do better than that”

“That’s all she said.”

Landeta turned away, going behind his desk. He opened a drawer and pulled out a small plastic evidence bag and put the index cards in. He sealed it with orange tape and then hesitated, looking up at Louis.

“I guess you should initial and date it,” he said.

Louis stepped forward, snatched a pen out of the holder on Landeta’s desk and filled out the label.

Landeta picked up the evidence bag as soon as Louis finished.

“I’d like to follow up on those girls,” Louis said.

“I’ll do it.”

“I’d really —-”

“I said I’ll do it. I make the assignments here. Not only am I point, I’m a cop. You’re not.”

Louis’s jaw tightened. “Horton asked me to work this with you.”

“Horton’s letting you play Rocky King Detective, just like on T
V, that’s all.”

“Playing?”

“And if you want to keep playing, you’ll take the assignments I give you.”

“I don’t need your shit, Landeta,” Louis
said, turning to the door. “Work the case by yourself.”

Louis started down the hall.

“Hey, Rocky!”

Louis kept walking, starting down the steps.

“Kincaid, wait.”

Louis turned. Landeta was at the top of the stairs.

“Okay,” Landeta said. “I need you to go down to Naples.”

“What for?”

“That’s where Emma Fielding’s brother lives. Go down there and see what you can get out of him. Here’s his address and a copy of the original police report.” Landeta held out paper.

Louis stood there, hands on his hips.
Then he walked slowly up the stairs, grabbed the paper and went back down the stairs.

The next morning, he was up early. He got a coffee from the 7-Eleven and steered the Mustang onto I-75 South. The police report on Emma Fielding was lying on the passenger seat but he had read it all last night.

According
to the 1953 report, Emma had run away from home when she was sixteen. Her stepfather, Cliff Parker, had reported her missing to the police, saying Emma might have run off to live with her older brother, Neil. But when police questioned Neil, a construction worker living in a trailer park in East Naples, he said he hadn’t seen his sister in six months.

A year later, a drunken Cliff Parker drove his pickup into a canal along Alligator Alley, drowning himself and his wife. Emma was never heard from again and police shuffled her disappearance to the cold case files.

When Louis exited the freeway onto Golden Gate Parkway, he stopped at a light and rechecked the address he had for Neil Fielding.

It hadn’t been hard finding the
brother. He was still living in the same trailer, now surviving on disability after a work accident.

The Lazy Lakes Mobile Home Park looked like it might have seen better days, but there were still signs that not everyone had given up
—- a garden gnome here, a plastic picket fence there.

At lot number 35, Louis parked and looked up at the trailer. He wondered what he was going to get from this. How much could a brother tell about a sister who had gone missing more than thirty years ago? Especially since the two apparently weren’t exactly close to begin with.

Louis went up the Astroturf-covered ramp and knocked. The sound of the television, tuned to a game show, came through the door. Louis banged again on the metal door.

It jerked open. A man in a wheelchair squinted out at Louis. His eyes narrowed in fear
—- at the sight of a young strange black man, Louis presumed.

“Mr. Fielding? I’m here on behalf of Fort Myers police.”

“What about?”

“Your sister, Emma.”

Neil Fielding’s pasty face screwed into a frown. “Em? Fuck, she’s been dead for thirty-four years, man.”

“Missing,” Louis said.

Neil shrugged. “Missing, dead. What’s the difference?”

“I need to talk to you, Mr. Fielding. Can I come in?”

“Sure, why not? I’m not doing anything.”

Neil wheeled away and Louis opened the door to the trailer. It was dark inside, the sun kept out by dust-coated old plastic
blinds. A wall unit wheezed away over the worn plaid sofa, keeping the place plenty cold but doing nothing to disperse the smell of dirty clothes and cigarette smoke. There was an under note of another odor that Louis couldn’t place, something fusty and metallic.

“Sit down,” Neil said backing his chair in front of the
television. He picked up the remote off the TV tray and turned down the sound on the game show. “Why are cops coming round asking about Em after all this time?”

“We might have connec
ted her disappearance to the recent death of another young woman,” Louis said.

“That so?” Neil’s eyes had drifted to the TV
. He was a big man, or had been at some point. He still had a barrel chest beneath the stained T-shirt and his arms looked like he might still lift weights. But his legs were withered like an old woman’s. Louis’s eyes went to his right foot. It was heavily bandaged, red, and swollen. Louis suddenly recognized the smell -— decay.

Neil saw him looking at the foot. “Diabetes,” he said. “Probably gonna lose it.”

Louis pulled a photograph from the file. It was a close-up of the coral ring they had found on Shelly Umber. “Did your sister have a ring like this, Mr. Fielding?”

Neil took the photo, shook his head, and handed it back. “Em liked gold. Was all she ever wore.”

“Were you and your sister close?”

Neil shrugged. “I was four years older. You know how that goes.”

Neil’s eyes drifted to the TV where Bob Barker was shoving a microphone into the face of a woman in a purple tube-top.

“She disappeared when she was sixteen. Your stepfather told the police back in 1953 that she just ran away one night”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

Neil looked at Louis. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why would your sister just leave?”

“Kids run away all the time, don’t they?”

“Did you?”

Neil stared hard at Louis but finally he just shrugged and looked away. “I left, yeah.”

Louis looked at Neil’s 1953 police interview. “You were seventeen when you left home, right?”

“I guess.”

“So, why’d you leave, Mr. Fielding?”

He shrugged again. “I dunno. Didn’t get along with the old man, I guess.”

“How about your sister? Did she get along with him?”

Neil was silent, staring at Bob Barker. Louis was looking at the line in the old police report about the car accident. He was thinking about a drunken Cliff Parker driving off that dark two-lane highway, plunging his pickup into the black water. But he was seeing his own mother, Lila, seeing her and hearing her and smelling her the way she was when she would come home drunk.

“Mr. Fielding,” Louis sai
d, “was your stepfather an alcoholic?”

Neil didn’t answer.

“Is that why you ran away?”

Neil’s eyes didn’t leave the television. Louis waited.

“I got out,” Neil said.

“What about Emma?”

Neil’s pasty face had gone lax as he continued to stare at the game show.

“Mr. Fielding?”

“Where the hell do they get these cretins?”

“What about your sister, Mr. Fielding?”

“Higher, asshole!”

Louis reached over, grabbed the remote, and clicked off the TV
. Neil’s face swung toward him.

“Talk to me, Mr. Fielding.”

“I talked to the cops thirty-four years ago.” He shook his head slowly, looking away. “I don’t want to do it again. I can’t.”

“Why, Mr. Fielding?
”

“
Emma’s dead. What does it matter now?” Neil’s eyes shot back to Louis’s face. “Get out of my house.”

Louis shook his head. “Not yet. Not until we’re finished
.”

Neil was gripping the arms of his chair. Louis watched his hands, watched the knuckles turning white.

“Mr. Fielding —-”

“
Look, I can’t throw you out or I would. Now just leave! Please.”

Louis focused on Neil’s face. His pupils were jumping, like
there was something deep inside him fighting to get out.

“
Talk to me, Neil,” Louis said.

Neil ran a hand through his sparse, oily hair. He was shaking his head slowly, deliberately.

“Whoever killed your sister is still out there,” Louis said “We’re trying to find him. You can help.”

Neil closed his eyes. “He killed her,” he said
.

“Who, Neil?”

“My stepfather. That fucker killed Em.”

Louis was silent. Finally Neil looked at him. His eyes were watery. “The fucker just wouldn’t leave Em alone. He kept at her and kept at her. And I couldn’t stop him. Then, one night I heard him going into her room again, heard her crying again, so I went out there in the hall and and —- ” Neil drew in a breath. “He was standing there with his pants off and his dick hard.”

Neil took another deep breath. “I told him to do me, to do me instead and leave her the fuck alone. That was the only night he didn’t go into her room.”

Neil ran a hand roughly over his face. It was quiet except for the wheezing air conditioner.

“I left the next morning,” Neil said. “It was really early. The sun wasn’t even up. But Em heard me and came running out in her nightgown. She started to cry
and said she wanted to come with me.”

Neil stopped again, but Louis didn’t prod him. Finally, Neil let out a long breath.

“I said, ‘Em, I can’t take you with me. I gotta go, Em. I gotta go.’ And she got so mad and screamed at me, ‘Just go then! Just go!’”

Neil looked at Louis. “So I did.”

His eyes held Louis’s steady for a second but then wavered and he looked back at the television.

“Fuck it,” he whispered.

Neil was quiet, hands hanging limp over the arms of the wheelchair, eyes fixed on the blank television.

“Mr. Fielding, one last question,” Louis said. “Did you or your sister know anyone named Frank Woods?”

Neil looked at him. “Woods? No, why?”

“Nothing,” Louis said. He rose and placed the remote in Neil Fielding’s lap. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Fielding,” he said.

Neil Fielding grabbed his pack of Marlboros and lighter off the TV tray. His hand shook slightly as he lit up a cigarette. He sucked in a quick drag and blew it out, not looking up at Louis.

Louis let himself out, pausing to take in a deep breath of fresh air. He heard the sound of groans and Bob Barker yelling that the woman in the purple tube-top had just lost out on winning a brand-new, all-equipped 1987 Corvette.

He got in the Mustang and started the engine. He sat there, his hands gripping the wheel. Finally, he slapped the car in gear and drove out, not looking back until the trailer had disappeared from his rearview mirror.