A Conspiracy of Bones (Temperance Brennan #19)(103)
I looked at Slidell. His attention was laser-focused on the kid.
The girl was beaming, revealing teeth only possible in the very young. Pressed to her chest was a plastic trophy topped with a swimmer poised to go off the block.
The girl began skipping, sunny dress swinging to the rhythm of her gait. As the scene registered, she slowed. The van. The cops. The handcuffed man in urine-stained pants.
The cornflower eyes widened as the day’s joy turned to nightmare. She stopped. The glossy lips trembled. Reshaped to form one word.
“Daddy?”
36
SUNDAY, JULY 15–TUESDAY, JULY 17
I thought and read a lot about the human brain that summer. About the complex three-pound organ containing a hundred billion neurons branching out to more than a hundred trillion synapse points. About the brain’s one hundred thousand miles of blood vessels. Neuroanatomists have named the fissures and sulci and lobes: cerebrum, cerebellum, hypothalamus, medulla oblongata. They’ve dissected the parts, traced the neural pathways, analyzed the electrical and chemical properties. Still, no one fully understands how the sucker works. I was definitely at a loss concerning mine.
The skirmish at Body’s house exists in my memory as a hodgepodge of sensory input. Sight. Sound. Smell. Pain. Lots of pain.
And one crystal-clear snapshot.
A child’s terrified cry. Daddy! Body turning on the beat of that word, a look of devastation on his face. The same look mirrored on hers.
At the station, Body, Unger, and Kimrey were allowed to see that Yates Timmer was also enjoying the hospitality of the CMPD. Each was hosted in a separate interview room. All that day and the next, I observed the questioning, shifting from window to window as Slidell moved up and down the hall.
The four “persons of interest” stonewalled briefly, eventually turned on one another. But gently, not with the save-your-ass savagery we’d expected. More like playground snitches sharing benign crumbs. Some info came out. Not what we’d hoped.
The child with the trophy was Body’s daughter, AvaLeigh Tayman. AvaLeigh’s mother had left Body years earlier, subsequently remarried. Needless to say, the divorce decree included a monster nondisclosure clause. Thus, their names never surfaced in any of my online searches.
AvaLeigh made occasional visits to the fenced property in Cleveland County. The teeth and pink sneaker were hers. She was probably the child Duncan Keesing saw driven through the gate. The child whose face he’d painted on his barrel.
The house at Lake Wylie was a sales office for Timmer’s inventory of abandoned military silos and bunkers. And a clubhouse for local “homeowners” in his two underground condo complexes. Rah-rah promotional pitches were made there. Social events were held. Movie night. Steaks on the grill. Cocktails cruising the lake.
According to Body, his motive for investing with Timmer was purely financial. According to Timmer, his partner’s reasons were more complex. Fearing he carried the mutation for Huntington’s, Body planned to retreat underground if symptoms appeared.
DeepHaven I was a legitimate success. As Unger had stated in his earlier interview, the twelve-story subterranean complex was complete and fully sold out. Timmer told the same story. Documents confirmed it was true.
And an unexpected zinger. Six years back, during her series of on-air conversations on Body Language, Margot Heavner purchased a small unit, the million and a half price significantly discounted in exchange for inside morgue information, especially on cases involving kids.
To me, an underground getaway seemed out of character for Heavner. I’d have guessed her spare bucks would go for Botox or Jimmy Choos. Struck Slidell that way, too. When he questioned her, Dr. Morgue admitted that money, not survival, was her motivator. She planned to flip the unit for a profit but to date had found no taker.
Guess Heavner’s ethics were even lower than I suspected. Her desire for wealth even stronger.
DeepHaven II was a different situation. The project was hemorrhaging money, and no one was buying. According to both Timmer and Unger, propaganda about missing kids had worked with phase I. Unclear why. People purchase bunkers for a lot of reasons: fear of financial collapse, a race war, a nuke strike, a plague. A survival home is an option that remains empty most of the time. When the big one comes, you can head underground. So why acquire one out of fear of losing your children?
Rightly or wrongly, Body believed the trend was real, so a similar campaign was implemented to boost sales for phase II. Body was using his blogs and podcasts to create panic among his reading and listening public. His defense was repulsive. What the hell? No law against spreading a little alarm.
Each time I listened to a session with the loudmouthed carnival barker, I had to fight back my incredulity. And revulsion. Body wasn’t a defender of the little guy, as he portrayed himself. The blustering bully was in reality a middle-aged cokehead up to his eyeballs in debt. He didn’t live in the little cookie-cutter house on Pine Lily but in a sprawling estate in an area of sprawling estates near Weddington, south of Charlotte. A property titled to another holding company and mortgaged far beyond its value. Not as heinous or dangerous a profile as I’d suspected. Still, the great Oz was a fraud on so many levels my instincts still insisted there was something else there.
Over the years, Felix Vodyanov had been tasked with researching many topics, the Estonia tragedy and missing and murdered children being but two. Nothing sinister. Nothing violent. No kid was ever harmed by anyone involved with Body Language or DeepHaven. On that point, all four held firm.