A Conspiracy of Bones (Temperance Brennan #19)(7)

Slidell had also gone radio silent. Erskine “Skinny” Slidell, a combo of bluster and paunch and bad polyester, was for decades a detective with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department homicide squad, thus Ryan’s equivalent in Dixie. Not in the sheets, just in the murder probes. Like Ryan, Slidell had also retired and shifted to PI work, though he continued as a volunteer with the CMPD cold-case unit. I was never sure of Slidell’s whereabouts lately, either.

I heard from no one. Saw no trace of my cat. The annex was filled with a silence so total I wondered if the previous week’s migraine had caused a mini-stroke resulting in hearing loss.

By one o’clock, I was suffused with enough manic energy to summit Everest solo.

OK, Brennan. Showtime.

Grabbing a Diet Coke and the laptop, I double-stepped up to the spiffy new addition.

Light was slicing through the slats of the plantation shutters. The gray shutters that were supposed to be white. I made a mental note to phone my contractor first thing Monday. Cursed when I remembered he’d taken off for Puerto Rico to help his brother rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Revised note. Call the painter.

The air was infused with the sweet smell of freshly sawed wood. OK. That was sort of nice.

One of the two desks was new, the brainchild of some chichi designer who’d probably dubbed the style Italian Modern Chic. Slab-of-glass top, stainless-steel legs. I’d found the stark lines jarring at first. Had to admit, the thing was growing on me.

Two pictures hung above the gleaming glass, below the point where the new roof angled down to meet the new wall. Ryan, second from the right top row, taller than most in his police academy graduating class. Ryan in a S?reté du Québec officer’s dress uniform, arm wrapping the shoulders of his daughter, Lily, now several years dead from a heroin overdose.

Atop the gleaming glass, illuminated by an off-angle slash of daylight, a Canadiens bobblehead signed by Guy Lafleur. Beside the bobblehead, a lamp that looked like a twisted hunk of wing from a Nebulon frigate.

I settled at the other desk, old and familiar, a flea-market find the chichi designer would have labeled Salvation Army Reject. Wiring dangled from the ceiling and jutted from the wall above me, a stark reminder of the electrician, as incompetent and unreliable as the painter. The two phone confrontations that would brighten my Monday.

Diplomas waited on my desktop, ready for hanging. Northwestern University MA and PhD degrees. An American Board of Forensic Anthropology diplomate certificate.

Beside the diplomas, framed photos sat on the patina-glazed oak. Mama and Daddy smiling over two blond-plaited girls in pinafores. Pete and I holding an infant Katy. Ryan and I outside an auberge in the Quebec countryside. Larabee and I on an AAFS panel.

Daddy. Larabee. Both dead. Pete and I, metaphorically so. The chronology of a shattered life?

Christ, Brennan. Give it a rest.

Ryan and Slidell, retired and in partnership. PIs, not cops. Heavner in charge and myself exiled from the MCME. The reconfiguration of my well-ordered world was blowing my arterially compromised mind.

Call it a character flaw. A product of aging. I’d only owned up to the weakness in the past few months.

I dislike change.

Thus, my reluctance to relocate to this new space.

But I was here now. With everything related to the faceless man. New investigation. New era. The rest of my files and documents I would bring up piecemeal.

Goaded by my irritation with Heavner, I opened the laptop, went to Google, and entered the name “Hardin Symes.”

Not much came up. But enough.

There was coverage of the child’s disappearance and the massive search that ensued. The tragic outcome. All reports were consistent on the basics.

Seven-year-old Hardin Symes lived with his mother, grandmother, and two sisters in an apartment on East Indiana Avenue in Bismarck, North Dakota. On August 19, 2012, Hardin was snatched while playing alone on the complex’s front lawn. Neighbors reported seeing a dark-haired man forcing a child into a car. Five days later, Hardin’s decomposing corpse was found by hunters fifteen miles from where he’d lived.

A 2014 article in the Bismarck Tribune reported on the trial of Jonathan Fox, the suspect charged with Hardin’s murder. The defense argued that all the evidence was circumstantial and that public statements made by the ME had prejudiced the defendant. The jury ended up deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial.

Of particular interest was a story that appeared on the three-year anniversary of Hardin’s death. Seventeen months before Hardin had been taken, eight-year-old Jack Jaebernin had disappeared from his home in the same neighborhood. Jack’s father said a dark-haired stranger had invited his son to a local park to catch frogs. Though he’d been warned not to go, the boy went anyway. That night, a family out hiking found Jack’s beaten body in a forest twelve miles away. An autopsy showed he’d been strangled or smothered.

The parallels were striking. The two boys had lived just blocks apart. They’d disappeared within a year and a half of each other. They were roughly the same age. Both were dumped in wooded areas at approximately the same distances from their homes. And, most telling, Jonathan Fox had rented a unit in the same apartment complex as Hardin Symes’s family.

Though the Bismarck police were convinced they’d arrested the right guy, Fox was never retried. In 2015, the department’s cold-case homicide squad began sifting through boxes, looking for sufficient evidence to nail the bastard.