James Patterson: 7th Heaven

I reevaluated Melody Chado as she fought with Yuki. Chado had either had a great education, grown up in a family of lawyers – or both. Junie fell back in her chair, turned a shocked face toward her breathless attorney. I guessed that Chado’s description had blown off whatever romance was left of Junie’s memory of Michael Campion.

“I want to hear about the knife, Junie,” Rich said, steering the interview to our only piece of evidence.

“The knife?” Junie asked.

“We found a knife under your sofa. Looks like bloodstains on the blade. It’ll take a few days to get the DNA results, but if you help us, Ms. Castellano will take that as another sign of your cooperation.”

“Don’t answer,” said Melody Chado. “We’re done .”

Junie was looking at Rich, and she was talking over her attorney. “I thought the knife went into one of the garbage bags,” she said to my partner. “So I don’t know what knife you found. But listen, I remember the name of the town.”

“Junie, that’s enough. That’s all!”

“I think it was Johnson,” Junie said to Rich. “I saw a sign when we got off the highway.”

“ Jackson?” I asked. “Was it Jackson?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“You’re sure about that? I thought you said you drove up the coast.”

“I’m pretty sure. It was late, I got confused. I wasn’t trying to remember,” she told me, her eyes downcast. “I was trying to forget.”

THE TOWN OF JACKSON was known for its cowboy cookouts and craft fairs. It also had a sizable dump. It was just after noon, and the smell of rot was rising as the sun cooked the refuse. Gulls and buzzards circled the trash dunes that filled our view out to the foothills.

Sheriff Oren Braun pointed out the square acre of landfill he’d had cordoned off – the approximate section where waste had been unloaded at the end of January.

“Soon as I got the call from the governor I had my boys on it,” Braun told me and Conklin. “ ‘Pull out the stops,’ that’s what he said.”

We were looking for eight black plastic garbage bags in a sea of black plastic garbage bags. A hundred yards uphill, a dozen members of the sheriff’s department were picking very slowly through the three thousand tons of refuse piled twenty feet high, and the dump foreman was assisting the dog handler, who followed behind his two cadaver dogs as they trotted over the site.

I was trying to maintain some optimism, but that was tough to do in this grim landscape. I mumbled to Rich, “After three months out here, all that’ll be left of Michael’s corpse will be ligaments and bones.”

And then, as if I’d telepathically cued them, the dogs alerted.

Conklin and I joined the sheriff in stepping cautiously toward the frenzied, singing hounds.

“There’s something in this bag,” their handler said.

The hounds had located a plastic shopping bag, the thin supermarket kind. I stooped down, saw that the plastic had been ripped, that the contents were wrapped in newspaper. I parted the newspaper wrapper. Saw the decomposing remains of a newborn child. The baby’s skin was loose and greenish, the soft tissues eaten by rats, so that it was no longer possible to tell if it was a boy or a girl. The date on the newspaper was only a week old.

Someone hadn’t wanted this child. Had it been smothered? Was it stillborn? At this stage of decomposition, the ME might never know. Rich was crossing himself and saying a few words over the baby’s remains when my Nextel rang.

I walked downhill as I answered the call, glad to turn my eyes from the terrible sight of that dead child.

“Tell me something good, Yuki,” I begged her. “Please.”

“Sorry, Lindsay. Junie Moon has recanted her confession.”

“ No . Come on! Michael didn’t die in her arms?” My roiling innards sank. Right now, all we had was Junie’s confession.

How could she take that back?

“Yeah. Now she says that she had nothing to do with Michael Campion’s death and disappearance. She’s saying that her confession was coerced.”

“Coerced? By whom?” I asked, still not getting it.

“By you and Conklin. The mean ol’ cops made her confess to something that never, ever happened.”

SUSIE’S CAFÉ IS KIND OF a cross between Cheers and a tiki hut bar on a beach in St. Lucia. The food is spicy, the steel drums are live, the margaritas are world-class, and not only do the waitresses know our names, they know enough to leave us alone when we’re into something – as Cindy and I were now.

We were in our booth in the back room, and I was glaring at Cindy over my beer.

“You understand? Talking to you off the record is ‘leaking.’ Just saying to you that I was working a new lead on the Campion case could jam me up!”

“I swear, Lindsay, I didn’t use what you said. I didn’t need a quote from you because I got the story from upstairs .”

“How is that possible?”

“Management has a source and I did an interview and I am not telling you with whom ,” she said, setting down her beer mug hard on the table. “But the point is, you can hold your head up, Linds, because you told me nothing. Okay? That’s the truth .”

I’m several years older than Cindy, and we’ve had a big sister, little sister thing since she crashed my crime scene a few years back and then helped me close the case.

It’s hard to be friends with reporters when you’re a cop. Their rationalized “public’s need to know” gives bad guys the heads-up and messes up jury pools.

You can’t truly trust reporters.

On the other hand, I love Cindy, and I trusted her 99 percent of the time. She sat across from me in her snow-white silk sweater, blond curls bouncing like mattress springs, her two overlapping front teeth making her pretty features look even prettier. She looked totally innocent of my accusation, and she was holding her ground.

“Okay,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Okay and I’m sorry?”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Good. You’re forgiven. So, can you tell me what’s happening on this case?”

“You’re a funny girl, Cindy,” I said, laughing and waving my hand so that Yuki and Claire could see us from the doorway.

Claire was so far along in her pregnancy she couldn’t fit in the booth anymore. I got up, moved a chair to the head of the table for Claire, as Yuki slipped in beside Cindy. Lorraine took our orders, and as soon as she’d left us, Yuki said to Cindy, “ Whatever I say, even if it’s in the public domain, it’s off the record.”

Claire and I cracked up.

“What a pain. See, people think it’s actually an advantage that I know you guys,” Cindy said, sighing dramatically.

“The hearing to suppress Junie Moon’s confession? It went great,” Yuki told us. “Since Junie had been Mirandized when she confessed, the judge says it’s admissible.”

“Excellent,” I said, letting out my breath. “A break for the good guys.”

“Yuki, you’re trying her for a murder and you don’t have a body?” Claire asked.

“It’s a circumstantial case, but circumstantial cases are won all the time,” Yuki said. “Look, I’d be happier with physical evidence. I’d be happier if Ricky Malcolm made any kind of a corroborating statement.

“But the powers that be are piling on the pressure. Plus, we can win.”

Yuki stopped to gulp down some beer, then carried on.

“The jury is going to believe Junie’s confession. They’re going to believe her, and they’re going to hold her responsible for Michael Campion’s death.”