Brian Freeman - The Bone House

She also remembered something Amy had said in her email back then. It was the kind of throwaway line that a college girl would use. He's a good coach, if you can get past the creepy factor. That was the word she'd used. Creepy.

Hilary wanted to know more about Gary Jensen.

She visited the UWGB web site and drilled down to the athletics page. She found a link to the coach's biography in the faculty roster. The first thing she noticed was that, unlike most instructors, Jensen had no photograph posted on his page. His bio indicated that he'd taught at the school for four years, and she thought it was odd that he'd managed to duck the photo shoots for so long.

His bio said little about his past. He had a bachelor's degree in physical education and a master's in educational leadership, both from the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Based on his years of graduation, Hilary calculated that Jensen was in his mid-forties. At Green Bay, he taught physical education classes for freshmen and coached dance and wrestling. What was missing from his bio was detailed information about his work experience prior to his arrival in Green Bay. The summary was vague: 'Gary has been an adjunct professor and coach at colleges in Alaska, Oregon, South Dakota, and Canada.'

Despite the lack of specifics, his bio raised no red flags. Even so, Hilary kept digging, looking for more information about Jensen's past. She found references to him — or to someone with his name — in articles about sports teams in Anchorage and Portland, but most of the articles were more than ten years old. The name was also common enough that she found thousands of pages on men named Gary Jensen who had no connection at all to Amy's coach.

Then she found a headline on one of her searches that caught her attention.

COACH'S WIFE DIES IN FALL.

She read the brief article from the Green Bay newspaper. Not even four months earlier, Gary Jensen had lost his wife during a rock-climbing vacation in Zion National Park. The couple had been married only three years. Jensen was described as devastated. Heartbroken. The Utah Police had investigated the incident and found no evidence to suggest the death was anything other than what Jensen described. A terrible, tragic accident.

Hilary wondered. Two violent deaths in four months, and both times, Gary Jensen was nearby. A coincidence?

She of all people knew that smoke didn't mean fire when it came to guilt or innocence. Mark had suffered when others jumped to conclusions. She had nothing specific to feed her suspicions about Jensen. No connection to Glory. Nothing in the man's background. Just Amy's unsettling phone call. And a dead wife.

Hilary returned to Amy's profile page. She knew that Amy posted photographs compulsively, and she found an album dedicated to the girl's dance activities. The album included nearly one hundred pictures of Amy and her college teammates in performances and competitions over the past three years. Hilary went through the pictures one by one, eyeing the backgrounds, trying to find a photo in which she could spot Gary Jensen.

She found three pictures. Jensen wasn't the focus in any of them; he was standing behind the girls. When she enlarged the photos, she was only able to obtain two-inch by two-inch squares on her screen, not enough to see his face in detail. She squinted, focusing on his balding crown of hair and his narrow face. One of the pictures was in profile, and she could see the sharp V-angle of his nose. He looked fit and fat-free. She printed out the best of the pictures, and then she ran another search.

This time she hunted for a photo of Harris Bone.

A man with no identity could be anyone at all, she reasoned to herself. Even a fugitive with another dead wife in his past.

The newspapers had all used the same photo of Bone at the time of the fire, a face-front shot from his arraignment. Hilary printed that photo and compared the two. The results were inconclusive. There were some similarities between the two men, but Hilary couldn't be sure if she was looking at a ghost or a stranger. If Gary Jensen was Harris Bone, then he'd lost weight in the last six years and probably had some surgical work done to his facial features. The most she could say was that it wasn't impossible. On the other hand, the faint resemblance may have been nothing more than her own wishful thinking.

Hilary frowned and rocked back in her chair. The only way to be sure was to know what Gary Jensen was doing six years earlier, before he arrived at Green Bay, when Harris Bone was burning down his house in Door County. She ran another search, and this time she found a brief notice about Jensen's hiring. The article was no more than three paragraphs long, but it provided her with the one fact she needed. The university had hired Jensen away from a coaching position at a private high school in Fargo.

One of Hilary's best friends at Northwestern was the director of financial affairs at the same school.

She dialed the number. She hadn't spoken to Pamela Frank in almost three years, but they still sent Christmas cards and the occasional e-mail. When she reached Pam at her desk, she was relieved to discover that news of Mark's problems hadn't made its way to Fargo. The last thing she wanted to do was rehash the events of the past week. Instead, after five minutes of small talk, she got to the point.

'Listen, there's a name I want to run by you,' Hilary said. 'Someone who may have been a coach or teacher at the school a few years ago. Gary Jensen.'

Pam was silent on the phone for a long while. 'OK.'

'Do you know him?'

'I remember him, sure.'

'How long was he there?' Hilary asked.

'Three or four years, as I recall.' Pam was oddly close-mouthed.

'What do you remember about him?'

'Why do you want to know?' Pam asked. 'Is this in conjunction with some kind of employment application?'

'No, nothing like that. It's personal.'

'Oh.' She sounded relieved. 'I have to be careful what I say, Hilary. It's too damn easy to get sued.'

'You know me, Pam. This goes no further.'

'Let's just say we weren't unhappy when he left us to go to Green Bay. That was about four years ago.'

'What was wrong with him?' Hilary asked.

'We didn't have any real evidence,' Pam said. 'It was just rumors.'

'Rumors about what?'

'Sex with students,' Pam said in a clipped tone. 'We investigated but couldn't prove anything. The law says we can't talk about unproven allegations in a reference check, so there wasn't anything we could say to the folks in Green Bay. But it was solid enough that his wife divorced him.'

The second wife wasn't so lucky, Hilary thought.

'What's going on?' Pam asked. 'Is Jensen in trouble again?'

'I don't know.'

'Well, you said it was personal. I assume you're not involved with this guy?'

'God, no.'

'Good. I never heard anything bad about his work as a coach, but if you ask me, he was creepy.'

'I appreciate the information, Pam.'

'How's Mark?'

'Great. Just great.'

'Tell him I said hi.'

'I will.'

Hilary hung up the phone. She didn't know how to interpret what she'd found. Pam knew Jensen from his years in Fargo, which overlapped with the timeline of the fire. That meant one thing: Gary Jensen was not Harris Bone.

So who was he?

Amy and Pam had both used the same word to describe him. Creepy. If Pam was right, the coach also had a history of sexual relationships with underage girls.

Like Glory.

Hilary stared at the fuzzy image of Gary Jensen in Amy's photograph. She wished that the phone call with Amy hadn't ended so abruptly.

She wished she knew where Amy was.

Amy awoke to find that her senses had been stripped. She opened her eyes and saw nothing. She tried to scream, but her mouth was stuffed with a wadded-up cloth that made her cough and choke. When she moved, she found that her wrists and ankles were tightly bound. She was on her back on what felt like a soft mattress. When she turned her head, her brain was still dizzy with pain. She tried to piece her memory together, but her mind was blank, and she struggled in confusion and panic before she remembered Gary Jensen.