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“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.”
Chapter 14
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.”
Chapter 15
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?”
