THE BOOK OF TRUTH
by Nancy Pickard

Nancy Pickard brings her series character Marie Lightfoot, a writer of true crime, to EQMM this month. The first of Lightfoot’s three book-length cases, The Whole Truth, earned a nomination for the Edgar, and the subsequent novels, Ring of Truth and The Truth Hurts, were published to rave reviews. Ms. Pickard’s latest novel, The Virgin of Small Plains (Ballantine), is a non-series book set in her home state of Kansas. 

* * * *

“Is this really Marie Lightfoot?”

“It is.” I smiled down at a copy of my new book that just happened to be in my lap when I picked up the phone. The author’s photo on the back sure enough did look like me. “This is Marie.”

“You answer your own phone?”

It was a friendly, incredulous, older male voice.

“I do.” I was in a good mood. The book had entered the New York Times bestseller list at number three, up two places from my last one. Even better, I wasn’t blocked on my current manuscript. Another couple of uninterrupted months and I might even make the deadline. Teasing my caller, whoever he was, I said, “I also sweep my own floors, eat my own food, and I even write my own books. Who’s this?”

“Amazing. I’d have thought—oh, never mind, you don’t want to hear all that. Ms. Lightfoot, my name is Luis Cannistre. I am one year away from retiring from the Bismarck, North Dakota, Police Department and there is a case I need to see solved before I leave here.”

“All right,” I said, meaning only, okay, I’m listening. Bismarck. That was a new one. For that matter, so was North Dakota. I had written about criminal cases in many different locales, including my own hometown of Bahia Beach, Florida, but I had never pursued a case as far north as he was located. Already slightly intrigued by the setting, if nothing else, I said, “What’s the case?”

“Triple murder, although not all at once. Three young women. Abducted and killed over a period of three weeks, twelve years ago.”

Once he got over his surprise about me, he was succinct.

“I’m guessing you have a prime suspect?” I said, knowing that most unsolved murders do have favorite suspects, albeit without enough evidence to prosecute them.

“Oh, we’ve got a suspect, all right,” he said, in a wry tone.

“Where is he now?”

“He’s in prison, Ms. Lightfoot. He’s serving a life term for killing one of them.”

“Then what’s the problem? Do you think this guy was wrongly convicted, Mr. Cannistre? Or is it Detective?”

“Detective.” He had given his name the Spanish pronunciation. Loueese Cahneestray, with a trilled r. As a native of south Florida, my tongue wrapped around it easily. Or maybe it was just that I had drunk enough Cuban coffee in my time that I had finally assimilated the language along with the café con leche. “No, we’ve got the right man,” he said.

“Okay, well, if you’ve already got him, then what—”

“We’ve got him. We don’t have them.”

“Them?”

“The victims.” He cleared his throat and told me more. “There was enough evidence to convict him without the bodies, including blood in his car and ATM and grocery-store video of him with one of the victims after she disappeared. But twelve years later and the son of a bitch—pardon my language—still won’t say where he put any of them. The families suffer, Ms. Lightfoot. All these years and all they want to do is bury their loved ones. And I can’t stand to retire without knowing they can.”

“I take it these were your cases.”

“Yes, ma’am, they were. Still are, the way I feel about them.”

“And I come into this how, Detective?”

“He’s a big fan of yours.”

“Who?”

“Darren Betch. The man who killed them. He is pretty much obsessed with any true-crime book, but he is a fanatic for yours.”

I wasn’t surprised. I’m a big hit in prison libraries. For those guys it’s akin to reading trade journals. I’m like Business Week for serial killers. They can read about the masters of their trade. I work very hard, however, at not giving them ideas about how to do it better, and to make the lawmen the heroes.

“If Darren could get you to write his story it would be like getting on the cover of Time magazine to him. He’d think he was ‘da man’ of the year.”

“I don’t write to glorify these guys,” I said, a shade defensively.

“But it does, in their minds.”

I didn’t say anything.

“If you saw the fan mail he gets,” Cannistre said, “the proposals of marriage—”

“Yeah, well, some women are nuts.”

“Imagine how much more nuts they’ll be if he’s the hero of one of your books—”

“Not hero,” I said firmly. “Villain. Bad guy. Killer. Not hero.”

“Ms. Lightfoot, I’m not trying to offend you. Hell, I love your books, myself. We’ve got off on the wrong track here and it’s my fault. Let me back up and tell you why I’m really calling.”

Again, I kept silent. He had dug a hole for himself with me.

While I waited to see if he could recover ground, I picked up half of the lobster-salad sandwich that sat on a plate on my desk, and nibbled at it. He had interrupted my lunch, which suddenly seemed like another strike against him even though I wasn’t all that hungry.

“The thing is,” he said, “twelve years have gone by and it’s finally sinking in with Darren that he’s never going anywhere. He spends most of his time reading true crime. He particularly loves your books, and he’s an arrogant SOB who gets off on publicity, and I think if you wrote a book about him he might tell you where the bodies are buried.”

I inhaled sharply—nearly choking myself on the bite of sandwich I had been swallowing when he said that. “You’re not serious,” I said when I could talk again. “You really think that’s possible?”

“I think it’s worth a try and I’d try anything to help these families. Wouldn’t you?”

“Detective, of course I’d like to help the families, but do you know what you’re asking? You’re asking me to write a book about this guy. Do you think I just whip those out over a spare weekend? It can take me a couple of years to write one of my books, a year to research and another year to write and rewrite. Not to mention that I’m already in the middle of one. I’d like to help, I really would, but I don’t think you know what you’re asking.”

“It’s a fascinating story. It would make a great book, Ms. Lightfoot.”

“Maybe, but it’s not my book. I have my own work I’m doing.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have to write anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, maybe you could just make him think you are going to.”

I went silent again. I had no idea if such a thing could work, but the idea made it harder to turn him down completely.

“Like I told you,” he said persuasively, “the families just want to know.”

Damn the man. How could I go back to my other book when guilt was now calling my name? Grudgingly, I said, “I guess we could talk about it, at least.”

“Great! Any chance you can come here?”

“You don’t want much, do you?” I said, and he laughed a little.

I dumped the book off my lap and sighed. “All right, Detective Cannistre. Where? When?”

* * * *

Luis Cannistre picked me up at the Bismarck Airport five days later.

He turned out to be a tall, lanky man in his late forties. He wore a white dress shirt, bolo tie, black suit, and hiking boots. A pungent scent of cigar smoke lingered in his car, but I didn’t mind: Being from so close to Miami, I’m nearly as accustomed to cigar smoke as I am to café con leche. He wore his metal-gray hair in a flattop. It had been a long time since I’d seen a grown man in a flattop, but it suited him. Me, I was dressed for business and prison: black slacks, black shirt, short black jacket. No bolo tie. Also no pockets that would need to be emptied, no underwire bra to set off the metal detectors, and no jewelry to take off.

As we drove east from the airport, he glanced over at me and said, “Most people, the first thing they say about Bismarck is that it’s flat.”

I smiled out the car window at the proof of that. “Hey, I’m from Florida. We invented flat.”

The Missouri River was behind us. The North Dakota State Prison was ahead of us. There was nothing but flat all around us. I felt right at home, give or take a few palm trees and an ocean or two.

“We have a nineteen-story skyscraper,” he said with wry braggadocio.

“And you can see it from four counties.”

He laughed. “Just about.” Then the smile faded and he glanced at me with a sober expression on his deeply tanned and weathered face. “I expect you’ve done some homework since the last time we spoke.”

“Erin Belafonte,” I said, staring at the highway and clicking into my memory. “Twenty-two. Jessica Burge, thirty-one. Caroline Meyers, thirty-two. Those two, Jessie and Caroline, were best friends. Nobody knows for sure if they knew Erin, but a lot of people felt sure they had at least been acquainted, because they tended to hang out at the same TGIF parties in the condo complex where Darren Betch worked maintenance. He showed up at the parties. The guys liked him. The girls thought he was hot.”

“A few of the men did not like that,” Luis commented drily.

“I’ll bet. Betch never arrived with anybody, but he sometimes left with someone. Never the same someone, apparently. The last woman who was seen going out the door with him was Erin Belafonte. That was also the last time she was seen by anybody who knew her. She was captured on videotape at an ATM machine two days later and then on a grocery-store camera that night.”

I went silent, because so had Erin Belafonte, and my heart suddenly hurt for her.

“She looked terrified,” I said, and then cleared my throat.

“You all right?” Cannistre asked.

I nodded, but turned to the window so he couldn’t see the tears that had come to my eyes. “I write about a lot of them. If I don’t feel it, I can’t write it. Just now, at that moment, that’s the first time since you brought up this case to me that I felt anything about it.”

“Does that mean you’ll do it?”

I stared out the windshield. “I don’t know, but at least it means I can do it.”

We came within sight of a big red brick building that could only have been a nineteenth-century prison or orphanage. Clean, plain grounds. A tower above the main floors. Foreboding. Grim. I never get blasé about the first moment of seeing a prison, any prison. There is always that flash of claustrophobia, that instant of depression, before reality shoves through and reminds me I’m just a visitor. At those moments, and even when I know that certain lives, lived certain ways, could probably only end up in such places, I want to know, What were you thinking? How could you have been so stupid?”

* * * *

We went through the preliminary security, got our hands stamped with ultraviolet ink, entered a code to get through gate one, went through a turnstile, presented our visitor’s passes, and then went through four more iron-barred, clanging gates to get to the visiting room. This being North Dakota, the room was different in one respect from other prison visiting rooms I had seen. There were the usual vending machines and toys for children, but this one also had display cases of Native American arts and crafts made by the inmates and offered for sale. I saw some beautiful beaded jewelry.

Security was provided by an officer on a raised platform in the room and also, Cannistre told me, by two other officers in a control room where they were operating and monitoring two 360-degree cameras. The cameras’ “eyes” were smoked glass balls in the ceiling and it was impossible to tell which way they were pointed at any time.

Cannistre went to stand near the officer on the raised platform.

I chose one of the twenty round oak tables in the room, one in a far corner away from the children’s toys, and sat down to await the arrival of “my” inmate. Women alone and with children began to come in, along with a smattering of obvious lawyers. Then it was the inmates’ turn. Their shoes sounded heavily on the gleaming white linoleum floor. Soon the room filled with the quiet murmuring of adults and with children’s noises.

I had time to think about the killers I have known and to wonder how he had come to be hung in their gallery. It’s ... weird ... talking face-to-face to people who you know have done hideous things. Sometimes it takes an act of will to remember that, because there they are sitting across from you, laughing, talking, crying (a few of them), drinking sodas, looking like any other human being except for the prison haircut, pallor, and clothing. No horns. No twitching tail. No bloody fangs. Sometimes they’re likable. Sometimes they’re pitiful. Their annoyances sound as petty as anybody else’s—too much light, not enough light, too much noise, too quiet, they hate the food, they’re broke, their woman done them wrong, whatever. And all the while the knowledge of what they did hangs between us like an invisible movie on an invisible screen. Sometimes I think I can hear the soundtrack. I hear faint distant screaming, the whispers of somebody dying.

My last few books had killers who were definitely short on charisma. I was overdue for a “charmer” like Ted Bundy.

It arrived in spades and then some.

He was so good-looking in such an unusual way that it was startling. Having seen earlier photos of him I could tell that prison had sapped and faded some of his appeal, but it was still impressive. He sat down, or rather ... kind of gracefully, athletically swung himself down into the chair across the table from me ... and grinned around the gum he was chewing.

Darren Betch was not Native American, but you’d have sworn he was.

Whatever his true heritage, it had given him a big strong physique, black hair, smooth olive skin, generous lips, and a strong nose. In North Dakota, home to large reservations, he could easily be mistaken for belonging to a tribe if he wanted to, which apparently he did. It had come as a surprise to the other people who attended the big TGIF parties when they found out that the big handsome guy with the beaded shirt and the long braid wasn’t any more Indian than they were.

“Why did he do that?” I had asked the detective.

“It helped him get girls who might not otherwise have gone with him, Marie. These were nice girls. A little wild, maybe, but basically decent girls. In the end, that’s what killed them. They couldn’t say no to Darren, because they thought he was Indian, and they were afraid of looking prejudiced. He knew that. He used it. I told you, he is one cunning son of a bitch.”

It was an ironic, appalling theory, and easy to believe when I saw him.

Even now, in the prison, he wore his long black hair in a classic, handsome Indian braid. If I hadn’t known it wasn’t true, I would have sworn he had braves and chiefs in his genealogy. He clasped his hands in front of him on the table and shoved forward so he was leaning toward me with his knuckles just over the halfway line between us. He was suddenly so close that I smelled the cinnamon in his gum. His khaki shirt sleeves were rolled up, showing off football-player forearms. He had eyes the color of pecan pie, soft brown and caramel with flecks of gold.

He wasted no time.

Locking eyes with me, he said, “May I call you Marie?”

Looking right back at him, I said pleasantly and firmly, “No.”

Then, immediately, I bent over to pick up my notebook and pen from the floor where I had placed them on purpose. It was a ploy to avoid shaking hands with him. I hardly ever do that at this stage with a potential book subject. I won’t refuse the handshake if they make the move, but normally I can arrange the distance between us, or shift my eye contact, so that it’s not going to happen. It’s strange, but most of these guys seem to understand that strangers don’t want to shake hands with them. There’s something too ... accepting ... about it, as if it confers approval. I usually wait for the handshake until it can mean something else, something unambiguous like goodbye, or thanks for your time.

I was also careful not to shift my own posture, not to scoot back or stiffen when he edged so close to me, and definitely not to respond to the flirtatiousness in his beautiful eyes. It was crucial that I not allow him to control my movements by the aggressive friendliness and sensuality of his. Crucial, but not easy. I could manipulate interviews with the best of them, but he had the advantage of being both manipulative and a sociopath. Sort of like the difference between amateurs and pros.

“Thank you for meeting me, Mr. Betch.”

He gave me a slow crooked smile. “Call me Darren.”

I smiled back at him, a cool-eyed smile I keep in my repertoire and don’t much like to have to use. In a relaxed tone of voice that was only possible by virtue of my other experiences with men who have killed women, I said, “I understand you’re familiar with my work.”

I was being even more cautious than I usually am with these guys, because the first words out of his mouth—”May I call you Marie?”—screamed control freak. This was the kind of guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer and who kept after you until you got in his car, let him in your house, gave him the access that killed you. Before he even said hello to me he was taking the reins of the conversation, or trying to. It was going to be fascinating to watch him persist, which he would. Oh, he would. On the pad of paper in my lap I began making hash marks with my pen. One slash for every time he brought up my name. There was one mark on my pad already and we weren’t even one minute into the interview.

“You’re the best,” he told me, with that smile. “I love your work.”

I wondered if he thought I was going to tell him that I loved his, too.

“Thank you.”

“That last one, Marie, that was shit-hot.”

I put my pen on the table, picked up my pad, and started to get up.

“Ms. Lightfoot, I meant to say.” His grin turned little-boyish.

I sat back down and made a second hash mark.

“I figured it wasn’t the ‘shit’ that bothered you,” he said in a teasing tone, making verbal air quotes around the obscenity. “I mean, your books are pretty blunt with the language, so I figure you don’t offend easy that way. Are you offended by your name? That’s kind of sad, Marie. What’s the matter with your name? Don’t you like it?”

Hash mark. Three. 

This was where I was supposed to get flustered. This was where I was supposed to turn red and stammer, “There’s nothing the matter with my name. I like it okay.” And he was supposed to smile charmingly at me and press closer to me and say, “I think it’s a beautiful name. That’s why I want to say it....”

“I’m more interested in the names Erin, Jessica, and Caroline,” I said.

He pulled back just slightly, before he could stop himself. It was just enough for both of us to know who was in control here and that so far, it wasn’t him.

“Those are beautiful names,” I said, and this time it was I who clasped my hands together and leaned forward on the table. “They were beautiful girls. But there are a lot of beautiful girls who get killed, unfortunately. Dime a dozen, you might say. As you can probably imagine,” I continued, “I hear about a lot of murder cases. I can take my pick of them to write about, Darren.”

A bit of emphasis on his first name.

There had been a shift. He had heard the threat: Behave yourself or I walk and you lose your only chance to get the world’s premier author of true-crime books to write about you, Darren.

“You write about me, you’ll sell a lot of books,” he boasted.

“I write about anybody, I’ll sell a lot of books.”

A flash of anger passed across his face. I’d hit his ego. What I saw within him in that instant scared the hell out of me, and I hoped he couldn’t see that pass across my face. I had to do it this way, had to push him fast, had to get a glimpse of what he could do, who he could be, before I could lower the boom.

“You want me to write about you, Darren?”

He shrugged, offended.

“You’re an interesting guy,” I told him, feeding him now.

For my trouble I got an unnerving glimpse of something else in him—that canny, intelligent part that Luis Cannistre had alluded to. He hadn’t fallen for my flattery; he had heard it as weakness.

“There are other authors I like, too,” he said, laughing at me now.

“Oh, bullshit. You know I’m the best there is. You would, if you’ll pardon the expression, kill to have me write about you. I’m going to do it, but only on one condition.”

He began to smile. He knew what it was.

“I won’t write the book without knowing where the bodies are.”

I don’t know what I thought he might say to that, but nowhere in my wildest imagination did I ever dream it would be what he did say.

“Here’s the deal,” he said, with a suddenly dead-serious look in his eyes. I wondered what the expression in his eyes had been the last time the women looked at him. I shivered inside. “You show me proof you’re going to write it. Like, a publisher’s contract, okay? And then I’ll give you proof I mean it, too.”

“What kind of proof?”

“I’ll tell you where to find the first body.”

I felt my mouth drop open a little and couldn’t prevent it.

But he wasn’t through shocking and surprising me.

“Finish the book, prove to me that it’s going to be published, and then I’ll tell you where to find the others.” His slow half-smile appeared again and this time when he moved toward me I moved away. “No tricks, Marie. You publish the book, I give you the bodies, do we have a deal?”

“What’s in it for you, Darren?”

He smiled again and shrugged. “I figured it out. If I can’t be free, at least I can be famous.”

* * * *

“That cold SOB,” Cannistre said furiously when I told him. I had waited to tell him until we had navigated the reverse stages of getting through security. Now we stood by his car in the wind-swept parking lot. He slammed his right fist into his left hand as if he were punching it into Betch’s face. The sharp slap of skin on skin made me jump and I moved back a step from him. “Using those girls as bargaining chips!”

“As we were going to do,” I pointed out.

He gave me a look.

I shivered, though the day was warm. “You’re right, it’s different. Sorry. It rubs off.”

“I know what you mean,” he conceded, and then he took a deep breath in an obvious attempt to calm himself. “What did you tell him?”

“That I didn’t know who could approve something like that. I told him I’d get back to him.”

“Good. We have to talk to the families. We’ll use your motel room.”

“I don’t have a motel room,” I reminded him, and then I postulated the obvious: “So I guess that means I’m staying?”

“Aren’t you?”

After a second’s hesitation, I nodded.

Of course I was staying. How could I not?

We were meeting in my motel room, Cannistre told me, because he didn’t want publicity “yet.”

“Yet?” I said.

“It could come in handy later. Whatever he tells you, it could jog somebody else’s memory.”

“Or conscience.”

“That would be nice,” Cannistre said in the deeply wry tone I was coming to associate with him. He had calmed down a lot since I’d first given him the news, but I could still feel the waves of anger coming off of him.

* * * *

I’ve met many friends and families of homicide victims over the years, just as I have met the people who killed their loved ones. But I had never before met them as a group, and certainly never for such a reason.

They all arrived early and then filed through my door to find places to sit in the three chairs, or on the edges of the two beds.

“I’m Erin’s mom,” the first person to come through the door told me.

She wore no makeup save for a dab of lipstick, and she was allowing her hair to go naturally gray. On this warm day she had on a black cotton jumper, a white, long-sleeved blouse with a white cardigan sweater over it, and brown loafers that she wore with hose. She had the gray, hollow-eyed look of someone who has been depressed for years, and her next words gave me an even deeper understanding of why that might be.

“Her dad died the year after she went missing,” Mrs. Belafonte said, so quietly that I had to lean in to hear her. She gave me a forced, reflexive smile that disappeared so fast that I might have thought I only imagined it. “There’s just me now.”

Erin Belafonte, Darren Betch’s first victim, had been an only child.

My heart began to hurt again, in the way it does when I’m confronted with pain I can’t ease.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to her.

She nodded, gently pulled her hand away from mine, and went on into the room.

“This is Billy Sterson,” Cannistre told me by way of introduction to a man in his forties. “He was Jessie’s fiancé. And this is her brother Sam.”

The two men were studies in contrast, and I noticed that they seemed to keep a careful distance from each other, not looking at one another, never touching. The fiancé, Billy, was a tanned, strapping forty-something dressed in black slacks and a pink golf shirt who looked as if he might have just stepped out of the local country club. The brother, Sam Burge, had a leftover hippie look, from his shaggy hair down to his tie-dyed T-shirt and blue jeans and his brown leather sandals. Like the fiancé, he was also probably only in his forties, though, which made him too young to be the real thing.

“My parents can’t be here,” he let me know.

“Typical,” Detective Cannistre muttered behind me, but there wasn’t a chance to turn around and ask him what he meant.

The brother explained, “They moved to Tucson. But if there’s anything they should know—” He held up a cell phone.

“They know about this meeting?” I asked him.

“Oh yeah. They know as much as any of us do.”

The implication was: which isn’t much, and what the hell is this about?

The final three people to arrive, though even they got there a few minutes before six, were Caroline Meyers’s parents and the lawyer they brought with them. Like Jessica Burge’s fiancé, Billy Sterson, they had a healthy and prosperous appearance, all three of them. Mrs. Meyers had on what looked to me to be a St. John suit, a kind of fashion that costs a fortune, wears like steel, and looks classic for a lifetime. Large gold earrings and a gold bracelet matched the buttons; her pumps were the same rich pink color as the suit. Mr. Meyers and the lawyer were both in business suits. He had French cuffs with gold links that looked as if they might have been bought at the same place that supplied his wife’s jewelry.

“Love your books,” the attorney whispered to me when we shook hands at the door. “I wish I had the time to write.”

Don’t we all, I thought, and turned to follow them into my motel room.

* * * *

As they settled into their places, I tried to get a feel for the mood of the room. I thought I detected curiosity, dread, hope, and not a little fear. The fear was understandable. People who’ve lost loved ones to murder are often a lot more fearful all their lives after that; there’s nowhere that ever again feels quite safe to them.

Luis Cannistre dropped our bombshell fast rather than make them suffer through a preface to it. “The son of a bitch has offered to tell us where he buried one of the girls if Marie, here, writes a book about this case. He hasn’t said which one he’ll tell us about. He claims that as soon as she shows him proof she’s going to write it, he’ll direct us to a ... grave. He says she has to finish the whole damn book before he’ll tell us the rest of it.”

Both women gasped at the end of the first sentence.

They all looked stunned at the end of the detective’s brief announcement.

Sam Burge broke the paralysis. “How fast can you write?” He was already on his cell phone. We stared as he listened to his parents on the other end.

When he looked up at us again, I asked him, “What do they say?”

“They think you’re on a wild-goose chase—” He made an apologetic gesture—”but go ahead and do it, anyway.”

“Are you kidding?” Billy Sterson, the man who had been engaged to marry Jessie Burge, shot to his feet. Beneath his golfer’s tan his complexion darkened even more. “Are you out of your minds? I can’t believe we’d give this guy anything he wants. Ever.”

“It may lead us to Jessie’s body,” Luis Cannistre said with brutal frankness.

“So what?” The fiancé came back with equal brutality. “It won’t bring her back, will it? It’ll just make him famous all over again. The only thing any of us will get out of it is heartbreak.”

“Heartbreak?” Her brother’s tone was scathing. “Oh yeah, right, like you were so heartbroken when you married somebody else three months later! You’ve got a wife and three kids, and what have my parents got? Nothing! This may be their best chance to find Jessie, and you don’t have any right to try to stop them.” Sam Burge looked as if he could spring across the motel bedroom and assault the other man. “You can just shut up. You treated her lousy when she was alive and now you’re trying to cheat us out of finding her body?” His voice rose in pitch and volume. “You shouldn’t even be here. I don’t even want to be in the same room with you. What the hell are you even doing here anyway?”

“I invited him,” Cannistre interjected. “He was like family then.”

“Well, he isn’t like family now,” Sam Burge said hotly. “And he shouldn’t get any say in this.”

“I agree,” Mr. Meyers said, and his wife and the lawyer nodded.

The fiancé clamped his mouth shut, and stepped back. He sat back down on the edge of the dresser where he had been leaning, and folded his arms in front of his chest. He looked furious, but he also looked as if he knew he’d been put in his place, and that place didn’t include a vote in these proceedings.

Over in a corner, seated in one of the chairs, Erin’s mother began to cry.

“Yes,” she said, as the tears rolled down her face and she struggled to find a tissue in her purse. “I vote yes. Let’s do it. I don’t care what happens to him or what it does for him, I just want to know where my daughter is.” Her eyes, when she looked from one to the other of us, were pleading. “Please, oh please, all of you say yes.”

Across the room from her, Mrs. Meyers grabbed her husband’s hand.

Her husband said, “Absolutely. God, yes.”

“What if he’s lying?” their lawyer said. “And he doesn’t give us the other two?”

“He will!” Erin’s mom said tearfully, fiercely. “He has to!”

But of course, he didn’t have to. There was nothing riding on it for Betch. If he reneged, what were they going to do, give him another life sentence?

I looked at them all, people I had never met until half an hour ago, and wondered if I could possibly do what they expected of me.

That night my editor faxed a new contract, already signed by the publisher, to my agent, who looked it over to make sure it said everything they had agreed on by telephone, and then she overnighted copies of it to me. At nine the next morning I signed the copies in the presence of Darren Betch.

By eleven, men with shovels were gathered at a leaf-strewn spot in the woods north of Bismarck. The weather had turned chilly, the sky was pewter gray, the air smelled of wood fire burning somewhere. I felt the mood within and around me as one of almost unbearable suspense. Had Betch told me the truth about where she was? And if he had, was his memory good enough to guide us correctly to the place?

“Who are we going to find?” I had asked Betch that morning.

“You need to leave me some surprises,” he had told me, smirking.

The body in the hidden grave was a surprise, all right.

“It’s not any of our girls!” Cannistre yelled, even as he was walking up the hillside to tell me. He looked stunned, distraught. “It’s somebody else. My God, how many women did that son of a bitch kill?!”

The three original families were devastated.

So was the new family ... the family of Susan Mae Lerner, who had been twenty-three years old when she met a guy that nobody knew, in Minnesota, and who told her friends she was going out with him one night and never was seen again. It was easy to identify her. Betch had buried her purse with her.

* * * *

“You lied to me.”

“No, I didn’t.” One hour later, back in the visitors’ room at the prison, with children running wild around us and other inmates talking, arguing, laughing with their wives, girlfriends, lawyers, Darren Betch had a crooked smile on his face. He didn’t sound defensive; he looked amused. “I never said you’d find the Belafonte girl. I only said you’d find the first one.” He paused, lengthening the moment for dramatic effect. “And you did. You really did. You found the first one.”

I wanted to slap him hard enough to leave a permanent mark on his face.

“Games. No. I’m not playing with you.”

“Sure you are.” His smirk widened into a grin. “You’re already a player. You think you can quit now? What do you think you’re going to tell those families? That they’ll never know where their girls are, because you’re too pure to play with me?”

I was too furious to speak.

“Tell you what,” he said, putting his hands behind his head and tipping his chair back on its legs as if he were relaxing on his own back porch. “Give me a couple of chapters, I’ll give you another body, how’s that?”

“How many are there, Darren?”

He smiled. “How many chapters do you have in your books ... Marie?”

“No.” I drew back, appalled, and unable to keep from showing it. “There aren’t that many, are there?”

He brought the legs of his chair back down with a crack that made the whole room go silent. Behind us I heard the guard jump to his feet; I imagined a rifle leveled toward us. Darren gave a casual wave, to indicate there was nothing going on. After a tense couple of moments, I heard the guard sit back down again.

“No,” Darren told me, with his infuriating little smirk, “don’t worry, there aren’t that many. Hell, you must have thirty chapters in most of your books; what do you think I am, some kind of monster?” One more time, the smirk changed into a grin. “Just bring me those first two chapters. How fast can you write?”

* * * *

How fast could I write? 

That was the question, all right, and now the location of all three young women’s bodies depended on it, not just two of them. It was a good question. It was a terrible question. Luis Cannistre had asked me, too. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the maid at the motel stopped making beds long enough to pop her head in my room and inquire.

“Nothing makes me stop writing faster than pressure,” I warned Cannistre. “You’ve got to understand, I’m not a journalist. What I do, it only looks like journalism. I’m a storyteller, like a novelist, only what I write just happens to be true. Stories take their own time to develop, or mine do. I’ve taken six months to do a book, and I’ve taken three years.”

“But what about those books that get put out so fast?” he wanted to know. “Like, there’s a disaster somewhere in the world and two weeks later there’s a book about it. How do they do those?”

And why can’t you? was his unspoken query.

“Those are special cases, with writers who specialize in the quick and dirty.”

“But he wants you.”

I nearly smiled, he sounded so regretful.

“And I’m going to hire one of them.”

“You are? Who’s going to pay for that?”

“I am, Luis.”

He didn’t say anything but I saw from the way his jaw began to work that he was either gritting his teeth or feeling touched by my offer.

But I didn’t want any credit for doing it. I couldn’t finish my other book obligations—on which several million dollars of my publisher’s money hung—and also research and write this one, all at the same time. I needed professional help, a hired gun of a writer. If a book actually resulted, it would pay the freight. And if it didn’t, well, I already had more money than was good for me.

In Luis’s car, miles before we reached the prison to confront our game-playing killer, I was already on my cell phone to my agent to get her to find me a two-week wonder. Then I called my assistant to tell her to get her rear to North Dakota.

* * * *

My hired gun, Markie Lentz, wasn’t any taller than me, but he had twice the energy in his compact frame. Just watching him arrive cheered me up a little, made me feel encouraged instead of overwhelmed. Maybe we could get this done fast so we didn’t have to prolong the families’ suffering any more than could be helped. Coming down the ramp, he stood out in the North Dakota crowd: a small, broad-featured man in his forties, nearly bald, walking so fast he was almost jogging, dressed in a pink golf shirt, pressed blue jeans, and red running shoes. He was talking on a cell phone when he came down to Baggage, where I waited to pick him up. He recognized me and came over, saying, “Later,” into his phone and flipping it shut.

“You do great books,” he told me, the first words out of his mouth. “They’re a little long, but very compelling. How fast do we need to do this thing? How do you want to divvy up the load? You write some, I write some?”

“As fast as we can work,” I said, and then stuck out my hand to the young man behind him whom he had not introduced. “Hi. I’m Marie.”

The young man grinned and shook my hand. “Peter Nussert.”

“Yadda, yadda,” said his boss with a dismissive wave of one small hand. “Say, three weeks. That quick enough for you?”

I stared at him. “Really? You do books in three weeks?”

“Isn’t that why I’m here?” He smiled, sharklike. “God knows, as thick as your books are, you could never do it.”

I burst out laughing, a release of emotion that I must have really needed, so loud that a few people passing by with their luggage turned and looked at us. When I stopped, I grinned at him and said, “What’s the matter? I thought you were supposed to be fast. You can’t write it overnight?”

“Not with you to slow me down,” he said, and grinned back at me. “Peter, why are you standing there? Get the bags.”

* * * *

In my rental car, with me at the wheel, hyperactive Markie Lentz in the front passenger seat and Peter Nussert behind us, I returned to one of his first questions. “I take Darren Betch, because he can’t know about you, and I take the cops, lawyers, judges. I take everything about him up to the time he goes to prison. You take the victims and their families.”

“You trust me with the victims?”

I glanced over at him. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You start most of your books with a sentimental glimpse of a victim. Builds suspense. Makes us care about them before they get whacked. It’s one of your hallmarks. I’m surprised you’d turn that over to anybody else.”

“Don’t you do that, too?” I said. “Open with the happy vacationing family just before the typhoon hits the beach?”

“You do, boss,” Peter chimed in.

“Oh yeah!” He sounded pleased with himself. “That’s right, I do.”

“How could you forget that?” I asked, amused.

He shrugged. “My books, they’re like cramming for a test. While I’m doing it I don’t know anything else, but a month later...” He snapped his fingers. “...Gone. Anyway, who cares? Our last books are so yesterday. This book! Facts. Load me up. Tell me everything you know.”

I told him.

“You’re not taking any notes,” I said at one point.

“Short-term photographic memory,” he boasted.

“Ah,” I said. “That explains it.”

“Also, I’m a genius.”

“Also, I’m taking notes,” Peter said from in back.

“All right, genius.” I pulled into a parking spot and turned off the engine. “I have six rooms for our little group. One each for you, Peter, me, my assistant. Plus a double suite for our campaign headquarters. Questions?”

“Is your assistant cute?”

I gave him a look.

“Not for me!” he said scornfully, and then jerked his head toward the backseat.

“Cut it out, boss.”

I smiled, thinking of my rather eccentric young assistant. “She’s cute.”

“All right,” Lentz said approvingly. “Come on, let’s get to it. Hell, I could write the whole damn book from nothing but what you just told me. What do we need another nine days for anyway?” He was halfway out of the car before Peter or I had moved. I glanced over the backseat and asked his assistant, “Cocaine and speed?”

He laughed, this young man with a calm demeanor and a lot of intelligence in his eyes. “Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

* * * *

By that evening we had our double suite lined with sheets of white butcher paper tacked to the walls. My assistant, Deborah Dancer, had been out ever since she arrived taking photos of anything and anybody we might want to describe. From the victims’ homes to Darren Betch’s apartment, from the TGIF party condo to the prison and the road to the grave, Deb had snapped locales and the people in them with her digital camera. Then she transferred the photos to her laptop computer and from there made enlarged color prints for us to tack up. We had wall sections for each “character” in the book, with lists of their habits, jobs, education, ages, physical traits, personality traits, everything we knew about them, detailed below. We had a flow chart of Darren’s process through the North Dakota legal system, along with names and titles of everybody who had prodded him along its path.

We had a chronology of the Bismarck victims:

Erin Belafonte is reported missing. 

A county-wide search ensues. 

Ten days later, Jessica Burge and Caroline Meyers are reported missing. 

Darren Betch is arrested for the murder of Erin Belafonte; he denies it. 

He is convicted, at trial, after which he confesses to all three homicides, and goes to prison. 

A lot of this I would have done anyway on any of my books—only slower, as Markie Lentz loved to point out—but he added some idiosyncratically efficient ways of doing things that I vowed to steal and use in the research for my own books. For instance, he had Peter and Deb using different colors of Magic Marker for each person, so we could see with a mere glance at the walls where they turned up in the story.

“Did Jessie’s family go to the sentencing?” 

“Just her brother and fiancé—it’s on the wall.” 

“Who made the actual arrest?” 

“Cannistre.” 

“Are you sure about that?” 

“It’s on the wall, Markie.” 

On Day Two, he suddenly appeared at my shoulder. “Hey, Lightfoot. We got a problem at our end of the room. We’re having a hell of a time trying to give these families the old sentimental twist.”

“Why?”

“You know how Caroline’s folks drag that lawyer around with them like he’s their pet dog? Turns out they have good reason for never leaving home without him. It seems Caroline’s parents have run a few financial scams in their time and now and then they’ve made the mistake of crossing some tough customers. I don’t know if they’re afraid of getting sued or if they just want a witness when they get shot.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Right,” he said sarcastically. “Like we have time for joking around.”

I smiled. Markie always had time for joking around. We were all working nearly nonstop, fueled by coffee and by food that we sent the assistants into town to pick up for all of us. But that didn’t stop him from needling me every chance he got about how slow I was. As payback, I constantly ragged on him for being sloppy.

Neither was true. I was working like a demon. He was careful, a pro.

“You said ‘families,’“ I reminded him.

“Yeah, Jessica’s fiancé, Billy Sterson? He beat up on her a couple of times. Her brother Sam is a real winner, too. You want to know why his parents say they moved to Arizona? Because Sam’s a leech of the first order. And when they don’t let him squeeze them, he gets nasty about it. They moved to get away from their own son, if you can believe that.” Markie cracked a cynical smile. “I think they miss their boat more than they do Sam. Aren’t many lakes in Tucson, apparently.”

I sighed. “Ozzie and Harriets, one and all.”

“That first girl, the real first one, the one from Minnesota? Susan Lerner? Mother married five times, father’s whereabouts unknown. It was all I could do to persuade her mother to send me a photo and even that is so old you can’t tell what she looked like the year she died. Which leaves us with only one family sob story, which is Erin Belafonte’s family. You know how her dad died the year after she went missing?”

“Yeah?”

“Suicide. His wife says it was guilt.”

“Guilt?”

“For not being able to protect his only child, his baby.”

“You going to start with that one, then?”

“I don’t know yet. Nothing works so far.”

“You’ll find a way.”

“Maybe I’ll just make something up.”

“Markie, no! Don’t even say that! Even apart from the ethics of the thing, we don’t know what Darren knows about them. I’m betting he knows enough to spot it if we invent lives they didn’t live.”

“Oh hell,” Markie said, whirling around to return to his side. “You’re no fun.”

He wouldn’t have done it. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have done it.

We finished two chapters and I delivered them into Betch’s hands, praying he wasn’t any kind of judge of quality. Holding my breath, I watched him leaf through the pages. When he looked up, he said, “Erin Belafonte is buried one mile to the east of the first one you found.”

Is buried. As if he’d had nothing to do with it.

But he told the truth. She was buried there.

He’d buried her purse with her, too.

When I returned to see him after that, he said, “Now we go back to our original bargain. You finish the book, I give you the rest of them.”

I dreaded finding out what he meant by the rest of them.

* * * *

Fortunately, from our point of view, we were working in a county where the coroner had to be a licensed physician, which gave me more confidence in the report we got from her office than I might have had from a coroner in a county where literally anybody could do the job.

Susan had been stabbed and strangled, as had Erin Belafonte.

But then, we already knew that, because Darren Betch had told us so.

What we hadn’t known until Detective Cannistre had a deputy deliver a copy of the coroner’s report to us was that the first victim was 5’5” tall, thin, 110 pounds, with dark hair cut to shoulder length. A pair of prescription eyeglasses had been found in the grave with her. From her reluctant mother, Markie had learned that she was an only child. She had been a child-care worker at a day-care center, and a high-school graduate with no college. When those facts and a few others got put up on the wall under her name, the four of us stood back and looked at what we now had about all four of Betch’s known victims.

Our heads swiveled back and forth from one section of white paper to another as we took it all in.

For a while, there was silence.

Then ... “Uh,” said Peter.

“Marie?” said Deborah.

“Yes, I see it,” I told her.

“We’ve got a problem,” Markie said, sounding disgusted.

“No.” I reached for the motel telephone. “The cops have a problem. What we have is a more interesting book.” When I got through to Luis Cannistre, I said, “I think you’d better get over here.”

* * * *

It was all on the walls, clear as the North Dakota sky outside our rooms.

Now that there were four victims we could finally see that two of them fit together in a pattern and two of them clearly did not. Susan and Erin Belafonte: both around 5’5”, both about 110 pounds, both with dark hair worn straight and shoulder-length and with bangs that touched their eyebrows, both child-care workers, both high-school educated with no college, both wore eyeglasses, both only children. The last two victims, the two friends, weren’t anything like that portrait: They were older, for starters, blond hair, red hair, short hair, curly hair, a master’s degree, a bachelor’s degree. Both had siblings. Neither wore glasses or even contacts. One was a saleswoman for a national car-rental company; the other worked for an advertising firm.

Markie Lentz said, “Two killers.”

“But Darren Betch confessed!” Peter exclaimed, in tones of outrage.

“He may have done it to protect himself,” Cannistre said, looking like a man who wanted to kick himself from there to California. “Think about it. Here was a guy who had gone around pretending to be Native American and he was facing going into a prison where there’s a big Indian population. They were not going to appreciate that. He knew how unlikely it was that he’d ever get out on appeal. He was there to stay, and he had a more immediate concern. He had to worry about staying alive. One murder made him ordinary. Three murders made him a very bad guy that the other inmates were a whole lot less likely to mess with.”

“But he still uses the Indian thing,” Deborah said.

“And by now they probably all believe it,” Cannistre said.

Confession or not, our walls showed there was more evidence to suggest that Darren killed the first two but somebody else killed the other two. Betch had tossed Susan Lerner’s purse into the grave he dug for her, and he’d done the same with Erin Belafonte’s purse. Jessica Burge’s purse, on the other hand, had been found at her apartment, along with her friend Caroline Meyers’s purse. Not only that, but both Susan and Erin had hundreds of dollars taken from their checking accounts right after they disappeared. Jessie’s and Caroline’s accounts were untouched. It appeared to be two completely different M.O.’s, perpetrated against two completely different pairs of girls.

The first time I had spoken to Luis Cannistre, I had asked him if he had a favorite suspect. Now I found myself asking him again. “If Darren didn’t kill the last two women, then who’s your most likely suspect?”

Markie Lentz interjected his own list of possibilities:

“There’s the abusive fiancé, the parents with the rough business partners, the suicidal father who felt ‘guilty,’ the sponge of a brother.”

“No,” Cannistre said, looking thoughtful and unhappy, “none of those.”

“Wait.” I walked closer to Markie and Peter’s side of the walls, wishing now I had paid more attention when they were gathering information about the friends and families of the victims. What I now saw there made me turn around and ask the detective, “When we met with the families in my room ... why did you say, ‘Typical’?”

* * * *

Divers found them, or rather a watch that one of them had worn and other jewelry the other had worn, at the bottom of the biggest lake outside of Bismarck.

There are no lakes in Tucson, Arizona.

Jessica Burge’s mother and father had moved to the desert, as far away as they could get from reminders of what they’d done, or rather failed to do. They had not murdered their child and her friend, but they had kept everyone from finding out how the girls had died.

“What made them your favorite suspects, after Darren?” I asked Cannistre.

“They never cooperated the way the others did. Everybody else took lie-detector tests, but not them. They claimed they didn’t trust us, didn’t trust the system, didn’t trust anybody. At the time it looked suspicious, but then we arrested Darren, and everybody assumed he had killed them all, so we let it go. And then Darren confessed to killing them. I never thought about it again.”

They’d had their 36-foot cabin cruiser out on the lake and they had Jessica and her friend Caroline with them. It had been a spontaneous trip. Nobody knew they went. They towed along the little motorboat they used for water skiing. The girls, who had been drinking beer all afternoon, took it out to ski. Jessie lost control of the boat while Caroline was up on the skis, running over her friend. Panicked, drunk, Jessie overcompensated at the wheel and the boat turned over.

From the cruiser, Jessie’s parents saw it all. They too were drunk.

They were afraid of being charged with negligent homicide.

They were afraid of being sued by Caroline’s parents.

Knowing there was already one girl missing from the city, they went back home and two days later called in their own missing-person report, leaving Caroline’s family to report her gone, as well.

They allowed the other family to grieve for twelve years without knowing what had really happened to their daughter.

* * * *

“Why’d you do it, Darren?” I asked him. “Why did you take the rap for two murders you didn’t do?”

His trademark smirk was in place. “I don’t have to tell you everything.”

“All right.” I had a feeling that Detective Cannistre had the correct theory on that, which meant there was no way that this man’s overweening pride was ever going to let him say, I pretended to be an Indian, and I was afraid of what the real ones might do to me in here, so I had to look tough. “Well, here it is,” I said, pushing a pile of pages across the table at him. “Here’s your book. Or some of it.”

“What do you mean, some of it?”

I looked into his eyes. “Our deal was that I’d finish the book and you’d give me the other bodies. But we already found them, didn’t we? So what do we need you for?”

“But that just makes it a more interesting book,” he said, grinning.

It was exactly what I had said to Markie and our assistants.

Darren wasn’t getting it, he wasn’t understanding, so I got up and started to leave.

“Wait a minute,” he called out from behind me. “You’re going to finish it, right? Where are you going?”

I turned back to look at him. “I’m going home.”

“Not yet, you aren’t. You’ve got to finish it. We’ve got to talk about publicity, all that stuff.”

“There’s not going to be any publicity, Darren.”

His eyes narrowed, his jaws stopped chewing his gum, and he stared at me.

“There’s not going to be any publicity,” I said, “because there’s never going to be a published book.”

He stood up, but then sat down again fast when it caught the guard’s attention.

“We have a deal!”

I shook my head. “We’re done. There never was going to be a book. Did you really think I’d let you blackmail me into publishing a book for you? Did you really think you could play those kinds of awful games with me, and win?”

“You have a contract with your publisher!”

“Who agreed to tear it up.”

And Markie was being paid a lump sum for his contributions.

I could admit to myself, even if to no one else, that there had been moments when I’d been tempted. Markie had even tried to persuade me. We both knew it would have been a big seller.

I turned again to leave.

“There were other girls,” he blurted.

My heart sank. I believed him. But I turned around and said coolly, “There are other writers, too.”

* * * *

At the airport, Markie and Peter’s plane left before mine.

I thanked them and said, “Maybe we’ll work together again.”

“No way.” Markie gave me his last shot. “I’m the rabbit, you’re the tortoise.”

“Which means I win in the end,” I pointed out.

He grinned and hurried off toward his gate with Peter running behind him.

Luis Cannistre flashed his badge so he could walk Deb and me to our gate.

Once there, I held out my right hand and he took it.

“You don’t fly your own plane?” he asked with a smile, taking up where we had left off in our original conversation.

“No, but I sign my own books.” I turned to Deb and she handed me an autographed copy of the new one that wasn’t even in the bookstores yet. I handed it to him.

“Well, thank you,” he said, looking pleased. “For everything.”

He gave Deborah one of his wry smiles and winked at her. “But I’ll bet that’s the last time she answers her own phone.”

Copyright © 2006 Nancy Pickard