The Blessed Bones

by Kathryn Casey

  Those feelings mingled with thoughts of Max waiting up the mountain for me. It worried me that I so looked forward to seeing him. We’d worked a handful of cases together since I’d returned. I enjoyed that as much as our dinners, his long phone calls at bedtime to talk before we fell asleep, even our weekends away. On the job, I watched his mind work, saw his responses. Even when we argued about cases I respected him. I’d never been this close to anyone before. At times, it felt as if our minds meshed. I blushed thinking about the physical intimacy, the thrill of being so close, bonding so tightly with a man. I liked that his hands felt rough running over my skin, the musk of his aftershave, the way he cupped my cheek when he kissed me.

  I touched that same spot on my face. Warm. And I felt my body respond to the memory.

  A bit of traffic ahead, I considered flicking on my siren and lights to speed up the drive to the scene. My hand paused on the way to the switch as my radio crackled into life.

  “Chief, it’s Stef,” my rookie said, her voice booming through the SUV. “Kellie said you have a job for me?”

  “I do. Did she give you the file?”

  “Open in front of me on my desk. This kid’s old man did a real job on that eye. How come they never prosecuted him? I can’t find any charges, not even any investigation notes against Clyde Benson in the computer.”

  “This is one of the files from the Tombs.” That answered everything. I didn’t need to say more. Stef had been the one who first unlocked the secret room for me, so she well understood that this was a case that had been abandoned.

  “Got it,” she said. “Looking at the date, this is way old. Way past when we could go after this human trash for doing this. What am I doing with the folder?”

  “I have an angle. May not work, but I want to give it a try. I need you to find Danny for me. I want to talk to him.”

  “Just find him? You want me to ask him some questions? I’d like to get this old man of his in an eight-by-eight room with bars across the front. Looks like that’s where he belongs. And to think we buy our gas from this POS.”

  Needless to say, Stef was still in her honeymoon phase, where she thought she could take on the world. I’ve always liked that about a good rookie. But it could be dangerous. They need supervision and guidance so it doesn’t become hubris, and she didn’t have the background to interview Danny. She could taint the investigation, as District Attorney Hatfield had worried.

  “Just find Danny for me, Stef. Don’t talk to the kid. Don’t approach him. Get contact info and give it to me. This is delicate. I’ll take over once you have a location for him.”

  “Got it.” I wasn’t surprised that she sounded disappointed; I knew she ached to get into the fray. But she confirmed, “Will do, Chief.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I heard about the remains. You think that could be the Bradshaw girl?”

  “Not sure. I’ll call in and let Kellie know when I have more info.”

  “What’s your ten-twenty-six?”

  “I’m twenty minutes out.” I was a mile away from the turnoff from the highway on to the narrow back road leading to the construction site where they were building the ski runs.

  It was then that I reminded myself where this route was taking me. I’d been so excited about the possibility of recovering Christina’s remains that I’d forgotten. Immediately, I tried to block it from my mind. No time for this now, I cautioned myself. Keep your focus.

  As I drove, I promised myself I would keep my eyes straight ahead. But once I mounted the crest of a small rise, I couldn’t resist the urge—it felt almost physical—to look over to my right. There it stood, just as I remembered it: a palatial structure covered with gray stucco, the windows bordered with dark green shutters. Three stories high, the house had four chimneys and balconies on each floor. The sister-wives’ pristine cottages with their bric-a-brac fronts spread out on one side. As I passed, a dozen or more of the ranch’s championship Arabians grazed in the pasture bordering the road. The arch over the closed gate was topped with the name of this sprawling compound: SECOND COMING RANCH. I involuntarily shuddered. Tense fingers strained my upper back, my neck and shoulders, and squeezed the muscles across my chest.

  The compound looked as I remembered it: like a fortress.

  Since my return, I’d known that one day I’d confront this. I’d dreaded it, but I hadn’t anticipated such a strong physical reaction. I averted my eyes, stared straight ahead at the road and willed myself not to look at it.

  “Listen, Stef, I’ve got to go.” I heard it in my voice, the residue of old fear.

  “You okay, Chief?” she asked, apparently picking up on the change. “You sound kind of strange. Is something going on?”

  I cleared my throat and took a swig out of the plastic water bottle in the cup holder. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t keep from again turning to catch a glimpse of the house. I felt as drawn to it as I was repulsed by it. A wave of anxiety coursed through me; memories flooded my mind, and his rumbling voice rang in my ears. “Clara, you are a waste of a woman.”

  In the field where the horses foraged, a tractor hauled hay. In years past, tending the livestock had always been one of his favorite pastimes. That couldn’t be him, I thought. He’s too old. But maybe—

  “Chief!” Stef interrupted my thoughts. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” My voice sounded hollow in my ears, fighting the other voices, the ones out of my past that sent shivers through my soul. “I’m okay, just distracted, looking for the cutoff to the access road for the ski lodge.”

  “You need directions?”

  “No. I see it now. Up ahead. I’m making the turn in a few minutes.”

  “You’re sure that you’re okay?”

  I must have sounded truly off for Stef to be so concerned. “Yes. I’m fine. Bump the chief deputy and tell him that I’ll be there in fifteen minutes or less.”

  “Will do.” And the radio silenced.

  The Second Coming disappeared behind me, but the flashbacks continued: the massive table in a dining room big enough to be a banquet hall, the women buzzing around feeding the children, tending to the men, while our husband shouted orders.

  A horn blared, and in the rearview mirror I glimpsed the CSU trailer, the crew letting me know they were following me to the scene. I took the narrow road that led to where the ski lodge was taking shape just below the mountain’s slope. I thought of the trees that had been cut down to make room for the building, the lift, the runs. Some were a hundred years old or more, and they were felled like twigs then scavenged for their wood. Probably taken to the lumber mill my father ran until his death, the one my brother Aaron now owned. I thought of myself as a teenager in my dresses, and the day my father put my young, smooth hand in the cold palm of a man entering the final decades of his life.

  “That’s old news. This is who I am now. A cop. A police chief,” I muttered, glancing again in the mirror and seeing the crime scene unit make the turn behind me. I am not that girl anymore. I am not the young woman who ran in fear. I am no longer powerless. And I have no reason to be afraid.

  Five

  I hadn’t been on the construction site before, although I’d heard rumors about the grand plans. The millions being invested to turn the mountainside into a resort was the talk of Alber. While some folks lauded the prosperity it could bring, the descendants of the original settlers, members of Elijah’s People, balked at the prospect of even more outsiders flooding their town. Up close, the lodge didn’t look particularly impressive, although I’d heard that it would have a hundred guest rooms.

  The front of the building, a primitive, rough timber structure, resembled the Ponderosa from Bonanza, that sixties western where Ben Cartwright raised his three sons. When I was a kid our father and mothers monitored what we watched. We had one TV in the house, but it wasn’t used for anything but videos. Many were church-related, recordings of the prophet’s talks to the faithful. Two evenings a week, we sat in the
living room on the big couches and watched what the church hierarchy billed as “inspirational messages.” One I remember was a long, confused missive, extolling the virtue of living the Divine Principle, plural marriage, and chastising the mainstream Mormon church for “abandoning” what the prophet described as “God’s plan for his people.”

  The only other entertainment available to us—although I’m not sure the prophet’s ramblings qualified as such—were television series that were old even then: in addition to Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, Daddy Knows Best, Lost in Space and the like. Our parents purchased the DVDs through a shop in Pine City, where they made a business of selling to families in Alber and the other polygamous towns. Part of their customer service involved blocking out anything the least bit suggestive, including any display of affection. That meant we’d be watching and suddenly the screen would go black. Any scenes where the mother and father entered a bedroom disappeared. Later, I thought how odd this was, considering that we lived in a house where we saw our father circulate between our mothers’ bedrooms at night and where one or another of our mothers was usually pregnant.

  The lodge was a timber and white mortar construction, with high-pitched roofs and a wide front porch. Attached to the main building at the rear was a separate structure that looked like a dorm, which I assumed must have contained the majority of the guest rooms.

  I didn’t see Max’s car in the parking lot, just what appeared to be the construction workers’ rides, so I kept driving toward the mountain and took a track toward the back where they’d cut down the trees. When I swung behind the building, I found his squad and the medical examiner’s van. A new purchase by the county, it enabled Doc Wiley to transport bodies on his own, not wait for a hearse. Before, if the funeral home had a conflict, it could take hours to remove a corpse from a scene. As soon as I came to a stop, the CSU trailer pulled in alongside me. Lieutenant Mueller and the others rushed out, and I followed them toward a group clustered fifty feet away. I spotted Doc Wiley’s silver hair, but he stood out anyway in his lab coat, bow tie, khakis and galoshes. When I saw Max, I couldn’t resist the reminder of our weekend together, the comfort of his body against mine in the night.

  “What have we got?” I asked, shaking the memory away as I joined the group. I didn’t recognize most of them—predominantly men and only a couple of women, their clothes covered in mud. I assumed they were the construction workers.

  Max shot me the briefest of glances, the slightest of smiles, and my nerves pricked in response, then he was all business. “Chief Jefferies, I have someone I want you to meet.”

  Max wasn’t a short man, a full six feet, but the guy standing beside him had to be nearly half a foot taller, with another six inches or so added onto that for the rise of his tan cowboy hat. He looked to be in his mid-sixties, had silver hair that matched a mustache that dripped down on both sides to his chin.

  I stuck out my hand. “This is?”

  The man gave my hand a shake but didn’t respond, and Max took over the introduction: “Clara, meet US Marshal Ash Crawford. He runs the agency’s Salt Lake office.”

  I wasn’t sure how to react. What I felt was surprise. I’d worked with the marshals in Dallas on an escaped convict case. We’d chased the guy all the way to Texarkana and arrested him over a plate of steak and eggs in a Waffle House. The only other case I’d worked with them involved a district court judge who took bribes. I’d never known the marshals to show any interest in an investigation into a criminal case.

  “Good to meet you, Chief,” Crawford said as he shook my hand, his voice as deep as a croaking frog.

  “Same here, Marshal,” I said. “So what are you doing here?”

  Crawford gave Max a slanted glance, like they were part of some boys’ club I wasn’t invited to join. Maybe I was being overly sensitive. Over the years, I’d found some guys in law enforcement, especially the senior ones, weren’t particularly welcoming to women. But I could have been jumping to conclusions. I mean, I didn’t know the guy. All he said was, “Whoa, Max, she gets right to the point, doesn’t she?”

  “One of those things I find refreshing about her,” Max responded, perhaps to cut him off.

  Personally, I thought the conversation felt like a distraction. “That didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out. “Why are you here?”

  At first, the guy didn’t reply. He chewed a bit on the inside of his cheek and his eyes turned to impatient slits. Eventually, he gave me a slow smile. “I’ll explain once we’ve taken a look at the scene. Mind going ahead? They’ve been holding me back for the last hour, waiting for the two of you to arrive.”

  Max and I exchanged a glance, mine suspicious. I didn’t particularly trust Ash Crawford, although I couldn’t have explained why. But Max nodded. He knew Crawford, so I didn’t object. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  That decided, the construction foreman, a skinny guy with a straggly beard named Jerry Cummings, walked us up the mountainside about two hundred feet. Cummings kept swallowing hard, nerves I guessed. He had thinning hair and puffy eyes, a lower jaw that folded into an overbite. Not long into the walk, I realized that I probably needed to start running again. The slant was dramatic and my thighs burned with the effort. Lieutenant Mueller trudged behind me followed by a few of his crime scene techs. As we got closer, Mueller looked worried. “How much farther? We need to stop a distance back from the gravesite,” he said. “All these people are going to make a mess. I don’t want the scene trampled. There could be tire marks or footprints.”

  Cummings shot Mueller an over-the-shoulder glance. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. My men have been working all around here for months. There’s gonna be lots of footprints, but probably none will have anything to do with the body. We’re building a ski lift, you know.”

  Mueller groaned, but the truth was that he was being overly optimistic even thinking there’d be prints. Those bones had most likely been buried for a long time. I did have concerns, however. “Okay, but have your folks stay back. They don’t need to put any more footprints on the ground around here. And we all need to watch for anything that could be evidence, something as small as a cigarette butt, a piece of fabric, anything that could be used as a weapon, anything out of place,” I ordered, glancing at Cummings. Everyone else knew the drill, but this wasn’t his area of expertise. “Be careful. If you see anything at all, tell Lieutenant Mueller or one of his men. Don’t touch it.”

  Behind me, Mueller whispered, “Thank you, Chief.”

  On the way, we passed two areas that had been excavated, both with cement poured—foundations, Cummings explained. Eventually the piers would rise up to hold the ski lift. A short walk, another few minutes, and we were clustered around a rectangular hole. We stood about ten feet back on all sides. A half dozen shovels lay strewn about, I assumed because the workers panicked and dropped them. The entire skeleton wasn’t completely exposed, just the upper half. Max, Mueller, Crawford, Doc and I edged forward, while the others hung back.

  A foot below the disturbed rocky surface lay the nearly skeletonized remains in a stained prairie dress, resembling a grotesque Halloween decoration. Yet that ghoulish holiday had passed six months earlier. This was April, and we were in the mud season, when the rains came often and the mountain snow was melting.

  All I could see was the skull, the neck bones, and one arm, sticking out from beneath a torn sleeve. In places, thin ropes of muscle and sinew stretched across the bones, swathing them in a thick, leather-like layer. But the muscle that had once connected the head to the body had withered away, and the skull lay loose, like she’d been decapitated. From previous cases, I understood that was unlikely. Rather, the heavy skull became dislodged after the muscles that held it to the neck rotted away. Something else was odd, however; the top of the skull had a hole in it big enough for a golf ball to roll through. The chunk of skull that had broken off lay on the ground a couple of feet from the body.

  Doc squeezed his eyes nearly
shut, his face flushed, and he appeared as perturbed as if someone had left the door open on one of the lab refrigerators overnight, letting a body warm. “How did that skull break? What’d you use to uncover her? A forklift?” he asked Cummings, who had the good sense to look embarrassed.

  Max bent forward and examined the bones. “Doesn’t look like that’s an old skull fracture, does it?”

  “No, it does not,” Doc complained. “Fresh, I’d say.”

  At that, Doc pulled on gloves, then picked up the chunk of skull and turned it to display the rough, broken edge. Unlike the rest of the visible areas of the skull which the earth had tarnished a dark brown, the fracture remained a creamy off-white. “If they’d found the skull this way, the edges would be stained from being buried in the earth over a long period of time. That the broken area is clean and unstained is a big tip-off that this damage is recent.”

  Max looked warily at Cummings, who turned toward me and objected, I guessed because I was the only one who hadn’t already expressed an opinion. “Chief, we’re building a ski lift here, you know? That’s not delicate work. We break into the ground, dig out the dirt and move on. So, yeah, we were using equipment and not being particularly careful. We’re not up here looking for bodies.”

  Doc appeared ready to lose it with Cummings. The ME’s mouth clamped down, scrunching his upper lip. From my point of view, Cummings had a point, and it made no sense to argue with him; we needed his cooperation. I changed the subject. “How did you find her? Explain what happened.”

  Cummings began a lengthy, rather convoluted account of their method for clearing the land, how they had to sink the foundations to a particular point to adhere to the engineer’s specifications.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mueller whispering to his crew. They responded by splintering off in various directions, I assumed to hunt for evidence. One guy stayed behind, the photographer, who snapped photos of the remains.