by Nancy CoCo
“Cool.” Liz pulled a digital camera out of her cargo pants pocket and snapped a photo.
“Stop.” Rex covered her lens with his hand.
“Hey.” Liz glared at him.
“I’m declaring this an official crime scene. That means it’s closed to photographs.”
“I don’t think so.” Liz lifted her camera and snapped a photo of Rex, momentarily blinding him. He did what anyone would do: put his hand across his eyes to block it.
She was fast. I watched with amazement as she snapped a couple more pictures of the bits of toe and of Mal sitting proudly next to the sock-covered bone.
Rex swore something dark and dangerous under his breath and reached for the camera. Liz ducked out of his way and rushed back inside the newspaper office.
I watched while Rex debated whether it was more important to follow her or to stay with the evidence. Tilting my head, I smiled. “It seems I’m not the only troublemaker on the island.”
“Reporters,” Rex mumbled and went back to his investigation.
It was then I noticed that Mal had disappeared back under the lilac bush. “Oh, no,” I said and stepped forward to get her.
Rex stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Don’t move. You’re not trained in crime-scene investigation.”
“Neither is Mal and she seems to be doing fine.” I crossed my arms over my chest. Mal popped back out with another bit of bone in her mouth. She dropped it at his feet and gave a short bark before running back to the bush.
“I’ll get her,” he strode to the bush and got down and pulled Mal out from under the bush. She rewarded him with a lick on the cheek.
“Ha!” Liz said, coming out of the Crier sans camera. “Someone else getting dead-body kisses.”
“Don’t wipe it off,” I warned him with a grin. “It could be evidence.”
“It’s not evidence,” he grumbled and raised his hand to swipe it off.
“It could be DNA evidence,” I said, holding up my hand in a stop motion. “Or soil evidence. Do you really want to take the chance of ruining microscopic clues?”
“Oh, for the love . . .” He strode my way, his sexy eyes stormy. My heartbeat picked up, but I stood my ground. “Here,” he said and handed me Mal, his cheek clearly dirt-smeared from her kiss.
“This is definitely nail polish on this toenail,” Liz said as she studied the bit of bone. “These must be female bones.”
“How do you figure that?” Rex asked.
“Do you know any men who paint their toenails?” Her blue gaze teased as she raised one winged eyebrow.
“You can’t assume anything,” Angus said as he strolled over to her. “Huh, it does look like a toe. Came out of the shredded shoe, you said?” He shoved his hands in his brown corduroy pants. He tilted his head and studied the bits.
Mal squirmed in my arms and gave a short bark. I jumped. It still startled me when she barked out of the blue.
“Dog says yes.” Angus nodded. “So, Manning, looks like there’s a body under the lilacs. What are you going to do about it?”
“First thing I’m going to do is get everyone off my crime scene.” He narrowed his eyes and put his hands on his hips, emphasizing his gun belt.
“Hey, only looking, boy.” Angus pulled his hands out in surrender. “Come on, Liz. Let’s take a step back.”
“Don’t worry, Rex won’t do anything. He knows we’d put a big article on the front page of the paper complaining of police brutality.” Liz put her hands on her hips and stuck her chin out.
“Um, guys . . .” I pointed. A Saint Bernard had come around the corner while they fought. I didn’t think much of it until he got closer to the bone with the sock. Then I felt like it was my duty to warn them that he was there.
Rex spun on his heels to see the giant dog delicately pick up the bone and slowly back away as if we wouldn’t notice him taking it. “Ah, crap,” Rex said.
“Daisy!” Liz shouted. “Leave it! Leeeeave it—”
For a brief moment it looked as if Daisy planned to obey. Then just as suddenly, she changed her mind and took off down the street.
Mal barked and barked. I held on to her tightly. “That dog could sniff you up her nose if she wanted to,” I chided Mal. I put my hand around her nose. Her little growl vibrated up my hand.
In the meantime, Rex and Liz took off after Daisy. It was kind of comical to see a cop and a reporter chasing after a dog with a bone.
“Are you going after her?” Angus asked me, his eyes sparkling.
“No.” I shook my head. “Someone has to stay here and keep the crime scene safe.” We stood side by side and watched Daisy disappear around the corner in the direction of the Grand Hotel. Rex could run pretty fast in his uniform. Liz was an arm’s length behind him. They both called after Daisy to stop.
“Is Daisy Liz’s dog?” I asked.
Angus shook his head. “No, that scruffy Saint Bernard belongs to Mrs. Finch. She summers on the island in a home that has been in her family for a century. Unfortunately she’s one of those owners who opens the door and lets the dog out without a leash or a keeper. The old bat says it’s good for a dog to roam. Besides, she can’t go far. It’s an island and all the porters know not to let Daisy on the ferry.”
“I suppose Mackinac is safer than most summer places. I mean, it’s not like Daisy is going to get hit by a car here on island.”
“If she doesn’t watch it she may end up with buckshot in her rear end. Some of the old-timers don’t take kindly to marauding dogs.”
Mal snuggled up in my arms and closed her eyes. Her soft fur brushed against my cheek. It was pretty clear she felt that her work here was done. I glanced at the bits of bone and nail polish on the ground. “How long do you think those bits have been there?” I asked. “Doesn’t it take a while for bodies to decay to the point of mostly bone?”
“Depends on the weather.” Angus walked over to the shoe and studied it. His hands behind his back, he looked through the glasses perched on his nose. “It could take only a few weeks or a few months. I highly doubt these pieces have been here long.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because this bit of shoe, or rather boot, looks familiar.” He sighed and straightened. “See how rounded the toe is?” He picked up a stick and pointed out the edges. “This looks like part of a seam. Possibly from steel-toed shoes. There is one person I know who wears argyle socks and brown steel-toed boots.”
I took a deep breath and blew it out slow. “Please tell me it’s not a loved one.”
“It’s not,” he confirmed. “I just don’t know how to explain the nail polish.”
“Why? Didn’t she paint her nails?”
“As far as I know, he never did.” Angus looked at the top of the bush as if it could tell him exactly what happened.
“He?”
“Steven Karus,” Angus said. He turned his steady gaze on me. “The stable manager.”
CHAPTER 3
“Do you think Angus is right? That this boot toe might belong to Steven Karus?” I asked.
“It’s too difficult to tell who it is based on the toe of a shoe,” Shane Carpenter, the St. Ignace crime-scene technician, said as he gathered bits of bone in a washtub. He picked up the toe section with his crime-scene-gloved hands. “We could run a trace on the polish. It could be a special kind.” He plopped the bone bit into the washing tub. “More likely it will belong to an everyday ordinary drugstore kind of polish.” He shrugged. “Real life is not as clean-cut as a crime show.”
“What about the gender?” I had to ask. “Can you tell gender based on toe bones? I mean, I would have figured toenail polish belonged to a woman, but Angus thinks the socks are a man’s.”
“I think it’s best not to make any assumptions based on what little information we have here.” He picked up another bit and dropped it in the washtub
Rex had called Officer Brent Polaski over to help him out. Brent was a few inches taller than Rex. He looked
to be somewhere in his early thirties, with short, dark hair and brilliant blue eyes. While Rex had that older, in-control sexy thing going on, Officer Polaski had that I-can-do-push-ups-with-one-hand kind of look.
I watched from the edge of the crime-scene tape as the two officers put a black plastic tarp down on the ground and carefully shoveled the mulch onto it. So far they had found nearly an entire foot. Who knew there were so many bones in a foot?
I suppose a doctor would know or a podiatrist.
“Can you tell how long the body has been in the ground?” I asked. Shane worked with the medical examiner. I’m sure he could give me more information than Angus had.
“Depends on a lot of factors.” Shane picked through the mulch. “There are five stages of decay—fresh, bloat, active decay, advanced decay, and dry remains.”
“These are dry remains, right?” I asked.
“Right.”
“Good thing.” Angus wandered over beside me. “I don’t care for the idea of Daisy snacking on the meat of someone’s foot.”
Angus had brought out a denim-covered director’s chair. It was low to the ground and was one of those people brought to local softball games and soccer when they didn’t want to sit on the ground. He popped it out and settled down in its sagging bottom. His dark gaze watched the CSI tech with intent, his hands folded on the top of a mahogany cane. “Any sign of what killed the poor fellow?”
“Hard to tell.” Shane picked another small bone out of the debris and studied it in the light. “Looks like the body wasn’t too exposed. No sign of animal foraging. Not on these bits, anyway.”
A crowd had formed around the yellow crime-scene tape. My best friend and now coworker, Jennifer, waved and worked her way through the crowd toward me. “Hi, Allie.”
“Hi,” I replied. “How’s the McMurphy?”
“We need you to make a few batches of fudge,” she said, her attention on the officers working. The men had taken off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves. “The dark chocolate cherry rum fudge is flying off the shelves. Besides, a girl stopped by, she wondered if we needed a candy maker. I told her to come back at 2 PM. That gives you thirty minutes.” Jennifer’s gaze never left the officers. “Nice eye candy.”
“I’m not here for the eye candy.” I tried not to blush. It was a losing proposition. I distracted her with a flick of my wrist. “The crime tech was telling us that these are dried remains. So far there isn’t any sign of animal activity.”
“Besides Mal’s teeth marks, right?” Jennifer asked.
Just then the re-enactors at Fort Mackinac fired the cannon. It was a daily occurrence, and island regulars were so used to it we barely noticed. I noticed this time because the tourists in the crowd all reacted as one and looked over their shoulders, spooked by the noise.
“Whoever it is had to be buried at some point,” Jennifer said and raised a black eyebrow. “Or you would have smelled them decaying. Right?”
The air currently smelled of fresh mulch, sweet lilacs, and hints of dirt.
“True,” Shane said. I noticed that his hazel gaze had moved from his work to Jennifer and stayed there. “Do you study taphonomy?”
“What?”
“Decay of living organisms,” Angus said.
“Oh, gosh, no,” Jennifer laughed and waved her hands delicately. “Do I look like someone who studies decomposition ?” She showed off her lilac nail art. “No, no, I watch those crime shows where they do all that lab work. Some of them are interesting.”
“Not much of that is true.” Shane pushed his dark-framed glasses up on his nose. His brilliant eyes sparkled behind them. “It takes weeks—sometimes months—to properly analyze a crime scene. By then most murders are cold cases. All that science you see on television is rarely funded. Which brings us back to old-fashioned police work and investigation.” He went back to screening the mulch.
“But you do send evidence to a lab, right?” Jennifer pouted, batting her eyelashes at the loss of his attention.
“Yes.” He studied the bark carefully. “But usually the science merely strengthens the case—rarely does it solve it.”
Angus took a camera out of his pocket and snapped pictures of the crowd from where he sat.
“What are you doing?” I asked, stepping out of his viewfinder’s range.
“Taking shots of the crowd in case the murderer has joined in with the onlookers.”
“Who would be that stupid?” I asked.
“Most serial killers,” Jennifer answered. “They say that there’s a good chance the killer is in the crowd or otherwise tries to insert themselves into the investigation.”
“Just like you,” Angus said and took a fast shot of my face.
“Or you,” I pointed out.
“Or me.” He nodded, his dark eyes twinkling. “I can’t remember the last time I saw Karus. I know I saw him supervising the horses when they moved in for the season.”
“That would have been in April, right?”
Angus nodded.
I studied the crowd. The tourists who stopped and watched were tugged back by their impatient kids, who begged for fudge or ice cream from Main Street.
“Here.” Jennifer handed me her cell phone.
“What’s this for?” I took the phone.
“Call Trent Jessop. He owns the stables. He’d know if Karus is missing.” Her eyes twinkled. “I know you know his number.”
“Good idea,” Angus said as he continued to take pictures of the crowd. “Jessop would know.”
I narrowed my eyes at Jennifer. Trent Jessop was the gorgeous grandson of my father’s dear friend. The friend who had been murdered in my utility closet. The entire town had been convinced that there was a feud between the McMurphys and the Jessops. So much so that they had started wearing ribbons to let everyone know whose side they were on.
Trent had stifled the feud idea in a rather unusual way. Ever since, I’ve been nervous in his presence. There was a certain level of sexy that a girl like me didn’t dare get involved with—it never turned out for the best. Now someone like Jennifer . . . that was a different story. But she was having none of my protests.
“Call him,” Jenn pushed.
I shot her a dirty look, and she winked at me. I glanced at Rex, his broad capable shoulders straining against his fitted uniform as he tossed shovels of dirt and mulch onto the black plastic.
There wasn’t a lot of free time in my life for things like dating and relationships. That didn’t mean I didn’t have a rich fantasy life.
“Do you want me to do it?” Jenn whispered near my ear.
“I’ll do it.” I punched in the numbers and walked as far from the crime-scene crowd as I could.
“This is Jessop.” Trent’s rich, deep voice brought shivers down my back.
“Hi, Trent, this is Allie McMurphy.”
“What can I do for you, Allie?”
Now that was a loaded question. “Trent, does Steven Karus work for you?”
“Karus? No, he works for the Jacobs’ stables. Why?”
“Have you seen him lately?”
“Sure, I saw him yesterday. He stopped in to look at our new gelding.”
“He did? Are you sure?” I glanced at Angus.
“Of course I’m sure. I’ve known Karus since I was a kid. What’s this all about?”
“I don’t know that I’m able to say just yet,” I hedged. “But I’m glad to hear Mr. Karus was alive yesterday.”
“Allie . . .”
“Thanks for the info, Trent,” I cut him off. “Stop by sometime and I’ll get you some fudge and coffee—on the house.” I hung up the phone before he could say anything else. Trent was pretty wired into the community hotline. I figured he’d figure things out on his own pretty quickly.
“Steven’s alive.” Angus studied me.
“Yes, Trent saw him yesterday.”
“That shoots my theory down.” Angus scowled, then pursed his lips. “Too bad, I was kind of looking forw
ard to figuring out why he had his toenails painted orange.”
I handed the phone back to Jenn. “Maybe we should be checking to see who isn’t in the crowd,” I said. “These bones could belong to a local who died this spring or even someone who died last fall and has been buried in snow.”
“Oh, like the iceman they found in Switzerland.” Jenn tucked the cell phone back into her pocket. My best friend was tall, curvy, and elegant. Her long, black hair and fine features made her a perfect candidate for modeling. Cameras loved her hair. In contrast my own mop of dark brown hair, which refused to reflect any sort of light, always looked dull in pictures and videos.
Today Jenn wore a flowery sundress with a buttery-yellow background and a long, blue sweater. Her heels were white cotton espadrilles that had four-inch platforms and made her over six feet tall and all elegant arms and legs.
Jenn was not only a good friend, but an excellent event planner. She came to Mackinac to help me with my first season. In the short month she had been here, she had been hired to plan two weddings. The woman was a genius when it came to organizing. She made me feel rumpled in my pink “McMurphy” polo shirt and black pants—standard uniform for retail workers. My uniform matched the pink stripes of the McMurphy’s lobby interior. It was an old-fashioned theme meant to remind people of their stay whenever they saw one of my pink and white striped boxes.
On my feet were cushiony athletic shoes meant to be more practical than attractive. A good candy maker was on her feet most of the day. Four-inch platform shoes were useless when moving a copper kettle filled with boiling fudge.
While Jennifer’s hair floated in soft curls around her shoulders, mine was pulled back in my attempt for a low ponytail—most of it was in the ponytail. I ignored the wild curls that had slipped out of their confines and flew about my face.
“Allie, what’s going on?” Trent pushed his way toward us through the crowd. He wore jeans and a pale blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Like me he was a small-business owner. His family had run the island stables for over one hundred years. “You have to know you can’t call me like that and not expect me to follow up.”