“—once in her head, Hayden can tell us an uncanny amount about her processes and motivations and history,” Hatch added.
“And the good news is Hayden’s nearby in New Orleans to give a talk tomorrow. Looks like he’ll need to make a little detour.”
“Which reminds me, after you talk to Hayden, we need to head out of the swamp for a detour of our own,” Grace told Hatch. “I tracked down the cleaning crew that employed the man posing as the long-dead Ronnie Alderman.”
* * *
Hatch flashed his badge, and a middle-aged man pushing a vacuum across the entryway of an insurance office rushed to the door and opened it. Once again, Grace marveled at the doors so readily opened by Parker Lord’s famed Apostles.
After meeting with the vet, she got hold of the owner of the property management company responsible for cleaning the phone retail store where Lia Grant’s killer had purchased the phones, the same store where the security images, both inside and outside, had been conveniently wiped for the day of purchase. She then tracked down the cleaning crew who’d worked with the person posing as the long-dead Ronnie Alderman.
“Thanks for seeing us, Mr. Montoya,” Grace said as she shook the burly man’s hand. “About the crew member you worked with, the one called Ronnie Alderman—”
“I already told my boss, I don’t remember working with a Ronnie Alderman. We get a lot of college kids in and out of here during the summer, and all the faces and names run together.”
“Maybe it was that weird chick.” A younger man pushing a cart with a squeaky wheel stopped near the receptionist’s desk and picked up a trashcan. “You know, the one who liked to vacuum in the dark.”
The older man scratched the side of his head. “That was a guy, wasn’t it?”
“Nah, she was pretty small, wasn’t she?”
“Okay, might have been a woman. Her name was Ronnie, huh?” He shrugged. “She wasn’t with our crew but for a day or two.”
“Did she get fired?” Grace asked.
“No, she just didn’t show up.”
“What did she look like?” Hatch asked.
The man rested his hands on the vacuum cleaner handle. “Smallish. Youngish. Hard to tell because like Caleb said, she liked to work in the dark. Kind of weird, now that I think about it, cleaning in the dark. But I didn’t say anything because she did a damn good job. Must have had eyes like an owl. Caleb, here, may have a better idea than me. He worked with her.”
“Dark hair.” The young man dumped the trash into his cart. “I think.”
“Long? Short? Straight? Curly?”
“Not sure.”
“How about her face?”
“Nothing stands out. Kind of average. Kind of pale. Maybe.”
“Physique?”
“Maybe skinny, but she wore baggy clothes. All black, by the way. I think. Or maybe they just looked black because she kind of lurked in the shadows.”
“Any distinguishing characteristics like tattoos, scars, or jewelry?”
“Not that I remember.”
More unknowns. More dark. More shovelfuls of nothing.
“Would you be willing to work with a forensic sketch artist from my team?”
“Sure, I’ll talk to your sketch artist,” the burly cleaning guy said. “But I’m not too sure how much it would help. Seriously, I don’t remember much about this Ronnie Alderman.”
“You’d be surprised what you’ll remember when asked by a person trained to dig deep into your head.”
“I can try, Agent Hatcher, but don’t hold your breath.”
On the way back to Cypress Bend, Grace drove while Hatch dialed his team’s forensic artist. The phone rang thirteen times. Grace would have hung up, but Hatch leaned back in the seat and watched the countryside rush by.
“Peace and goodwill,” said a woman with winded breath.
“Peace and goodwill back at you, Berk,” Hatch said with a smile that reached his eyes. “Did I catch you chasing the sun again?”
“Chasing, but not catching.” A chiming laugh tinkled. “I went through half a tube of cadmium yellow and six different brushes. Maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow.”
“The sun will have to wait. I need you.”
And like that, one of the finest forensic artists in the country was making arrangements to hop aboard a private jet and make her way to the Florida panhandle. Parker Lord’s team featured the best of the best, including the man sitting next to her.
Hatch had grown up, but he’d grown in other ways. Although still restless, he’d grown more patient. Although still the laid-back charmer, he’d grown a more serious side, and she had a feeling Parker Lord had a great deal to do with that.
“You’re being quiet again,” Hatch said long after he hung up.
“Still thinking,” she said.
“About bacon?”
“About you.”
He settled his fingertips on his chest and dipped in a half bow. “I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be. I’m thinking about what a liar you are.”
“Excuse me?”
“You said you wouldn’t make a good family man, but you’re a part of a family. You and Agent MacGregor are like brothers, and the minute you need something, boom, your teammates Hayden and Berkley are there. Sounds suspiciously like a family to me.”
“You must be hearing things, Princess, because I don’t do family.”
She just smiled.
With a frown he rolled down the window and rested his arm on the frame, his thumb tapping a steady beat on the metal. He said nothing on the remainder of the drive to Cypress Bend, and she wondered if he was thinking about his dad. Her family hadn’t been perfect—a paranoid mother and a father who spent long days and sometimes nights in the office—but she loved them and couldn’t imagine growing up alone and lonely as had been the case with Hatch. No wonder he was a hell-raiser. He desperately wanted the attention of a disconnected father.
When they reached Cypress Bend, she pulled into the sheriff’s station to update the lieutenant about their interviews with the cleaning crew.
On their way to the lieutenant’s private office, Deputy Fillingham waved them down. “Hey there, counselor. I was going to call you today. The forensic team working on your property wrapped up their investigation. I just received the paperwork releasing the site. Your construction crew can start digging tomorrow.”
In light of more recently dug graves, Grace had forgotten about the old bones. She’d even tucked away her need to push forward with construction of her dream home, a longing that had driven her the past six months. Crazy didn’t begin to describe the past few days.
“And while you’re here,” the deputy continued, “I’ll need to get an official statement from you.”
“I already talked to the lieutenant. I know nothing about the remains of the woman.”
“I know, but the forensic team found more than one set of remains.”
* * *
“Holy shit,” Hatch said under his breath.
Grace shared Hatch’s sentiment but couldn’t utter a word, her throat thick and tight as she stared at the two skeletons stretched out on the steel table in the county morgue, one full size and the other so tiny it would fit in a shoe box.
“Newborn?” Hatch asked on a ragged rush of air.
The M.E. nodded. “Skull shows signs of passing through the birth canal. Live birth. Cause of death is severed spinal cord.”
Hatch shook his head. “Such a violent way to die.”
“After only barely living.” Grace finally found her voice. She pointed to the full-size skeleton. “And this one?”
“Given the circular pelvic inlet and broad sciatic notch, definitely female. She’s of European ancestry, and the closure in the cranial sutures and rib ends show she was between the age of thirty and forty.”
A woman and child. As far as Grace knew, Lamar Giroux, who’d lived on her land for more than sixty years, had never married. He had one sister
with kids, all who lived in Tallahassee. The old hunter had seemed content to live out his life with his dogs on twenty acres of secluded land. “Have your people talked with Giroux yet?” Grace asked Deputy Fillingham.
“Not yet,” the deputy said. “But I’ll be heading to Tallahassee when we get the Gravedigger off the streets.”
“What about the woman?” Grace asked the coroner. “She was shot, right?”
The coroner ran her finger along a jagged hole in the skull. “Single GSW to the head. Bullet entered right temple. No exit wound.”
“Self-inflicted or homicide?” Hatch asked.
“Given the slight upward trajectory, I’m leaning toward self-inflicted.”
There was so much story in these old bones, and each bone was a chapter. The woman could have killed her baby then killed herself. Or perhaps someone else killed the baby, and in her grief, she took her own life. Had the baby been nestled against her chest at the time she killed herself? Had the babe been buried in her arms?
“The arm,” Grace said with a start. “What happened to the infant’s arm?”
“The skeleton indicates normal bone and skeletal growth. Appears to be a recovery issue. The team in the field widened the search area and never found the arm.”
“But they found some other stuff,” Hatch said, motioning to a small tray at the head of the table. “These the artifacts?”
Artifacts, such a cold, hard word for the bits and pieces of what had once been part of a human being. On the tray was a synthetic woman’s slipper, a strip of wide ribbon attached to a square of nubby fabric with pink bunnies, a silver coin, and a large silver filigree barrette.
Grace slid her finger along the barrette. “She must have had long hair.” Was it blond, brown, or black? And what about her eyes and the color of her skin? If only these artifacts could talk and tell of the secrets buried here.
“What’s that?” Hatch asked, pointing at a pile of red dirt.
“An anomaly,” the M.E. said. “The earth at the exhumation point had a large concentration of sand. This loamy, red earth was clumped around the infant bones.”
“Which means the baby was most likely buried in a different location, unearthed, and placed with the mother for communal burial,” Hatch said. “Could be the reason for the missing arm.”
Grace pictured the baby nestled in its mother’s arms, and for the first time since she’d seen the skull poking up from her construction site, the situation felt a little less gruesome. This mother and child belonged together.
Hatch studied the artifacts while she gave a formal statement to Deputy Fillingham. No, she had no knowledge of either set of remains, nothing about the artifacts looked familiar, and Lamar Giroux had never said or done anything that led her to believe he knew anything about this lone grave on his property.
When she finished with the deputy, she turned to Hatch, who was still standing at the table over the bones. His fingers traced, but didn’t touch, the curve of the woman’s skull. She settled her hand on the hard curve of his shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Listening to the bones.”
Bees and bridges and talking bones. Her world was much less drab with Hatch back in her life. She slid her hand down his back. And right. “Bones don’t talk.”
“Not to people like us.” A fire glinted in his eyes. “When Berkley’s done with the Ronnie Alderman sketch, I want her to find out what these bones have to say.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Greenup, Kentucky
The cop shows got it all wrong. Detective work wasn’t about car chases or dodging bullets while tailing bad guys in souped-up sports cars. Detective work meant planting your ass in a chair, jamming a phone to your ear, and plastering your eyeballs to a computer screen.
Detective Tucker Holt squeezed eye drops into both eyes, the liquid burning, but after ten seconds his eyeballs no longer felt as if they’d met up with a few sheets of coarse grit sandpaper. He’d spent all day searching the Internet for high schools in the contiguous United States with mascots called Hornets. He found more than seventy and had spent the past three hours tracking down high school athletic directors to find out if they had any star pitchers called the Stinger. So far he’d racked up twenty-two nos.
His phone rang, and he grabbed it, hoping it was a call-back from one of the coaches he’d left messages with. Caller ID showed no such luck. For a moment he thought about sending Mara, his soon-to-be ex, straight to voice mail. It wouldn’t be the first time a case kept him from personal calls, but this late on a Sunday evening, it was probably something about the kids.
“Hey, Daddy!” came the bubbly voice of his four-year-old, Hannah. “I’m a bumblebee, Daddy, a bumblebee.”
A smile settled on his face even though he needed a damned hornet, not a bee. “That’s nice, Hannah-Banana. I’ll bring you a bouquet of flowers and you can make honey.”
Hannah giggled. “Not a real one, silly, a dancing one. You’ll come watch me dance, right?”
“Of course I’ll watch you dance.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Hannah made a slurping kiss sound, and the phone rattled, as if dropped.
After squeals and scuffles, Mara came on the line. “We’ll see you Thursday at seven o’clock. Make sure you’re on time because the bumblebees go first.”
Bumblebees? His head was still wrapped around hornets and stingers.
“Tuck, you didn’t forget Hannah’s year-end dance recital, did you?”
Like last year. Mara had always complained about him being disconnected from the kids, but two days ago, he’d taken the time to record all of Jackson’s and Hannah’s summer activities on his phone. He called up his calendar and scrolled through the week ahead. “’Course not. Seven o’clock at the Center for the Arts.”
“And this time you’ll bring the flowers?”
It was a long-standing tradition at the dance studio for fathers to bring flowers to the dancers, and only slacker dads forgot. Like him last year when Hannah had dressed up as an itty-bitty sugar plum fairy. Thankfully, one of the dance teachers had plucked a pair of roses from her bouquet and tucked them in Hannah’s hands before the tears started. “I’ll bring the flowers.” He wasn’t a monster, just distracted by monsters. He was getting his shit together for his kids, Hannah the bumble bee and Jackson the fisherman. “Is Jackson still awake?”
Muted voices sounded on the other end of the line. “He doesn’t want to talk,” Mara said. “He’s playing a computer game.”
“Tell him to get off.”
“Tuck, he’s busy.”
“And I’m busy, but I’m making time for him. You see that, don’t you?” She needed to because he didn’t want her convincing some judge he was a shit of a father.
Mara let loose a sigh, and Jackson finally got on the phone. “Hey.”
“Hey buddy, I thought maybe you and I could go fishin’ sometime this week.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll pick up some night crawlers, the big, fat juicy ones.”
“Sure.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yep.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“Nope. Now can I go? I wanna get back to my game.”
Mara got back on the line, and Tucker said, “He didn’t sound too enthusiastic.”
“What do you expect, Tuck? You talk about fishing all the time, but it’s all talk.”
“Because of work.”
“Exactly, Tuck, because of work. See you at the dance recital. And in case you forgot, Hannah’s favorite flower is—”
“—daisies,” Tucker finished for his ex. “I’m not a total fuckup.”
When the phone went dead, he stared at the photo of faceless Grandpa Doe. According to the waitress, he was a guy who spent a lot of time with his grandkids. Did he take them fishing? Go to their dance recitals? Buy them daises or pie with three scoops of vanilla ice cream?
H
e picked up the phone and continued to look for a Hornet called the Stinger. Up next, a high school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was late, past the decent hour for phone calls from strangers. Fuck decency.
“Coach Lancaster, please,” Tuck said.
“You got him.”
“This is Detective Tucker Holt with the Kentucky State Police. I’m investigating a situation here and am trying to track down an older couple who may live in your neck of the woods. You coach high school baseball, correct?”
“Yep.”
“Ever hear of a player called the Stinger?”
“The Stinger? Sure. He’s our boy. One of the best shortstops I’ve ever seen. Devan Lassen.”
The palms of Tuck’s hands prickled. “Do you by any chance know if he has a set of grandparents who came out and watched him play?”
“Sure does. Never missed a home game. Real nice couple.”
The prickle moved down his arms and across his chest, kicking up his heart rate. “Can you describe them for me?”
“She’s tiny, gray hair. Looks like a typical grandma. He’s a big guy, probably played football in his day but has a gut on him now. Likes the sweets. Is everything okay?”
Now it was Tucker’s turn for the word that had haunted him for days. “No.”
* * *
The Game had changed.
Someone had discovered her secret hiding place. No one was supposed to know about the floating cabin. It was her secret, and secrets, like bones, should stay buried forever. But now everyone knew about the hiding place, and she couldn’t use the third wooden box. Someone had taken it away. None of this was supposed to happen. It wasn’t a part of The Game.
Tiny worms skittered across her arms, and she brushed her hands along her skin, trying to push them away. They burrowed deeper, crawling toward her insides. She pushed harder, pushing away the flesh-eaters, and finally her skin smoothed. They were gone.
Good. She had work to do.
The pawn from Level Two dangled by a handful of tiny tubes and wires. Soon they would break, and soon she would be out of The Game. Then they could all move on to Level Three. Unfortunately, they couldn’t go to the next level without a box. She wasn’t about to go to the home improvement store in Tallahassee and purchase more lumber. That FBI agent, the one the color of the sun and sky, was smart, and so was Grace. But none were as smart as her.
The Buried (The Apostles) Page 19