His temper flared. It was just like Anita to make something up to get him to stay and talk with her. “Anita, goddammit, quit your stalling and tell me!”
Anita cleared her throat and sat up a little straighter, making sure that Riley saw the hurt look in her eyes as she put on her glasses, but finally, she spoke. “Now, don’t you go saying where you heard this from. It isn’t public knowledge, and I believe that the woman deserves a decent rest without a bunch of folks gossiping over her. And no, of course they haven’t had time to dig that poor woman up yet. God willing, they never will.”
But of course they would, Riley knew. The Billings boys were already convinced that Thad had killed his wife, too, and made it look like an accident.
Anita crossed herself before going on. “No, she’s still buried beneath God’s green earth, right where she belongs. But”—she paused for effect—“it just so happens that Alice Bosman is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and her son, little Archie Bosman, took over Wakeman’s Funeral Parlor last year. You might remember, the Wakemans never did have any children.”
“I remember,” said Riley, trying to keep himself calm. “Go on.”
“Little Archie Bosman—and mind you, I’d be the first to say that boy grew up with too much mommying, even if Alice is one of my dearest friends. But that don’t hurt him none with the dead folks, I guess. They don’t know the difference. Little Archie told his mother—now, I don’t think that’s healthy, do you?”
“What?”
“Telling your mama everything at forty years of age?”
“No,” said Riley. “I guess not.”
“He told his mom that when he was fixing up the body that he found…” Here she paused and lowered her voice to a whisper, even though it was obvious that there was nobody else in the whole goddamned office. “…she had a tail!” Anita finished, sounding triumphant.
“Excuse me? What do you mean a tail?”
“I mean,” said Anita, “she had a tail. That’s what Alice told me Archie told her, so don’t shoot the messenger. I Googled it, though. I’ve gotten real good at the Googling. My granddaughter showed me. And guess what? It isn’t that uncommon, that’s what the Google said. Sometimes people are just born like that. Besides, it wasn’t a full-blown tail, just a little nubbin.”
“Holly Williams had a nubbin.”
“That’s what I said,” said Anita. She crossed her arms over chest. “What, you think I’m just making all this up? Let me tell you, young man, I have more important things to do than—”
“All right, Anita, settle down. I believe you. It just doesn’t do me a whole lot of good, you know, finding that out. I feel sorry for the woman, but that’s just her shit luck, huh?”
“Riley! You watch your unholy mouth, boy. You’re not too old to bend over my knee.”
Riley smiled, despite himself. That was a picture he hoped he’d never see come to reality. “Okay, okay. Thanks for the information. Anything else, ’Nita?”
“There was one other thing,” she said.
“Yes?” Riley waited for Anita to tell him that Holly Williams also had some kind of piercing in an inappropriate place or something else equally distasteful. Anita was a good woman, but a damn bit of a gossipmonger, too.
“Sam called in to say they found a couple more bodies.”
“What!” Riley forgot that he was holding the dog’s leash, and in his excitement he jerked on it. Maxie issued a loud bark of protest. “What?”
“You said any news from the Billings boys. It was Sam who called this in.”
Anita bent complacently in her chair to scratch Maxie, as if she’d said nothing more interesting than the weather report. “You need me to keep this dog an extra night?”
“No. What about the bodies?”
“Because I can. I don’t mind keeping her at all.”
“Forget about the damned dog! I’m taking her back to the owners.”
“Hmph,” said Anita. “I don’t know that you should. Personally, I don’t think they’re taking care of her as good as they should. Her poop was a little runny. You tell those folks that they need to think about what they’re feeding her. Ask them if it has corn in it, because dogs—”
“Anita!” The headache he thought he’d conquered yesterday reappeared loud and strong, thrumping like an insistent lead-weighted finger at the center of his forehead. “Tell me about the bodies.”
“You going to ask them about the dog?”
“Yes,” said Riley. He took a deep breath. It was a meditation technique his ex-wife, New Age wannabe that she was, had taught him. It wasn’t working.
“What are you going to ask?” prodded Anita.
Breathe, two, three, four. Imagine yourself on a river. A motherfucking river with two dead bodies and a corpse with a tail. Hallelujah. “I’ll ask them if she eats corn,” said Riley. “Tell them dogs shouldn’t eat corn.”
“That’s right,” said Anita. “But not just eating corn, if it’s in its food. Anyway, about those bodies.” Her voice changed immediately to professional. Despite everything, Anita was extremely competent, which was why he kept her around. “There were two, like I said.”
“Gender?”
“Female.”
“Identified?”
“Weelll…not exactly. But I’ve got a pretty good guess. Sam said they were women, and their hair, what was left of it, matches the description of two prostitutes that used to work the truck stop but haven’t been seen around there lately.”
“How the hell did you find this out?”
“I called down there and asked them. Nancy, the truck stop manager, is my cousin Crystal’s daughter. You’d be surprised how much they see at the store.”
“God bless you, Anita.”
“He does indeed,” said Anita. “Anything else, Sheriff?”
“Not now. Just let me know if you hear anything.”
“I will, and you make sure—”
“I’ll tell them about the dog.”
“I guess I’ll just be here all alone, then.” Her voice perked up. “You need any company at the Festival?”
“I doubt I’ll even go, what with all this going on. But if I do, I’ll be sure to call you.”
“Don’t forget.”
“Scout’s honor.” He had no more intention of taking Anita to the Festival than he did of growing wings out of his ass. “Have a nice afternoon.”
“I will. Just as soon as I get off work I’ve got to go home to get my pies ready for the Feast Dinner. You’re coming to that, aren’t you?”
“Wouldn’t miss it. You let me know if anything else comes through on the Williams case, okay? I’ll keep my walkie on me.”
“I will. And you tell them folks about the corn.”
He stood to leave and whistled for the dog, who followed him out the door obediently, pink bow and all. Riley opened his cruiser door and Maxie hopped in, looking quite at home riding shotgun.
2
Riley sat in the car and mulled over his conversation with Anita.
Two bodies, unidentified except by Anita’s nebulous second cousin, but he would bet the woman’s instincts were spot-on. Anita was a gossip, but she rarely got her information wrong. So what did it all mean, exactly?
He ran over the facts again. Thad Williams, a stand-up Cavus citizen, loses his wife to what seems to be a freak accident and then, a month later, disappears, along with his daughter. Three female bodies, probably prostitutes, are found on his property.
Could grief do that? Make a man crazy enough to kill?
Maybe, but Riley didn’t think so. Not a man like Thad. He guessed there was still a chance that it hadn’t been Thad who killed the women, but Riley knew in his gut that they’d find out he had. There was no other way for it, especially with all the reports that had come in from around town about Thad still driving his police car. A few of those calls had mentioned a passenger. At the time, Thad had assumed that passenger had been his daughter, but now…
Was the daughter dead, too? They hadn’t found her body yet, so there was still a chance she was alive. Maybe even with her father.
But why? Why had Thad killed those women?
When he’d gone out to the Williams place and seen the dead woman, the Billings cops had offered a neat explanation for all of this, and it was one, Riley knew, he should probably swallow and then let the case go.
“Seen shit like this before.” There were two Billings cops, a fat one and a skinny one, like some kind of goddamn Laurel and Hardy. It was the skinny one who spoke. Brown, Gray. Riley couldn’t remember the man’s name. Only the ever-present toothpick he kept twirling around in his mouth.
“Like this?” Riley asked, and gestured to the woman’s body where it lay slumped against the chair.
She wore a white dress, a small and intricate piece with lace ties at the shoulders. It might have made her look delicate, like a woman dressed in an old Victorian nightgown, if not for two things: one—the full sleeve of tattoos along her arm, a mixture of skulls, dragons, and goldfish; and two—the fact that she no longer had a face. Her hair hadn’t been touched. It hung in perfectly curled blond pieces, the color obviously out of a bottle, but pretty. Could have been a princess wig like they sold to little girls on Halloween. And underneath that, not a scrap of flesh left. Just a raw, gaping hole of red meat and gristle, a bit of white cheekbone peeking out from between the red. The center of the face was the worst. There, there were…indentations. Like something had been gnawing on it. The dog, maybe.
“You’re telling me you’ve seen shit like this before,” Riley repeated.
“Sure.” The fat one answered him, looking bored in his perfectly pressed uniform shirt. Riley didn’t trust a cop whose shirts were that clean. It meant you weren’t doing your job, weren’t trucking the hot streets and stinking and stewing in the messy interiors of perps’ houses or your car. “I seen it plenty of times.”
A desk drone. No doubt about it. “Okay,” Riley said. “Then please, by all means, tell me.”
“Drugs,” Fat Man said. “You mean to tell me you never seen a drug case gone bad?”
Riley had. Of course he had. Missoula was rife with its own horror stories of fighting and fucking and pure pissed-away lives full of drugs, but he had never seen anyone chew someone’s fucking face off before.
“Not like this,” was all he said.
“The stuff they got out there now, it isn’t clean,” Gray said. “It’s nasty. Home-brew shit. The meth’s the worst. I seen a man cut his own dick off ’cause he thought he had worms eating it.”
Riley guessed he had seen a few cases of self-mutilation himself, even one where a wife high on angel dust had taken a tire iron to her husband’s head, but what was in the Williams’ kitchen…No, he’d never seen anything like that before. The woman looked like some kind of goddamned monster.
Riley dug a hand between the seats of his car, searching, having to move Maxie aside to do so, and then grunted with satisfaction as he pulled free a loose Tums. He popped it into his mouth.
Maybe Gray and the Fat Man were right. Maybe it was drugs. Thad had gotten himself into something heavy, a meth ring, maybe, and everything had gone to hell from there. Riley should go with the easiest answer, and let sleeping dogs lie. Focus on finding Thad, and his daughter if he could, and stamp a big Case Closed on the matter.
Except…
Except before he left, Riley had lived in Cavus a long time, had grown up there. He’d known it and its people well. And none of it fit with this new Thad Williams, who was starting to look like a pretty sick fuck indeed.
Years ago, when Riley had first started out as a cop, he’d worked with his own dad, who’d been sheriff. Riley was a newly minted deputy, and he’d been full of the honor of being a policeman, had been eager to do all the community outreach his dad had thrown his way. One of those jobs was at the local high school. Thad was a junior there back then, and on the football team. Riley’d come to the school to give a pregame pep talk speech about honor and teamwork. He’d always liked to think that him giving that speech and meeting Thad had something to do with the boy’s later decision to join the force.
That teenaged Thad had been a stand-up guy, had waited in the gym to shake Riley’s hand after the pep rally. But people could change. Obviously. He looked down at his thick gut, where a spot of syrup remained from his breakfast. People could change and most often it wasn’t for the better.
He sighed.
Thad was probably long gone, running from this whole mess, but maybe the daughter wasn’t. That was what was bothering him most about the Billings boys. They were acting like she was already dead and were just going through the motions of locating her.
But Riley wasn’t so sure. She might still be alive.
And if she was…Riley couldn’t just let it go at drugs. He knew if he turned this mess over to the state cops, they would do little to look for other explanations. But if it had been Riley, and the girl were Izzy, he had to hope that somebody would try their damnedest to make sure his daughter was okay and then make damned sure that her papa was guilty before telling her any horror stories.
Maxie ducked her head under his free arm, seeking a scratch and Riley obliged.
Technically, he’d scheduled himself to stay near the office today, field any calls about the case and act as a glorified secretary while the state boys figured the rest of it out. But Riley didn’t think that was what he was going to do.
No. He thought he’d go to the Festival. Because that was something the other cops wouldn’t pull their heads out of their asses far enough to do. They’d be spending all their time at the Williams house, just waiting to dig up Star’s body.
But if she wasn’t dead…If she wasn’t dead, then the Festival was as good a place to find her as any. Her or somebody who might know something about her.
And if Riley didn’t find anything there, he’d let it go. Get back to what he’d planned on as a quiet life here in Cavus. He’d start refinishing the old house he’d bought on the outskirts of town, go down to Lowe’s and buy that can of pink paint he’d been eyeing for Izzy’s room. It was the exact same color as the strawberry milkshakes that were her favorite.
Riley pulled the car out of the station’s driveway, and hit the window button to allow Maxie to hang her head out. He’d do what he could today. And he knew he’d get a lot more out of Cavus folks if he talked to them as one Cavusite to another. Not a cop, just a hometown guy out at the Festival enjoying a good time. Riley turned onto the main road, and picked up speed. He looked over to see Maxie’s head so far out that her gums were blowing in the wind.
“A fucking tail,” he muttered under his breath, shaking his head. He stomped his foot on the gas pedal and pushed the car up to sixty. “Welcome home, buddy boy. Welcome home.”
Chapter 10
1
To Javier, his second job wasn’t like a job at all. He loved riding the paper route. It wasn’t his bike, unfortunately—his boss, Terry, was letting him borrow it. For Javier, the route was relaxing and enjoyable. It allowed him time to stretch his legs and lungs from being cooped up in the factory all day. It allowed him time to think.
Today he was thinking about Mabel. He couldn’t help it. He was smitten. He grinned at the use of the word. “Smitten.” He’d been making himself read a Jane Austen book (which, it had to be admitted, he quite liked) because he’d read her name on a list of the “greats” for authors, and he wanted to see what the fuss was about. He’d taken the book from the local library, as he did all his books, by sneaking it out, because without identification he didn’t qualify for a card. He didn’t count it as stealing because he always returned them. So far, in the Austen book, there were several characters smitten with a Mr. Darcy, although the lead
girl was proving a lot harder to win over.
Javier mounted his bike, rolling up his left pants leg to keep it out of the spokes. He imagined himself as Mr. Darcy, trying to woo the reluctant Mabel.
He blushed. Gay! What was he thinking of. God, what a stupid hombre. If his friends back home could have heard him thinking this trash they would have beat the shit out of him.
He started his route, tossing the papers expertly onto the doorsteps, never missing. Not that anybody gave a shit. These weren’t real papers, just a kind of buyer’s guide with a bunch of junk ads that most people threw away. According to Terry, the last kid hadn’t even bothered to deliver them, just tossed them in a dumpster, which was why he’d been fired.
Javier flung another bundle in a well-aimed arc. He had a perfect arm. One of his greatest regrets about not attending school was the missed chance to be on a sports team. He thought he’d make a hell of an athlete. His dad had always told him so. Told him that someday he’d teach Javier to ride like he did, maybe let him enter a few rodeos.
“But not for life,” his padre had said, pulling up his pants legs and showing Javier his beat-up legs, so bent and deformed from crookedly mended bones that they looked like broken sticks stuck back together with putty. “Life, it’s for education. So that your legs, they don’t look like mine.”
Javier stood up on the pedals of his bike, enjoying the whip of the wind against his face. No trouble with his legs here, not just yet. And the education would come. After Gabriela it would come.
Down the streets of Cavus he flew, his bike as much a part of him as his arm, the two of them moving as one through the town that was the first one in a long time to feel like home to him. But home was where you made it, that’s what his mom always said. He agreed. Wasn’t anything for free in this world, not even feeling like you had a home. You had to work for it, and Javier didn’t just work, he busted his ass. Wasn’t anyone, not even the cop from last night, going to stop him from giving his family a home.
He rounded the corner of Cinbar Street, flipping the last paper onto the porch of Mr. Harold Pimberton. He checked his watch. It was nearly nine o’clock now. Javier tucked his empty bag in front of him, in between the handlebars. The whole route finished in only fifty minutes. Record time.
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