Bad Moon (Kat Campbell Mysteries)

by Ritter, Todd

  James crowded him from behind. “Can I touch it?”

  “No.”

  Eric yanked the box away, causing the dead ferret inside to slide to another corner. Something else slid with it. He had missed it earlier because it had been hidden beneath the animal. Now it was exposed, sitting askew against one of the ferret’s front paws.

  A flat disk, it was roughly the size of a plate from a child’s tea set. Eric picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It was made of clay and surprisingly heavy for its size. One side was unadorned. The other had been coated with a thin layer of white paint. Dark traces of clay could be spotted through the paint job, giving the whole thing a blotchy, stubbled look. It wasn’t until Eric examined it at arm’s length that he realized what the disk resembled.

  It was a full moon.

  “What’s that?” James asked in a manner that came close to resembling awe. For him, this really had become a treasure hunt.

  “Just a piece of clay.”

  “Can I have it?”

  “No can do,” Eric said. “We need to leave it where it is and bury the animal again. Quickly.”

  Eric returned the disk to the box and put the lid over it. Climbing to his feet, he grabbed the shovel and used it to widen the hole he had pulled the box from. When it was big enough, he laid the box inside and, with much guilt, began to rebury it.

  He was almost finished when James tugged on his arm and whispered, “He’s awake.”

  Eric looked to the house, where a light had brightened a second-floor window. He caught sight of a silhouette behind the glass, apparently looking out over the yard.

  “Go,” Eric hissed to James. “Run.”

  The boy sprinted away, streaking from Glenn Stewart’s yard. Eric soon did the same, running with the shovel as fast as he could until he was back in his own yard. He caught up with James on the back porch. There was a giddy smile plastered on the boy’s face as he breathlessly said, “That was so cool! Do you think he saw us?”

  Eric shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  It was a lie. Eric knew without a doubt that Glenn Stewart had seen both of them. He also had a dreadful sense that his neighbor knew exactly what they had been up to.

  NINETEEN

  The bones lay on the stainless-steel table like parts of a jigsaw puzzle ready to be pieced together. The skull Nick had found in the water sat at the head of the table. Just below it was the lower jaw with its row of browned teeth. The rest of the bones that state police divers had found were arrayed below that in a fair approximation of what a full skeleton would look like. Ribs in the middle. Two arms—one of them broken in half at the elbow—resting alongside them. Legs pointing to the bottom of the table.

  Years underwater had stripped the skeleton clean. There were no traces of skin, organs, even tendons. Time had wiped away most of it. Fish had done the rest. All that remained were the bones.

  Nick took a slow walk around the table, studying them. The hand of the right arm, the one that was in two pieces, lay flat against the table’s surface, fingers slightly spread. The left hand was balled into a fist, the bones of its fingers tight against each other. He had just reached out and touched it when a woman sailed into the autopsy suite, leaving its double doors swinging wildly behind her. She looked first at the skeleton and then at Nick.

  “Are you in charge?”

  Lieutenant Vasquez, who had been sitting quietly in the corner, stood. Like Nick, he was still damp from their unexpected dip beneath the mill. Unlike Nick, he had removed his shirt and approached the woman with a bare-chested swagger. The show-off.

  “I am,” he said, extending a hand and introducing himself.

  “Lucy Meade. We spoke on the phone.” To Tony’s disappointment, the woman had gone back to looking at Nick. “Who’s he?”

  “Nick Donnelly. He’s helping out with the case.”

  “If you want to help,” Lucy said, speaking directly to Nick, “then don’t touch my fucking bones.”

  The way she verbally took possession of the skeleton informed Nick that she was the forensic anthropologist brought in to examine the remains. She was younger than he was expecting—early thirties, tops—and too pretty for someone who spent most of her time with the long dead. Her eyes were blue. Her auburn hair was tied back into a ponytail. She wore jeans, Nikes, and a CIA T-shirt.

  “You were once with the CIA?” Nick asked.

  Lucy Meade covered the shirt with a white lab coat she pulled from a hook next to the door. “Yes, but not the one you’re thinking of.”

  “What other CIA is there besides the Central Intelligence Agency?”

  “Culinary Institute of America,” Lucy replied. “I was going to be a chef.”

  “What happened?”

  “Bones are more interesting.”

  She shooed Nick away from the table with a flick of her hand and swooped in to replace him. Then she took a long look at the bones arranged in front of her.

  “It’s a boy,” she said. “Taking a wild guess, I’d say he was no older than eleven.”

  Nick was impressed. “How can you tell?”

  “Pubic bones.” Lucy pointed to a series of bones held together in a butterfly shape. “There’s hardly any wear and tear of the pubic symphysis, indicating the skeleton belongs to someone who died very young. The pelvis is narrow and deep, telling me it’s a male.”

  “That sounds like our boy.” It was Tony, who had put on his shirt and joined them at the table.

  “And just who is ‘your boy’?” Lucy Meade used air quotes as she said it, a gesture that normally annoyed the hell out of Nick. In her case, however, he found it charming. Mostly because she was smart. And pretty. And didn’t hesitate to throw her weight around.

  “Noah Pierce,” he said. “Nine years old. Went missing in 1971.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “In the lake next to the state park where he disappeared.”

  “We’ll need a dental anthropologist to try to match the teeth with dental records,” Lucy said, “but I have a feeling this really is your boy.”

  “Would you be able to determine how he died?” Nick asked.

  Like the others, he also was going on the assumption that the bones pulled from the water had once belonged to Noah Pierce. What he really wanted to know was who killed him and why. But since there was no way Lucy would be able to tell them that, Nick would gladly settle for a cause of death.

  “Maybe.” Lucy’s eyes never left the bones on the table. She looked at them the way an art critic studied a Picasso—curious, probing, searching. “It depends on how he was killed. Since you found him in the water, wouldn’t logic dictate that he drowned?”

  Nick and Tony had discussed that possibility while toweling off in the back of a CSU van at Lasher Mill State Park. Both already knew that serial criminals rarely drowned their victims—the horrible truth being that it was less fun for them that way. When a victim of a serial killer was found in the water, there was a good chance it was merely a dumping ground and that the victim was killed by other means.

  Snapping rubber gloves over her hands, Lucy moved to the head of the table and picked up the skull. She held it at eye level, tilting and turning it.

  “I don’t see any sign of skull fractures or contusions,” she said. “I’ll spend the night doing a more thorough examination, but off the bat it doesn’t look like any blunt force trauma was involved.”

  Lucy set the skull down as gently as she had picked it up. She then moved to the side of the table, swiping a stray lock of hair behind her ear as she bent over the bones. She looked at each one closely and methodically, gaze skipping from rib to rib.

  “What are you looking for?” Nick asked.

  “Damage to the bones that could have been made with a weapon. Stabbing victims sometimes have slices on their bones made by the knife blade. Shooting victims have notches from where the bullet passed through. The good thing about the remains belonging to someone so young i
s that there’s not a lifetime of skeletal damage to make things confusing.”

  Nick morbidly thought of his own leg and how it would have looked after four decades underwater. He suspected the titanium pins would still be there, unless the fish had been especially ravenous. It would certainly be enough to throw off even someone with Lucy Meade’s expertise.

  “With children,” she continued, “there are fewer fractures to contend with. Fewer broken bones. The bad part—”

  Nick volunteered an answer. “Is that the remains belong to a kid.”

  Lucy looked up from the table and smiled sadly. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

  She resumed her examination of the skeleton, pressing her fingertips against the bones of the right leg and running them down to the toes. Then she moved to the other side of the table, doing the same to the left leg, fingers now working upward.

  “So tell me, Mr. Donnelly,” she said, “is this one of your foundation’s cold cases?”

  Nick, whose gaze had been following Lucy’s hands, now looked at her face. It remained mostly blank, her eyes squinting with concentration. Had she been studying his face, she would have seen surprise that she knew who he was.

  “Partly,” he said. “We sort of stumbled upon this one.”

  “Which is why you’re back to helping the state police.”

  “Exactly.”

  At last, Lucy looked at him again. “I’ve read a few articles about you and your mission. I admire what you’re trying to do. Call me if you ever need help with a case. I’d be glad to offer my expertise.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Or,” Lucy added, “call me if you just want to grab a beer sometime. I’d be happy to do that, too.”

  Tony, who was standing behind her, gave Nick an excited thumbs-up. Because he was facing Lucy, Nick couldn’t react to the gesture. But, inside, his stomach was doing happy somersaults. He fully intended to make that phone call once he was done with the current case.

  “I’ll definitely keep that in mind,” he said.

  Lucy didn’t respond. She was too busy leaning over the left arm splayed on the stainless-steel table. Something about the clenched hand had caught her attention, and she drew in close until her nose was almost touching the knuckle of the index finger.

  “I think he’s holding something,” she said.

  She flipped the arm over; pressing the wrist against the table with her left hand, she began to peel back the fingers with her right.

  The pinkie finger was first. The joints cracked loudly when Lucy separated it from the others—a sickening popping sound that made Nick wince. Once it was flat against the table, Lucy instructed him to put on a pair of rubber gloves.

  “Hold the finger down,” Lucy told him once the gloves were on.

  Nick pressed down on the bone as she moved to the ring finger. As soon as she pulled on it, the finger snapped off and clattered to the table.

  “Fuck.”

  “That’s one way of doing it,” Nick said.

  Lucy frowned. “The wrong way.”

  Although clearly flustered, she didn’t hesitate to move on to the middle finger. It made the same cracking sounds as the pinkie, although louder. When its knuckles had been bent to the table, Nick also held it down. He did the same once the index finger was unfurled. Soon he found himself staring into the now-open palm.

  The object sitting in the hand was unidentifiable at first glance. Decades of mud and algae clung to its surface, making it look more like a turd than anything else. When Lucy slid it out from beneath the thumb, it left a smear of dark slime behind.

  “It’s heavy for something so small,” she said.

  Lucy made her way to the sink along the wall and began to wash it off. Picking up a nearby scrub brush, she scoured it for a good five minutes. Every so often, the grime that coated the object made an audible splat as it fell into the sink’s basin. When it was clean, Lucy turned around and showed it to them.

  “What is it?” Nick asked.

  “Honestly, I have no idea.”

  She passed it to Nick, who examined it. The object was about a few inches long and indeed heavier than it looked. If he had been asked to guess what it was made out of, he would have said wrought iron. Fortunately, he didn’t need to guess.

  “It’s a model rocket,” he said.

  The paint job had been wiped away, leaving just a basic rod with a top that tapered into a rounded tip. What looked to be two small fins jutted out at the bottom. But the main thing that allowed Nick to identify it wasn’t the shape or size. It was the letters that had been carefully scratched onto the side.

  He held the rocket to the light and angled it until the letters could be seen by Tony and Lucy. What they spelled was a first and last name.

  That name was Dennis Kepner.

  TWENTY

  After his experience in Glenn Stewart’s yard an hour earlier, Eric wasn’t sure if he wanted to open the box Kat brought back from the cemetery. He still felt guilty about digging up his neighbor’s dead pet and remorse about invading his privacy. Staring at the tin box sitting on the dining-room table didn’t help matters. If anything, it only reinforced the lesson he had learned next door—that some things were meant to stay buried.

  “Are we really doing the right thing here?” he asked.

  Kat sat next to him, nodding gently. “Isn’t this what your mother wanted?”

  Eric’s mother wanted him to find Charlie. He wasn’t sure she ever imagined that digging up things she had once buried would be a part of that. But apparently it was. Now he had to decide whether to go through with it or not.

  To her credit, Kat remained patient as he thought through his dilemma. She had sent James home with Carl Bauersox, asking the deputy to keep an eye on him until she returned. Eric was certain she wanted to do that sooner rather than later. He was also pretty sure that, having been the one to unearth the box, she wanted to see what it contained.

  After another minute of silence ticked by, Eric said, “I guess it has to be done.”

  Without giving it any more thought, he removed the lid and looked inside the box. A photograph of his brother stared back at him. Again, it was Charlie’s final school portrait—an image Eric had seen far too many times in the past few days. He picked it up and stared at it a moment, taking in his brother’s sad eyes, jug-handle ears, and wary smile.

  “There’s something else in the box,” Kat said.

  Eric set Charlie’s picture aside and peered into the box once again. Sitting on the bottom, where it had been hidden by the photo, was a key. Once bronze but now tarnished to a dull dark brown, it was smaller than modern keys. The teeth were more pronounced, the ridges less deep. Nothing was attached to it—no ring or chain—and nothing indicated what the key could be used for.

  Eric, however, had a good guess.

  Grabbing the key, he jumped up from the table and headed out of the dining room. Behind him, Kat could barely keep pace as he rushed upstairs, stopping at the door to Charlie’s room. With shaking hands, he slid the key into the hole. It fit perfectly. When he turned it, a slight click emanated from inside the door.

  Charlie’s room was now open.

  Standing in front of the unlocked door, Eric let out a joyous whoop. That was followed by some celebratory hopping up and down. He grabbed Kat, who had at last caught up to him, and pulled her into the dance.

  “It’s the key!” he shouted. “We’re in!”

  He drew Kat close, enveloping her in a bear hug. He pulled her face close to his. Then, without thought or warning, he kissed her.

  *

  Kat wasn’t expecting the kiss. But when it came, she realized that she had wanted it. From the moment she had laid eyes on Eric again, she wanted it. After barging in on him naked earlier that day, when she had peeked more than she cared to admit, she knew she really wanted it.

  So when that first sudden peck on the lips was over, she silently indicated she wanted another by placing a hand on
the back of his head and pulling him close again. Halfway through that second go-round, she started kissing him back.

  They had kissed before, of course. Long, long ago. When they were dating, one of their favorite pastimes was finding new places to park and make out, places her father and his deputy didn’t know about. But they had been kids then. Now they were adults, and Kat was pleased to see that Eric’s style had changed and matured. His kiss was somehow simultaneously forceful and gentle. There was a hunger to it that Kat liked.

  Eric snaked an arm around her lower back and lifted, pulling her against him. The resulting collision of their bodies made her weak with desire, and she found herself grabbing onto the door handle for support. When Eric moved his lips to her neck, the pleasure she felt caused her to twist the handle.

  Like the initial kiss, the opening of the door was a surprise. Both of them had been leaning against it, shoulders adding pressure to the wood. When the door went, they went with it, tumbling into the room in a heap of intertwined limbs.

  Kat landed on her back, head knocking painfully against the floor. Eric fell on top of her, although his arm remained beneath her body. She felt the bump of it running along her lower back. When he slid his arm out from under her, it was colored a dark gray from the dust.

  Every movement they made only kicked up more dust. By the time they had helped each other to their feet, they were engulfed by a cloud of it.

  “Jesus,” Eric said, swatting in vain at the dust particles floating in front of his face. “I can barely breathe.”

  Neither could Kat. The dust was overwhelming. Dipping a hand into the front of her uniform, she yanked the collar of her T-shirt until it was over her nose and mouth. Eric did the same with his own shirt as both of them peered through the dust cloud into the depths of the bedroom.