The leathery corpse’s dried-up, shriveled eyeballs stared right into the core of me, and the way the skin had pulled away from the teeth made it look like it was grimacing. It wasn’t cold in the house, but I couldn’t stop shivering. Smooshie’s tail thumped on the floor excitedly.
“Stay put,” I told her. She made a whining noise. My baby wanted desperately to play. “What in the world happened?” I asked the corpse. “Someone did a real number on you.”
I’d seen worse things in my life, unfortunately. My brother’s killer had made him virtually unrecognizable as a person. At least this victim was like a dried husk, not bloated and disfigured. Instead, the dark skin looked as if it had been shrink wrapped around the bones. The Midwest had high humidity and a fluctuation of temperatures. I’d read a mystery once in which it took almost a year of limited moisture exposure for a body to desiccate to this extreme.
I planned to call the sheriff’s office, but Sheriff Avery hated me. He would find a way to make this body my fault. There was a hole in the side of the corpse’s head and another in the chest on the right side. The one in his chest was jagged. Was it a knife? Or some kind of tool? I was assuming the one in his head was a bullet hole, but I didn’t have enough experience with weapons to know for certain. The corpse’s hair was thin, brittle, and choppy, as if the person had gotten a bad haircut right before death.
I allowed my cougar to surface. The world around me colored, and my sense of smell grew keener. I leaned forward and took a big whiff of the body. Must, mold, dust, hardly any rot or decay, even with my Shifter nose in action. It wore denim pants that were stained brown. The shirt was of the button-down western variety. It had decorations over the pockets and metal snaps. There were no shoes, but I imagined this was the kind of person who wore cowboy boots. The right side of his neck was more discolored than the other parts of his exposed skin. A tattoo maybe. It was hard to tell. I’d read that mummified skin could be rehydrated for fingerprints. I wondered if it worked the same for tattoos, or did the process damage the embedded ink?
I plucked a screwdriver, a flat head, from the toolbox and lifted the fold of the shirt. No bra. Which didn’t really mean anything, but I decided this was probably once a man. Hadn’t Parker mentioned a family disappearing from here back in the eighties? Was this the father? Was the rest of the family buried behind the other walls?
The idea was repugnant enough to make me pull back from the wall. I hadn’t noticed that Smooshie had stopped thumping the floor with her tail.
My partial turn had her thinking we were going for a run. “Not this time, girl.” I reached out, and she rolled her ear against my hand. I willed my cougar side to fade. “Such a good girl.” Except for the finding-a-dead-body-in-my-home thing.
Her tail swished frantically, her mouth opened in her usual wide-mouthed, tongue-lolling grin. I scratched her behind the ear. “We’ll run again soon, promise. Right now we have to deal with ol’ Leather Face.”
I turned back to the body. It was folded unnaturally. One hand was bent behind the corpse’s back, the over was tucked into his side. He was making a fist. I reached down with the screwdriver again and gently pried at the clenched fingers.
A whispering crack made me stop. The tip of the index finger fell to the ground. Oops. I looked a Smoosh, who gave me an Is that mine? look. I shook my head. I stared down at the desecrated digit then back to Smoosh. “I won’t tell about the big toe if you keep quiet about the finger.”
She gave me a quick bark.
I grabbed my phone from my purse. When I turned it on, it beeped at me twice. Of course the battery was on the last leg.
“Okay, girl. To the truck,” I told her, since I’d left my charger out there. “Come on.” I did not need to have the phone die in the middle of reporting a body. That would not play well with Avery.
When I got Smooshie into the truck, I went around to the other side and climbed in. I started the engine and plugged my phone into the car charger. It made a couple of more beep sounds, then the lightning bolt indicating it was receiving external power showed up on the depleted battery image. Instead of calling the sheriff’s department, I called Nadine.
I cussed myself for calling her on date night, but I’d panicked. “Hey, Chick,” she said brightly. “We still on for drinks tomorrow night? You better not be cancelling on me.”
“Hey, Nadine. Nothing like that. I…uhm…”
“Just spit it out, Lils. You need my help at the new place? My carpentry skills are terrible, but I’ll happily take a sledgehammer to unwanted walls.”
“Speaking of walls…” I proceeded to tell her all about Smooshie finding the mummy beneath some drywall, the two wound holes in his body, and what I could describe. I left out the part where I broke off his finger.
“Jesus, Lils. That’s terrible. Which deputy took the call?”
“I didn’t call the police.”
Nadine made an eep-like sound, and we were disconnected.
I called her back.
In a very calm and official-sounding voice, she said, “Call the sheriff’s office now, Lily. And don’t you dare tell anyone you called me first.”
“But you’re coming, right?”
A brief pause made me fear she would hang up again. “Yes,” she finally said. “I’ll be there.”
Chapter 6
Before the first responders arrived, Merl Peterson called. “Is it true?” he asked.
“I’m not sure what you mean?” Had I done something wrong?
“A friend of mine who works for dispatch called me. Did you really find a body in the house?”
“Oh. Yes. It was behind the living room wall.”
He cussed a blue streak, apologized, then hung up abruptly.
Three hours later, I had two sheriff vehicles, one fancy white luxury car, and an ambulance lined up in front of my house. Deputy Bobby Morris, a tall man with dark skin and piercing brown eyes, was the first to arrive. He looked to be in his thirties, but it was hard for me to tell sometimes with humans, they aged at such crazily different rates. I’d seen women in their twenties who looked older than some in their forties.
It was the first time Morris and I had met, and I determined in a few short words that he had an honest countenance. He hadn’t been friendly, exactly, but he’d been professionally courteous, and unlike Sheriff Avery, he didn’t automatically dismiss me.
When the sheriff finally arrived, I’d been summarily kicked out of the “crime scene” and he proceeded to grill me like a steak burger at The Cat’s Meow. The fact that he smelled like a steak burger added to the image, and frankly, made me hungry. I wondered if his wife knew he was topping off her health shakes with fatty red meat. A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth, and the sheriff stopped talking mid-sentence.
“Are you even listening to me, Ms. Mason?”
“I’m sorry, Sheriff.” All his lecturing words had turned to blah, blah, blah. “What did you say?”
“I asked you if you touched or removed anything from the body or around the body.”
“Uh, no.” I thought guiltily of the screwdriver. “Other than the drywall, I didn’t disturb evidence.”
“And the foot?” He gave me a pointed look. “Why was it on the mantel of the fireplace and not in the wall?”
“Smooshie found the body, Sheriff Avery.” I cast a glance at my truck, where Smooshie was poking her head out the opening at the top of the passenger window. She barked and whined, eager to join in on whatever fun she thought we were having. “She’s a dog. They play with bones.”
“And you let her?”
“I was in the other room. It wasn’t like I’d planned to buy a house with a body in the wall.”
“Uh-huh.” He grunted as if he didn’t believe me.
Nadine pulled in about that time with Buzz.
“Deputy Booth,” Sheriff Avery said. “What are you doing out here?”
“Lily called me,” she replied.
“After I called yo
u all, of course,” I said to the sheriff.
Nadine gave him a tight-lipped smile. “Buzz is Lily’s only family. I thought she’d want some kin with her.”
Buzz’s red hair shined like copper wires in the spotlights Deputy Morris had set up. He shrugged when Avery glared at him before he looked over to me. “You all right, Lily?”
“I’m good. Thanks for coming.”
“You got a nose for finding bodies,” the sheriff said, interrupting the family reunion. “Why is that, Ms. Mason?” He eyed me suspiciously.
I asked myself that same question. Often. But to Avery, I said, “I didn’t have anything to do with the Kapersky murder, and I don’t have anything to do with this poor guy’s death. As old as that body looks, he was placed there long before I’d ever even heard of Moonrise.”
His gaze narrowed on me as if he’d caught me in some big lie. “How do you know it’s a he?”
“Oh, for the love of Pete,” Buzz murmured.
“It’s just a pronoun,” I said. “I don’t really know one way or the other.”
“It’s a man,” a woman said. She had black hair swept up into a neat bun. She wore blue slacks and a silvery-gray silk blouse under an open windbreaker. She took off a pair of gloves and shoved them into her jacket pocket. “By the wear on his teeth, I’d put him mid-thirties, early forties when he died.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Regina Crawford,” she replied, offering me her hand. “I’m the coroner.”
So she’d replaced Tom Jones. Interesting. Tom had been Bridgette’s husband and accomplice to the previous murders in town. The coroner position was an elected one, which meant the coroner didn’t actually need medical expertise. Tom had been a dentist. I wondered if Regina was a barber.
Not with that fancy car. “What do you do when you’re not on county time?”
“I’m a GP at the family practice in town.” She smiled. I could see amusement in her expression. “And what do you do when you’re not finding bodies?”
“Ha ha,” I said. Not amused. I guess I’d earned the remark though. “I’m glad the coroner has real medical knowledge. Are you state certified for medical examinations?”
She raised her brows. “No, not yet, but I’m working on it.”
I heard a crackling over the police radio. Bobby Morris walked a fair distance from us and took the call. I could hear things like 1099 and 1053, and since I didn’t know police code, I was clueless, but when I heard Bobby say, “Give me a minute,” and shut himself into his vehicle, I figured it was something more than a traffic violation.
The sheriff walked over to his deputy’s SUV and tapped on the window. The motor in the door squealed as the window rolled down.
“What’s happening, Bobby?”
The deputy, who had been so calm and nonchalant when he’d arrived at my place, looked disturbed. “There’s another body, Sheriff.”
“Another mummy? What the he—”
“No, not an old body. A fresh one.”
“Where?”
“Two Hills Community College.”
“Who?”
Even quieter, Morris said, “Merl Peterson.”
I felt the blood rush away from my fingers and feet. I glanced at Buzz. His face held a look of contemplation. He didn’t show any of the alarm I was feeling.
“Get this scene wrapped up, Morris.”
Without a glance back at me, Sheriff Avery jogged to his vehicle, got in and took off.
“What in the heck was that all about?” Nadine asked.
Buzz gave me a quick shake of his head.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Seemed urgent though. Maybe you could find out from Deputy Morris.”
She brightened. “Good idea.”
Regina Crawford’s pocket beeped. She pulled out her phone. I craned a little her way and glanced at a text. It was one word. Body. It beeped again. Two Hills Community College, behind admin building. Regina said, “Gotta go.”
I moved closer to Buzz when we were alone. “You heard all that, right?”
“Of course.”
“Merl Peterson is dead. I talked to him tonight. He called right after I reported the body. Someone over at the dispatcher’s office told him about it.”
“You can tell the sheriff when Merl’s death is public knowledge. For now, act like you don’t know.”
I could feel the tears doing their best to form. I took a deep breath. Was he dead because I found this old corpse. Was this somehow my fault?
As if reading my mind, Buzz said, “This isn’t your fault, Lily. Or your problem. Let the police do their job.”
I wondered if the sheriff would feel that way, about whether it was my fault or not. I was sure I’d be asked to provide an alibi. As to the “letting the police do their job,” I was also sure the sheriff totally agreed.
Buzz put his hand on my shoulder. “Calm down. It’ll be okay.” He gave me a meaningful look. “Also, you have to stop reacting when you hear something no one else can. Okay?”
The conversation from thirty feet away had been crystal clear when I’d focused on the sheriff and Morris talking, it was hard to believe no one but Buzz and I had been privy to the conversation. Where we grew up, you just expected people would overhear you talking if you were in a public place. “I’ll do better.”
“I know. It just takes time.”
Nadine came jogging back to them. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “You all are not going to believe this.”
Chapter 7
The light patter of rain on the metal roof of the trailer woke me. Buzz had bought a memory foam mattress to replace his old one for me, and Smooshie was buried beneath the covers. A few times during the night, she’d awoken me with little barks and growls, her paws moving, as she dreamed of chasing squirrels. Or at least I hoped it was squirrels and not more dead bodies. My head hurt with the pressure that came with cooler weather, high humidity, rain, and lack of sleep.
It had taken four hours after I’d reported the body for the police and the forensics team to photograph, print, collect potential evidence, and clear the house. They’d cut out large squares in every piece of drywall to make sure there weren’t any more remains buried in the walls. So much for saving money. The whole living room would have to be redone.
It was late when the last of the vehicles pulled out, and I was left alone. Buzz asked me to go back to his and Nadine’s for the night, but I didn’t see a reason for it. Surprisingly enough, I wasn’t scared. Whoever had done that to the guy in the wall was probably long gone, and even if he or she wasn’t, they wouldn’t accomplish anything by scurrying out of the woodwork now. Even so, it wasn’t until the rain started hours later that I finally fell asleep.
I shuddered now, praying my new home didn’t have any more surprises. Like more corpses under the floorboards or worse. I stared at the ceiling, reluctant to get up. The bed was comfy, much more comfortable than Parker’s pull-out sofa bed. I missed knowing Parker was next door, but I did not miss the apartment. I certainly didn’t miss the sound of cars going up and down the road all hours of the day, and even some at night. It was peaceful here, if you didn’t count the dead guy, and I needed peace. And distance.
The rain turned stormy, and the sound of it took on a thunderous beat. Smooshie wiggled herself closer to me and poked her nose out from under the blanket. She began to snore. I closed my eyes, wishing I had a good murder mystery handy. I still hadn’t read the latest Aurora Teagarden novel by Charlaine Harris, but it was on my list to get as soon as possible. I really wanted more Shakespeare books, but I contented myself with the knowledge that Harris would keep writing stories, and I would keep reading them.
What would Aurora do with a dried corpse in her house? She’d most likely march down to the police station and snoop out crucial evidence that would put her on the killer’s trail. If I went down to the police station to snoop, Sheriff Avery would probably have me arrested. I decided to stay away from the
sheriff’s office for now. Nadine would give me the scoop when she got it, but today was her day off, and she might not get any new information until tomorrow.
It was still a little dark out as rain sheeted down the windows and a brisk wind shook the trailer. My alarm hadn’t gone off yet, so it had to be early. I wanted, make that needed, more sleep.
Something fell in the kitchen. Smooshie sat up at the same time I did. “Maybe it’s the ghost of Old Man Mills,” I said to her. I gave her my best spooky “OoooooOOooooo.”
Smooshie crooked an ear.
“A pan probably rattled out of a cabinet.”
The dog stood up, stretching her front paws forward, her chin an inch from the surface of the bed and her butt high in the air. There was a reason the yoga pose was called “downward dog.”
I looked at her. “Do you want to check it out or should I?” The trailer shook again as the wind gusted up. “We’re not in Kansas, right?” Reluctantly, I got up and slid the door back to the small hall that led into the kitchen area. A cookie sheet was on its side, propped up against the bench seating that came with the pull-out table. “Yep, just a pan.”
Lightning flashed, and the windows of the trailer lit up with the quick flash. Smooshie wedged herself under the table for shelter. “It’s okay. Just a storm.”
I didn’t know who I was trying to convince more, her or me. I grabbed my phone from the counter to check the time. Dead. Crap on toast. I’d forgot to plug it in to fully charge when I settled in. I had no idea what time it was, and I couldn’t check the weather or call for help even if I wanted to.
I plugged in the phone and started a pot of coffee. Was my corpse and Merl Peterson’s death related? If so, how? Merl had only acquired the property recently. Whoever laid the drywall had to be responsible. John Mills had suffered from senile dementia, according to Parker. Someone could have put a body in the wall without him knowing, and even if he had witnessed it, would anyone have believed him? Would he even have remembered?
The Money Pit Page 6