Bone Maker: Will Finch Mystery Thriller Series Book 1

by D. F. Bailey

  Fiona chuckled at this and then told him that she had to go. Family commitments: She had to be up by six so she could babysit Alexander’s cousin while her sister drove her husband to the airport.

  “But call me if you need any help with anything up there, okay?” she said.

  “Okay.” He sighed, felt another urge to get back to the Bay Area. “I’m glad you called.”

  “Me too.”

  He clicked off his phone and thought about the women in his life. Or lack of women. After the smashup with Bethany, he knew that a period of abstinence was in order. But loneliness has a way of clawing at you, of picking at the scab of isolation.

  A moment later he heard the light tapping at his door.

  ※

  “Gianna … hi.” A look of mock surprise fell across Will’s face. He’d been expecting her and he knew he’d have to dissuade her from pursuing whatever she had in mind. “Really, this isn’t a good idea.”

  “It’s okay, I’m sober now. I promise.” Gianna held an arm in the air, fingers crossed as if she were making a false pledge.

  “Look, that doesn’t change things.” He set his hand on the door and leaned against the doorframe to block the entrance to his room. She still wore her black cocktail dress and as she stood beside him, he could see how her body filled the lines of cascading silk, the way her dark hair tumbled in soft curls across her neck. The scoop neckline exposed the taut cleavage of her breasts. Her skin exhaled sweetness and warmth. What a vision.

  “This isn’t about that.” She nodded toward the bed. “It’s about our interview.”

  “What about it?”

  “Something’s wrong.” A narrow pout crossed her lips. “I just need to talk about it.”

  He studied her face as he considered his next move. She’d removed her lipstick and the rims of her eyes appeared puffy and sore. Obviously she’d been crying.

  “Can I come in? Please.” She raised her open hands, a plea for sympathy. “Just for ten minutes.”

  “All right. But just ten.” Finch shook his head in a gesture of concession and dropped his arm from the door. Part of him felt exasperated. Another part, desire.

  “Thanks.” She brushed against his chest as she passed into the room. She glanced at the bed and the two chairs. “They haven’t redecorated these little bed-stalls since my grad night.”

  “Which would be when? Two, maybe three years ago?” He threw off this compliment with a smile but a dim anxiety gnawed at his stomach.

  “Yeah. Sure.” She laughed. “Closer to twelve or thirteen. But I like to pretend. One of my personal flaws, apparently.”

  “Have a seat, Gianna.” His hand swept toward the plastic chair beside the bedside table.

  She squeezed past him and sat down, then tucked the edges of her dress under her thighs and brushed her hair over a shoulder. He sat opposite her in the tiny space next to the bed and leaned forward and set his hands on his knees. “So, you’re worried about the interview.” He laid this out as a matter of fact. “It’s not uncommon. Happens a lot, actually.”

  “That’s just it.” Her voice came as whisper. “You can’t print it. You can’t print anything I said tonight.”

  Finch leaned forward and tried to catch her eyes. “So what’s changed, Gianna? A few hours ago, you said I could ask you anything and that you wouldn’t respond to something if you didn’t want to. So who’s changed your mind?”

  “No one’s changed my mind.” Her voice raised a notch. “It’s just … I can’t.…”

  He let her words drift a moment, then pressed forward. “Can’t what, Gianna?”

  She stood up as if she wanted to leave, then seemed to decide that she had nowhere to go. She turned and settled on the edge of the bed facing him. “No one should know all that. About Raymond. About my brothers. About what happened.”

  When he saw tears brimming in her eyes, he realized her story was only half completed. She had more to reveal, but couldn’t bring herself to tell all. Maybe he could prompt her with a little coaxing. “So what did happen, Gianna?”

  “Nothing.” She held a finger to her lips as if she were holding back an enormous secret — one she desperately wanted to reveal. But at the moment when she was about to unlock the mystery, two tears rolled down her cheeks, one from each eye.

  “Gianna.” A wave of compassion swept through him. He felt responsible, protective, needed. “Come on. No need for that.” He sat beside her and slipped an arm behind her waist.

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered and brushed away her tears. “I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. I’m such a fucking mess right now.”

  “It’s okay. Everyone understands what you’ve been through.” His hand slid up to her bare shoulder. Her skin was silk.

  “Oh god,” she moaned and turned and rolled against his chest as her arms wrapped around his back. She looked up at him and kissed his mouth. “I need this so much,” she said and kissed him again.

  ※

  They dozed, but after an hour Gianna shifted her head from Finch’s shoulder. She propped her chin into the palm of her hand. She gazed at Finch’s unblemished face. “You are handsome, you know.”

  “What’s that?” He tried to blink away the sleep enveloping him.

  “For a journalist, I mean.” She kissed his forehead and ran her hand over his chest. “And ballsy. The way you walked into the kitchen, sat at Daddy’s table like you belonged there.” She pressed her lips to his shoulder. “For a moment you made me forget about Raymond. I wanted to ride you right there.” She kissed him again and climbed out of the bed.

  “Are you leaving?”

  “I have to get back to San Fran.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll text you when I get there.” She waved a business card in the air. “I’ve got the cell number on your card.”

  “Are you serious?” He pushed away from the pillows. “You’re leaving now?”

  “Yes, now. I told my father I was getting out. Today. Yesterday,” she corrected herself as she slipped into her dress. “I realize it’s the only thing I can do to get my life back. A final break from my family. All of them, except my mother. You helped me figure it out, Will. Tonight — right now!” Her shoes slid onto her feet. “And you definitely have to see me again. Okay?”

  He stared at her in disbelief. What had come so unexpectedly, now departed too soon.

  “Okay?” Her voice held an edge of desperation.

  “Yeah. The day I get back,” he murmured. He tried to muster up a mental image of his daily calendar, his place in time. “Sometime next week.”

  She paused at the door, a moment of deliberation. She took a step back toward him and said, “By the way, you can do it if you want.”

  “Do what?”

  “Publish the story. Everything I said tonight. Everything we talked about. It’s the only way the truth will get out.”

  He nodded. Did she know that he’d publish it no matter what she said? No matter how much she might plead.

  “All right. I will.”

  “Good.” She blew him a kiss and was gone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jennie Lee hunched at her desk and stared at the computer. The digital clock at the top of the screen read 1:34 AM. She wondered if she snatched two or three hours of sleep now, would she have enough time to finish the autopsy report and slap it onto Gruman’s desk by ten in the morning. She’d never seen him so agitated as he marched back and forth across the parking lot in front of the marina earlier that evening. He’d turned the case into a personal crusade to get to the bottom of the incident that had claimed the boy’s life. “Miss Jennie Lee,” he’d barked once the corpse was on the trolley and headed toward the ambulance, “I want your report on my desk by noon tomorrow. No, damn it — I want it by ten AM.”

  God, what a hardass.

  She decided to break her resolution against ordering pizza from Sahara Pizza on weekends. On weekdays, when she might work all hours, a slice of pizza was perm
issible, but weekends when she could prepare a sensible salad? Forbidden.

  “Make it a vegetarian, double-cheese, no mushrooms,” she sighed through the phone.

  “Be there in twenty minutes,” the pizza boy claimed, but from past experience she knew not to set her watch by it. Among so many other annoyances, the pace of pizza delivery in Astoria made her homesick for Portland. Back home, if pizza was delivered even a minute late it was free.

  But twenty minutes would give her time to digest what she’d discovered about her latest John Doe, aged fifteen to seventeen. She knew she needed to clear her mind and focus. Apart from the ligature marks around his wrist where he’d grasped the cord attached to the prawn trap, the body was free of any marks, abrasions or wounds. In addition, the autopsy revealed the classic symptoms of death by drowning. In fact, this was a textbook case: sufficient water in the lungs to block the flow of oxygen to the brain leading to brain death, probably within about six minutes of immersion. Cardiac arrest likely followed within another few minutes. Because water was found in the stomach and in the lungs, the victim was probably alive when he fell into the sea. Following his immersion into the ocean a predictable sequence of responses followed: water splashed into the mouth, the gag reflex led to gasping for air, and water ran down the boy’s gullet into his stomach. Since rigor mortis had already subsided, she’d have to make a guess about the date of death. The corpse was only moderately decomposed and relatively free of scavenger bites, except those to his face which rendered him unrecognizable. Therefore, she assumed he’d died less than two days ago. She could only conclude that the boy had drowned as the result of an accident in which he’d become entangled in a prawn trap as it was being hauled onto, or cast off, from a boat. Once the forensics staff and the sheriff confirmed his identity, the sheriff’s team would perform a routine canvass of the victim’s friends and associates to determine who’d seen him last and “the circumstances of the accident.” Once again, Gruman’s words. Words that haunted her.

  And therein lay the heart of Jennie Lee’s moody funk. Once her report was submitted, the forensic results of the case would determine the course of action. And this particular John Doe provided a maze of forensic puzzle pieces. Item one: a relatively new Glock 19 G4 9mm with a partially loaded magazine cinched under the belt of the victim. Item two: the empty prawn trap attached to a quarter-inch-thick nylon line. The cable, still firmly in the grip of John Doe’s left hand as he was hauled onto the deck of the Osprey Nest, was entangled in the ship’s nets as it passed through Clatsop Spit. The ship’s captain, Wesley Mann, had the good sense not to unravel anything attached to the corpse, the cord, or the prawn trap.

  When Jennie and Gruman had arrived on the deck of the Osprey Nest, the forensics team had already photographed and documented the tangled mess that Wesley Mann had hauled aboard his boat. After inspecting the situation and following all necessary protocols, Gruman gave the all-clear and assigned the grim tasks ahead to each party. The body was loaded into the ambulance and driven to the pit where Jennie completed the autopsy. The Glock and the prawn trap were allotted to the deputy sheriff, Biff Winslow. He was Gruman’s old school friend and the sheriff trusted Winslow to handle the grizzly details of all the county’s dead and dismembered tragedies.

  “Give priority to the Glock,” Gruman had said to Winslow, his face in a scowl. “I want to know the history of that gun right down to the name of the Nazi-Austrian son-of-a-bitch who designed the trigger on the damn thing.”

  Winslow had smiled, unsure if Gruman was joking. He’d seen the sheriff’s temper blow hot and cold many times, often as the lead-up to a joke.

  “I’m not fucking kidding.” Gruman had narrowed his eyes when he saw the disbelief in Winslow’s face.

  “All right.” Winslow shrugged, bagged the pistol and carefully set it in his kit bag. “Then I’ll see about this prawn trap and the line.”

  “Whatever,” Gruman had said and turned his attention to the men climbing off the Osprey Nest.

  Jennie then watched Deputy Winslow coil the line that led to the trap and noticed a look of surprise cross his face as he peered at the brass plate fixed to the empty trap.

  “Jesus. Mark, get over here and take a look at this.”

  Gruman turned back to his friend and gazed at the name plate on the trap. Jennie had seen his face blanch as the blood drained from his cheeks.

  Biff Winslow then uttered something in a whisper that Jennie could not decipher.

  Both of them had glanced at Jennie.

  “All right. Back to work, everyone.” Gruman barked.

  When Jennie hesitated, he took a step toward her. It marked a turning point, she now realized. That’s when he’d said, his voice coiled and rattling, “Miss Jennie Lee, I want your report on my desk by noon tomorrow. No, damn it — I want it by ten AM.”

  What a hardass.

  ※

  “No, there’s no word about the nine millimeter slugs and the brass. I told you we wouldn’t get that until this afternoon. At the earliest. And with the drowning last night, we’ll probably have to wait until next week for any more news.”

  Jennie rubbed her eyes and sipped her coffee. She hadn’t felt this tired since she’d been in med school back in Portland. She’d agreed to meet Finch for breakfast only if she could choose the restaurant. The Astoria Coffee House and Bistro was usually quiet in the morning and she knew they could speak in confidence.

  “Besides, Biff Winslow was side-tracked by the sheriff,” she continued in order to explain the potential delays ahead. “Gruman told him to put all other investigations aside until he ID’ed the owner of the Glock.”

  “Biff Winslow? Who is Biff Winslow?” Finch swallowed the last bit of his breakfast and pushed his plate aside. “And, more important, why do half the people up here sound as if they were named after an uncle in the Ozarks?”

  Jennie laughed, felt the first glimmer of levity since Thursday when Finch crash-landed next to the examining table in the pit.

  “The deputy sheriff,” she said and wondered if she should reveal his decades-old friendship with Gruman. “Besides Gruman, he’s one of the few paid cops in the county. Everyone else is deputized whenever they’re needed. Which is at least once a month, from what I can tell.”

  “Okay, I get it. The drowning of a local kid takes priority over a week-old bear attack on some blue-suit, out-of-towner like Toeplitz. And I know this sounds heartless of me, but sorry, it’s getting in the way of the story I’m working on.”

  Finch set his jaw and frowned at Jennie. For the past ten minutes he’d listened to her monologue about the boy, just identified as Donnel Smeardon, who’d been fished out the of ocean by the crew on the Osprey Nest. Not only had the drowning troubled her — she felt it whenever a young life was cut short — but the sheriff had responded with such an iron-fisted pique that she couldn’t sleep even after she’d finished her report. But to Finch, the only interesting element to her story was news of the Glock.

  “By the way, that’s two of us,” he said, “who didn’t get much sleep. I spent half the night piecing together Toeplitz’s murder.” His mind turned to Gianna. Best not to mention her to Jennie.

  Jennie’s face clouded over. She seemed distracted by the puzzles presented by Donnel Smeardon’s drowning.

  “With what we now know about the nine-mille slugs,” he said as he leaned forward to ensure he had her attention, “it’s all completely obvious.”

  He let this hang. When Jennie didn’t offer a response, he continued.

  “Toeplitz is driving up Saddle Mountain. Someone, and I’ll get to who in a minute, pulls him to a stop at the side of the road. He opens the car window. That someone approaches and without warning fires two slugs point blank into his chest or head. We’ll never know exactly where he was struck according to your autopsy, but the important point is that Toeplitz is left to bleed-out in his Mercedes. That accounts for your concern about the volume of blood found in the car and it proves
that the bear didn’t attack him and immediately drag him through the window. Next, the killer flees the scene. And as dumb luck would have it, twenty or thirty minutes later the bear ambles down the road. He stands, sniffs the air and discovers Toeplitz’s corpse. After a brief struggle, the bear claws at the door and finally manages to wrench Toeplitz out of the open window. The bear drags him up the road to a place where he feels secure, where he can watch for other predators. Then … the rest happens.” Will waved a hand and glanced away.

  Jennie nodded. “All right.”

  “Now the next act in the tragedy unfolds. Ethan and Ben Argyle happen to walk down to the road hunting for deer. They see the abandoned Mercedes and fifty yards along, our bear. The rest, once again, we know.”

  “Okay. Now who’s the someone?”

  Finch propped his elbows on the table and leaned even closer. “The some one, is in fact two people.”

  “Two?” She shook her head.

  “Justin and Evan Whitelaw, age twenty-seven. Positioned to move up the ranks at the Senator’s firm,” he added. “It turns out that on the morning of Toeplitz’s death, they drove him out to Saddle Mountain. They went in two cars. One of the boys accompanied Toeplitz, the other led the way in his own car.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “It’s all on here.” Finch held his phone aloft as if it were a legal exhibit. “From an interview I took last night.”

  A puzzled look crossed her face. “With who?”

  Finch considered this. If Gianna hadn’t come to his room last night, he’d have no reason to withhold this information. “Protection of sources. I simply can’t disclose that. Not yet, anyway. Now,” he paused, scanned the room, and continued, “here’s my theory of how it went down. The two cars are traveling up the switchbacks on the mountainside, Justin leading the way, Toeplitz and Evan following. It’s all a set-up because Toeplitz had wanted to see the area for years but never took the time before. The idea is that they’ll drive up to the summit, take in the view, and when it’s time for Toeplitz to head back to San Francisco, he’ll drive east on route 26 and the twins will return to the lodge in Cannon Beach.”