“Chili. Find,” Kuhl repeated. Chili gave a louder yelp and lay down next to the spot.
“Humph,” Kuhl said, taking a step back and holding up both her hands like that was that. She turned away, went back to her van, and returned with a small plastic spike.
Kuhl asked Chili, “Are you sure?” Chili barked.
Hiatt was in a carnival mood, all excited suspense, like he was watching another television show. But the fact that we were looking for little ones made it different for the rest of us. Because of this we felt anticipation, sure, but it was anticipation covered by the shroud of small lives lost in violence, a life never lived. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t exciting, it was deathly sad, where we were.
I sensed these feelings were in the breath Staci Kuhl drew as she again asked the dog, “Chili, are you sure?” The dog barked again, and she gently placed the marker into the sand near the spot Chili indicated.
“Are you positive there’s something down there?” Delgado asked.
“Yes. Yes and yes,” Kuhl said.
“And it’s human?”
“Yup. Well, can’t swear it’s bones, but I can swear that human remains have been here. Chili hasn’t been wrong yet. My job’s done. Secure the scene and call in an anthropologist.”
Chili yelped again, more commanding this time. Kuhl reached into a small bag hanging from her shoulder and withdrew a rubber toy. It looked like a chicken mermaid. “You love you some merchick, don’t you?” Kuhl said, and passed it to Chili, who squeaked it with an air of triumph.
“You got anyone in the area you can get?” I asked Delgado.
Delgado nodded and pulled out his smartphone, saying while he dialed, “University near Orlando has a good forensic anthropology department. Hey, Hank? Gabe Delgado in Vero. I think we found bones.” He explained what was going on, then smiled. “I figured as much,” he said, and disconnected. “Henry Aggrawal. I sent him the coordinates of the scene so he’ll get here via GPS. I got his attention. He’s canceling a class, and he’ll be here in an hour and a half.”
“You say he’s good?” Laura asked.
“One of the top five bones guys in the state, board certified. He testified at the Anthony trial.”
The construction guy was listening with interest, pleased to be part of it all. “I know where we can get subs,” he said.
Instead Delgado thanked Hiatt for his civic service and told him he’d call if he was needed anymore. Delgado quickly secured the scene and got a nearby officer to come stand guard. Then at my suggestion, “seems appropriate,” we dropped Hiatt back at the police station, picked up our own vehicles, and drove over to the Cracker Café.
* * *
Turned out Shayna wasn’t there, and Sam, the owner, objected to Chili. But Staci Kuhl muttered, “Service dog,” and when Sam looked like he thought she was suckering him, Delgado assured him it was the truth. Sam trusted Delgado, apparently—that small-town connection again.
We all ordered and ate in relative silence, everyone concerned with their own thoughts. Gabriel Delgado was a little different now than when I had seen him before. He didn’t seem to want to meet my eyes, or Kuhl’s or Laura’s for that matter, just kept them roaming the restaurant and fixed them on his roast beef sandwich when it arrived.
I could only imagine what he was thinking, about how he had missed finding the children, and whether he might have given up too soon, whether he could have saved them if he hadn’t wasted time trying to get Creighton to tell him where they were. And how they were still waiting to be found, like silent witnesses. Just because Delgado was a little smarmy didn’t make him a bad person.
I said, “Detective Delgado, if these are the Creighton children, it proves that the whole family was wiped out that night. There was nothing you could have done to stop it.”
He cleared his throat by way of acknowledging that, and chewed his sandwich. Kuhl shared hers with Chili, who sat between her and Laura. Laura just had water, and she only drank half the glass and watched the rest of us eat.
“Actually, Brigid, you might be wrong there,” Laura said, not looking at Delgado. “Maybe they weren’t killed immediately. Maybe they were taken to a secondary scene and held there, even for several days until the killer was confident the law was stopping with Marcus Creighton.”
Delgado made a sucking sound in his throat as if Laura had punched him in the gut and he was trying to keep his sandwich down. Before I could step in to referee, she added, “Once I’ve helped clear Marcus Creighton, I’m going to find who really killed those children.”
Delgado finished swallowing, then wiped his mouth with his napkin and looked at Laura with unasked questions on his face. Like he wouldn’t risk asking what had her so convinced Creighton was innocent, because she just might tell him. “Getting a little ahead of ourselves, I think” was all he said, keeping his voice as mild as he could, trying not to sound defensive given that he was the one who put Creighton on death row.
Laura said nothing, but the battle lines were drawn.
We finished in less than half an hour, and while Delgado gallantly took out his wallet to leave money on the table for all our lunches, I went over to the counter and asked Sam where Shayna Murry was. He looked a little wary and was exceedingly polite. I gathered that he figured me being with Delgado changed the rules of engagement. Maybe he didn’t want me to let Delgado know he and the fish peddler had come across all tough guy with me.
He said she’d taken a couple of days off, the way she did sometimes when she got depressed. “She fiddles around with her sculptures,” he said.
“Isn’t that a hardship on you, for her to not come in?”
Sam waved his hand around the place. Two tables were taken besides ours. “Typical lunch hour, I don’t really need her. I just have her here as a kind thing to do. She’s a nice girl, pretty good worker when she isn’t running off after her nutso brother.”
“Nutso brother?” I pressed.
He nodded. “Erroll. He’s a nervous man,” he said, finally choosing the word.
“Ah, that’s the brother Gabriel Delgado told me about,” I said, feeling another piece of information fall into place with an almost audible clink. Erroll was the man I’d seen at the restaurant, and the brother Shayna took care of when their parents deserted them.
Not seeming to notice my surprised interest, Sam nodded. “I buy fish off’n him for a good price. Every so often I just have to run him off when he needs gentling, but it’s worth it.”
On the way back to the site, Delgado pointed out Shayna Murry’s house. We went by too fast to get a good look, but I marked its location and got an idea.
* * *
Henry Aggrawal showed up about fifteen minutes after we arrived, with Oliver Brach, the medical examiner out of Jupiter, following close behind. He was there as the legal witness in case human remains were found.
Aggrawal was one of those guys, more common in the South than anywhere else, who came across like a good aw-shucks country boy who had accidentally stumbled on his PhD in physical anthropology. Brach was just generically young, with none of the distinctive markings that make aging interesting. He was the kind of man you want to say “Hello, son” to when you’re introduced.
Chili led Henry to the spot as if the marker Kuhl left there wouldn’t have been a good enough clue. Then Chili and her handler left.
“I’m going to go easy,” Aggrawal said. “I figure with erosion there would be less ground now then there was when the remains were first buried, so they might be even closer to the surface than you say they were.”
Aggrawal put on latex gloves and laid out a small tarp a bit away from the spot. Then he got down on his haunches with a small trowel and started digging a square trench around the area. He placed every trowel full of dirt on the tarp for later searching.
Brach stood over Aggrawal and asked quiet questions about the process. You could tell this was new for him.
Both with different issues at stake, Delgado
and Laura kept their eyes fixed on every move Aggrawal made, without his seeming to be aware of them. When he was finished with the trench, he got out another tool, this one more of a paintbrush with hard bristles. He scraped away the dirt carefully. Looked.
“It’s cloth, canvas. Maybe a tarp.” He eased more dirt away and found an edge at which he pulled gently. Pulled something brownish yellow out of the hole. “It’s human, all right.”
At that, Brach bent onto his haunches beside Aggrawal, who went on, “Stained by the tannin in the soil. I’d reckon it’s been here for well over a decade. It’s a clavicle.”
“The age. Can you tell the age?” Laura asked.
“Definitely juvenile,” he said. “This is going to take some time. Gabe, you want to call in some help, that would be great, and I’ll just keep working.”
Delgado made the calls to get extra law enforcement to help document and monitor the site.
Laura stood by, staring at the spot as if her eyes could make it all go faster. I wished she would say something, cry, moan, something. It would be good if she could get rid of some of what was coiled up inside her. At the same time, I knew she would not.
I put a hand on her shoulder to nudge her out of her tunnel vision. “Coleman. We don’t know for sure if it’s them,” I said.
“It’s them,” she said, her face giving nothing away.
It struck me that, except for her blowing up when she found out Evers hadn’t overnighted the physical evidence, Laura had been taking great care to hide her emotions from me. My telling her to keep a lid on them was partly to blame. Yet in those two words, It’s them, she couldn’t disguise the grieving voice of a mother.
Twenty-two
It’s not like on TV where it takes five minutes including commercial breaks. Many times watching a forensic anthropologist at work is like watching a paleontologist unearth a wooly mammoth with a toothbrush. But Aggrawal made surprisingly good progress while I sat under the shade of the bridge and watched fish jump.
He carved a trench the width of a trowel around the whole perimeter of the supposed bodies. The dirt from the trench made a sizable pile on the tarp.
The others all reacted when he exposed what served as a burial shroud, some canvas tarp or a sail from a boat. He cut the ropes tying it together while leaving the knots themselves intact at both ends, and peeled it back the way the flesh is laid open in an autopsy. I had got up from where I was sitting and watched him first examine the remains, then begin drawing out some of the bones and placing them in paper bags after numbering them with bits of sticky notes. There was no bad smell. It just had an earthy aroma as if it was in the long process of turning into soil the way all flesh does.
Aggrawal was focused, so I asked Brach what we had.
“The bones are commingled, and best he can tell at this point we’re definitely looking at multiple juveniles,” Brach said. “See, there’s some clothing fragments. Only one skull intact. The others are in fragments, either from blunt force trauma or maybe the heavy construction equipment rolling over the spot. There’s part of a mandible.”
Laura’s head jerked and she made an awww sound that everyone pretended not to hear. For my part, I went back to that night and wondered what the children saw, and whether they could tell us now even though we’d violated the spot they’d come to rest in.
“Whoever did it wanted to do it fast and didn’t consider destroying identifying evidence,” I said.
Delgado agreed. I pried Aggrawal’s attention from the remains by bending over, hands on knees, face close to his. “Can you see anything that identifies the clothing?”
He didn’t look up at me. “No, it’s a mess.”
“Something, a brand name.” I turned to Laura, partly to force her attention off the goop that was in the tarp. I knew that what she’d seen before was bad, but not as bad as this. “I can’t remember if companies were advertising themselves that way in the late nineties. Or that blingy stuff on T-shirts?”
Laura ignored me, and Aggrawal was just annoyed. He stopped and looked up at me with some impatience, losing his southern drawl. He pointed with his trowel. “Did I say this is a mess? All the bug carcasses and matted fur and practically liquefied clothing and bits of remaining flesh that fell away from the bones, you can see it’s like a rotten black pudding here. The tarp surrounding it, the dampness of the area, the ambient temperature up to ninety-five degrees, it’s like sixteen years in a Crock-Pot.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the water lapping at the shore. “And you see where the water is? With searise, and erosion, and the tides, even though the remains look securely encapsulated, I might have to go into the water. I promise the moment I find something I’ll let you know.”
“What about shoe rubber? Like a flip-flop?”
“Let the man do his job,” Delgado said, but gently.
“We don’t have time for DNA analysis,” I barked gently back, but they ignored me. Of course they did. They knew it wasn’t my circus, or my monkeys either. I heard Mom’s refrain behind the thought.
Thinking of Mom made me think of Dad, and I called the hospital. Mom answered this time, sounding tired again, and said he was breathing funny. I said breathing funny how? And she said just funny. I said what about sending for the doctor. She said the doctor was coming in a while. I wanted to go, but Laura wouldn’t, and we only had the one car. She kept a careful eye on each bone as it went into the bag. Like they were her own bones and she didn’t want to lose count.
* * *
We stayed till the tide started to come in and it got too dark. Aggrawal wasn’t satisfied that he got all the remains and was going to come back the following morning. We were both quiet on the drive back, me worrying about Dad breathing funny and Laura probably thinking about what she was going to tell Marcus but not daring to discuss it with me.
I was at the hospital with Mom listening to Dad breathe when I got a call from Laura.
“There’s already something on the news,” she said. “How does that happen?”
“Easy answer, fuckin’—sorry, Mom. Richard Hiatt, construction guy. He was pissed that he didn’t get to play forensic scientist and called the local station.”
“You’re right. He’s being interviewed right now. Everything about the bodies, and the Creighton case, and they did the background and connected it to Marcus’s execution. Like it’s a done deal.”
“He doesn’t sound so funny anymore,” Mom said.
I looked out the hospital window to the east where I knew the ocean was. Except for that walk on the pier I hadn’t been near the beach, and there was my hotel right on the water. I decided that’s where I needed to be the next morning. Take a break from everything, Dad, Mom, Laura, Creighton. I was standing next to the whiteboard where the hospital staff listed the names of those on duty. I picked up the marker hanging by a string next to it and absentmindedly started doodling on it to detach a little from Laura’s intensity. I do doodle, but it’s limited to a few cartoons I once learned: a monkey, a toucan, and a dog.
“You probably shouldn’t do that,” Mom said. Her lips got thinner.
“We need to tell Marcus ourselves,” Laura said.
“Laura, we don’t even have confirmation that it’s the children.”
“Multiple juvenile bodies in the ground over ten years and less than twenty. Vero Beach. No other missing children at that time and place. Who else could it be?”
“Did I tell you the doctor is going to come back tomorrow to check on him again?” Mom asked.
“Yes, you did, Mom. We need proof. What we need is to tell Marcus before someone else does. Tomorrow first thing.”
I had gone through my repertoire of doodles by that time, and, thinking about whether Dad was actually Yosemite Sam or maybe Foghorn Leghorn, I branched out and tried Mickey Mouse.
While I was doing a bad job on Mickey’s ears I asked, “Did you talk to Will today?”
“I told him the remains had gone to Gainesville for sorti
ng and interpretation. That I’d stay on it in case they found anything that we can use. All he has right now are the phone records and the opposing opinion of the independent examiner on the fingerprint.”
Laura was still trying to stay cool, and you had to know her to hear what was behind “Brigid, the hearing is tomorrow!”
“We were going for the stay before we had the remains, remember? We always knew the best we could hope for was the phone records and Puccio’s opinion on the print. But you know what might help? If Marcus can confirm it’s his children, maybe they’d give us time to examine that new evidence.” I stared at my doodling. Memories loop forward as well as backward, and link to each other in unlikely ways. “Or maybe Marcus has already given us what we need. Do you have Creighton’s photo album handy? And do you own a magnifying glass? I thought you would. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning. Bring it with you.”
As soon as I hung up, Carlo called.
“Hi, honey,” I said, keeping my voice light as I looked over at Mom. She was staring at me, her lips getting thinner. On all sides except home I felt engulfed in other people’s pain.
I responded to Carlo’s question with “Oh yeah, everything is going well here.”
“You can’t talk right now, can you?” he asked.
“That’s right. No news, but I’m having a visit with Mom right now. I’ll call you again tomorrow, okay?”
Mom’s lips got even thinner and then disappeared altogether.
Twenty-three
I knew it was a long shot, but as we headed up to Jefferson Pen, Laura got on the phone with Will in Tallahassee who got on the phone with the guys in Gainesville where Aggrawal had taken whatever he had found before the tide came in and started saturating the ground in his excavation site. Will begged them to stop worrying about defleshing the bones or any other scientific protocol and instead look through the mess for any plastic or metal objects that might have been on the children’s bodies the night of the murders. Plastic not so much, but metal might have survived.
“They say sure would help if they knew what they were looking for,” Will said.
A Twist of the Knife Page 14