Bone Deep

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Kat Riley was tall and lush and vibrant. Some people might have called her thick, glossy hair “brown,” but it had a copper gleam in sunlight and some strands as pale as dried cornstalks, others as dark as mahogany. He’d sat directly behind her once at a chamber meeting and, lost in fascination with her hair, missed ninety percent of what was said.

  No loss, of course, and thank God no one had asked him a question.

  She had great cheekbones, deep blue eyes and a mouth he thought would have gentle curves if she ever let it relax. He wasn’t sure her face was entirely symmetrical. The details didn’t seem to matter. Some combination of physical characteristics and personality and—hell, who knew?—chemistry made her irresistible to him.

  Once, he’d thought she felt the same.

  He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders and knocked.

  “Come in,” she called.

  When he opened the door, it was to find her standing behind her scarred oak behemoth of a desk as if she, too, had braced herself.

  She looked at him coolly. “You didn’t have to come yourself.”

  Stung by how obviously she wished he hadn’t come himself, he only shrugged. “I was arguing with my budget. Any excuse.”

  She nodded, the movement a little jerky. “This is a waste of your time anyway. But I have a kid working here who’s taking Anatomy at the college, and when he saw the bone he was just sure it was human.” She rolled her eyes, as though to say, Of course, I never thought anything that stupid.

  Not surprising she was sensitive about having to make this kind of call. She’d spent the past four years riding every law enforcement department in western Washington about any human remains that turned up, making sure they remembered that her husband had never been found, dead or alive.

  He’d been peripherally aware of the bone lying there right in front of her, but now he said, “Well, let’s see it,” and reached across the desk.

  The moment he really looked, Grant knew. Well, crap. He turned the small bone in his hand, seeing the way she stared at it as if it were a black widow spider. Oh, she knew, too, on the same gut level he did.

  He didn’t tell her how many bones he’d seen. Didn’t like to think about the killing field in Bosnia where they’d dug up forty-eight complete skeletons. A few men, mostly women and children. Most of his nightmares involved human skeletons, whole or shattered to fragments.

  “I’m no forensic scientist,” he said, “but I think your kid’s right. It looks human to me, too.”

  “Oh, no,” she whispered, and sank into her chair as if her legs had lost strength. Her unblinking, shocked gaze stayed riveted on the bone in his hand. “How could it be…?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll get it looked at to be sure, then ask some questions.” He set it down on the desk and pulled a small spiral notebook from his breast pocket. “Where did you find it?”

  He relaxed a little when she explained that it had been in compost she’d shoveled into a wheelbarrow that morning from the piles in back that were regularly replenished by Wallinger’s. Grant’s men had dug through those heaps of compost, bark and shavings after Hugh’s disappearance. No body. So this bone had nothing to do with her. Cruel chance had made her the one to come across it. Hell, most people probably would have thought, animal bone, shrugged and tossed it out.

  And maybe it was an animal bone.

  He had her walk him to the greenhouse where the wheelbarrow sat, and with her permission combed through the dark, damp compost carefully to be sure the rest of the finger wasn’t in it.

  “Show me which bin you got this batch out of.”

  Back outside, shrubs in big black pots marched in rows, evergreen separated from deciduous, all carefully labeled so purchasers would know the eventual size, sun and soil needs and time of bloom. Then flowering trees, some already budding, were heeled into ridges of shavings. Half a dozen customers prowled out here on the back forty. He knew several of them, including Pete Timmons, one of his own deputies who happened to be off today. Pete returned his nod, but eyed Kat speculatively. She clearly noticed, because her cheeks flushed.

  Grant was most surprised to see George Slagle, who owned the lumberyard and hardware store in town. There’d been talk that George resented Kat’s nomination for Business Owner of the Year, considering his revenue was likely two or three times hers. And Grant knew his house had been landscaped by the builder and probably maintained by a yard service. George was no gardener.

  Some woman Grant didn’t know spotted Kat and called, “Can I ask you something?”

  She smiled and held up her hand. “Give me a minute and I’ll be right back. George, nice to see you.”

  George nodded, looking a little unhappy.

  She was good, Grant mused. She must be thrumming with tension, but she’d exuded the friendliness and helpfulness that brought return customers.

  Behind the last greenhouse, a row of bins, each five or six feet wide and maybe eight feet deep, had been constructed with railroad ties. Lower fronts allowed access. Kat pointed to one, with the compost getting low.

  “Go help that woman,” he suggested. “I’ll dig through this.”

  She bit her lip, nodded and left him to it.

  He should have asked her for gloves, but shrugged, grabbed a shovel leaning against the dark ties and stepped into the bin.

  Trying to be systematic, he lifted one shovelful at a time, moving compost from the back to the front. As he poured compost from the shovel, he watched closely.

  Nada.

  His arms and shoulders ached by the time he was confident he’d examined every damn inch of that pile. Since he’d moved it to the front, he had to climb over it to get out, his shoes sinking into the soft, damp heap.

  Damn it, despite a temperature in the high thirties, he was sweating and filthy. He’d better go home and shower before he went back to the station.

  Kat appeared as soon as he leaned the shovel against the ties. Seeing the anxiety in her eyes, he didn’t make her suffer.

  “Nothing. May turn out I’m wrong and it’s from an animal. If not…” He shrugged. “Chances are, we’ll never know how that one bone ended up in there. I’ll go talk to them at Wallinger’s, though. They might’ve had an accident, or know of one at a logging site or with one of the road crews.”

  Relief leaped into her eyes. “I was thinking that earlier. It would be easy to stick a hand into a shredder.”

  He nodded. “That’s my best guess. Not something we’d necessarily hear about.”

  “Yes.” She gave a long exhalation as tension left her body. “Okay. You’ll take it, then?”

  “I’ll take it.” He already had; he’d slipped it into an evidence bag and then his pocket.

  “And you’ll let me know?”

  “Minute I hear anything.”

  “Okay.” Shyness wasn’t usual for her, but she was plainly feeling it. Still, she met his eyes. “Thank you.”

  So now she was grateful he had come, Grant realized, which meant she’d been more scared than she would want to admit.

  “Coming out here’s my job.”

  “You could have sent someone.”

  “I want to find Hugh as bad as you do.”

  Seeing the turmoil on her face, he cursed himself immediately for baiting her that way. Their history had no place here, and neither did his longing for something that wasn’t going to happen. “That’s the only major open case on our books,” he explained. Let her think that’s all he’d meant.

  After a moment, she managed to suppress her reaction and give a jerky nod. “I’ll walk you back.” Her gaze lowered, seeing his hands. “You popped a blister.”

  He’d acquired several blisters. The one that was now flattened and seeping burned. “Don’t worry. I’ll wash it up at home.”

  “I should have found you some gloves.” Kat sounded contrite. “I didn’t think.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said again. He nodded at the nursery around them. “Business looks
good.”

  “It’s been great. Didn’t even slow down this winter as much as usual, maybe because of the mild weather.”

  “I was surprised to see George Slagle here.”

  “He’s planning to put in a row of trees to screen the lumberyard from Legion Park.”

  Beautification didn’t seem George’s style, but who was Grant to say?

  Changing the subject, he said, “You’ve turned this nursery into something special.”

  “Hugh and I made plans years ago.”

  He didn’t believe it. She’d probably made plans, and her husband had nodded agreeably. Hugh Riley had been known for charm but not ambition. Grant had never been one of his fans, although the fact that he coveted Riley’s wife might have had something to do with that.

  They’d arrived out front. “What smells so good?” Grant asked, at random.

  “Daphne mezereum.” She pointed out a small shrub with pink flowers just opening and no leaves.

  “I wouldn’t mind one of those in my yard,” he said at random, wanting to hold her in conversation.

  Eyebrows raised, she glanced at his blisters. “They can be fragile.”

  So, okay, she could tell he wasn’t any kind of gardener, but, irked by her pitying tone, he said, “I’ll take one.”

  Next thing he knew, she’d deftly turned him over to a brisk, wiry woman who lectured him on planting it right away, digging a hole bigger than the root-ball and filling it with compost and peat moss. Kat herself vanished long before he handed over his debit card and winced at the total, then drove away with bags of both peat moss and compost in his trunk and the shrub on the floor next to him, its sweet smell damn near sickening in the confines of his car.

  No wonder business was booming if all the customers were as easy to manipulate as he’d been.

  Putting the car into gear, Grant shook his head at his own idiocy. He didn’t want to plant anything, but now he’d spent so much money, he had to take care of the shrub as though it were a baby. Planting it would have to wait until Sunday, though. If it could sit safely in a plastic pot at the nursery, it could sit a few more days at his house.

  So…home to unload, shower and put on a clean uniform and at least one bandage, then up to the community hospital to find Dr. Arlene Erdahl, the pathologist, and get answers about the bone in his pocket.

  He might be ninety percent sure it was human, but he was praying for the other ten percent. Despite what he’d told Kat, he had an uneasy feeling about this. No human bones had turned up in Fern Bluff since he signed on as police chief. Now, assuming one had, it was at the nursery owned by Hugh Riley.

  Who so happened to be the only person who had gone missing locally in Grant’s tenure.

  He never had believed in coincidences.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “OH, DEFINITELY HUMAN.” Sitting behind her desk, Dr. Arlene Erdahl turned the single bone over in her hand. “Likely male, because not many women have hands the size this suggests.” She held out her own as a comparison.

  Grant nodded. He’d guessed as much.Dr. Erdahl was a brisk woman with a stocky build and close-cropped graying hair. Grant put her at about fifty. Murder victims went to the county coroner, not the pathologist at the hospital in Fern Bluff, but she was always willing to answer questions when he called or stopped by. Her husband was an E.R. doc, an interesting pairing. One fought to keep people alive, the other explored them once they were dead.

  She took a magnifying glass from a drawer and scrutinized the bone. “No sign of trauma. If this finger was cut off, it happened below the knuckle. Age…? Not juvenile, no obvious osteoarthritis… Twenties to possibly mid-forties, tops. More likely this came from an individual in his twenties or thirties.”

  He didn’t want to push his luck, but asked, “I don’t suppose you can tell which finger it is?”

  She set down the magnifying glass with a decisive movement and handed the bone to him. “Gut feeling, not the pinkie. Likely the second or third digit.”

  “Ah…middle fingers?”

  “No,” she said patiently. “Your first digit is your thumb. Index finger is second.”

  “Oh.” Grant contemplated his own hand. So. Some one had lost either the finger he pointed with, or the one he used to give people the bird.

  Unless, of course, that person was dead, and this bone had become separated only after death.

  “Given the lack of tissue, whoever this came from—” she nodded at it “—either lost the finger at least a couple of years ago, or has been dead that long. But I’ll tell you what. That bone hasn’t been in a compost pile for two years.”

  Jolted, he asked, “What makes you say that?”

  “Look at it. The most interesting thing about it is the lack of any stains or discoloration. It’s more likely to have been kept in a drawer than buried unprotected in the ground.”

  Grant stared at the single finger bone lying in his hand. He should have noticed how pure the ivory color was. “What the hell…?” he muttered.

  “I’ve heard of instances where someone’s cut a finger off accidentally and kept it.”

  “Yeah, so have I. But then how did it end up in the compost at the nursery?”

  “A joke?”

  His gut tightened. Remembering the shocked expression on Kat Riley’s face and the tremble in her voice, he said grimly, “If it’s a joke, it’s a nasty one.”

  He thought about that as he walked to his car. A joke—if you could call it that—meant the bone had been planted there for her to find. But from what she’d said, it hadn’t been lying on top of the compost in her wheelbarrow, or on the worktable. In theory, she could have dumped it in a plant pot without ever spotting it. Which would have meant a nice surprise for someone else.

  An innocent explanation would violate his rule regarding coincidences, but shit did happen, right?

  He took the bone to Wallinger’s the way he’d planned. It got in that damn compost somehow, and Grant would be a lot happier to find that had happened here rather than at the nursery.

  Fred Wallinger himself came out of the office. A backhoe was turning one steaming pile of compost behind them, while a couple of guys were feeding yard debris into a shredder that crunched up its meal, choked occasionally, and spewed digested bits in a plume.

  They had to raise their voices to be heard over the din. A middle-aged, bulky man wearing quilted coveralls over a red buffalo plaid wool shirt, Wallinger shook his head at Grant’s question about stray fingers. “Haven’t heard of any such thing in a long time.” He grunted. “Well, ’cept over at Northland. Guy lost four fingers to a saw. Maybe six months back? Didn’t you hear at the time? You could ask over there. Seems they might have reattached ’em, though. Doubt they lost any.”

  The sawmill, the only one left in Fern Bluff despite the town’s logging past, was less than a quarter of a mile down the road.

  A logging truck rumbled past as Grant parked and got out, breathing in the tangy smell of sawdust. The piles of logs went on and on and on, a giant’s version of pick-up sticks.

  He stepped into the office and found the receptionist, a busty blonde, happy to talk to him. She abandoned her headphones and computer and leaned against the short counter, arms crossed on it.

  “Oh, that was Wally Camp.” Her eyes widened in remembered distress. “It was awful! I guess he just got distracted, and that saw sliced clean through. He’s on disability right now.” She lowered her voice. “From what I hear, he’s not going to be able to come back.”

  “Were they able to reattach his fingers?”

  “Only two of them.” She wrinkled her nose. “The other two were practically ground up, is what I heard.” Her tone brightened. “But at least he didn’t cut off his thumb, too.”

  “Do you have an address for him?”

  She did, and shared it.

  Wally lived a good fifteen minutes outside of town, deeper in the Cascade foothills. The two-lane, yellow-striped road wound along the river by new develo
pments of outsize, suburban houses that looked misplaced in this rural setting even if they did sit on five-acre lots, dairy farms held on to by stubborn old-timers and second-growth forest. Not far above, snow clung to the trees, defying the promises of spring at the nursery.

  He found the address scrawled in white paint on the side of a dented mailbox and turned onto a rutted dirt driveway that led to a run-down, single-wide mobile home and rusting metal shop or garage. A couple of enormous mixed-breed dogs came howling from a hole beneath the porch to circle his car, froth splattering the window and claws scratching the paint job as he slowed.

  Since their tails wagged furiously as they waited for him to get out, Grant took a chance and opened the door. Apparently he was the high point of their day. He petted, told them they were good dogs, and they happily bounded ahead of him across the frozen yard to the trailer.

  He’d have thought the pandemonium would bring someone out, but when he knocked a voice yelled over the din of a television, “Leave it on the porch!”

  “Mr. Camp?” He knocked again.

  After a long pause, the door opened. Grant’s first thought was to wonder why this kid of Wally Camp’s wasn’t in school. He’d seen the traffic near the high school as he went by and knew this wasn’t a holiday or in-service day.

  But then he saw the hand, dangling at the kid’s side as if he no longer knew quite what to do with it.

  Wally, a scrawny redhead, had to be older than he looked.

  He’d better be, Grant thought with quick pity. Other wise, who the hell had let him operate a saw?

  Though it was now late afternoon, Camp looked as if he’d barely rolled out of bed. He hadn’t shaved in days, leaving patchy growth on his gaunt jaw. From the odor wafting out, he hadn’t remembered to shower, either.

  “I thought you was the UPS guy,” Wally said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Wally Camp?”

  “That’s me. Dad’s not here, if’n it’s him you want.”