Bone Deep

by Janice Kay Johnson

  After a moment, she said, “I can tell you what I’ve heard, but I don’t know how true most of it is.”

  He nodded his understanding.

  “You know Belinda Foster, don’t you? She’s a loan officer down at County Mortgage. It’s pretty well-known he had an affair with her.”

  “Before or after her divorce?” Grant asked grimly. Belinda had been married to John Foster, who headed the city’s Department of Public Works.

  “After.” Shelly hesitated. “Maybe during.”

  She had a better memory about such things than he did, and they were able to pin down the timing to a year and a half or more before Hugh drove away never to be seen again. Still worth talking to her, he guessed.

  “All right. Anyone else?”

  She came up with a couple of other names. Julia Bailey, a clerk at the library and not married, then or now.

  “Although that might have been longer ago,” she said thoughtfully. “She’d probably tell you.”

  He added the name to his notes.

  “And there was an aide at the school. I knew her a little because she worked in Aidan’s classroom.” Aidan was her son, now eleven or twelve, Grant thought. At that stage where he was starting to trip over his own feet. Frowning, Shelly gazed into space. “Pretty. And young. I actually saw them together. So this one isn’t rumor. I saw them coming out of La Hacienda in Marysville. They kissed before she got in her car. Angie,” she said suddenly. “Angie Hewitt or Hiatt or something like that.”

  “Is she still around?”

  Shelley shook her head. “I think she moved away. I know she wasn’t back the next fall, anyway. I remember wondering if it might have something to do with him.”

  She wasn’t sure when she’d seen the two of them together, except the weather had been warm because Angie had been wearing a tank top, cropped pants and flip-flops. “If she was more than twenty-two or -three, I’ll work an extra shift at the next full moon without pay.” Her mouth was tight. She had a daughter, too, at the high school. One not that much younger now than Angie Hewitt or Hiatt had been back then.

  “Damn,” Grant muttered.

  “Bert may have a hard time handling his remains with respect,” Shelly said, voice hard.

  Their eyes met. “As long as he treats Kat Riley with respect, I’m okay with that,” Grant said softly.

  “If I asked around, I could probably dredge up a couple more names from longer ago, but those are the ones that come to mind from nearer the time when he went missing.”

  She went back to work, and Grant back to brooding. He’d like to know which of Kat’s employees had spread the gossip about the bones. The kid who’d been so sure that first one was human? Had any of the others even seen a bone? Joan Stover knew about all the discoveries, but he had a hard time picturing her rushing to call all her friends with the latest. She’d struck him as fiercely loyal.

  That said, if there was one thing he’d learned in his years in law enforcement, it was that you couldn’t judge by appearances. He’d seen a pierced, tattooed drug addict rescue a kitten from the river, and had personally arrested a handsome, well-liked banker with a beautiful family for raping his eight-year-old daughter. Joan Stover could conceivably be harboring resentment of her employer.

  A teenager, though, would be more prone to texting his friends the minute he left work. Who might tell their parents. And Kat had eight employees, full- and part-time.

  He glanced at his watch and decided he could catch Belinda before lunch. She was an easy one to talk to.

  Since he and her ex-husband were both city employees, he’d met Belinda a few times when Grant had first taken the job here. He’d liked them both, and would have been more surprised when he heard she and John were getting a divorce if his own marriage hadn’t been rocky. He and Rachel put a good face on it in public. Those kinds of troubles didn’t always show to casual acquaintances or even close friends.

  He got lucky and spotted her coming out the rear door of the mortgage office as he pulled up.

  When Grant told her what he wanted to talk about, she looked more resigned than upset, and agreed she could spare a few minutes.

  In the car with him, Belinda sat with her back so straight it barely touched the seat, purse gripped on her lap, and stared straight ahead through the windshield during most of their conversation.

  “The bastard dumped me,” she said. “I fell in love with him. It was stupid, when I knew he was married. I’d even met her—his wife—a couple of times, but I had myself convinced she must be some kind of bitch or he wouldn’t have been so unhappy with her. John and I had just split up, you know, and I guess I was…” She hesitated.

  Vulnerable. Just like Corinna.

  “Primed,” was the word Belinda chose at last. “He came into the office to talk about refinancing his house. He said he wanted some capital for the nursery.”

  “Did he go ahead with the refinance?”

  She shook her head. “He said his wife didn’t like the idea. He dropped it after that. But he took me out to lunch a couple of times. Dropped by, and it seemed casual at first. Friendly. You know.”

  “How long did the affair last?”

  She shrugged, her expression bitter. “Four or five weeks. He was romantic. Bringing me flowers, taking me to out-of-the-way, candlelit restaurants. And then I guess he could tell I was getting serious about him, and next thing I know I’m getting this spiel about how he needs to give his marriage another chance. It was the first time I could look at him and see plain as day that he didn’t mean a word he was saying. I felt like such an idiot.”

  She knew exactly when she’d started seeing Hugh, because she knew when she and John had separated and when their divorce was final. September and early October.

  Hugh had disappeared in May of the following year.

  The very young teacher’s aide must have been his last affair, Grant realized. She sounded like an unlikely murderess, but he very much wanted to find and talk to her.

  Grant couldn’t help wondering, though, whether there might have been another woman in between Corinna and the teacher’s aide. Unless Shelly’s memory was off—and he didn’t believe that—there would have been eight or ten months, minimum, between the end of one affair and the start of the next. Had Hugh and Kat had a good stretch for some reason?

  Another question Grant hated to ask her but would anyway.

  He phoned the school district office and a woman in Personnel promised to do some research. She was prompt; not half an hour later, her call was put through to him.

  “It was Hiatt,” she told him. “Angela Jo Hiatt. She wasn’t even with us a full school year. The last day I show her working was May 16. She let us know she had a family emergency. It was an email. I have it in her file.”

  The day after Hugh Riley disappeared. That couldn’t be a coincidence. But what did it mean?

  “She quit?” he asked.

  “She wouldn’t have been automatically rehired anyway. Para-eds have to reapply annually. They put in for the school they want, the number of hours, whether they’d like to do special ed or work at certain grade levels. No guarantees. She didn’t reapply.”

  Armed with the address and phone number she had in her records for Angela Hiatt, Grant thanked her. When he tried the number, he reached a perky voice mail message for Loretta and Pete Ringstad. He didn’t leave a message. The phone company reassigned numbers after six months.

  He knew the apartment building where Angie had lived, and called the manager, who, regrettably, Grant also knew. Joe Grier was a cranky old bastard who had a habit of letting himself into apartments and browsing whenever he was inclined. The out-of-state owner cared only that he maintained the building adequately and kept the units rented. Tenants hadn’t been able to prove Grier had been in their apartments, but Grant knew damn well he had, although whether he was actually stealing or merely rifling through drawers and who knew what else wasn’t clear.

  Grier wasn’t pleased t
o hear from Grant. He grunted and said, “You expect me to remember some woman from five years ago?”

  “You do keep records, I assume.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Grant heard heavy breathing and the scraping sound of a file cabinet drawer being opened, followed by the thud of it closing and a second one opening.

  “Unit 203? That what you said?”

  Grant agreed that it was.

  “Angela Hiatt. She paid through May.”

  “Did she give notice?”

  “Key and a note were dropped through my slot. Place was empty by the time I checked it out. I don’t know whether she stayed the whole month or not.”

  “Did you reimburse any of her cleaning deposit?” Grant asked. “Do you have an address?”

  “Doesn’t look like she ever applied. Lotta people don’t.”

  Lotta people probably knew Grier would find some excuse not to give them their deposits back, Grant suspected. Tenants talked to each other.

  He checked Department of Motor Vehicle records next and found Angela Jo Hiatt’s driver’s license had expired the following year and she had never renewed it, which presumably meant she’d moved out of state. Damn it, he thought in frustration. He’d have really liked to talk to her. He was pissed at himself for not digging deep enough then to find out about her. Then he would have suspected the two of them ran off together. Now, he knew that hadn’t happened. But what in hell had?

  Finding Angie Hiatt had become a priority.

  It was time now to go out to the nursery and have a long talk with Kat.

  “THEN HUGH’S BEEN DEAD all this time.” Kat knew she sounded too calm. She had gone numb sometime during the night. The confirmation from Dr. Espinosa that the dental records were a match couldn’t penetrate this weird, puffy insulation that seemed to muffle her emotions.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Grant corrected her. He sat across the desk from her in her office. He’d requested an interview with her in a voice she had recognized from those days. He was all cop. And she was a suspect. “Did he die that day? Probably, but not necessarily. It could have been a day later, a week later, months later. A long time ago, sure. The condition of the bones tells us that. But all we’re certain of is that he drove away. Where did he go that day? Who did he see?”She went very still. “What is it you suspect?”

  His gray eyes were watchful. “I believe he was having an affair at the time with a young woman named Angie Hiatt. She quit her job, citing a family emergency, the day after Hugh disappeared. I haven’t yet been able to locate her.”

  That hurt did penetrate, slipping lethally through her ribs. Angie Hiatt. For all her wondering, Kat had never had a name. Never been sure.

  She kept her chin high, not letting him see the wound he’d dealt. “Who was she?”

  “A teacher’s aide at the elementary school. Not quite twenty-three years old. That’s about all I’ve learned so far.”

  After a moment she nodded.

  “You say you didn’t know. Kat, I’ve verified two other affairs. The women confirmed having them with him. He took them away for weekends, out to candlelit dinners. He brought one to the nursery on a Sunday.” He leaned forward, so large he loomed, his intent obviously to intimidate. “How is it possible you didn’t know?”

  It took everything she had not to move, to shrink away from him. “You think I did,” she whispered. “You think he told me that he and this Angie Hiatt were going away together.”

  “That seems a likely scenario,” he said in a hard voice.

  She carefully removed her hands from the desk and laid them on her lap to hide the tremor from Grant. “I suppose it does,” she said, around the huge ball of something caught in her throat.

  He waited, his face as hard as his voice. Yesterday, he’d been kind. He’d changed his mind about her since.

  “But you’re wrong.” She made herself return his gaze. “It’s true I’d been afraid he was seeing someone, but I didn’t know for sure. I never did. He…just wasn’t that different when he was from when he wasn’t. Mostly, I’d notice stretches when he wanted sex more or less often.”

  “The weekends away?”

  “There weren’t very many. Supposedly he was visiting wholesale or specialty nurseries.” She moved her shoulders, hating the helplessness of the gesture. “We deal with ones down in Oregon and even northern California, so that wasn’t unusual. Once there was a high school reunion. He convinced me I had to keep the nursery open, and I’d be bored anyway. I didn’t mind.”

  His stare had become incredulous. “You must have had a real loving relationship.”

  Humiliation made her cheeks burn. “I…suppose we didn’t. I didn’t have anything to judge by. I thought we were mostly happy.”

  “Happy.”

  Anger lit a pilot light beneath her breastbone. “Is that so impossible?”

  “The guy was screwing half the women in town, and you thought he was happy with you.”

  “He was!” Shocked, Kat realized she’d half risen to her feet and was shouting. “He didn’t want anything more from me! Don’t you get it? He liked having me as a partner in the nursery and someone to put dinner on the table at night and laugh at his jokes and not…not challenge him too much. I think…” Oh, this was even more humiliating, but she had to say it. “I think maybe he turned to someone else when I pushed too hard. When I’d get mad because he wouldn’t do what he should have to make the nursery more successful, or work on the house, or talk to me about something that mattered. That’s when he’d drift away.”

  “And find someone who’d admire him.”

  “Yes,” she said dully. It had been her fault. She supposed she had known. She’d simply…protected herself, by pretending she didn’t.

  Grant said a crude word. Suddenly he wasn’t just a cop. “Why in hell did you put up with it, Kat? Tell me that.”

  She was still standing, she realized. Her knees gave out and she dropped into her squeaky chair. She didn’t know how to begin to explain. This big, domineering man would never understand.

  “Maybe I didn’t care enough.” That wasn’t quite it, though, was it? Because she had. It hurt, losing the illusions she’d clutched when she first married Hugh and imagined them deeply, forever in love. “It was gradual,” she said. Whispered. She cleared her throat, pushed herself to speak louder, stronger. “I liked working at the nursery. Having a home. Hugh was easy to live with. I never really knew anyone with a marriage any better.”

  Oh, that sounded pathetic, and was. She’d been so damned grateful for what Hugh had given her, she’d resigned herself to not having the more he’d promised. Love and passion and genuine friendship, the kind that accepted vulnerability to each other. Except for the occasional sex, she and Hugh had ended up like roommates who’d found each other on Craigslist, ones who got along fine and liked each other but were unlikely to stay in touch very long once either moved on. Only…to all appearances he’d been content; he was satisfied with his life the way it was.

  And she’d so lacked in pride and confidence, she’d been grateful to be his partner and wife even if both relationships had been so shallow she’d had to be very, very careful not to look beneath the surface.

  “If you’d caught him in bed with another woman, would you have left him?”

  The heat in her cheeks slid throughout her body, burning as it went. “Yes.” Then, more softly, she said, “I think so.”

  He shook his head in bafflement. “Why would you have hesitated?”

  “Because then I wouldn’t have had anything.” She made herself meet his eyes. “I shouldn’t have said that, should I? Now you know how much I didn’t want to lose what little I had.”

  Grant flattened his hands on the desk. Something roughened his voice; rage, maybe. “Did you catch him with Angie Hiatt, Kat? Was he going to leave you for her? Did you kill the son of a bitch so you could keep your home and the business?”

  She stared back at him. “Why both
er asking, when you already seem to know the answer?” Kat pushed herself to her feet. “Unless you have any more questions, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ON HER COMPUTER MONITOR, video feed from one of the new security cameras played. In the week and a half since they’d been installed, Kat had tried to get in the habit of letting video run as she worked at her desk, although she’d have had to admit she barely kept half an eye on it. Like right now, when most of her concentration was on an order for fall-blooming perennials. She hadn’t managed to watch more than an hour here or there of footage from any of the cameras. There didn’t seem to be any great urgency, since no more bones had been left at the nursery.

  What she was seeing now, she realized, was closing time yesterday. The camera had a good, wide-angle view of the interior of the main building—the counter with the cash register, the door to the employee break room, the exit to the parking lot.Melinda Simmons was behind the counter, counting money. Kat saw herself walk by, on her way to her office, if she remembered right. Jason disappeared into the break room, reappeared with a backpack slung over his shoulder and, after a wave, went out the front. It was like a mime show, oddly unreal. Tess Miller came out of the break room a minute or two later, carrying a big tote bag. The way she glanced around caught Kat’s attention; order form momentarily forgotten, she watched as Tess brushed against a table that held hand-sculpted clay figurines and paused as if checking to be sure she hadn’t knocked anything over. Her next movement was smooth, practiced. She snatched one of the figures off the table, slipped it into the tote and walked out.

  Maybe it was stupid to be shocked, but… Kat rewound the feed and watched again as a trusted employee stole from her.

  Tess always carried a big tote instead of a purse. She brought her lunch in it, sometimes had a crochet project to work on at lunchtime. Other days she’d pull a magazine out to skim as she ate or sipped a diet cola. Like all the employees, Tess had her strengths and weaknesses. She was good with customers, did really well behind the cash register and in the gift area, knew her annuals. She could fake it with the other plants, but didn’t seem to retain what she learned about the difference between one hydrangea and another, never mind the hybrid Japanese maples or the huge sedum family. She was reliable, though, which was a plus.