by K. J. Emrick
“We know who that hand belongs to.”
Darcy stared at him. He’d gotten to the point so suddenly after firing off all those veiled insults that she almost missed it. “How can you know who it belongs to already?”
Maxwell lifted both of his hands, palms facing Darcy, and wiggled his fingers.
She got the idea just fine from that, even before Jon translated the motion into words. “They were able to use a scanning device to get the ridge and whorl patterns from the hand’s fingertips. When they did, the prints came back to someone who has a criminal record. Or rather, someone who did have a criminal record. He’s been missing and presumed dead for two years now.”
“Two years?” Darcy couldn’t believe it. “So, that means that hand we found has been out there in the woods, potentially, for two years?”
Maxwell stopped wiggling his fingers to rap his knuckles on Jon’s desk instead. “Well, I can see why she’s your consultant. She asks all the tough questions.” Reaching over, he picked up a brown folder and handed it over to Darcy. “The hand belongs to a man named Samuel Huntsman. He was arrested on a burglary charge in his twenties and did three years in prison. After that, he got arrested again for committing an assault with a baseball bat. Spent a year and a half in prison. Then two years ago, he’s reported missing by a girlfriend. Her information’s in there, too. After that, he disappeared off the face of the Earth.”
“Now we know why,” Jon added. “You were right, Darcy. This is a murder mystery. Now we know our victim’s name.”
Darcy flipped through the pages until she found a picture of the dead man, Samuel Huntsman. He was short, and pudgy faced, in his forties, with long red hair that curled around his shoulders even though it had receded from the top of his bald head. “But… where’s the rest of him?”
“Beats me. I can’t even begin to understand the mindset of someone who can cut up a body like that. For all I know there’s other parts out there that haven’t surfaced yet. It isn’t unheard of for someone to murder their victim and then spread the body parts around to try to make the body harder to identify.”
“Do I need to remind you,” Maxwell huffed, “that we were traipsing all over those woods of yours. We even brought in a canine officer. We didn’t find the rest of Samuel Huntsman. The rest of him might be somewhere else. Might be spread across the lower forty-eight states and Canada, for all I know.”
“That’s true, you had Officer Santiago’s dog out there helping us search, but he’s a tracking dog. He’s not trained to find dead bodies. I think we need to try again with a cadaver dog. You guys have one of those, right?”
“Two, actually. I can reach out, I guess, but I really don’t think it’s necessary.”
“Well,” Jon shrugged, “it’s your case, and I’m not going to tell you how to run it, but it seems to me that we don’t want to leave any stone unturned. Literally. That hand could have been buried somewhere upstream and uncovered by heavy rains or an animal digging it up.”
“Fine,” Maxwell said, although he didn’t seem happy about it. “I’ll have one of our agency’s cadaver dogs go out there and search again. We’ll see if we can find a burial site for that hand, or any other body parts.”
Darcy had to wonder why he was dragging his heels on something like this. Now that they had determined the hand was the result of murder, not an accident or a mob scene straight out of Goodfellas, she would have expected him to jump at the chance to solve it. That didn’t seem to be the case, and she had to ask herself why?
He stood up from his seat and held his hand out to Darcy for the folder. She frowned at him, because she would have liked to read the rest of the report, but really, she had no reason to keep it from him if he wanted it back. So she gave it to him.
“Thank you,” he said, and settled his uniform shirt at the cuffs and shoulders. “Now. I imagine since you’re the official consultant for the Misty Hollow Police that you’ll be going with Jon to interview the suspect?”
Darcy felt like she was definitely on the wrong side of the loop here. First they had an ID on the murder victim, and now… “We have a suspect all of a sudden?”
“Yes. Of course we do.” Maxwell slapped the folder against his thigh. “Weren’t you paying attention? Samuel’s girlfriend reported him missing. That means she’s the last person we know of to see Samuel Huntsman alive. Now that part of his body has shown up, that makes her a murder suspect.”
“But she’s the one who reported him missing, right?”
“Yes, but she wouldn’t be the first one to report a crime just to cover up her own involvement in it.”
Darcy supposed she had to concede that he had a valid point. The girlfriend was going to be a good place for them to start looking into this mystery. One way or the other, she would have information about Samuel Huntsman that might lead them to who his killer was.
“But this is still your case, isn’t it Sergeant Dillon? Why are you having us get involved?”
Jon took her by the hand, and there was almost a smile on his face. “Because it turns out the girlfriend, Annie Pellegrino, lives right here in Misty Hollow. Looks like we have another mystery to investigate after all.”
Darcy smiled back at him. Okay, so she wanted to see where this mystery led them. She wasn’t ashamed to admit it. And, she definitely wanted to hear what Annie Pellegrino had to say.
“You two are cute,” Maxwell said. He didn’t make it sound like a compliment.
Adding that to the growing list of things that were making her want to take a swing at that sharp chin, Darcy sighed and let go of Jon’s hand after a quick squeeze. “We’ll have to wait to talk to the girlfriend,” she pointed out. “If we want to go together, I’ll have to call Aaron and ask him to watch Colby and Zane again. We really need to have a serious talk about hiring a babysitter.”
“Yes, we do, but in the meantime maybe Grace and I should do the initial interview with Annie.” He said it carefully, trying to spare her feelings, but she knew he was right.
“If you think that’s for the best.” She was disappointed, and she wasn’t doing a good job of hiding it, but that did make the most sense. They couldn’t wait to investigate what had clearly become a homicide just because it didn’t fit Darcy Sweet’s schedule.
He brushed her cheek with a thumb. “You’ll be there for the next one. Promise.”
“Aw. You know just what to say to a girl.”
Maxwell grumbled under his breath. “I think I’m going to get sick off all the cute in here.”
Darcy ignored him. She definitely did not like this man.
“You know, it’s strange,” Jon was saying, his brow creased in thought. “I’ve never heard of Annie Pellegrino. Or any Pellegrino’s in Misty Hollow, for that matter. You’d think if she’s been living here you or I would have at least heard of her.”
Darcy had been thinking the same thing. Between the two of them they practically knew everyone in town. If not by face then by name. Misty Hollow wasn’t that big of a place, after all.
They were going to get to know her before the day was out, though. Hmph…well, Jon and Grace would, at least. She was going to have to sit this one out. She was a mother now, and her own children had to come first no matter what else was going on in her life. She might want to be at the center of this mystery, just like always, but she didn’t regret giving things up for her children. Not one little bit.
“I almost forgot,” Jon said to her just as she was thinking about leaving. “What brought you down here to the police station?”
It seemed so silly now. “I thought I had a lead for us to follow up. It turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong. A man came into the bookstore today and his hand was all bandaged up and I was thinking, you know, that it might not actually be a hand in there at all but just made to look like a hand.”
“Hmm.” Crazy-sounding or not, Jon wasn’t just dismissing her out of hand, and she loved him for it. “I see where you’re going with that.
Are you sure that guy wasn’t the man the fingerprints come back to? He wasn’t Samuel Huntsman?”
“No, definitely not. Huntsman is heavyset and short and the guy who came into the store was tall and skinny.” Darcy pictured Mark Franks in her mind again. “He reminded me of someone, actually. I just can’t think of who.”
“As fascinating as that is,” Maxwell said, sarcastically, “we have work to do. We’re not going to go around arresting everyone with a sprained thumb. Chief, I’ll leave you to interview Annie. I’m going to go arrange for the dog to come and sniff around along the river. Got a feeling all we’ll come up with is more dirt, but hey. We’ll try it your way. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find the rest of the body.”
Darcy frowned at him. That wasn’t exactly what she considered luck.
Unless, of course, you happened to be in Misty Hollow.
But no matter how much she told herself that she didn’t mind not being with Jon when he interviewed Annie Pellegrino, she couldn’t think of anything else for the rest of the day.
All the while that she was at the bookstore, even when sales unexpectedly picked up in the afternoon, she was thinking about a missing man with a missing hand. Even when it was time to call over to Colby’s friend’s house, and make sure she remembered to come home for dinner, she was thinking about how Samuel Huntsman had been reported missing. Taking Zane and Cha Cha home, down her street just around the corner from the bookstore, she thought about where the rest of the missing man might be now.
It was like a macabre little nursery rhyme, sort of like that one about holding your breath when passing a graveyard. “Hold, hold, hold your breath. The air, the air, it smells like death! Beware Sam Huntsman, poor missing man. His sad, sad ghost only has one hand!”
Darcy frowned at herself in the rearview mirror as she parked in their driveway. That wasn’t exactly poetry she had just thought up in her head, but it did raise a question. Where was Samuel Huntsman’s ghost? Usually a ghost like that would have come beating on her door for her help. For Pete’s sake, she’d had ghosts reach out by appearing in movie scenes while she watched DVDs with Jon. In her dreams, too. If that awful Willamena Duell got to be in her dreams, why not a ghost who really needed her help, like Samuel Huntsman?
Of course, it wasn’t always a given that ghosts would reach out to her, either. Sometimes it was a relief when they didn’t. Other times, like now, it just left her sitting in her car, wondering about a mystery that—right or wrong—she was being shut out of, while Jon and Grace and that pompous donkey’s-back-end Maxwell Dillon got to run down every lead—
There was a knock on the passenger window, and it made Darcy jump.
It had broken her concentration more than scared her. She blinked, and saw that it was Colby standing there, watching her with an odd look on her face. Her bicycle had been discarded on the front lawn. She must have just gotten back home.
Opening the door on that side she climbed in and sat in the front next to her mother. “Hey. Why are you just sitting in the car?”
Darcy felt a little embarrassed at having been caught out here by her daughter. “Um. Sometimes I get lost in my thoughts, I guess.”
“Oh. Okay. I do that sometimes, too. Like whenever my friend’s brother starts bugging us for no reason, I just have to sit there and wonder, why did God make boys in the first place?”
Zane clapped from his seat in the back. “Yay! God mades us first!”
“That,” Colby said in a flat voice, “is not what I meant.”
Darcy managed to keep a smile off her face. Colby had been spending a lot of time with her new friend from school, Audrey. They both lived here in Misty Hollow, and they were only a half a year apart, and they were already as close as close could be. The only hitch was Audrey’s older brother. To hear Colby tell it, he was the absolute worst. He kept trying to talk to her and interrupted their games and kept pestering her to see his rock collection. Darcy had been around boys long enough to know when one was interested in a girl. Colby might need a little while to figure it out.
“So anyway,” Colby said. “What’s for dinner?”
“Yeah,” Zane piped up. “I kinda hungry.”
It was then that Darcy realized she had nothing planned for supper.
Thankfully, Misty Hollow now boasted one single pizza parlor. Chef Marios Pizzeria was a hole-in-the-wall place run by two brothers who thought they did a great job cooking everything from meatball subs to manicotti even though in reality, their pizza was the only reason to eat there. They’d forgotten to put the apostrophe in ‘Marios’ when they first opened and now, it was just another part of their charm.
Considering she had nothing planned, and no real drive to cook at the moment anyway, a couple of large pizzas sounded like just the thing.
“Come on you two,” she said with a smile at Colby and Zane. “We’re going to order some pizza. Your dad will be home soon and he’ll be hungry, too. I’m thinking… anchovies with onions and lots of garlic and, oh! Fish heads! Yes. That sounds perfect. What do you think?”
“Ew, Mom!” Colby said, already with one foot out the door. She stopped where she was and gave her mother a glare that would have melted butter. “No to all of that. Hard pass. How about just cheese and pepperoni?”
“And fish heads?” Darcy teased.
“Fish heads!” Zane cheered, clapping out a slow rhythm as he began to chant, “Fish heads, fish heads, ‘ummy ‘ummy fish heads! Fish heads, fish heads, eat ‘em up, yum!”
Colby rolled her eyes. “Oh great. Now you’ve got him started on that, he’ll be singing it all night long. No Zane, we’re not having fish heads.”
It was a goofy little song that Darcy used to sing around the house when both of them were little, something she’d picked up from Great Aunt Millie once and never forgotten. She wasn’t even sure where the song came from, it was just a happy memory from her childhood. Well, happy if you weren’t the fish, she supposed.
Cha Cha stood up on the seat next to Zane, looking around at everyone, finally barking with his head tilted to one side.
Zane patted his doggy friend on the head. “Cha Cha says he wants fish heads, so there.”
“Cha Cha doesn’t even know what fish heads are,” Colby pointed out.
“He does too!” Zane argued, sticking his lower lip out. “Cha Cha’s smart. He knows lotsa stuffs.”
“Well I know more. I’m in school, and he’s not, so there.”
Zane stuck out his tongue, and with it still protruding past his lips he told her, “F’sh he’ds!”
“Oh, you are such a little brother!”
“Am not!” Zane blurted out.
“Are too!”
“Am not!”
“Zane,” Colby sighed, “you are a little brother.”
“No I’m not, you are!”
“What! That doesn’t even make any sense!”
“I tell you what,” Darcy said, before this could get out of hand. “Let’s compromise. No fish heads this time, but how about onions? Cheese and pepperoni and onions. How’s that?”
“Yay!” Zane said, and Darcy had the feeling that no matter what she offered him, Zane would take it with a smile because his Mommy had given it to him, and his Mommy would always give him good things.
Darcy knew he’d start to feel differently when his teenage years arrived, but for now she was still amazing in his eyes, and always would be, and she was going to soak that up for as long as it lasted.
“I suppose,” Colby said graciously, “that we can have onions this time. If you really want.”
“Thank you, my dearest daughter. So glad you approve.”
“Oh, Mom. Don’t be so dramatic. Come on, let’s get inside so you can order for us already. I’m starving!”
That one still loved Darcy with all of her heart, too, even if she was trying to act all mature at the grand old age of twelve. Colby did things in her own way, and that was fine. Their family was anything but ordinary. Each person i
n it was special in their very own way. Darcy liked it like that. Normal was boring.
As soon as they were inside Cha Cha went right to his food bowl. He snuffled around inside and gobbled up the last few pieces of kibble and then looked up at Darcy expectantly.
“Zane, can you get Cha Cha some more food, please? I think he’s as hungry as we are. You know where the scoop is?”
“Yep,” he said, always happy to help.
“Just one, okay? We don’t want him getting fat. People will think he’s a rhinoceros or something.”
“No they won’t!” Zane laughed hard at that as he got the scoop and carefully opened the bag of dry dog food. “Him’s a doggie, not a rhino!”
“He,” Darcy said, “is a great doggie. Do you want to watch TV while I order dinner?”
“Uh-huh. Thanks, Mommy.”
Darcy used the wall phone to call Chef Marios pizza parlor. Not being able to make calls with her cell meant they had to keep their home’s landline phone in service. Sometimes she felt like theirs was the last house in Misty Hollow to have one.
Calling for takeout pizza wasn’t something they did very often. Once in a while it was fine, but for the most part Darcy much preferred to make their meals. It was better for all of them to eat healthy stuff rather than junk food, and it was cheaper too. Then again, that was becoming a tossup with today’s food prices.
She finished the order and hung the phone back in its cradle and then turned around… to find Tiptoe sitting on the counter.
Annoyed, Darcy put a hand on her hip as she stared down at the gray feline. “You really like to push this, don’t you? No cats on the counters. Down please.”
Tiptoe yawned, and then curled her tail around her feet. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“You know what, my little feline friend? You’re just as stubborn as your father ever was.”
It could have been Darcy’s imagination, but she thought maybe she saw the cat’s eyes get wider. Tiptoe still missed her father quite a bit. Those two had been inseparable before Smudge passed on from their lives. Anyone who thought cats didn’t feel love as deeply as people did, had obviously never had a cat in their own lives. Tiptoe loved more deeply than a lot of people Darcy knew. She had loved her father, that wily cat named Smudge. Then again, who didn’t?