Cold to the Bone

by Emery Hayes

  “Only a ton.”

  “Enlighten me, and I’ll tell you all about it when I can.”

  There was only a slight pause, and then Jordan said, “Only the true king could pull the sword from the stone. It was a test. A lot of people tried, but only Arthur succeeded, and that’s how he became king.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Are you kidding? That sword is, like, the most important part of the Arthurian tales. It gives Arthur power and position. It’s capable of magic.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  “Well, it protected Arthur, until Morgan le Fay stole it.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Arthur died.” She could hear the shrug in Jordan’s voice. “That’s the short version.”

  “What happened to the sword?”

  “It was thrown back into the lake.”

  “Really?”

  “Always,” he confirmed. “Doesn’t matter who’s telling the story, the sword of a knight is always thrown back into the lake. Why? Did you find a sword?”

  “No.” But it was interesting, the lake connection. She doubted that Beatrice had been out there looking for a mythical sword. Still, it teased Nicole’s mind with the possibility of connection.

  “If you think of anything else I should know about it, call.”

  “’Kay. Are you coming home soon?”

  “Not until late. I’ll call before you go to bed.” It was the best she could do. There were many tasks to be done before she could think about food or sleep. “Mrs. Neal is making beef stroganoff for dinner.”

  “I know. And then it’s checkers or backgammon.”

  Nicole’s smile grew at his quiet disgust. “Visiting hours at the nursing home?” Although Mrs. Neal was a square fifty years old.

  “I like her.”

  “I know you do.”

  “I don’t like board games.”

  “She’s trying.”

  “Yeah.”

  And he’d put up with it because he really did like Mrs. Neal, and he couldn’t bring himself to swat a fly.

  “She’s a comfort to me,” Nicole admitted.

  “I know.”

  “Thanks.”

  “For putting up with a grandma?”

  “For treating her like one.”

  Nicole disconnected and returned to the text messages on Beatrice’s phone. She did a quick internet search. Beatrice had given Kenny the icon of a sword from one of the best-known romances in literature and film. Excalibur was symbolic of many things: strength and weakness, life and death. The list was exhaustive. So Nicole moved on to extrapolation. Had Beatrice seen herself as a Morgan le Fay—a young woman of mystery, capable of shape-shifting and even manipulation? In many tales, le Fay was portrayed as a heroine, in others as a woman who used her beauty and sexual allure to defeat her foes. Which of those qualities had Beatrice seen in herself? What was she to Kenny: ally or adversary?

  And who was Kenny? A classmate? A friend from home? There had been passion in his words, a shared affection in the thread, and Nicole felt comfortable ruling him out as a new acquaintance. And yet the last series of messages referred to a meet on the Diamond Run on December 22nd. A done deal, because Kenny had “enjoyed the ride” with her.

  Kenny was here, in Montana, but who was he? That and the shoe size would drive her visit with the Esparzas this afternoon.

  Beatrice had kept up a running conversation with her brother. The first message was dated December 16th:

  We’re not going. Dad keeps driving.

  No response from Joaquin. A few minutes later, Beatrice tried again:

  Like we’re on one of those racetracks. Round and round. He won’t stop.

  Silence. Then two minutes later:

  Mom isn’t picking up her phone. Beatrice punctuated it with a sad-faced, crying emoji.

  Joaquin didn’t respond. The vic had waited six minutes before another attempt:

  I want to come home.

  What’s your contribution? he’d written back, and the words stirred something elemental in Nicole. They weren’t a threat but felt like one. She could hear the challenge, or the sarcasm, in his tone. That was one of the problems when conversations were conducted electronically—tone was always an assumption.

  Too much. Too soon.

  Lab rats have no say, Joaquin wrote.

  The vic’s response was another emoji, this time the classic heart breaking in two.

  The thread grew cold, and then on Christmas morning, Joaquin wrote her: You want to do this?

  Dad’s counting on me.

  Joaquin didn’t respond.

  Then at 10:20 Christmas night, Beatrice wrote her final text. An appeal to her brother. SOS.

  When they should have been watching the movie and drinking hot chocolate brewed in the coffeepot.

  The timing was good. It fell within MacAulay’s time-of-death window.

  Had Joaquin ignored his sister’s plea for help? Or had he acted on it? Nicole thought about the condition in which she’d found the family just six hours after Beatrice’s final attempt at contact. All of them had been wide-eyed, tense, expecting the worst. Except Joaquin. He had seemed to know the situation was bad but believed all was not lost.

  The two remaining threads were messages from Beatrice’s parents.

  The mother had written many unanswered messages dating back to December 20th and ending Christmas afternoon. Most were along the lines of family plans: We’re leaving for dinner at … or Your sisters would like to ski with you … Others were corrective. Eerily, the first and last messages were the same: Good girls don’t do this.

  But what had the vic been doing that upset her mother? It wasn’t stated, but known. Mother and daughter had their opinions on it, equally strong.

  The father had sent one message to his daughter, early evening Christmas Day: Cooperate. A single word that managed to stir the hairs on Nicole’s nape. Cooperate. With whom? Esparza? Why would he need her cooperation? With the people holding her captive? Either was equally possible. As were a number of other less-than-nefarious possibilities. But she would be a fool to ignore the obvious.

  She sent a text to Lars. They were going back to the Huntington Spa, and they weren’t leaving without answers. Then she returned to her exploration of Beatrice’s cell phone, hoping to find further implication. The most promising app was a digital diary, but it was locked. Nicole sent an email to forensics, indicating that they should attend to this first.

  Nicole put the cell phone aside and picked up the slim diary. The one the vic had used solely for sport. She fanned through it and realized there were as many words as there were numbers. She opened to the first page. It was an accounting of that day’s performance on the track, followed by Beatrice’s commentary arranged in two columns. Under the title Negatives she’d written sluggish, bloated, swollen ankles/wrists. Positives included one-tenth of a second cut from her sprint time. That was May 8th.

  On May 9th she’d recorded her mile time—four minutes thirty-two seconds. In italics was the word slow. And she’d noted, Coach asked about my time. What could I say? Tired, I guess. Maybe more sprints would help. Tomorrow.

  The doctor was right. Beatrice had expected better from her body. It seemed to Nicole that the girl had set goals that were nearly impossible to attain. She’d run a mile at four and a half minutes. Nicole had never broken five. And yet the vic hadn’t been happy.

  She turned to the next page. Same setup. Beatrice was organized. Every page began with the date, the type of run, followed by the time it had taken to complete it and reflections on her performance. A pattern began to emerge. Two days a week the vic completed sprints and fartleks at the high school track. Sometimes she wrote down comments her coach had made to her—most of them balanced on the tail of reasonable. Two days a week Beatrice ran a fast mile on the track and indicated her time. On Wednesdays she ran a 5K to build her endurance. This was also the vic’s cross-country event.

 
At first, Nicole noticed small achievements. In late May Beatrice had run a four-twenty-eight mile and noted next to it that there was only one other girl her age in county competition who could best that time. On July 4th, Beatrice trimmed her mile to four minutes twenty-two-point-zero-three seconds. But on July 20th there was a sudden drop in her performance and her mile clocked at four minutes fifty-five seconds. An exclamation mark was noted beside the time, the ink dark and smeared, the paper carved by the many repetitions of the pen point over it. Beatrice had been upset. Clearly. And below the time she had scrolled Nueva Vida. That same week, Nicole found, Beatrice’s longer run—three-point-one miles on the cross-country field—took significantly longer to complete. Her coach was concerned. So were her teammates. The vic had written in the margins, Coach wants to speak with me and my parents. He wants to know what’s going on. If something’s wrong. What happened to my edge? Lauren is catching up to my time.

  Nicole paged through the next week and then the next, noting the continued and not-so-subtle decline in Beatrice’s performance. The last week of August showed a turnaround. Not just a stability of numbers, but a climb in the right direction. Nicole continued to turn pages and found that by September 9th, Beatrice was back to the numbers she’d put up in early July, and then she exceeded them. Her mile time improved to four minutes seventeen seconds. Nicole turned two pages forward, to the vic’s next mile run, to find that Beatrice had shattered her own personal best by clocking a four minute eleven-point-seven mile. At that level, shaving six seconds off a PB in just days was not possible, was it? And yet, Beatrice had indicated it was. Three more pages in and Nicole realized the mile times cantered at a crazy four minutes and one one-hundredth of a second. They teetered there for twelve days and then there was another sudden decline: four minutes thirty-one seconds. Dad told coach running isn’t everything. His daughter should be well-rounded. And he asked me to drop from the team. There will be time for sports later, Beatrice. Next year. But I won’t. I’m not a quitter.

  A father with great expectations—why would he ask Beatrice to sacrifice certain glory on the track and the real possibility of a full scholarship to a top college? What was there to be gained from that? No good reason surfaced, so Nicole left that thought alone for a while and went back to the diary. She counted backward. Each slide in performance hit after three weeks of excellence.

  What had happened every three weeks to cause the dip in performance? What had caused her to wallow in that trough for—Nicole paged backward to get an accurate read—four to five weeks, followed by a remarkable improvement in time?

  She pulled out her cell and sent off a text to MacAulay. Steroids? She didn’t expect a quick reply. MacAulay sometimes forgot he had a cell phone, and he complained his fingers were too large to use the keyboard. Nicole had given him a stylus—actually three or four, so he’d always have one handy—and this had resulted in same-day returns. Rarely within minutes, but this time MacAulay surprised her.

  No trace in prelim.

  8

  The snow came down in sheets so that objects were reduced to color and shape without any clear identity. Visibility was about three feet. By the time Nicole left the station, two hours after leaving the crime scene with the victim’s cell phone and purse, the Yukon was snowed in. She opened the back hatch, rummaged through the cargo area for the small miner’s shovel, and dug out her tires, then used a scraper to push the snow off the roof and hood of the SUV. She cleared the windshield and slid behind the wheel. The windows were streaked with ice and gave the outside world an underwater look. Across the street, storefronts twinkled with holiday lights. She put the SUV in gear and rolled out of the lot.

  She was meeting Lars at the Huntington Spa. She had called ahead and told Dr. Esparza to have his wife and son with him when she arrived. He hadn’t asked any questions, but agreed as though he’d expected her call. Again, Nicole had the feeling the family was waiting for her.

  She didn’t like when those being investigated were one step ahead of her. This afternoon she would change that.

  Nicole slowed as she passed the turnout for Lake Maria. The trees were shrouded in white powder and the iced lake lost under the steady fall of snow. Their crime scene was completely wiped out. What had been gathered was all they would have to work with. She had given the call ten minutes before—pull back. When she and Lars returned to the station, they would sift through evidence and follow the leads it provided. It was nearing ten thirty, and they’d had the crime scene for a total of ten hours. They needed more; she’d worked with less.

  Nicole parked the SUV under the peaked roof in front of the resort lobby. She cut the engine and pushed the vehicle door open against a swift wind. She could see Lars standing under the grand chandelier, working his phone. His face was still rosy from the hours he’d spent raking through drift. They hadn’t recovered the girl’s outerwear. In fact, there were no further big finds at all. The dogs had tracked the scent off the gloves. It had taken them through the trees, to the Lake Road, then faded to confusion. The dogs had circled, stopped, and stood their ground.

  Sometimes the snow, the below-freezing temperatures, tampered with the dogs’ sense of smell and direction. Other times the scent was lost because a car or snowmobile had been used to leave the scene. There was no physical evidence to suggest that either was the case.

  She stepped into the lobby, and Lars turned when the cool wind hit him.

  “You think any more about motive?” she asked.

  She’d briefed him on the text messages and hoped he’d spent some time thinking about them, that he’d come up with some of the same questions and conclusions she had.

  “Cooperate,” he said. “That has some pretty sinister implications. Makes me think right away a kidnapping. But you’re right, there’s something more here. Something within the family dynamics. And whatever it is, it’s keeping Joaquin in check, and either Esparza or the wife too, depending on who’s holding the cards.”

  All things Nicole had already thought of herself. “Of the three, where’s your money?”

  He shook his head. “You think Joaquin is the weak link, that his anger will make him talk. Maybe. But Mrs. Esparza is just as likely to lead us to the killer.”

  “She’s keeping secrets,” Nicole said. They all were. So why did it bother her more that the mother wasn’t telling all, doing all for justice? “But she’s not our prime suspect.”

  “Physical evidence doesn’t lie,” he agreed.

  The woman wasn’t tall enough to wrap her hands around her daughter’s throat from the angle carefully measured by MacAulay, not unless she’d stood on an object seven to ten inches in height. Not plausible. Her shoe size was too small for the hiking boots, her legs too short to fit the strides measured on the slopes.

  “My guess, she’s covering for Joaquin or her husband. But for what? Neither fits with the date-rape angle.”

  No. That was Kenny, the sword in the stone, elusive but almost certainly the killer. They needed to find him.

  “The mother knows something,” Nicole asserted, because she just couldn’t let it go. Alma Esparza rubbed her the wrong way. “She wasn’t surprised to see me. And the soft soles, they could belong to her.”

  “Size seven or eight,” Lars said. “That’s the best we’re going to get for the UGG.”

  The material of the sole and a slippery surface made the prints blurry, and casting them was a challenge. UGGs were a popular resort boot with women, and some men too. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll be wearing a pair.”

  “You don’t think she’ll open her closet for you?”

  “She’s picking up the pieces,” Nicole said, because she could allow the woman that. She’d been genuinely distraught that morning. “But she’s not above cutting corners to make them fit.”

  She thought on that a moment longer, until Lars interrupted her with more facts.

  “I looked up that mile time,” he continued. “The vic’s rate of improvement
is unheard of. Anything under a sub-five-minute mile makes her an elite athlete. They shave time by the hundredth of a second.”

  She’d thought so. “She wasn’t making up those times.” There was no reason to. The diary was the vic’s personal record of her performance. She’d included the good, the bad, the ugly.

  “No,” Lars agreed. “So something else was at work.”

  “Not steroids. I asked MacAulay.”

  “But something,” he repeated. “And maybe it’s connected to that lab rat comment.”

  “Joaquin’s text,” Nicole said. “That’s been on my mind too. Our vic was a lab rat, but for what?”

  “First pass showed no evidence of chemicals?”

  In prelim, bloodwork came back in minutes and would reveal the existence of a foreign substance if one was present, but deeper testing was required in order to put a name on it.

  “The tests picked up something. MacAulay says he wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be Rohypnol.”

  Lars nodded and moved on. “What do you make of Kenny?”

  “He fits neatly into the date-rape angle.”

  “The sword-in-the-stone thing, the whole King Arthur connection, makes me think that the victim thought of herself as a heroine. Strong, smart, capable.”

  Nicole agreed. They knew a little more about Beatrice Esparza. Nicole was beginning to like the girl.

  “Let’s go see what the family’s been up to,” she said.

  They fell into step. Lars, several years younger than Nicole but the bigger of the two the way a tree dwarfed a blade of grass, naturally took the lead in a barreling walk that stretched Nicole’s long legs. He didn’t assume a commanding presence; it just was, and he never trod on her authority or challenged her decisions. He was the best backup Nicole could ask for—well, unless they were in a shootout, but something like that was rare. Nicole had discharged her weapon only twice in her fourteen years on the job and never since coming to Montana.

  “So how do you want to do this?” he asked.