by Karen Harper
Claire hoped Brad would let them look at the dagger closer, even before it was cleaned, but, with another quick glance at the corpse, he took the artifact from the room.
* * *
“Unbelievable!” Nick told Claire that night as she described her first working day at Black Bog. He sat at a kitchen bar stool while she put the dinner plates in the dishwasher. He had gotten home late; Lexi and Trey were both in bed, and he’d kissed Lexi good-night and stood over Trey’s crib for a while before joining Claire in the kitchen. “I’m just grateful you were in an archaeology lab and not a modern morgue.”
“I’m certainly going right to work for the Vances. I’m anxious to know if that next body—pretty sure it’s a woman’s—will have met with violence too.”
“I hate to bring this up now when I’d rather be relaxing, but I have sicced Heck on the frozen-woman case to figure out what Cynthia Lindley was like before she died. We need to find who could have hated her enough to kill her, who would have known where to find her—and known where to store or hide her body.”
“Heck always turns something up.”
“I’ve also got to have Dale give me his version of Cyndi’s life and character, and I’d like to have him over here for dinner for that. You could listen too—not take notes, not seem to interrogate him, but I’d like another set of ears, not a lawyer’s. And you do come at a reasonable price.”
“Right. Your love and life. Your lovemaking, your son...”
Claire’s voice drifted off. Did Hunter once have a son? A wife? Did someone wait for him to come home with deer meat, with a warm pelt for their bed? What went so wrong that he—
“Sweetheart, I said is that okay? I know it puts more work on you.”
“I’m honored you asked, and you know I love to be included. Yes, of course, as soon as you need to pursue that—him. Dale still could be involved, right?”
Claire’s phone on the counter rang. She walked over and glanced at it. “It’s Brit,” she said. “Hope nothing’s happened to Jace, doing all that flying, just when things are looking good for them.”
“I know you still worry about him,” Nick said.
“Of course I do. Lexi would be devastated if something happened to him,” she said as she slid the phone icon upward to answer it. “Brit, Claire here.”
“Hi, Claire. I know it’s late, but Jace and I were having a celebration dinner, and we wanted to tell you and Nick something before you hear it elsewhere. We’ve set a date for the wedding, Saturday, August eleventh. Now don’t get your hopes up that Lexi’s going to have another new baby to fuss over, because it’s not a shotgun wedding except I may have held one to his head so he’d set a date. Of course, we want you two as guests and Lexi as flower girl.”
“Congratulations from both of us—and, of course, from Lexi. No problem with setting a date, since you’re both ready.”
“It will be a small wedding, though I’m not sure we’ll be able to take a honeymoon then with Jace’s flying demands—well, my work with the animals too.”
They chatted a moment more, then said goodbye. Claire explained to Nick, though he’d picked up on this end of the conversation.
“So, that’s good news,” he said, smiling. “Let’s have that private reception of ours sooner than that. I called the Orange Grove Country Club today and we can have the Blue Room there this Sunday afternoon. Nothing huge, no formal invitations, just our friends, including the almost newlyweds. I suppose you’d better explain to them we had this more or less set up, so Brit doesn’t think we’re stealing their thunder.”
“That’s great about our belated reception,” she told him, but she turned quickly back to wiping down the sink area. “She’ll understand. I’ll let them know tomorrow.” As she wrung out the dish rag, she glanced at her face in the window over the sink. Daylight was almost gone, and the lower pane of glass had become a dark mirror.
Jace had rushed his proposal to her years ago. They had rushed their wedding. It had almost been an elopement. A whirlwind romance that had too soon become regrets and separations—but at least they had Lexi. With his long international flights, she and Jace had spent too much time apart. She had tried to hide her narcolepsy from him. Too late, she’d tried to reach out to him to mend things...
The memory of that hand reaching toward Hunter in the bog leaped at her. A woman he’d loved and lost or left?
She jumped as Nick appeared in the window reflection behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“Are you all right, sweetheart? You said you like Brit and think they are good for each other—and for Lexi.”
She turned toward him and into his embrace, pressing her cheek against his chest where she could hear his heart beating. “Of course they are, despite being risk takers, both of them. Jace on the hunt for bad guys, Brit protecting her beloved endangered animals.”
Wishing that long-gone Hunter didn’t make her think of Jace, she put her arms around Nick’s waist and held hard.
At the firm the next morning, Nick kept thinking about Claire’s reaction to her ex-husband’s coming marriage. He hoped she was just worried about things working out well when she had to share Lexi with him and Brit for longer periods, not that she was somehow sad or reluctant he was remarrying.
And, as fascinating as her work at Black Bog was, he could already feel it was consuming her thoughts. Well, he told himself as he sat down at his full-of-work desk, that was always the way Claire was, full-steam ahead, and he recognized that workaholic drive in himself. What was that saying about birds of a feather flocking together?
He heard a man’s raised voice outside, one he couldn’t place, then his secretary Cheryl’s steady reply, higher pitched than usual. “Sir, I don’t know how you got past our security desk, but you cannot just go into Counselor Braun’s office. No, I will not tell you which it is, and I am calling security.”
Nick jumped up and headed for the door. He’d told Bronco he could come in late today because he and Nita were moving in with him and Claire for a few days. Was a police officer out here, ready to arrest Dale? Why hadn’t Detective Jensen advised him of that?
He yanked the door the rest of the way open. It wasn’t Jensen, not a police officer or anyone he knew. It was a red-bearded man, stocky and bald, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket over a long-sleeved flannel plaid shirt—totally un-Naples, especially this time of year. At least at first glance, Nick thought the guy wasn’t armed.
“May I help you, sir? I’m Nick Markwood, senior partner here.”
“I’m looking for that bastard rat lawyer works here, kilt my sister. She said he works here.”
Nick almost blurted out Cyndi Lindley’s name, but that might be construed as admission Dale killed her.
“No one in this firm killed anyone, but am I to assume you are Cynthia Lindley’s brother from Georgia?”
“The same. Drove down here straight from Zebulon, an hour south of Atlanta. Got a call from the county coroner, so I’m here to claim her body. Never met her so-called intended before he dumped her, but I got more’n words for him!”
“Please come into my office and calm down. Cheryl, we won’t need security, but bring in some coffee for—your name, sir?”
“Tanner Linschwartz. It’s her real last name too, but she was hell bent on getting away from her former life, out of Zebulon where she was hostessing in the Down Home Restaurant. Gone first to Atlanta and ended up here, seating people in some fancy restaurant, where she musta met her killer.”
“Step inside,” Nick coaxed again, gesturing toward his open office door. Finally, the man’s angry stance relaxed a bit; his shoulders drooped and his fists uncurled. It was totally understandable that he’d be exhausted and on edge. Vengeful too, so Nick had to watch that. Seemingly calmer now, the man shuffled past Nick into his office.
“Cheryl, I’ll leave the door open. G
et hold of Bronco and have him wait out here. And,” he whispered, “tell Dale to clear out for now, go somewhere nearby, and I’ll call him when the coast is clear.”
Visibly shaken, though she’d been through a lot around there, Cheryl nodded and jumped up to head for Dale’s office just down the hall.
“Very sorry for your loss, Tanner,” Nick told the man and sat down in the chair next to him. “You’ll take her back to Georgia for a funeral?”
“Going to get her cremated here, then spread her ashes on the beach, in the waves. She’d’ve liked that, even said so once, so I’ll honor that.”
“It’s unusual for someone as young as your sister—”
“Near on thirty.”
“Yes, but to think about dying, to plan for her funeral.”
“She was scairt of someone, and now I know who, and got a big score to settle with him. She said he might just be playing her along, that he was going places, maybe where he wouldn’t want to take her. Ten to one he kilt her and put her in his dead momma’s freezer till he could toss her in the swamp or somewhere. Well, I’m gonna be sure he gets caught for killing her, or if not, pays the price for what he done.”
“So,” Nick said, realizing he should also tell Cheryl to call Detective Jensen, “tell me about why your sister came to Naples, what she was like. As I said, I’m sorry for the loss of such a lovely, and no doubt ambitious, person.”
“She shoulda stayed to home and married Will MacBride, not go gallivanting off to parts unknown.”
“So Will MacBride was pretty sad or upset she left?”
“Can’t blame him. Childhood sweethearts and all that. She gave him his ring back. I was damn ticked off too.”
This man was right on the surface, coming in here with threats and admitting a motive for being angry with his sister, though he didn’t seem the type to think of putting her in anybody’s freezer. But then there was this Will MacBride and what was he thinking when he heard about Cyndi?
Hell, who really knew what anyone was thinking or was capable of in the heat of passion? He wished this case and Claire’s new endeavor could just be calm, objective business. Like she had said last night about that Black Bog body they were calling Hunter, didn’t the poor prehistoric guy’s chest wounds seem symbolic of life in general? Didn’t some things just tear your heart out?
9
Claire thought the arm that was slowly being uncovered by the dig team was definitely stretched out toward where Hunter had been buried. She grew impatient at the slow going as they were barely to the body’s elbow, so she went back inside again.
She had been given a desk in the corner of Kris’s small office. Its single, long window had a view of the bog, that is of the twisted-trunk ficus trees that surrounded it. She tried to put things out of mind and get familiar with their online system of linked laptops, but the dig kept calling to her.
By standing up to look out the window, she could see Kris still waiting, so she prepared to head back out.
She passed Andrea’s office down the hall. The door was open and lights on. No Andrea. Brad was in there, though he had a separate lab area, not really an office. He was not seated but was bending over Andrea’s chair, stiff armed on her desk, looking closely at her large laptop screen. At a quick glance, Claire thought a series of ancient tools or utensils were on the screen.
He must have heard or sensed her presence, because he closed the screen and turned around just as Claire started to move on.
“Hey, going back out?” he called to her.
So he knew she had come in. She went back a few steps. “I think they’ll have reached the second body soon, so I’d like to be there for that. Are you going out too?” She knew the answer to that, but wondered what he would say. His claustrophobia and reluctance to be on scene outside obviously wasn’t a secret around here.
He came a couple of steps closer and jammed his hands in his jeans pockets, almost as if he were a kid caught at something. “As you’ll see, I don’t do much of the field work. My bag is PR. Contracts. Especially funding. Actually, I have claustrophobia, so I don’t like to see or even think about someone being closed in the dark heavy ground that long.”
“I can understand,” she said, edging away, though he came closer to the door. “So, are you able to look at the photos they take?”
“I look at the bodies once they’re in the lab.”
“One more thing, if you don’t mind. Do you prefer being called Brad, Bradley or Senator by the staff, as I’ve heard all three.”
“I answer to each and any,” he said with a shrug and a sheepish smile as he leaned against the frame of Andrea’s office door. His body language was so unlike the take-charge former Florida senator as she’d pictured him. Had she caught him at something when he was looking at Andrea’s screen? “Calling me Brad is fine. So, I know who your husband is, and see you two have had your problems with the law.”
That was a strange way to word that, she thought. “Only because we had some unscrupulous people trying to harm us. And then, of course, finding the body in the freezer, which gave the media a field day recently. That was pretty horrible.”
“I hope they’re right that poor woman was already dead when someone stuck her in there. Talk about claustrophobic nightmares...”
Claire almost asked him if he had such nightmares, but she was probing and presuming too much. Yet she could not believe that Brad wasn’t curious enough about a new, unusual discovery in the bog to go out and at least take a look, which she intended to do right now. The grave, after all, was being opened, not closed, though she had to admit those huge, heavy ficus trees with their twisted trunks and roots seemed to press in on the entire area.
“I’d best go back out, Brad,” she told him and walked away.
She was relieved that he had seemed not only friendly but honest. And it made her feel good he had admitted knowing Nick—at least who he was, though she hoped his mention of their public troubles wouldn’t cause trouble here in this supersecret environment. But then she had not been hired here to psych out the living—just the dead.
* * *
It was late morning by the time Detective Ken Jensen responded to Nick’s call about Tanner Linschwartz having left his law office and heading to the ME’s morgue to take possession of his sister’s body. Nick sat him in the same chair Tanner had recently vacated. Nick thought he had settled Tanner down, maybe even convinced him that Dale had really cared for Cyndi but had just realized their marriage would not work out. Since she was a hostess at a tony restaurant in town, Tanner had to admit she could have met someone there who had hurt her, especially since he’d said, “Yeah, she was a man magnet everywhere she went.”
Great, just great, Nick thought, in growing frustration. That probably meant lots of possible perps to check out—all of which he conveyed to Jensen right away. He also explained that Bronco and Nita Gates would be at their house for a few days if he needed further statements from them.
“Hey,” Jensen said, finally looking up from scribbling notes, “maybe you and Claire can take me in too so we don’t have to keep meeting like this.” His expression hovered between a grin and a grimace.
Nick told him, “I hope you’re not focusing on Bronco and Nita. I know you and I have a silent agreement not to tell each other how to do our jobs, but shouldn’t you focus on this new loose cannon from Georgia? He’s volatile and aching for a confrontation at the least.”
“I warned the ME’s office after your secretary called and have an officer there, but I can understand why he’s distraught. He sounds like a real Georgia good old boy with a touch of redneck in him. Thanks for defusing him here a bit—though I’m sure you were thinking he’d sidetrack me off focusing on your junior partner. Irate brother finds sister at Dale’s house, they have a fight, he chokes her, stashes her body next door in a freezer to make it look like Dale did it.”
“Gotcha. By the way, Nick, as I’ve said before, if Claire ever wants to work part-time, the department could use a forensic psych. Seriously, I like her, trust her. Keep it in mind, okay?”
“She’s working part-time as a business consultant. With the new baby, that’s enough, at least for now.”
“Sure, I understand. If she did facial reconstruction models, we’d have a full-time job for her, but I get you want her working somewhere private where she can keep out of the trouble you two seem to find. See you soon, Nick,” Jensen said, leaning over so they could shake hands. “Hopefully not in court.”
* * *
Claire thought the extended arm and hand of the next body looked as if she—or he—had wanted to touch Hunter, or even shake hands, but who knew what their customs of greeting were. The team had excavated one shoulder, but to everyone’s surprise, the corpse was not turned toward Hunter. Rather the body lay flat on her or his back with the other shoulder and arm evidently reaching out in the opposite direction.
Doug said, “If this burial wasn’t centuries before Christ, I’d say it’s almost posed like someone on a cross. ‘For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.’”