Sea of Bones

by Vickie McKeehan

  Doubled over, hands on her thighs, Skye shouted, “We can’t let him reach the boat.”

  Despite the gash on the back of his head from hitting the concrete, Josh took off for the boathouse. He reached the top floor in time to hear Elias bolt the heavy wooden door from the inside.

  They did what they could to force it open, putting their shoulders into the massive wood and banging into it, again and again.

  From inside, they heard Elias let out a delirious whoop. “I’ve beaten you!” the man yelled. “I’ve won!” Elias turned to race down the stairs to the lower level where his boat waited. But in his haste, he missed the second step and did a head-first dive down the flight of stairs. The momentum carried him a foot across the floor in a slippery slide, the green moss his enemy. His head struck one of the support beams before he rolled face first into the water.

  Above him on the second floor, Josh finally managed to break open the heavy wooden door and took out his 9-millimeter before stepping inside.

  Behind him, Skye did the same. In a whisper, she pointed out, “I never heard the boat start up. Did you?”

  “No.”

  The second floor consisted of three main rooms. One was used for storing fishing gear, sports equipment, life jackets, and spare boat parts. The middle room was more like a sitting room with outdoor furniture. It had a bar stocked with all kinds of booze. The French doors looked out toward the blue Pacific. The third room was a mini kitchen complete with appliances and an eating area. They did a cursory check of those places before making their way around to the stairs that led down to the wharf.

  The Evanesce sat docked, still moored in its spot.

  Puzzled, Skye looked around. “He has to be on the boat. Maybe we can still catch him before he fires it up.”

  They dashed down the pier toward the cruiser, scrambling onto the deck ready for anything. But all they encountered was an empty vessel and no Elias Pope anywhere on board.

  Skye leaned over the sides, looking around the water just to make sure Elias wasn’t clinging to the sides. But she saw nothing. “I don’t believe this. How is it he managed to disappear? He has to be hiding in the boathouse. We missed something, somewhere. Him. He has the advantage because he knows this place inside out.”

  Before heading back in the boathouse, Josh disabled the Evanesce by cutting the fuel line. “There. He makes it on board, he won’t be going anywhere.”

  “I still don’t understand how he got out of the boathouse. Maybe there’s a hidden trap door or room we didn’t see the first time. Should we split up?”

  “No. We stick together and go through the lower floor first before moving on to the second story.”

  They looked for anything out of place before moving upstairs. At first glance, the second floor offered no conspicuous places to hide.

  But standing in the center room, Skye stood back and stared at the thickness of the walls. It didn’t look right to the naked eye. She tapped on the wood with the butt of her gun, listening for anything unusual.

  Suddenly someone began tapping back.

  “Do you hear that?” Skye said, tapping again, waiting for a reply. Seconds later a weak tap echoed back. “Quick, look for a lever or a button, anything that gets us behind this wall.”

  She ran her hands over the maple, trying to find any irregularity or anomaly that might stick out.

  Josh scanned the room for anything that might work as a way to get in until his eyes settled on the bar. “What do you think?”

  Skye studied the setup. “Kind of obvious don’t you think?”

  Josh walked over and looked under the cabinet, spotted a remote. He picked up. “Odd that there’s no TV in this room.” Pushing a button at random, he watched as a seventy-inch, flat-screen TV rose up out of the floor. A video was half in progress. It continued playing, showing a naked man sitting on the floor, hog-tied. As the camera moved closer, the frame showed the man’s face and the fear in his eyes.

  “That’s Clayton Spencer, yelling, pleading, cursing, begging for his life.” They watched as Elias came into the frame and adjusted the camera before putting a plastic bag over Clayton’s head and duct taped it in place.

  “I can’t watch this,” Skye said in disgust.

  But Josh continued with the reel as Clayton struggled, sucking the plastic back and forth into his mouth. Elias got down on his hands and knees and looked directly into Clayton’s eyes as the life drained out of him.

  Josh clicked the next button on the remote and the wall slid open revealing another room made from clear plexiglass. Behind the cell sat a gaunt, emaciated Jennifer doing her best to pound on the clear acrylic that had kept her contained for almost a week.

  With what little strength she had left, Jennifer pointed to a padlock on the door to her cell. Skye waved at Jennifer to back up as far as possible. The woman did as she was told, getting as far away from it as possible in the confined quarters.

  Skye fired at the lock, again and again, until the padlock fell apart in pieces. She jerked the door open as Jennifer rushed into her arms. Holstering her weapon, Skye began in soft words, rocking the woman back and forth. “It’s okay now. You’re okay. You’re safe. You’re mom’s here. She’s come all this way from Montana to make sure you’re safe.”

  The woman almost dropped trying to take her first steps to freedom, but Skye helped her over to the couch. “Easy now, easy. Just don’t think about it.”

  Josh called Harry. “Get an ambulance here. We found Jennifer. She’s alive but very weak.”

  Harry relayed that information back to Deborah who he’d made sit and wait back in the van. “That’s super news. But just so you know Reggie and Leo found several bodies in the walk-in freezer in the basement of that cottage. But there’s no sign of Elias.”

  As the screen on the TV changed images, Jennifer’s cell disappeared and the screen switched to an underwater scene beneath the boathouse. Lights illuminated the horror show below.

  Josh counted maybe ten bodies anchored to cement blocks, wrapped in chicken wire, moving with the waves like a dance of the dead. Tangled up with his sea of bones was Elias, dead, drowned, a look of pure fear on his face.

  “I think we found Elias. It’s almost as if his victims wouldn’t let him go. They wanted him to join them in death.”

  Later, as EMTs hustled up the pathway where Deborah had her arms locked around her daughter, Skye sucked in a ragged breath and wiped the blood trickling from her busted lip.

  “Either I’m getting old or these sickos are getting better and stronger.”

  “What are you talking about? You took him down like a warrior goddess.”

  For the first time in a week, she had something to laugh about. “Is that why my knees hurt? And my elbow? I think he cracked a rib. How’s your head?”

  “I’m still seeing stars.”

  “Maybe you have a concussion.”

  “Nah. But I’m hitting the gym first thing next week. That guy was…”

  “Younger? Faster? Stronger?”

  “All those things.”

  “I know.” She nudged Josh. “Looks like Harry was right all along. Clayton was nothing more than a pawn in Elias’s little game.”

  “Yeah. I got a glimpse of what I think was Stacey Dysart back there next to Clayton on that video.”

  “I spotted it too. God, I need a shower. And some of Tom’s trout. I’m starving. What do you say to having supper on the Ole Maggie May?”

  “Alone. Just the two of us.” He nuzzled her ear as the sound of more sirens broke out in the distance. “As soon as we ditch this scene, you’ve got yourself a date.”

  Epilogue

  Ten days later

  Skye looked out over the backyard and watched Sierra romping around the orchard with Kiya and Atka, a sight she’d never get tired of seeing.

  “We’ll have Thanksgiving here,” Skye said to Josh.

  “Always. But after we talked about it, I went ahead and made an offer on the house in
the Magnolia neighborhood. We need a place to crash on the mainland. There’s no getting around it in the future.”

  “Malcolm won’t be too upset that we didn’t buy his, will he?”

  “Nah. He’ll hold onto that place until he talks his wife into moving back here. Wait and see.”

  “You men are so confident that we women will bend to your ways.”

  “You bend? I’d be waiting a long time to see that.”

  “What are you talking about? I bend. I’m flexible. All the time.”

  Josh snorted with laughter and linked his fingers with hers. Dipping his head, he laid his mouth on hers. “And we wonder why our daughter is both precocious and stubborn.”

  “She does take after her dad,” Skye said with a grin. “But not today. She’s romping around like she doesn’t have a care in the world.”

  “On some level, she knows the bad guy is no longer a threat.”

  “That’s our girl and our Kiya.” Skye looped her arm through his as they surveyed the crowd. She could tell the people who’d gathered—family, old friends and now new—were happy today, all smiles. Deborah and Jennifer sat together at the picnic table, never too far away from Harry. Winston seemed to be hovering near Jennifer, in protective mode, that one. Leo seemed as smitten as Win.

  Amused, Skye headed that way to assess the situation for herself. “Glad to see you’re on the mend,” she stated, taking Jennifer’s hand in hers.

  “You guys are amazing,” Jennifer said, her voice still raspy from the bout of pneumonia she’d contracted during her ordeal. She held her face up to the sun filtering through the cherry trees. “What I’m having a hard time with is figuring out how this was never about anything sexual. When I woke up from being drugged and got my first good look at the man who’d taken me, I was scared I’d be raped, then later that he’d kill me. But Elias Pope never once touched me like that. He only wanted to hurt me in every way possible.”

  “He’d seen cruelty enough over the years that it became his way of life. It’s hard for us to understand that, but for him, it was like breathing, second nature. He liked to watch people suffer, got off on it.”

  “How many…how many victims do they think he had?” Deborah asked.

  “Upwards of twenty,” Josh offered. “But the tally is likely to go higher. Finding numerous bodies stored away, preserved in the very back of the walk-in freezer indicated his years of activity go back a very long time. But Dave and Lindsey seemed to be the first murders that he could be directly linked to. The others, like the Dolans, were random encounters.”

  “And discovering that he kept the house freezing cold inside so that he could keep his mother, father, and brother close to him around the dining room table is just another example of how out of touch with reality he was,” Skye explained.

  “But I thought his father killed his wife,” Leo said, taking a seat next to Jennifer.

  “Fincher did kill Eleanor. Elias and Elijah witnessed him strangling her to death while on a camping trip when they were just eleven and twelve years old. It happened at Griffiths-Priday State Park. Before that, the park and beach there had been their favorite spot to camp out. Afterward, it played a significant role in how he had to bring his victims back there, even if it was just to take each one for a walk down memory lane.”

  “So he’d relive his mom’s murder at the hands of his father?” Winston added.

  “Maybe it was that simple. I delved into some of Elias’s papers he kept in the estate manager’s cottage. He preferred living there because as an adult he felt like he needed to be independent. Over the years, he wrote a lot about his father’s abuse. And after the death of his mother, Fincher apparently needed to make a point—backtalking wasn’t allowed. Resistance was futile. Elias even said that he and Elijah tried to bury the body of their mother there on that ridge, high above Copalis Beach the day after it happened. But when Fincher found out, he had a fit. Seems their dad couldn’t let her go, so Fincher had the boys bundle her body up and they brought it back to the estate.”

  Deborah squeezed Jennifer’s fingers. “Oh, my God. Imagine what that was like.”

  Skye nodded. “Yeah. It didn’t get any better when the boys got back home. They watched as their father tossed her body into the walk-in freezer.”

  “Where it stayed for two decades.”

  “Until Elias removed it and propped it up in the dining room. The coroner says it probably happened sometime last spring when he began wanting more attention for what he’d done. I guess he got lonely and brought them all together at the table.”

  “But I thought the brother died in a horrific car accident? The one he talked to all the time,” Jennifer pointed out.

  “You obviously never made it up to the house and the dining room,” Skye said. “Be glad. Funeral directors can only do so much repair work after a car wreck.” Shifting gears, Skye wanted to know, “Why do you suppose he kept you alive for longer than the rest? We think he made that video of you in the basement of his cottage where I’m sure he planned to kill you that night. What happened that he didn’t?”

  Jennifer sucked in a breath, closing her eyes at the memories she might never forget. “I talked to him. I could tell he was lonely like you said. I tried to use that to my advantage. I sympathized with him. I told him about how I’d lost my dad when I was very young.” She glanced over at her mother. “I made that up of course, but he didn’t know that. I weaved a story about a little girl in pain. When he lapped it up, I tried to lay it on as thick as I could. Unbelievably, I was able to get that psycho to feel sorry for me. And he kept me alive.”

  Skye glanced up to see Wanetta Mathison and Melba Collins making their way toward the picnic table. She excused herself, promising she’d be right back.

  Skye came up next to the two women. “You doing okay? Did Brian come out here with you?”

  “He’s here…somewhere. He wouldn’t let us take the ferry by ourselves. Afraid we’ll meet the same fate as Dave,” Melba explained, rolling her eyes. “I want to thank you for doing more for my son’s case than anyone else ever did. At least now we know for certain he didn’t run off.”

  Skye squeezed Melba’s fingers and looked at Wanetta. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll never be okay. But at least now maybe I can heal a little bit. The medical examiner says…” her voice broke and Wanetta dabbed at her eyes. “He says that they probably died together, which meant Lindsey wasn’t alone. He says their bodies remained in that stupid freezer for the entire time they were missing. What kind of psycho kidnaps people and keeps them in a freezer? Who does that kind of thing?”

  “Elias Pope,” Melba mumbled. “The paper said he wanted to be like the other famous serial killers we’ve known here. My David died because some sicko wanted to be like Ted Bundy.”

  “There’s nothing I can say,” Skye began. “Nothing at all. But you should know that our research shows that Elias made a habit of going to your website dedicated to Dave and Lindsey. He’d been leaving comments there since it first went up.”

  “Yeah, well that website is coming down,” Wanetta grumbled. “I’ll instruct Brian to fix it up like a memorial to them and not allow comments of any kind.”

  “That’s probably a good idea.”

  Melba cleared her throat. “David had some life insurance. It wasn’t much, but Brian and I want to donate the entire amount to your Foundation.”

  “I want to do the same,” Wanetta added. “It’s fitting. Lindsey would’ve wanted it that way.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Skye said in protest.

  “We do. You found our Lindsey after all these years,” Wanetta pointed out. “We know the money will be put to good use. Because there are other mothers out there like us, people who’ve lost hope that they’ll ever truly know what happened to their missing sons or daughters. You and your team did the impossible. Thank you.”

  “That’s generous of you to say…and do,” Skye said. “If it’s any consol
ation, Pope died without really going out in that blaze of glory he wanted so badly. He tripped and fell down a staircase and ended up drowning next to his victims.”

  “Good,” Melba uttered as her eyes tracked across to where Jennifer sat, now laughing with Leo and Winston around her. “I’m glad you found that girl alive, the last of his victims. I’m glad she hung on like she did to survive. We all could take a lesson from her bravado…and yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “You took down a serial killer, you and Josh, and that team of yours. You’re all state treasures to me.”

  “Us,” Wanetta corrected. “You will always hold a special place in the hearts of the Collins and Mathieson families. If you should ever need anything, anything at all, you have only to pick up the phone. We’ll be there for you and your organization.”

  ****

  After seeing everyone off on the ferry, together they gave Sierra a bath and got her ready for bed. Atka was waiting on the bed, curled up, head on the pillow when they tucked her in.

  Skye turned on the twinkle lights surrounding the bed allowing the walls to glitter with little tiny stars.

  While she settled beneath the covers, the little girl pleaded, “I want a story.”

  “I don’t know,” Skye began. “Have you been a good girl today?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do you think, Daddy?”

  “Yeah. She deserves to hear the one about the amazing wolf who protected a little girl from all the bad things in the world.”

  “Kiya!” Sierra shouted, clapping her hands. She drew Atka closer, wrapping her arms around the dog’s neck. “It’s about Kiya.”

  “You bet,” Skye said in agreement. “But it’s a story you haven’t heard before so hold onto your hat because it’s a doozy.” She reached over and grabbed Sierra’s beach hat with its colorful turquoise brim, white sun cap, and beaded band, and stuck it on her head.

  The little girl giggled with delight. “I’m ready for my story now.”