by Jen J. Danna
The work of recovering the dead and missing had begun.
CHAPTER SIX: SALT PANNE
Salt Panne: a calm, shallow pool of standing water after high tide; it usually has an extremely high salt content due to evaporation.
Tuesday, 9:23 P.M.
Abbott residence
Salem, Massachusetts
With a quiet sigh, Leigh settled back into the softness of her overstuffed couch, swinging her feet up onto the seat and slipping her cold toes into the crevice between the cushions. She cradled a steaming mug of jasmine tea between her palms and took a small sip, relaxing into the comforting warmth. Her head fell back against the cushions as the quiet strains of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos washed over her.
It had been a long day and it was good to be home.
Tension slowly seeped from her body. Closing her eyes, she let her mind sift through the day’s events.
The team had started early and had barely paused during the day. By tacit arrangement, Leigh ran interference with the Essex force and the crime techs, allowing Matt and his students to concentrate on their work. It was well past six P.M. when they were ready to head back to Boston with the remains. Leigh was more than ready to go home—she was hot and sweaty and covered with a layer of fine grit from sieving soil for small artifacts. But she followed Matt back to Boston and assisted with carrying the bones and equipment up to the lab. Once everything was secure, she’d left, promising him she’d be back the next morning to observe his examination.
She took another sip of tea and let herself drift. As tired as she was, the satisfied feeling of a job well done layered over the exhaustion. From a single bone, they had found and recovered their victim. She tried to dampen the triumph that rose in her. Colleagues like Morrison fully expected her to fail at this task, and she was more than happy to prove them wrong. They would certainly never expect her to get so far in such a short period of time. She gave up fighting the feeling and let a satisfied smile curve her lips. She could be triumphant here in the privacy of her own home. Tomorrow, in the bullpen, she’d be all business. And those who had hoped for her failure could simply go straight to hell.
At peace, her gaze roamed the small room. After the death of her father four years before, Leigh sold the larger family house where she had lived all of her life, moving just around the corner to this small fisherman’s house built in 1800. Many would find the tiny abode too cramped; yet, for her, the diminutive rooms with waist-high wainscoting and wide plank floors were perfect. The tiny living room, filled with overstuffed furniture and small tables scattered with decorative knickknacks, showed off her eclectic style—a flat-screen TV shared space with hand-thrown pottery, hand-blown glass, seashells, and interesting pieces of driftwood she found washed up on the beach.
Her eyes were naturally drawn to the painting over the mantel. It was a watercolor of a small blond girl dressed in a bright sundress running through the ocean surf. A black Labrador puppy, nearly as big as the girl, gamboled at her feet in the spray from the waves. The familiar wave of longing for the mother she didn’t remember washed over Leigh. She had to rely on rendered memories like this one—she was the girl in the picture; this was one of her mother’s final paintings before she succumbed to the cancer that finally took her life.
The shrill peal of her cell phone shattered the peaceful quiet.
Leigh gave an audible groan and reluctantly picked up her phone from the coffee table. She glanced at the Caller ID—“Matthew Lowell.” She frowned. Had they missed something at the site? “Leigh Abbott.”
“Leigh, we’ve got a problem.”
Matt’s urgent voice sent a bolt of electricity arcing through her exhausted body, shooting it from relaxed languor to anxious tension. She jerked upright on the couch, her tea sloshing dangerously close to the rim of her mug. “What’s wrong?”
“The bones don’t match.”
Leigh sat in stunned silence as she tried to make sense of Matt’s words. She leaned over and set her mug down on the coffee table. “What do you mean ‘the bones don’t match’? I watched you pull those remains from the ground and the site was guarded last night. No one could have tampered with them.”
“I know that,” he said brusquely. “But these remains don’t match the radius you brought me yesterday.”
“What?” Leigh swung her feet off to sit on the edge of the couch. “How can that be?”
“It just is. The radius that you brought me is from a much younger person than these remains indicate.”
Leigh stood and started to pace the wide hardwood planks in front of her fireplace—the tension in his voice had her pulse rate spiking. “Wait. Back up. How do you know this already?” She heard him heave a sigh on the other end of the line. “Do you need me to come to the lab?”
“No,” he said shortly. “There’s nothing for you to do here.”
Behind his voice, the lab seemed overly quiet. “Are your students still there?”
“No, I sent them home.” Exhaustion slightly slurred his words. “After you left, we got all the equipment washed and set out to dry. Then I told them to go home. They’d put in enough time for today. But I thought I’d get a jump on tomorrow morning by setting out the remains on the exam table, so we could start right away. As I removed each bone, I examined it to determine position and side. That’s when I started to notice something was off. So, I kept going until I had all the recovered remains laid out. Leigh, we assumed that we had the correct remains because we had a skeleton that was missing the entire left arm, so the fact that we already had a left radius made sense. But they simply don’t match. These remains came from a woman, likely in her early to mid-forties. The original radius came from someone decades younger.”
“You’re saying that after all that searching, we’ve found a set of remains, but not the right set of remains? And that the original body is still out there?”
Two beats of silence passed before Matt spoke. “Yes.”
Leigh was speechless with disbelief. A second body found where they expected the remains of a single victim? It simply couldn’t be a coincidence.
“You want the truth and my expert opinion?” Matt’s terse voice broke into her thoughts. “Well, this is it—we have the wrong set of remains. We have to go back.”
“Of course I want the truth and your expert opinion,” she snapped. “That’s why I came to you in the first place.” She returned to the couch to drop limply onto it, all sense of triumph wiped away, leaving her feeling wrung out and hollow. “But what you’re really saying is that we have two potential murders, not just one since we now have two sets of remains.” She hesitated, but needed to be sure. “You’re sure about this?”
“Yes.” His voice sounded strained, as if speaking through gritted teeth.
She closed her eyes and counted to ten much too quickly to be effective in calming her rapidly unraveling nerves. “Look, Matt, you’re tired. I’m tired. I’m sorry if it sounds like I doubt you, but I need to be sure.”
She heard the rattle of a wheeled office chair being pulled out and his harsh exhalation as he dropped into it. When he spoke, his voice was much quieter, much calmer. “I’m sorry too. I’m snapping at you, but this isn’t your fault. I’m just tired and I’d kill for a shower right now.”
Leigh gave a small laugh. “I know that feeling. I didn’t even eat until after I’d taken a shower. I just felt … grimy.”
“Food is up there on my list too,” he said tiredly. “Lunch was the last time I ate. And, truthfully, I’m more than a little surprised by this. I knew the remains didn’t match twenty minutes ago, but I kept looking for where I’d gone wrong, pulling out more bones, checking each one, looking for where I’d made the mistake in my initial evaluation—”
“Except that you didn’t make a mistake.”
A deep sigh. “No. There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Leigh tried to massage away the sudden tightness in the back of her neck. But no amount of rubbing would l
ift the weight that suddenly lay across her slim shoulders.
“You there?” Matt’s voice was quiet.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I guess I’m a little stunned myself. This isn’t Boston, where you can easily see seventy homicides a year. This is Essex County. Over the whole district, we’ll see maybe twenty or twenty-five homicides in the whole year and many of them are drug-related because of the heroin problem in this area. But suddenly we’ve got two deaths, neither of which appears drug-related—no one takes the time to bury those murder victims; they just drop them and walk away. So, yes, we need to go back. We should start early tomorrow, even earlier than today.”
“I was thinking that too. Leigh, we only covered about a third of the island. We stopped when we found the remains.”
“Because we thought we had our answer,” she muttered quietly.
“I think we should finish that first, then the smaller area north of it.”
“Then Cross Island,” Leigh proposed.
Matt blew out a long breath. “It’s like starting all over again.”
“Kind of discouraging, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Several beats of silence passed before Matt spoke. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I guess that depends on what you’re thinking.”
“Doesn’t it seem a little coincidental to you that we’d find a second victim where we were expecting the first?”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“What if we’ve got a serial killer on our hands? And we’ve stumbled into his dumping ground?”
It was out there now, no taking it back. Leigh’s mind was suddenly crowded with thoughts of news conferences, screaming newspaper headlines, task forces, and public panic. “Just what we need, another Boston Strangler. We have to consider that as a possibility, but we need to find the second set of remains before we make any leaps like that.”
“Yeah,” Matt agreed. “I’d better call my students. They’re expecting to be here tomorrow at eight but instead they’d better be here before six, maybe earlier. We can be there by six-thirty or six-forty-five. We not only need to find the remains; we need to complete as much of the excavation tomorrow as possible.”
“Works for me. Meet you at the same place?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you need to go home and get to bed as soon as you’ve contacted your students. Thanks for putting in the extra time, even if it did make you the bearer of bad news.”
“Well, on the good news front, we’ve found someone else who needs a name and to be returned to the arms of her family. Someone else to bring home. So it’s not all bad.”
“That’s true.” Leigh tipped her head back on the couch to stare dully at the ceiling. “This case is turning out to be a little more than you bargained for, isn’t it?” she asked quietly.
“Not your fault. It’s just how the chips are falling.” Silence rang over the line for a moment, then—“We’ll find your missing victim.”
“Yes, we will. You’d better go make your phone calls and ruin a few more evenings.”
He chuckled, but she could hear how drained he was. “I’ll do that. Grad students are infamous for not wanting to get out of bed a moment before they have to. Have a good night, Leigh.”
“You too. I’ll see you in the morning.” She ended the call.
For just one moment, Leigh let herself feel both disappointment and dread at the turn of events. But then she remembered Matt’s words. We’ve found someone else who needs a name and to be returned to the arms of her family. Someone else to bring home. It’s not all bad.
Her gaze fell to the framed photograph on her side table—her most treasured picture of herself and her father. It had been taken the day of her graduation from the Academy. In it, they stood together, both in full dress uniform, his arm around her shoulders. Her father stood a full head taller than she, but from his wide smile, it almost looked as if pride gave him extra height. She stared at his face, feeling the familiar wave of longing. What she wouldn’t give to be able to discuss this case with him, drawing from his knowledge and years of experience.
She rose and picked up her mug to take it back into the kitchen.
She had several phone calls to make and then she needed to get to bed.
It was going to be another early morning and another long day.
CHAPTER SEVEN: INTERTIDAL ZONE
Intertidal Zone: any area of shoreline subject to cyclical flooding and drying—i.e., covered with water at high tide and exposed to the air at low tide.
Wednesday, 4:52 A.M.
Lowell residence
Brookline, Massachusetts
Bone tired, Matt leaned back against the granite countertop and closed his eyes.
After a late and restless night, he had dragged his sorry ass out of bed at 4:20 A.M. and stumbled blindly into the shower. He lingered there for long minutes, hands braced on the smooth tiles and head bowed under the pounding hot spray, trying to jolt his body into wakefulness.
He now stood in his dim kitchen, the small light over the stove casting long shadows around the darkened room. He wore a charcoal T-shirt tucked into a pair of black jeans. His hiking boots stood by the kitchen door and a long-sleeved black and gray plaid shirt was draped over a kitchen chair to ward off the chill of the early fall morning. His still-damp hair stuck out in tufts from running his fingers through it.
He poured himself a cup of freshly brewed coffee and added a healthy dollop of cream before carrying it to the kitchen table. He took a long sip before setting the cup down with a quiet click on the bare wood. He braced his elbows on the cool surface and closed his eyes again as he rested his forehead against his steepled fingers, waiting for the caffeine to hit his bloodstream.
His eyes shot open again when he heard the familiar tick tick tick on the hardwood floor followed by the quiet shush of rubber wheels coming from the direction of the elevator tucked behind the main staircase. The Belgian Malinois appeared in the open doorway first. His single upright ear perked even higher when he saw Matt.
An affectionate smile tugged at Matt’s lips. “Hey, Teak, what are you doing up at this ungodly hour?” The dog trotted across the room, pushing his head against Matt’s knee until he reached down and scratched him behind his good ear. The dog laid his muzzle across Matt’s thigh and gazed up at him with a single soulful brown eye. Matt scratched carefully around the tattered floppy remains of the dog’s left ear. Now his father’s faithful companion, the Shepherd was an ex-service dog with the U.S. Army and had lost both his left eye and most of his ear in an explosion in Basra.
“One might ask you the same question.”
Matt raised his head to find his father in the doorway, his pajamas covered by a thick, dark burgundy robe. But instead of standing tall, he sat in a wheelchair, his wide, strong upper body a stark contrast to the withered legs strapped into place at the base of the chair. Mike rolled into the kitchen. “You’ve been up for a while from the smell in here. Pour me a cup, will you?”
“Sure.”
Matt joined his father where he had pulled up to the open side of the table as he waited for his coffee. Teak took up his usual spot, stretched out on the floor between the two men as they sat together in easy silence.
“You got in late last night,” Mike said.
Matt shrugged. “The excavation went fine. The trouble started after that.”
“Trouble?”
Matt took another long hit of the coffee, feeling it starting to warm and wake him. “Let’s start with this—the remains we excavated yesterday don’t match the initial bone that Leigh … that Trooper Abbott brought me.”
The older man froze with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth before setting it down on the table. “You mean that you went out and found a set of human remains that weren’t the ones you were looking for?”
“Kind of hard to believe, isn’t it? But yeah, that’s exactly what happened. Leigh … I mean Trooper—”
&nbs
p; “Abbott,” Mike finished for him. “You’re on a first-name basis now. I’ve got it. You are tired if you’re stumbling over something as simple as her name. Have some more coffee.”
Matt gratefully took another sip before filling his father in. “So,” he finished, “suddenly we have two victims. Maybe more, for all I know.”
“So you’re going back … What’s really going on here, Matt?”
Startled, Matt’s gaze jerked to his father. “What do you mean?”
“Something’s bothering you. You’re worried about your safety or the safety of your students.”
“I’m always concerned about the safety of my students. They’re my responsibility.”
“Of course they are, but this is more.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you don’t usually go out to an excavation armed.” His father raised his mug in the direction of the counter. “I’ll say it again—you really are tired. You left the Glock on the counter.”
Matt swiveled around, following his father’s gaze. His gun, securely seated in its holster, lay on the dark granite. “Right … Something about this case is starting to bother me.”
“You think you might be putting yourself in danger?” Mike asked.
Matt let out a self-deprecating laugh. “When you say it like that, it sounds totally over the top. We’ve found a bone, and then a set of remains, and now I want to weapon up before we go out looking for more.”
“No, it doesn’t.” To Matt’s surprise, his father’s voice was serious and without a trace of mockery. “We both know from our time in the military that when you have a gut feeling about something, you listen or you run the risk of ending up dead. We’ve both seen friends ignore that feeling, and we’ve seen them die as a result.”