South of Hell (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)

by P J Parrish

  “You stupid bitch!”

  The blonde yelped and crashed back into the barn door. Shockey was a blur, shovel swinging as he advanced on Brandt.

  Joe was quick, but Louis was quicker. But Shockey got the flat blade of the shovel planted in Brandt’s stomach before Louis could grab it and yank it away.

  Brandt gasped and spun away, doubling over and holding his gut. Louis backed Shockey up against the wood door, pinning him.

  “Jake! Enough!” Louis said.

  “I’m going to kill him!” Shockey yelled. “I’m going to kill the fucker!”

  “Enough!”

  Shockey was bigger than Louis, and Joe thought for a moment that she was going to have to help Louis keep him back. But Shockey stopped struggling. He stared at Brandt with cold hatred in his eyes.

  Brandt was still doubled over, coughing and holding on to the wall. The blond woman was lying in the hay, whimpering and massaging her head.

  And Amy?

  Joe glanced back. She was standing quiet and rigid, Dr. Sher’s arm around her shoulder, staring not at Brandt but at Shockey.

  Suddenly, Shockey pushed Louis’s arm away. He staggered forward, grabbed the shovel from the ground, and walked slowly back to the hole.

  He began to dig, his face red and dripping with sweat. He stabbed at the ground in furious thrusts.

  “Jake,” Joe said.

  The shovels of dirt kept flying.

  “Jake, slow down,” Joe said. “You’ll destroy—”

  A clunk, like metal hitting wood. Shockey stopped and slowly turned the shovel head. A cascade of dirt—and a skull tumbled out.

  Joe heard a gasp behind her but couldn’t take her eyes off the skull. She didn’t turn but said softly, “Dr. Sher, take Amy out to the car.”

  Dr. Sher, shielding Amy to her side, moved quickly around Joe and toward the door. No one watched them go. Everyone was staring at the ocher-colored skull lying in the dark dirt.

  A sharp clang. Shockey had dropped the shovel. His face had gone white.

  “Jesus Christ…”

  Joe looked up. It was Brandt who had spoken. His face was as white as Shockey’s.

  Suddenly, he bolted for the door. Before Joe could say or do anything, Louis ran after him.

  It was quiet. Except for a whimpering sound. Joe looked for the blond woman, but she was gone. Joe turned toward Shockey.

  He was kneeling over the skull, crying.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Louis had been in Michigan State Police substations a few times before. Once in 1984, giving a statement on an incident that involved two dead teenagers, a dead suspect, and a dead chief of police. The bullet that had killed the chief had come from Louis’s service revolver.

  The most recent time had been just last year, about an hour south of here, in Adrian. Detained and stripped of his Glock, he had again made a series of statements regarding the murder of three women and a dead man he had left floating in an icy lake.

  So it didn’t surprise him when the same state investigator, Detective Warren Bloom, had shown up here in Howell, the county seat. Bloom probably had heard Louis’s name mentioned when the news of the bones in the barn hit the station. Bloom had been the one busting his chops last time, so Louis was certain he had made it a special point to drive the seventy miles up from Adrian.

  Louis was standing at the observation window of an interview room. Inside were Bloom, Owen Brandt, and the Livingston County sheriff, Travis Horne. Horne was close to seventy and had the look of an old dog—slow-moving and in search of a soft place to lie down.

  When they called Horne to the Brandt farm, he had come with a local doctor he introduced as the coroner. Horne seemed to know Brandt from before. Once in the barn, Horne stepped forward, looked into the grave, and quickly suggested that they call the state police.

  That had been yesterday. The crime-scene techs had spent the night sifting dirt and extracting bones. Joe had taken Dr. Sher and Amy back to the hotel. Louis and Shockey had stayed until after midnight before grabbing a motel room in the nearby town of Pinckney. They went back this morning, but the techs were done. The hole was empty. It was obvious that the barn had been thoroughly searched for other evidence. But no one had told Louis or Shockey if anything else had been found.

  Louis slipped off his jacket and set it on a desk. He looked back into the interview room.

  Owen Brandt had been answering questions for more than an hour. He wasn’t under arrest yet. Louis knew they would need to make a positive ID on the bones first, which wouldn’t be too hard. They hadn’t found anything in the grave to help confirm the ID. But Shockey had pulled Jean’s dental records nine years ago and had already handed them over to the county medical examiner.

  Once the dental records were matched to the skull, Brandt would be arrested and charged. With Amy’s testimony of both prior abuse and what she recalled of the murder, it was a lock.

  Brandt’s initial shock at seeing the skull had disappeared. Now, as Bloom and Horne peppered him with questions, he showed nothing but arrogance. And he kept to the same story he had told the cops nine years ago.

  She just left. She had a boyfriend. They found her car at the train station. Don’t you fuckers know nothing?

  Louis felt a nudge at his arm. Shockey was holding out a Styrofoam cup filled with muddy coffee. Louis took it and drank some.

  “Your ass is in trouble, Jake,” Louis said. “Brandt’s going to sue you for everything you’ve got. You know that, right?”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Shockey said. “As long as he goes down for this.”

  Louis shook his head.

  Brandt finally said the magic words: I want an attorney. Bloom cut off the interview and left the room through a side door. He appeared in the hall with Louis and Shockey a few seconds later.

  Bloom was a big man, his face ruddy from the Michigan winters, his golden hair cut square on his head. He wore a yellow dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, and a gold badge on his belt.

  “I thought I smelled something out here,” Bloom said.

  “Cut the crap,” Louis said. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “I have to let him walk,” Bloom said. “That should come as no surprise to either of you. Illegal search, police brutality, trespassing. Anything else happen out there you want to tell me about?”

  “That’s about it,” Louis said.

  Bloom eyed Shockey and shook his head. “I understand how Kincaid could pull this stunt, but you’re a law-enforcement officer, Detective Shockey. Fifteen years in. How could you possibly think you’d get away with this?”

  “Took a chance,” Shockey said. “The way I read it, that little girl had every right to be there. And all she did was invite us in that gate with her.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Maybe so,” Shockey said, looking back at Brandt.

  Brandt was staring at the window. Louis knew Brandt’s side was mirrored and he couldn’t see Shockey, but still his stare was unnerving.

  “Can I ask you how that girl knew where to tell you two assholes to dig?” Bloom asked.

  Louis and Shockey exchanged glances.

  “Well?” Bloom asked.

  “She had a dream or a memory or something,” Shockey said. “Being in the barn must have brought it all back.”

  “And she was how old when her mother disappeared?” Bloom asked.

  “Four,” Louis said. “We can’t find any records for her and—”

  “She’s smart,” Shockey interrupted. “She’s real smart, but she’s also kind of strange sometimes.”

  Bloom raised an eyebrow.

  “I think she might be a little psychic, too,” Shockey added.

  Louis looked at Shockey quickly. Psychic?

  “And I think you’re nuttier than a squirrel turd,” Bloom said. “Stay here, both of you.”

  Bloom left them. Louis finished the coffee and tossed the cup into a nearby can. His thoughts, as they had done l
ast night until about three a.m., started to drift again. Away from Amy and Jean Brandt and back to Lily. Eric Channing still hadn’t called him. As much as he wanted to see Lily, he was afraid he was bringing Kyla more pain. He didn’t want to break up her marriage. It seemed to be a pretty good one.

  “Damn it,” Shockey muttered.

  “What?”

  “My pager again,” Shockey said, angling himself so he could see the display of the beeper on his belt. “My lieutenant’s been paging all morning.”

  “You didn’t call him last night?”

  Shockey shook his head. “Nope. But I’m sure Bloom did. Bad part is, you know how I told you getting inside that barn was all my lieutenant’s idea?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t. He didn’t even know we were going.”

  “Jesus, Jake,” Louis said. “Why don’t you just mail your badge in now?”

  Shockey looked again to the interview room. Bloom was holding the door open for Brandt. Brandt gave a sneer and left the room. Less than a minute later, Brandt appeared down the hall, emerging through another door. He still wore the same dark T-shirt, denim jacket, and filthy jeans Louis had seen on him two days ago.

  He came toward them, his eyes locked on Shockey. Brandt stopped in front of Shockey, hiked up his pants, and smiled. Louis braced himself for a confrontation.

  “I know who you are now,” Brandt said. “You’re a cop. You live in Ann Arbor, and you were fucking my wife nine years ago.”

  Louis put a hand on Shockey’s sleeve. The muscle was tight, but he didn’t think Shockey was going to swing at him. Not here in the state police station.

  Brandt shook his head, his eyes moving over Shockey’s body disparagingly. “She had real lousy taste.”

  “Get out of my face before I rip your fucking tongue out,” Shockey said.

  Brandt was unfazed.

  “Go, Brandt,” Louis said. “Get out of here.”

  “I didn’t kill my wife,” Brandt said, “but if there was ever a bitch who needed to die, it was that slut.”

  Shockey started to lunge at him. Louis stepped between them and gave Brandt a shove.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Louis said.

  Brandt walked away. Louis kept a hand on Shockey’s chest until Brandt had turned a corner. Shockey pushed away from him.

  “Sonofabitch,” Shockey hissed.

  Louis headed down the hall and through a door that led outside. Brandt was climbing into the green Gremlin. Margi Ames was behind the wheel, and when she leaned over to give Brandt a kiss, he pushed her away and made an irritated gesture toward the street.

  “Hey, Kincaid,” Bloom hollered.

  Louis turned. Bloom was walking toward him. He had put on a brown jacket.

  “The ME wants to see me,” Bloom said. “You and dickhead want to come along?”

  Louis almost shot back a smartass response, tired of Bloom’s crap. But he suddenly realized that Bloom didn’t have to offer the invitation at all. In fact, Bloom could have confiscated his gun and probably locked him up for a few hours on trespassing charges. In exchange, Louis knew Bloom probably wanted to save himself a few hours of reading by having them bring him up to speed on Jean Brandt’s history.

  “Yeah,” Louis said. “We’d appreciate that.”

  “It’s only a block, so we’ll walk,” Bloom said. “You up for that?”

  “Let’s go.”

  There were two hundred and six of them. That’s what Joe had told him. Two hundred and six bones in the human body.

  Louis looked down. The brownish-yellow bones were laid on a stainless-steel table, forming a disconnected but perfect skeleton. There was no quick way to count, but Louis guessed that all—or almost all—of Jean Brandt’s bones were here.

  They were waiting for the ME to join them, and Louis took the time to look for signs of a fracture on one arm bone. Shockey had told him Jean had endured two broken arms. He finally turned away and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to capture a minute of lost sleep.

  The double doors bumped opened, and the ME came in. His name was P. Ward, according to the sign on the wall. He was fiftyish and slim, with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair matching a Van Dyke beard. He wore green scrub pants over an old T-shirt that said WET WILLIE ’74 TOUR: “KEEP ON SMILIN’ THROUGH THE RAIN, LAUGHIN’ AT THE PAIN.”

  “Detective Bloom,” Ward said. “Nice to see you again.”

  “Ditto, Phil.”

  “Phillip.”

  Bloom stared at him. “What?”

  “Phillip. My name is Phillip.”

  Bloom tried hard not to roll his eyes. “Yeah, right. So what’s the word here, Doc?”

  Ward looked down at the bones. “Exquisite, aren’t they?”

  “They’re bones,” Bloom said.

  “Yes, but it’s not often we find every one. The techs did an exceptional excavation. Please give them my praises.”

  Louis heard something of the South in Ward’s melodious voice. Maybe it was the cadence or the choice of words, but Louis’s stay in Mississippi had been long enough and he had spent enough time at his old boss Sam Dodie’s home for him to develop an ear for the Delta’s special music.

  “So, is it our victim or not?” Bloom asked.

  Ward turned and flipped the switch on a wall-mounted light box. He shoved the copies of Jean Brandt’s dental X-rays into the clip. Then, next to it, a larger X-ray of the skull.

  Louis stepped closer.

  They didn’t match. It was so obvious even he could see it. The skull from the barn had a wider jaw and large teeth—a perfect full set. Jean’s teeth were small and uneven, with several missing in the back.

  “Talk to us, Doc,” Bloom said.

  “The victim is a woman, probably between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But these bones do not belong to the owner of this dental X-ray,” Ward said, pointing to the screen.

  Louis looked at Shockey. He had turned away and was staring at the bones on the steel table.

  Ward carefully picked up a long, slender bone. “I was told the Brandt woman had two arm fractures,” he said. “There are no breaks in this humerus or in any of the arm bones.”

  Shockey’s eyes closed. “You must be wrong.”

  “I am never wrong, Detective,” Ward said. “Not about things like this. Oh, and by the way, the woman you found in the barn was most certainly African-American.”

  Louis’s gaze snapped back to the X-ray of the skull.

  “A marked alveolar prognathism,” Ward said, pointing to the X-ray. “Flat nasal region, broad nasal aperture, retreating zygoma, somewhat truncated nasal spine and a retreating forehead.”

  “All right,” Bloom said. “We get the picture. This is not Jean Brandt.”

  “Precisely.”

  Louis heard footsteps, and he turned to see Shockey leaving through the double doors. He turned back to Ward. “Can you tell how she died?” he asked.

  “As I said, there were no fractures in the arms,” Ward said. “I found one old leg fracture that was well-healed. But I did find six other breaks in the legs and ribs that were all perimortem fractures, meaning they were inflicted minutes or hours before death.”

  Ward picked up a plastic container. “Plus there is this. Your techs brought back a dirt sample from the gravesite. It was saturated with blood.”

  “The woman was still bleeding when she was put in the grave?” Louis said. “Buried alive?”

  “How alive, I can’t be sure,” Ward said. “But dead people don’t bleed.”

  Louis closed his eyes.

  “So I’m pretty certain this was a homicide,” Ward said.

  Bloom let out a grunt. “Well, ain’t this a kick in the nuts,” he said. “We got a missing woman and no body. Got bones and no victim. And on top of all that, she’s a black woman in an area that don’t have but a handful of black folks in it.”

  “Maybe it won’t be too hard to find someone who’s been missing, then,” Louis said.
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br />   “It may be harder than you think,” Ward said. “You might be looking for a woman who’s been missing for quite some time.”

  “What do you mean?” Bloom asked. “How long have these bones been in the ground?”

  “Well, there’s no way to know for sure without carbon dating,” Ward said. He picked up the arm bone. “But see how brittle and chalky this is? As bones age, they lose the proteins that make up the matrix that holds the calcium.”

  Ward gently pressed a fingernail on the bone. Louis was surprised to see it leave an indentation. “If I were to try to break this humerus in two, instead of splitting like a green twig, it would break and crumble,” Ward said. “So I’m guessing they are quite old.”

  Ward set the bone down and picked up a plastic bag, holding it out. “Then there’s this, which—”

  Bloom grabbed the bag. “What’s this?”

  “A piece of shoe leather with some buttons that the techs found with the bones. The style seems to date back to the mid-eighteen-hundreds.”

  Bloom stared at the black clump in the plastic.

  “Do you want me to send the bones out for dating?” Ward asked.

  Bloom tossed the plastic bag onto the table. “The state’s not paying for that,” he said. “This isn’t a homicide case anymore, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “But the shoe doesn’t prove anything for sure,” Louis said. “Don’t we want—”

  Bloom cut him off with a raised palm. “I don’t care about a hundred-year-old homicide. And if what Phil here says is true, she was probably just a servant anyway, maybe even a slave.”

  “What did you say?” Louis said.

  Bloom’s ruddy face colored a deeper red. “Sorry, Kincaid. Didn’t mean it like that. I just meant there wouldn’t even be any records for a woman like that. That’s all.”

  “Right.”

  “And who the hell has the time to work a case like this, anyway?” Bloom asked. “Where you going to find any damn witnesses?”

  Louis looked back at the X-ray, trying to imagine a woman’s face on the skull.

  “Well, I’m out of here,” Bloom said. “Kincaid, you tell Sheriff Frye I’d like a word with her before she goes home. I got a bone to pick with her boss, too. If you’ll pardon the pun.”