The boys pushed and pulled the wagon, finally coming to a stop several feet from the old wooden door. Eddie was rolling his shoulders to work out the kinks from bending over all the way up the hill, when Anson startled him by letting out another yelp.
“Hey! I thought you said the door had a lock on it.”
Nate adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and took a step forward, leaning over to peer closer at the rusty latch hanging from the doorframe by a single corner. “There was a lock.” He scuffed his feet in the dirt and looked down, swiveling his head from right to left until he bent at the knees and scooped up a brown piece of metal. “Here it is.” He held it up so both his friends could see it. “Looks like it’s been busted up. Or maybe it just fell off.”
Eddie gazed at the mangled lock and then over at the broken latch. “I think someone’s been here,” he said slowly.
Nate shrugged and dropped the lock back to the ground. “Weird, huh?” He reached out and pushed against the old door. It let out a loud creak of protest as it swung inward, its slow momentum coming to a complete halt at the halfway point.
Anson quickly lifted a hand and covered his nose. “What’s that smell?”
“I don’t smell anything,” Nate said.
“Well, I do.” Anson’s face scrunched up. “It stinks.”
Eddie walked forward, catching a faint whiff of something that he didn’t recognize but that did indeed stink. Lifting a hand to cover his mouth and nose, he took another tentative step, stopping in the middle of the doorway. “Probably some animal that found its way in and then couldn’t get out.”
Nate pursed his lips and gave a sage nod of his head. “Then it probably leaned against the door and broke the lock off. It was already rusted through, so it wouldn’t have taken much.”
Anson immediately brightened at the thought. “Yeah. Then the door just shut behind it and it couldn’t get out. Now it’s lying dead in there, stinking the place up.” He gave Nate a friendly slap on the back. “Good thinking. Let’s take a look at those stairs.”
Eddie thought it was an idiotic explanation, but since his two friends had crowded in behind him, he had no choice but to walk inside the dark space. From what he managed to see through the deep shadows, it looked to be about twenty feet in diameter, and was a good ten degrees cooler than the outside air. He grinned at the spiral staircase, rising out of the pitch-black shadows on the opposite side of the room. Pointing at it, he looked over his shoulder and wiggled his eyebrows. “Get a load of that. We hit the jackpot.”
“That should work great,” Nate declared.
Anson turned his head enough to look behind them, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “First, we need to get rid of that sme—” He sputtered to a halt and whipped his head back around, turning eyes that had grown as wide as saucers on Eddie. “What is that?” His breathing audibly spiked as he reached out and dug his fingers into Eddie’s arm. “What is that?”
Eddie squinted into the gloom over Anson’s head. He froze for a moment, then fumbled for his phone, quickly tapping on the flashlight feature. He almost dropped it when the beam of light landed on a grotesque face, its bulging eyes staring right back at him.
Anson shrieked and immediately jumped back, landing squarely on Nate, coming close to knocking them both over. Arms and legs flailed as the two boys scrambled to keep their balance and flee outside all at the same time. Rapidly blinking behind the heavy frame of his glasses, Eddie barely breathed as he slowly backed away, not taking his flashlight off the body lying on the ground. He half expected the man to jump up and chase after them like something out of a zombie movie. Once he’d passed through the open doorway, Eddie sprinted to the top of the path, where Nate and Anson were huddled together.
“What was that?” Anson repeated, his voice a full octave higher than its normal pitch.
“You already asked that, you jerk. It’s a body,” Nate choked out. “That was a dead body, wasn’t it?”
Both boys turned questioning eyes on Eddie, who gaped back at them. “How should I know?”
“Well, your mom has seen dead bodies. Probably plenty of them,” Anson said.
“That doesn’t mean I have,” Eddie snapped back. “It’s not like she takes me out on tours of crime scenes or anything.”
“Okay, okay. It doesn’t matter,” Nate shouted, then bit his lower lip and took in a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter,” he repeated in a much softer voice. He pointed to the phone Eddie still held in his hand. “You need to call your mom.”
Eddie stared at him for a moment before shifting his gaze to his phone. Yeah. He should do that. He didn’t want to, but he should. He lifted his arm and looked at the upper edge of the screen. One bar. Probably just enough to get through to her. Great. He desperately wanted his mom there, but sure didn’t want to face the crap load of trouble he was going to be in.
Resigned, he tapped on the call icon and raised the phone to his ear.
Chapter Two
Ricki James stood over the dead body, her legs braced apart and her hands on her hips. Whoever this guy was, she was certain he was the only murder victim in the Bay at the moment, and didn’t it just figure that her son would be the one to find him. She shook her head in disbelief, sending a long fall of dark hair pulled back into a low ponytail sliding across her back.
Tall and slender, with high cheekbones and an arresting face dominated by dark-blue eyes, she impatiently tapped one foot encased in a heavy hiking boot against the hard-packed earth that served as a floor in the old lighthouse. There was just enough sunshine coming through the single wide-open door to see the body lying ten feet away, right at the edge of where the shadows began to deepen. The rest of the space was swallowed up by the dark, with only the outline of a boarded-up window and a curved staircase barely visible on the far side of the circular room.
Clad in faded jeans and a plaid wool jacket hanging open over an olive-green T-shirt sporting the park service logo, Ricki grimaced at finding another dead person this close to home, with a bullet wound in his chest. She and her son lived in Brewer, the southernmost of the three towns in the Bay, and a twenty-minute drive up the two-lane highway that was the only road spanning the entire length of their small community. At least this time she wasn’t looking at a murder victim dumped inside Olympic Park. It was also helpful that the hike up to the old lighthouse was a lot easier than almost any trail the park had to offer.
It had only been six weeks since she’d taken back her old job as a special agent with the Investigative Services Branch of the park system. The ISB was a mix of the FBI and NCIS that focused on major crimes committed within the country’s more than four hundred national parks, three of which were in her home state of Washington. Always short on funding, the bureau’s agents had usually had to haul their low-tech equipment into remote locations. Since there were only thirty-three of them in the entire country, they all had literally a lot of ground to cover. But she didn’t mind any of that. She’d grown up in the Bay and loved the rugged beauty of the Olympic Mountains, so working here was no hardship.
Except when a dead body turned up.
Wondering how she got to be so lucky, Ricki glanced over her shoulder when a shouted greeting came from outside. She moved to the doorway and leaned against it, folding her arms across her chest as Chief Clayton Thomas walked into view at the top of the trail.
He crossed the distance between them with the easy stride of a natural athlete. His solid, muscular build topped six feet, and he had a face that could have easily earned him a good living as a movie star if he hadn’t chosen to be a cop. Gray eyes, rimmed with green around the iris, crinkled in silent amusement when he spotted the three boys sitting in a row on a fallen log, their heads down and shoulders slumped over as if the overgrown grass beneath their feet was absolutely fascinating.
The chief stopped in front of Ricki and inclined his head toward her son and his two friends. “Are they under arrest?”
“I’m thinking about it,�
� Ricki said, just loud enough to earn her an annoyed look from her son. She raised one eyebrow, which had Eddie immediately shifting his gaze back to the ground.
Clay chuckled softly at the silent exchange between mother and son. “Thanks for the call.” His grin widened. “Before you punished my only witnesses.”
“That will be coming,” Ricki said, forcing herself not to return his grin. It wasn’t funny. Not really. Although the three boys did look completely pathetic, huddled together on their log like a bad caricature of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. “Is there anyone else with you?”
Clay nodded as he slid his backpack off his shoulders and set it on the ground. “Jules will be along. He’s tracking down our new medical examiner, and I put in a call to Captain Davis for a forensics team. They’re on their way.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “They should be here in an hour.”
Frank Davis was with the Tacoma Police Department, and a good friend, not to mention her uncle Cy’s favorite fishing partner. The three towns in the Bay banded together to share the two-man police department, relying on the bigger cities on the other side of Hood Canal, as well as the state police, for additional help. Usually Clay didn’t need any, but there were exceptions to that. A murder was one of them.
“You’re sure it wasn’t an accident?” Clay asked.
Ricki nodded. “I’m sure. Bullet to the heart, or very close to it.” She let out a long, slow breath of air. “I doubt if it was suicide. I didn’t see a gun lying around but didn’t make a thorough search of the place. Thought I’d wait for you.” Her gaze cut over to the three boys. “The crime scene was already disturbed when I got here. From what they told me, all three of them walked over it.” She switched her attention back to Clay. “What new ME?”
“The one we hired last week and who is currently out fishing somewhere on the bay.”
Her frown quickly turned into a wide grin. “You aren’t telling me that TK took the job, are you?”
TK was the local nickname for one of the only two physicians in the Bay, having been bestowed on the doctor many years ago. Known all over town as the Trout King, and proud of it, Dr. Richard Evans was an avid fisherman, and so was his much younger partner in their small medical practice. The two of them generally worked different office hours, spending all their extra time out on the water, indulging in their favorite pastime. Ricki had recently heard through the usual small-town grapevine that after forty years of tending to everyone’s cuts, bruises, and more serious ailments, TK had decided to retire.
So the report that the sixty-something doctor was taking on the job of the local ME was something new. The very efficient gossip mill that usually ran like wildfire between the three towns had failed to pick up that juicy tidbit.
“I gave him a standing offer last year, and he let me know a week ago that he was ready to accept it.” Clay shrugged. “His thinking was that he wouldn’t have to do much to earn the monthly stipend to be on call.”
“Then he’s going to be really pissed off to have his fishing interrupted,” Ricki mused. The old doctor wasn’t exactly known for keeping his opinions to himself, and she was certain his complaint over having to deal with a murder victim so soon after accepting the ME job would be immediate and very loud.
“Maybe not. But I think he’s looking forward to it more than he’s willing to admit. He told me he’s been taking some online classes from the University of Washington ever since I brought the job up, and even went out and bought an old station wagon.”
“What for?”
“To transport bodies in,” Clay said with a straight face before looking around her to peer into the dark interior of the lighthouse. “Ready?”
Transport bodies? Was TK kidding? Ricki rolled her eyes. Trust the crusty old man to come up with something like that. She pushed away from the doorframe and with a stern “Don’t move a muscle” warning called out to the boys, turned to head inside when she was stopped by a voice yelling out from across the small clearing.
“Hey, Chief!” Deputy Jules Tucker’s thin, spidery form loped into view. His eyes squinted as he gave the boys a curious look before coming to a gangly stop in front of Ricki and Clay. “TK should be here in about thirty minutes. He has to row in, but he put out this morning close by, so his car is right here in Massey.” The deputy held up a hand-sized instant camera. “I brought this in case that cell phone of yours runs out of juice before we get all the shots you want.”
Ricki looked away to hide her grin at the sight of the plastic lens wrapped in yellow cardboard, with the name Kodak splashed across the front. It had probably sat forgotten on a shelf somewhere for at least a decade. Clay reached out and gave his deputy a hard slap on the back.
“That’s good forward thinking, Jules. And great timing. We were just about to go inside.”
The deputy nodded and then drew back a little as he wrinkled his nose. “Kind of smells.”
“Not as much as it will in a few hours once the air heats up,” Clay said. “So we better get to it.”
Ricki gave the deputy, who was suddenly looking a little green, an encouraging smile. She was all too familiar with the man’s weak stomach when it came to odd smells and the sight of blood. Word had it that he’d upchucked all over her last crime scene, and that was after the forensic team had processed it. “It’s not as bad as it could be, Jules.”
The deputy sucked in a deep breath through his mouth. “Okay. Okay.”
Leaving it at that, Ricki turned and walked inside, with Clay following right behind. The body lay sprawled out, with one hand over its head, the other arm bent to one side, and the legs almost straight. She and the chief stood side by side, studying the lifeless form.
“Looks like he fell over backwards after being shot,” Clay said.
Ricki nodded her agreement. “From the impact of the bullet to the chest.” She tilted her head to the side. “The blood pooled out from his chest and not underneath him, so the bullet didn’t go all the way through.”
“Probably still in the body,” Clay agreed. “Lucky break for us.”
“If you can find the matching gun,” Ricki said as she slowly walked around the body and squatted next to it. The head was turned to the side so the wide-open eyes were staring toward the open door. The bloat had already started to set in but wasn’t as bad as it was going to get. “Eddie said that Nate was up here two days ago, and the door was locked. When they got here today, the lock was broken, so that puts the likely time of death at twenty-four to forty-eight hours ago.”
Clay grunted his agreement, then sank down to match her position, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then leaned over and pushed the man’s jacket away. The gaping wound on the left side of his chest was surrounded by a large circle of dried blood soaked into his light-blue shirt. A wide path of dark red spilled down to the dirt floor. As Ricki silently looked on, Clay gently and slowly searched through the shirt, jacket, and pants pockets, coming up empty.
He raised his gaze to hers. “Nothing. No ID.”
“And I don’t see any jewelry either,” Ricki said. “No wedding ring, but it doesn’t look like there’s a tan mark showing he’d been wearing one either.”
“Since there’s no wallet or money, it might be a robbery gone wrong.” Clay rose to his feet and glanced over at his deputy, who was using two fingers to pinch the end of his nose closed. “I’ll take the photos, Jules, if you’ll go out and keep an eye on those boys. Maybe take their official statements.”
“Sure thing, Chief.” Jules didn’t waste any time heading for the door, still holding the disposable camera in one hand.
Shaking his head, Clay pulled his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. “This one is better anyway.”
Ricki watched as Jules walked away, leaving his footprints behind to mingle with the ones the boys had made. If there had been any left by the killer, the teenagers had managed to trample all over them before she’d arrived.
> Clay took several pictures then glanced her way. “Did Eddie tell you how they happened to come across the vic?”
“Uh-huh.” It had taken a good ten minutes to make sense out of the half-excited, half-terrified slew of words thrown at her as the boys had stumbled to talk over each other, but in the end, she had a pretty good idea of what had happened.
“Apparently they came up here to test out their latest bot.”
Clay lowered his phone and stared at her. “Up here? Why up here?”
She tilted her head toward the far side of the room. “Because they needed a curved set of stairs, and those are what they came up with.” She shrugged at his puzzled look. “Not important. So they drove up here, in a car that I’m sure Nate’s dad had no idea the kid had borrowed, and hauled the bot up the trail in a wagon.”
“Is that what’s under that blanket I saw?”
Ricki nodded. “Yep. Nate came up here two days ago, probably sneaking out in his dad’s car again, and checked the place out. He thought they could get in through the window since the door was locked. But when they got here today, there was no lock on the outside, and a dead body on the inside. That’s when Eddie called me.” She put her hands on her hips and nodded again. “That’s about it.”
The chief’s forehead wrinkled as he glanced over at the old wooden door. “Nate is sure there was a lock on the door the first time he came up here?”
“He’s sure,” Ricki said. “Just like he’s sure his dad is going to, and I quote, ‘blow a circuit’ when he finds out Nate took the car.”
“Not once, but twice,” Clay put in. “Nate’s still in high school, isn’t he?”
“Uh huh. Not quite sixteen, and the proud owner of an instruction permit.” Ricki dismissed Nate’s impending problem with his father, which the kid had definitely earned, and focused on the bigger one in front of them. Since Clay had only been living in the Bay for just over three years, a very short time by the local reckoning, she started with the obvious. “I don’t recognize him, Clay. And Jules would have said something if he knew who this guy was. The boys would have too.”
One Last Scream (Special Agent Ricki James Book 2) Page 2