“Then the odds are good that he’s not from around here,” Clay concluded.
“No.” She raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think this was a robbery gone bad?” She took a slow look around. “Strange place for a robbery.”
Clay sighed. “There’s an outside chance, I suppose, but that would be a new one, in my experience.”
Since the chief had spent a decade as a homicide cop in the Los Angeles Police Department, his experience level was pretty high. And her gut was telling her the same thing. It wasn’t a robbery gone bad. Whoever had killed this John Doe had done it deliberately.
As Ricki stepped back and quietly looked on, Clay took a continual string of pictures as he moved around the body. When he was finally finished, the chief tucked his phone away and glanced over at her. “If you wouldn’t mind staying, I could use an extra set of trained eyes to walk the perimeter. I can have Jules take Nate’s car and drive the boys and their bot home. I think they’ve probably had enough for one day.”
In complete agreement, Ricki nodded. “Can you ask him to drop Eddie off at the Sunny Side Up? And tell Anchorman to sit on my kid until I get there?” The Sunny Side up was the small local diner in Brewer that Ricki owned, and Anchorman was the ex-Marine sniper who was now her cook, and who sometimes doubled as Eddie’s babysitter and protector whenever her ex-husband was out of town. Like he was today—which at the moment was a good thing. She needed to get everything sorted out with their son, then she would deal with his father. Who was probably going to blow the same circuit as Nate’s dad. Her ex had a very sour opinion of anything to do with her job in law enforcement, especially murder investigations.
“Sure.” Clay glanced over at the body with a quick shrug. “At least this guy wasn’t left in Olympic Park, so you don’t have to deal with it. This one is all mine.”
As a general rule, she didn’t like to disagree with the local chief of police, but in this case she didn’t have much choice.
“Yeah. This one is yours.” She jerked a finger over her shoulder toward the wall farthest from the open doorway. “But that one over there is mine.”
Chapter Three
TK positioned the small stool and lantern he’d brought with him next to the skeleton and sat down. Placing both hands on his knees, he leaned over and peered through the thick lenses of his glasses. He used a long finger with hair growing out close to the knuckles, to trace along the edge of an exposed rib bone. When he finally straightened up, he pushed his glasses back up his nose before nodding his head and silently moving his lips, talking to himself.
“What do you think, TK?” Ricki asked, used to the doctor’s way of thinking things through. She shook her head when Clay opened his mouth. His eyes narrowed at her silent warning, but he crossed his arms over his chest and pressed his lips into a thin line.
“I think these bodies have at least one thing in common,” TK said, his loud voice bouncing against the stone walls around them. “They were both shot.”
“You’re sure about that?” Clay’s dry question earned him a stern look from the doctor.
“Well, you can see plainly enough that’s what happened to that one over there.” TK half turned on his stool and gestured toward the body lying closest to the doorway before looking back down at the bones laid out at his feet. “And this one has a good nick along one of his ribs, not to mention the bullet is lying in the dirt just to the right of the spine. It also looks like there’s a serious break in one of the leg bones.”
“So the bullet went through him?” Clay asked.
TK twisted around so he could look directly up at the chief. “No, son. It most likely fell there after all the flesh and organs had rotted away.” He took off his glasses and started to clean them with a pure-white handkerchief that he’d pulled out of his shirt pocket. Once he was done, he handed the square of cloth to Ricki. “Here. You throw that away for me.”
Ricki gingerly took the cloth with the tips of two fingers. TK had always been a stickler for cleanliness. Ever since she could remember, he’d always carried a white handkerchief with him and had never used any of them more than once.
Clay sank down on his haunches and leaned over to get a better look. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”
“They died at different times,” TK said blandly. “And judging by the shape of the pelvis, I’d say you were correct in referring to this one as a ‘he,’ even if it was a lucky guess.”
While the two men stared at each other in a silent tug-of-war for the upper hand, Ricki ignored them to carefully look over the skeleton neatly laid out on the dirt floor. The arms and legs were perfectly straight, almost as if the victim had simply fallen asleep and failed to wake up. Her eyes narrowed on the few small scraps of cloth still clinging to one rib and a hip bone before she shifted her gaze off to the side. A set of clothes was neatly folded and placed in a stack, with the jacket on top. The badly tarnished badge of a national park ranger was still pinned to its front. Whoever this skeleton had once been, he’d been one of theirs, and in her mind that made him her responsibility, no matter where he’d been found.
“How different?” Ricki asked into the silence, drawing the gazes of both men. “I mean, how far apart did these two die?”
Clay frowned. “It has to be at least a few years.”
TK gave a grunt to go with the exaggerated roll of his eyes. “More like a few decades.” He shrugged. “I’ll have to study the bones a bit more to figure out how many, but this one stopped breathing at least ten years ago, and probably closer to twenty, maybe even more.” He stood up and snapped his portable seat shut before grabbing the handle of the lantern. “Someone’s going to have to carry this body down to the hearse.”
Clay blinked, then cleared his throat. “Hearse?”
“Since I’m on a case, I taped the ME sign to the side of the station wagon. As long as it’s on there, that makes my car an official hearse.” TK nodded to put an emphasis on his words. “And I’m too old to be hauling anything other than this chair and lantern up any hills, so you just be sure to get these bodies down to the hearse.”
“I’ll do that,” Clay said through gritted teeth. “The forensic team should be here soon. They’ll get the bodies into your car.”
“Hearse,” TK corrected with a touch of smug in his voice. “And before it starts to rain. It was beginning to cloud up when I was rowing in.”
“Great,” Clay muttered.
“It’s the Northwest, Chief Thomas. There’s always rain on the way.” TK started a slow walk toward the open door. “I’ll be waiting in the hearse, where it’s dry.”
As the doctor disappeared through the doorway, Clay turned an exasperated look on Ricki. “This might have been a big mistake.”
She grinned back at him. “Oh, I don’t know. I think he’s going to make a great ME and the two of you are made for each other.”
“Ha, ha.” Clay ran a distracted hand through his dark-blond hair. It was neatly cut with the edges barely curling over the back of his shirt collar. “Two kills, left in the same place, decades apart. Isn’t that a bitch of a thing?”
“One civilian, one park ranger,” Ricki added. “Which makes it even more of a bitch to deal with. And strange to boot.”
“What part? The fact they were both shot out here in the middle of nowhere, or that they might’ve died in different centuries?”
“Well, there is that,” Ricki agreed. But neither of those puzzles was what bothered her the most. “I’ve never heard of a ranger going missing, much less shot.”
“Could be it happened so long ago it’s buried in a report sitting in a box somewhere in the storage room.”
Ricki shook her head. In a big city, that might be true, but in small towns that kind of thing was usually burned into the collective memory forever, often turning from bare fact into full-blown legend, or a bedtime tale whispered in the dark. But however it might evolve over time, a story like this one would never have died. Not in a small town.<
br />
“I’d know about it,” she said quietly. “No matter how long ago it happened.”
“Okay.” Clay looked around. “Since the older vic was shot, I guess that rules out this being some sort of bizarre tomb erected by the family.”
Ricki glanced up at the spiral staircase, its curves suspended over their heads. It was a weird place to put what was basically an undersized lighthouse, and since the man had been carefully laid out and his clothes neatly folded beside him, Clay’s thought that the structure was built for some other purpose besides guiding ships in the Bay wasn’t such a far-fetched theory. Since whoever he was had indeed been shot, just like his contemporary companion lying on the other side of the enclosed space, it wasn’t very likely the old lighthouse was built as a tomb by some eccentric family member. But there was some reason it was built on this piece of land.
“It could be he was stationed at another park and transported here,” she mused out loud. As a possibility, that held some weight, but her instincts told her no. Mount Rainier, the park closest to Olympic, was over a hundred miles away. Why go to the bother of transporting a park ranger from there, and then not even dump the body in the park?
Clay’s gaze rose from the skeleton to center on her face. “Sounds like it needs to be checked out.”
“Yeah. I’ll get on it.” Or rather she’d call Hamilton and see who he could get on it. Since he was the special agent in charge at the Seattle office of the ISB, and her boss, hopefully he could pull some strings and get her help with the legwork. Something told her she’d have to dig deep to uncover just who the mysterious ranger was, and why he’d ended up shot and left in the lighthouse. But resources in the bureau were scarce, so if Hamilton came up empty, maybe she could talk her uncle, who was the supervisor over the law enforcement unit inside Olympic Park, into loaning her one of his rangers. And she had a specific one in mind.
Tucking that away to follow up on later, she looked over at the first body they’d found. “It could be that the latest vic was a tourist who saw the lighthouse, wandered up here, and happened to get shot.”
“Why?” Clay asked bluntly. “Why shoot the guy? It’s not like there’s anything in here to steal.”
“It could have been a personal argument with a companion that got out of hand.” She gave the bones a thoughtful look. “Or maybe to keep him from telling anyone about the other murder.”
Clay scoffed at the idea. “When it happened more than a decade ago?”
Hard to argue with that. Before she could form another theory, a man with bright-red hair and a mustache to match appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in a paper-thin white jumpsuit and held a large black case at his side.
“Hey. We’re looking for Chief Thomas?”
Clay nodded and stepped forward, his hand held out. “That would be me. You must be with the forensic team from Tacoma.”
“Yeah, I’m Rob.” He looked to be in his mid-twenties, an image only enhanced when he snapped a piece of gum in his mouth. “We’re supposed to process a scene with a dead body?” He jerked his head backwards. “And some old guy where we parked the rig told us we should put the body into the back of his car to transport.”
Clay turned his head to give Ricki an exasperated glare but managed to keep his tone even when he looked back at Rob. “When you’re through here, go ahead and load the body into your rig. I’ll talk to the old guy. He’s our ME.” He pointed over his shoulder to where Ricki was standing. “She’s Special Agent Ricki James with the National Park Service. She also has a body that needs to be transported.”
Rob straightened up to his full height and stretched his neck to look past Clay. “We weren’t told about any second body, Chief.”
“I’ll clear it with Captain Davis,” Ricki said, already reaching for her cell phone. “And there are clothes over here that will need to be bagged, but I want to take photos of them first. There’s also a bullet underneath the body that will need to be preserved.”
“Okay.” Rob turned and blew out a short, piercing whistle. “Hey, Danny? We’ve got two in here.”
When Rob disappeared from the doorway, Clay turned to Ricki and smiled. “Well, what do you say, Special Agent James? It looks like you’ve got a murder to solve. At least this case is cold enough it shouldn’t come with someone shooting back at you.”
“Yeah, there is that,” Ricki agreed with a quiet sigh.
Chapter Four
Three hours after she’d received the call from her son about a dead body up at the old lighthouse, Ricki walked into the Sunny Side Up, her small, slightly run-down diner just off the center of town. Since she’d rejoined the elite investigative unit for the National Park Service, she had a regular paycheck again, and had used the boost in her income to spruce up the place with a new awning. The building still needed its wooden shingle siding replaced, but that would have to wait.
Anchorman, the Marine-turned-cook, was manning the stove, attacking the stack of order slips on the adjoining counter that were being held down by a coffee mug, with his usual fierce efficiency. Tall, standing a good six inches over her five-foot-eight-inch frame, her cook still sported the close-cropped haircut favored by the military, and was built like a solid block of granite.
He looked like a warrior as he wielded a spatula to flip the burgers in one hand, and a spoon to stir a bubbling pot of beans in the other. Ricki grinned as she slipped out of her windbreaker and turned to hang it on a hook by the back door. Anchorman always seemed to treat every task as if he were in the middle of a battle. Most of the time she appreciated his single-minded intensity. But when he used that same bullheadedness to dig in his heels about something, she could argue with him until she was blue in the face and he still wouldn’t budge an inch. She should know. That usually happened about once a week. Which was also how often she threatened to fire him.
“Deputy Jules dropped Eddie off an hour ago,” Anchorman said, his voice raised to carry over the sound of meat sizzling on the grill. “He said the kid is in a shitload of trouble.”
Ricki looked over her shoulder and nodded. “That’s right. He was up at the old lighthouse without permission.”
Her cook instantly scowled. “So? It’s Wednesday, boss, in case you’ve lost track of what day of the week it is. A faculty day, if you don’t remember the schedule, so no school. Which means he wasn’t skipping classes just to hang out with his buddies.” He quickly flipped a burger before returning his attention and his scowl to Ricki. “Although that’s a necessary thing sometimes.”
She crossed her arms and watched him with a gleam of amusement in her gaze. Since Anchorman felt particularly protective of her son, she wasn’t surprised that he’d immediately jumped to Eddie’s defense. “Uh-huh. Well, he did your idea of a necessary thing by riding along with Nate, who, I’d like to point out, does not have a driver’s license, and had taken his father’s car without permission.” Her mouth thinned into a straight line when Anchorman’s stubborn scowl remained firmly in place. It looked like they were headed for one of those arguments.
“Okay. That might be worth a lecture, but not much more than that. All teenage boys borrow the car on occasion.” He shrugged. “It’s a guy thing.”
“Is that so? How about trespassing? Is that a guy thing too?”
“When it’s on an old, abandoned property, yep,” Anchorman said without missing a beat. “And since that lighthouse isn’t on federal land, you can’t arrest him for it either.”
“How about coming across a dead body while he was riding in a borrowed car, driven by an unlicensed driver, to go trespass on private land?” Ricki nodded in satisfaction when Anchorman’s mouth dropped open but no sound came out. It was always satisfying to have the last word.
When he started to sputter, she gave him a smug “gotcha” grin, then breezed through the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the main dining room. Several of the booths lining the walls were occupied, as were all the tables crowded together in the center
of the room. Ricki recognized most of the customers and raised a hand in greeting when a number of heads turned her way.
Marcie, her waitress, friend, and the first employee Ricki had hired for the diner, smiled at her from across the room. The stocky woman was in her early fifties, which made her twenty years Ricki’s senior. She’d also successfully raised six kids of her own, so gave her boss an experienced, knowing look when she tilted her head to the far corner of the room.
Ricki turned in that direction, immediately spotting her son at the end of the counter that stretched along the back wall, sitting on one of the high stools with a faded red-vinyl seat. He was hunched over a book, his dark hair doing its perpetual flop over the top rim of his glasses. She walked between the counter and the back wall with its food and service stations, until she stood in front of him, her arms crossed over her chest. Tapping a heavily booted foot against the linoleum floor, she patiently waited until he lifted his gaze to meet hers.
When Eddie stayed silent, she lifted one eyebrow. “Well?”
“I’m sorry, Mom. But like I already told you, we needed some curved stairs to test out our bot, and there wasn’t anywhere else to do it,” he blurted out.
Her tall, broad-shouldered son might be built like his father, but the blue eyes staring back at her were an exact mirror of her own.
“Uh-huh. What about the St. Armand? There’s a very impressive curved staircase in the main ballroom.”
Eddie added an exaggerated roll of his eyes to his dismissive snort. “They never would have let us test out the bot there.”
“Oh? Who did you ask? The hotel manager?”
Her son’s gaze cut away as he squirmed in his seat. “Not exactly.”
“Meaning not at all.” Ricki held up a hand when he started to protest. “You’re too smart not to know that what you, Nate, and Anson did was wrong, so let’s skip over the debate, bud, and get right to the consequences.” She paused and waited for him to look at her. “You’re grounded. For a month.” When his lower lip jutted out, she waved a finger back and forth. “A whole month, bud, and it’s not up for negotiation. You’ll come straight here after school, do your homework, and then bus the tables for Marcie until your dad comes to pick you up.” When he looked relieved, she shook her head. “And I’ll be talking to him before you leave the diner today, to make sure he doesn’t cave in and let you slide by on this one.”
One Last Scream (Special Agent Ricki James Book 2) Page 3