Buried (Detective Ellie MacIntosh) (2 page)

It took two transfers but she finally got through to the correct department once she explained the situation, and the dispatcher promised to send out an officer. Since it wasn’t exactly an emergency, Ellie just gently pushed the button on her phone when the call was done and moved a few steps closer. “Any ideas?”

“About what?”

“Who it is?”

Crouching down, her grandfather frowned at the skull as if he could possibly recognize the person, his face pallid in the late afternoon light. “Don’t think so. This is land our family has owned for many, many years.”

Ellie glanced around and immediately started processing the scene in her mind. It seemed like a strange place to bury a body. On a steep hillside? The slope was at least at a thirty
-
degree angle. Then again, it wasn’t easy to walk on either, so discovery would be unlikely. “You said you didn’t find it. Who did?”

“Kid fishing on the lake in a canoe stumbled across the skeleton trying to get off the water as the storm rolled through. Roger Bridges. You’ve met his parents. Stepped right on it, or so he says. Scared him half to death.”

Human remains had a way of doing that to you. She winced inwardly. She believed the part about him taking refuge on the shore, but that Roger had contaminated the scene would not help forensics when the team came in. It looked like maybe he’d cleared away some of the dirt with his hands too, probably because he couldn’t quite believe it. “Why didn’t
he
call the sheriff’s department?”

As if it made perfect sense, her grandfather explained, “Because it is on my property. His folks have a place across the lake. If it hadn’t started to rain so hard so fast, he would have gone back to their dock. This is closer. Roger came to the house, and when he told me about it, I really didn’t believe him at first either. Told him it must have been a dead deer or something. Once the weather settled down, I came out to look. Then I called you. I knew you would have a handle on how to take care of it.”

Exasperated, she searched for something respectful to say.
Take care of it?
That answer was easy. Try calling for local law enforcement, which is what should have been done in the first place.

Her grandfather straightened. “Should we go back to the house? Kind of wet here and I could make a pot of coffee while we wait on them.”

“I…”

She stopped in the middle of her sentence. Something wasn’t quite right.

Just the two of them. The wind eerily rustling the leaves, the water silver and rippling, and a very dead silence.

Ellie thought uneasily:
You aren’t surprised enough
.

It wasn’t anything in particular, but she knew Robert Lawrence MacIntosh, and she felt it. Part of her job was reading people and it was just
there
.

Whoever lay in that grave, he just wasn’t surprised. Felt the need to report it because this kid knew, but really hadn’t wanted to call it in.

What the hell?

He stood there, this strong, kind man she’d known ever since the day she was born, his gaze averted as he turned, a lock of white hair blowing across his brow.

Were it anyone—
anyone
—else, she would start a rapid-fire litany of questions, but she found she didn’t want to ask them.

“You are a police officer,” he said it as if it gave him some sort of anchor. “A detective. When something like this turns up, what happens next?”

The breeze made her shiver almost as much as the sight of those bleached, deserted bones. “When the deputy arrives he’ll ask about the victim. Do you know who it could be, that sort of thing.”

“Thought that might be it. Then what?”

“They’ll exhume the body from the makeshift grave. I predict there will be crime scene techs all over as they look for clues, but it also looks to me, from an inexpert view because I am not a medical examiner, that this body has been there a long, long time, so I doubt they’ll find anything. Most of the evidence will have deteriorated.”

She stopped, took in a breath. Because she was a police officer, and because this was not just her job but a sudden immediate problem she had never seen popping up on her horizon but was still there, staring her in the face, she weighed her next words. She tended to try to meet problems head on. “As I said, they are going to ask you, so let me ask first. Do you know who this might be?”

“I can’t say that I do.”

But he didn’t look her directly in the eye as he spoke. Instead he gazed out over the rippling water of the gray lake.

Dear God, one of the people she respected most in the world was lying to her.

She remarked very quietly, “I would love a cup of coffee.”

*   *   *

Detective Jason Santiago
had been out of uniform for years now, but the rhythm of it came back naturally.

Officer Danni Crawford got the message from dispatch just as she was pulling out of the parking lot where she’d answered her last call, which proved to be simply a report on an unruly customer at a pharmacy. The man could not get his Schedule 2 meds filled for a few days and was starting to feel the pangs of withdrawal from a very strong narcotic if his erratic behavior was an indication. A few words with him and looking into those bloodshot eyes, Jason was reminded how little he liked the ramifications of addiction. The unruly customer was convinced finally that screaming at the pharmacist was not going to get him anywhere but into a jail cell and he’d left peacefully enough.

Job done. Problem solved, at least to the extent that Crawford did not have to haul anyone off in cuffs. Jason, just along for the ride because he was still officially on medical leave, was amused when she pleasantly asked the manager of the store—who was hovering uneasily and was the one who had called the police—who the hell thought twenty
-
four
-
hour places that could dispense narcotics were a good idea?

Corporate, he’d answered. Truthfully, he looked tired with his rumpled shirt and askew tie. Then he added, “And I couldn’t agree more with you, Officer.”

She wasn’t enthusiastic about her reassignment to this late shift, but beggars really couldn’t afford to be choosers she told Jason as they went out to get back into the squad car. Promotions required sacrifice.

“Don’t I know it.” Recently he’d taken two bullets in the line of duty.

Danni shot him a sidelong look as she started the vehicle. “Yeah, I guess you do.”

She was pretty enough, brown hair, pulled back at the moment in a no
-
nonsense ponytail because she was on the job. Danni was a little overweight, but there was nothing wrong with something a man could hold on to was always his attitude. Besides, though he doubted many people would believe it, he valued personality above physical beauty and she was, in short, a nice girl and a good cop.

Her radio sputtered and she answered.

The dispatcher said urgently without a hint of the usual boredom, “We’ve got a shooting and we think there’s possibly an officer down. The phones are lighting up. How close are you to KK?”

KK meant Kinnickinnic Avenue. Jason’s heart rate shot up.
Officer down
. Close, but it was a fairly long street …
officer down
?

“Minutes away,” Crawford said, her voice catching. “What do we have?”

“Shots fired at what seems like a routine traffic stop. We aren’t sure what happened, but we need as many officers to respond as quickly as possible.”

It was a Saturday, and the street would be busy. “Give me the address. I’m close. I’m already driving.”

Maybe it was just as well Jason had asked, out of sheer boredom, if he could ride along.

KK had recently become retro chic and there were nice but quirky restaurants and little shops where tourists and locals browsed. The sound of sirens shrieked everywhere as they sped along and it wasn’t hard to figure out exactly where they needed to be.

The man sprawled in the street in a spreading pool of blood was definitely in uniform, his hat lying a few feet away, one arm flung out, the other limp at his side. His patrol car was parked, but the door was still open.

“Oh God.” Danni’s voice echoed horror. “Jason, oh God. I think it’s Chad.”

She didn’t quite get the car in park before she was out and running. He did it for her, feeling the jerk as the transmission locked, a chill creeping over his skin.

She shouldered her way through the crowd, Jason following, and knelt by the side of the fallen officer. With shaking hands she sought a pulse as the sirens neared.

Jason also recognized him with a shock that froze his muscles.

No ambulance with even the most skilled emergency personnel was going to save him, he realized, looking down at his still face. The man was dead.

And Chad Brown and Danni had dated, for what? Four years now?

Jason reached down and touched her shoulder. “Hey.”

Danni started trembling uncontrollably. She crawled to the curb and vomited, her body reacting to her emotions so powerfully she couldn’t help it.

This is not happening,
Jason thought numbly.

Chad Brown
. Jesus, it
was
Chad.

Danni and Chad had never said they were serious, but Jason had seen firsthand how comfortable they were with each other. Lovers, friends, colleagues …

As she dropped her head, probably to keep from passing out, in the distance, someone said, “Ma’am—Officer—you okay?”

“I’ve got this.” Jason’s voice was curt but he was hurting too, in shock, a little paralyzed by what had happened. “Hey, hold on. Come on, Danni, he’d want you to keep it together.”

“I know.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sat up, but she was starkly pale and trembling.

Definitely not fit to be in charge. He said quietly, “Stay here. This is a homicide anyway. Let me handle it. Right?”

He did. Producing his badge—no one needed to know he wasn’t officially on duty—firing off questions about witnesses, directing the other officers arriving on the scene to look for casings in the street, ostensibly taking over even though he really didn’t have the authority at the moment, but someone needed to besides the pale-faced officer who had just emptied her stomach into the gutter.

She crawled back to the body and touched Chad’s face.

When she looked up, her face was streaked with tears. “I’ve been trying to drop the weight, you know? I kept telling him no engagement until I lose twenty pounds. He always said he loved me just the way I am. To stop worrying about it so much. Why did I worry?”

Man, if there was anything he was bad at, it was a moment like this. Jason crouched down next to her and said the most profound thing he could think of.

“Whoever did this is fucking going down.”

Chapter 2

The creak gave away there was someone on the stairs.

It must have because she heard the movement above as the bedsprings groaned, and then the sound of feet on the floorboards.

The electricity was out, but that happened often enough this time of year and she had a kerosene lamp. There was dark, and then there was the utter black of the north woods on a night with no moon. Later she would light it, but for now she was content with the darkness. It served her purpose well.

Utterly still and pressed against the wall, she strained to hear.

Her fingers gripped the knife so tightly her hand began to ache.

*   *   *

The room was
dead silent. Not even the rustle of a piece of paper.

Chief of police Joe Metzger said slowly, “These are the events as we know them. Officer Chad Brown stepped out of the vehicle with the intent to approach on what he called in as a speeding stop. The driver didn’t move but the passenger engaged, getting out even after being asked to stay seated, and he hit Brown with three rounds to the chest before the officer could even draw his weapon. At this point, our perpetrator apparently got back into the vehicle and they drove away.”

Lieutenant Carl Grasso asked neutrally, “Witnesses?”

“We have a description of the vehicle from a person who was passing in the other direction, but that’s about it. A lot of people heard the shots and ran to look, but when I say fleeting, I mean fleeting. It was a flash in the night. Brown had called in the stop, but the car didn’t have plates, and obviously there was no chance to get the registration. Beige doesn’t really give us a lot to go on.”

Ellie frowned. The shooting was all over the news, but this was the first chance she’d had to hear details from an accurate source. “What about ballistics?”

“We rushed it through. It’s inconclusive that it is exactly the same gun, but it is the same caliber as the last one anyway. A .45 Glock. I don’t like the pattern similarities.”

“Second cop hit in two weeks.” Grasso didn’t precisely smile but his mouth curved in an ironic arch. He was in his early forties, a touch of gray at the temples, his history with the Milwaukee PD not exactly pristine. Once upon a time he’d been the division’s most successful homicide detective until he’d been transferred to vice for a suspicious incident. He’d recently been temporarily reassigned as Ellie’s new partner and she wasn’t positive she was thrilled about it. He asked in a cynical tone, “Coincidence?”

Metzger shook his head, but then he sighed and rubbed his cheek, slumping in the chair behind his desk. The chief was thickly built, a former marine who rarely cut anyone slack, and a decent politician. Ellie liked him with certain limitations. He didn’t handle media attention too well. It annoyed him, and it showed. He was no-nonsense, and abrupt if pushed, which was fine with her. She preferred the real deal to the smooth-over.

He said shortly, “A fluke, not a hit, if I had to call it, but I don’t know. That’s why we are having this meeting, just the three of us. I want to think I’m just fishing around. Maybe it is just two incidents that happened and are not at all related.”

Now that is interesting
.