Chesapeake Summer (7 page)

“You're a cruel woman, Verna Lee, and because I'm a good guy, I won't tell your sister that you're less than enthusiastic about your very own niece.”

“I'm enthusiastic about one of them. The other terrifies me.”

D
etective Wade Atkins, chief homicide detective of Wicomico County Sheriff's Department, was no stranger to Marshy Hope Creek. He'd spent most of his formative years six miles out of the town limits in a two-room shack set low on a piece of land optimistically called Darby's Cove. The name evoked images of pleasure boats with white sails moored neatly in a harbor, bordered by charming restaurants and shops crowded with tourists. In reality it was a mosquito-infested glade, thick with alligators, toads and catfish all filled with enough radiation from the Pax River to make them inedible. Uncared-for front lawns boasted inoperable vehicles set high on blocks. The view from broken screens led to other faded shacks and mobile homes.

As soon as he was legally able, Wade hitched a ride on a big rig filled with sweet potatoes and made his way west where a stint in the army and the GI Bill earned him a place at California State University, Long Beach. From there he was accepted at the police academy.

Wade figured he was about as far away from his roots and Marshy Hope Creek as a man could be. Growing up, he and his brothers, the Atkins boys, “river rats” or “white trash,” depending on who was doing the describing, weren't big on community service. In fact, you might say they were more of a high-risk factor than anything else. Clem and Howard, the two oldest, spent more nights at the juvenile detention center in Salisbury than they did at home, and it was a known fact that the First Baptist Church took up a collection to buy Mace cans for their elderly, single ladies, just in case they should happen on one or, God forbid, both of the Atkinses' distinctive white-blond heads while walking down the street.

Wade, however, was different, not in appearance but in temperament. Like the others, he was towheaded with a mass of freckles, so many of them they all ran together, giving his face an attractive tanned look, paired with steely blue eyes, a jutting chin and a wide linebacker's body. But he was missing the mean streak that every male Atkins, from one generation to the next, never failed to inherit. In fact, Wade managed to clear four years of high school without a single knuckle-bruising scuffle. He was also, according to his teachers, fairly intelligent, with a kind of practical common sense that completely bypassed the rest of his clan. It made some people wonder if Carrie Eileen Atkins had been messing with the postman nine months before Wade was born. But then they looked at old Morris, at the steely blue eyes and that thatch of white hair shared by all his boys, especially Wade, and knew it wasn't so.

Wade didn't subscribe to the notion that he was
born
different. He attributed his path to a mild case of scarlet fever and subsequent bed rest. Carrie Atkins was beside herself trying to keep an active twelve-year-old boy cool and immobile in a house the size of a cracker box. She began by buying comic books. But when it became clear that each ten-cent copy was devoured in twenty minutes, she did what no Atkins had ever done before. She applied for a library card.

At first, Owena Harper, the librarian, was reluctant to allow it. In her experience the folks living on the wrong side of Marshy Hope Creek did not treat books with the proper respect. But when she heard the card was for Wade, she relented. He'd chopped wood for her the last two winters. She paid him fifty cents an hour and he showed up faithfully when he said he would and worked until the job was done. Owena allowed that he deserved a library card, him being sick and all.

That was Wade's introduction to a world outside his own. He read
Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Yearling, Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Works of Hans Christian Andersen
and many more. For the next six years he was never without a book in hand. Heroes appealed to him. He wanted to be like them.

That was thirty-five years and a lifetime ago, before he'd worked himself up from undercover vice to homicide detective. Now he wore a suit and tie and although his hours weren't regular, the pay was better. He figured he would have lived out his life in Santa Monica, California, quite happily, except that his wife, Susan, died five years before. After that, his workdays were bearable but his free time wasn't. All the old haunts, Diedrich coffee to start the day, a midmorning jog on the boardwalk, dinner at Gladstone's, were miserable without Sarah. So, he came home, not to Darby's Cove or Marshy Hope Creek, but to Salisbury and the Wicomico County Sheriff's Department, both different enough from the white sand beaches of the West to ward off memories.

The call came in at noon, an unusual time for reporting a homicide. Most were called in at night. Sheriff Blake Carlisle from Marshy Hope Creek was requesting a full crime-scene forensics team. Because Wade had high hopes of wrapping this one up in time to go straight home after his shift, he drove his own car.

Soon, he found himself on the back roads of his boyhood, his senses reeling from the brackish smell of the Chesapeake shallows, marsh grass, nesting birds, the contrast of golden sunlight and black shadow, the frustratingly slow pace of a pickup weighted down with tomatoes on a two-lane road. He'd skirted the area countless times, but he'd never been back, not since the death of his mother when he was a teenager.

Highway 39 was a narrow strip of road bisecting miles of marshland and pine forests. A single patrol car with blinking lights and yards of yellow tape signaled the location of the crime scene. Wade pulled the emergency brake, swallowed a goodly portion of his sixteen-ounce water bottle, grabbed his clipboard from the back seat, stepped into his boots, laced them up and hiked out to the tape border. He flashed his badge at the young police officer manning the log, stepped over the tape and, keeping toward the edge, maneuvered his way to the placards, the site of the crime and the officer in charge. “What does it look like?” he asked.

“The coroner's on his way,” replied Sheriff Carlisle. “See for yourself.”

Wade walked around the site, checking it out from every angle. “Hair and clothing looks good enough for lab samples,” he said to the sheriff following close behind. “There's a close-contact entry wound in the head. Who called this in?”

“A geologist from Weber Incorporated.”

“Where is he?”

“Back at the bed and breakfast.”

Wade jotted down notes on his clipboard. “Get him back here,” he said in a clipped voice. Pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he squatted down for a better look at the wound, picked up a fragment of clothing lying next to the body and sealed it in a plastic bag. “This bog is nearly as good as a mummy's tomb. The body's got flesh, hair and a full skull.”

Jim Marshall, the coroner, arrived mopping his brow, his bulldog face pulled down by heavy jowls and an extra fifty pounds. “Hot enough for you, Wade?”

“I've seen hotter,” Wade replied, unwilling to be distracted. “There's no blood anywhere but on the victim. Whoever this is was shot somewhere else and dumped.”

Marshall nodded his head. “Terry Gilmore is on her way. She's our new forensic anthropologist.” He looked around. “Has the photographer been here yet?”

Carlisle exchanged a look with Wade. “He's coming from Salisbury. He could have hitched a ride with you if anybody had thought of it.”

Wade laughed. “You don't want to work us too hard, now, do you, Blake?”

“No, sir.”

“How old do you think these bones are?” asked Wade.

“It's hard to say.” Marshall scribbled something on his own clipboard. “I'll do a field test after the photographer is through and then we'll send everything to the crime lab. It may be that Terry Gilmore can be more specific but, either way, I'll fax you the details as soon as I know.”

Wade nodded. “Carlisle,” he asked. “Did you get a statement from the geologist?”

Blake handed it over.

Wade skimmed it quickly and handed it back. “How big is your office?” he asked.

“Big enough for one at a time.”

“That's too bad because there'll be quite a few of us there until I'm satisfied we haven't missed anything.”

“I figured.” Blake glanced at his watch. “If we get back in time, I'll have my deputy make a food run. With any luck, Verna Lee might be willing to throw in some of her potato salad with the sandwiches.”

“I knew a Verna Lee in high school.” Wade stroked his jaw. “Verna Lee Washington. Pretty black girl with a knock-'em-dead body.”

“That would be her, except now she's Verna Lee Fontaine.”

Wade frowned at something in the distance. “I wouldn't have figured her for a shopkeeper. She was smarter than the rest of us put together and not afraid to let everybody know it.”

“She came back from San Francisco about fifteen years ago and started up her business. It's a health food store, and a little bit of everything else. Verna Lee's a success story.”

“Most people don't come back to places like Marshy Hope Creek once they've had a taste of the big city.”

Blake shrugged. “Verna Lee and her grandmother, Drusilla, don't have any other family. That's reason enough, I guess.”

Wade acknowledged that it was. His attention was diverted by the photographer who had just arrived on the scene. “What took you so long?” he asked bluntly.

“I'm backup for Ken Mitchell. I was in a movie theater.”

“Watch where you're stepping,” Wade warned him. “We need close-ups of the head wound, a full figure shot, any evidence we find and an orientation photo. Do you know what you're doing?”

The photographer, a young man with a black goatee and hoops in his ears, nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “This isn't exactly new territory.”

“Good.” Wade pulled out his dark glasses and settled into his watch-and-wait mode until the forensic anthropologist showed her face.

Fifteen minutes later she was in the field, a tall woman in her forties, dressed in what looked like hospital scrubs and tennis shoes. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and knelt beside the body. Wade walked over to introduce himself.

“I'll be with you in a minute, Detective,” she said tersely.

Wade backed away. He appreciated efficiency when he saw it in action.

Jim Marshall approached him. “We've got a few other cases on the schedule. Is this one a high priority?”

“What have you got?”

“One domestic homicide. Victim was strangled with a necktie.” Marshall looked up at the sky. “We've got a three-year-old girl with a head injury and broken limbs. Looks like she was thrown down the stairs.”

“Good God.” Wade's lips were tight and thin. “Do you ever wonder why we do this?”

“The pension's good.”

“I wonder.”

“You won't wonder so much when you're my age.”

Terry Gilmore had finished her field test. She stripped off her gloves, dropped them into a plastic bag she'd secured to her waist, pulled a pen and small pad from her pocket and began writing furiously.

Wade nodded in her direction. “She looks like she's got it together.”

Marshall grunted. “Time will tell. We lose quite a few. Usually our bones are from Indian burial grounds. That's a nightmare of paperwork and waiting.”

The woman looked up from her notes and walked over. “We'll grid off the site and cast the skull. There's a good chance I can reconstruct the face. Bone-marrow scrapings tell us quite a bit more. Marks on the pelvis indicate childbirth. It's hard to tell how long these bones have been buried, but my guess is about twelve to fifteen years. I'll have more information for you after I've completed my tests.”

Wade was impressed. “Nice work.” He waved Carlisle over. “Pull out all your files ten to twenty years old.”

“There aren't too many open files here in Marshy Hope Creek.”

“I said all of them. After we get the evidence figured out and logged, it'll be just me, you and your deputy. The coroner has bigger fish to fry.” He started to walk away, turned back and grinned. “Now's a good time to be thinking about those sandwiches. Tell Verna Lee I'll be stopping by.”

“He said what?” Verna Lee's hands were on her hips, a sure sign that a line was being drawn in the sand.

Blake knew something was wrong. He just didn't know what. “He said he'd be stopping by.”

“Is that a warning or something?”

Now he was frustrated. “Lord, Verna Lee. How would I know? I thought he was an old schoolmate. You're making it sound as if the guy has some ulterior motive.”

“They usually do,” she muttered under her breath.

“Can you make up the sandwiches or not?”

She waved her hand. “I can, but you won't get a discount.”

“Fair enough.”

“You'll have to pick them up. I don't deliver.”

“I know that, too,” Blake said patiently.

Verna Lee turned her back, fanned her pink cheeks with her hand and began pulling ingredients from the refrigerator. “Give me half an hour.”
Wade Atkins.
Who would've thought? There was a time when she'd hoped every one of the Atkins clan would drink too much of that corn liquor old Morris made up with regularity and fall into one of those rarely traveled fingers of the Chesapeake, preferably into the jaws of a hungry alligator. Clem and Howard, and to a lesser degree, Wade, secure in their blond good looks, hazed her unmercifully about her hair, her clothes, her brains, her lack of parents and the pouty fullness of her lips in an era when beautiful meant Christie Brinkley and Cheryl Tiegs.