Devil's Night (7 page)

“I should probably see one myself,” she said, “but I’m stubborn that way. It didn’t help that there was more excitement a few months ago.”

“Eric Olmstead and his brother,” Henry said.

Kat seemed surprised, although not unpleasantly so. If anything, Henry sensed she was impressed that her tiny town had once again made international news. Although not as big as the Grim Reaper murders, the story of Eric Olmstead’s quest to find the brother who had vanished decades before was enough to get the attention of his newspaper, if only for a day or so. Eric’s mystery novels, after all, were just as popular in Italy as they were in the United States. And the case was so sensational that no editor could resist.

“I barely survived that one, too,” Kat said.

“Maybe you have nine lives, like your name implies.”

“I hope so. Because I have a feeling today is going to kill me.”

They had yet to talk about the reason Kat was in the town’s history museum at such an odd hour. Henry knew it wasn’t just a fire keeping her up. Something else was going on. Something bad.

“Who was killed?”

Kat didn’t even bother asking him how he knew. He was a reporter. Part of his job was to be observant. Certainly, she was aware that a mobile CSI lab parked in front of the museum would tip off even the worst journalist.

“Constance Bishop,” Kat said. “President of the historical society. You ever come into contact with her during your time here?”

Henry hadn’t. He hadn’t been the most outgoing person when he lived in Perry Hollow. He hadn’t come out of his shell until a serial killer started playing mind games with him.

“I know you’ll catch whoever did it,” he said.

“Once again, we have help. Don’t be surprised if you see state troopers filling the streets while working on your article.”

“Is Nick Donnelly one of them?”

Kat gave a terse shake of her head. It’s what Henry had feared—Nick was no longer a cop. He had thought the state police would give him the benefit of the doubt. But some violations were too big to look past. Nick’s, apparently, had been one of them.

“I hate to do this,” Kat said, checking her watch and taking one last gulp of coffee, “but I need to run. I have to head out to the morgue.”

“That,” Henry said, “doesn’t sound like fun.”

“It won’t be.”

This time it was Kat who grasped his hands, squeezing them tight as she made him promise not to leave Perry Hollow again without saying good-bye. Henry swore he wouldn’t. He would be working all day and was scheduled to leave the next morning. His last stop, he told her, would be to give her and James a proper farewell. The one he should have given them a year ago.

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Kat said, placing some cash on the table and sliding out of the booth.

Before she left, Henry impulsively grabbed the sleeve of her uniform. The move startled not only Kat but himself as well. Usually, he was more composed than that. But there was one more bit of information he needed to know. Something that had been on his mind for a full year.

“Do you ever see Deana?” He had wanted to seem casual, to make it sound like an offhanded question, as if he had just thought of it. Instead, it came out strained and worried. “I’m curious about how she’s doing.”

“I haven’t really seen her,” Kat said. “She keeps a pretty low profile now. I know she’s still in town. She got a job at the library after the funeral home closed. Other than that, I have no idea how she’s doing. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”

Henry nodded his thanks before letting go of her sleeve. He remained in the booth as Kat wound her way around the old men and hungry night-shift workers trickling into the diner. Through the window overlooking the parking lot, he watched her get into her patrol car.

He didn’t leave the diner until he was certain Kat had driven away. Henry didn’t want her to see the slump-shouldered way he stepped into the gray gloom of dawn. He didn’t want her to notice his sad expression as he faced east. And most of all, he didn’t want Chief Campbell to see the direction he was headed in and realize his next destination.

6
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M
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Kat drove to the county morgue accompanied only by the Crown Vic’s radio and a sack of bones in the backseat. All the state troopers, Lieutenant Tony Vasquez included, stayed behind at the museum to work the homicide investigation. That meant Kat was alone on bone duty, an assignment that, while interesting, wasn’t quite as vital as trying to identify a killer. She thought of it as desk duty—mere busywork to keep her from bothering the big boys.

She didn’t mind. Much. Naturally, she wanted to be where the action was, but at least this way she could size up Nick’s girlfriend without anyone else present.

On the way to the morgue, Kat swore she wouldn’t make any snap judgments about Lucy Meade, pro or con. Nick was a grown man who could make his own decisions about who he wanted to date. Or sleep with. Or whatever he and Lucy were doing. Kat’s main priority was to learn as much as possible about the skeleton found in the museum.

Still, she couldn’t help keeping a mental checklist, especially when Lucy arrived right on time, pulling up to the morgue in a red Volkswagen Beetle. It was a vintage one, still in prime condition. That was definitely a mark in the plus column, with an extra point for punctuality.

When Lucy got out of the car, Kat was surprised by what she saw. Lucy looked to be a good ten years younger than Nick, with bright blue eyes and shoulder-length auburn hair that she tucked behind her ears before shaking Kat’s hand. Petty jealousy usually dictated that youth and beauty went into Kat’s minus column, but she stayed neutral this time. It was easy to see why Nick was attracted to her. Lucy was stunning.

“So you’re the famous Kat Campbell,” she said with a grin. “I’m so happy I finally get to meet you. Nick talks about you nonstop.”

“All good things, I hope.”

“All
great
things.”

Flattery. Straight to the plus column every time.

“He even told me how you like your coffee.” Lucy reached across the front seat of her Beetle, emerging with a giant thermos. “Black and strong, right?”

This was a tough one. Under any other circumstance, bringing coffee earned a place in the plus column. But Kat had practically a whole pot of java sloshing around in her stomach, and while the caffeine kept her mind alert, it wasn’t sitting well with the rest of her body. Still, it was the thought that counted. Another plus.

Lucy must have seen the uncertain look on her face because she said, “You just had some, didn’t you? Considering the hour, I should have known.”

“No, it’s fine,” Kat said. “I just should have had some food with it, I think.”

Lucy reached deep into the car again, this time returning with a flat box tied shut with some string. “Then it’s a good thing I also brought doughnuts.”

That was the moment Kat gave up trying to keep score. Lucy had passed with flying colors.

“So, these bones were found in the history museum?” she asked Kat once they entered the morgue.

“In a crawl space under the floorboards. They were in a trunk that a murder victim was found on top of.”

“Any indication that the victim knew they were there?”

“Not that I know of,” Kat said. “Our theory is that the body was put there by whoever killed her.”

“So these bones might not have anything to do with the murder.”

“Or they might be the key to solving it.”

Kat took the bag of bones to the morgue’s second autopsy suite, the first one being presently occupied by Wallace Noble and the body of Constance Bishop. Inside, she dumped the bones onto a stainless steel table in the center of the room.

Lucy grabbed a white lab coat and some latex gloves, putting them on before approaching the table. “Is this everything that was found in the trunk?”

“The whole shebang,” Kat said.

“Well, right off the bat, I can tell that these are some old bones.” Lucy started sliding them around the table, putting them in order from top to bottom. “I already see some bone rot.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to tell how old they are?”

“Possibly. Nothing exact, mind you. Maybe a ballpark figure.”

“That’s better than nothing.”

Kat retreated to a corner of the autopsy suite and grabbed a doughnut, munching on it while she watched Lucy work. For her part, Lucy was all business as she studied the bones. She arranged them slowly and methodically, occasionally pausing to give one a closer inspection.

“These are pretty well preserved,” she said, picking up a hand with fingers permanently splayed. She examined the back of the hand, then the palm, then the back again, swiveling it in a kind of morbid wave. “And while I can already tell this isn’t a complete skeleton, there’s a lot less scatter than I thought there’d be.”

“Scatter?”

“A body left out in the open never stays in one piece for very long. Animals usually come along quickly, taking bones with them. A corpse left in a forest could be scattered for miles within two weeks.”

Although she’d taken only two bites of her doughnut, Kat returned it to the box and closed the lid. Hearing about scattered bodies made her no longer hungry. “Since that didn’t happen in this case, then it means the body was buried.”

Lucy looked up from the table, a flash of approval in her blue eyes. “Nick told me you were a quick study.”

“Thanks, but I had help,” Kat said. “We found dirt with the bones.”

“How did it smell?”

“Pardon?”

“The dirt. Did it smell fresh?”

“A little bit. Not as overpowering as a freshly plowed field, but close enough.”

Holding the skull to her nose, Lucy sniffed deeply. “I see what you mean. That smell doesn’t come from the dirt itself. It comes from microbes that are in the dirt, which die off and fade away.”

“So this was all dug up very recently,” Kat said.

“Within a day or two.”

Kat couldn’t help but be impressed. It was clear that Lucy Meade was whip smart. Another mark in the already cluttered plus column.

“You’ve told me more in five minutes than I could have found out in five hours,” she said.

“Glad I could help,” Lucy replied. “Now, if we’re lucky, I’ll also be able to find out how old the person was when she died and what killed her.”

“She?”
Kat emerged from the corner and edged close to the table. “How can you tell?”

Lucy pointed to a section of bones in the center of the table. They formed the shape of a wide heart, with a large hole in the center.

“The pelvis,” she said. “It’s bigger in women than in men, thanks to our childbearing capabilities. And if I was a betting woman, I’d go all-in on the fact that our Jane Doe here had at least one child of her own.”

By that point, Lucy had finished arranging the bones on the table so that they were in the same order as the human body—skull on top, broken-off toes at the bottom. She pulled an iPhone from the front pocket of her jeans and started circling the table, taking pictures of the bones.

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to send these to a colleague of mine in Harrisburg. He knows more about identifying the age of bones than I do.”

“Would it be better if he saw one of them himself?” Kat asked.

“That would help.” Lucy shoved the phone back into a front pocket of her jeans. “You want me to head over there?”

“Seriously?”

“Sure,” Lucy said. “It’s not that far of a drive. And with the equipment he has, we might be able to tell you with some accuracy how old these bones really are.”

Kat didn’t know whether to hug Lucy, jump for joy, or both. Instead, she added a gigantic checkmark in her mental plus column.

“Take whatever bone you want,” she said. “Any information you can get will be more than we know now.”

Lucy’s hands hovered over the table as she decided which bone to choose. Furrowing her brow and biting her lower lip, she resembled a kid in a candy store who was told she could buy only one item. Much like what a kid would do, she settled on the biggest one—the femur.

“Now this is interesting,” she said, turning the bone over in her hands. “All of these were found in a trunk, right?”

“Technically, they were in a burlap sack inside the trunk.”

“And there was no fire damage to either of them?”

“None,” Kat said. “Why?”

Lucy lowered the femur so Kat could get a good look at it, pointing out charcoal-colored splotches on various parts of the bone.

“See those black areas? Those are burn marks.”

“But that’s impossible. The fire was clear on the other side of the room.”

“I believe you,” Lucy said. “Which means this wasn’t the first time these bones have been in a fire. In fact, it’s looking more likely that a fire is how this woman died.”

Contrary to what Kat was expecting, every bit of information Lucy revealed only created new questions instead of answering old ones. The bones of someone’s mother—an apparent fire victim dead for an unknown amount of time—had just been unearthed. They didn’t know where the bones came from, nor did they know who they had once belonged to. And not even Lucy Meade would be able to tell Kat why on earth they had been hidden inside the museum.

*

Once Lucy and the femur had departed for Harrisburg, Kat went looking for Wallace Noble. Now that she knew a little about one person found in the museum, she wanted to get the scoop on the other, more recent set of remains. She found Wallace outside, smoking a cigarette in the morgue’s parking lot.

“Postautopsy smoke?”

“It clears my head,” Wallace said. “I try to think about anything other than what I was just looking at. Today, it’s a young Sophia Loren.”

“Nice. Unfortunately, I need to break your reverie.”

Wallace dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his shoe. “Killjoy.”

Instead of going back inside, he ambled to a nearby bench. One of those curved metal contraptions so popular in the eighties, it was both uncomfortable and unsightly—a fitting combination for a sitting area located next to the front door of a morgue. It was also freezing cold. Kat felt the chill through her uniform as soon as she sat down.