Freefall (30 page)

Standing outside the yellow crime scene tape that had been used to cordon off the excavation, Sabrina, with Zach's arm around her shoulder, watched in stunned disbelief as a crew that Nate had called in from the state law enforcement division to assist with the investigation combed the site with metal detectors and sifted soil within grid areas created by staking out string in twelve-inch squares.

"Surely it's not part of the recent murders," she said to no one in particular.

"I'm no forensic techie, but the bones look old," Special Agent Caitlin Cavanaugh commented.

Although at this point the FBI didn't have any jurisdiction here, the agent said she'd been intrigued enough to drop by after Nate had also called her.

Or maybe, Sabrina mused, the lanky redhead was more interested in the sheriff than in his crime scene.

Wouldn't Titania love that?

"See how the skull's downhill from the rest of the body?" the agent pointed out, as casually as if she dealt with dead people every day.

Which, Sabrina realized, she might.

"The garden was built on an incline, and since the skull's usually the first part to become separated from the rest of the body, because all the orifices provide such an attractive location for maggot activity—"

A faint, ragged moan flew out of Sabrina's mouth before she could call it back. She pressed an arm against her stomach, which had pitched at the gory images those words had conjured up.

"Perhaps you should go inside and sit down, Sabrina, dear," Harlan, who'd been called to the scene in his capacity as medical examiner, said solicitously. "You're looking a little pale."

She was sick to death of hearing that.

"I'm fine," she snapped, more sharply than she'd intended, knowing from the way his face fell that he'd only been concerned for her. Both as a family member and as her doctor.

She placed a hand on his sleeve. "Really."

"Sorry," Caitlin Cavanaugh said with a grimace. "I get so fascinated by this stuff, I tend to forget I'm talking to civilians."

"No problem," Sabrina said. "Really," she insisted yet again as she felt Zach looking down at her with the same concern Harlan had displayed. She lifted her chin and instructed her mutinous stomach to stay put. "You were saying?"

While decaying bodies might be at the bottom of her list of conversational topics, they were still preferable to discussing the post-bombing state of her health.

The agent gave her a probing look, then shrugged.

"Well, anyway," she continued, "a lot of times something about teeth that come out postmortem will help us learn the identify of the person. Maybe a filling, a crown, that sort of thing.

"When the skull's several feet away, as it happens to be in this case, teeth will usually be found somewhere between the skull and the body."

She glanced over at Sabrina again. "Are you sure you wouldn't like to go inside, Ms. Swann?"

"I'm fine."

Swannsea was her home. Her legacy. Which meant that this situation, as unsavory as it was, was her responsibility.

"Sheriff Spencer said you don't have any idea who it could be?"

"No idea at all." Sabrina shook her head. "There's been a private cemetery on the grounds of Swannsea for more than a century. Since shortly after the Civil War. There'd be no reason for any family member to be buried in my grandmother's garden."

"Maybe it wasn't a family member," the agent suggested. "Maybe it happened during the war. Perhaps some Union soldier came by to do a little looting and plundering, faced a bit of local opposition, and didn't make it back across the Mason-Dixon Line alive."

"That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it, Cait?" Zach suggested mildly. "Maybe you ought to get together with Quinn and collaborate on a thriller."

She snorted. "Wouldn't that be something?" she scoffed. "Then the police would be investigating a new homicide, since there's no way McKade and I could be in the same room for ten minutes without one of us killing the other."

"Not to hear him tell it," Nate murmured as one of the techs put a bit of soil into a screw-top plastic bottle.

"What?" Cait Cavanaugh's head spun toward him.

Sabrina wasn't quite sure how Zach knew the former Somersett homicide detective turned FBI special agent, but when he'd introduced her as an old friend, she'd gotten the impression that there was definitely some personal history there.

When something alien stirred, something she reluctantly recognized as jealousy, Sabrina tamped it back down.

If there'd been anything important between them, he would tell her. And if Caitlin Cavanaugh and Zach
had
had a romantic relationship, it was in the past.

Bygones.

"It wasn't any big deal." Zach jumped in to help Nate, who was looking as if he wished he'd kept his big mouth shut. "We were playing cards the other night and Nate mentioned having talked to you about his serial killer. Which was when Quinn casually said something about having dated your roommate."

"That was a long time ago," Caitlain said briskly, effectively slamming the door on that topic of conversation.

She frowned and folded her arms across the front of her charcoal suit that had to be uncomfortably hot, though it was summer weight. But Sabrina didn't think heat had anything to do with the color staining those chiseled cheekbones.

"If any teeth would be found between the body and the, uh, skull"—Sabrina had trouble saying the word out loud—"why are they sifting dirt from all over the site?"

"Because you never know what a killer will drop," Nate said, showing he'd done his homework. "A cigarette butt, maybe even a receipt showing a date and time, anything that could prove helpful in apprehending him."

"If the bad guys weren't stupid, we'd never catch them," Caitlin agreed. "We tend to use the same basic principles and procedures that archaeologists do when they come across the ruins of some ancient civilization, or dinosaur bones. But because we don't have the same luxuries of time in law enforcement, we have to work faster. Which means also working smart.

"We studied a crime scene at the academy where the killer had knelt down beside his victim—who happened to be a twelve-year-old girl he'd nabbed on her way home from school—and ended up leaving an impression of his palm in the dirt.

"Well, it was red Georgia clay, which left enough of a readable ridge that we were able to track him down by his fingerprints."

"That's amazing." Harlan, apparently in medical examiner mode, was clearly impressed.

Sabrina, who'd never watched
CSI
or any of those other copycat forensic shows because they grossed her out, silently agreed.

"It is rare," the agent admitted.

She rocked back on her pumps, which, while a staid FBI black, were Bruno Maglis. Having always considered the Italian designer a shoe god, Sabrina decided that this made her and the special agent, at least in one respect, kindred spirits.

"But you never know," Caitlin Cavanaugh continued. "Which is why it's important to process it like any other crime scene. There's also the chance that stuff fell from the victim's pockets, or maybe there's some jewelry, something that will help identify him."

"Or her," Harlan said.

"Or her," the agent concurred.

As if on cue, one of the technicians sifting the soil shouted, "I've got something."

The captain in charge of the crime scene took the evidence in a gloved hand and carried it over to where the others were standing.

"Would you happen to recognize this, Ms. Swann?" he asked on a drawl that spoke of Piedmont roots.

"I'm afraid not."

It was a man's gold ring. Heavy yellow gold, with a framed crest she didn't recognize, three Greek letters engraved on one side of the crest, and a date—1958'—on the other. Which, she thought, definitely disproved Caitlin Cavanaugh's imaginative murdered-Yankee-soldier hypothesis.

"I don't recall ever seeing it before."

Sabrina was trying to remember her Greek alphabet when Harlan gasped.

"Oh, my God!" he said. "It's Robert's."

"Robert?" the SLED captain asked.

Zach, whose expression rarely gave away his feelings, appeared as stunned as Sabrina felt. "Robert Swann?"

"My grandfather?"

It was impossible. The man who had deserted Lucie in the middle of the night to escape being prosecuted for a bank fraud might be dead.

He could have died in a car crash on a freeway somewhere in California, or keeled over from a heart attack while making love to some woman half his age in Las Vegas. Or even been eaten by a shark while surfing off the Australian coast.

But to have been murdered in cold blood?

And buried in Lucie's garden all these years?

The very thought was inconceivable.

Wasn't it?

"It's a Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity ring," Harlan said.

"Are you sure?" Caitlin asked.

"Of course," he said, regaining a bit of his physician's authoritative tone. "We were fraternity brothers at USC." He held out a visibly shaking hand. "I have the same ring."

It was, to Sabrina's eyes, identical. Same yellow gold, same crest, same initials.

"Okay," she said on a short, exhaled breath as white spots, like snowflakes, began swirling in front of her eyes. "I believe I'd like to sit down now."

Titania had been practicing her patience. If she was going to be in a relationship with a law enforcement officer—and it appeared she was—then she was going to have to become accustomed to his being called out at all hours of the day and night.

If she wanted a nine-to-fiver, she may as well sleep with a banker, like Jeremy Macon's son, Dennis, who for the past two years had been hitting on her every afternoon when she deposited the day's receipts.

It wasn't that Dennis was so terrible. Oh, he was a little dumpy, due to all the hours spent behind a desk, but he certainly wasn't obese, like his father. His sandy hair was beginning to thin at the temples, and his attempt to hide it with a comb-over definitely wasn't working.

But all in all, a girl could do worse. If she didn't mind spending the rest of her life bored senseless.

It might be showing her shallow side, but Titania liked the fact that Nate hadn't let himself go since leaving the Marines. That his body was as hard and ripped as it had been when he'd been one of the few. The proud.

And despite being antiwar on principle, she had to admit that that pistol he wore on his hip like some old-time gunslinger was fiat out sexy.

He was also intelligent, which was a plus, because while she was clever enough to know that looks faded, brains didn't (at least most times, anyway), and even if the sex was off the Richter scale—which with Nate it definitely was—if she couldn't talk to a man out of bed, well, she didn't want him
in
her bed in the first place.

She also had to admit that beneath that hottie Marine body and fitted khaki uniform was a genuinely sweet man. Which was why, although she wasn't about to tell him yet, she'd fallen in love with him.

But even loving him didn't mean that she was happy about him having left a message on her voice mail telling her that something had come up and he was probably going to have to cancel their movie date.

Hoping it wasn't yet another murder, she took a deep breath and braced herself as she entered Silver Shores Manor.

The first thing she noticed, other than that smell, which, heaven help her, she was getting used to, was that the TV was tuned to the news again.

Wondering how many times she had to tell the staff that murder and mayhem weren't beneficial to the residents' peace of mind, she was about to change the channel when she saw her hunk sheriff on the screen.

And even more surprising, Nate appeared to be standing in front of Swannsea.

Oh, please, God, she thought as she sank down into an empty vinyl chair beside her father's wheelchair, don't have let anything have happened to Sabrina!

Nate was talking about a body being found. Blessedly, not a woman's body. One that appeared to have been buried a very long time ago.

Joshua Davis muttered something under his breath.

"What, Daddy?" she asked absently as Nate was explaining that SLED would be sending the bones to the crime lab and it could take time to get a positive identification.

"I said, it's Robert," he said in a stage whisper. "That bastard Robert Swann."

Her father had always been the sweetest, most gentle man she'd ever known in her life. She adored him to pieces, and he was why, she realized now, as she took his hand in hers and tried to unfold his fingers, which had tightened into a stiff claw, she'd responded to those same traits in Nate Spencer.

"Daddy," she soothed, "you can't possibly know that."

Though, given how Lucie's husband had mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night, Titania supposed there was an outside possibility he'd guessed right.

Poor Sabrina! She must be beside herself.

"It's him," he said, with more authority in his tone than she'd heard in years. "I figured he'd surface one of these days."

He shook his head with what appeared to be very real regret. Looked out the window for a very long time.

"You have to understand, Mel," he said, once again calling her by her mother's name. "I did it for you."

"Did what, Daddy?"

His stared at her for a long time, making her think that she'd lost him again, even deeper into that labyrinth of what had once been a quick and clever mind. So clever that Lucie Swann, ignoring warnings about the potential perils of giving a black man so much control over her business holdings, had put him in charge of Swann Tea.

"I killed him, Mel." Those clawlike fingers squeezed hers until she feared he'd break them. "I killed that lowlife bastard, Robert Swann."