The Bone Yard (23 page)

Chapter 26

A
ngie wasn’t back by eight, or by eight-fifteen. At eight-thirty, Vickery went ahead with the morning briefing, which was short and to the point. The good news was, FDLE’s forensic divers had recovered the GPS collar from the Miccosukee River late the previous day, along with a .45-caliber pistol that the Firearms Section would clean and test-fire, in hopes of matching the bullets from Pettis and Jasper. The bad news was, Anthony Delozier—the reform school “alumnus” who’d done graduate study at the state prison—had dropped off the radar screen. He’d missed two mandatory meetings with his parole officer, and no one in the rough-edged trailer park where he lived had seen him in the past ten days. Rodriguez raised his hand. “You think Delozier might have killed Pettis or Hatfield?”

“I don’t see him killing Pettis,” Vickery answered. “What would be his motive? Why would a guy who tells us to find the Bone Yard kill the very person who’s helping us find it? Hatfield, though—I can totally see him wanting to take out Hatfield. What’s the old saying about revenge? ‘A dish best served cold’? Delozier had years in Starke to cook it up and let it chill.”

It was nearly nine by the time Angie showed up, and Vickery had checked his watch and dialed her phone at least a dozen times by then.

“Sorry, Stu,” she said. “I fell asleep without setting the alarm.” She looked exhausted, as if she’d lain awake most of the night before finally nodding off. Or never nodded off at all.

“Is your phone on? I’ve been trying to call you for half an hour.”

“Sure, it’s always on.” She unclipped it from her belt. “Oh, crap; no, it isn’t. I shut it off when Ned and I went to a movie. I totally spaced out. Obviously. I’m really sorry.”

Annoyed, he waved her off, and she motioned to me to walk with her to the one grave we’d not yet excavated. As we walked, she powered up the phone, and once it was on, it gave a chirp. “Oh, great,” she said when she saw the display. “A text message from Don Asshole Nicely.” Her finger hesitated, then she pushed a button to call up the message. Her eyes narrowed, and then a hand went up to her mouth. She stared at the screen, as if something astonishing were unfolding there.

“Angie? You okay?”

“Jesus,” she said. “Read this and tell me what you think it means.”

She handed me the phone. The message read: “From: Don, May 31, 6:44
A.M.
your right I killed Kate and I cant live with it. Im sorry.”

I reread the message. Three times. “Hard to know,” I said. “It might mean he’s ready to confess. Or it might mean he’s suicidal.” I handed the phone back. “Either way, I think it means you need to call the sheriff.”

She nodded, then scrolled through her phone’s contact list and hit a number. “
Dis
-patch,” came a woman’s flat voice through the cell-phone speaker.

“Hello, my name’s Angela St. Claire. I’m the sister of Kate Nicely, who died from a gunshot wound two weeks ago.”

In the background, I heard squawks and staticky radio transmissions, and the periodic beeps indicating that the call was being recorded. “How can I help you, ma’am?”

“I just got a text message from Kate’s husband, Don Nicely. I think maybe you should send somebody to check on him.”

“Why is that, ma’am?”

“He just text-messaged me to say that he killed Kate and that he can’t live with it anymore.”

“Could you repeat that please, ma’am?”

“I just got a text from my dead sister’s husband. Don Nicely. He says he killed Kate and he can’t live with it anymore.”

“And he sent you this text message just now?”

“Actually, he sent it a couple hours ago, but my phone’s been off, so I just now got it. He sent it at . . . hang on just a second . . . at six forty-four this morning.”

The dispatcher was silent for a moment, and I heard radio traffic in the background. “We’ll send someone to check on him. What’s that address?”

“The house is at 119 Amherst Drive. If he’s not there, you might see if he’s shown up at his job. He works at the Walmart out on the bypass.”

“And if we need to reach you, is this the best number?”

“Probably,” said Angie. “But let me give you my office number, too.” She rattled it off. “That’s the crime lab at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. ”

“I’ll send a unit to check on him, ma’am, and we’ll contact you as soon as we know anything.”

“Okay, thanks very much,” Angie said. She hung up, then phoned her husband. “Listen to this,” she said, and told him what had just transpired.

H
alf an hour later, as she and I were beginning to excavate the seventh and final grave, her phone rang. She glanced at the display and drew a deep breath. “Angie St. Claire.”

The volume was cranked up high, and I could hear the sheriff’s voice clearly, even though her cell wasn’t on speakerphone. “Ms. St. Claire, this is Sheriff Etheridge, up in Cheatham County, Georgia. I’m calling to ask if you could come up and see me today, please.”

“Have you talked to Don? Did he confess?”

“I need to speak with you in person, ma’am.”

“Sheriff, I’m working a big crime scene right now, the murders at the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory. I’ll be glad to come up there if there’s a good reason, but I’d appreciate knowing what’s going on. Has Don Nicely confessed to killing my sister?”

There was a long silence on the other end. Finally the sheriff said, “Ms. St. Claire, your brother-in-law is dead, and I need a statement from you. How soon could you come in and do that?”

“I’m out in Miccosukee County, Sheriff, about an hour west of Tallahassee. I can probably be there in about ninety minutes.” She hesitated, then asked, “Can you tell me how he died?”

“No, ma’am. We’re not releasing any details until we’ve done a thorough investigation.”

“Of course. I understand. I’ll be at your office in the courthouse as soon as I can.”

She hung up, stared at the phone awhile, and took a series of deep breaths. “He’s dead,” she said. “The man who murdered my sister is dead. Thank God. There is some semblance of justice in this world after all.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. She shook her head, then looked at me. “A thorough investigation. Why is it that the locals spent all of sixty seconds on Kate’s death, but they’re ready to pull out all the stops to investigate that son of a bitch Don’s?”

I shrugged. “He was a man—a white man. That might be part of it.” I hesitated, but decided it would be foolish not to say what was hanging in the air, unspoken between us. “Might also be that they figure somebody had a pretty good reason to kill him.”

“Somebody sure did,” she said. “Mainly his own sorry self.” She called up the text message she’d received. “Look here. He said it himself. ‘I’m sorry.’ That’s for damn sure. As sorry as they come.”

I shifted my gaze from the screen to her exhausted face. “Angie? Is there any chance the sheriff might find anything that could implicate you?”

“No,” she said. She shook her head and then I thought I saw a hint of a smile, so brief and slight and enigmatic I instantly doubted whether I’d seen it. “Not a chance.”

That enigmatic smile scared the hell out of me.

Chapter 27

A
ngie was back at the scene by late afternoon, looking wrung out. Don Nicely had died from a shotgun blast to the head—a blast virtually identical to the one that had killed Kate. The Cheatham County sheriff had questioned Angie for two hours, she said, and would expect her to come back for another interview soon. The sheriff had also questioned her husband, Ned. Ned had confirmed that she’d been with him all night, at the movies and then at home, but the sheriff seemed unconvinced.

She related this to me as she swept a metal detector over a grave—the outermost of the graves we’d discovered. It was the seventh and last of the graves to be excavated; it was also, I suspected, the last of the graves to have been dug, lying as it did on the outermost margin of the Bone Yard.

The skull, which I’d excavated first, was that of another young white male. Judging by the presence of the twelve-year molars and the partial fusion of the sutures in the palate, his age was probably somewhere between twelve and fifteen. Although I couldn’t be sure, because of the dirt and remnants of tissue on the bone, I didn’t see any skull fractures. The absence of trauma gave me some small hope—foolish, perhaps—that his death had been less brutal than the other boys’ deaths appeared to have been.

The bones were slight of stature, and still not fully developed; the ends of the long bones were not yet fused to the shafts, I saw as I began working inward from the margins, so he—like the others—had still been growing at the time of his death. My guess, which I’d be able to confirm or correct when I examined the teeth and bones more closely, was that he’d been in his early teens—older than the prepubescent child whose skull had been Jasper’s first find, but certainly younger than the robust lad whose skull had been Jasper’s second find.

So: fourteen, perhaps. His hip bones, though, could have come from an arthritic seventy-year-old.

Viewed from the front, human hip bones show more than a passing resemblance to a big, bony pair of ears—the ears of an African bull elephant, to be specific, spread wide as he’s about to charge. The top of the hip bone, the iliac crest, looks a bit like the ear’s thick upper edge, sculpted in bone. During childhood, the iliac crest is attached to the ear-shaped ilium by cartilage that eventually ossifies, turns to bone, once the hips have finished growing; during adulthood, the sutures fade, just as the sutures in the skull gradually fill in and disappear over the decades of adult life. In this boy’s pelvis, the iliac crest had not yet fully fused, because his growth spurt was just winding down, and the suture was more like a fissure, a valley, than a plain. I’d expected that.

What I hadn’t expected, and what I’d never seen before in any adolescent pelvis, was the arthritic appearance of the hips in the region of the iliac crest. Instead of being smooth and graceful, the bone along the suture line—the bone that had most recently been deposited along the growth plate—was thick, uneven, and lumpy, especially on the right side, though somewhat on the left as well.

As I studied the deformity, the realization of what had caused it dawned on me with chilling horror. When soft tissue or bone is damaged, inflammation occurs. Inflammation is painful, but it’s crucial to healing, especially in broken bones: blood flows to the site of the break, bringing with it an abundant supply of cells that clot into a thick, collagen-rich splice called a “healing callus.” Over the course of six or eight weeks, the collagen matrix in the callus fills in with calcium and becomes new bone. In this boy’s case, I realized, trauma to the hip bones—trauma at the vulnerable growth plate—caused inflammation, creating a callus that calcified into the thick, lumpy contours I was now seeing. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the likely cause of the trauma to the hip bones was a five-foot leather strap, slamming again and again into the buttocks and hips of a growing boy. A boy who lived long enough to heal, in a slightly misshapen way, before being killed.

But what had killed him, months after he survived a beating—perhaps even multiple beatings—that had been forceful enough to deform his hip bones? I hoped the grave would contain the answer.

During Angie’s absence, Rodriguez had done an initial scan with the metal detector before I’d begun excavating, just as we’d done with the six prior graves. Alerted by the detector’s staticky squawk, I’d been watching for metal as I’d troweled down through the shredded plastic and sandy earth, working my way from the edges of the grave inward to the bones. I hadn’t gotten far—only as far as the boy’s right thigh—when I found a piece of metal embedded in the back of the bone. It was a bullet, lodged in the bone in much the same way as the flint arrowhead I’d once found in an Arikara Indian thigh. But the Arikara warrior had been an adult, a warrior, shot in battle; this was a boy, shot from behind, probably as he ran.

From the legs, I’d worked my way up the pelvis, up the spine, until I reached the third lumbar vertebra, the one centered in the small of the back. That vertebra’s spinous process—the knob jutting from the body of the bone, to give muscles a place to attach—was snapped off, and the vertebral foramen—the channel through which the spinal cord ran—was collapsed. Some powerful blow, possibly from the edge of the heavy leather strap, or more likely from something heavier, like a baseball bat or a metal pipe, had shattered the bone and doubtless crushed the spinal cord. The fracture lines here remained sharp, with no signs of healing. This injury, unlike the trauma to the hip bones, had occurred at or around the time of death.

The damage to the spinal cord would almost surely have paralyzed the boy’s legs. But would it have killed him? Not directly, though if he’d spiraled down into shock, he could have died within hours or even minutes. That theory seemed plausible, but then, as I continued to probe the grave, I found a small bone that forced a new and terrible realization on me. It was the hyoid—the fragile, U-shaped bone from the front of the throat—and it was snapped, the way a chicken’s wishbone would snap if you squeezed its ends together instead of pulling them apart.

I could think of only one sequence of events that fit all the pieces of this skeletal puzzle together: long after the boy’s initial beating or beatings—perhaps he still walked with a limp; perhaps, having been damaged already, he was an easy target for continuing abuse—he’d tried to escape. He’d been shot, then beaten again, so brutally that a vertebra shattered, rendering his legs useless. At that point, realizing things had gone much too far, someone had wrapped a strong, pitiless hand around the boy’s throat and strangled him.

A
fter I finished excavating the ravaged skeleton, Angie scanned the grave with the metal detector again, and again the instrument squealed angrily in her hands. The signal was strongest in the area where the top of the chest had lain. I dug deeper with the tip of the trowel, watching closely for the glint of metal. As I flicked aside a pea-sized clump of earth, I heard the faint clink of metal on metal, of trowel on artifact. “Got something,” I called, and Angie came over to crouch beside the grave as I dug deeper. A small hollow took shape beneath a miniature dirt cliff, and tiny avalanches of sandy soil broke free and trickled down. And tumbling down in one of these crumbling little landslides was a disk of blackened metal, two inches across and a half inch thick, its rim rounded and its weight slight enough to hint at hollowness. A seam around its equatorial edge, and a corroded bulge that might once have been a hinge, seemed to corroborate this notion. Might it be a locket, a boy’s memento of his mother?

It was not a locket. What it was, I saw as Angie carefully pried it open, was a compass.

We had just found the remains of Buck, I felt sure.

I felt something else, too, something I’d never felt before during an excavation: I felt tears streaming down my face as the story of the boy’s death emerged from the ground.

The diary had told us that Buck had died the night he tried to escape. The bones now told us that Buck had died the most painful, brutal death of all the boys we’d found here.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Buck checking his compass by the light of the moon, picking a direction, and starting to run. And then I saw him tumble to the ground as a guard’s bullet tore into his leg from behind and the guards closed in on him for the kill.

Leading the pack—a rifle still clutched in his one good hand—I imagined Cockroach.