The Homecoming (8 page)

She shook her head. “A dollar doesn’t even cover the cost of the paper plates.”

“It’s Friday.”

“I’m well aware of that. But how does which day of the week it is fit into this discussion?”

“Friday is always Chez Douchett’s all-you-can-eat discount buffet. Luckily Velcro didn’t find that bone on Wednesday, or these guys chowing down on po’boys could be putting a big dent into the town’s budget.”

Kara shook her head. “Arguing with you is futile, isn’t it?”

“You always were a quick study.” She’d been the smartest girl in town. But all those book smarts hadn’t had her realizing that he’d been carrying a major torch for her most of their senior year.

She glanced over the areas sectioned off with string as she took a bite of her sandwich. “I’m beginning to think that bone really was an anomaly.”

“Maybe part of a body that washed down the cliff from some family plot around here.” Although the legal burying of bodies on private land had fallen out of favor, the practice—recently dubbed green burial
—
was gaining in popularity.

“I suppose that’s possible.” She took another bite. “Did you cook this yourself?”

“Not much to it,” he said with a shrug. “Toss some Dungeness into a pot with a couple lemons, garlic, red pepper, and some crab boil, and a few minutes later you got yourself a mess of tasty crab.”

“My mother cooks, but nothing like this. Being a health-freak doctor, she’s more into grilled chicken breasts and steamed veggies. I pretty much nuke. This is really, really good.”

“Everyone has their skills. For me, growing up over the family business, learnin’ to cook was pretty much a rite of passage.”

“Jared cooked sometimes. When he was home. On special occasions.” She scooped up a forkful of the dirty rice. He’d never before realized how arousing it could be to watch a woman actually enjoying eating. Most of the ones he’d ever gone out with would end up ordering a salad, then pick at it all evening. “He’d have enjoyed this.”

Sax was about to tell her that adding the lemon into the jambalaya had been Jared’s idea, the last time they’d hung out with Cole in Bon Temps’ kitchen before the two best friends had shipped off to boot camp. But he didn’t really want to talk about Kara’s husband.

“How much longer are you gonna be out here?” he asked instead.

“As long as it takes.” She took a napkin and dabbed at the corner of her mouth. When he found the casual gesture achingly sexy, Sax began to understand what a guy felt like when he took his first step into quicksand. “Why?”

“I just was wonderin’ whether or not to call Dad and ask him to keep the mutt overnight.” Knowing that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to keep Velcro in the house while everyone was out on the beach, he’d called his dad at first light and asked him to keep the dog at the bait shop.

“We should be finished soon.” Her amber eyes scanned the area. “I sure wish we knew where, exactly, she found the bone, because then we could work outward from there looking for the rest of the skeleton.”

“If the body did wash up onto the beach from a wreck, odds are the wildlife have scattered it around.”

“Isn’t that a lovely thought,” she murmured. “But true. The thing is, heads are usually the first to detach from the body. And that’s a much larger part of the body for some animal to carry off. So there’s still a chance of finding something useful.”

“You know your job.”

He also knew that fact about bodies, because he’d called Quinn McKade, an old SEAL teammate, first thing this morning. The fellow sniper he’d once spotted for had married himself a former FBI special agent.

Sax had wanted to talk to Cait McKade not because he didn’t think Kara would be up to her job. But because he wasn’t sure how many details of the case she’d be willing to share. And given that the bone
had
ended up on his property, Sax figured he had a personal stake in finding out where it came from.

“Oceanside PD sent me to a course at the FBI Academy. I picked up a bit of stuff.”

“Naturally, you aced the course.”

Her eyes smiled, just a bit, at that. “You bet.” There was a rumble of thunder out over the ocean. “Storm’s coming,” she said. “Which is all we need.” She stood up, tossed her cleaned-off plate and napkin into the waste-basket he’d brought outside. “Back to work,” she called out to the others.

There were a few grumbles. When they’d all first arrived, everyone had reminded Sax of the mood at an OSU Beaver Nation’s Saturday-afternoon football game tailgate party. As the day had worn on without as much as a tooth having been discovered, enthusiasm visibly flagged.

Until ten minutes later, when a fresh- faced deputy who didn’t look old enough to have a driver’s license came running over to Kara.

“You gotta come, Sheriff,” he said, reminding Sax a lot of Velcro. If the deputy had had a tail, it would’ve been wagging to beat the band.

Ignoring Kara’s instructions to stay put, Sax followed them into a shell-strewn cave the tides had carved into the stony cliff.

“Bingo,” Kara said as the three of them looked down at what was obviously a human skull.

Having never claimed to be a monk, Sax had known a lot of women over the years. But he’d never met one like Kara Conway, who was looking at that empty-eyed, bleached-out skull with its grimace of broken teeth the way another woman might look at a sparkly diamond bracelet.

Definitely quicksand, he reminded himself as the blaze of light in her eyes hit him directly in the heart, then sent heat flooding downward.

Although death certainly was never anything to smile about, Kara couldn’t suppress the burst of excitement that zinged through her at the young deputy’s discovery.

Odds still were that the bones were old, possibly belonging to a victim of one of the many boats that had capsized off the coast. And since there hadn’t been any reports of anyone having gone missing from Shelter Bay since she’d arrived in town, if the death was the result of a crime, it would undoubtedly be a very cold case.

But it
was
a case. Not just a bashed- in mailbox or some graffiti sprayed on the bridge crossing from the bay to the coast, but a real case to be solved.

Someone was dead, by either a violent act of nature, natural causes, or someone else’s hands. Whichever the results would turn out to be—if they could even determine the cause of death—it was her job to identify the body. To give it a name and hopefully return it to those who’d once cared about him or her.

That was one thing she’d discovered while working the Oceanside streets: Everyone, no matter how low they’d fallen, no matter how alone their existence appeared to be, had at least one other individual, somewhere, who cared that they’d lived. And even for those estranged from their families, no one lived on an island. Lives touched others; relationships were created.

Now the thing to do was to connect the dots and find out whom this skull belonged to, and how he or she had died, so this victim could at least be awarded the dignity in death everyone deserved in life.

One problem with that goal was that when she’d called the state police this morning about the bone find, they hadn’t exactly turned cartwheels in glee at being invited down here to help. The fact of the matter was that while the detective she’d spoken with hadn’t exactly laughed out loud (though that had definitely been a smirk Kara had detected in his tone), he’d turned her down. Flat.

Which wasn’t that surprising. She remembered, long before color-coded terrorism threats and other increases in the usual crimes caused by drugs, poverty, and simple bad behavior, her father complaining about much the same thing.

But Ben Blanchard had handled his problems the same way he’d handled every other difficult thing in his life: He sucked it up and did his job.

Which was precisely what Kara intended to do.

She carefully wrapped the skull, tagged it, and boxed it, trying not to even think about how long it would take for anyone in the state lab—needless to say there were probably high school science labs with more equipment than her department’s—to begin an investigation. Especially since the state of the skull and last night’s bone pointed toward a cold case. And as the detective told her when she’d called this morning, didn’t they have enough active cases to solve?

“It’s probably going to be the next century before OSP gets anyone on this,” Sax, who’d unsurprisingly ignored her instructions and followed her out here, suggested.

“Try millennium. And although I’ve never had a reason to check it out, I suspect the state isn’t at the top of the list for sending dental records of missing-persons cases into NCIC.” The National Crime Information Center, while not entirely reliable, was still the only nationwide dental database. “What I really need is a forensic reconstructionist.”

“I know someone who can help with that.”

“You know a reconstructionist?” Anyone who’d ever watched
Bones
knew that having an expert re-create what the person whose skull this was once looked like could be a huge help. Unfortunately, crime fighting wasn’t as simple as it was on TV.

“No. But I know someone who undoubtedly does. Cait’s a former FBI agent who married an old teammate. They both work for this private agency funded by a guy who just happens to have made himself about a bazillion bucks before the markets went south. And he’s more than willing to spend it if the cause is right.”

Kara speared him a look, wondering what his angle was. Years as a cop had taught her there was
always
an angle. “I can’t imagine my skull would interest him.”

Sax shrugged. “Truth be told, it probably wouldn’t. But Cait already offered to help when I called her this morning—”

“You called a civilian?” Kara fought for patience. Cops who allowed themselves to lose their cool were cops who lost control. Which was never a good thing. “About a possible crime my department hasn’t gone public with yet?”

“I called someone with contacts to just about everyone—at all levels—in law enforcement,” he corrected mildly, seeming to ignore her uncharacteristic flash of temper. “Who also can get her hands on way more resources than Shelter Bay’s sheriff’s department could ever dream of having.”

She sensed that work had stopped while everyone began watching them with interest, but kept her gaze on his. “And she would be willing to help me why?”

“Because she likes puzzles, which this is. Also, she likes me.”

Was there a female on the planet who wouldn’t? Years ago Sax Douchett had been a walking, talking testosterone temptation. The years since had only upped his babe-magnet quotient.

Not that she was personally interested.

But that hadn’t kept her from noticing.

“And,” he continued, “as it happens,
I’m
interested in you. Which makes her interested in your possible crime treasure hunt.”

There
was the angle she’d been expecting. Kara folded her arms. “That’s emotional blackmail. Using my need to solve a crime as a way to get closer to me.”

“It’s being a good citizen,” he countered in that frustratingly reasonable male tone that triggered a headache. “The way I see it, assisting our local police force is along the same lines as not littering and pickin’ up after Velcro when I take her onto the beach. A civic responsibility.

“As for your implying I have an ulterior motive, for the record, Sheriff, I’ve never had to use coercion to get a woman into bed. And I’m sure as hell not going to begin with you.”

“We’re not going there,” she insisted, wondering which of them she was trying to convince. Sax? Or herself?

She rubbed her throbbing temple as she looked down at the box. Thought about some family out there waiting for a lost loved one. Some family who deserved the right to a proper burial. As this man’s brother had helped her do for Jared.

“Call your friend,” she said. It wasn’t her only choice. But it was the right one. When her tone sounded too sharp and brisk even to her own ears, as if she were channeling her mother, she added more contritely, “And thanks, Douchett. I really do appreciate it.”

He shrugged. “No problem.”

Was it only yesterday that she’d been finding life boring? Kara asked herself as she walked back to her cruiser.

Which just went to show how much could change in twenty-four hours.

The light was fading from a sky crisscrossed with birds when Sax finally pulled up in front of his parents’ house, parking in the drive between a stand of fir trees and his brother’s new vehicle.

As yet more proof Cole had succumbed to estrogen poisoning from all the girlie wedding preparations, he’d traded in his fire-engine red dually diesel pickup truck. And the Escape wasn’t just green in color; it was a tree hugger’s dream hybrid. Not that Sax had anything against saving the planet, but this shiny new SUV was just screaming for a couple of booster seats.

Sax liked kids. Which was why he’d suggested Kara bring her son over to play around with Velcro. But the idea of his big, tough jarhead bro becoming all domesticated was more than a little scary. Because if Cole could fall, what hope was there for the rest of the single guys out there?

At least it was a Ford. Shelter Bay, like many small towns, tended to be traditional. Which meant that if you didn’t want to be ragged until doomsday and beyond, you’d best be buying American. Especially when it came to cars.

Sax’s own vehicle was the same ’97 anniversary Camaro he’d had in high school. White, with hugger orange SS hood stripes, it had been a Mustang killer in local (and illegal) drag races. His dad had kept it in shape for him during the years he’d been in the Navy, declaring that you didn’t let a classic car rust.

Which was true enough, but Sax’s mom had clued him in on the most important reason Lucien Douchett had babied the muscle car like it had been one of his own children. Apparently Sax’s dad had believed that as long as the car was waiting for Sax to come home from the war, his middle son
would
come home.