The Homecoming (39 page)

Nick studied that image, letting it burn into him, because he’d need it to keep him centered on what was important here.

It was likely that someone had done this to her, and whoever it was, Nick was going to find him and put him in a cell.

Whoever it was.

“What’s that behind her?” Tig asked.

Call moved the light in closer. A small rounded object was a few feet deeper into the root mass. It looked like a cage made of twigs. Or bone. There was something round inside it.

An egg
, Nick thought.
An egg in a basket
.

“One of those bone basket things.”

Farrier was losing patience.

“Evan, you and Mike go in there and get that poor lady out of there or I’ll suit up and do it myself. And there will be consequences. Am I clear?”

A silence.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then do it.”

They did.

It took another half hour, but Call and Tuamotu managed to untangle Alice Bayer’s body from the root mass and bring her up to the surface, where she lay in the current, her long gray hair streaming, her flesh waxy and soft. She had swollen up so severely that a silver necklace was buried in her neck and the watch she had been wearing, something quirky by Fossil, had cut a trench into her wrist. It was a day/date watch, stopped
of course, but maybe useful for setting a time of death. Nick made a note of it and bagged her hands.

By that time Tig had called the medical examiner’s van in and the morgue attendants had managed to get all of her into a body bag and close the double doors.

“There any eels in this river?” one of them asked Tig, in a low voice meant only for him.

“Yeah. Why?”

The man shrugged, lifted his palms.

“She’ll have live ones inside her.”

The other attendant, an older man with a sallow, waxy face and bloodhound eyes, simply nodded, looking apologetic and pained.

“Happens. If a body’s in the water long enough. They go down the throat. Or up the—”

“Thanks,” said Tig, cutting him short. “That really made my day.”

“Hey. Weird things happen, Lieutenant,” said the younger man. “Yesterday, somebody stole two cadavers out of a refrigerated truck. What the heck are you gonna do with two frozen stiffs?”

Tig was about to turn away.

He stopped.

So did Nick.

“A refrigerated truck?” he asked. “Where?”

The man grinned at his partner.

“Out of the State Police lock yard near Gracie.”

The bloodhound man spoke up.

“It was those two guys, got killed in that police pursuit the other day. The brothers. Shugrue? Shogun? Wanted by the Feds. Got killed in the crash where all those bystanders got hurt? At the Super Gee?”

“You mean the Shagreen brothers?” said Tig, glancing at Nick.

“That’s it. Knew it was something like that. Everybody was talking about it at the ME’s office. Nobody knows how long they been gone, but they’re gone, that’s for sure. They figure the guys were in this White Power cult and the cult came and took them, maybe gonna have a weird cult ceremony over them.”

“And they’re
gone
?” said Nick. “Both bodies?”

“Gone as gone can be, Detective. Staties are all in a tizzy. They seek them here. They seek them there. Those Staties seek them everywhere. Anyway, there you go. Weirdness lives.”

Tig looked at Nick.

“I’ll call Marty Coors,” he said. “Ask him why he didn’t give us a heads-up. Maybe you better let Reed know. Could be biker guys in town thinking about payback.”

“I will. What do you make of it? You really thinking bikers?”

Tig looked out across the river. The sun was glittering on its surface. How could something so pretty hide so much that was so ugly?

“Nah. Even the Nightriders wanted these guys out of the gang. I’m with these guys,” said Tig after a moment. “Weirdness lives.”

“That’s my take on it,” said the bloodhound man. His partner laughed, they shrugged again, and were about to get in the van and pull away when Nick asked them to hold on.

“Tig, wait one. I gotta do something.”

Tig nodded, and Nick went back to the river, where Mike Tuamotu and Evan Call were just getting ready to come out of the water. Lemon was kneeling by the bank, talking to the divers as Nick came up.

He stood up and looked at Nick.

“I know. I’ve already asked them,” he said.

“Yeah. And we sure as hell don’t want to,” said Tuamotu, with a sullen edge.

“But we will,” said Evan Call.

Forty-five minutes later they had seven of the “bone baskets” lined up on the riverbank. They had washed off as much of the river silt as was possible. Up here in the light of day the objects looked even stranger than they had down in the root mass.

Nick and Lemon were squatting and studying them, but not touching them. Tig was standing over them, looking like a man who would like to be in another kind of story. One with palm trees and naked dancing girls and drinks with tiny umbrellas.

Farrier and the divers were squaring away their gear and talking quietly among themselves. The morgue attendants were smoking cigarettes and telling each other horror stories about various floaters they had known and loved. The crane guy was gone and Alice Bayer’s car was sitting on a flatbed trailer, leaking muddy water and smelling like a dead skunk.

“What the hell are they?” Tig asked, for the ninth time.

“What do they
look
like?” asked Lemon, for the eighth time.

Tig shook his head, considering the larger one at the left end of the row. It was about a yard long and a foot wide, and it looked like an oblong cage made of calcified stone that had been colored a deep amber by the river mud.

The bars of the cage looked like stone ribs, in that they tapered as they rose up, and where they touched at the top, they looked like steepled hands, with the spiky fingertips making the roof of the church. Inside the cage there was a floor of cylinder-shaped stones, linked in a row that ran the length of the cage. And resting on the chain of linked cylinders was a small round object, about the size of a five-pin bowling ball, uneven, muddy brown, with markings on the surface that looked like the canals of Mars.

Tig grunted, said nothing.

“Come on, Lieutenant. What does it look like?” Lemon asked again.

“Okay. I’ll say it,” said Tig, in a raspy tone, clearly unwilling to have this conversation. “It looks like a skeleton. With the skull down inside the rib cage. Happy?”

Lemon reached out and touched the side of the basket, pushed it gently.

“Maybe these ribs are hollow. To come down the river and get caught up in these roots, these things would have to be light enough to get carried by the current. But it feels like stone. Like it’s not organic.”

“What’s that?” asked Nick, pointing to something embedded in the base of one of the cage bars—
face it—the ribs
—of the basket.

He touched his fingertip to a vaguely greenish bump. He rubbed his fingertip across the bump and there was a sudden flash of dark green.

Lemon leaned in to look at it, and then he pulled out a long, slender knife, black, with a ribbed steel handle, a small oval hilt, and a tapering double-edged blade that came to a needle tip. The blade was black except along both edges, where the sharpened steel glittered in the sunlight. Tig jumped a bit, but Nick, who had seen where it had come from, was less surprised.

“A Fairbairn-Sykes?” he said.

Lemon grinned at that.

“Yes. Won it from an SAS guy in Iraq.”

“How?”

“He was sure I was an Apache.”

“You’re not?” said Nick, but Lemon ignored him. He leaned in and used the tip of the knife to pry the green object from the stone. It came
free with a dry pop and tumbled into Lemon’s palm. It was shaped like a beetle, oval, and it had crude markings scratched into its surface. Lemon rubbed it and the shine came up stronger.

He handed it to Nick, who hefted it in his hand. It was heavier than it looked. He handed it up to Tig, who turned it in the light.

“Looks like a piece of jewelry.”

“It is, in a way,” said Lemon. “It’s a trade stone. Made of malachite. You see hundreds of them up and down this coast. Mostly in museums. They were in use long before you guys came and screwed everything up. They were like a coin. All the tribes agreed on their value, based on the weight and the color. Mayaimi used them. Cherokee. Choctaw. Seminole. You’ll find them in collections and museums as far west as Santa Fe, north as far as the Dakotas.”

“So it’s part of somebody’s
collection
?” said Tig. Lemon looked down at the bone cage.

“Or maybe he’s a lot older than we think and it was something he carried in his medicine bag.”

“
His
,” said Tig, his voice going higher. “You think this thing here is … 
human remains
?”

“I’m beginning to think I do,” said Lemon.

“But you said it yourself. It’s made of
stone
.”

“It is now,” said Lemon. “I don’t think it started out that way. It’s like it went through fire or something. It got … changed.”

Tig literally snorted.

“Hello? Lemon Featherlight? Come back. Earth needs you.”

Lemon stood up.

“You ever see a mouse after an owl has eaten it? That tiny ball of bone and fur the owl sicks up?”

“Yeah. Sure. All over the place. Little egg-shaped packets of skin and bone. So what?”

Tig stopped, did a take.

“No, wait—that’s what you two think these things are?
Bodies
that have been … eaten? By what? No. Never mind. They’re
stone
, Lemon. Not bone.”

Nick stood up, brushing the dirt off his hands.

“Tig, we might have to find a way to get all the bone baskets we can find the hell out of that root mass.”

“For why?” asked Tig. “There must be hundreds of them.”

“I’d say thousands,” said Lemon. “Maybe more.”

“Okay. Thousands of whatever the hell they are. Why do we have to dam up the Tulip to get them?”

“Because this might be a crime scene,” said Nick. Lemon nodded.

“Or at least a graveyard,” he said.

Tig went silent, thinking it through.

“Look, here’s what I can do. We’ll take these things back to the lab—along with poor Miss Bayer over there—and we’ll see if we can figure out what the hell they’re made of. And if they’re made out of anything human—which I seriously doubt—I’ll think about what we’re gonna do about that. If they’re really old bones, maybe Native Americans, then it’s a matter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And maybe you, Lemon, seeing as how you’re a Mayaimi Indian. If they’re newer bones—and I’m saying
if
—then maybe there’s foul play involved and then it belongs to Nick here. How’s that sound?”

“Fine with me,” said Lemon.

“Me too,” said Nick.

Tig sighed and put his hands on his hips.

“Okay. But what’s most on my mind is this. Nick, this Alice Bayer thing looks like a suspicious death, at the least, and maybe even manslaughter. Or worse.”

He paused but both of his listeners knew what was coming. It was inevitable, but after it was said, nothing was going to be the same between Kate and Nick. All three men knew that.

“Okay,” he said, in a warning tone, “here it is, Nick. We’re gonna have to talk to Rainey and Axel about what happened here. Is that gonna be a problem?”

“Not for me.”

“Kate, maybe? Or Beth?”

Nick shook his head.

“No. Kate’s an officer of the court. She knows how it works. Beth’s been around law enforcement and the courts for years. She knows how it works.”

“Kate’s also a lawyer. If we’re gonna talk to a minor, they’re both going to need a lawyer there when we do it. That’s state law. Will she act for both of them?”

“I don’t know. It’s tricky. She’s also his legal guardian. And Beth will have a say.”

“Who was the judge who sat on the Rainey Teague custodial hearing? It was Teddy Monroe, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. He’s still the supervising adjudicator.”

“Maybe Kate should talk to him, get his advice. Teddy’s a reasonable guy. If he thinks Kate will have to recuse, he’ll know a good alternate to stand in for her with Rainey. See that he’s protected properly.”

“I’ll talk to her about it.”

“And Beth? About Axel.”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe I should do it.”

“Be an idea, I think.”

Tig looked at Lemon.

“We’re gonna need what you’ve got, Lemon. Can you do that? You and Kate found the car. You were first on the scene. Sooner or later you’re going to have to make a formal statement. If there’s … a hearing, say, you’ll be called. I know you were—you are—tight with the kid?”

“I haven’t seen anything that makes me think Rainey or Axel had anything to do with what happened here. What
may
have happened.”

“Neither have I,” said Nick.

Tig looked at him, and then came back to Lemon.

“I’m hearing a
but
. But what?”

Lemon paused, thought about it.

“But yes. I’m ready to do … whatever.”

Tig nodded, as if his expectations had been confirmed.

“Okay. I figured you’d see it that way. Both of you. I’m gonna go get the morgue guys to bag these … 
things
 … up. While I’m gone you two guys may want to take a minute to come on back to our home planet, okay?”

Tig stalked off towards the morgue van, anxiety and frustration in his wake.

Lemon and Nick watched him go.

Nick turned to Lemon, speaking low and urgently.

“We have a problem with Alice being down here looking for truants.”

“I know it,” said Lemon, who was thinking exactly the same thing, and had been since dawn.

“So … I got a question.”

“I’m here.”

“Rainey. You knew the kid before this all happened. Before he got disappeared, the coma, the whole thing. Do you think he put Alice Bayer in the Tulip and sent her car in after her?”

Lemon said nothing for a time.

Nick waited him out.

“I’ll say this. The Rainey Teague I knew would never have involved another little kid in playing hooky. He would never have been sneaky enough to get the entry code to his old house out of Kate’s notebook. And he wouldn’t have been cold enough to fake a note from his dead mother.”