08-A Thousand Bones, page 5
“So,” Leach said, “I don’t want any statements made to the press or anyone else that even come close to insinuating this is a homicide. Are we clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Joe said, setting the photograph back on the table.
Mike nodded.
Holt hesitated. “Yes, sir.”
“Mack?” Leach pressed. “Is that clear?”
“Yeah, it’s clear,” Mack said.
“All right. Next,” Leach said, “I have called the state police, but I have asked them to let us do a preliminary investigation to see if we can identify the victim through other items we might pick up over the next week. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get a skull or a wallet. And if the lab can narrow down the time of death to even a few years, we’ll have a better idea of what we’re looking at.”
“Do you know how long it will be before any results come in?” Joe asked.
“On the bones, possibly months,” Leach said. “On anything else, like the jewelry, we should have something on that soon. That and a few other items we picked up yesterday have already been sent off. There’ll be more items coming in every day as the searchers work the area.”
Leach went to the door and called for Augie. He was there in a second, handing over the large blue binder that held the missing persons bulletins. Joe’s eyes flicked to the folder she had brought in. Inside were the copies she had made yesterday.
“Mack is going to be point on this,” Leach said. “But no investigation is done without a lot of grunt work. We’ll start with the missing persons file.”
Joe was watching Mack. He was eyeing the blue binder with something close to contempt.
“If this is not Annabelle Chapel,” Leach went on, “my guess is that she was local or semilocal, maybe from within a hundred miles. I doubt she was a tourist. I think we would have heard about something like that. Statistics tell us she was probably between fifteen and forty, more likely on the young side of that. In the absence of forensic verification, I’d also guess she’s been dead at least a year.”
Leach pushed the binder across the table to Mike. “Mike,” Leach said, “I want you to go through these and pull the ones that fit those criteria.” He paused. “That is, if you can remember it, since I see you’re not choosing to write any of this down.”
“Joe already did that,” he said.
“Did what?”
“Pulled the possibles and made copies,” Mike said.
Everyone looked at Joe.
“What criteria did you use, Joe?” Leach asked.
“Just about the same as you have,” Joe said. “I went back ten years and used a hundred-mile radius.”
Leach nodded. “Good. Where are the copies now?”
Joe could feel Mack’s hard stare as she held the folder out to Leach.
“Give them to Mike,” Leach said. “He can narrow them down as to who’s turned up and who hasn’t, and we’ll go from there.”
“Can’t I do that?” Joe asked.
Leach hesitated, then glanced at Mack, as if he were trying to tell her something he could not say out loud. She guessed Mack had already asked Leach that she be moved to the sidelines.
“I’d appreciate it if you would just carry on with your regular patrol duties, Joe,” Leach said. “Mike will ride with you in the morning, but in the afternoon, he’s on the phones.”
“We’ll call you if we need you,” Mack added.
Joe looked to him, wanting to lunge across the table and punch him.
“This is going to require some extra hours and hard work on everyone’s part,” Leach said. “So I’m thanking you in advance for your cooperation. Dismissed.”
Joe stayed her seat, her eyes flicking up to Mack as he and the others left the room.
Leach remained. “Joe, you okay?” he asked.
She couldn’t look at him. “Not really, sir.”
“Look, all we’re doing at this point is a preliminary investigation. We both know we’ll be turning this over to the state in a few days.”
She stood up. Mike had forgotten the folder. She picked it up.
“Is there something else?” Leach asked.
She faced him. “Officers like Holt see what Mack does and they learn from it. That’s wrong, Sheriff. You know it is.”
Leach rubbed his jaw, his eyes going from Joe to the open conference-room door, then back to her. “You knew coming in this was not going to be easy.”
“I don’t want it easy,” she said. “I just want it fair.”
Leach nodded. “I’ll talk to Mack.”
“But you’re not going to tell him to let me in on this.”
“No. He’s lead because he has the experience. Lead investigators have to make their own calls. I have to let him do his job.”
Joe brushed her hair from her forehead. She was not going to win this. “Are we finished, sir?” she asked.
Leach nodded.
She made her way to the front office. Augie was hanging up the phone and waved her over.
“We’ve got a problem out on Lake Shore,” he said.
Joe sighed. “Mrs. Elsinore’s grandson?”
“The neighbor says he’s been peeking in her windows again.”
When she reached for the slip of paper, Augie touched her wrist. “I heard what happened in there,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. She didn’t want Augie—or anyone else, for that matter—to see her disappointment. She went to her desk on the pretense of looking for something in the drawer.
“Joette, do you know anything about wine?” Augie asked.
“Just that three glasses are my limit,” she said without looking up.
“I always thought people were like wine,” Augie went on.
Joe didn’t say anything.
“I mean, you’ve got your Burgundies,” Augie said. “Mature, lots of finesse, easy to swallow, but only after a serious aging process. That’s the sheriff. Then you got your Beaujolais. Playful but doesn’t stay long on the tongue. That’s Mike.”
Joe tapped the folder on her palm, her eyes going to the conference door, where Mike was talking to Leach.
“And then there is Medoc. A heavy hitter that can overwhelm everything.”
“Mack,” Joe said.
“Yeah, but Mack is corked Medoc, just on the edge of going bad.”
Joe smiled. “All right, I’ll bite. What am I?”
“I’m guessing an austere Burgundy. Good stuff that just needs aging.”
Joe laughed softly.
“You know, maybe you should go talk to Theo,” Augie said. “Maybe he could help you with the case.”
Theo was the editor of the Echo Bay Banner and Augie’s lover. Joe knew that between the two of them, they probably knew the business of every person who had ever set foot in Echo Bay over the last twenty years.
Before she could answer Augie, Mike came up to the desk. Joe handed him the note Augie had given her.
“Shit, not that creepo grandson again?” Mike asked.
“You got it. We might as well go and get this over with.”
Joe followed Mike out the front door. They started toward the cruiser.
“I wouldn’t get too close to Augie if I was you,” Mike said.
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “You know how those people are.”
“What people?”
“Uh-huh. Pretend you don’t notice.”
“What are you talking about?”
Mike stopped at the driver’s door. “Homos.”
There was no hate in his tone. It was more of a strange acknowledgment of something foreign that he had chosen to let exist as long as it kept its distance.
She didn’t reply, putting on her cap as she started toward the passenger side of the car. Mike opened his door and stopped. “Shit,” he said. “I left the bulletins in the conference room.”
“I’ve got them,” Joe said, holding up the folder.
As she held it out to him over the roof of the cruiser, she felt as if she were handing over one of her kids for him to babysit.
“Thanks,” Mike said, taking it. He opened the door and tossed the folder into the backseat. Joe stared at him. He finally noticed that she hadn’t made a move to get into the cruiser.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“You could show them a little more respect,” she said.
He looked confused for a second. “They’re just papers, Joe,” he said.
She jerked open the door and got in. Mike slid into the driver’s seat.
“They’re people, Mike,” she said without looking at him. “People who are still missing. And someone is still missing them.”
6
It took them more than an hour to get out of Mrs. Elsinore’s house. The old lady plied them with coffee and Entenmann’s Caramel Apple Twist and yakked about everything from the trash clogging the narrows of Lake Leelanau to why “that Sergeant Pepper woman” on Police Story dressed like a hooker.
Finally, Mrs. Elsinore promised to keep her grandson away from the neighbor’s windows, and they left.
Joe, still angry over Mike’s cavalier attitude, had barely said a word during the whole hour. As they stepped off the porch, Mike trailed behind.
“Maybe you should start dressing like Angie Dickinson,” he said.
“Shut up,” Joe said without turning.
Mike tossed his notebook into the back as he slid behind the wheel of the cruiser.
“You’re not even going to write this up?” Joe asked.
“Jeff Elsinore is harmless,” Mike said. “By seven tonight, she’ll be making him a pot pie and forget we were even there.”
“We still need to do a report,” Joe said.
“Be my guest.”
Mike swung the cruiser back onto the main road. Joe reached down to get the black zippered binder at her feet. In it were her ticket book, log sheets and report forms, her address book, maps of the state and county, and a small spiral notebook. The binder had been a gift from her mother the day Joe graduated from the academy. Florence had used the same binder when she was on the force back in Cleveland.
Joe ran her hand over the scuffed leather and pulled out a report form. She filled it out in her neat handwriting, then zipped the binder closed.
She settled back into the seat and glanced at Mike. He didn’t have a binder. He had a giant rubber band. The rubber band held his ticket book and department forms, his coffee-stained maps, and a bright blue spiral notebook that he had probably lifted from his kid.
Mike had put on his sunglasses, and the warm breeze from the open window whipped his long dark hair.
Too long, Joe thought, and she found herself wondering why Leach let him get away with it.
He didn’t let her get away with anything. From the first day she met Leach, he had told her that this was not just a job but a career. You were expected to take pride in what you did, and you learned quickly to polish everything from your manners to the toes of your shoes.
Joe closed her eyes, thinking of the long hours she had spent trying to get that mirror shine on her shoes. Her shelf had been cluttered with bottles of things that claimed to add a sparkle or stiffness to every surface she had. Leather. Brass. Cotton. Except her nails. No nail polish on that shelf.
Nails…she had a sudden memory of cutting off her own the day she went into the academy.
She had been only one of two women there. Nothing—not her mother’s warnings, Brad’s protests, or her own imagination—had prepared her for how tough it was. The men didn’t give a damn about the new Equal Employment Opportunity Act that gave her the right to be a cop. Not just as her mother had been back in the fifties. But a cop with the same uniform, the same duties, the same pay.
She was five-ten but slender, with no upper-body strength. She gritted through the tactics training, the weight lifting, the pull-ups, the nine-mile morning runs. She endured the sexist jokes, the used Kotex napkin left in her locker, the hits from being slammed to the mat by the guy trying to take her out and make his point. At night, alone in her room, she would cry silently, unable to pull in a full sob because of her bruised ribs.
Four weeks into training, the other woman dropped out. That same morning, during a baton drill, the instructor was called away, and that’s when it began. One of the guys started using his night stick in a jerking-off motion. The others howled as the guy started simulating oral sex, moaning her name. That night, when Leach called to ask how she was doing, Joe burst into tears on the phone.
“Joe, there is nothing they can do to run you out. Only you can quit.”
Two months later, she graduated. One week after that, she was wearing a Leelanau County sheriff’s badge.
“So how long is this silent treatment going to last?” Mike asked, interrupting her thoughts.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Mike let out a sigh. “Look, if you’re mad because the sheriff gave the bulletins to me and not you, that’s not my fault.”
“I’m not mad.”
“You’re mad. You just won’t admit it.”
She was silent.
“When you’re mad, your face gets kind of, well, mean-looking,” he said.
“Mean?”
“Jesus, I can’t say anything right today. What I mean is you’re a good-looking woman, Joe. God knows, Mindy gives me enough shit about it.” He paused. “But your eyes have a way of turning into little slits that make you look like something, like a cat you don’t want to meet in a dark alley.”
She wasn’t sure how to take that, so she kept quiet. They rode on in silence for several miles. They were coming back into town when Mike finally spoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We have to ride together, so whatever the hell I did—or didn’t do—I’m sorry.” He glanced at her. “Okay?”
She didn’t trust herself to look at him and not say something more that would make things worse. So she just gave him a tight nod and leaned back in the seat, gripping her mother’s black leather binder.
Mike went back to the station to go to work on the bulletins. Joe slid behind the wheel of the idling cruiser, and for a moment, she just sat there. The radio was quiet; there was nothing to do, nowhere to go. She pulled away, intending to just cruise the town. As she turned onto Main, the sign for the Echo Bay Banner caught her eye.
She thought about what Augie had said. What could it hurt to talk to Theo?
The newspaper office was housed in an old dress shop, with a counter separating the front from the desks, file cabinets, and computer terminals beyond. Carrie, the teenage girl who manned the desk and took classified ads, looked up from her Glamour when Joe came in.
“Is Theo here?” Joe asked.
Carrie popped her gum. “He’s in the back. You want me to go get him?”
“Please.”
A few minutes later, a light-skinned black man appeared, rubbing his hands on an apron. Theo Toussaint was a short, chubby man of about fifty, with close-cropped hair surrounding a harvest-moon face set off with black-framed glasses. He had a ready smile as he approached the counter.
“Augie said you might be coming,” he said in a lilting accent Joe had never been able to place. Town gossip said Theo’s father was a Haitian doctor who had fled Duvalier’s regime in Haiti and settled in Montreal, where he married a British woman. No one knew how Theo had gotten down to Echo Bay, but he was as much a fixture in the town as the smokehouse over in Fishtown.
Theo offered his hand, and Joe took it. When she pulled away, there was something sticky on her palm.
“Oh, merde,” Theo said. “I’m sorry. It’s the wax. I’m pasting up tomorrow’s edition. Come on back, and I’ll give you something to clean it off.”
The back room was crowded with what looked like small lighted architect tables. Each bank of tables held pages of tomorrow’s Banner, with headlines, stories, and pictures pasted onto paper grids.
Theo gave Joe a rag wet with acetone. As she wiped her hand, Joe stepped up to look at the paste-up of tomorrow’s front page: no leads on bones found in woods.
“I don’t know why I bother,” Theo said. “By the time I can print anything, the whole town already knows more than I do.” He walked off to a machine in the corner.
Joe knew that Theo did most of the work himself, writing the stories, taking the pictures, and probably sweeping up at night. She knew, too, that Augie probably told Theo everything that went on inside the station.
Theo came over to the light table, holding out the waxed paper strip like a Christmas garland. Joe watched him as he carefully patted the strip into a blank column on the front page.
“So what can I help you with, Joe?”
“Right now, I’m just gathering information about missing girls,” Joe said. “I know you’ve lived here forever, and newspaper people, well, they know things, hear the gossip.”
“Gossip?”
“I was wondering if you might remember anything the police may not have.”
“Such as?”
She shrugged. “Some wife who was rumored to have left town in the middle of the night, a runaway no one might have reported.”
“You’re from Cleveland, right?” he asked.
“Yes, why?”
“Well, things are different in small towns,” Theo said. “And Echo Bay is a very small town. Some families have been here for generations, others have come here, drawn to the calm. Here on the peninsula we are very isolated, not just physically but emotionally, from the rest of the world. People here like that.”
“But people do disappear, don’t they?”
“Yes,” he said. “The teenagers get restless and run off looking for jobs or excitement. But they always seem to come back. Like Sheriff Leach did.”
Joe nodded. “So anyone come to mind who didn’t come back?”
“Just that girl from Petoskey.”
“That’s about a hundred miles from here, right?” she asked.
“More, metaphorically speaking.”
“What do you mean?”
