08-A Thousand Bones, page 7
They had made love again in the morning. She had lingered in the shower, convinced she could still smell the scent of sex on herself. She stopped to spray herself with Jean Naté, something she never wore when she was in uniform.
Mike had given her an odd grin this morning when she squeezed by him to take her place in the conference room. It was one of those looks a man gives another guy when he knows he has gotten a quickie from an unexpected source. It didn’t feel bad being included in that strange man-type exchange.
The door banged open. Holt set a large cardboard box on the table with a thud. Joe rose to peer inside. Dozens of plastic evidence bags. And not in plastic, a strange metal contraption that looked like a rusted hoist of some kind.
Leach came in, followed by two other deputies and a man Joe didn’t know. No badge, but he looked like a state guy.
“Okay,” Leach said, drawing a deep breath. “Let me first introduce Detective Norm Rafsky, Michigan State Police investigator. He’ll be working with us from here on out.”
Rafsky gave a bob of his head. He was a tall, slender man, wearing a plain blue suit under his tan trench coat. He had a long face and a head of ragged sandy-brown hair.
“Joe,” Leach said, “would you do me a favor and take meeting notes?”
Joe held his eyes for just a second, then flipped to a new page in her notebook.
Leach looked down at the folder in his hand. “I got the ME’s report back,” he said. “They have no opinion on the cause or manner of death. None of the bones we found give any indication of blunt-force trauma, stabbing, or cut marks. Until they have more, that opinion is not likely to change.”
Leach reached into his pocket and withdrew the plastic bag with the bracelet inside. “Turns out the jewelry we found is not a necklace, it’s a charm bracelet,” he said, setting the bag on the table. “Mack checked with Annabelle Chapel’s parents, and Annabelle never owned a charm bracelet, so—”
“The bracelet isn’t important. It doesn’t mean Annabelle is not our victim,” Mack said.
There was a flicker of irritation in Leach’s eyes at being interrupted. “You’re right, Mack,” he said. “But we have nothing but your insistence—and the one fact that Annabelle Chapel disappeared less than a hundred miles from where we found the bones. You can stay with the Chapel girl, but the rest of us will check out other possible victims. And we still need to keep the bracelet in mind as a possible link to those victims.”
Mack sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.
Joe stared at the bracelet lying on the table. Her hand was resting on a manila envelope that held Theo’s pictures of the charms. But before she could say anything, Leach said, “Mike, where are you on the bulletins?”
Mike gave Joe an odd look, as if he were waiting for her to say something, but then he turned back to Leach. “I’ve contacted all the agencies or families of the missings Joe pulled,” he said. “None have turned up, dead or alive. None had any links to Leelanau County or family up here. And no one could remember any of these girls owning a charm bracelet, either.”
“Bracelet? You already asked about the bracelet?” Leach asked.
“Sure.”
“How did you know about it?”
“I saw it yesterday on Joe’s desk,” Mike said.
Mack’s eyes shot to her, followed by everyone else’s. Leach started to say something, but Mack spoke first.
“You opened my package?” he demanded.
She sat a little taller. “It was addressed to you, but it also said Leelanau County Sheriff’s Office,” she said. “I wanted to see it. And when I—”
“Joe,” Leach interrupted, “you should not have done that. That’s how things get messed up with an investigation. Evidence gets lost or mishandled, and before you know it, the case is thrown out.”
“But I knew when Mack saw it was not Annabelle’s, he would dismiss it as nothing,” Joe said.
“You don’t know anything,” Mack said. “You were out of line, Frye.”
“Enough, Mack,” Leach said quickly. “Joe, I will talk to you later about this. Let’s move on.”
“Sheriff?” Joe drew in a breath. “May I say something about the bracelet first?” she asked.
Mack let out a disgusted breath. Leach’s hard stare told her he was still upset with her, but he gave her a slow nod.
“One of the charms has an engraving on the back,” she said. “I couldn’t make it out, so I had it photographed and enlarged.”
She pulled the shot of the engraving out of the envelope and slid it across the table. Leach looked at it, and then his eyes went back to Joe.
“Who took this picture?” he asked.
“Theo,” Joe said.
Mack leaned across the table. “You shot your mouth off to that frog about what we found?”
“No more than what you did at the Riverside,” she said. “The whole town knows about this now.”
Mack glared at her, but before he could say anything, Leach held up a hand. Mack sank back in his chair. Leach picked up the enlargement to look more closely at the CHHS. She took his silence as her cue.
“The engraving says CHHS,” she said. “There are only three high schools in the state with those initials and only one has a Spartan as its mascot. It’s in Inkster, a suburb of Detroit.”
“That bracelet could belong to anyone,” Mack said.
“Isn’t that the point, to figure out who it belongs to?” she asked.
“The point is,” Mack said, “that you overstepped your position. You don’t touch evidence.”
“So now the bracelet is evidence?” Joe asked. “A minute ago, it was nothing.”
Mack looked to Leach. “What the hell is this, Sheriff? She’s out of line here. This is my case. My case, damn it, and—”
“Shut up, Mack,” Leach said. “Both of you just keep quiet.”
Joe sat back in her chair, jaw tight. Her heart was racing, and she hated confrontations like this, but damn it, what else was she supposed to do? She felt a stare and glanced up at the state investigator. He was holding back a small smile.
“Mack,” Leach said, “you will treat your fellow officers with some respect here. And you will keep an open mind about this case.”
Joe looked away from the state investigator and back to Leach, trying to relax her shoulders.
“And you, Deputy Frye,” Leach said, “you will not investigate one more lead in this case without consulting both me and Mack beforehand. Do you understand?”
She bit back her response, remembering that there were others at the table—including Detective Rafsky—and she knew Leach just needed to make a stand here.
She sat back slowly. “Yes, sir.”
“And I don’t want to hear about anyone talking about this case outside this station without my say-so,” Leach said. “Are we all crystal-clear on that?”
Everyone was quiet. Mack wouldn’t look up at Leach.
“All right, then,” Leach said, turning to Mike. “Mike, I want you to go back through all the bulletins and see if there’s anyone from Inkster in there. If there is, let me know.”
Joe’s eyes snuck to Mike. He mouthed an “I’m sorry.” It occurred to her she probably had that mean look on her face again, and she tried to soften it.
“Let’s go on,” Leach said. “Holt, bring the box over here.”
Holt jumped to his feet and dragged the box over. Leach began to lay the bagged items on the table. Joe leaned closer, but she was at the far end and couldn’t see anything clearly.
“These are the other items the search team collected over the last week,” Leach said. “Everything was found within a hundred yards of the three bones. While we have bagged everything as evidence, I am not convinced that all of this actually is. So we’re going to go through this stuff and decide what is worth sending to the lab.”
They went through a variety of items. A frying pan with a broken handle. Three empty cans of Dinty Moore stew. A used condom. A pair of rusty scissors. A broken arrow. A pair of men’s wire-rimmed glasses. Twenty-seven bullet cartridges of varying calibers. A Diner’s Club credit card. Three orange ball caps, muddy. A long piece of lace, blue. A man’s wedding ring.
They voted to keep the condom, the cartridges, the credit card, and the piece of lace. The rest would be saved to be analyzed later, if needed.
Leach was about to go on to something else when Joe pointed. “What’s that big rusty thing?” she asked.
Leach lifted it out of the box and laid it on the table. “It’s a deer hoist, Joe,” he said.
It looked like a large metal frame with a set of pulleys and tangled rope. “How is it used?” she asked.
Mack rose and grabbed the frame by a short piece of rope. When the frame hung down, it formed a triangle, like a large, heavy clothes hanger suspended by the pulleys.
“You hang the hoist up in a tree. You hook the hind legs of the deer to these two prongs here on each end,” Mack said. “Then you pull the carcass up off the ground and gut it down the belly. The blood drains down. Nice and clean.”
She heard a snicker behind her and glanced back, but she couldn’t tell who had laughed.
“Are we sending that?” she asked.
Leach shook his head. “Well, it’s not a cheap piece of gear, but it’s something hunters can forget about and leave in the tree when they get to drinking like they do.”
Joe stared at the deer hoist for a moment. There was nothing wrong with not knowing something, but she still felt as if she had made a mistake asking about it.
Leach put the hoist back in the box. “All right,” he said. “We need all the heads in this we can get. And that includes Joe. Mack, give her an assignment.”
Joe’s eyes slipped to Mack. Throw her a bone.
“Okay, you like to play with evidence?” Mack said. “Your assignment is to log all the crap that isn’t going to the lab, then deliver the rest of it personally to Lansing.”
She didn’t bother to look at Leach, but she let her gaze slip around the table. The state guy, Rafsky, was watching her, seemingly interested in her reaction. Holt was standing by the box of junk, looking as if he had just witnessed a traffic accident. And Mike…
No shock there. Just pity and something else, maybe. Something close to respect and a glimmer in his eyes that gave her a tiny sense of victory. If only between them.
Leach made a few other comments, and the meeting broke up. Rafsky and Leach quickly disappeared. Mack stayed at the table, poking at the evidence bags. He picked up the bag with the blue lace in it and held it up to the light.
“What are you going to do? Take that to Chicago, wave it in front of the Chapels, and ask if it’s from their daughter’s underwear?” Joe said.
“I might,” Mack said.
He dropped it to the table and left the room. Mike glanced after him, then straightened his stack of bulletins.
“Look, Joe,” he said, “you found this Inkster connection. If you want to check the bulletins again, I don’t mind.”
Joe picked up the engraving photograph. “Of course you don’t.”
She heard the crispness in her voice but didn’t look up. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mike walk out of the room and knew she should apologize. Having Mike as an ally was better than no one. She would talk to him about it later, but for now, she was going to take him up on his offer.
It took her less than ten minutes to go through the bulletins and determine that there was no girl reported missing from Inkster.
Holt approached, carrying the box of bagged evidence. He set it on her desk with an apologetic look and left. Joe sat there, staring at the box.
Well, hell.
She walked down the short hall to Leach’s office. His door was closed, and she could hear voices inside. She leaned against the wall and waited. Five minutes later, the door opened and Rafsky came out. The hall was narrow, and she had to step back against the wall to let him pass. As he did, he paused, in front of her. His trench coat smelled of a recent rain. His eyes were a startling, clear blue.
“The bracelet’s a good lead,” he said quietly. “Stay with it.”
She watched him walk away until he turned the corner at the end of the hall. Then she stepped to the doorway and looked in at Leach. He was standing behind his desk, a bulky silhouette backlit by the sun. She couldn’t see his expression.
“Come in, Joe,” he said.
She moved forward so she could see his face. It was solemn. But not angry anymore.
“I have a request,” she said.
Leach waited.
“Since I have to go to Lansing tomorrow anyway,” she said, “may I have permission to drive down to Inkster and visit the high school? Maybe ask some questions?”
“Let’s wait until Mike checks on any girls missing from there first,” Leach said.
“I already did. There are none.”
Leach’s mouth pulled into a thin line.
“I’ll use my own time,” she said. “Even pay for my own gas.”
“It’s not about the cost, Joe.”
“Then what is it about?
Leach took his time in finding his answer. “It’s about protocol. Investigations need to follow procedure. They need a structured format and a single direction.”
“How can an investigation have a single direction?” she asked. “Isn’t that the same as having only a single line of thought or a single suspect?”
“I’m simply trying to keep things focused.”
“On Annabelle Chapel.”
“No, but I agree with Mack that she needs to be eliminated before we move on.”
She stepped forward. “Sir, we could find a wallet with a girl’s ID in it, and Mack wouldn’t budge. You know that. Even if we don’t find anything, we only have three bones. No one can prove they belong to Annabelle Chapel. We’ve got to look elsewhere and follow other leads.”
“The leads need to be viable.”
“And jewelry found near remains is not viable evidence?”
“Of course it is, but—”
Leach stopped himself, studying her for a moment. Then he came out from behind the desk. He stood close to her, and Joe resisted the urge to take a step back. The look on his face was more fatherly than anything else, but it bothered her. Still, she didn’t want him to know it. The fact that he had been her instructor at college, even the fact that he had taken a chance on her, still didn’t give her the right to expect special treatment.
“Sheriff,” she said quietly, “I just have a feeling about this.”
He almost smiled. “Women’s intuition?”
“Maybe. Maybe that is all it is.”
“All right,” he said. “Take a couple extra hours tomorrow and visit that high school. And stop by the Inkster police department and see if they know anything.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“If it’s a dead end, I don’t want to hear anything else about it.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
She started to the door and had it open when Leach called to her. “And Joe, let’s just keep this between you and me.”
9
Despite its odd name, Inkster looked like most of the suburbs she had known back in Cleveland. It was a grid of small brick houses whose tiny porches, aluminum awnings, and modestly clad windows gave out the mute scream of white, middle-class respectability.
Joe took the road called Cherry Hill toward the high school of the same name. She passed clusters of party stores, gas stations, and restaurants and a park that was probably there long before the blocks around it started growing bricks.
Earlier that morning, she had stopped at the lab in Lansing to drop off the search items. The paperwork had taken almost an hour, and when she was finished, she had stood in the parking lot, listening to the whistle of the Chicago-bound train, thinking about Annabelle Chapel and about how Leach had gone out on a limb by letting her go to Inkster. She needed to come back with something that justified his faith in her.
Joe glanced down at the directions. She was on a street called Avondale now. More cookie-cutter houses, the lawns littered with children’s bikes and dented trash cans. She eased the car to a stop in front of a low-slung school built in the style typical of the fifties. The sign in front read cherry hill high school, home of the spartans, with a Spartan head symbol that looked exactly like the one in the photograph.
Inside, Joe paused in the tiled lobby. There was an area set off with big windows, trophy cases, chairs, and a huge papier-mâché chariot toting a Spartan head. She headed toward the office marked administration.
The woman behind the desk stiffened at the sight of a uniform. “Can I help you?” she asked.
Joe gave her a smile and identified herself. “I’m hoping you can,” she said, setting a photograph on the counter. “Is it possible this charm is from your school?”
The woman had a pair of reading glasses on a chain around her neck and set them on her nose to peer at the picture. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Have you tried Michigan State?”
“It’s not from a college,” Joe said. “And this looks exactly like the one on your sign out front, and I was hoping—”
“May I ask, please, what this is all about?”
The woman’s eyes dipped to the Leelanau County S.O. patch on Joe’s sleeve. Joe could tell by her expression she had no idea where Leelanau was, and Joe didn’t feel like explaining it. Joe caught sight of a white head in the office behind the woman. The sign on the door said mr. garrett principal. She had the odd thought, not for the first time, that sometimes men respected the authority of her uniform more than women did. At least outside the station.
“Could you please tell the principal I’d like to talk to him?” she asked.
The woman’s face went tighter, and she pivoted to the glass office. The man inside was craning to look at Joe. He came out to the desk. “I’m Mr. Garrett,” he said, hand outstretched.
“Deputy Frye. Leelanau County sherrif’s department,” Joe said, shaking it.
