Hidden Bones (Dead Remaining), page 17
Jake asked, “What people?”
“Assume everyone you meet here. So, if I were you, I’d get out of town—today. Because nobody’s going to give you an ass-kicking warning. You’ll be as gone as your two friends.”
“But—”
Without another word, Miles got into his truck, slammed the door, and left them standing in the parking lot staring after him as he sped away.
CHAPTER 24
“So, let me get this straight. You’re telling me that it was hunters who did that to Eric’s car?” Susan said, wanting to bang her head against the wall in frustration. “You honestly believe that?”
Sheriff Stogg sat back in his chair, his expression aggravatingly impassive. “It’s hunting season,” he said with a shrug. “Who else would it be?”
“You can’t be serious. One or two strays, I could maybe understand. But the entire side of his car was shot up. There were far too many bullet holes for it to be coincidental.”
“And why would somebody want to shoot up his car?” Stogg asked. “You’re not even from around these parts, so why would he—or any of you—have enemies?”
Susan had to focus hard to keep her voice even, a shout boiling up deep in the pit of her stomach. “Come on—I don’t really need to spell it out for you, do I?” She sighed hard, noting the sheriff’s bored expression. “Okay, maybe I do. You saw how the locals treated us at the search party. And let’s not forget our two friends who’ve gone missing under suspicious circumstances.”
“You think it’s suspicious.”
“Oh my God! It’s like you’re going out of your way to be obtuse!” Susan cried, her hands flinging up at her sides.
The sheriff leaned forward in his seat, his face darkening. “You’d better mind your tone, Miss Marlan. You might be the town darling where you come from, but around here you’re still a civilian.”
He was right, of course. “I’m sorry; I mean no disrespect,” she said hastily, though she absolutely did not mean it. She could, however, face a serious reprimanding back in Perrick if Stogg took it upon himself to call her superiors. “This has all been so frustrating, with our friends missing . . . look, if you’d rather I deal directly with Clausen, I’d happily do so.” And she’d wanted to, but once again, Clausen was nowhere to be found.
Stogg flapped a hand. “Clausen is off arresting teenagers for letting off fireworks in campgrounds or some damn thing.” Some damn thing a euphemism for some trivial task.
Oh, because you’re doing a lot of good sitting on your lazy ass, you arrogant joker, she wanted to say. At least Clausen is doing something.
“I’m the sheriff here, so you can deal with me. I have just as much authority as he does.” His tone indicated that he believed his authority stretched beyond “just as much.”
“All righty. Have a look at this, then,” she said, producing the fingernail. He made a move to seize the bag, but she pulled it out of his reach. She trusted the man no farther than she could throw him—his competency not to lose the evidence in particular. He’d probably get drunk and throw it out along with his empty booze bottles.
“Am I supposed to know what that is?” he asked.
“This is a fingernail we found in a clearing off the trail. It’s the same color nail polish Madison was wearing when she disappeared.” She paused for effect. “We found it next to a mobile drug lab when we were out looking for her and Chuck.”
His reaction was not as she’d anticipated, though she shouldn’t have been surprised. “Oh, so now there’s a drug lab out there too? Isn’t that a coincidence—you didn’t manage to find your friends, but you found that? Anything else? Amelia Earhart’s airplane?”
Susan could have joyfully wrapped her hands around Stogg’s throat and squeezed until she burst all the gin blossoms around his nose. “We were just there, less than an hour ago! Why on earth would I make such a thing up? I’ll take you right to it, if you’re determined not to believe me—which it seems you are.”
“Oh, like how you and your boyfriend led me to the dead body under the tree stump?” he said with a vicious snort. “Only thing I’m determined not to do is waste time.”
Susan clutched her hands into fists on her lap. “Are you going to help me or not?”
Stogg shook his head in a manner that was almost pitying. “Look, you wanted to search for your friends, and we did—even organized a whole party that most of the town showed up for. Volunteers, not getting paid. We searched nearly every inch of the woods, which you witnessed with your own two eyes, and didn’t find them. And now . . .” He spread his hands out on his desk in a gesture that she could not interpret.
“And now what? What does that have to do with a drug lab being out there—with Madison’s fingernail next to it?”
“I suspect this whole drug lab narrative is your way of getting us to search a new area. That nail could be yours, for all I know. And the fact that you were on Anquikia Trail when we found Madison’s car at Mitchatepi shows how much you’re grasping at straws. Want to know what I think? I think your musician friends”—musician friends uttered like scumbag delinquents—“did one too many hits of acid, and then they took off on you. You just don’t want to face facts. My suggestion to you is for you and your friends to pack your things and go home. Because I can’t waste public funds for the sake of your denial.”
“That’s ridiculous!” she shouted.
Stogg was not fazed by the outburst in the slightest. He probably galled quite a few individuals on any given day and was accustomed to being hollered at.
He lazily held out a hand. “Okay, then why don’t you hand over that fingernail, and I’ll have it tested? If it turns out to be Madison’s, I’ll look anywhere you want for the rest of the month. Hell, I’ll even organize the search parties myself.”
Susan placed a protective hand over the baggie. “No way.”
Stogg raised his eyebrows. “No way?”
Susan exhaled hard through flared nostrils, feeling her heart thumping underneath her breast. “From day one, you have made it infinitely clear that you are unwilling to perform the bare minimum of your job requirements. It’s a sad time in law enforcement when a forest ranger has to step up and do the job of the sheriff.”
Stogg rolled his eyes. “Here we are on Clausen again. You want to go to him with this nonsense, go ahead. He might even entertain you. But, like I told you, he’s out busting those kids—”
“No, we’re beyond that now,” Susan spat with an aggressive shake of the head. “I will be sending this nail out to the FBI in the morning, as I no longer have confidence in Clancy authorities to do a thorough and competent job. And I’m sure they’ll be interested in hearing all about your unwillingness to help a fellow law enforcement official, Sheriff.”
Stogg sat up straight in his chair, his droopy jowls aquiver. “Now, hang on just a minute! I never said I wasn’t going to help you.”
“No, but you made it pretty clear,” she said, quickly getting to her feet.
“Wait—”
“No, I’m done waiting.” It was time to start getting results.
CHAPTER 25
Eric and Jake arrived back at the hotel at the same time as Susan. While they all wore miserable expressions, Susan’s was more of the outraged variety. Her meeting at the sheriff’s department had gone as well as they’d expected, which was not well at all.
“Man, Suze, you look like you’re about to face a firing squad for a crime you didn’t commit,” Jake commented.
“Don’t even get me started,” she said grimly. “Let’s get inside; I’m freezing.”
Susan walked toward their room in front of Eric, so when she let out a horrified exhale, he initially didn’t know why and for a moment he believed that an intruder was waiting for them with a gun.
But then he saw.
The door to their room had been kicked in, and the place had been ransacked. Their clothes were strewn about, many ripped into shreds. Feathers were scattered all over the bed, the floor, the air, as their pillows had been hacked apart. The mirror above their dresser was smashed, leaving shards of glass everywhere, as if it had exploded. Eric’s laptop was sitting open, its screen shattered. LEAVE TOWN was written across the wall in Susan’s lipstick.
“Why . . .” Susan looked to Eric, bewildered. “How long were you guys gone for?”
“I don’t understand it,” Eric said. “We weren’t even gone that long. We only walked to the gas station to get some coffee. They must’ve been waiting for us to leave.”
“Let’s go check on Jake,” she said, and they bolted.
The devastation in his room was far worse than theirs. They found him sitting on the bed, his eyes brimming with tears. He clutched a mangled object in his hands. “They smashed my violin,” he said. “How could anyone do this to something so beautiful? It was an antique, irreplaceable. There will never be another one of these made again, ever. It was handed down to me by my great-grandfather, and it was the only one in existence. It was one of the few things he’d taken with him when he immigrated to this country from Norway, and they came in here and smashed it like it was nothing. It would have been better if they’d just stolen it. It was priceless.”
And they hadn’t only smashed the violin. Jake had been storing the band’s equipment in his room, and all of it had been destroyed: guitar splintered into dozens of bits, drums kicked in, amps busted. How had they—whoever they were—been able to do this in the middle of the day without anyone noticing? On Jake’s wall was a message written in the same shade of lipstick as the one in his and Susan’s room: WE’RE WATCHING YOU.
The image of their friend’s pain was so moving that Susan began to weep. She crossed to the bed and put an arm around Jake, muttering apologies. It hurt Eric’s soul to watch, and he probably would have wept, too, had he not started feeling so strange.
His skull was throbbing as if his head had been smashed in as badly as the drum set. Woozy, he pinched the bridge of his nose, which did nothing to help. He took a step forward, fell to his knees.
“Eric!” he heard Susan and Jake shout from what sounded like the far end of a long tunnel. Jake set the violin aside and ran to his aid, placing a hand on his shoulder. Eric looked up into his face and shrieked.
Jake was dead—or he looked as if he might be dying. Blood poured down the side of his face, and his skin was ghostly white. Eric could feel every one of his injuries, which extended all the way down to his organs and bones. “Jake . . . no . . .” He could hear the screams of the other injured around him, smell the tang of fuel mixed with blood. And he was fading, fading, his consciousness drifting up from his body—
Jake pulled his hand away, and poof, the image was gone. So was the pain. Eric blinked, looked up, and saw the fright on Susan’s and Jake’s faces.
“What’s the matter?” Susan asked, her face still wet with tears.
“I saw . . .” His gaze drifted to Jake, who had endured enough mental agony in the last ten minutes to last for the year. He wasn’t keen to add to it by revealing what he’d just seen, particularly since Jake was a great believer in his psychic powers. He shook his head and got to his feet. “I don’t remember, but I feel fine now. And, before you ask if I’m sure, I’m positive.” He provided them a smile he hoped looked genuine.
“If you’re sure you’re feeling okay, then,” Susan said, “I think we should go to the front desk and see how the hell this happened to our rooms.”
“Let’s go get to the bottom of it,” Eric said, happy when they didn’t press.
The three of them stomped down toward the office, their anger mounting with each step. When they reached the office, Susan yanked the door open, and the three of them fanned out. As they approached the front desk, Susan cleared her throat loudly, ready for battle, but it was Jake who beat her to it.
“Listen!” he yelled. “Somebody broke into our rooms and smashed apart all our things. I want to know how this happened in the middle of the day, with you sitting down here . . .”
The girl glared at them from behind the desk. Her face was red and puffy, her eyes bloodshot and brimming with tears. “You!” she screamed, jabbing a shaky finger at Susan. “You stupid bitch!”
The trio stood silent, the words shocked right from their tongues. “My brother Ian is dead!”
Susan looked confused for a moment, but then her face changed with understanding. “Big Ian from the gym?”
The girl swiped a stream of snot away from underneath her nose. “They found him in the pool,” the girl sobbed, “with the cover pulled over him. He drowned. They’re saying it’s an accident, but we all know it wasn’t!”
Susan hesitated. “I . . . ,” she finally managed.
“You should’ve kept your nose out of things, you stupid, stupid bitch! You and your friend. Everyone here knows you’re a cop—and you made Ian talk to you? In front of everyone?”
“What . . . but . . . I don’t understand—”
“His blood is on your hands!” the girl shrieked. “You’re going to pay for this! I hope you never find your friends!”
A man came quickly running out from the back office. He said a few quiet words to the girl, put an arm around her, and helped her into the back office. A few moments later, he returned.
“What can I help you with?” he asked with a polite smile, as if the interaction had never taken place.
CHAPTER 26
“I don’t want to go home, do you?” Susan asked Eric and Jake back in their rooms. Jake and Eric had since apprised her of their interaction with Miles at the gas station, just as she had told them of her futile exchange with the sheriff. Now, they paced Jake’s room uneasily, cleaning up debris as they went.
“Hell no, I don’t want to go home. Okay, I want to go home, but I’ll be damned if I do it without Chuck and Madison . . . or, at least until we find out what happened to them,” Jake said stubbornly, folding his arms across his chest. “But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. These people up here are maniacs. I mean, look at my room. And you should have seen that guy’s face at the gas station, Suze. He looked like he’d gone a few rounds with a Louisville Slugger.”
She looked to Eric, seeking confirmation. She didn’t think Jake was an outright liar, but he did occasionally have a flair for the dramatic. “It was pretty bad,” Eric agreed solemnly. “It makes me sick to think that they did that to that poor kid because of us.”
“It makes me sicker to think that that would have been us had that Ben guy not intervened at the bar,” Jake said.
Susan shivered, realizing how close the two had come to being jumped and beaten by a crew of vindictive drunkards. Or, worse, killed. After, would they have vanished into thin air the way Chuck and Madison had? What would she have done then? Jake was quickly turning into a close friend, but Eric had become such a welcome and uplifting fixture in her life that she couldn’t imagine living without him in it. It hurt her deeply, thinking of harm befalling them.
“Even if we did leave town, like every damn person we meet keeps telling us to do,” Eric said, “we’d only drive ourselves crazy.”
“And we’ve faced worse,” Susan said, not needing to clarify to Eric what she meant. “We’re no cowards.”
Jake asked, “What now, then?”
“I’m going to head over to our room and call Howell,” Susan said and then shook her head. “I don’t know why I didn’t just do that in the first place—maybe it was wishful thinking that Clausen would be the one to help us after being shot at near the lab, but then I, of course, got stuck with Stogg.”
“Think the FBI will actually assist on this one?” Eric asked.
Susan shrugged. “No idea. Probably not if it was just Chuck and Madison. But, with the drug lab and all the things we keep hearing about all these mysterious murders happening, they might take an interest. Howell mentioned that the DEA have been monitoring this area, too, so all these things might catch their attention. I won’t know until I talk to him, but it doesn’t hurt to make a call.”
Fifteen minutes later, Susan was finishing outlining the previous days’ events for Howell. He’d listened silently in his typical fashion, though she’d heard the scribble of pen against paper on his end of the line. She finished speaking, but he still said nothing, as if he was waiting for her to say more.
“And . . . that’s all,” she said awkwardly and with a weak chuckle once the silence got to be too much. She felt like an idiot immediately. Her desire to do right in Howell’s eyes was so strong that it was almost pathological. She wanted, she realized, to work for the FBI so very, very much. And, once the mess in Clancy had been sorted out, she planned on taking Howell up on his job offer. Her mind was finally and absolutely made up on the matter.
“I’ll call you back in a few,” he said and hung up.
“A few” turned out to be an hour, but it seemed Howell had been busy. “I’ve contacted Kinger over at the DEA. He and I will be flying into Seattle tomorrow—”
“Tomorrow?” she blurted. “Just like that? I thought . . .”
“You thought what?” He sounded amused.
“It’s . . . no, I’m grateful for the help! I’d only figured that it would take some time to get things organized.”
“Normally, it would. And I don’t typically work so closely with the DEA,” Howell said and then paused. “This trip, however, will be strictly off the record. And, of course, I am the boss, so I have certain leeway at the FBI. Kinger and I will be traveling to Clancy strictly as tourists, understand? I need to know that I can trust you with privileged information?”
He phrased it like a question, so she figured she’d better answer. “Yes, of course.”
“Kinger, as I may have mentioned before, works on a task force that has been monitoring the drug highway that runs through Clancy. I told him about your discovery of the mobile lab, as well as the other information you provided about your friends and other locals disappearing. I’ve only done so because I trust your judgment.”
