by Shandi Boyes
Me: Are you sure you’re okay? The last time you were up this late was when you shook your way through a s’mores sugar-high.
I bunker down for another late night when the three dashes of an incoming message dart across the screen of my phone. My intuition is proven right when Melody’s reply pops up two seconds later.
Melody: If I recall correctly, that was the night of my fifteenth birthday. Which means it wasn’t a sugar-high keeping me awake…
“It was me,” I whisper at the same time her next message arrives.
Melody: It was you.
Unsure if the wetness seeping into my pants is because of the incalculable number of times Melody featured in my dreams last night, or the faulty pipes of the one-star motel I’m camped in, I slip my hand into my sweatpants. I’m hard and virile, my cock stretching well past the waistband of my boxers, but there’s no sticky residue as I’m anticipating, so faulty pipes must be to blame.
I realize neither of my suggestions are right when icy-cold water is tossed over my bed. It shrivels my dick in an instant and has me scampering up the bed. After pushing my flopped hair out of my eyes, I stray them in the direction the water was flung from. A growl rumbles in my chest when I spot the condescending sneer of soon-to-be-retired Special Agent Harvey Rose.
“Up and at ‘em, kid, you’re gonna wanna see this.” How he ever got through the academy with a lack of vocabulary shocks me. He could only be more hillbilly if he had a piece of straw stuck between his buck teeth. “And change your clothes. If your moans like the last twenty are anything to go by, I don’t want you sitting in the cab of my truck in those pants.” He stares at my no-longer extended crotch while snickering out, ‘those pants.’
“Can you give me a minute?” I ask when he remains standing in the doorway of my attached bathroom, holding an empty bucket while smirking like a smug prick. “I can’t really get dressed with you standing there staring at me, can I?”
“Can’t get any worse, can it? You’re lying on top of the bedding, stroking your dick through your pants. I’ve seen about all I can see.”
His thick silver mustache wobbles when I growl, “I wasn’t stroking myself. I was checking for wetness—”
“In your pants. Nuf said.”
When he pushes off his feet to mosey out of the room like a real-life gunslinger, I stumble onto something more atrocious than a fellow agent breaking into my room to wake me as if I’m a prisoner of war. He got a piece of paper wet, a very important piece of paper.
“What the fuck? Do you have any idea what you have done? That’s evidence you’ve ruined. You could be suspended for that.” I climb out of my bed before carefully lifting the banking slip I swiped from Hunter’s van yesterday when Isaac, Hunter, and Hugo were fussing over Isabelle. I felt like scum at the bottom of the shower in my motel room, but the recurring deposit placed into Hunter’s account each month had my interests too piqued to leave the paper in his glove compartment. None of Isaac’s many businesses have the trading name of the payee on Hunter’s bank record, and the money appears to be coming from an offshore account. It could be a dead end, or it could be a gold mine, but it won’t be anything if I can’t stop the ink from smudging. “Grab me the hairdryer.”
“The what?”
“The. Hair. Dryer.” I speak my words super slow as if Harvey is hard of hearing. “It’s under the vanity sink.”
Harvey steps into the bathroom for a second before his big frame refills the doorway. That’s how small the bathroom is. “This?” he asks, holding up the hairdryer with two fingers as if it’s covered in cooties.
“Yes. Bring it to me.”
When I click at him as if he’s a dog, he pegs the hairdryer at my head before stalking to the door. “Come find me in my truck when you’ve finished fancying yourself up. If you’re not out in ten, I’ll leave you here.” I’m about to tell him I’m fine with that, but his next set of words stop me, “And I’ll pass your murder onto another agent.”
I slant my head, my heart rate rising. “Murder?”
His lowriding ponytail swishes along his back when he cranks his neck back to face me. “Yep. Murder. That boy’s feet were dangling above a shallow grave.”
“You found a second body?”
Harvey doesn’t answer me unless you count whistling as an agreeing sound.
“Is it a female?”
“Coroner is on her way, but I’d say so.” He nudges his head to a truck that looks like it belongs on the top of a wreckage heap. “You coming or not?”
“I’m coming.” After snapping a quick image of Hunter’s bank record on my phone and forwarding it to Phillipa, I snag my shoes from the foot of my drenched bed and my jacket from the desk, then follow Harvey out of my motel room, acting ignorant to the droplets of water dripping off my trousers.
“Caucasian female, early to mid-thirties. Multiple stab wounds to her chest. Several broken bones. Some have been fused over, though, so prolonged physical abuse is suspected.”
Dr. Maude, a mid-fifties coroner from Parkerville, raises her gentle eyes to mine when I ask, “Did she have any children?”
She nods as her eyes soften more. “Yes. Multiple times.”
I take a step back when she says ‘multiple.’ “More than once? Are you sure?”
“Uh-huh. She had both natural and caesarian births.” She lifts a plain white sheet to show us a C-section scar. “Caesarian scars are still identifiable even on badly decomposed bodies, although hers are a little jagged, and the suturing for each one was horrendous.”
“Indicating she most likely gave birth at home.” Harvey jumps in as his eyes stray to a woman we believe is Rhianna Shroud, Carlyle Shroud’s designer wife.
“It does look that way.” Dr. Maude drags her glove-covered index finger along skin that doesn’t really represent skin anymore. “Her sutures were an old military style. They were a running style instead of the favored continuous sutures most hospitals use. No staple marks were noted, either. Whoever stitched her up took no care. Her uterus is so poorly damaged, if she had survived her attack, she’d be infertile.”
“Do her C-section scars give any indication on how long ago her children were born?” The weariness of my words reveals my tiredness. Harvey and I have spent the last five hours sitting on hard plastic chairs outside a morgue that would be lucky to see one to two patients a year, much less two murder victims. Mercifully, the lack of victims around these parts means Dr. Maude could get straight to work.
“Her scars are aged. I’d say most of her children were born twenty to thirty years ago. I’ll have a more conclusive answer once I’ve finished my autopsy.”
Nodding, I join Dr. Maude at the sink so she can wash her hands. “Is there any indication the victim’s wounds could have been self-inflicted?” With Megan’s mental instability beyond proven by multiple psychiatric hospital admissions the past ten years, I can’t leave any stone unturned.
As Dr. Maude dries her hands, she purses her lips. “I had considered that at the start, multiple ligature marks and cuts were noted on her thighs and forearms, but the angle of the wounds indicate her attacker stood over her and thrust down.” She demonstrates what she means on me. Her ‘attack’ replicates a poorly-scripted knife killing scene all B-grade horror movies have. “If the injuries were self-inflicted, the wounds would be straight with little to no angle manipulation.” She demonstrates what she means by stabbing herself in the chest with an invisible knife. There’s no downward thrusting, meaning the entrance wounds of the knife are straight.
“So, she was murdered?” Harvey asks, catching the gist of our theatrics.
“Yes.” Dr. Maude nudges her head to Carlyle’s body lying lifeless on a gurney. He’s been deceased for so long, his head still sits at the odd angle the rope contorted it to. “As was he.”
“Carlyle was also murdered?” Harvey asks, once again joining our conversation. I’m glad as I am so shocked, my words aren’t working. “We believed Carlyle hung himsel
f where he did because it was directly above the shallow grave of his wife.”
Dr. Maude shakes her head before moving toward the early toxicology reports. “According to this, Carlyle had traces of tetrodotoxin in his stomach contents.”
“Pufferfish is a delicacy in Japan, could incorrect preparation be the cause of his death?” I’m not a fan of fishy dishes, but I sampled pufferfish a few years ago when Phoenix dared me to. He was a risk-taker long before Joey died, but it grew substantially worse after his death.
Dr. Maude once again shakes her head. “That wasn’t the only traces of poisoning we found in his stomach. It was as if someone googled the most poisonous foods and plants, and hit him with near-lethal combinations as often as possible.”
With me needing a few seconds to decipher a possible reason for prolonging Carlyle’s death, Harvey’s years of service get a chance to shine. “If he were dead, the disability checks would have stopped coming. Keeping him alive, although sick, kept the money coming in.”
“Quite possibly,” Dr. Maude says through twisted lips. “I’ll have a full workup to you by the end of the week. Perhaps sooner if you can supply me with a list of toxins to search.”
Hearing Dr. Maude’s request as readily as me, Harvey dips his chin in farewell before heading for the exit. I fall into step behind him a second later.
“Were any domestic disturbances reported at the Shroud property around the time of their deaths?” I ask Harvey while climbing into his truck. Yes, I said climb. His truck is one of those big-wheeled vehicles that short-asses like me need a step-ladder to enter.
Harvey shakes his head while firing up his truck. “I went back over three decades. No reports at all. Not surprising, though. They live too far out for neighbors to hear their screams.”
With his honest comment gurgling the greasy egg and bacon burger I scarfed down while waiting for Dr. Maude to do a preliminary autopsy on the female corpse found by the forensic team late last night, I keep my mouth shut during our drive back to the Shroud family ranch.
Even with the area being guarded by over a dozen members of the local sheriff’s office, our silent descent down the long driveway is oddly eerie. The Bureau has stumbled onto many houses of horror since it was founded, but I have a feeling the Shroud ranch will top the cake on their previous cases.
After pulling in at the front of the property, Harvey locks his eyes with mine. “I’ll start on the sheds while you go through the house. If Carlyle was moved from the house to the barn, some kind of help was needed. He wasn’t a slim man by any means.”
After lifting my chin, acknowledging his request without words, I hotfoot it up the front porch stairs. The agent side of me wants to head straight to the kitchen, certain the food scraps on the floor will have traces of the poisons Dr. Maude is chasing, but the right side of my head, the intuitive part, directs me to Megan’s room instead. It’s as sterile as a psychiatric hospital, making it the ideal place to store dangerous goods.
I dip my chin in greeting to a deputy at the door before snagging a pair of gloves out of the box at his side. CSI officers are still working the scene. They’ve removed a majority of the photographs from the walls, so now they’re working on the ceiling.
With them occupied, I move for the room Isabelle, Hugo, and I discovered two days ago. It reeks of bleach and instigates horrid memories of seeing Mr. and Mrs. Gregg in the operating theaters years ago, but I keep moving, knowing my job will forever come first. And no, I’m not referencing my position in the Bureau.
“Has anything been removed from this room?” I ask a young techie who’s digitally categorizing the space as Hunter did yesterday morning.
She peers up at me with her big almond-shaped eyes out in full force before shaking her head. If the width of her pupils is anything to go by, she’s brand-spanking new to the job.
After nudging my head to the door, I ask, “Can you give me a minute? I work better in silence.”
Her headshake switches to a nod as she stands to her feet. “I could probably do with a breather. This is a little creepy.”
I purse my lips to hide my smile. Creepy is much too blasé of a word for what could possibly be going on here.
Once I’m alone, I stand in the middle of the all-white space before slowly pivoting around to take in each surface with due diligence. Most agents would move straight for the physically visible stuff before deepening their search. I prefer starting at the other end. When dealing with a deranged person, you must think outside of the box.
A few minutes later, my head slants to the side. A seam of drywall tape is running down one wall. It wouldn’t have been visible if it weren’t for the faintest portion of afternoon sun breaking through the storm clouds above my head.
“Can I borrow that?” I ask a male CSI officer who’s holding a box cutter. Nick’s photographs were glued to the wall, meaning they have to be sliced off the wall along with the drywall’s plaster.
After handing me the cutter, the crime scene investigator joins me inside the room, halving its space with his broad shoulders. “What are you looking at?”
“Can you see the seam?” I outline the area I’m fixated on before twisting my torso back to face him. “All the drywall in this room is from a continuous sheet… except that one.”
I can tell the exact moment he spots what I’m referencing as he purses his lips. “Do you want the pleasure, or shall I?”
“I’ll cut while you photograph. If the amount of bleach in this room is anything to go by, and the fact we have missing children, we’ll want to get everything on tape.”
“All right.” He grabs a video recorder off a kit just outside of the room before firing it up. The light on top of the recording device bounces off the stark white walls, blinding me, but mercifully, it also highlights the seam I’m about to slice through.
“Is that… ugh… the smell.”
“At least it isn’t a human corpse,” I gabble through a gag while removing a mummified cat from the wall. It’s so badly decomposed, I’m going to burn my nose hairs with bleach just with the hope it’ll eradicate the smell from my nostrils.
I realize not all the smell is coming from the cat when I break away a large chunk of the drywall. There’s a hand, a tiny one, and it’s very much human.
While working my jaw side to side, hopeful its workover will hold back the bile scorching my throat, I move to the window Isaac broke with his elbow. After removing a thin piece of thread the CSI team has yet to discover and sliding it into my pocket, I shout down for Harvey.
When he pops his big head out of the wooden shed Carlyle’s truck is parked in front of a few seconds later, I jerk up my chin. “You’ll want to see this.”
My brows inch together when he replies, “You first.”
“I’ve got a body,” I shout, stilling the deputies standing between us.
“So do I, kid,” Harvey replies, “And more than one of them.”
13
Melody
I slant my head to the left before slowly dragging it to the right. Printing out the image Brandon sent me this morning hasn’t improved its quality at all. I can tell it’s a bank record, there’s a familiar logo in the top left-hand corner, and some of the digits not covered by smeared ink could possibly be an account number, but without knowing every digit and what this document corresponds to, I’m running blind.
I would have more of an idea on what I’m seeking if Brandon had included text with his picture message. This soggy image is all I’ve got to work on. He gave me more information when he requested Marjorie Hawke’s file.
There’s a thought. I wonder if that corresponds with this?
Eager to check, I snag my loft keys off the coffee table, then dash into Julian’s office. “I need to pop by my loft. Did you want me to pick up something for dinner on the way back?”
“You’re going out… alone?” The shock in his voice is understandable. My backside has barely left the couch since my run-in with Mr. McGee t
wo nights ago. Leo was adamant I was to take a few days off, and since Julian has a butler, a cook, and several housemaids, I haven’t needed to lift a finger. Although Brandon’s underhanded request for help isn’t exactly heart-pumping stuff, it feels nice to be needed. Julian never needs anything, and if he does, he has a bucket load of staff at the ready, waiting to serve him.
When I nod, Julian asks, “Would you like me to come with you?”
“No, it’s fine. You’re snowed under. I should only be a few minutes.” When a worried groove burrows between his brows, I nudge my head to the large Samoan man standing in the corner of the massive living room. “I’ll take Tiny with me.”
Tiny smiles a beaming grin when my nickname reaches his ears. Fetu isn’t close to being tiny. He’s thick, tall, and his face tattoos would have people double-guessing their approach before they’ve even considered it.
“If you’re late, I’ll wait up for you.”
Julian’s brow arches when I mutter, “I won’t be late.” He knows I barely turn up for anything on time, and let’s not mention the fact he printed out Brandon’s image for me, meaning he most likely knows what my trip home is about. I left a certified copy of Marjorie’s file on my desk. “I’ll be back soon.”
When I spin on my heels, Julian calls my name. He waits for me to pop my head back into his gigantic office before he signs, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” I reply with a smile.
When Fetu joins me outside of Julian’s office, I hold my finger in the air, requesting a minute. The smell of freshly baked cookies streams through my nose when I dash into the kitchen. It’s as large and as well-equipped as the rest of Julian’s penthouse, but mercifully, it has a homey feel to it. That might have more to do with Julian’s cook’s fond fascination with dessert items.
