“Bill Brockton. Pleased to meet you.”
“Agent Vickery speaks highly of you.”
“That’s kind of him.”
“Let me see if I’ve understood Agent Vickery correctly, Dr. Brockton. He says you don’t think the two skulls that the victim’s dog brought home came from the burial ground at the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory.”
“No, I don’t think they did. I know this is Florida, and things grow fast down here, but the vegetation at that cemetery looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in years. I just don’t see any way the dog got those skulls from that burial ground.”
“So where did he get them?”
I shrugged, and Vickery said, “That’s what we were hoping to learn from the GPS collar we put on the dog.” Riordan nodded, then excused himself to take a look inside.
Another unmarked car appeared, but this one didn’t stop at the house; instead, it continued farther down Pettis’s dead-end road. Thirty minutes later the car returned and stopped, and a pale young man with short, dark hair and wire-rim glasses got out. He held out a hand to me. “You must be Dr. Brockton, the anthropologist.” I nodded. “I’m Nathaniel James—Nat—from the Forensic Computing Section. Nice to meet you.”
“You, too, Nat. I’m a little surprised to see you out here. I wouldn’t have pegged Mr. Pettis as particularly wired.”
“No, he wasn’t what I’d call wired,” said Nat. “But we are. I just retrieved the GPS receiver and the flash drive I set up in the fire tower. We don’t have the collar that was on the dog, but I’m pretty sure we do have the data it transmitted.”
If he was right, would that mean we’d find the source of the bones? And would it mean that Pettis and the dog had not died in vain?
Darkness had fallen by the time we left the cabin and headed back toward the lavish comforts of the Twilight Motor Court and the Waffle Iron diner. Angie and Whitney had bagged Pettis’s body, and it was loaded onto a panel-truck van from a local funeral home, which would transport it to the small hospital where Dr. Bradford would autopsy the body. After much arguing and a series of phone calls, the dog’s body had been added to the van, for delivery to a McNary animal hospital. I had hoped that Jasper would be buried beside Pettis, but I suspected that he’d be unceremoniously dumped in a ditch somewhere beside Highway 90.
The forensic techs had finished their work in the house, but Vickery had asked the sheriff’s office not to release the scene until after we’d seen what Nat James was able to learn from the GPS data captured by the receiver and stored on the flash drive. Deputy Sutton’s penance—for he continued to feel guilty about failing to prevent Pettis’s death, and possibly even contributing to it—was to keep vigil at the property until we returned the next day.
As Angie and I bumped along the dirt road back to the highway, her phone rang. She glanced at the display. “Oh my God,” she said, “it’s Maddox, from the GBI.” She flipped open the phone. “Mr. Maddox, it’s good to hear from you. Did you get my messages? . . . I understand. It’s been busy down this way, too . . . So how’s the investigation going? . . . Well, have y’all questioned Don? . . . Okay, that’s a good start. Have you charged him?” Angie was silent, and as far as I could tell, Maddox was silent, too. Finally she said, “Mr. Maddox? Did I lose you?” She took her foot off the gas, and the Suburban slowed to an idle. “I don’t understand, Mr. Maddox.” She put the transmission in park, and the Suburban lurched and slithered to a stop. “You mean not yet, right? You mean you aren’t charging him yet. But you will, won’t you?” Panic and despair were rising in her voice, and as they did, I felt sorrow welling up in me. “But why? Why not? He killed her, Mr. Maddox. That man put a shotgun in my sister’s mouth and blew her head off. You know that. You saw her body. You saw the trajectory. You saw that she didn’t do that to herself, Mr. Maddox.” Pleading now. “But you saw it. You saw it, you saw it, you saw it.” She was choking on the words now; they came out as a guttural, ragged whisper that I suspected was not even audible at the other end of the line. “You saw it.” I heard a beep as she disconnected the call and let the phone fall beside her. She turned and stared at me, hollow-eyed in the dim light from the instrument panel. “He says he doesn’t think they’ll charge him. So far they don’t have enough evidence to make a case. They’re sending Kate’s body back to be reburied.”
I stared at her, feeling helpless. “I’m sorry, Angie. So very sorry.” I struggled to find some words of comfort. “Maybe it’s not over yet. Maybe they’ll reconsider. Maybe we can come up with something else.”
“What else? There is nothing else. It’s done.” She shook her head. “She’s like one of those dead boys whose graves we just saw. Nobody gives a damn.”
“You give a damn,” I reminded her.
“A lot of good that’s done her. I’ve let her down. And it’s killing me.”
“Don’t let it. Don’t give up—on her or on yourself. That would be letting her down.”
She drew a deep, shuddering breath, put the Suburban in gear, and drove us to the Twilight in sad silence. Vickery’s car was parked outside his bungalow, and a light showed through the threadbare curtains. “I don’t feel like going to dinner,” Angie said. “You and Stu go on without me.” I started to protest, but she waved me off. “Really. I’m exhausted,” she said as we got out. “I’d be lousy company, and I can’t eat. I just want to sleep.”
“You sure you’ll be okay?” She nodded. “I’m sorry,” I said again, acutely conscious of the inadequacy of the words. “Sleep well. I’ll see you in the morning.” She headed for her door, and lifted a weary hand by way of a good-night.
I showered as quickly as the anemic water pressure would allow, then headed for Vickery’s bungalow. Angie’s light was still on, so I decided to check on her before collecting Vickery. I tapped lightly on her door. She didn’t answer, and I realized that her air conditioner was even noisier than mine, so I knocked again, harder this time. The door was unlatched, apparently; it swung open from the force of the knock, and as it did, my blood froze.
Angie St. Claire was lying on her bed. In her mouth was the muzzle of a shotgun.
Chapter 18
“Angie, don’t,” I shouted from the doorway.
She jerked convulsively, wild-eyed, and the shotgun fell from her hands and tumbled to the floor. Instinctively I ducked and covered my head with my arms, but there was no blast from the gun. The only blast was a piercing shriek from Angie.
“Son of a bitch,” she yelled, scrambling to a sitting position against the headboard as I dove for the gun. “You scared the living shit out of me.” She pounded the mattress a few times with her fist. “Thank God that thing’s not loaded. You’d be picking my brains off the floor for sure.” She took a deep breath and whooshed it out, then took in another and let it out more slowly. “Wow,” she said, and then she looked at me and laughed—actually laughed. I was still kneeling on the floor, clutching the gun and staring at her, as confused as I’d ever been in my life. “Bless your heart, how awful,” she said. “You must have thought I was about to pull the trigger.”
“Well, yeah. Weren’t you?”
“No. I’m not suicidal. I’m just . . . obsessed, I guess. Still trying to figure this thing out. Still trying to understand how in the world my sister ended up with a Mossberg twelve-gauge in her mouth.”
“I thought we already figured that part out.” I got to my feet, my heart still pounding, and took a few deep breaths of my own. “Learn anything new?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Always make sure the door’s locked when you’re doing something questionable in a low-rent motel.”
I tried to smile, but it felt more like a grimace. I laid the gun on the bed, after making sure the safety was on.
Suddenly I heard a door banging somewhere nearby, then heard Vickery yelling, “Angie? Are you okay? Angie?”
“Oh, shit,” she said in a low voice. She tucked the gun into the gap between the bed and the wall. “Keep this
between us, would you? I don’t want Stu to think I’m cracking up.” She held my eyes for an instant, and I nodded. Then she tucked her feet beneath her and sprang into a standing position on the mattress.
Vickery appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, on high alert, his pistol in his hand. He looked at Angie, standing on the bed, then at me, then at Angie again. “I heard a scream. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry to scare you. It was just a mouse.” He stared at her, his eyes still wide, his nostrils flaring, his breath rasping loudly enough to be heard over the air conditioner. “A mouse? You’re kidding me, right?” He turned to me and rolled his eyes. “Doc, is she pulling my leg?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t see the mouse. But I sure heard the scream.”
Angie stepped off the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. “I was lying down, resting for a minute before dinner. I felt something crawling up the leg of my pants, and I freaked out. Sorry, guys.”
Vickery shook his head. “Jesus, Angie. And everybody thinks you’re tough as nails.” He holstered his gun. “What’s it worth if I keep my mouth shut about this?”
“Stu, are you blackmailing me?”
“I sure am.”
“Uh . . .” Clearly she was struggling to switch gears. “Well, could I buy your silence with the meat-and-three special at the Waffle Iron?”
“I was thinking more like a lifetime supply of cigars,” he answered. “But I’m a reasonable man. Throw in a piece of apple pie, and the mouse incident stays in the vault.”
“Shake on it,” said Angie, “and let’s go eat. Dr. Brockton, will you be my witness?”
“Sure, I’ll be your witness,” I agreed.
But a witness to what? I wondered all through dinner—the dinner Angie had earlier said she didn’t want. There was a reason I wondered. As we’d left Angie’s room to head to the diner, I’d glanced back at her bed, and my eyes had caught sight of a small box sitting on the lower shelf of the nightstand. I wouldn’t have staked my life on it, but in the instant before she switched off the lamp, I thought I’d glimpsed the image of a shotgun shell printed on the side of the box.
I continued to wonder about Angie after we returned to the Twilight, and then my wondering shifted gears, became more personal and more painful. I wondered about my father, and the moments just before he pulled the trigger and shot himself. If someone—anyone: my mother, a client, even my own three-year-old toddling self—had come into his office and found him with the gun to his head, might he have explained away the scene, put away the gun, and set about cleaning up the financial mess he’d accidentally made?
I would never know, of course. And therefore I would forever wonder. “Remember me, remember me, remember me.” The ghost whispering those words was not Angie’s sister nor Hamlet’s father this time, but my own.
Chapter 19
The next morning Angie, Stu, and I returned to Pettis’s place. We were met there by ten crew-cut-sporting students who’d been bused over from the Pat Thomas Law Enforcement Academy, a training facility located in the nearby town of Quincy.
We were also met by Nat James, from the Computer Forensics Section. “Do you want the last track,” he asked Angie, “or do you want the dog’s last track?”
“Aren’t those the same?”
“Nope,” he said. “There’s a slow, loopy track in the middle of the night. And then there’s a straight, fast track yesterday morning, about an hour after Pettis called Deputy Sutton. That one heads away from the cabin and out the dirt road to the highway, moving about twenty miles an hour. Then, at the highway, it turns north and accelerates to seventy-five miles an hour.”
“It’s the killer,” breathed Angie. “The collar is tracking the killer as he drives away.”
“Where does it go?” demanded Vickery.
“It ends.”
“You mean he stops?”
“No. I mean he gets out of range. The collar’s still moving fast, then the receiver loses the signal.”
“Crap,” said Angie.
“Leave it on,” said Vickery. “Maybe he’ll come back.”
Nat nodded. “I thought of that. I’m rigging a satellite link, so if the receiver picks up the collar’s signal again, it’ll relay the new track to my computer right away.”
Angie carried a handheld GPS into which Nat James had loaded Jasper’s track, so the route we took would be superimposed on the map of Jasper’s. Slung over one shoulder was her crime-scene camera, and tucked into the belt of her cargo pants was a bundle of orange survey flags. In addition, she’d enlisted students to carry two shovels, two trowels, a couple of baggies of gloves, more survey flags, a partial roll of crime-scene tape, and paper evidence bags.
Stu carried his cigar. I carried a half-dozen detailed topo maps, which Nat James had brought us. The computer whiz was right: FDLE, or at least his piece of it, was highly wired. The day that Pettis had agreed to putting the GPS collar on the dog, Nat had come out to put the finishing steps on the tracking technology. He’d connected the receiver—the small display on which a hunter could see his dog’s position—to a flash drive, which captured the location coordinates that the collar transmitted. He’d reset the tracking interval from five seconds to thirty, to stretch the battery’s life. Then he’d concealed the pair of devices high in the nearby fire tower, as Pettis had suggested, for maximum range.
Most of the dog’s coordinates clustered around and inside the cabin. The one notable and intriguing exception was the long, looping ramble that the dog had taken during his final night.
The top page of the printout I carried was an overview of the area, including a bright red “you are here” dot marking the location of the cabin. From it, a squiggly red line meandered to the northeast before looping back. The other five pages each showed enlarged views of segments of the route Jasper had covered before returning with the bone. According to the tracking data, Jasper had covered seven miles during his final outing. As the crow flew, though, he’d remained within a three-mile radius of home.
Vickery had suggested that we retrace the dog’s footsteps exactly, but Angie disagreed. “I doubt that the dog did a lot of wandering with a big bone in his mouth,” she reasoned. “He obviously wasn’t looking for a place to bury it, since he brought it back, right? See how the last part of the track looks fairly straight? It’s like he was hurrying home with his new treasure.”
“I think I see what you’re saying,” I said. “You think we should follow the track in reverse.” She nodded, and Vickery agreed, so we lined up at the edge of the clearing side by side, Angie at the center, flanked by Vickery and me, with five trainees on either side. Angie had us spread out, arms stretched wide, until our fingertips were barely touching. “That’s your spacing,” she said. “Try to maintain it. I’ll set the pace. We’ll stop and re-form the line whenever it gets too ragged, but try to keep it fairly even.” On her signal we began moving forward in unison, more or less, scanning the ground for bones, signs of recent digging, or anything else out of the ordinary.
The first mile or so took us through pine stands that were relatively free of undergrowth, and we made good time. Jasper had also made good time on this stretch, his home stretch: the red thread of the GPS track was marked on the map with a string of small dots, showing his location at thirty-second intervals. Judging by the spacing of the dots and the scale printed on the map, the dog had covered the final mile in just ten minutes. It took us twenty-five minutes, partly because there were occasional stops to examine holes in the ground—the burrows of various animals, according to Vickery, including one that he swore, with a straight face, had to be a python’s hole—and partly because Angie had to call several halts to straighten and tighten the ragtag line.
A half hour after we’d started the search, we halted once more. This time it wasn’t to inspect an animal burrow or to re-form ranks; this time it was to figure out how, and whether, to cross a coffee-colored stream that lay in our path. Angi
e, who’d zoomed her GPS all the way in to pinpoint where Jasper had crossed, pointed to a narrow, muddy notch in the bank. “Dog tracks,” she said, and I saw that she was right. “That was a damn good collar.” I squinted at the map, which showed a narrow blue squiggle corresponding to the brown water before us. The fine print that bordered the squiggle sent a chill down my spine: the stream was named Moccasin Creek, and I was reasonably certain the name wasn’t a reference to footwear.
Moccasin Creek moved sluggishly between high, eroded banks bordered by overhanging branches. Lurking amid the leaves, camouflaged by the foliage, were countless snakes, I felt sure, draped liked venomous garlands, just waiting to drop upon us as we waded, neck-deep, in the murky waters. My nightmarish reverie was interrupted by Vickery. “Mind if I take a look at that map?” I handed it over, and he studied it briefly. He stepped closer to the bank and peered upstream and downstream, then huddled with Angie and me. “We could have big problems if we cross this creek,” he said quietly.
“I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s nervous about snakes,” I said.
“Huh?” Vickery looked puzzled. He reexamined the map, then shook his head. “Actually, Doc, I’m more worried about humans than reptiles.” Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “We’re in Apalachee County right now,” he went on. “But over there? The other bank? That’s Miccosukee County.”
“Oh, good grief,” Angie groaned. “So what?”
The Bone Yard Page 17
