‘He didn’t have to. I already knew.’
Beaten again, the judge looked down at the mystifying label.
‘It’s for her anxiety,’ said Oren, a gracious and charitable winner.
Hannah anxious? Never.
Henry Hobbs regarded the pill bottle as if it might be filled with little white bombs. ‘That can’t be right. She ’s so calm, she’s downright sluggish. She goes to bed early, takes naps in the afternoon.’ He addressed the object in his hand. ‘There ’s got to be another use for this medication. You know, over the past six weeks or so, I think she’s gotten a little paranoid. Hiding the car keys – that fits. And you’ve seen all the locks on the front door? Kitchen door, too. That ’s Hannah’s doing.’
‘Well, sir, you’ve got human bones dropping on the front porch like clockwork. That might account for the locks.’
The sash was raised on the window in Josh’s bedroom, and both men looked up to see the sheriff leaning over the sill and calling out in a neighborly fashion, ‘Oren? A word?’
Hannah came down the stairs as Oren climbed upward.
‘I plan to throw a quick lunch together. You fancy a chicken sandwich?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
She paused on the step beside him. ‘I told Cable everything.’ In passing, she whispered, ‘I don’t think he’ll need to question the judge today.’
‘Good job.’
Reaching the second-floor landing, he saw a stranger standing idle in the hallway. Printing on the back of his jacket identified him as the county coroner’s man – still waiting for the bones. That was odd. Hannah’s small store of information would have filled ten minutes at the outside. What had Cable Babitt been doing with all this time?
Oren hovered on the threshold of his brother’s bedroom. He stared at the open closet, the rod packed tight with smashed-together clothes, a shelf piled high with junk – and he wondered if the sheriff had noticed the single anomaly in that chaos.
Henry Hobbs was surprised – and wary.
No revved-up Porsche had announced the arrival of Addison Winston, who so loved a noisy entrance. The lawyer came strolling across the meadow – quietly, and that alone was cause for suspicion. Though technically neighbors, the Winstons owned a great deal of acreage, and it was a good hike from the lodge – for an attorney in wildly expensive dress shoes. All decked out in a superbly tailored suit of gray silk, Addison hardly looked the part of a man in early retirement. But then, he had never fit that role by so much as a single strand of gray hair.
‘Hello, Henry. I saw the sheriff ’s jeep in the driveway. Thought you might need a good lawyer.’ Ad Winston had a smile that could charm a suicide bomber – but not the judge.
The attorney’s lean jawline was suspiciously well preserved. His hair was cut to a youthful shoulder length, and the Vandyke beard, no doubt dyed the same shade of brown, was trimmed to a sharp point. The judge was convinced that if he could only see the man’s ears, they would be pointy, too. And so, in a Dorian Gray kind of way, Addison never seemed to age.
‘I don’t need a celebrity lawyer,’ said the judge.
‘Well, Henry, if you’re down to your last million, I could take you on as a charity case.’ The attorney sat on the tree stump and raised his face to the sun, as if he were not tanned enough.
The judge also looked up, but to the north where the Winston lodge perched on a foothill. All that could be seen above the tree line was the conical roof of the tower atop Addison’s castle of logs. ‘You got a telescope up there?’
‘Three of them,’ said Addison. ‘Tools of the trade for an ambulance chaser. Actually, I passed the coroner’s van on the road. So, naturally, I assumed you were dead.’ His smile faded off as he turned toward the house. ‘Please tell me the coroner didn’t come for Hannah.’
‘Hannah’s just fine.’ Or was she? He was still speculating on the pharmacy bottle in his hand.
‘Not dead. Glad to hear it. My daughter mentioned seeing Oren in town. So the boy’s come home.’
‘Josh, too.’
Ad Winston wore a look of stunned surprise. And the judge would have enjoyed that so much if he could only believe that it was genuine.
Oren stood at the center of Josh’s bedroom and looked down at the coffin, where his brother’s bones blended with those of a stranger.
‘It’s official now,’ said Sheriff Babitt. ‘Twenty years late, but we got ourselves a homicide investigation.’ He rolled up a cloth tape measure that looked like something borrowed from Hannah’s sewing basket.
So this was where the time had gone. The sheriff had been measuring the bones of arms and legs.
As a CID agent, when Oren had no DNA samples or dental records, he had sometimes used these same markers to identify victims found in the mass graves of combat zones. And, on one occasion, all he had was the vertebrae of a baby mingled with bones of the mother. But Cable Babitt was probably more concerned with the body count in the coffin. This man would not care to wait on a pathologist’s report to tell him how many people it had taken to make this one partial skeleton.
‘A double homicide,’ said Oren. ‘Unless you think there might be three victims.’
The sheriff smiled. ‘Nice catch, son. Hannah told me you figured on at least two people here. If I come up with a different number, you know I won’t be sharing that with you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Cable Babitt glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Where the hell is Dave?’ He called out to the coroner’s man in the hallway. ‘Harry? No need to wait for my deputy. I guess we can just load the bones into a body bag.’
‘No,’ said Oren. ‘Don’t bag them.’ He reverently lowered the heavy wooden lid. ‘Just load the casket into the van.’
The sheriff nodded to the man in the hall. ‘Go get another pair of hands, Harry.’ When the other man’s footsteps had died off down the hall, he said, ‘Good idea, son. It’s best if your dad doesn’t keep the coffin in the house. He might get to thinking that ’s a normal thing to do. Now, about these bones showing up on the porch. Hannah tells me this has been going on for a while . . . but you just got home last night.’
Oren nodded, looking down through the open window as a jeep pulled up in front of the house. The door opened, and the driver dropped to the ground on the run. Only seconds later, the coroner’s man entered the room, followed by Dave Hardy, who had changed into his uniform. They each grabbed a brass handle, then lifted the coffin and turned it toward the door with some haste on Dave’s end.
‘I made a call to the Army,’ said the sheriff. ‘Oren, you know how this works. I had to account for your time while the judge was collecting those bones.’
The coroner’s man and the deputy were in less of a hurry now. Though the coffin must be heavy, they lingered at the bedroom door.
If this annoyed the sheriff, it never showed on his face. ‘The boss of your old outfit vouched for all your duty hours. He told me you were the best CID agent he ever met. He thinks I’d be a fool not to make use of all that talent. But I guess you know why I can’t do that.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Oren well understood the reason: One day, two brothers had walked into the woods, and only one had come back alive.
SIX
The road was narrow, and new shoots of foliage reached out to touch the sheriff ’s jeep, just a kiss of leaves in passing. As Cable Babitt traveled toward the coast highway, the dense forest was left behind, and he had a broad vista of town and sea and sky. He turned to the silent man beside him to make one more attempt at an actual conversation.
‘I hear the Army gave you a real fine education – a damn master’s degree in forensic science. They must think a lot of you, son. I’m surprised they let you go without a fight.’ This was doubly surprising in wartime, when the military was strained and stretched thin, when National Guardsmen much older than Oren were pressed into active duty. ‘Your commanding officer didn’t say why you quit. I had the feeling he didn’t know.’
A st
ation wagon sped past. The name of a news program was printed on a sign anchored to its roof. Oren Hobbs turned in the passenger seat to watch this vehicle heading back toward the judge ’s house.
‘Reporters,’ said the sheriff. ‘Those guys are from a local radio station, and the signal’s pretty weak.’ He pointed to the sky and a low-flying helicopter with station call letters boldly printed on the bottom. ‘Now that ’s the outfit that worries me. They broadcast statewide.’
‘Turn around,’ said Oren. ‘Take me home.’
‘Bad idea, son. But don’t worry. I’m the one who called Ad Winston. He’ll look out for your dad and Hannah. Nobody handles reporters better than Ad does.’
‘The judge doesn’t even like him.’
‘So what? Henry Hobbs is like royalty around here, and Ad would never miss a chance to do that old man a favor. It’s better if you stay away from the media. You know that, right?’
‘I know I’m the prime suspect.’
‘Son, you could confess right now, and I’d still put you to work.’
Oren Hobbs was stunned and quiet for all the time it took to point the wheels of the jeep toward the county seat. In sidelong vision, Cable kept an eye on his passenger as the younger man struggled with the logic of this proposition – the absolute lack of legality, not to mention common sense.
‘You know I can’t help you,’ said Oren. ‘You laid it out yourself back at the house. You told me—’
‘What I said back there – that was for my deputy’s benefit.’
High school grudges were long-lived, and Dave Hardy would never forgive Oren for beating him bloody and senseless in front of half the town.
Isabelle Winston, PhD, stood upon a wooden deck that encircled her mother’s retreat, a tower room at the top of the lodge. The crisp, cool air was filled with spraying birdseed, loud caws, whistles and trills, and the rush of wings. Hungry birds landed at feeders hung all around the railing, and the sated ones took flight.
The ornithologist ignored them. Birds were not her passion today.
Her binoculars were trained on a helicopter landing in the Hobbs meadow. She could easily identify her father, Addison, as he crossed the tall grass, one hand extended to greet the reporters piling out of the aircraft. Overhead, a private jet was making a descent at the county airstrip. More media? Of course. First the local radio station had created a serial murder from the bones of one lost boy, and now the circus had come to town.
She moved around to the other side of the tower and set the binoculars on the railing, startling a cowbird into flight and a high whistle of wee titi. She looked through the eyepiece of a telescope, one of three that were permanent fixtures of the deck. This lens was focused on the town of Coventry. Her mother, a gifted amateur naturalist, did more than note the passage of birds.
Isabelle looked back at the sleeping woman on the other side of the glass wall. How many years ago had that bed been moved up here? When had the tower room become Sarah Winston’s whole world?
Turning back to the telescope, Isabelle shifted it, and kept the sheriff ’s jeep in sight until it made the turn onto the coast highway, carrying Oren Hobbs away. Keeping track of Oren had once been the schoolgirl hobby of summer vacations. And now that he was out of sight, her interest in voyeurism faded. She opened the sliding glass door and stepped inside.
The tower room offered shade from the midday sun but no greater sense of privacy. The northern and southern exposures were floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, and there were no curtains. The walls, east and west, were made of plaster and covered with framed drawings from her mother’s sketchbook. There were also photographs taken by the judge’s youngest son, Joshua Hobbs. They pictured the early birthday balls, a time when her mother had looked forward to that annual event. By Addison’s account, the festivities of later years had been stressful. On those nights, Sarah Winston had been allowed no alcohol until the last guest had departed, and then her own private parties would become drunken stupors lasting for days.
This morning’s stress had been resolved not by the bottle but with sleeping pills.
Sleeping beauty.
In her middle fifties now, the woman lying on the bed was greatly changed by time. But in repose, wrinkles smoothed, the good bones of a fabulous face could still be seen. Her eyes fluttered open, so blue, so wide.
‘Belle?’
‘Yes, Mom, I’m here.’ Isabelle reached down to stroke her mother’s hair. Once, the blond tresses had been natural, so silky. Now they felt coarse. ‘It’s after one. You must be starved.’
Her mother sat bolt upright on the bed. ‘Is it true? I wasn’t seeing things?’
‘You were right. Oren Hobbs came home. I ran into him in town this morning.’
More accurately, she had chased him down with a very fast car and an old grudge.
Oren Hobbs stood by the window and looked out on the Saulburg street. This town seemed like a bustling metropolis compared to his lethargic Coventry, where a dog on crutches could outrun every car. Behind him, a fly buzzed round the room, and Sheriff Babitt’s fingers drummed on his desk blotter.
‘Pull up a chair, son.’
Oren was more inclined to leave, but the judge had raised him to be well mannered, and so the gentleman in blue jeans and cowboy boots accepted the invitation to sit down. By his posture, no one would guess his military background, for he slouched low in the chair. By outward appearance, he had shaken off twenty years of soldiering, as if that part of his life had been lived by someone else. This might well be the day after Josh had gone missing, the last time he had sat down to a conversation in the sheriff ’s private office.
‘So,’ said Cable Babitt, ‘we have a deal? This is an old cold case, and I don’t—’
‘It never was a case. You wrote my brother off as a runaway.’
‘The hell I did.’ The sheriff spun his chair around to unlock a drawer in his credenza. When the chair swiveled back again, the man held a stack of files in his hands, and he settled them on the desk. ‘There must ’ve been a thousand people combing the woods for Josh. And I’ll bet you not one of them ever saw that boy as a runaway.’
To be fair, a search of the forest had gone on for a solid month, long after all hope of finding Josh alive was gone.
‘It’s always been an open case.’ The sheriff slapped one hand down on his pile of paperwork. ‘This is it, all the files. There are no copies. Now this is a one-way deal. I don’t share anything with you. But everything you find, Oren – you bring that straight to me.’
No copies? Active files should be in the hands of a case detective. The sheriff had at least five of them to cover a county this size. Why would this man shut out his own investigators?
‘I’m a civilian now,’ said Oren, ‘and a suspect. What you’re suggesting is against—’
‘Son, this is between you and me. It’s not like I’m gonna give you a deputy’s star.’
As if the sheriff might be only half bright, Oren carefully measured out the words, ‘I’m – the – prime – suspect.’
‘Oh, hell, I never thought you had anything to do with Josh’s disappearance, and neither—’
‘When I was seventeen, you asked me for an alibi.’
‘And your alibi’s one thing that isn’t in these files. It was a good one. I believed it . . . but I never put it down on paper.’ He tapped his temple. ‘It’s all up here. So I guess you’re working for me. Now that it’s a homicide investigation, you might need that old alibi.’
‘I never—’
‘No, Oren, you never said a word. Someone else came forward to account for your time that day. You wouldn’t tell me a damn thing when you were a kid. But now you’ll work this case for me.’
A gang of ravens made an assault on the bird feeders surrounding the tower room, and the flight songs of smaller birds were fading in the distance. The ravens had no song. They croaked.
Cr-r-ruck and pr-r-ruck.
‘I don’t see Judge Hobbs. He must�
��ve gone inside.’ Sarah Winston handed the binoculars to her daughter and then bowed her head to look through the eyepiece of a telescope. ‘I see your father. He’s in the middle of that crowd of reporters.’
‘The sheriff asked him to handle the media. That’s his job today.’ Father was not Isabelle ’s preferred name for Addison, but all of the four-letter names disturbed her mother.
More reporters had joined the feeding frenzy below, where Hannah Rice was chasing a station wagon off the grass. When another helicopter descended to the meadow, the housekeeper threw up her hands and retreated to the porch.
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Sarah, one eye to the telescope. ‘You see that yellow Rolls-Royce? That ’s Ferris Monty’s car. You remember him, don’t you?’
Yes, Isabelle had a vivid recollection of Monty, though he had only come to dinner once, never to be invited back. His yellow Rolls pulled into the judge ’s driveway. It was a beautifully restored vintage model. She loved the car, but the little man behind the wheel revolted her. She had never shaken off the first impression of him formed in her childhood. ‘Wasn’t he a real writer once? I think I read something of his when I was in college.’
Her mother nodded, never lifting her eyes from the telescope. ‘Thirty years ago, he was a literary star on the rise. But he turned out to be a one-trick pony.’
This slur was charity. The man had de-evolved into a celebrity muckraker, a writer of gossip columns and exposés in the form of true-crime books. As a frequent guest on television, he was known to millions of viewers who had never read nor even heard of his one good piece of art.
‘So he still keeps a house in Coventry?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said her mother. ‘And he ’s still the only one in town who’s never invited to my birthday ball.’
Bone by Bone Page 4
