Skye Cree 03: The Bones Will Tell

by Vickie McKeehan

  Skye nodded again. “That actually makes sense. He chose that spot for a reason. He wanted her on display where he could get the biggest charge out of someone finding her.”

  Because the others in the group thought so too, the assembly took it through various scenarios.

  “Maybe he watched from a vantage point.”

  “There’s a thought. Check out all the places where he could have staked out the area from higher ground.”

  “He knew the area…well.”

  “Well enough to have no fear of getting caught.”

  “What about the time of death? Does Bayliss have any idea how long Willa was out in the elements?”

  Harry shook his head. “Not yet. We’re hoping he can narrow it down.”

  After the meeting ended, a few detectives approached Skye and Josh in the hallway. A group from law enforcement that hadn’t exactly welcomed them with open arms in the first place encircled them. It made them understandably leery of any attempt at camaraderie or small talk.

  “I wasn’t sure about letting civilians near the task force, let alone have access to crime scene photos,” one of them admitted. “But I have to say I’m impressed. Coming up with that boat theory showed you could be an asset to the team.”

  The other deputy turned to Skye. “And you’ve saved countless abduction victims. And you caught Frank DePalo, beat the holy crap out of the sadistic bastard, as I recall. Your input should also be invaluable to us.”

  A third stuck out his hand and added, “Good to work with you. At least you two aren’t claiming you’re psychics. We tried that shit some years back with Ridgway, found out real quick they couldn’t see their own asses through a hole in a doughnut.”

  “Yeah, name me one crime that’s ever been solved by a psychic?” the fourth man demanded. “Now if those shysters could ever come up with the numbers for me to win the Mega Millions jackpot, then I might become a believer.”

  There were laughs all around as the cops continued to make fun of using psychics or mediums.

  “We take any tips the public offers. That doesn’t change no matter where the tip comes from. That includes anything called in by a bunch of kooks,” one of them added. “We treat every lead the same way. We process the information and run it down until we hit a dead end.”

  “Old-fashioned police work is what solves crimes.”

  While Skye and Josh didn’t disagree with that, they had no intentions of ignoring a second sense. If a supernatural element could be utilized to get scum off the street, they’d keep with what they did best.

  As they headed back to the car, Skye turned to Josh. “Was that conjecture about the boat, or something else?”

  “When you called me that they’d found her body, I went out to the park. I watched the cops and the crime scene techs mill around acting as if they didn’t care. Sure they were doing their jobs, but I knew Willa, had seen her lift trays at the restaurant, carry food to my table. The woman took my order not four days before she disappeared.”

  “You were upset. It’s understandable.”

  “Seeing them all stand around or wander about, seemingly without a care, got to me. That was my first reaction. My second was this. How the hell did he get Willa to that spot? The closest road is back the other way near the parking lot, a good half mile. If he wanted her found quick, then why didn’t he simply dump her there near the main entrance? The only thing that made sense was he motored there with her in the boat.”

  Skye dipped her head in agreement, able to see it play out in her head. “So he comes in from the west. We had a storm churning then. The water had to be choppy as hell. In the pouring rain, he trudged up that hillside carrying Willa’s body.”

  “Or dragged it out of the boat and up to that ridge. Any drag marks, footprints, or indications of either, were lost to the lousy weather conditions.”

  “Did you get anything studying the pictures of the crime scene?”

  “Other than outrage, disgust and the fact I’m fed up with this guy? Sure.”

  “You held something back.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah. I think he had help getting Willa’s body into the park.”

  That bombshell evaporated any hope of shifting from murder to downtime before they had to go back out again. Relaxation took a backseat. For four hours they batted around the two-killer angle till they reached the same conclusion. If the guy did have someone willing to help him dispose of a body, it had to be someone he trusted, someone in his closest circle, someone he could depend on who knew his darkest secrets—someone he trusted with his own life.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It wasn’t until that night Harry stopped by the loft to share more detailed information face-to-face.

  “Bayliss found a drug called rocuronium during Willa’s autopsy. He says there is absolutely no need for anyone to have rocuronium show up, let alone the amount that was there. The drug is used primarily for general anesthesia, used to induce muscle relaxation for endotracheal intubation, or mechanical ventilation. It paralyzes the lungs. You suffocate to death. You’re able to see what’s going on around you, but can’t move or breathe on your own.”

  “Poor Willa.”

  “Yeah. She didn’t go easy. There were marks around her wrists and ankles, rope burns around her throat indicating she’d been bound for some time and tortured. Willa went through a lot before she succumbed to a cut to her throat. Insect activity showed she’d been at that spot where we found her for about three days.”

  Harry turned to Josh, “Look, I need to give Skye a little bit of background info before continuing. You want to leave us alone for a few minutes?”

  Skye brooded into her coffee mug, gave her longtime friend an anxious frown. “Whatever it is, Harry, I don’t mind it if Josh stays.”

  Harry lifted a shoulder. “All right. You know that I’ve been going through cold cases to see if I could find any victims from around 1993 who might fit into the ‘possible’ category. I came across two cases in HITS. And one is a little bizarre. Try to hear me out first before you jump down my throat.”

  Puzzled, Skye said, “I feel like I should sit down or something.”

  Harry cast a bleak look at one, then the other, before letting out a heavy sigh. “Might not be a bad idea.”

  “Maybe we should both sit down,” Josh proffered. “What exactly is HITS?”

  “A database used by law enforcement that stores crime-related information. Various agencies put in characteristics of crimes so if anything similar pops up, we know about it statewide. It’s been around since 1987, first used in Bundy’s crimes and then utilized by the Green River Task Force.”

  Skye and Josh exchanged glances. “This sounds promising.”

  “The thing is I have a box of evidence from a cold case that goes back twenty years, a verified homicide. But I’ll get to that in a minute. The other case is a bare-bones file folder on a young soldier’s wife who went missing about the same time of the murder. Both have a connection to Fort Lewis, Washington, before it was known as Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

  “When she was twenty years old Trisha Danes went missing. Trisha was originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, a newlywed who had moved across the country to be with her husband, Milo. The night she disappeared, the two had had a fight. Milo locked her out of the apartment they shared on base and sent her packing with the clothes on her back. After that, she essentially vanished into the night and hasn’t been seen since.”

  “Milo sounds like a prince of a guy. I’d bet the husband did something to her,” Josh tossed out.

  “You’d think. That was my initial gut reaction, too. But I called in a favor from the base and got hold of the old file yesterday. It seems two witnesses came forward at the time and told the CID investigating officer—”

  “Military? Because it happened on the base?”

  “That’s right, they had jurisdiction. Anyway, the witnesses said they saw Trisha get into a car not far from the apartment b
uilding. That car was listed in the file as a Jeep Cherokee.”

  Skye’s jaw dropped open as chill bumps ran along her arms. “Any chance Trisha’s family has looked for her?”

  “This morning I got off the phone with Trisha’s stepmother, Brandy Sue Grainger. Brandy never liked Milo and always thought he had something to do with Trisha’s disappearance. Brandy spent years doing what she could to help find her stepdaughter. She didn’t have a lot of money but back then she pleaded with a friend to loan her enough cash to hire a private investigator. The private eye worked on it for about two months but gave up when he found nothing new on Trisha and decided the woman simply vanished into thin air leaving her family devastated.”

  “But a stepmother won’t be much help with DNA,” Josh declared.

  “True. But even though Brandy and Trisha’s father divorced years earlier, Brandy put me in touch with him. Local law enforcement in North Carolina has scheduled a trip to collect his DNA.”

  “You really are amazing, Harry,” Skye proclaimed.

  “I hope you still feel that way after I finish explaining about the homicide, the other case. The victim’s name was Ellen Schreiber, a young, pretty, army lieutenant who grew up in the Los Angeles area. ”

  “Okay. I suppose we have another victim,” Skye determined. But the look on Harry’s face told her it was much more than that. “What’s so special about this particular victim?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Skye, but Ellen Schreiber had a connection to your father.”

  For a second time, Skye’s jaw fell open in shock. “How so?”

  “At the time of Ellen’s murder, Daniel Cree’s name appeared on the suspect list, both from CID and the jurisdiction where the body was eventually discovered. It took years, but when they started adding lanes along the I-90, specifically near State Road 519 and Fourth Avenue near downtown, they dug up a body. This was long before Safeco Field. The Kingdome was still home to all our major sports teams. I didn’t get the Schreiber case, but it fell to Seattle PD to coordinate it with army CID. Seattle PD took the lead but…”

  “It remains unsolved,” Skye finished.

  “It does indeed. Along with the bizarre case I mentioned. According to what was in the evidence box, Ellen’s makeshift grave still held her clothing, as well as the weapon, a fourteen-inch butcher knife with a rosewood handle.”

  “So she wasn’t dismembered?”

  “I didn’t say that. The killer tried to slice off her hands at the wrists. Instead of cutting them entirely though, he left them dangling by a string of muscle tissue. Parts of the hands were still attached even though she’d likely been in that grave a couple of years.”

  “We might have DNA, Harry,” Skye said, excitement dripping in her tone.

  But Josh got the implication. “It doesn’t seem Harry is as excited by that as we are, Skye. How did this Ellen Schreiber and Daniel Cree know each other?”

  “Daniel worked at the base as a civilian contractor. Ellen was an officer. They worked in the same department. Witness statements back then said Ellen and Daniel used to see each other quite a bit—outside of work. They were essentially colleagues, Skye. There were rumors of an affair.”

  Skye bristled at the mental picture. “So?”

  “When Ellen first went missing the investigator on the case was an MP by the name of Jason Berkenshaw. He’s the one who interviewed your father. Berkenshaw wrote in the file there were major inconsistences in Daniel’s statement, his alibi.”

  “Which was?”

  “Daniel told the cops he’d gone to visit his daughter in Seattle. The report in the file says your mother, Jodie, backed him up. He was eliminated as a suspect.”

  Skye blew out a relieved breath. “So that was the end of it?”

  “It was, until I went through that evidence box. Ever since this guy decided to start sending you all these boxes with bones, I took the liberty of going through all our cold cases from that timeframe. I went through boxes and boxes of evidence from at least thirty homicides narrowing the focus down to the 1990s, all females. I pulled out whatever articles of clothing were inside. Anything in there that could be tested for DNA, I sent off to the lab. They’ve been working overtime testing everything. They got to Ellen Schreiber’s stuff last week.”

  That feeling of impending doom landed in Skye’s stomach. “You’re getting to the point soon I hope. And it doesn’t sound like good news.”

  “No, it isn’t good news. In Ellen’s box there was a scarf. Touch DNA on her scarf is a match to Daniel Cree’s.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I thought you’d say that. I brought the report.” He handed off a manila file folder.

  She skimmed the piece of paper, read the results with her own eyes. “What the hell? I don’t understand. Touch DNA, that’s a transfer of skin cells, correct?”

  “Sloughed-off skin cells or nucleated sweat. They call it CNA or fragmented, free-floating DNA.”

  “You’re certain of the results? I mean, there’s no mistake.”

  “The DNA doesn’t lie.”

  “No chance of cross-contamination in the lab?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “I’m grasping at straws here, Harry. How do you know it was a match? I mean what the hell is Daniel Cree’s DNA doing in CODIS?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  She threw the file folder on the coffee table, spread her hands out wide. “Do I look like I’m going anywhere anytime soon? What gives?”

  “When you went missing, for that span of time you were gone, we found the body of a young girl in Andrews Bay. Since you were the most recent missing child we had, we asked your father for a DNA sample to see if our dead girl was a match to you. Daniel complied.”

  Her temple throbbed at the thought. “I don’t understand. But it wasn’t a match. It couldn’t have been a match to me anyway,” she mumbled, almost to herself. “Why on earth would he provide DNA knowing that?” All at once she realized she’d spoken out loud and couldn’t take it back.

  Harry scowled beginning to get the gist. “Why wouldn’t it match yours, Skye? Unless… You can’t possibly mean that Daniel wasn’t your biological father?” Harry sat back as lines formed along his forehead, the idea sinking in.

  “That pretty much sums it up. Seems like when my parents wanted a child, they learned he had trouble with low sperm count or something. They turned to a third party,” Skye explained, doing her best not to feel totally immature about the disclosure.

  “Okay. Then who is your father?”

  What the hell, she thought. She got up from the sofa, crossed her arms over her chest and paced to the window and back again, decided she might as well go all in. “Travis. He and my mother hooked up and then decided down the road to make it a whole lot more, if you get my drift.”

  “They had an affair? Jodie Cree and Travis Nakota?”

  “You got it. It lasted for some time, too. And now you’re telling me during that same time when my parents were separated, Daniel’s main squeeze turned up dead. That’s uncanny. And yes, bizarre.”

  “But if Daniel wasn’t your real father then why would he provide us with DNA? He knew it wouldn’t be a match.” Harry scratched his head. “Why would he do that?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Maybe Daniel wanted to keep up appearances. Maybe he didn’t want to let that info out of the bag and have you deal with that along with everything else, so when I asked for a sample, he complied to make it look good.”

  Skye drew in a sigh, smiled at her friend. “You do have a habit of saying the right thing. There’s just one problem with that theory. He didn’t know for sure that wasn’t me pulled out of Andrews Bay. It could just as easily have been me.”

  “That’s a horrible thought,” Josh stated. “But accurate.”

  “I was there, Skye. Your father, er, Daniel, and your mother were absolutely terror-stricken that they’d never see you agai
n. Now that I look back, Travis was right there with them every step of the way just as petrified.”

  “I know. But let’s get back to the subject at hand, for now anyway. I don’t understand why you kept his DNA all this time. It’s been years since I was abducted. The case closed. I got away from the bastard, alive. Why didn’t you just toss it in the trash?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Once Daniel’s DNA was put into the system, or anyone else’s for that matter, it stays there, whether it goes into CODIS or NCIC, it doesn’t matter. Even though it wasn’t a match to our young victim at the time, there was still hope that you’d be found alive. Once you showed up, we obviously didn’t think any more about the sample, the DNA that is, because a couple of days later, you were found wandering around an apartment complex parking lot.”

  She closed her eyes remembering that day she’d escaped the clutches of a monster. It still haunted her enough to cause nightmares ever so often. “I wonder… Is there anyway Daniel and Travis could have switched cheek swabs?”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible. When did you find out about all this, Skye?”

  “About my father not being my father? Several months back. I had to pull the info out of Travis though.”

  “I never would’ve guessed. But now we have to figure out how Daniel’s DNA got on Ellen Schreiber’s scarf. That’s the issue.”

  “Hey, I intend to dig into that with a shovel the size of Mercer Island. I want to see the evidence box, Harry.”

  “I thought you’d say that. That’s why I made a few copies of info I thought was pertinent.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  After Harry left them, the two went back over the entire conversation. She had to face facts. Her father had worked at Fort Lewis two decades earlier. His connection to Ellen Schreiber was unmistakable.

  “I refuse to accept that Daniel Cree killed Ellen Schreiber,” Skye finally said. “That isn’t even on the table for negotiation. The father I knew, the man who raised me, was a good and decent man.”