The Bone House

by Brian Freeman

  'You're painting a target on your husband's back. You're both acting guilty.'

  'You've already said you won't believe me, so why should I say anything at all?'

  Before he could answer, Cab heard his phone ringing in the inner pocket of his suit coat. It was Lala on the other end of the line. He listened to her, and he knew that the Cuban cop's voice was loud enough to be heard throughout the room. He didn't care. When he hung up, he noticed the changed expression in Hilary Bradley's eyes. She'd followed the thread of his conversation, and she was uncomfortable now. And worried.

  'I don't think you were sleeping, Mrs Bradley,' he told her. 'I think you woke up, and your husband was gone.'

  'Goodbye, Detective.'

  'That was one of my investigators on the phone. You heard what she said. We have a witness. A hotel employee who saw Glory Fischer going out to the beach. The question is, what else did he see?'

  Hilary said nothing.

  Cab rapped his foot against one of the suitcases on the floor, which had been open when he first arrived. 'I saw the yellow tank top. Is that what your husband was wearing? That's hard to miss, even at night.'

  She folded her arms again and was quiet. Her face grew flushed.

  Cab walked past her toward the hotel room door. As he passed the closed door to the bathroom, he pounded on it loudly. 'Don't think you can hide behind your wife forever, Mr Bradley. The sooner you talk to me, the easier this will be.'

  When there was no answer, he left the room.

  Mark waited until he heard the hotel room door slam shut. He emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed, and found his wife sitting on the end of the bed. Her face was tired and stressed. He'd seen that look for weeks last year, as they'd both faced his accusers at the school.

  'You heard?' she asked.

  Mark nodded. His frustration bubbled over, and he felt like punching the wall. 'He's right. I should have come out and talked to him. I don't like to hide, Hil. That's not me.'

  She shook her head. 'He was just pushing your buttons. He was trying to goad us into saying something stupid. Look, I'll call my father and get the name of a defense attorney here in Naples. There are probably Chicago snowbirds all over the place down here. We'll talk to him and then decide what to do next.'

  'Guilty people hire lawyers.'

  'No, smart people do,' she told him. 'This is about protecting ourselves.'

  Mark glanced at the suitcases on the floor. 'We can't leave.'

  'I'll call the desk and see if we can stay another night.'

  'Does he really have a witness? Or was that just a mind game?'

  'I don't know. I heard the person on the phone say that someone at the hotel saw Glory, but they could have staged the call.' if someone saw me with her ...' Mark's voice trailed off. if someone saw you with her, maybe they saw you leave, too. Maybe they saw who really did this.'

  * * *

  Chapter Six

  Lala Mosqueda had added black sunglasses to her all-black outfit as the sun got higher over the resort. Her skin had a glistening sheen of sweat. It was Florida, and there was nothing you could do to escape the humidity. Cab had assumed he would get used to it over time, but in two years, he never had. By the time he was done shaving every morning, his skin was already damp. Every surface he touched felt moist and swollen. When he left his high-rise, beachfront condo, his clothes stuck to his body, and he felt the thick air draining his energy. The only creatures that thrived in the damp climate were the cockroaches and spiders, which grew like mutants.

  Lala leaned against the trunk of a palm tree near a wide, tiled walkway that led toward the water. The sky overhead was postcard blue. On the hotel terrace, Cab saw a goateed hotel employee with greased black hair sitting alone at a patio table, nervously pushing around the floral centerpiece and swigging water from a plastic Aquafina bottle. The man shifted and crossed his legs uncomfortably in the deckchair. White cuffs jutted out from the sleeves of his red hotel jacket, and he wore black slacks. He was in his early twenties.

  Cab met Lala, who was texting on her phone. 'That our witness?' he asked.

  'Yeah, his name's Ronnie Trask. He's a bartender at the pool bar.'

  'He looks ready to pee his pants. Is he feeling guilty about something?'

  Lala holstered her phone and pushed up her sunglasses, which were slipping on her sweaty face. 'The other employees tell me he's a smooth operator with girls who like to party too much. The younger the better. But if he was involved in what happened to Glory, I think he would have kept his mouth shut rather than stick himself in the middle of our investigation.'

  'Have we found anyone else who saw anything?'

  'Not yet.'

  'What about cameras? Don't they have any cameras out here?'

  'Not too many spring breakers want hotels with eyes in the sky, you know? What happens on the beach stays on the beach. The only place they've got a camera is the lobby. We're looking at the tape.' She added, 'What about Mark Bradley? You get anything from him?

  Cab tugged the buttons of his dress shirt away from his sticky chest and adjusted the gold chain on his neck. He smelled chlorine from the nearby hotel pool. 'He ducked me. I talked to the wife.'

  'And?'

  'And they're not crazy about answering questions. Let's dig up whatever we can about this incident in Door County last year. Call the sheriff up there. I want to know more about it before I talk to the sister and the boyfriend, OK?'

  'Sure,' Lala said. Cab turned away toward Ronnie Trask, but Lala called after him. 'Hey, Cab?'

  'What?

  'I saw your mother in a movie last night.'

  It was an innocuous comment for her to make, but every time they deviated from work talk, he felt gravity again, as if the two of them were circling the black hole. He recognized it was a big leap for Lala even to say it, and he wondered if she had an ulterior motive.

  'Yeah? Which one?'

  'Sapphirica.'

  Cab nodded. 'That was twenty years ago. I was on set with her when she filmed that one in Italy. It won a special jury prize at Sundance.'

  'Did you travel with her a lot growing up?' Lala asked.

  'Yeah, it was like being an army brat without the guns.'

  'You look a lot like her,' she told him.

  'Thanks.'

  'So why aren't you an actor like her, anyway? You've got the looks for it.'

  'My head kept getting cropped out of the frame.'

  Lala laughed, but it was hollow. She went back to her phone as if he'd dismissed her with an expletive, rather than a joke. He thought about saying something more, but he didn't. He was his mother's son.

  Tarla Bolton was a fierce loner, and so was Cab. She'd never married and never even acknowledged the man who got her pregnant. He didn't know who his father was, although he had narrowed the field to a few likely candidates based on the film she was making at the time he was conceived. He'd never asked her for the truth.

  Cab had never married either, although he'd got close. Once. Her name was Vivian Frost. Vivian was the reason he made a point of never trusting anyone. She was the reason he was always running.

  Cab took a seat at the patio table opposite Ronnie Trask and pushed the chair back to make room for his long legs. He squinted up at the sky and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. 'God, this heat, huh?'

  The bartender sucked on his lower lip and drummed the glass tabletop with his nails. 'Yeah.'

  'I'm Cab Bolton. Naples Police.'

  'Ronnie Trask. Naples bartender.' He added, 'What kind of a name is Cab?'

  'Born in one,' Cab said. 'Oh.'

  'You work here at the hotel, Ronnie?'

  The man drained a last swallow from his Aquafina. 'Yeah. I work nights, I work afternoons, whenever they slot me in. Crappy schedule. I sleep somewhere in the middle.'

  'You always work at the bar?'

  'Yeah.'

  'So tell me what happened last night.'

  Trask shrugged. 'I closed up t
he pool bar at one o'clock. I was cleaning everything up. It must have been close to one thirty when I saw a teenage girl in a bikini on the far side of the terrace. She went through the palm trees out to the beach. End of story.'

  'Was anyone else around? Employees or guests?'

  'Nah, once the booze shuts down, the guests go to bed. I was the only one out here.'

  'Tell me about the girl.'

  'What about her? She was a cute kid. Young.'

  'Was she alone?' Cab asked.

  'Yeah, she was alone.' 'Did you talk to her?'

  Trask scowled and got defensive. 'Hey, I told you she was on the opposite side of the terrace, didn't I? How was I supposed to talk to her?'

  Cab let the man stew before he went on. 'You could see her clearly, though?'

  'Clear enough, sure.'

  'Could you see what she had in her hand?'

  'Like what? She wasn't carrying anything.'

  'So where'd she get the wine, Ronnie? We found a bottle of wine with the body.'

  Trask tugged at his goatee. 'Oh, yeah. She had a bottle of wine with her. I forgot that.'

  Cab slid a pen from inside his suitcoat pocket. He reached across I he table and rolled Trask's empty water bottle toward him with the cap of the pen. 'We're testing the wine bottle we found near the body for fingerprints. I think we'll test your water bottle, too.'

  Trask cursed under his breath. 'Shit. OK. I sold her the wine.'

  'She was sixteen.'

  'I didn't know she was underage.'

  'You already said she looked young.'

  'Fuck it,' Trask breathed. 'So what, man? She gave me thirty bucks. These kids down here will always find a way to score booze, you know? Why shouldn't I get a slice? The hotel writes it off as breakage, and everyone's happy.'

  'Not Glory Fischer. She's not happy, she's dead. Had she been drinking before you sold her the wine?'

  Trask shook his head. 'She looked sober enough.'

  'Did you help her drink it?'

  His eyes widened. 'Say what?'

  'Did you have a drink with her? Did you go with her to the beach?'

  'Shit, no,' he hissed.

  'Word is, you do well with the girls who come down here, Ronnie.'

  'Yeah, well, I don't do jailbait.'

  'So you did know she was underage.'

  'Oh, for Christ's sake, sure I did. Big deal. I didn't go to the beach with her. I took her money, opened the bottle for her, and she went off by herself. That's all. That is all.'

  Cab heard the panic in Trask's voice. 'What did the girl say to you?' 'Nothing. She wanted a drink. That's it.'

  'Did she say why she was out there?'

  'No, man, no.'

  'How did she behave?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'I mean, how was she acting? Upset? Happy? Angry?'

  Trask ran his hands over his slicked-back hair. 'Oh, hell, I don't know. She was kind of flirty, you know, the way teenagers are. Smiling at me. Adjusting her bikini. Acting all girlish. I think she figured she could tease the wine out of me.'

  'Did you take that as an invitation?'

  'Huh?'

  Cab leaned across the table. 'Did you assume she wanted sex?'

  'Look, whatever she wanted, I didn't give it to her.'

  'OK, Ronnie. How long was she at the bar?'

  'A couple minutes, no more. She bought the wine, and she headed down to the beach.'

  'Did you see anyone else after the girl showed up?' Cab asked. 'Did anyone follow her?'

  Trask shook his head. 'Nobody.'

  'You didn't see anyone else outside?'

  'I left right after the girl did. My shift was over. I locked up, and I cleared out.'

  'What about before she arrived? Did anyone go past you out to the beach during the half-hour you were cleaning up?'

  Trask stared at the sky, as if he was hoping he would remember someone, but he came up blank. 'I didn't see anybody.'

  'So you were the only other person out there with the girl who was murdered.'

  'Hey!' he barked. 'I'm telling you, I left. I didn't follow her, and I didn't see anybody else. The clerk behind the desk saw me leave through the lobby. You can ask her. Hell, you've got hotels up and down this beach. Anybody could have done this.'

  Cab knew that Trask was right. That was what worried him. Beach bodies meant thousands of suspects. If you didn't get lucky with forensics or witnesses, it was almost impossible to make a case. He thought about Glory Fischer on the beach. And about Mark Bradley. He'd hoped Trask would have spotted Bradley outside, or at least mentioned someone matching Bradley's description. He could have prompted Trask by mentioning the yellow tank top, but he guessed that the bartender would take that tidbit of information and spit it back the way jail- house informants do, to give Cab whatever he wanted to hear. Yellow tank top? Yeah, come to think of it, I did see someone out there wearing something like that.

  'Did you recognize the girl?' Cab asked Trask.

  'What do you mean?'

  'She was at the hotel for several days. Had you seen her before last night?'

  He nodded. 'Actually, yeah.'

  'You sound pretty sure. This place was crawling with teenage girls this week.'

  'Well, she almost knocked me over.'

  Cab cocked his head. 'When was this?'

  'Friday night. I was bringing a case of wine to the pool bar from the restaurant, and out of nowhere, this girl sprints past me. I mean, there I was big as life, but it was like she didn't even see me. I almost dropped the bottles. Pissed me off. You want to shout at these kids sometimes, but the hotel won't let you do that.'

  'Why was she running?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Did anyone else run after her?'

  Trask shook his head. 'Nope. There were people milling around down by the event center, hitting the bathrooms, going outside to smoke, that kind of thing. No one paid any attention to the girl, as far as I could tell. She just came at me down the corridor past the outside windows like some bat out of hell.'

  'She came toward the lobby from the event center?'

  'Yeah.'

  'That's where they were doing all the dance competitions, right?'

  'Yeah, I guess.'

  'Did she stop and talk to you when she ran into you?'

  'No, she kept going. I dodged out of the way, and she didn't apologize or anything. She looked really freaked.'

  'Excuse me?'

  'Freaked,' Trask told him. 'Scared. She was crying. It was like she'd seen a ghost.'

  * * *

  Chapter Seven

  'Oh, man,' Amy Leigh announced. 'Did you see this?'

  Amy sat in the next-to-last row of the Green Bay team bus. The window beside her was cracked open, and Amy could smell exhaust fumes as the bus sputtered through the foothills of southern Tennessee. Unlike the Wisconsin campus, where winter had barely loosened its grip, the trees and mountains here were lush green.

  When her roommate kept typing on her laptop without responding, Amy nudged the girl with her shoulder. 'Hey, look at this.'

  Katie Monroe glanced away from the screen impatiently. 'What? I've got to get this article done. I need to email it to the paper by three o'clock.'

  'Yeah, but check this out,' Amy insisted.

  She held out her iPhone to her friend, who squinted at the online news feed. After reading the first couple lines of the story, she took the phone from Amy's hand and scrolled to the next paragraph. 'Wow. Is that where we were?'

  'Yes, that was our hotel. A girl was murdered there last night.'

  Katie blew the bangs out of her eyes with a quick puff of breath. 'It says here she was drinking on the beach in the middle of the night. Jeez, not smart.'

  'It still sucks.'

  'Of course it does. Life sucks.'

  Katie handed back the phone and returned to the document on her laptop. Amy wanted to talk more, but when her roommate was writing, you didn't interrupt her. Amy reclined her head against
the musty foam of her seat cushion and stared into space down the dimly lit aisle of the bus. Her body jolted with the bumps of the road. Her eyes felt heavy, but she couldn't sleep, unlike most of the other girls, who were draped over the seats. It had been an adrenaline-packed week, and she hadn't come down to earth yet. Her dance ensemble from Green Bay had taken first runner-up in the competition - almost the winners, but not quite. She figured they would nail the prize next year, because the hotshot team from Louisville that beat them would be losing most of its first-string girls when they graduated in June.

  Amy was a junior. One more year to go.

  She tried to clear her mind, but the image of the girl dead on the beach outside their Naples hotel intruded on her brain. That was who Amy was. She was a psychology major, always analyzing people and trying to figure out what made them tick. When she thought about the girl, she imagined the world through her eyes, seeing the empty stretch of Gulf sand. Here was a teenager four years younger than Amy was, alone, assaulted, killed. Katie was right; it was dumb to go off by the water and drink in the middle of the night. But Amy had done stupid things too.

  'Hey.' Her roommate waved a hand in front of Amy's face, breaking her trance. 'You OK?'

  'Yeah.'

  'You still thinking about it?'

  'Yeah.'

  'You can't take on the whole world's problems, you know,' she chided her.

  'I know.'

  'So knock it off.'

  Katie was the reporter, who looked at the world like a black-and- white encyclopedia of facts. Amy was the eye candy with the soft center, the one who felt too much, laughed too much, and cried too much. She secretly believed that her roommate would make a better therapist than she would herself, because Katie didn't let people get to her. She kept her distance, cool and objective. Amy dove in head first.

  'She was from Wisconsin,' Amy said.

  'Who?' Katie asked, dragging her eyes away from her article. She'd tugged along with the team to write about the competition for the Green Bay newspaper. It made for a free spring break trip, with the

  paper picking up the hotel tab and her parents not worrying about what they didn't know.

  'The girl. Glory Fischer. The one who was killed. She was from Wisconsin.'