The Bone House

by Brian Freeman

  'I already told you, no,' Tresa insisted. She twisted the loose fabric of her T-shirt into a knot, and her eyes grew teary again. 'Don't you think I'd tell you if I knew what happened? When I left her, she was fine. I was the one who was upset.'

  Cab eased back in the chair, his long legs stretching out, his arms behind his head. He watched the girl in front of him, and he thought about all of the messes, insecurities, fears, jealousy, pettiness, and traumas of being young. There were so many nicks and cuts that felt deep even when they were shallow and left scars that you could pick at years later. To him, Tresa looked like a typical teenage girl, screwed up in all the ordinary ways, but looks could be deceiving.

  He brought his arms back on to the table and leaned forward. 'Tell me about Mark Bradley,' he said.

  Tresa recoiled in surprise. 'What about him? How do you know about him?'

  'It doesn't matter.'

  'Troy told you, didn't he? That stupid jerk.'

  'I know Mark Bradley and his wife were here at the hotel this week. I know you and he have some history together.'

  Tresa pushed her chair back, physically adding distance between them. 'That was all a misunderstanding.'

  'He was a teacher accused of having an affair with a seventeen- year-old student.'

  'It didn't happen like that!' Tresa retorted. 'God, all of you are so stupid. No one listened to me. No one believed me.'

  'He lost his job.'

  'Yes, and it was my fault!'

  'Are you in love with him?'

  Tresa's face flushed. She tugged at her dirty red hair. 'That's none of your business.'

  'Mark Bradley was at your performance on Friday night, wasn't he? Is that why you didn't do well? Did it make you nervous having him there?'

  'I choked. The pressure got to me. That's all.'

  'What was Mr Bradley's relationship with Glory?' Cab asked.

  'None. There was no relationship.'

  'Did Glory believe that you and Mark Bradley were having an affair?'

  'No! That was my mother. That was all her stupid idea.'

  'Did you or Glory have any contact with Bradley this week? Or with his wife?'

  Tresa shook her head fiercely. 'No. I didn't even know he was there until I saw him on Friday. We didn't talk to each other.'

  'Are you protecting him?' Cab asked.

  'From what? He didn't do anything.' She hooded her eyes and stared at her lap. 'Are we done? I need to find my mom.'

  'Sure. I understand. You can go.'

  Cab watched her as she gathered up used tissues from the table in her fist and left the room. Her face was a pouty mask. He realized that he'd reached a roadblock with Tresa anyway. The girl was shutting him out. What frustrated him was that he still didn't know a thing about Mark Bradley, and he didn't have any evidence about the man, only rumors.

  He was an enigma. Was he an angry predator with a predilection for teenage girls or an innocent victim?

  Maybe Glory Fischer, drunk, sexually promiscuous, had met Mark Bradley on the beach on Saturday night. Maybe it was an accident or a deliberate rendezvous.

  Maybe.

  If Glory did meet him, what happened next?

  * * *

  Chapter Nine

  'It was him,' Troy Geier insisted, bolting out of his chair. 'Bradley. He did it. I know it was him. That son of a bitch.'

  Cab held up his hands. 'Sit down, Troy. OK? Take it easy.'

  The burly sixteen year old paced back and forth between the walls of the interview room and then slumped heavily into the chair again. 'Sorry.'

  'You did the right thing by telling us about Mark Bradley. I appreciate it. Right now, though, I want to talk about Glory.'

  Troy's big head bobbed. 'Sure. OK.'

  Cab sucked out more of his iced latte, which had melted and was mostly warm. He gave Troy a minute to calm down. The teenager was a beefy kid with a broad face dotted by pimples. He had wavy brown hair covered by a baseball cap, which he wore backwards. His flabby chest and huge forearms stretched out the green fabric on his Packers T-shirt. As Cab watched, Troy stuck an index finger between his teeth and chewed on the nail.

  'This is my fault,' Troy murmured, his mouth full.

  'Why do you say that?'

  'I never should have left her alone.'

  'You're being pretty hard on yourself,' Cab told him.

  'Yeah, but we argued, and it was stupid. She wanted to stay and swim, and I really wanted to see this Will Ferrell movie on TV. I told her to come with me, but she wouldn't, so I just left. Then the movie sucked, and I fell asleep anyway.'

  'You never realized Glory hadn't come back?'

  'I was out like a light. The bartender snuck me a couple beers for a few bucks. I crashed.'

  The bartender. Ronnie Trask obviously had a thriving business funneling alcohol to minors. It was a spring break tradition in Florida.

  'Tell me a little more about Glory, OK?' Cab went on. 'How long have you known her?'

  Troy shrugged. 'Pretty much all our lives. We go to school together. Both of our families have been in Door County forever. We're natives, but now it's all rich fibs moving in, buying up the land.'

  'Fibs?' Cab asked.

  'Fucking Illinois Bastards.'

  Cab smothered a smile. 'When did the two of you start dating?'

  'Last year. She had a bad summer break-up. She was dating an older kid who was staying on the peninsula for the summer. A tourist. She figured he loved her, but he was just in it for the sex. After he dumped her, I think she decided she wanted someone who really wanted her. That's me.'

  'What was Glory like?' Cab asked.

  'She was super cute. Really outgoing, doing things a mile a minute. Me, I'm pretty shy, and I always felt like I was running to keep up with her.'

  'Was it exclusive between the two of you?'

  'Oh, yeah. Definitely.'

  Cab was dubious. 'Are you sure it was exclusive for her?'

  'Absolutely. After school, we were going to get married.'

  'Was that your plan or hers?'

  'Mine, but Glory wanted it too.'

  'Most girls aren't looking for a serious relationship at sixteen,' Cab told him.

  'Well, I loved her, and she loved me,' Troy insisted. 'We weren't thinking about college. You go to college, and they ship your job over- seas these days. I figured we'd both work at my dad's restaurant after we graduated. That's where Glory's mom works. When my dad retires, I figure I'll take it over, although he tells me I can't handle it.'

  'Why does he say that?'

  Troy frowned. 'Oh, he never thinks I can do anything right. He still thinks I'm a dumb kid.'

  Cab thought about what Tresa had said. Troy's father didn't treat him well, and neither did Glory. Despite his size, Troy looked like the kind of boy who got kicked in the head and came back on his knees for more punishment. At some point, all the kicks probably felt like love.

  'I heard that Glory was a wild child,' Cab told him. 'Sex, drugs, drinking. Is that true?'

  'Sure, Glory liked to do crazy stuff sometimes. Drugs once in a while, but nothing heavy. She'd get me to sneak some wine from my dad's restaurant on the weekends. So what?'

  'Sex?'

  'Yeah, we had sex. Glory was cool about it.'

  'It sounds like you two were pretty different, though.'

  'I told you, I had to run to keep up with her, because she was always going two hundred miles an hour. It was like I was along for the ride sometimes.'

  Or maybe you were just the designated driver, Cab thought. He understood the attraction for Troy, who had obviously worshipped Glory for most of his life. It wasn't as clear to him what Glory saw in Troy. The teenager was plain, and simple in a farm boy way, but he had the attraction of being utterly pliable. Cab guessed that Troy's role in their relationship was to do whatever Glory wanted him to do.

  'Whose idea was it to go to Florida?' Cab asked.

  'Glory's,' Troy said.

  'To see Tresa danc
e?'

  Troy shrugged. 'Yeah, that's what she told her mom so she'd say yes. Really, she just wanted a vacation in Florida, you know? Swim and sun.'

  'How was it for you two hanging out with Tresa? Big sister, little sister. Did that slow you guys down?'

  'Tresa's pretty low-key compared to Glory. Always with her nose in a book. We didn't spend much time with her. She was practicing a lot for the dance thing anyway.'

  'Were there any arguments?'

  'Between Glory and Tresa? No.'

  'How about between you and Glory?'

  Troy flushed. 'Just on Saturday. Glory was really pissy with me. I don't know why. That's one of the reasons I left her at the pool. She'd been giving me shit all day over the stupidest things.'

  'Did something happen?'

  'No, that's the thing. We'd been having a great week.'

  'When did it start?' Cab asked. 'I told you, it was Saturday.' 'Not Friday night?'

  Troy stopped. He chewed his fingers again. 'Well, that night she went to see Tresa dance, and I stayed back at the room watching basketball. Glory came back around ten thirty.'

  'How did she seem?'

  'She was quiet,' Troy said.

  'Upset? Angry?'

  'I'm not really sure,' Troy admitted. 'I was watching the game. I know I should have paid more attention, but I didn't. I found out the next morning that Tresa hadn't done well in the dance competition, and I figured Glory was just disappointed for her.'

  'What did Glory do when she came back to the room?'

  'She took a shower. I remember thinking she was in there a long time.'

  'Then what?'

  'She came out and sat down next to me. She had a towel on, and I thought maybe she wanted to have sex, but when I tried to kiss her, she pushed me away. I asked what was wrong.'

  'What did she say?' Cab asked.

  'She said it was nothing.'

  'That's all?'

  'She told me that she saw someone she knew.' Troy blinked nervously, as if he realized he'd forgotten to share something important.

  'Someone she knew?' Cab leaned forward. 'Who?'

  'She didn't say.'

  'Did you ask?'

  'Yeah, but she didn't answer me. She didn't make it sound like it was a big deal. She just said she was going to bed.'

  'Did you ask her about it the next day?'

  'No, she didn't say anything more about it.'

  Cab laid this nugget of information down in his head and stared at it. Someone she knew?

  Not a stranger. Someone who sent her running through the dark corridor of the hotel in tears, nearly colliding with the hotel bartender, Ronnie Trask. And the next night Glory wound up dead on the beach.

  It still could have been a random assault. Boy meets girl, boy rapes girl, boy kills girl. Sometimes it happened that way, but Cab was beginning to wonder if Glory's death involved a more personal motive.

  'Did you see anyone you knew during the week?' he asked. 'Anyone that Glory would have known?'

  Troy shook his head. 'Nobody,' he said. 'Nobody except Mark Bradley.'

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  Cab found a bag of organic plantain chips in the drawer of his desk. He ate them one at a time as he reviewed the interview notes gathered by the police with guests at the hotel throughout the day. He also reviewed the crime scene photos, and as he studied the body and imagined how Glory Fischer had ended up in the surf, topless, strangled, he found his memory going back to Vivian Frost.

  The girl he'd asked to marry him. The girl who had said yes.

  It wasn't a big leap from Glory to Vivian, not that they looked alike or had anything in common about their lives. What they shared was the similarity of their deaths.

  Glory, a dead body on a beach in Florida. Vivian, a dead body on a beach north of Barcelona.

  A dozen years later, he could still picture her face, vivid both in life and death. He'd always assumed that the memory would fade, but it didn't work out that way, no matter how much he tried to outrun her. She followed him as he moved from place to place and job to job. Whenever he felt the urge to let down his guard, Vivian was there, reminding him that trust was a dangerous thing. Lala and the other women in his life since then had paid the price.

  That was another reason he hated beach bodies. They came with a lot of baggage.

  Vivian Frost. His mother had warned him that he was falling too hard and too fast. Tarla Bolton was a Hollywood actress, which meant by definition that everyone was trying to screw her. She'd tried to protect her son with an emotional suit of armor, but back then, in his early twenties, Cab was still young enough and naive enough to reject her view of the world. He hadn't been burned as a cop or as a man, and he didn't want to end up as disillusioned as his mother. Vivian changed all that.

  He'd gone to Barcelona as a newly minted special agent with the FBI, dispatched to Spain to liaise with local authorities in the search for an American fugitive named Diego Martin, who'd been caught on videotape in a bar on Las Ramblas. The waitress he'd interviewed at the bar, a divorced woman ten years older than he was, languid and sensual, was Vivian Frost. She was a British expat who'd married a Spanish computer executive and been kicked out of his estate after she got tired of his cheating. Like most Londoners who moved to Spain, she had no interest in going home, even after she'd found herself alone and mostly penniless in the city. She worked long hours. She smoked incessantly, the way everyone smoked there, and it gave her a husky voice. She had bone-white skin in a city of golden faces. She glided where everyone else walked.

  After an interview in which Cab decided that Vivian knew nothing about the man he was chasing, he went back to the bar that same night and sought her out again for his own purposes. She professed to be utterly uninterested in men, and the more she rejected him, the more he returned to the bar like a moth to a flame. He became obsessed with Vivian. He fell completely under her spell.

  The fruitless investigation dragged on for weeks, then months. There were no more leads. The American fugitive, Diego Martin, had gone underground or left the city entirely. Cab's superiors in the Bureau wanted him back home if the trail was cold, but he gave them hope where there was mostly no hope at all. What he wanted was more time with Vivian. His lies bought him three more months, and slowly, cold indifference on her part gave way to a few casual dates and then to their first night of sex in her cramped, smoky apartment, with the neighbors listening on the other side of the thin walls. He found her to be uninhibited, making love with abandon, unlike any other woman he'd known. After that night, they were inseparable.

  When the Bureau finally ran out of patience with his delays, he quit. He walked away from the job he'd sought from his earliest days out of college. His mother told him he was insane and that he didn't understand women or how manipulative they could be. He told her he was in love. Madly in love, and that was the truth. He told her he was staying in Spain and getting married. Looking back, he remembered those days as the one time in his life when he'd been innocent enough to be happy.

  Vivian Frost. Beautiful, funny, intense, wicked, graceful, faithless, and treacherous. Vivian Frost, who'd wound up dead with a bullet in her brain on a deserted beach north of the city.

  Unlike Glory Fischer, though, there was no mystery for Cab about who had killed her.

  He'd done it himself.

  'Someone she knew?' Lala Mosqueda asked as she sat down next to Cab's desk. 'Troy said that Glory recognized someone?'

  Cab sat with his hands cupped over his nose and mouth. He didn't hear her. Instead, he heard a roaring noise that sounded like the Spanish surf, and he saw Vivian's face again, eyes open, entry wound in her forehead.

  'Hey, Cab?'

  He blinked as Lala said his name and heard concern in her voice. He rocked back in his chair and reached for the bag of plantain chips, but it was empty. He forced a smile on to his face. 'Moh-skee-toh,' he said, drawing out her nickname, talking loudly enough to cause others in the dep
artment to turn and watch them.

  Lala shook her head in disgust, then leaned closer and hissed under her breath, 'Why do you do that?'

  'What?'

  'Push people away.'

  'Is that what I'm doing?' he asked.

  'You know damn well it is.'

  She was right. He'd become an expert at keeping women on the far side of his safety zone. Those he liked, like Lala, were the ones he worked hardest to alienate.

  'Fine,' she said, when he didn't reply. 'Be an ass. I don't care.'

  Cab wanted to apologize, but he swallowed it down. 'Yes, Glory saw someone she knew,' he said. 'That's the story. Troy thinks she was talking about Mark Bradley, but he's just guessing. Glory didn't say who it was.'

  Lala waited before she said anything else. When she spoke again, the softness in her tone was gone, replaced by cool detachment. She'd opened the door; he'd slammed it shut. That was his pattern.

  'Do you think Troy is telling the truth?' she asked calmly. 'Did Glory really say anything like that, or is he simply trying to point us toward Bradley?'

  Cab shrugged. 'I don't believe Troy is enough of a deep thinker to come up with a plan like that. He says he's certain that Bradley killed her. If he was going to lie, I think he'd just say that Glory said she saw Bradley on Friday night.'

  'What about Tresa? Did Glory say anything to her about recognizing someone?'

  'Apparently not.'

  'Well, Troy backs up what Ronnie Trask told us,' Lala pointed out. 'Glory saw someone she knew, and for some reason she freaked and ran.'

  'Too bad, I was hoping Trask made the whole thing up,' Cab said. 'The question is who Glory saw.'

  'Could it be Mark Bradley?'

  'Sure it could. Troy's guessing, but he may be right. What did you find out about Bradley and the Fischers?'

  'I called the sheriff's department in Sturgeon Bay, which is the county seat for Door County,' Lala told him. 'I talked to the sheriff himself, tough old goat named Felix Reich. He said that pretty much everyone in the department believed Bradley was having sex with the girl. That would have been a misdemeanor assault in Wisconsin given their ages, but Tresa was adamant in denying the affair. No witness, no charges. Even so, Bradley wound up losing his teaching job. Tresa's mother, Delia, kept calling for his head. The district called it budgetary, but no one expected the school to keep him on. He hasn't found another job.'