“You’ve been here only one day, and your room has already been broken into. Sheriff Hardin doesn’t have the manpower to keep a guard with you at all times. It’s after seven. How were you planning to get back to the inn tonight?”
Nina knew he’d said something, but she wasn’t sure what. She bent a little lower over the magnifying lamp. There was a nick near the head of the femur tagged number one. Straightening, she glanced at the white board where she’d written the significant facts about each of them.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
It was irritating how easily he read her. Generally, the reaction she got from people was that it was impossible to know what she was thinking.
Dr. Mayfield had said once that she could unearth proof of the lost continent of Atlantis and the bones of Adam and Eve in the same day, and no one would know it by looking at her.
“What makes you think something’s wrong?” The question might have been an automatic response, but truthfully, she really wanted to know how he could read her so easily. It was almost as disturbing as her sense that she knew all about him.
Before she realized he’d moved, he was at her side. “Those the thigh bones? Are they the only bones you were able to find?”
She blew out a frustrated breath, then crossed her arms and leaned against the table edge. “As it happens, once I was able to convince Sheriff Hardin that you really had given the okay to build a platform, Todd finally got it finished—late this afternoon. He and Julie, my two best graduate students, are sifting through the dirt and mud, looking for more remains.”
“Good. What have they found?”
She glared at him. “Do you think you could retract that ridiculous order you gave to Sheriff Hardin that no one but you can authorize anything having to do with the site?”
Wyatt started to shake his head.
“It would cut down on delays.”
He glared at her, and she knew she had him. “I’ll tell Hardin you can make decisions dealing with extracting the remains.”
“Thank you.” She relaxed a little. It was a huge victory for him to trust her with a little of his responsibility. “By the way, speaking of the sheriff, I want him to talk to Betty Alice’s niece…scare her a little.”
“You figure it was her niece who snooped around in your room?”
She shrugged. “That’s what Betty Alice said. I’m more inclined to believe it was Betty Alice herself. It will be interesting to see what she does when Sheriff Hardin contacts her niece.”
Wyatt’s mouth turned up. “I’ll tell Hardin to warn Betty Alice about tampering with evidence.”
“Good. Thanks.”
“Professor? The bones?” he prodded.
“Oh, right. We have two males here. I’ll start with the bone tagged as number one. Judging by its length, he was five feet eight inches tall. It’s hard to determine weight with so little to go on, but I’d estimate that he was average weight for his height. He was over twenty-five…could have been as old as fifty. I’m basing that on some early indications of osteoarthritis. Here, where the head of the bone is nicked, I can see some reduction in bone density.”
“What about when he died?” Wyatt was frowning at the white board.
“I can’t determine that with the resources I have here. That kind of testing requires a fully functioning forensics lab.” She handed him the two sheets of paper. “I’ll need to take bone scrapings to send to your Ranger lab so they can perform those tests. Meanwhile, take a look at these. Mason Lattimer and Ray Phillips’s medical records.”
“The two who disappeared from Comanche Creek in the past five years.”
“Right. The size of the second femur,” she continued, “indicates a male, five feet eleven inches. Again, hard to say about his weight. He was younger, maybe thirty.”
He looked at the sheets of paper in his hand and then at the white board. “Then those two thigh bones could be Lattimer and Phillips.”
“It’s possible, but I can’t be sure. Not without more to go on.”
“But you’re sure both bones belonged to males?”
She didn’t even bristle at his question. She understood that it came from concern and frustration. Because she felt exactly the same way.
He’d expected an in-depth analysis. That was her area of expertise. So she knew he was surprised by her uncertainty of the weight of the two men.
“The diameter of the head of the femur in males is larger than that of females. A female thigh bone with a head in the size range of a male’s would be an anomaly. At best, it would probably indicate a height of more than six feet.”
Wyatt grimaced slightly. “And Marcie was under five-six.”
“That’s right.” Nina pressed her lips together.
Neither she nor Wyatt was going to get closure. Not today. Maybe not ever.
“So that means…”
“Marcie’s not there.”
“Maybe she’s underneath the other bones?”
Nina shook her head. “Not unless the entire site got turned upside down, or these two were put there after she was. I don’t think that happened.”
Wyatt stared at her, and she could see his brain working to sort the information into a rational, understandable format. To force it to make sense. She waited, knowing he was going to fail. She knew because she’d already been through it herself.
“Are you saying Marcie might be alive?”
“No, I’m not.” Her voice held a jagged edge. She stood. “Come over here.” She led the way to a small laminar flow hood. “This is what I did this morning,” she said as she opened a pair of surgical gloves and slipped them on. “Here’s the clump of hair. I extracted the necklace from right about here. Now, take a look at the hair’s roots. That’s blood.”
Wyatt was standing so close to her that she could smell the peppermint on his breath and feel his tension.
“Blood?”
She nodded. “I managed to get enough to type it. It’s the same type as Marcie. She was O-negative, and so is this.”
“The blood is Marcie’s blood type. It’s Marcie’s hair.” Wyatt’s words were a statement rather than a question.
“There are a lot of people with O-negative blood. We have to wait for the DNA match from the Ranger lab, but…” Nina’s breath caught, and her eyes filled with tears. She carefully returned the clump of dirt-encrusted hair to the evidence bag and sealed it.
Wyatt swallowed hard. The curve of Nina’s back and her bowed head gave him the answer he’d expected. They might not have found Marcie’s bones yet, but that was her blood, her hair, her necklace that they’d pulled from that sad shallow grave.
The faint hope that had burned inside him flickered wanly, like a flame in the wind. Very little doubt remained. The evidence that Marcie was dead was piling up.
“What else have you got to do tonight?” he asked.
“What else?” Nina looked up at him. The glitter of moisture in her eyes took him aback. Although he supposed it shouldn’t have. Marcie had been her best friend. Of course she’d held out hope, no matter how faint, that her friend was still alive.
“Have you eaten?”
She stared at him blankly.
“I’ll take that as a no. Come on. I’m buying.” He wasn’t sure why he felt like he had to cheer her up when his own world was falling apart. It was one thing for a witness to disappear. Protected witnesses were not always happy about being protected. A surprising number of them ditched their protector or resigned from the program.
But this—this new information, which the professor had gleaned from just a few hours of study—meant that Marcie hadn’t just disappeared. The evidence pointed to murder. Her hair, her blood, her necklace had been recovered from a shallow grave. It was only a matter of time before they found her bones.
As soon as the tests confirmed her identity, the entire case would be reopened. And this time he could lose his badge.
WYATT PAID THE CARHOP and took the bag. “Thank
s,” he said, waving away the change.
Nina grabbed the bag. “It has been way too long since I had one of Bud’s grilled cheeseburgers.”
Wyatt glanced up at the neon sign. Bud’s Burgers and Shakes, Since 1953. “You take a perfectly good cheeseburger and fry it? Bread, pickles and all?”
“Don’t knock it,” Nina said as she bit into her sandwich, which did smell really good. “Think of it as a grilled-cheese sandwich with beef. Mmm.”
Her appreciative murmur reverberated inside him like a roomful of violins. He gritted his teeth as he dug into the bag for his own ordinary burger and fries.
They sat in his Jeep and ate, while the carhops glided back and forth on their roller skates, taking orders and delivering food.
Wyatt acted mildly interested in their activity while he polished off his food and settled back to watch Nina eat. By the time she finished, he’d decided if he could give her one-fifth the enjoyment she was getting from that burger, he’d be over the moon—and so would she.
He’d also decided that if he didn’t stop thinking like that, he’d end up embarrassing himself.
“So you grew up here, too? Like Marcie?” he asked when she finally crumpled up the wrapper and licked her greasy fingers before cleaning them with a paper napkin.
She shook her head. “No. I’ve never lived in a small town. Not sure I’d ever want to.”
“Not even for grilled cheeseburgers?”
She smiled and licked a dollop of mayonnaise off her lower lip, something he’d have liked to do for her. He groaned inwardly and looked away.
“I guess you live in San Marcos because of the university?”
“No. I live in Austin,” she replied.
Wyatt sent her a thoughtful glance. “What part?”
“Lady Bird Lake area. Travis Heights.”
“No kidding? I live a few blocks away from the lake. So did you grow up there?”
“No. In San Antonio. I met Marcie when we were paired as roommates at Texas State.” She laughed. “Marcie wanted to major in anthropology. It took her only one visit to the body farm to decide it wasn’t for her.”
“Yet you two stayed friends.”
Nina looked at him as if trying to decide if she’d rather share her memories of Marcie with him or cut him off at the knees for daring to talk about her best friend.
“My dad and my brother died within seven months of each other. It was an awful time. But Marcie was the one person I could count on, no matter what. She was always there for me…”
Wyatt silently finished Nina’s sentence. Until your negligence got her killed. He balled up his burger wrapper and his napkins and stuffed them down into the bag.
“Ready?” he asked and pulled out of the parking spot without waiting for an answer. He headed back toward the Bluebonnet Inn, on the other end of Main Street.
“Did you talk to Shane and Trace Becker?” she asked as he parked the Jeep in the limestone parking lot.
“Becker never showed. But, yeah. I talked to Shane. After Hardin let all the bigwigs in town meet with us in the sheriff’s office.”
“Bigwigs? Like the mayor? I’m sure he was there.”
Wyatt nodded. “He was. And Jerry Collier, Marcie’s boss. She’d told me that the fraudulent land deal was Jonah Becker’s idea. But Collier was the one she was afraid of.”
Nina nodded. “I know. I think she was afraid of what he’d do if she testified.”
“Right,” Wyatt agreed. “That’s why she was in our custody. Without her testimony, there was no proof that Collier or anyone else had done anything illegal.” Wyatt swallowed the bitter taste of failure. “Some guy named Whitley was there, with his wife. You know them?”
“I don’t think so. I met only a few people who were in and out of her office fairly regularly.” She paused. “So you questioned Shane?”
Wyatt nodded. “He couldn’t tell me anything more about who attacked him last night. He said he was about to get into his truck to warm up for a few minutes, but when he walked around to the driver’s-side door, someone hit him from behind.”
“That’s consistent with the state of the ground by the driver’s-side door and the mud on his knees and hands. He didn’t see anything? Not even the attacker’s shoes?”
“He said he was too dazed. He about fell all over himself apologizing to everybody in Hardin’s office for not stopping the guy.”
“Hmm. Did you ask him anything else?”
“I got his shoe size. Twelve. Same as the castings from the crime scene. Which makes sense. And I questioned him about Marcie. Asked him if he thought her body might be buried out there. He looked surprised and upset, as if he’d never thought of that. According to him, he loved her. Said he was going to ask her to marry him. Said they’d talked about it.”
“Oh, right. He’s such a liar.”
“They didn’t talk about it?”
“He might have talked about marriage. But if Marcie did, it was only to tell him to dream on. She was through with Shane for good after that last…” She paused as though realigning what she was about to reveal.
“Last what?”
“Nothing,” she said, crossing her arms. “What did Jerry Collier say?”
Wyatt saw that Nina wasn’t going to say anything else about Tolbert and Marcie. He’d ask her later, when she was less defensive.
“Collier got real nervous. Kept fooling with a ballpoint pen till I thought I was going to have to take it away from him. I don’t get why Marcie was afraid of him.”
Nina shook her head. “Of course you don’t. You’re a tall, strong, intimidating man. Marcie was five-four and weighed one-twenty at the most. Plus, Collier was her boss. He could have ruined her life with nothing more than a few well-placed words in her personnel file.”
Chapter Ten
Nina’s words gave Wyatt pause. He wasn’t used to looking at the world through different eyes—certainly not a woman’s.
“I never thought about it that way. You’re right. It’s hard for me to understand how anyone could be afraid of a little pip-squeak like Collier. Although I can guarantee you, Collier would never go up against Shane Tolbert in a physical confrontation. What’s he? Maybe five-eight? Shane towers over him and outweighs him by at least thirty pounds.”
A shudder rippled across Nina’s shoulders.
He doubted it was entirely from the cold. Now that she’d made him aware of the difference in the way a man and a woman view other people, he could imagine what she was thinking.
She was probably picturing just how small and helpless Marcie had been next to Tolbert.
“You’re cold,” he observed. “Let’s go inside. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”
She didn’t protest. Wyatt got out and went around to open the door for her, but she’d already climbed out of the truck and was heading inside.
He followed, watching her perfectly shaped backside and wishing he didn’t understand exactly why she was so determined to ignore any polite gesture from him. Wishing, for many more reasons than one, that he could go back in time and have a second chance to save Marcie.
Upstairs he took off his shoulder holster and washed his face and hands. Then he put on a pot of coffee and knocked on the connecting door. “Ready for coffee?” he called.
“Sure,” he heard. “Just give me a minute.”
He fixed himself a cup, black with lots of sugar, and sat down in the desk chair, leaving the slipper chair for her.
When she knocked lightly on the door and opened it, he gestured her in.
She’d changed into long, flowing pants and a matching top. She’d taken her hair down. Having it loose around her face had transformed her from a professor into a woman. The dark frame of her hair softened her features and made her skin look enticingly creamy and soft.
He forced his gaze away from her kissable face. Looking down, he saw that her feet were bare, with pink nail polish gracing her pretty, sexy toes. He groaned inwardly. When had he ever thou
ght toes were sexy?
She headed straight for the coffeepot. “This is what I love about B and Bs,” she said. “Real cream and a sugar bowl full of real sugar.”
Wyatt watched her load up her mug with sugar. He had a strange urge to talk with her about sugar, about coffee, about how much he wanted to run his fingers through her black hair, but not only was that a waste of valuable time, which he could be using to get one step closer to what had happened to Marcie, it was also a surefire way to be shot down.
She hated him. She blamed him for her friend’s death. They would never be friends. Talking about the grilled cheeseburger earlier was probably the closest they’d ever get to friendly conversation.
So there was no point in him waiting until she was less defensive to ask her about Marcie. There would never be a better time.
He decided to plunge right in. “You said Marcie was through with Shane for good after the last…something.”
The teaspoon Nina was using to stir her coffee rattled against the side of the cup. “Last something?” she repeated, without looking at him.
He compressed his lips. She knew exactly what he was talking about. “What did you mean?”
She sat down on the slipper chair and flipped her hair back over her shoulder with one hand. “You think it was Shane who kidnapped Marcie? You think he killed her? I don’t like him, and I certainly have no reason or desire to defend him, but I don’t think he kidnapped her. For one thing, he didn’t have time. He was there after the attack. Later I mean. After you were taken away in the ambulance.”
“I know,” he said gruffly. “I’ve read all the depositions, all the eyewitness accounts, all the interviews with everyone who could have possibly had any reason to stop Marcie from testifying. Nobody was anywhere, and nobody saw anything.”
“What about you? What did you see?”
Wyatt rubbed his fingers across his forehead. How had the conversation ended up here? He started to change the subject back to what Tolbert had done to Marcie, but he made the mistake of meeting Nina’s gaze. Her dark eyes were wide and pleading, and again he wished he could turn off the strange intuition that told him what she was thinking.
Classified Cowboy Page 9
