Looking at the elfin door, I thought of the Rathburns’ ill-tempered gnomes. Anybody taller than they were would have had to crouch to get inside.
I started to ask Emma what was going on, but the question stuck in my throat when I registered the horrified expression on her face. She was pale, and even though the basement was cool, she was perspiring.
“Clare,” she said hoarsely, with a nod toward the opening in the wall. “There are bones in here.”
At first, I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. “Bones?” I echoed stupidly. As many bodies as I’ve run across in my time, you’d think I’d be quicker on the uptake.
Emma nodded woodenly. Tried to speak, swallowed, and made a second attempt as I knelt to take the flashlight and peer into the black hole. Sure enough, the beam played over a human skull with its mouth wide-open, as if it had just uttered a primal scream, and the rest of the skeleton was there, too, but scattered, as though rats and other creatures had been at play.
“My God,” I whispered. “My God.”
“I c-came down here to wash my jeans, for school tomorrow—” Emma gripped my arm tightly, almost convulsively. “Waldo started scratching at the door and barking, so I opened it to show him there was nothing there—”
I put down the flashlight and wrapped both arms around my niece. “It’s okay,” I said, but my mind was racing, trying to make sense of the thing. I hoped my talent for finding dead bodies didn’t run in the family. “It’s okay.”
She pulled back, shaking her head. It wasn’t “okay,” and we both knew it. “At first I thought it was just a Halloween decoration that somebody left behind when they moved—”
I got to my feet, pulling Emma with me. First order of business: call Sonterra. Second order of business: make a pit stop before I wet my pants.
“Who do you suppose it is?” Emma asked, with a shudder, as we started up the steps. Waldo and Bernice followed, and we were back in the kitchen before I realized Waldo had brought a pelvis bone along as a souvenir.
I took it from him and set it gingerly on the counter.
“I have no idea,” I answered, a few beats after I should have, numb with shock. Once Emma was seated at the kitchen table, still shaking, I made my way to the phone and dialed Sonterra’s number.
My purse rang.
I swore. He had my cell phone. I tried again.
“Sonterra,” he said brusquely.
“You have to come home.” It was all I could think of to say, at the moment. My gaze strayed to the pelvis bone on the counter, brown and nicked all over with the marks of rodent teeth. A chill gyrated through me, and I shivered in its wake.
I felt Sonterra shift from mild irritation—he was clearly in the middle of something—to red alert. “What is it?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Clare.”
“Bones,” I said.
By then, Emma had recovered enough to cross the room and take the receiver out of my hands.
“Waldo found a skeleton in the cellar,” she said matter-of-factly.
I groped my way along the edge of the counter, drawn to that fragment of a human being and, at the same time, repulsed.
“Okay,” Emma responded, and hung up the phone. “Tony said not to touch the bones. He’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
I nodded, still mesmerized. Had the victim been alive when he was placed in that dark cubbyhole with the rats? Dear God, I hoped not.
Emma and I were both sitting at the table, staring mutely at each other, when, some twenty minutes later, Sonterra unlocked the back door and burst in, closely followed by Special Agent Timmons and a couple of his cronies.
All of them homed right in on the pelvis.
“Waldo did it,” I said.
Sonterra nodded, as though what I’d said made some sort of sense, and headed for the basement steps. Timmons caught my eye for a moment, then trooped after Sonterra. The other agents were right behind them.
I felt icy cold, as if an arctic wind had swept through the room, wide as a river, but emanating directly from that grim little nook in the basement wall.
At least half an hour must have passed before Sonterra returned to the kitchen, accompanied by Special Agent Timmons, who was on his cell phone, calling for a crime-scene team.
Sonterra pulled back a chair and sat down between Emma and me.
“What’s the story?” he asked quietly.
Emma bit her lip, then repeated what she’d told me earlier.
Sonterra listened, nodded when she was finished.
“Do you think it’s Oz Gilbride?” I asked, referring of course to the remains. “After all, he disappeared, and this was his house—”
“We won’t know for sure until we get results on the lab work,” Sonterra replied, and something in his tone told me he was about to deliver breaking news. “If it is Chief Gilbride, he didn’t rot alone. There are skeletons piled up in that hole like firewood.”
I put a hand to my mouth. I had a thousand questions, and all of them scrambled into my throat at once, like mice fleeing a fire through a narrow pipe, and got stuck there.
Emma, steadier now, spoke up. “How come nobody figured out that there were bodies down there before this?” she asked. “They must have stunk like crazy while they were decomposing.” That’s what happens when you have a fourteen-year-old who aspires to be a cop. They use words like “decomposing.”
Sonterra gave a grim nod of agreement. He answered Emma, but he was watching me very closely the whole time, as if he expected me to suddenly come apart at the seams. “There’s no possible way those people died here. I’d say they were killed elsewhere, then stashed after the flesh rotted away.”
I grimaced reflexively as the obvious images cascaded into my brain.
Timmons, having completed his telephone call, leaned against the kitchen counter, inches from the rat-gnawed pelvis.
“They’ve been in there a while, though,” he put in.
I shivered, remembering my skeleton dream, and wondering if I’d known all the time, subconsciously of course, that there were bones under the house.
Within an hour, our place swarmed with State Police, FBI agents, people from the Pima County ME’s Office, and crime-scene techs. Emma, the dogs, and I waited in the living room, staying out of the way.
“This is way past creepy,” Emma observed, her eyes wide. Now that the shock had subsided a little, she was intrigued. Although I didn’t encourage it, I knew she read a lot of true crime and watched the same forensic science programs on Court TV that I did. “Don’t you think it’s weird that the graveyard is just over the back fence? It’s like there was an underground earthquake or something, and a bunch of the bodies shifted into our basement.”
I shuddered. “What a lovely thought,” I said. “Unlikely that they’d all funnel into a crawl space, though.”
Emma nodded in solemn agreement. “Do you think they’re coyote victims?”
“Maybe,” I said. I’d thought my despair couldn’t run any deeper, but once the prospect was out in the open, I felt swamped by gloom. Sonterra had said there were a lot of skeletons down there, and I wondered, though he hadn’t been specific, if some of them were women and children.
I heard Deputy Dave’s voice in the kitchen. I didn’t bother to play hostess. He’d find his own way to the cellar.
The news media arrived next, clogging the street out front with reporters, vans, and cameras. Timmons and his Bureau colleagues kept them at arm’s length, but when the ME’s crew began carrying the bones out in body bags, the yard lit up with eerie, flickering flashes. I could imagine what the pictures would be like.
Around midnight, Sonterra joined Emma and me in the living room, brushing cobwebs off his clothes.
“You might as well go to bed,” he told me.
“Like I could sleep,” I replied.
“Just think,” Emma said. “We’ve been hitting the sheets every night, with no clue that there were a bunch of stiffs righ
t under our feet.”
“Emma.” I sighed.
She pulled me up from my chair. “Tony’s right,” she said solicitously. “You need some rest.”
Next thing I knew, Sonterra was undressing me and tucking me in. He kissed me on the forehead, took jeans and a T-shirt from his dresser drawers, and went across the hall. I heard the shower running, and took comfort in the normality of the sound.
I closed my eyes, listening.
When I opened them again, it was morning.
During those first few seconds of muddled, sleep-drugged thought, I believed I’d dreamed the whole thing. Reality was on me like a pit bull as soon as the fog cleared.
With a groan, I rolled out of bed—Sonterra’s side hadn’t been slept in—pulled on a robe, and crossed to the bathroom for a shower. When I was presentable, in navy sweats and sneakers, I went downstairs.
The kitchen brimmed with weary-looking FBI agents. Esperanza, shoulders stooped, stood at the stove, mass-producing omelets. Sonterra, still in last night’s change of clothes, poured me a cup of coffee.
Timmons got up to give me his chair at the table, but I shook my head. Sipped the coffee. It seemed to have no taste at all, but it was hot.
“Now what?” I asked Sonterra.
He caressed my cheek, countered my question with one of his own. “You okay, Counselor?”
“Just great,” I told him, looking around. No sign of Emma, or the dogs. “Where—?”
“Relax,” Sonterra said, putting his hand to the small of my back and steering me out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and into the study, where we could talk privately.
“Tell me you didn’t send Emma to school,” I blurted. “The other kids will be all over her, not to mention the media.”
“She’s with Jesse’s mother,” Sonterra told me. “Bernice and Waldo, too.”
“Who?” I asked, a split second before I remembered that—of course—Jesse was Sonterra’s deputy. Significant, I thought, that he hadn’t sent Emma and the dogs to Madge and Dave’s place. “Are you sure they’ll be all right?”
“Positive,” Sonterra said, turning the chair in front of my computer around and pressing me into it.
“This is a nightmare,” I murmured.
He huffed out a sigh. “No argument there, Counselor.”
“Any IDs on the bodies yet?”
Sonterra shook his head. “Best guess, they’re illegal immigrants.”
I closed my eyes, rubbed my temples with the fingertips of both hands. The realization that I’d forgotten all about Suzie struck me then, with the force of a baseball bat. I gripped the arms of the chair, stricken that I could have let her slip my mind for even a moment. It was as though, by remembering, by keeping a conscious vigil, I could prevent her from dying.
“Suzie,” I whispered.
Sonterra gave my knees a squeeze. “Keep the faith,” he said gruffly. “There are people combing the desert right now, looking for her.”
“The desert?” I sat up a little straighter. “Did you get a lead? Is that where you were when I called you last night?”
He sighed. “No, I didn’t get a lead. Yes, that’s where I was. We were operating on Timmons’s theory that the call came from within twenty-five miles of Dry Creek. The Bureau brought in a couple of scent dogs, and one of the TV stations in Tucson loaned us a helicopter and pilot to search from the air once the sun came up, but there are about 9 million caves out there.”
I’d pulled him, and a flock of FBI agents, off the search because of a bunch of bones. Granted, the skeletons belonged to human beings, almost certainly murdered, but they’d probably been around for a long time. Their cause clearly wasn’t as urgent as Suzie’s.
Sonterra frowned, trying to read my expression. “What is it?” he asked.
“You might have found her by now, if I hadn’t—”
“Stop,” Sonterra interrupted firmly. “There must be a hundred volunteers out there. The situation is under control, and there’s no point in beating yourself up.”
A light rap sounded at the study door.
Sonterra closed his eyes for a second, then said, “In.”
Timmons opened the door. “Sorry to bother you, Chief,” he said, “but I just got a call from the field. They found something.”
“Something?” Sonterra echoed tersely.
I couldn’t speak.
Sonterra stood up.
“Not the kid,” Timmons added quickly. “Evidently, one of the dogs picked up a scent and tracked it into a hole behind a pile of rocks. He came out with a sandal.”
Sonterra was on the move so quickly that I had to hurry to keep up with him. I stayed on his heels all the way to his car and climbed into the back while Timmons took the front seat, reconnected with his field contact via the cell phone, in case there were updates. Either Sonterra was too distracted to insist that I stay behind, or he knew it would be a waste of breath.
Maybe he’d just resigned himself to my badge.
It was a bumpy ride, but we were on the scene within ten minutes.
By then, the searchers had found a cell phone, half buried in the sand, and a few footprints. Two Bureau guys were already making plaster casts.
“Running shoes,” one of them told Sonterra and Timmons, as we rushed over to investigate. Sonterra paused long enough to give me one of those stay-back looks, and I didn’t press my luck. He could have me bodily removed from the scene if he wanted to, and worried about the consequences from Robeson’s office later, and I knew he would if I got in the way.
The prints looked big, probably a size eleven or larger. There was a clear one, and three or four partials.
A tech came forward with a plastic bag, a tiny plastic sandal tucked inside.
My heart skittered, righted itself. Memory is a tricky thing. The unconscious picks up all kinds of details, catalogs them, and feeds them up later, when they become pertinent. Suzie had been wearing shoes exactly like that the one and only time I’d seen her—in front of Doc Holliday’s house the previous Friday afternoon.
Sonterra’s gaze sliced to my face, questioning.
I confirmed what the search dog had already figured out. “That’s Suzie’s,” I said.
He gave a half nod and handed the bag back to the tech.
“Any tire tracks?” he asked one of the agents.
“Not so far,” the man replied, after glancing at Timmons, silently seeking permission.
I became aware of the volunteer searchers, hovering in a little cluster under a lone, thirsty-looking mesquite tree. The dog handlers were already loading their canine cops into the back of a van, and the helicopter whirred in the distance, like a giant horsefly, headed toward Tucson. I had a crazy need to run after it, waving my arms, and shouting, “Come back! She’s here somewhere!”
By then, Sonterra was assessing the discarded cell phone, also bagged, having handed the sandal off to the tech. I felt a tear slip down my cheek and didn’t bother to brush it away.
“Is everybody just going to give up?” I demanded in frustration.
Sonterra took so long to answer that I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. Finally, though, he looked me in the eye. “Suzie’s been moved to another location, Clare,” he said patiently. “It’s no use searching out here anymore.”
I drew nearer, to examine the phone through the plastic. The battery had been removed. “Is that the one she used to call us?”
“Probably,” Sonterra said bleakly. “We won’t be able to tell for sure until it’s operational again.”
Just then, a squad car came bumping over the desert. Deputy Dave brought it to a rattling halt about fifty yards out, shoved open the door, and stormed across the distance in between.
“Maybe you forgot, Chief,” he ranted at Sonterra, “but I’m still a member of this police force, and I’d appreciate a call when something like this goes down!”
Sonterra didn’t waver, nor did he raise his voice. “You put in a long night sorting bones
,” he said.
Rathburn looked apoplectic. “Yeah, and I wouldn’t have known about that, either, if I hadn’t had my scanner on. If you want me to turn in my badge, just say so, but don’t leave me out of the loop again!”
I saw a tiny muscle bunch in Sonterra’s cheek, but other than that, he was cool as a winter breeze. “When I want you,” he told the other man evenly, “I’ll call you. We’ll discuss this privately—later.”
The deputy blustered a little, but he finally caved. “Fine,” he bit out. His gaze strayed to me, and I knew he wanted to ask what I was doing there, but he didn’t quite dare.
Sonterra turned his back on Rathburn and started going over the surrounding area, following some mental grid. It didn’t matter to him that the scene had already been searched—he had to see for himself.
Deputy Rathburn stood glaring after him for a few moments, sized Timmons up, then approached the milling volunteers with his questions.
Timmons crouched at the mouth of the hole where Suzie’s sandal had been found, sweeping the interior with the beam of a flashlight.
He looked up at me. “You shouldn’t be here, you know,” he said mildly, and with a certain good-natured resignation.
I didn’t bother to explain that, for all practical intents and purposes, I represented Pima County. The Bureau being what it was, he probably knew it anyway. “Has anybody been in there—besides the dog?”
“One of the techs got most of the way in,” he said. “It’s a tight space.”
I measured the opening with my eyes and suppressed a shudder. It was the last place I wanted to go, but at the same time, I felt compelled to see for myself what might be in that hole. “I could make it.”
Timmons straightened, shaking his head. “Why?”
“Because I’d like to see it for myself,” I said.
He looked around for Sonterra, spotted him talking to one of the techs, then turned his gaze on me again.
“It’s a crime scene,” he reminded me.
Time to play the big card. “And I’m an investigator with the Pima County Prosecutor’s Office. I can call for a warrant if you like.”
One Last Look Page 20
