The Bone Man

by Vicki Stiefel

He picked up a shard, twirled it in his hand. “So what are we missing?”

  “That’s the trouble. I don’t know.”

  I looked at the mantel, where I’d put the old Chaco stone given to me by the governor, then felt the one in my pocket that offered a warm comfort. “The blood fetish, whatever that is. Not just some red rock, but something of material worth. I don’t really get what these pot thieves think it is.”

  “They’re gonna keep after you, babe.” He poured another finger of bourbon into his glass.

  “Me, too.” I held out my glass. “I know they are. Thing is, just like with the pots, I don’t seem to have any answers.”

  “We’d better get some. Fast.”

  “Ayuh,” I said.

  Right then, the lights flickered and died.

  I began to shake. I was transported to Chaco, being chased by Dumb Dick. Sweat dotted my upper lip, and I slid off the couch in search of my Taser. In the light from the streetlamp, I saw the glint of Hank’s gun.

  “Stay put,” he said.

  “I want the Taser.”

  “Tally, don’t.”

  “I need it, Hank. I don’t give a shit that it’s not legal in Massachusetts. I will not be intimidated by these people.”

  He hissed. “They’re not out to intimidate you. They aim to kill you.”

  “My point exactly.” I scrambled across the carpeted floor and into my bedroom. I reached into the drawer in my bedside table and wrapped my hand around the Taser. The shaking eased, not totally, but it was better. A cold nose nudged my cheek. For just a moment, I buried my face in Penny’s fur.

  “They won’t get us, girl,” I said to her. “Pozor! Guard, Penny. Pozor!”

  A knock from the hall on the bedroom door. I pressed my back against the side of the bed and pointed the Taser straight at the door.

  The door creaked open. “Tal?”

  “Jake? What?”

  “Sorry about the lights,” my landlord said. “I messed up. You know how I suck at home repairs.”

  I let out a relieved breath. I realized I was totally paranoid. Dear heavens. “Oh, I sure do, Jake. I sure do.”

  The following morning, Aric called to say the package would arrive at the Salem post office the following day. I was glad. I couldn’t live the way I’d been going on for the past few weeks.

  I saw monsters everywhere, jumped at the least thing, feared constantly for my life. And I had no idea why I was the prime target of the pot thieves.

  I wished I understood the meaning behind the blood fetish and the words written by The Bone Man. At least then I could figure things out. Now . . . ? I was flailing around like a beached whale.

  “A beached whale?” Hank said as he breezed through the front door.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Work. I’ve got the eight to three.”

  “That stinks.”

  “I’ve had worse,” he said.

  “So what’s up?” I went into the kitchen and returned with a mug of black coffee. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks.” He took a long pull. “What a cliché. The coffee at the station is so damned lousy. C’mon. We need to go on a road trip. I’ll explain on the way. I got Penny’s leash.” He held it up.

  I peered out the window. A light rain had turned the world gray and gloomy. So typical for early October in New England. While Hank leashed up Penny, I slid into my Keene boots and down jacket, wrapped my favorite scarf around my neck, and pulled on my fishing hat, the one with the broad brim that made me look like an Australian cowboy.

  Just as I was locking the door, the phone rang.

  “Leave it,” Hank said.

  “I should, but . . .” I ran back inside and checked the caller ID. MGAP. “Tally Whyte, here.”

  “You told, didn’t you?”

  It was Gert. “What do you mean?”

  “You told everybody.” A sob.

  “Gert, I don’t know what you’re talking about, hon. I said nothing. Please.”

  She clicked off.

  I looked at Hank, who stood in the doorway wearing his usual mask of patience. The man could be a saint.

  “We’ve got to stop at MGAP on the way,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Can’t, Tal. This package won’t wait.”

  “What package? Hank, I’ve got to.” I walked past him leading Penny, headed for my 4Runner.

  He grabbed the collar of my coat, swiveled me around. “This isn’t a request, Tally. You’re there. Know what I mean?” His serious eyes stormed with anger.

  “Hank?”

  His frown squinched up the dimple in his chin. “I know just how pissed you’re gonna be, and I never like that. But you’re coming with me.”

  “Gert needs me,” I said.

  “I don’t much care if the queen needs you. Sorry.”

  “But, Hank, dammit.”

  “Now!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  We took Storrow Drive to the Northeast Expressway.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Revere.”

  “Revere? What, for a day at the beach in the rain? How romantic.”

  “Not quite so nice.”

  We ended up on Route 1A, to Ocean Ave., to finally Revere Beach Blvd. I could almost hear the yips of the greyhounds at Wonderland Park, except I wasn’t sure if they ran this late in the fall. To my right, the steel-colored Atlantic blended with the leaden sky, which continued to spit chilling rain. Oddly, I longed for snow.

  I cracked a window and listened to the wild sound of a rainstorm at the beach. The rhythm of the whooshing tires added to the surreal feel of the day. A quintessential New England October day, for sure.

  We pulled into the state barracks across the boulevard from Revere Beach. The tall buildings of Boston rose behind us, but the station was old and moody, built in the late 1800s. Its tall tower always reminded me of a watchtower, with its weathervane twirling in the wind. Today, it was twirling like mad. We parked inside the chain-link fence, and Hank led me in.

  We threaded our way through the bullpen. Hank waved to a woman I presumed was an old friend. Or maybe a new friend. Huh. She was awfully cute, with a bob of brown hair and a perky smile. Too perky.

  “Tal?” Hank said.

  “Oh, right. Coming.”

  We walked through an arch and then turned left into a room where a tech sat at a small console and another plainclothesman slept in a chair, black bandana across his eyes.

  Hank kicked the sleeper’s foot, and the guy nearly lifted off the chair. Aric!

  I gave him a huge hug. “Wow. I’m so glad to see you.”

  “Yeah. Me too.” His eyes smiled at mine with genuine joy. Made me feel swell. He looked at Hank. “Time to get started?”

  Hank sighed. “I guess so.” He lifted a manila folder from the wall holder and breezed through a bunch of pages. “You sure about this?”

  Aric made a face. “More than sure. She’s a rainmaker.”

  Hank’s eyebrows shot high. “If you say so. Back in a sec.”

  Aric dragged up a seat for me and helped me with my coat.

  “What’s going on?” I slipped off my hat and scarf and laid them on the table in front of me.

  “He didn’t tell you?” Aric said.

  I shook my head.

  “We got the girl who broke into your house. And I brought in a specialist to chat with her.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that one bit.

  I sat between Aric and Hank and stared at the blank wall in front of us. Aric had donned an earpiece, and he began to motion to the tech at the console.

  He held up fingers. Three, two, one.

  Lights came up in the room just behind the blank wall. It looked like an interrogation room. It was small and rectangular, with cinder-block walls. We could see inside, but I guessed we were hidden from those in the room behind a mirrored wall.

  Our room was darkened, but the interrogation room’s lights gave off a yellow cast, and th
e walls were greenish gray and shiny. The room was empty, but for a pitcher that sat on the table along with two glasses. Minutes passed. I sipped the Diet Coke Hank had brought me.

  We waited. It felt like just before the curtain rose on a Broadway show. Tension was heightened. Anticipation was huge. Everything was staged. Aric leaned close to me. “It’s about sixty degrees in there.”

  “Why so cold?” I asked.

  “To make this girl uncomfortable.”

  “What are we waiting for?” I said.

  His smile was grim. “The show to start.”

  A door on the right opened. In came Zoe, the girl I’d spoken with on the phone and met nearly four weeks earlier on the Vineyard. The one who had worked for Delphine. She wore her hair in long, thin braids, except stray wisps flew everywhere. I wondered when she’d last had a comb in her hand. Instead of clothes, she wore a sheet wrapped around herself, like a toga. A hand pointed her to the one wooden chair, and she sat.

  “The back of the chair tilts slightly forward,” Aric said. “It’s incredibly uncomfortable.”

  It all looked and sounded grim to me.

  “She’s been grilled by a mean-ass guy,” he said.

  I turned to Hank. “I can’t say I’m liking this.”

  “She hasn’t been harmed or deprived of sleep or tortured in any way.”

  “She better not have been,” I said. “You know I’d mouth off.”

  Aric pointed at the room. “Watch.”

  A woman entered on the left and shut the door behind her. She wore a calf-length denim dress that didn’t disguise the broadness of her shoulders or fitness of her body. The cardigan she wore over the dress looked handmade. It was gorgeous and oddly out of sync with her persona. The sweater was lime green, with a knit fuchsia ruffle up the front of each buttoned side.

  This girl didn’t appear like any frou-frou I’d ever known.

  Her honey-blond hair was clipped short, in a bob to her ears, and parted off center, so two semi-bangs danced on her forehead. She carried a carpetbag with twin handles of bamboo. I wished I could see her eyes. They were large and round, but I couldn’t catch their color. She was lean and lithe and sturdy, with squared hands like mine. But at five-foot-ten, I would top her by a good five or six inches, I guessed. She was bigger boned, too, and her lips were lush and strong. She was quite a package. I had a feeling she was a woman to be reckoned with.

  “How old is she?” I said to Aric.

  He slipped a hunk of chaw into his cheek. “Around twenty-eight. Something like that.”

  “Who is she? What’s her name?”

  Aric slung an arm around me and leaned close. “Who she is, well, that’s for her to say. Her name is Styx.”

  “Sticks? Like, sticks and stones?”

  He shook his head. “Like the river that separates the living from the dead.”

  That shut me up fast.

  The two women faced each other. By now, Zoe was shivering.

  “You want my sweater?” Styx smiled, and her whole being changed from stark to gentle. Anyone would want to see that smile again.

  “Thank you,” Zoe said and reached for the sweater.

  As I watched Zoe slip on the garment, I’d swear she was just a sweet, young girl who’d lost her way. Now I knew she was anything but. She might even have been Delphine’s killer.

  “Thank you,” Zoe said. “It’s freezing in here!”

  Styx nodded. She leaned down to her bag, opened it, and pulled out two knitting needles and a long hank of knitting that she began working on. “Let’s talk.”

  Zoe swallowed. “I’d love to.”

  Styx began to knit. Her hands made the needles fly. They looked like black steel and flashed in the light. We could hear the sound in the observation room, and the rhythmic clack-clack-clack became unnerving. Styx’s eyes never left Zoe, and yet soon the sweater, or whatever it was she was crafting, began to grow. So did Zoe’s unease.

  The knitter finally looked down at her work. She smiled what I’d call a secretive smile. “Want to talk?” she asked Zoe.

  “About what?”

  Styx looked up. “Oh, you know.”

  “I . . . I do?”

  “Of course you do.” Her smile was so warm, so welcoming. Who could resist it?

  “I have no idea what everyone wants me to say,” Zoe said.

  Styx knit faster. “No?”

  Zoe’s eyes darted around the room. Her nose ran. But then she looked back at Styx. “I swear, I didn’t kill Delphine. I don’t know where the bitch is.”

  Faster and faster Styx knit. The black garment swayed and jigged, and Zoe’s eyes couldn’t seem to leave it alone.

  “Huh,” Hank said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve really never seen anything like it.”

  “Or her,” he said.

  Aric laughed softly. “She’s part Abenaki. The People of the Dawn. Is it any wonder?”

  Abruptly, the knitter halted. She leaned forward, clasped Zoe’s hand in one of hers. I moved closer to the mirror, so I could see what she was doing. Back and forth, she rubbed her thumb across Zoe’s hand. A comfort move. Also, a hypnotic one.

  Tears waterfalled from Zoe’s eyes. “My friend, Jerry Devlin. He called me.”

  Styx leaned closer. “Is he a friend or your boyfriend?”

  Zoe nodded. “Boyfriend. I . . . I guess. He said he and another guy were going to come to the shop. They were gonna get this woman from Boston.”

  I looked over at Hank, and he nodded.

  “Jerry told me what to do and how to act.” Her voice sank. “I was only following orders. And then this jerk of a guy came. I mean, he was such an idiot.” She wound one of her braids round and round her fingers. “He’s dead. Bloody dead.”

  Styx lifted her chair and brought it around beside Zoe. She set her knitting on her lap and wrapped her right arm around Zoe’s shoulders in such a way that we could still see both women.

  “But Jerry’s not dead, right?”

  “No. No, he’s not,” Zoe said.

  “You’re crazy about him still, aren’t you?” Styx said.

  Zoe nodded. “And I like working for Delphine. I really do.”

  “I know. But something bad happened, right?”

  “Yeah,” Zoe said. “Delphine’s daughter showed up, and, well, they had to take her.”

  I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. Delphine’s daughter, Amélie. Where was she? I’d seen her months ago, but since then . . . I turned to Hank. He shook his head that he didn’t know, but his whole body tensed.

  Styx’s spine had stiffened, too, just the slightest bit. It was a tell, but one I doubted Zoe noticed.

  “And where is she?” Styx asked with a warm, honeyed voice.

  Zoe shrugged. “I dunno. Why do you care about her?”

  “Because she could affect your safety. But let’s talk some more about you. You’re right. Where’s Jerry?”

  The younger girl pouted. “He hasn’t done anything. He knows I’m here and—”

  “Where is he, sweetie?” Styx said.

  “Where he always is,” Zoe answered. “At that damned museum. I hate it.”

  Styx moved away from the girl and resumed knitting.

  “Why are you doing that again?” Zoe folded her arms in a huff.

  “Because I’m the knitter. I stitch things together, Zoe. Like why you broke into Tally Whyte’s apartment.”

  “Oh, come on. I didn’t break into anyone’s apartment.”

  Styx smiled, and again the room glowed. “Yes, you did.”

  Zoe inhaled a stuttering breath. “Will you still like me?”

  “Oh, Zoe,” she said in an incredibly warm and friendly tone. “Nothing you say could change my feelings for you.”

  The younger girl beamed. “She’s got the key.”

  The key? I held my palms up to Hank and Aric. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Aric whispered in the microphone. Styx nodded, then sai
d. “I don’t understand. What key?”

  “The key, the key. That old fetish everyone’s been after. I was supposed to find it or something. Maybe it was never there. I don’t know. Just a bunch of new junk that I took with me.”

  “I don’t know either.” Styx carefully folded her knitting and slipped it back into her bag. Her eyes went to us, behind the mirror. Aric leaned forward, into the microphone. “Thanks, Styx.”

  The woman nodded and rose to leave the room.

  “Wait!” wailed Zoe. “Aren’t you going to stay with me?”

  Styx slipped out the door and closed it behind her.

  We found Jerry Devlin in the system. When a bland, nice-looking guy stared back at us from the computer screen, I knew I’d seen him before.

  “I know this guy,” I said.

  Hank leaned over my shoulder for a look. “And . . . ?”

  I tapped a key. “And, nothing. I know him. He was the anchorman for the National Geographic team. Allegedly, they were going to film the reconstruction and the skull. Two of them are dead.” I explained who they had been. “Things are coming together, Hank.”

  “I’ll be back in a sec,” he said.

  I printed out the image of Jerry Devlin. I wondered if he’d look the same. The other two men, Paulie and the killer at the lodge, hadn’t.

  “I need to get out of here for a while, okay, Aric?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  We headed toward the front of the barracks.

  “I’d like to meet her,” I said to Aric.

  “Styx?”

  I nodded. “She interests me. A very unusual girl.”

  “She doesn’t like people much,” Aric said.

  “She’s talented,” I said.

  “She is,” Aric said. “She works for the FBI part time.”

  “She could help with the case.”

  He shook his head. “She always gets what we need. But at a price to her. It’s painful to watch. C’mon. Let’s walk.”

  “Should we wait for Hank?” I asked.

  “He had to do something with the prisoner. That kid’s a pistol.”

  Our footfalls sounded hollow on the polished linoleum.

  “You mean Zoe?” I said. “She’s been in this from the beginning, I’m thinking. She’s a nasty little piece of work. Only out for herself.”

  “Seems so,” Aric said.