Death Night

by Ritter, Todd

  “So you’re the famous Kat Campbell,” she said with a grin. “I’m so happy I finally get to meet you. Nick talks about you nonstop.”

  “All good things, I hope.”

  “All great things.”

  Flattery. Straight to the plus column every time.

  “He even told me how you like your coffee.” Lucy reached across the front seat of her Beetle, emerging with a giant thermos. “Black and strong, right?”

  This was a tough one. Under any other circumstance, bringing coffee earned a place in the plus column. But Kat had practically a whole pot of java sloshing around in her stomach, and while the caffeine kept her mind alert, it wasn’t sitting well with the rest of her body. Still, it was the thought that counted. Another plus.

  Lucy must have seen the uncertain look on her face because she said, “You just had some, didn’t you? Considering the hour, I should have known.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Kat said. “I just should have had some food with it, I think.”

  Lucy reached deep into the car again, this time returning with a flat box tied shut with some string. “Then it’s a good thing I also brought doughnuts.”

  That was the moment Kat gave up trying to keep score. Lucy had passed with flying colors.

  “So, these bones were found in the history museum?” she asked Kat once they entered the morgue.

  “In a crawl space under the floorboards. They were in a trunk that a murder victim was found on top of.”

  “Any indication that the victim knew they were there?”

  “Not that I know of,” Kat said. “Our theory is that the body was put there by whoever killed her.”

  “So these bones might not have anything to do with the murder.”

  “Or they might be the key to solving it.”

  Kat took the bag of bones to the morgue’s second autopsy suite, the first one being presently occupied by Wallace Noble and the body of Constance Bishop. Inside, she dumped the bones onto a stainless steel table in the center of the room.

  Lucy grabbed a white lab coat and some latex gloves, putting them on before approaching the table. “Is this everything that was found in the trunk?”

  “The whole shebang,” Kat said.

  “Well, right off the bat, I can tell that these are some old bones.” Lucy started sliding them around the table, putting them in order from top to bottom. “I already see some bone rot.”

  “Do you think you’ll be able to tell how old they are?”

  “Possibly. Nothing exact, mind you. Maybe a ballpark figure.”

  “That’s better than nothing.”

  Kat retreated to a corner of the autopsy suite and grabbed a doughnut, munching on it while she watched Lucy work. For her part, Lucy was all business as she studied the bones. She arranged them slowly and methodically, occasionally pausing to give one a closer inspection.

  “These are pretty well preserved,” she said, picking up a hand with fingers permanently splayed. She examined the back of the hand, then the palm, then the back again, swiveling it in a kind of morbid wave. “And while I can already tell this isn’t a complete skeleton, there’s a lot less scatter than I thought there’d be.”

  “Scatter?”

  “A body left out in the open never stays in one piece for very long. Animals usually come along quickly, taking bones with them. A corpse left in a forest could be scattered for miles within two weeks.”

  Although she’d taken only two bites of her doughnut, Kat returned it to the box and closed the lid. Hearing about scattered bodies made her no longer hungry. “Since that didn’t happen in this case, then it means the body was buried.”

  Lucy looked up from the table, a flash of approval in her blue eyes. “Nick told me you were a quick study.”

  “Thanks, but I had help,” Kat said. “We found dirt with the bones.”

  “How did it smell?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The dirt. Did it smell fresh?”

  “A little bit. Not as overpowering as a freshly plowed field, but close enough.”

  Holding the skull to her nose, Lucy sniffed deeply. “I see what you mean. That smell doesn’t come from the dirt itself. It comes from microbes that are in the dirt, which die off and fade away.”

  “So this was all dug up very recently,” Kat said.

  “Within a day or two.”

  Kat couldn’t help but be impressed. It was clear that Lucy Meade was whip smart. Another mark in the already cluttered plus column.

  “You’ve told me more in five minutes than I could have found out in five hours,” she said.

  “Glad I could help,” Lucy replied. “Now, if we’re lucky, I’ll also be able to find out how old the person was when she died and what killed her.”

  “She?” Kat emerged from the corner and edged close to the table. “How can you tell?”

  Lucy pointed to a section of bones in the center of the table. They formed the shape of a wide heart, with a large hole in the center.

  “The pelvis,” she said. “It’s bigger in women than in men, thanks to our childbearing capabilities. And if I was a betting woman, I’d go all-in on the fact that our Jane Doe here had at least one child of her own.”

  By that point, Lucy had finished arranging the bones on the table so that they were in the same order as the human body—skull on top, broken-off toes at the bottom. She pulled an iPhone from the front pocket of her jeans and started circling the table, taking pictures of the bones.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to send these to a colleague of mine in Harrisburg. He knows more about identifying the age of bones than I do.”

  “Would it be better if he saw one of them himself?” Kat asked.

  “That would help.” Lucy shoved the phone back into a front pocket of her jeans. “You want me to head over there?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure,” Lucy said. “It’s not that far of a drive. And with the equipment he has, we might be able to tell you with some accuracy how old these bones really are.”

  Kat didn’t know whether to hug Lucy, jump for joy, or both. Instead, she added a gigantic checkmark in her mental plus column.

  “Take whatever bone you want,” she said. “Any information you can get will be more than we know now.”

  Lucy’s hands hovered over the table as she decided which bone to choose. Furrowing her brow and biting her lower lip, she resembled a kid in a candy store who was told she could buy only one item. Much like what a kid would do, she settled on the biggest one—the femur.

  “Now this is interesting,” she said, turning the bone over in her hands. “All of these were found in a trunk, right?”

  “Technically, they were in a burlap sack inside the trunk.”

  “And there was no fire damage to either of them?”

  “None,” Kat said. “Why?”

  Lucy lowered the femur so Kat could get a good look at it, pointing out charcoal-colored splotches on various parts of the bone.

  “See those black areas? Those are burn marks.”

  “But that’s impossible. The fire was clear on the other side of the room.”

  “I believe you,” Lucy said. “Which means this wasn’t the first time these bones have been in a fire. In fact, it’s looking more likely that a fire is how this woman died.”

  Contrary to what Kat was expecting, every bit of information Lucy revealed only created new questions instead of answering old ones. The bones of someone’s mother—an apparent fire victim dead for an unknown amount of time—had just been unearthed. They didn’t know where the bones came from, nor did they know who they had once belonged to. And not even Lucy Meade would be able to tell Kat why on earth they had been hidden inside the museum.

  Once Lucy and the femur had departed for Harrisburg, Kat went looking for Wallace Noble. Now that she knew a little about one person found in the museum, she wanted to get the scoop on the other, more recent set of remains. She found Wallace outside, smoking a cigarett
e in the morgue’s parking lot.

  “Postautopsy smoke?”

  “It clears my head,” Wallace said. “I try to think about anything other than what I was just looking at. Today, it’s a young Sophia Loren.”

  “Nice. Unfortunately, I need to break your reverie.”

  Wallace dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his shoe. “Killjoy.”

  Instead of going back inside, he ambled to a nearby bench. One of those curved metal contraptions so popular in the eighties, it was both uncomfortable and unsightly—a fitting combination for a sitting area located next to the front door of a morgue. It was also freezing cold. Kat felt the chill through her uniform as soon as she sat down.

  “The blow was on the right side of Constance’s head,” Wallace said. “From the location and the angle of the wound, I can tell she was hit by a right-handed male. A woman of average strength wouldn’t be able to strike that hard. No offense.”

  Even though he was most likely right, Kat appreciated the coda. “None taken.”

  “Has a potential weapon been found?” Wallace asked.

  “Not yet. You said yourself it could have been any number of items in the museum.”

  “Well, I can help you narrow it down. She was hit with the edge of something flat and heavy. It left a line of damage to the skull instead of a circle. So if you were thinking someone bashed her head in with a cannonball, you need to guess again.”

  A cannonball was exactly what Kat had been thinking. There were several in the museum—small ones the size of a grapefruit that someone strong enough could easily lift with one hand.

  “There was no trace evidence found in the wound,” Wallace continued. “No paint chips or fiber. Whatever she was hit with, it was undecorated metal. Judging from the impact, it was something heavier than your average stainless steel. I’m thinking lead. Or cast iron.”

  “Can you pinpoint the time of death?” Kat asked.

  “When did the fire start?”

  “Neighbors across the street reported it at 12:52.”

  “Then she died sometime between then and the time it was put out.”

  Kat’s eyes widened. “Are you sure? The cause of death is blunt force trauma, right?”

  “Actually, it isn’t,” Wallace said. “Turns out Constance died of smoke inhalation.”

  The only way Kat could have been more surprised would have been if Wallace had said drowning. She had seen the wound on Constance’s head, complete with flecks of brain or bone or something that had come out of it. Constance Bishop must have been one tough woman to survive a blow like that. Adding to the shock was the fact that she might have still been alive as the firefighters were trying to put out the blaze.

  “They could have saved her,” she murmured. “If her body hadn’t been dumped in that crawl space, then Dutch Jansen’s boys would have seen her when they entered the museum.”

  “Technically, it wasn’t murder,” Wallace said.

  “Close enough. Whoever set that fire killed her, so it’s murder in my book. Especially after she was tossed into that hole in the floor.”

  “That’s another thing. It’s looking less likely that she was dumped there. I found fresh scrapes on both of her knees. There were similar ones on the inside of her forearms, not to mention a splinter near her elbow.”

  Another shock that Kat didn’t see coming. “You’re saying she crawled there by herself?”

  Wallace nodded gravely. “If she had been dragged, the scrapes would have been slightly above her knees. The ones I found were below the knees, suggesting that her legs had been bent.”

  Kat processed the information, unsure what to make of it. If Constance had crawled across the floor at some point during the night, it could have been before the blow to the head—while trying to fight off her attacker, for instance. But the scrapes on her forearms made that seem less likely. A woman scurrying away from an attack would be on her hands and knees. The wounds on her arms suggested she pulled herself across the floor.

  Kat tried to form a timeline of events, based on what little she knew. According to Emma Pulsifer, Constance was in the museum a little before eight. She might have left at some point during the night, but was back there after midnight. Maybe she had arranged to meet the person who struck her over the head. Or maybe the person’s presence came as a complete surprise. Either way, Constance was left for dead on the floor as her attacker started the fire on the other side of the gallery.

  Once the fire was burning and the assailant was gone, Constance headed to the crawl space. When Kat had entered the museum, the trapdoor in the floor had been closed. If Constance did climb into the crawl space herself, then she also closed the door after her. A tough task for an elderly woman with a devastating head wound. But it was possible. Anything was possible when you were fighting for your life. Still, that theory created one big question.

  “Why would she go down there?”

  “Maybe she thought it could be a refuge from the fire,” Wallace said.

  Again, it was possible but unlikely. “Why not just keep going down the hall? There’s a back door there. That would have taken just as long as entering a hole in the floor.”

  “She probably wasn’t thinking straight,” Wallace said. “Remember, she was struck in the head very hard. It likely would have killed her if the smoke hadn’t gotten to her first.”

  Kat thought back to the way she had found Constance slumped over the trunk with the bones in it. She had managed to get most of her body over it, almost as if she was trying to protect it.

  “Maybe she knew exactly what she was doing,” Kat said, thinking aloud. “She was hurt real bad. Probably in a lot of pain, not to mention surrounded by fire. Maybe she knew she was going to die and went into that crawl space for a reason.”

  “Which would be?”

  “Trying to save the trunk that was down there. Or if she died, then making sure whoever found her body knew it existed.”

  “But why would she spend the final moments of her life doing that?” Wallace asked.

  “Because Constance knew what was inside it,” Kat said. “Other than the scrapes and the splinter, did you find anything else on her hands or arms? Any residue or dirt?”

  Wallace dipped his fingers into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a cigarette. “I think I’m going to need a smoke for this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, lighting up, “I found dirt under Constance’s fingernails. Not the everyday grime we all have, but actual dirt. I’m talking fresh soil. She had definitely been doing some digging recently.”

  Kat turned to Wallace, stunned. “Constance is the one who dug up those bones?”

  “It certainly seems like it.”

  “But I don’t understand. This is getting weirder by the minute.”

  “And I haven’t even gotten to the writing on her hand.”

  “It was a message from her killer,” Kat said. “It has to be.”

  Wallace exhaled a long stream of smoke. “I have a theory about that. Let’s say you were a right-handed killer and your victim was on the floor, lying on her back. Now, say you wrote a message on the victim’s left hand. If you were standing at the victim’s head—”

  “The words would be upside-down,” Kat said.

  “Exactly. And that wasn’t the case here. Which means that you, the killer, were standing in the other direction, by the victim’s legs. Depending on your position, the words would likely appear either horizontally across the palm, beneath the fingers, or perpendicular to that, running beneath the thumb.”

  But that wasn’t where the words on Constance’s hand had been located. The message was written somewhere in between those two positions, appearing diagonally across her palm.

  “What are you getting at?” Kat said.

  “Here.” Wallace pulled a pen from the pocket of his lab coat. “Write something on your left hand.”

  Grabbing the pen, Kat held up her left hand. She couldn’t
bring herself to write the same words that were on Constance’s hand, so she simply scrawled a short and sweet my name is kat.

  “Now, look at the position on your palm,” Wallace said.

  Kat lifted her hand in front of her face. The words were in the exact same position they had been on Constance Bishop’s palm.

  “Are you sure?” Kat asked, not quite believing what she was seeing or hearing.

  “Positive,” Wallace replied. “The killer didn’t write on Constance’s hand. She—”

  Kat broke in, finishing the sentence for him—“wrote that message herself.”

  7 A.M.

  Kat sat in her Crown Vic, listening to the idle of the engine while trying to make sense of the situation. It was so strange that it bordered on the surreal. Yet the proof was there, and it pointed to one thing: the ominous message on Constance’s hand hadn’t been from the killer.

  While Kat was relieved not to be facing another Grim Reaper scenario, it still left too many questions for comfort. Why had Constance written on her hand? And what was she referring to? Was she predicting more murders? More fires? More bones? Running through all the possibilities gave Kat a headache.

  When she called Lieutenant Tony Vasquez with the news, he seemed equally flummoxed but none too surprised.

  “One of the CSI techs found a black Sharpie in the crawl space,” he explained. “It was on the floor, right next to the trunk.”

  “Even more proof that the message was the work of Constance herself,” Kat said. “You guys find anything else?”

  “Nope,” Tony replied, disappointment evident in his voice. “What about you?”

  Kat briefed him on the state of the bones. Old. Female. Burned. Then she dropped the other bombshell that Wallace Noble had provided—not only had Constance known about the bones in the trunk, but she had been the one to dig them up.

  “Why would she do something like that?” Tony asked.

  “Beats me,” Kat said, “but I imagine it had something to do with the historical society meeting she had planned for tonight.”

  And that was only a guess. Kat had no clue why the bones would be important; nor did she have an inkling about where the digging took place. The first location that sprang to mind was Oak Knoll Cemetery. She assumed someone would have reported a gaping hole in the ground, but just to be on the safe side, she radioed Carl Bauersox as soon as she was done talking to Tony.