by Ellen Crosby
“Can you let me know when they do that?” I asked. “I can’t bear to watch. I need to be sure I’m somewhere else.”
“Of course.” His voice was gentle. “I promise, I’ll take care of it. We’ll do our best to save it.”
We drove through more storm-wrought debris but encountered nothing as devastating as the sycamore. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until he pulled into the circular driveway to my home. Built more than two hundred years ago by my ancestor, Hamish Montgomery, and named in honor of the 77th Highlanders, his regiment that had fought in the French and Indian War, Highland House was a graceful blend of Federal and Georgian architecture made of stone quarried from our land. Hamish had carved the Montgomery clan motto—“Garde bien”—in the lintel over the door like a talisman. “Watch well. Take good care.” Except for more small branches scattered on the lower-pitched roofs of the two wings, the house looked exactly as it had when I left this morning.
I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks.
“At least it spared the buildings,” Quinn said, pulling up at the front door.
“I know.” I let out a long breath. “We’re lucky. It could have been so much worse.”
“Wonder how long we’ll be without power,” he said.
“A couple of days, I imagine.”
“How are you going to manage a shower with no water?” he asked.
“The water tank will be full, so at least I can get cleaned up even if it’s tepid water.”
“I think I’ll just go—what’s your French expression?—au naturel until we get power restored.”
“You mean miss the weekly bath on Saturday night?”
He grinned. “Listen, princess, I bathe and shave every day. I change my underwear.”
“I’m not touching that.” I climbed out of the Mule, glad to be back to our usual exchange of banter. “And I’d better get ready before the sheriff’s people get here.”
“Any idea who that body is?” he asked. “Maybe it’s some black sheep relative who didn’t make it inside the family burial ground.”
“I thought of that. But there’s no coffin and it looks like he was just dumped there in a shallow grave.”
“What makes you so sure it’s a he? Maybe it’s a she.”
I shuddered. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”
“Guess so,” he said.
Inside, the house was still and airless. Already I could feel the weight of the outdoor heat filtering into the two-story foyer as it reclaimed the dry air-conditioned coolness. Upstairs, my bedroom would probably soon be unbearable. At least I could sleep in the hammock on the veranda, as I’d done when the air-conditioning system died two years ago. I found camping lanterns, candles, and flashlights in the front hall closet and put them next to Leland’s favorite bust of Thomas Jefferson in the foyer alcove. Then I climbed Hamish’s grand spiral staircase, watching dust motes swirl around the Waterford chandelier in the dying daylight.
I’d nearly lost the house once in a fire, but I’d rebuilt what had been destroyed. Thank God this time I’d been damn lucky.
I took a sponge bath instead of a shower to save water and didn’t bother to dry off. The landline on my bedside table rang as I was in the bathroom pulling my wet hair into a ponytail. The answering machine would be knocked out, but at least the phone worked.
“Two deputies are waiting at the villa for you, and you’ll be happy to hear the Gator is back in business,” Quinn said when I answered.
“I’ll be right there. What was wrong with the Gator?”
He snorted. “Someone put the gas-and-oil mixture we use for the weed whacker in the tank. I figured it might be some dumbass stunt like that. I drained the tank. Caught it before it fouled the plugs and we had a real mess on our hands.”
“So it was an accident.”
“Accident my ass. Those gas cans are labeled in English and Spanish plain as the nose on your face. The only way you could have screwed up is if you had your eyes closed while you were filling the damn gas tank,” he said. “If I find out who did this, he’ll be cleaning wine barrels from now to harvest.”
“I’ll talk to the guys and say something about paying attention and being more careful.”
“That would include your boy Chance.”
“He’s not ‘my boy.’ Plus he knows better. It might have been Tyler. He can be sort of scatterbrained.”
“You mean the Tyler who caused a volcano this morning when Chance let him top off one of the barrels of Pinot?”
I closed my eyes and rubbed a spot on my forehead. A volcano was our term for filling something too full. If the wine was still fermenting and someone overfilled the barrel, it caused the kind of explosion that resulted from shaking a bottle of beer and opening it, or popping a champagne cork too quickly. Not something anyone wanted to happen to a five-thousand-dollar barrel of wine.
“Yes, okay, that Tyler. Maybe he shouldn’t be topping off barrels anymore.”
“Maybe he shouldn’t be working here.”
“I promised Jordy and Grace—”
“Yeah, yeah. That we’d babysit him until he finds a real job. Wherever he goes next, he shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy equipment or be around sharp objects.” I heard him sigh. “You’re the boss, so if you want him to stay, he stays. But wait ’til he forgets to take the valve off one of the tanks and it blows up. Or runs the forklift through it. I do plan to say ‘I told you so.’”
“You know, I was sort of dreading the meeting with those deputies,” I said. “But after all that cheery news, I think I’m kind of looking forward to it.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Because they can’t wait to talk to you.”
Though I knew a few of the deputies who worked for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, I didn’t recognize either of the men who waited by their cruisers when I pulled up in the winery parking lot five minutes later. Their name tags said Mathis and Fontana. Mathis was a gray-haired African American built like a football linebacker, with eyes that looked like they could pin me to a wall, metaphorically speaking. Fontana was small and muscular, dark haired and dark eyed. His uniform stretched taut across his chest, showing off the physique of someone who hit the gym regularly.
After we got through the introductions, Mathis said, “How do we get to where you found the body?”
“It’s probably best if I take you there in one of our ATVs,” I said. “Some of the terrain is pretty rough on a car, especially if you don’t have four-wheel drive.”
Mathis sat next to me on the drive over to the grave site and flipped open a spiral notebook. He asked the usual questions.
“Has anyone else been to the site besides you and Mr. Miller?” His voice reminded me of melted butterscotch.
I knew the two of them were going to hate my answer.
“Chance’s dog, unfortunately. I’m sorry. It was an accident. She found a bone near the skull and started playing with it.”
“You let a dog dig around a grave site?” Fontana said.
“We stopped her as soon as we realized what she was doing. But she wasn’t the first animal to get hold of that bone. The ends had already been chewed.”
I pulled up a few feet from where I’d found the skull and they got out. Mathis must have had a sixth sense for locating dead bodies because he walked straight over to the place before I could tell him where it was. For a heavy man, he moved gracefully. He knelt and pulled on a pair of latex gloves he got from his back pocket. Fontana photographed the scene. I stayed out of the way and waited.
“Vic,” Mathis said, “you’d better call it in. Have them get hold of Noland. And bring a search warrant.”
I’d known Bobby Noland, one of my brother Eli’s close friends, since we were kids. By the time Bobby was in high school, he’d gone from the honor roll to the detention hall, hanging out with a tough crowd who spent nights getting wasted on booze and drugs at the fields near the old Goose Creek Bridge. At least,
that’s what I heard. After he graduated I figured Bobby’d leave town, but he surprised everyone by saying he wanted to fight for his country and signing up for the army. Two years later he came home from Afghanistan with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star he didn’t want to talk about and joined the sheriff’s office. By the time he made detective and got assigned to Narcotics, he’d picked up another award for bravery. A year ago he moved to Homicide.
“You won’t need a search warrant,” I said to Mathis. “You’re welcome to do whatever you need to do.”
Fontana joined us. “Noland and the ME are coming. Also a crime scene guy, but that’s it for now. Everyone else is busy handling tornado stuff,” he told Mathis. To me he said, “Thanks, but Biggie, here, likes to do things by the book, so we’ll be getting that search warrant just the same. Saves a lot of headaches down the line, especially if we have to go to court.”
Biggie. I’d bet money that’s not what his mother named him. But I wasn’t going to object if Mathis wanted to dot his i’s and cross his t’s by getting a search warrant, so I nodded in agreement.
“Do you have any idea how long he’s been here?” I asked.
“Long enough to change the terrain,” Fontana said. “See how much greener the grass is around here? And that indentation where the ground has collapsed? You’d see it pretty good if you looked down from above—if you knew what you were looking for.”
He did an air sketch with his finger indicating where the earth seemed to have settled. “If that other bone belongs to this body, the remains could be pretty scattered. A grave needs to be at least six feet deep so an animal won’t dig it up. This one looks like it’s no more than two feet.”
Mathis stood up and I heard the joints in his knees crack. “You’re quite sure you have no idea who this might be, Ms. Montgomery? An old family feud, maybe? Ever hear anyone talk about something like that? How about any skeletons in the closet?” He smiled with his eyes as he peeled off his gloves, but if there had been a wall, I would have been pinned to it. “No pun intended.”
I tried to meet his gaze. “We wouldn’t be normal if we didn’t have our share of problems and a few family secrets, but I can tell you for sure that there are no skeletons in the closet that would lead anyone to kill someone, if that’s what you mean.”
Mathis kept that laser vision trained on me and I did my best to project self-assured confidence.
“We own five hundred acres, Deputy Mathis. It’s a lot of land. Whoever did this, a complete stranger, could have come and gone without anyone ever seeing him or her.”
Mathis nodded, but the expression on his face said he’d heard that one a million times before.
“We’re certainly going to check that out,” he said. “And I appreciate your cooperation.”
“We need to rope off the crime scene,” Fontana said. “That means you and any of your employees, and that dog, have to stay away from the area until our investigation is finished.”
“Do you have any idea how long that might take?” I asked.
Mathis tucked his gloves in his pocket. “As long as it takes. Two, three days. Maybe longer. Depends what we find.”
“After all this time what could you possibly find?” I asked. “Surely it’s been too long?”
“You’d be surprised,” Mathis said. “Locard’s principle doesn’t usually let me down.”
I took the bait. “What’s that?”
“A killer always leaves something at the scene of a crime or else takes something away with him.”
“Always?”
He nodded. “Always. That’s why it’s Locard’s principle. Make no mistake, Ms. Montgomery. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, if this turns out to be a homicide. So if there’s anything else you want to tell us, now would be a good time.”
Chapter 4
“Do I need a lawyer?” I asked.
When had the dynamics shifted, transforming me from a helpful public citizen to someone trying to spin what Mathis seemed to imply was an improbable tale: that I really had no idea how a dead body ended up on my farm?
Now that the storm had passed, the woods were again filled with the pleasantly discordant symphony of birdsong and the cicadas’ gentle whirring. A breeze like a warm caress rustled the leaves, carrying the unmistakable baked-earth smells of summer. The tornado seemed like it had happened a lifetime ago.
Mathis and Fontana stood there and watched me.
“You tell us,” Fontana said finally. “Do you need a lawyer?”
“I…no. I don’t.”
Mathis shot Fontana a look that seemed to tell him to back off.
“You’re not being charged with anything,” he said, warming up that rich voice a little. “But if you know something and we find out about it later, you could find yourself in real hot water. Understand?”
“There’s nothing you’re going to find out because I don’t know anything.”
Fontana’s cell phone chirped.
“It’s Noland,” he said. To me he added, “Can you give him directions to this place?” I nodded and he handed me the phone.
Bobby Noland knew the layout of my farm almost as well as I did since he’d spent so much time here when we were growing up. He and the medical examiner showed up in a Jeep with the sheriff’s department logo on the door a few minutes later. Unlike the deputies who were in uniform, Bobby wore khakis and a black polo shirt with “LCSD, Homicide Division” on it. His badge was clipped to his belt. Though he was only two years older than I, his face had settled into the heavyset demeanor of someone who has seen too much evil and cruelty in his work and understands the burden of keeping that knowledge locked away from the rest of us.
The medical examiner, deeply tanned, fiftyish, and lanky, wore a broad-brimmed leather hat trimmed with what looked like a crocodile band and carried a black leather bag. Up close I could see the result of years in the sun in the age spots on his face and exposed forearms, but there was a youthful spark of animation and interest in his eyes as he looked us over.
Bobby pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and offered it all around. Only Fontana accepted.
“Hey, Biggie. Hey, Vic. Friedman’s coming from the CSU but she’ll be awhile. Junie, you know these guys.” Bobby stuffed gum into his mouth and said to me, “Lucie, this is Junius St. Pierre. The county medical examiner.”
We shook hands. “Nice to meet you.”
“Same here.” He drawled “heah” with a Down Under accent—either Australia or New Zealand, I couldn’t tell. Like Mathis, he pulled a pair of gloves out of his pocket and went over to examine the skull.
“I guess this is what they mean when they say ‘his jaw dropped.’” Junie grinned at Bobby, whose mouth turned up in a small ironic smile. “Poor chap. Wonder what happened to the mandible.”
Mathis and Fontana smiled as Junie winked at me.
“No disrespect intended to this fella, you understand,” he said.
I nodded, used to morgue humor after listening to Bobby talk about his work. “You can tell it’s male? I mean, that he’s male?”
“I can’t be a hundred percent certain until I see the pelvis, but based on the skull I’d say it was an adult male. Probably Caucasian.”
“How do you know all that so fast?” I asked.
“Come here.” I obeyed and squatted next to him. So did Bobby. Junie moved his gloved index finger along the forehead, hovering just above the bone. “In general, males have a heavier browridge over the eyes. It’s called the supraorbital ridge. And the orbits, or eye sockets, tend to be smaller and more square than a female’s, with rounded edges. Males also have more pronounced markings where the muscle used to be attached to the bone, like this one here.” He indicated a rough-looking bump that ran down the forehead above one of the eye sockets.
“How long do you think he’s been here?” Bobby asked.
“Roughly…I’d say less than forty years. Maybe only thirty.”
“Will it take you long to fi
nd out who this is?” I asked.
Junie glanced at Bobby. “Could be easy, could be tough. Depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether anyone ever reported him missing or not,” Bobby said. He stood up and brushed imaginary dirt off his khakis. “People vanish for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes nobody says anything because maybe they wanted the person to disappear.” He blew a bubble and popped it. “If that’s what happened to this guy, we got our work cut out for us.”
It was just after seven when I drove back to the winery parking lot. Bobby told me they’d probably start excavating tonight and would return in the morning. He also said I should expect a cruiser at the vineyard with someone babysitting the grave site.
“Why do you need to do that?” I asked. “It’s completely isolated. No one’s going to go there.”
“Chain of custody,” he said. “You get screwed if you can’t account for evidence every single second from the moment you bag it until you go to trial. Since we’re not recovering all of it tonight, I need someone to make sure nothing happens to that crime scene.”
I climbed the flagstone steps to the porticoed courtyard, which connected the ivy-covered brick building where we sold wine to the semi-underground barrel room where we made it. The whine of a car engine coming down the road broke the evening stillness. A van with “Mobile Crime Scene” stenciled on it barreled toward the south service road. Probably Friedman, the crime scene investigator Bobby mentioned earlier. She seemed to know where she was going as her lights fishtailed and disappeared from view.
After so many years, could they really find some shred of evidence that tied the killer to the victim? Mathis seemed to think so, but I wondered.
First, though, they had to identify the man with the missing jaw. I wondered about that, too. How long would it take? Who had died out there on my land?
The fan-shaped gravel courtyard was littered with bright blotches of color. Geraniums and pansies, which had overflowed cut-down wine barrels, were crushed and broken on the ground wherever I looked. The hanging baskets had been stripped of the impatiens and fuchsia that had filled them this morning. Their blossoms glowed like jewels in the fading daylight, some clinging to the white portico columns like starfish, others carpeting the ground. By tomorrow we’d have a sodden mess of bruised brown petals to sweep up.
