by Regan, Lisa
“Clothes on the floor?” she said. “You sure were in a hurry to get them off last night.”
“You didn’t make the bed,” he added. “And your make-up and hair ties are all over the dresser.”
With a flustered sigh, Hanna threw her spatula down and stomped out of the room. Alex counted her footsteps on the stairs. Frances said, “Boy, keep an eye on that bacon, would you?”
Alex walked over to the stove, picked up the spatula and pushed the greasy meat around inside the pan. He had never cooked bacon before. He had no idea how to do it or when it would be done so he kept pushing it around. After a few minutes, Frances said, “Isn’t it done?”
“I—I don’t know,” Alex stammered.
Frances’s chair scraped across the tiles as he stood. “Stupid, stupid, useless boy,” he muttered. He pushed Alex out of the way and then held his hand out for the spatula. “Give me that, boy.”
But Alex didn’t want to. He didn’t want to give his father anything anymore. He was tired of yielding to him and his arbitrary demands. He held fast to the handle of the spatula.
“Boy,” Frances said, his voice rising. “I said, give me that!”
He seized the flat part of the handle, trying to snatch it from Alex’s hand. With a grunt, Alex began to wrestle him for it. With each push and pull, Frances grew more frustrated. Finally, he reached up, snaked a hand behind Alex’s head and pushed with all his might. Alex’s face slammed into the sizzling pan of bacon. A scream ripped from Alex’s throat as he scrambled away from the stove. His face was on fire. He ran to the kitchen sink and let the water run cold before thrusting his head beneath it.
It didn’t help.
By the time his mother came back into the room, led by his screams, Frances was again seated at the table, calmly sipping his coffee and reading the newspaper.
Twenty-Six
While Shannon and Christian drove the two hours back to their home in Callowhill to find Trinity’s letters, Josie brought Lisette home with her, and freshened up the guest bedroom so that Lisette could stay with them for the time being. It was ten at night, and poor Trout had been alone all day, so she took him for a run and fed him, checking her phone every few minutes to see if there was any word on Trinity. There wasn’t.
On her way back to the station house, Mettner called to let her know that Special Agent Drake Nally had arrived. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she told him.
“We’re in the conference room. We’ll wait for you.”
Josie nearly forgot to put her vehicle in park after pulling into the municipal parking lot. She sprinted through the crowd of shouting reporters stationed at the back door and up to the first level. The conference room door was open. Around the table sat Gretchen, Mettner, and Noah together with Drake. Josie took in his dark brown eyes, neatly trimmed goatee and charcoal-colored suit. When he saw Josie, his face flushed. His lips moved as though to speak but no words came out. He stood up, and Josie saw he was tall and rangy, every bit the imposing federal agent except for the shock on his face. Drake walked around the table and extended a hand, finally managing to find some words.
“Sorry,” he said. “You just… you look exactly like her. When she’s not all made up, I mean.”
“Thank you for coming,” Josie said. “I assume the team brought you up to speed on all the developments. Not that there’s much to report. We’ve got far more questions than answers.”
He nodded and motioned to a thick file on the table in front of where he’d been sitting. “They did. I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you about this over the phone but it’s a lot to… get into.”
Josie looked at Mettner pointedly, mentally asking if he’d told Drake about the remains. He gave a brief shake of his head. Mettner was still keeping that detail close. Since Drake was here as a civilian, and not as an FBI agent, there was no need to tell him any details about the investigation that they deemed sensitive.
“What’s in the file?” Josie asked, turning back to Drake.
Drake remained standing while Josie sat down between Gretchen and Mettner. Noah sat across from her, next to Drake’s chair.
Drake pulled the file closer to him and placed a large palm over it. “In a minute,” he said.
Mettner spoke up. “With all due respect, Agent Nally, you’re not here in your official capacity. You’re here as a known associate of a high-profile citizen who was abducted from our town, so we’re going to be the ones asking questions.”
Drake’s lips were a thin line. Josie could see the barely perceptible movement of his jaw as he ground his teeth together. He removed his hand from the file, pushed it toward Mettner and sat down, adjusting his suit jacket and tie. He said, “I will answer any questions you have, but I need to know one thing before we start. The news reports state that some personal items may have been taken from Trinity’s vehicle along with her. May I ask what those were?”
“Why?” Josie asked. “Why do you need to know?”
“Because she took something from me, and I have a right to know if that thing was one of the items taken during her abduction.”
Mettner didn’t open the file. Instead he pushed it over to Gretchen. She put on her reading glasses and opened it up. Josie glanced at the contents and saw the familiar layout of an autopsy report.
Mettner told Drake, “Two letter boxes. One of them had the personal effects of the late news anchor, Codie Lash, which Trinity’s assistant had shipped to her from New York. We don’t know what the other box contained.”
Drake let out a long sigh and rubbed his hands over his face. His shoulders slumped.
Noah said, “I’m guessing you do know what was in it.”
“It was a file. A very large file. Trinity had compiled it over the last two months. She was obsessed. It was a story she wanted to tackle. A serial killer.”
Gretchen turned more pages in the file until she came to some photographs of a skeleton—except that it wasn’t a normal skeleton. “Mettner,” Gretchen said, the tone of her voice higher than normal.
Josie had to grip the arms of her chair to keep from jumping out of it. Gretchen flipped through more of the photos. All of them were the same. Torso in the middle circled by small bones. The bones of the arms together at six o’clock with the pelvic bone sitting at their knobby ends, along with the skull, and the leg bones at two o’clock. In one of the photos, the pelvic bone and skull were at the two o’clock position, at the ends of the leg bones instead of the arm bones.
“Mett,” Josie said.
She pressed her back into the chair so that he could lean across her and see the photos for himself. Drake opened his mouth to speak, but Mettner held up a hand to silence him. He glanced at Noah, who stood, walked around the table and stared at the photos. A moment later, his hand settled on Josie’s shoulder. He looked at Drake. “What is this?”
“That’s the serial case I was just talking about. The Bone Artist.”
Josie said, “Why does that sound familiar?”
Drake replied, “He was active in Pennsylvania beginning in 2008.”
Gretchen said, “One of his victims was found in Philadelphia, but it wasn’t my case. Someone on day shift caught that one, but the FBI swooped in and took over. That was the last I heard of it. I had my own caseload. I never heard anything about it after that. There was a task force, although they never caught the guy.”
A muscle ticked in Drake’s jaw. “The Philadelphia victim was a thirty-three-year-old guy named Kenneth Darden. He lived in a suburb. Left his house after dinner for a late doctor’s appointment. His car was in the doctor’s parking lot, but he never made it to the appointment and never made it home.”
“No cameras in the doctor’s lot?” Mettner cut in.
“Nope. Not back then. Not in a low-crime suburb. Exactly thirty days after he disappeared his bones were found arranged on the bank of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.”
“Arranged?” Josie said. “Like these photos?”
Drake held a hand out to Gretchen, and she gave him a stack of photos. He riffled through them, plucked out a color photograph, and handed it to Josie. She stared at an eerie facsimile of the scene she’d found behind Trinity’s cabin that morning. “The case was covered on the news from time to time, but they never showed… this.”
“These were never made public. There were some witnesses who saw the bones who talked about it, but no photographs were ever released.”
Noah asked, “They were all like this?”
Drake said, “Always. The torso—rib cage and spine—is always in the center with all the small bones from the hands and feet as well as the clavicles circling it. The arm bones are at six o’clock and the leg bones are at two o’clock. The only difference is that sometimes the pelvic bone and skull are placed near the arm bones and sometimes they’re near the leg bones. Sometimes the positions of the pelvic bone and skull are reversed.”
Josie pulled another photo from the file in front of Gretchen, also of a set of human bones arranged just as Drake described them, this time in what looked like an abandoned gravel lot. “What’s the difference? Why does he put them in different places?”
“We don’t know,” Drake said. “A lot of theories have been developed over the years as to why, but none of them have helped us get any closer to this guy. We’ve had teams study the arrangements trying to figure out what they mean. It’s definitely ritualistic but no one has been able to come to a definitive conclusion. I can get you those reports if you’d like to read them, but I’m not sure that the meaning behind these displays will help us find the killer.”
Mettner looked over Josie’s shoulder. “How many victims in total?”
“Four,” he answered. “Darden, in Philadelphia, was the third victim.”
“What was their cause of death?” Gretchen asked.
Drake replied, “We don’t know for certain.”
Mettner asked, “None of the bones indicated stabbing or shooting or trauma of any kind?”
“No,” Drake said. “We just know all the victims were abducted and killed in even-numbered years. In 2008 it started with Anthony Yanetti. Then in 2010 he killed Terri Abbott; in 2012, Kenneth Darden and then in 2014, Robert Ingram. All in the state of Pennsylvania. With every single one of them, exactly thirty days after they went missing, their bones turned up somewhere else arranged like that.”
Josie thought of the Post-it notes she’d seen in Trinity’s room before she’d torn them down. One of them had said OCD. Many serial killers had rituals—that didn’t mean they had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but she supposed it was possible that the Bone Artist suffered from it. Even-numbered years; exactly thirty days between abduction and staging of the remains—Josie could see why Trinity had raised the possibility of OCD.
Noah reached down and tapped a finger on the photo in front of Josie. “Thirty days? It’s our understanding that that’s not long enough for a body to decompose that badly.”
Drake said, “There are ways.”
For a moment, Josie’s heart stuttered before going back to its regular rhythm. She thought of Nicci Webb, missing for only seventeen days and reduced to a skeleton. She noted the name Abbott, Terri at the top of the photo. With her finger, she traced the woman’s rib cage. “There’s frayed material here, on her rib cage.” She pointed to the femur bones. “And here as well. That’s usually an indicator of scavenging, isn’t it? Could animals accelerate the decomposition of a body if they… got to it?”
She looked up from the photo. Drake held her gaze for a long moment. As tension filled the room, she resisted the urge to tug at her collar. “There were some studies done at a body farm in Texas,” he said quietly. “Scavenger birds—specifically black vultures—in a great enough number, say a gathering of about twenty to thirty—can reduce a body to skeletal remains in as few as four hours.”
Josie’s throat felt painfully dry. When she spoke, her voice cracked. “He leaves his victims outside? Exposed to the elements until they’re picked clean?”
“That’s what we think. Four different experts have examined the remains and opined that the victims were reduced to skeletons by avian scavengers over a relatively short period of time. Except for Anthony Yanetti, the first victim; there were no indicators of rodent or canid scavenging.”
Gretchen said, “The first victim’s remains were exposed to other animals in the wild then.”
“That’s what we believe, yes.”
“We,” Josie said. “As in the FBI?”
“Yes. The task force was disbanded in 2018 after the Bone Artist failed to kill for a four-year period. He’s been inactive now for six years total.”
Josie and her team exchanged a few looks. Drake didn’t miss it. “What?” he asked. “What is it?”
“Any idea why he stopped?” Noah asked, ignoring his questions.
“None,” Drake said. “We used to think that a serial killer who stopped killing was either dead or in prison. Of course, the Bind Torture Kill, or BTK Killer, threw that whole theory on its head. He started killing in the seventies, then took an eight-year break before killing three more people. His last murder was in 1991, and he was inactive until 2004 when he contacted the media again. He was out there living a perfectly normal life all those years.”
“Didn’t the Bone Artist contact the press as well?” Gretchen asked. “I think I remember seeing that on the news.”
“Yes,” Drake confirmed. “It was right before his last victim was found. The press had dubbed him the Boneyard Killer, but he didn’t like that. He wrote to several reporters demanding to be called the Bone Artist. We were never able to trace him through any of those communications though.”
Josie asked, “Was Codie Lash one of those reporters?”
“No,” Drake said.
“Why was Trinity obsessed with this case?” Mettner asked.
Drake sighed and gave his head a little shake. “She thought she could ‘make contact’ with him.”
Josie looked down at Terri Abbott’s remains, staged like some kind of obscene art installation. Oh Trinity, she thought. What have you gotten yourself into?
Twenty-Seven
Hanna ran a brush across the palette of skin-colored powder and then swiped at Alex’s face. “Close your eyes, my love,” she instructed. The make-up brush tickled his forehead, nose and the side of his mouth. “Okay,” she told him when she’d finished.
He opened his eyes and watched her facial expression as she surveyed her work. “Much better,” she assured him, but he could see fine lines at the corners of her eyes, a tightening in her cheeks when she pursed her lips.
“You can barely see the scar,” she told him. A moment later, she said, “Zandra, darling, don’t you think the make-up works well? You can barely see Alex’s scar?”
Zandra met her mother’s eyes. “I guess.”
Hanna stared at her. “Zandra.”
“What?”
“It’s really important that we don’t have any more incidents.”
Zandra said, “You’re joking, right?”
Hanna looked stricken. She threw the make-up brush onto the vanity with a clatter. “This is no joke. You cannot hurt me anymore. Alex tries to stop you, but he can’t and then he gets punished. So you have to stop, do you understand? Restrain yourself. I don’t want Alex sleeping in the shed like a dog. I don’t want you locked away.”
Zandra looked up at Hanna defiantly. “Then do something about it.”
Alex saw Hanna’s hands trembling as she fisted them at her sides. He stood up.
“Hanna,” came a voice from the doorway. “What’s going on here?”
The tension in the room was so thick and all-encompassing that none of them had heard Frances come into the house and up the steps. He leaned into the bedroom, watching them.
Hanna put her hands on Alex’s shoulders and turned him away from the mirror. “Nothing,” she said. “Everything’s fine. We were just spending time together.”<
br />
He took another step inside and folded his arms across his chest. “You know that the children can’t be trusted. They shouldn’t be in here.”
“Zandra has promised not to hurt me again. They’ve both promised to be good.”
“They’re lying, Hanna.”
She dropped her hands from Alex’s shoulders and stepped in front of him, as if shielding him from the accusation. “I’m right here, Frances. I’m watching them.”
A sneer curled his upper lip. “The way you were watching Alex the day he nearly burned his face off?”
Alex felt Hanna’s whole body quiver—with rage or regret, he couldn’t tell—but she said nothing.
“Zandra,” Frances said. “Go back to your room.”
Twenty-Eight
Josie felt a cloying sense of dread overtake her as she watched Gretchen sift through the Bone Artist file Drake had brought, making piles for each of the four victims across the table. Josie said, “Four victims, multiple jurisdictions, a task force. This can’t be the entire file.”
“It’s not. Those are just the highlights.”
Noah said, “Trinity had access to all this?”
Josie noticed a vein in Drake’s forehead bulge. “There’s no way you would have let her view classified FBI files,” she said.
“I’d lose my job, get into legal trouble,” Drake agreed.
“But she found a way, didn’t she?” Josie went on. “You’re not even here for her, are you?”
Drake said nothing.
“Agent Nally?” Mettner prompted.
“Whatever she managed to take or copy from the FBI files, you don’t want it going public,” Josie accused. “Because if it ever got out that she had tricked you or stolen some information from you while you were dating, your career would be over.”
The vein in Drake’s forehead pulsed.
Josie kept going. “You said the photos were never released to the public. What else? The expert reports? Autopsy reports?”
