Whisper of Bones

by Leigh, Melinda

  “I’ll check the rest of the house!” Tessa yelled over the alarm.

  Logan set down the extinguisher and drew his own weapon. He positioned himself at her left flank as they moved from room to room. In addition to the great room, the house had three bedrooms upstairs and an office for McCoy Construction on the first floor. The office had its own separate entrance. The decor was uncluttered and open. It didn’t take them long to clear the rest of the house and return to the kitchen.

  Shards of glass littered the counter and floor. Tessa shone her flashlight on the glass. Mixed in with the large pieces of window glass were amber shards and the labels of two empty liquor bottles. Molotov cocktails?

  “All of this glass isn’t from the broken window!” she yelled.

  “Incendiary device!” Logan shouted back. “Thrown through the window!” The color had drained from his face, and the skin seemed to be stretched more tightly over it, sharpening his cheekbones. With his close-cropped black hair, he looked gaunt.

  She moved closer to speak into his ear. “We’re lucky that whoever set this fire wasn’t very good at it. The cabinets are solid wood, which doesn’t burn as easily as you’d think, and the flames never grew large enough to carry over to the tile and granite.”

  “But whoever did this must have just left.” Soot smudged Logan’s cheek. He wiped it on his sleeve.

  Tessa agreed. “The house is isolated. I didn’t see any other residences nearby.”

  “No nosy neighbors to see the arsonist run away.” Logan scanned the kitchen, then stared up at the smoke detector mounted on the ceiling. “This looks like a local unit. I don’t see any sign of a central alarm system. If we hadn’t come here, no one would have called the fire department.”

  He coughed again.

  “Let’s give the house a few minutes to air.” Tessa waved smoke away from her face. She crossed the tile and opened a set of glass doors. She gestured to Logan to follow her onto the patio overlooking Widow’s Bay. She saw no one in the yard and turned toward the water. A cabin cruiser bobbed at the end of a long dock. Behind the boat, the afternoon sun sparkled on small whitecaps in the bay. Pacing the pavers, she called the station to update Kurt about the status of the fire. Her eyes burned as she lowered the phone.

  “We’ll head back to the front yard and wait for the fire truck,” Tessa said. “I’ll walk in this direction. You go the other way. Look for footprints.”

  Logan coughed and nodded, then disappeared around the opposite side of the house.

  Tessa gave the grass around the foundation a wide berth so as not to disturb evidence. She stopped a dozen feet from the broken window, just shy of a small patch of trampled grass. The arsonist hadn’t left any convenient litter. The ground was damp, and a trail of crushed grass led toward the front of the house. She took a photo and switched to video. She recorded her walk as she followed the trail right to the driveway.

  Logan was waiting for her. “No prints on my side, but I found a shed. Did you find footprints?”

  “Not exactly. Some crushed vegetation in the best place to hurl a flaming bottle through the kitchen window. Unfortunately, the grass is too thick for tread impressions. I can’t even tell what size the shoe is.”

  “We just left Sarah.” Logan frowned. “She didn’t set the house on fire.”

  “We don’t know where her mother went when she left the house.”

  “You think they’re working together?”

  “I have no idea yet, but we need to keep an open mind.” Tessa didn’t want to limit herself to any preconceived theories this early in the investigation. Her job was to gather facts and see where they led.

  Logan’s gaze shifted to the bay. “His boat is tied up at the dock. I’d wondered if it would be missing.”

  Tessa nodded. “Because he was dumped in the water somehow. Is there any possibility he went into the water here, and the current picked him up?”

  Logan cocked his head. “If he was tossed off his own dock, the current would have probably carried him to the opposite shore of the bay. His body might have eventually been washed out to sea, but I believe it would have taken a few turns of the tide. It’s not impossible, but things tend to wash into the bay, not out.”

  A siren approached.

  “Here comes the fire truck,” Tessa said.

  The truck arrived with a blare of sirens and a swirl of lights. The firemen checked out the kitchen, walked through the rest of the house, and proclaimed the structure safe.

  After they left, Tessa and Logan returned to the kitchen and scanned the grimy, soggy mess.

  “I hope there’s still evidence here,” she said.

  Logan turned in a slow circle. “If I wanted to destroy the evidence, I’d start the fire where most of the evidence was located.”

  “Me too.” Tessa squatted and scanned the floor. “As Henry said, head wounds bleed copiously, and it’s all but impossible to remove all traces of blood. If he was killed here, there will be traces, but we have to find them.”

  “I smell something.” Logan crouched next to her. “Not just smoke. Something with a caustic odor.”

  Tessa sniffed. “I don’t smell any sort of fuel. Alcohol?”

  “That would explain the fire not catching well. Alcohol has a short burn time. But this is something else.” He leaned closer.

  Tessa inhaled more deeply and caught the scent. It was sharp enough that the smoke and foam hadn’t destroyed it. “Bleach.”

  “As if someone tried to clean up a mess.”

  “Yep.” She pulled the flashlight off her duty belt and shone it on the wet floor. “Blood would wipe off the tiles easily, but grout is trickier to clean.” She followed the grout lines with the beam of light. Residual foam dripped from the cabinet onto the floor. Smoke stains blotched the walls and ceiling.

  “The arsonist might not have set the best fire,” Logan said, “but I destroyed more evidence putting it out than he did with the flames. Goal accomplished.”

  Tessa sat back on her heels. “If Jason was killed in the kitchen, then the blood would most likely have been concentrated on the floor. Most of the foam is on the cabinets. There are tiles in the center that are clear. Even if the floor was cleaned, there might still be traces of blood that can be picked up with luminol.”

  Logan glanced at the glass doors that led out onto the deck. “Plus his body had to be removed from the kitchen. There could be a drag trail we aren’t seeing.”

  She stood. “Let’s keep looking. We’ll check the boat and dock as well. It hasn’t rained in forty-eight hours. We might get lucky.”

  She and Logan inspected every inch of the kitchen floor but found no visible blood.

  Frustration tightened Logan’s face. Then his lean features softened with a broad smile as he focused over her shoulder. Tessa turned. High up on a kitchen cabinet, on a white spot untouched by smoke, dark-red spots formed two arcs.

  “Henry said that Jason had multiple indentations in his skull.” Tessa walked closer and stared at the drops. “That looks like cast-off blood spatter. The drops are elongated. The tails point this way.” She pointed toward the back of the house. “Indicating that the object casting off the blood was moving in that direction, so the killer was likely facing this way.”

  Tessa moved into the killer’s position. She raised an arm over her head and brought it down as if striking someone in front of her.

  “The killer struck Jason and brought his arm up for two more blows. The blood flicked off the murder weapon at the top of the backswing.” She demonstrated, then glanced over her shoulder. The arcs of blood droplets echoed the movement of her arm. “I need to make sure it’s human blood before we get too excited.”

  She returned to her car for a Rapid Stain ID kit. After photographing the blood spatter from multiple angles, she sampled a single drop and confirmed that the substance was human blood.

  “I’m going to request a forensic unit from the mainland.” She glanced around the mess of soot a
nd residual foam. “Between the cleanup attempt and the fire, the biological evidence here will be fragile. An expert will have the best chance of finding and preserving it.”

  “We can’t just cover the kitchen in luminol and see what lights up?” Logan asked.

  “We could, but it isn’t as simple as it appears on TV. Luminol can react with other chemicals besides blood, and it can also destroy DNA.”

  “Leaving you with even less evidence.”

  “Yes.” Tessa operated in a small remote sheriff’s station. The Widow’s Island deputies were accustomed to processing their own crime scenes and collecting evidence. But there were times when it was best to ask for assistance. When she solved the murder and arrested a suspect, her evidence needed to hold up in a courtroom. “This is likely the primary crime scene. It’s already been compromised by the murderer, our attempt to put out the fire, and the fire crew traipsing in and out of the house.” She scanned the large disaster in the kitchen and the expansive lawn, the dock, and the boat visible through the windows. “We have a lot of ground to cover. With his injured knee, Kurt is reviewing the phone and financial records back at the station. Frankly, we need more bodies.”

  She pulled out her phone and called the main sheriff’s office on the mainland. Ten minutes later, she returned her phone to her pocket. “The sheriff agrees. Two forensic techs are coming on the next ferry. They should be here this evening.” Tessa glanced at the glass doors at the back of the kitchen. Darkness was falling. “It’s going to be a long night. I’ll need someone to stay with my mother.”

  “I’ll call my grandmother.” Logan’s grandmother ran the Widow’s Island Knitting and Activist group. The members took care of many of the social needs on the island, including helping Tessa with her mother.

  “I wouldn’t be able to do my job without those ladies.”

  “My grandmother and her friends appreciate what you do for the community. They believe in supporting you.”

  But the fact was that Tessa would only be able to keep her mother home for a short while longer. Mom wandered more and more. It would break Tessa’s heart to move her mother into a secure facility, but that was exactly what she would have to do.

  “I’d intended to put the Christmas lights on the house tonight. This could be Mom’s last Christmas at home. I want it to be special.” Balancing work and her mother’s care would be easier if people stopped killing each other.

  4

  Logan started upstairs to the McCoys’ master bedroom, while Tessa took the office on the first floor. It was nearly midnight as he searched Jason’s closet shelves, then went through the pockets of his jackets and coats. Nothing. He checked behind the furniture and under the mattress, then removed each drawer from the dresser and examined the underside and back. He took a last look around the room but still saw nothing amiss.

  He walked into the hallway and down the steps. He could hear the forensic techs setting up in the kitchen. Due to the fragility of the biological evidence, Tessa had decided to let the forensic techs finish collecting physical evidence before she and Logan tackled the kitchen.

  He turned left at the bottom of the steps and walked through the outer office, which contained filing cabinets and a utilitarian desk Logan assumed was for a secretary. He poked his head through the doorway and scanned the inner office. Tessa crouched behind a large oak desk. A fingerprinting kit sat on the desk next to a laptop.

  “Find anything?” he asked.

  The heater kicked on with a hum and a rattle.

  “Maybe.” She straightened and gestured toward a drawer with a gloved hand. “The lock on the bottom file drawer was broken, and the corners of papers were sticking out of the files. Considering how well organized and neat the rest of this office is, I suspect someone searched it. The files in the cabinets out there”—she motioned toward the outer office—“were also just slightly askew.”

  “You took prints?” Logan asked.

  “Yes. I’ll compare them to Jason’s and his secretary’s.” Tessa nodded as a coverall-clad forensic tech appeared in the doorway. “We’ll interview her first thing in the morning. Hopefully she can tell us if anything is missing.”

  Unless she is the one who killed him.

  “Deputy Black, we’re ready.” The tech gestured toward the front of the house. “You’ll find personal protective equipment in the back of our van. You’ll want to suit up.”

  Luminol was a suspected carcinogen.

  Tessa and Logan stepped into coveralls, then grabbed the rest of the gear and carried it into the house.

  “Stand here.” The tech directed them into position behind the kitchen island, facing the area they believed was the kill site.

  The second tech lifted a camera into position. “I’m documenting with a long-exposure photograph. If you want to take your own pictures or video, you’ll want your cameras ready. You’ll only have about thirty seconds.”

  They put on gloves, face masks, and goggles. Logan held a video recorder while Tessa handled a still camera. The first tech turned off the lights and sprayed Luminol over the area, which immediately began to emit a blue glow. The tech moved across the kitchen. The scene emerged as he sprayed. The glow showed a large patch where Jason had bled heavily in front of the sink and a drag trail that led right out the back door. They all followed it out onto the pavers, where the trail disappeared abruptly at the edge of the patio.

  Tessa lowered her camera. “Maybe they used something to move his body from here.”

  “There was a wheelbarrow in the shed,” Logan said.

  They trooped out to the shed. The tech pointed out several dark spots on the metal edge of the wheelbarrow.

  “I’m not going to spray those.” The tech shook his head. “The wheelbarrow is rusty. Luminol works by reacting with the iron in blood. It can also react with other substances. Rust is one of them. So results might not be meaningful, but we can take the wheelbarrow to the lab for further testing.”

  They went down the dock and boarded the boat. The luminol reacted in several places on the deck.

  “But I would expect to find biological substances on a fishing boat,” said tech number one. “We’ll take samples for additional testing.”

  The forensic techs spent another hour preparing samples to take back to the lab. Tessa and Logan had already searched the rest of the house.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Now we get a few hours of sleep,” Tessa said.

  She locked the house with a set of keys they’d found hanging on a peg in the kitchen. Then they climbed into the SUV, and she backed out of the driveway, carefully navigating between the boulders that flanked the entrance. Once on the main road, she drove to the marina, where Logan’s vehicle waited.

  Logan leaned across the console and gave her a quick kiss good night. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She smiled. “I’ll be at the station by seven.”

  For a few seconds, he wished he could ask her to come home with him. Death and fire always reminded him of his time in the Middle East. No doubt there was a nightmare in store for him tonight, and sometimes that made him feel acutely alone. But Tessa needed to go home to her mother and sister.

  He opened his door and got out. She waited until he was behind the wheel of his dented Range Rover before driving away.

  Logan started the engine. His breath fogged in the cold SUV. The trip from the marina to his cabin at the entrance to Bishop State Park took thirty minutes. He zigzagged the switchbacks with care in the dark. By the time he entered his cabin, it was after three in the morning.

  Knowing that every time he closed his eyes, he would see fire and death, Logan decided to skip going to bed. He’d have to be up early to meet Tessa anyway. Three hours of sleep didn’t seem worth the toll a nightmare would cost him.

  Logan brewed a pot of coffee and took his latest mystery novel to the kitchen table. At five, he changed into running clothes and jogged out to the beach and back to clear his he
ad. After a hot shower, more coffee, and three eggs, he felt mostly human.

  When he arrived at the sheriff’s station at seven o’clock, he found Kurt sitting at one of the two desks. His leg was propped on a chair with an ice pack balanced on his knee.

  “How’s the knee?” Logan asked as he unzipped his jacket.

  “No permanent damage, but Henry wants me to stay off it for a few days.” Kurt grunted his displeasure.

  Tessa came through the door with a burst of cold air. Her cheeks were flushed, but dark circles underscored her eyes.

  “Everything OK?” he asked.

  “Mom was restless last night.” She drank from a stainless-steel travel mug, then narrowed her eyes at him. “You don’t look like you slept either.”

  He shrugged. He should tell her about his worsening nightmares. Denial wasn’t working for him, yet he clung to it like a life raft. “We’re starting with Jason’s secretary today?”

  Tessa nodded. “Yes. We also have Jason’s ex-wife to question.”

  “Here is their contact information and some basic background info.” Kurt slid a manila folder across the desk. “I’ve also started reviewing Jason’s financial and phone records. I’ll text you if I find anything interesting.”

  “Thanks, Kurt.” Tessa tucked the folder under her arm.

  “It’s the least I can do,” Kurt grumbled. “I’m feeling pretty useless. You’re doing the interviews, and Bruce is handling the routine patrol duties. I’m just sitting here.” Bruce Taylor was the newest deputy in the department.

  “Reviewing records might not be exciting, but someone has to do it,” she pointed out.

  Kurt sighed, clearly unhappy that he was the one.

  Tessa and Logan went outside and stepped into her SUV.

  “I called Jason’s secretary, Marybeth Springer. She’s meeting us at his office.” She handed Logan the folder. “Is there anything interesting in there about Ms. Springer?”

  Logan skimmed the papers. “Not really. She’s sixty-seven years old, drives a pickup truck, no traffic tickets, no criminal record.”