Bone Dust White (4 page)

Macy glances up at the house again. She wants an excuse to have a look at Arnold Lamm’s office. “No one has been in the house?”

“Elizabeth wouldn’t allow it.”

“That’s not very cooperative.”

“All the action took place in the woods behind the house. She doesn’t see any reason for us to go traipsing through her living room.”

Macy spots the unfinished frame of another large house some two hundred feet away. “What kind of a neighborhood is this anyway?”

“A failed one. Some nutcase had the grand idea that Collier needed a golfing community. The developers lost their shirts when the economy collapsed.”

Macy hadn’t seen a single finished home on the drive up from the neighborhood’s entrance. “So how many people live up here?”

“Two.”

She stops and rests her palm on the trunk of a tree. The land rises up ahead of them. They’re following a well-trodden path through the snow but footfalls fan out in all directions. There isn’t a breath of wind and it’s completely silent. “Two households or two people?”

“Two people. Grace Adams lives here with her aunt Elizabeth Lamm. There used to be three, but Arnold Lamm died of a heart attack last winter.”

Beside them a high stone wall rises upward more than ten feet. Above it Macy can just about make out the darkened windows of the upper floors. In the shadow of the hillside the light is dim enough to use a flashlight. She directs her beam to an upper window.

“The witness, Grace Adams, stood up there?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, guiding her farther up the hill, offering his arm when she steps off the path and sinks into the snow and bracken. “Grace has the bedroom up there in the eaves. From there she had a clear view of the murder scene.”

They dip under yellow crime-scene tape and continue up the hill. “And she’d no idea it was her mother.”

“I’m only going by what the paramedic told me. Grace only knew it was her mother once she’d come outside to help.”

Macy looks down the slope toward the wrought-iron gate built into the garden wall. It’s an isolated location and Grace was vulnerable once she left the safety of the house. “Her coming up here. Kind of a crazy thing to do.”

Warren Mayfield takes off his hat and scratches his head. He’s almost hairless and his skin is heavily freckled. “That’s what I thought.”

“So she must have spoken to her mother.”

“Got no idea about that.”

“When do you think we can interview her?”

“We’re hoping for tomorrow, but given her condition it might be a few days. The girl nearly died of exposure.”

“She was only wearing pajamas. A red baby-doll nightie?”

Warren says he’s not seen the nightie. “Like you said it seems like a pretty crazy thing to do.”

They come to a small clearing where the slope flattens out before rising up steeply toward the ridgeline. Crime-scene tape weaves among the tree trunks like string art. An area of snow the size of a double bed has been scraped away, revealing bare, damp earth. There’s no sign of blood but there are plenty of footprints. It’s impossible to tell which ones might be the killer’s.

“Pity about the snow,” he says, looking around at the heavily trampled ground. “Kind of made a mess of the evidence.”

“When the body was moved, did you take everything you could from the immediate area?”

“We’ve got a few garbage bags of stuff in the freezer in town.”

Macy kneels down to take a closer look. “The medics said the bodies were covered in snow?”

“Yes, ma’am. It was coming down heavily. A bit more time and they’d have been covered completely.”

“The site isn’t secure.” From where they stand she can see directly into Grace’s window. She walks the perimeter of the crime scene, her flashlight picking up a confusion of footprints. “When did your guys leave?”

“About an hour ago.”

Macy frowns, but the fact is she’s not sure there’s much of a crime scene to protect. She shifts her gaze toward the darkening woods, positioning her beam to what appears to be an opening in the trees. “Is that a road?”

“It’s a fire trail.”

“Where does it lead?”

“There’s a whole network of trails out here. Some snake in a loop around the neighborhood while others, like this one, end somewhere along Dray Creek Lane.”

Macy looks up at the sky. It’s nearly dark. “What’s the forecast?”

“More snow in the morning.”

“We’d best head out to Dray Creek Lane then.”

At the curb in front of the house, Macy pauses at the garbage cans. “This is where you found the roses?”

“Yep, there was a price sticker from Olsen’s Landing on them.”

“What’s Olsen’s Landing?”

“It’s a fishing camp on the northern end of town. There’s a gas station and mini-market out front. We spoke to the owner this afternoon. There’s no record of sale. The flowers are in buckets near the front door. They may have been stolen.”

“Any chance they have security cameras?”

“It’s not that kind of place.”

Macy looks down the road. There are no streetlights. “Did the city collect the trash this morning? Someone may have seen something.”

“Pickup must have been today. Otherwise the cans would still be in the garage.”

“We need to find out what time they came.”

“I’ll make the call when we’re heading over to Dray Creek Lane.”

“You said you found the car Leanne drove nearby?”

“We found it parked in the driveway a couple houses along. Grace’s address was scribbled on a piece of paper sitting on the passenger seat. Leanne had the car keys in her coat pocket.”

Macy debates walking up to see where they found the car but decides against it. “If Leanne drove down from Canada, she wouldn’t have gone into town to get flowers for Grace. It’s a good half hour out of the way.”

“It also would have been odd to bring her daughter roses. That seems a bit of a romantic gesture if you ask me.”

“Fair enough, but it’s not your typical mother-daughter relationship, so we can’t rule it out.”

They leave their vehicles parked at the turnout for Dray Creek Lane and continue up the road on foot using their flashlights.

“The garbage pickup was around half past nine this morning,” says Warren.

“That was well before Grace Adams called nine-one-one.”

“Yeah, it’s a bit early for them to have seen anything, but I’ll interview the crew tomorrow.”

Macy points out the parallel grooves that run five feet apart through the snow. Unfortunately the tread marks are lost under a fresh layer of snow. Macy and the sheriff walk to the side of them, swinging their beams to the right and left. They’ve gone about a half mile when Warren gestures toward a bend in the road.

“The trailhead should be just up there.”

“What’s out here anyway?”

Warren doesn’t hide his frustration. “These days not much other than meth labs. During hunting season it gets busier but aside from that there’s no reason to come up here. The road dead-ends another mile or so further on.”

Macy tells him to stop when she finds what she’s been looking for. “You see that?” She traces the outline of a rectangle where the snow isn’t as deep with the beam of her flashlight. It’s roughly the size of a car. “At some point today there was a car parked here.”

The sheriff leads her to a rusted length of metal chain strung between two posts. “I’ll have my boys check in the morning, but if memory serves that’s the trailhead you’re looking for.”

By the time Macy and Warren have walked back down the length of Dray Creek Lane, Macy’s legs ache. She leans against her car to catch her breath and Warren notices.

He opens her door and gives her a hand getting in. “Look, I know the paramedic Jared Peterson well. He’s a good guy.”

Macy purses her lips and gazes out over the steering wheel into the darkness. It’s starting to snow again. “Jared Peterson,” she says before turning to face Warren.

“Why don’t you head on to the Motor Lodge, and I’ll send him over to talk to you. You can interview his partner, Carson, tomorrow. Near as I can tell it’s really Jared that you want to speak to anyway.”

At the Collier Motor Lodge, there’s a pile of messages waiting for her. She looks beyond the reception desk past the big stone fireplace and settles her eyes on the bar. She’d know that profile anywhere. Jared Peterson sits alone nursing what she’s sure is whiskey. His head is tilted upward, and his eyes never leave the flat-screen television. Macy can hear what sounds like the running commentary of a basketball game. She’s trying to think when she last saw him and realizes it’s been at least four years. For a long time she missed his company. They’d been so close and then nothing. He faded away like the rest of them. The receptionist gestures toward the bar and adjacent dining room.

“Detective Greeley, I forgot to mention. Jared Peterson has come by to see you.”

Macy asks the receptionist to take her bags up to her room and goes over to meet Jared, tucking her hair behind her ears and straightening her shirt as she makes her way.

The first thing he does is laugh at the size of her. “Jesus, Macy, how did that happen?”

“The usual way.”

He lifts his arms. “A hug for old times’ sake.”

Macy braces herself. “If you insist.”

Jared drops his arms. “Sorry, I forgot that you weren’t much of a hugger.” He waves the bartender over. “How about I buy you a drink instead?”

“In my dreams,” she laughs, ordering orange juice and a plate of nachos. She points out a table in the corner. “Do you mind? I don’t really do barstools much these days. It’s not a good look.”

He walks ahead, deftly pulling out the chair that faces away from the basketball game so she can sit down.

“Gosh,” she says, settling in. “This is just like our last date. You watch the game and I do all the talking.”

Jared raises an eyebrow. “How long has it been?”

Before answering Macy searches her bag and places her phone on the table in front of her. “Long enough for it not to bother me anymore. Four years, I think.”

Jared holds up his glass in mock salute. “Here’s to your lucky escape.”

“You’re still quick. I like that.”

“Most people don’t,” he says, ordering another drink when the waitress comes by their table.

Jared pulls his hair away from his face. There is a small scar above his lip where the doctors stitched up his mouth after a meth addict he was treating hit him with a broken bottle. The closed-over holes of several piercings are visible along the length of one of his earlobes. Macy remembers how he used to wear earrings when he was off duty. When they’d met in a bar down in Helena he’d looked very different from how he does now. Collier’s only punk. She relaxes in her chair and observes him as they settle into a conversation. Even though he’d actively avoided meeting her parents he asks after them and is sorry to hear that her father has passed away. They talk about work and winter, carefully avoiding questions about their present circumstances. She sees that some things never change. He still has an irritating habit of flicking his eyes up at the television screen each time he thinks her attention is directed elsewhere. She takes a sip of her orange juice and focuses on work.

Macy opens her notebook and takes up a pen. “So tell me about this morning.”

“Bit of a mess, really.” He twirls the ice in his glass and checks the game again, wincing when he doesn’t like what he sees. “Route 93 was all but blocked. Multiple pileup. We had to edge our way through. They were none too pleased when we drove past the worst of it.”

“And when you arrived at the house?”

“The house was locked up so we had to go around the side. It was snowing pretty hard by then. Several inches had built up in the time it took us to drive out there.”

“What did you see?”

“Nothing at first. It was too damn quiet. For a few minutes Carson and I thought it was some kind of prank call. Dispatch told us to look higher up the slope.” Jared closes his eyes. “That’s when I saw them lying there together.”

“Describe it for me.”

Jared opens his eyes a fraction wider and takes a sip of his drink, looking everywhere but directly at Macy. “At first all I saw was a red stain in the snow. It took me a few seconds to realize what I was seeing. I could see the outline of the two women lying together. Grace had her arms around her mother. Both of them looked dead.”

“It sounds as if their bodies were staged.”

Jared leans back in his chair and folds his arms. “You know the girl was nearly naked. It’s amazing she didn’t die from exposure. She completely freaked out when I took her pulse.”

“What do you mean?”

“She started screaming and thrashing around.” He reaches up and touches his cheek. “She clipped me at least once. She’s surprisingly strong considering her size.”

“Adrenaline will do that.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it happen before.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“A bit. She said she was cold. After she calmed down she went quite limp, almost like she was about to pass out. She was covered in blood and near freezing.” Jared holds up his hands, showing Macy how Grace had stared at the blood. “Truthfully, she seemed really out of it. I wrapped her up as best I could and told her I was going to help her friend.”

“At that point you still didn’t know it was Leanne Adams?”

Jared takes his drink from the waitress and makes room on the table for Macy’s order of nachos. “I’d never have guessed it was Leanne Adams. The woman was legendary around Collier. I’d seen her a few times from a distance. She was big.” He swirls the ice in his whiskey. “The lady that died was nothing but skin and bones. I thought maybe she was a meth addict.”

“We’ll have to wait for the autopsy report to find out.”

“Anyway, I told Grace I needed to help her friend and she started crying. That’s when she told me it was her mother. She seemed embarrassed. She said she’d not seen her mother in so long she hadn’t recognized her.”

“Did she say anything else?”

Jared keeps his gaze on the table for some time. “No, I think that was all. I sat her down a few yards away and went to help Carson with Leanne but we both knew it was too late. It may have always been too late. I reckon she’d been stabbed at least a half-dozen times.”