Bones Never Lie (19 page)

“Eeyuh.”

“Maybe revisit Leal’s bedroom? See what she was reading. What dolls or animals she had. Anyway, get what you can for Pastori.”

“You know the guy is an Olympic-class gasbag. Runs on and on, I’m guessing to fluff his geeky little ego. Every time I call him, it’s half my day.”

I imagined the exchanges between Slidell and Pastori. My sympathies were definitely with the latter. “Is the media still clamoring?”

“Some asshole videoed us working Leal’s body at the underpass, can you believe that? Wanted their fifteen fucking minutes of fame.”

I changed the subject. “What about the age progression on Anique Pomerleau?”

“Yeah. I got that.”

“Did you plan to tell me?”

“I am telling you.”

“How does it look?”

“Like she got older.”

“Send it to my iPhone. Please.”

I briefed Slidell about events on my end. The unsatisfying interviews. My subliminal breakthrough after studying the dossiers from 2004 and talking with Sabine Pomerleau. The property in Vermont.

“Not bad, Doc.”

“If she did use the Corneau home as a hidey-hole, she’s long gone now.”

“When will you toss the place?”

“When Rodas gives the word.”

“He ask for a warrant?”

I hadn’t thought of that. “Gotta go.” I disconnected.

9:46.

I cleaned the coffee off the kitchen tile, then unpacked the carry-on I’d brought from Charlotte. Took a shower and dried my hair. Dressed in jeans, wool socks, and a sweater.

10:38.

I checked my phone, hoping a text had landed while I was engaged in toilette. Nope.

I paced, too wired to sit still. Why such angst? I felt what? Stunned that I’d been right? Maybe right. Thrilled that we might have found the spot Pomerleau first went to ground? Might have. Outraged that Rodas and Ryan had sidelined me? Definitely.

The phone finally rang at ten past eleven. Area code 802.

“Brennan.” Cool as snow in Vermont.

“Ryan’s on his way to pick you up.”

“Is he.”

“You need to get down here. Fast.”

THE SNOW STARTED
as we crossed the Champlain Bridge. Turned to sleet as we hit Stanstead, just north of the border.

I watched the wipers chase fat flabby flakes, later slush, from the windshield. Now and then a wind-tossed leaf hit the glass and was whipped free, brittle and shiny with moisture.

The car’s interior smelled of wet leather and wool. Stale cigarette smoke.

“Look for the Passumpsic Cemetery.”

The first words Ryan had spoken in almost two hours. I was good with it. After he’d relayed what he knew, which was virtually nothing, we’d both burrowed deep into our own thoughts.

Occasionally, I’d check my iPhone. An email with an attachment arrived from Slidell just past noon. I downloaded and enlarged the image.

You’ve seen pictures of Charles Manson. No matter what his age is, his eyes send a frigid wind knifing straight through your soul. His hair may be shaggy or shaved, his cheeks full or gaunt. You feel like you’re gazing straight into the heart of evil.

That’s how it was with Pomerleau. She was in her teens when the sole existing photo was taken. Now she would be thirty-nine.

The computer had softened the jawline, drooped the lids, and broadened the lips and facial contours, transforming the child face into that of a woman. Still the eyes looked stony cold, reptilian, and unfeeling.

As they had on our last encounter. When she’d doused me with accelerant, then coolly lit a match.

I did as Ryan asked. We’d just passed through St. Johnsbury, were now seeing mostly farm fields, trees, a few clusters of homes.

“There.” I pointed to the cemetery. It was old, with headstones and pillars, rather than ground-level plaques for the convenience of mowers. A perfect Poe tableau in the wintry gloom.

Maybe a quarter mile more, then Ryan slowed, signaled, and made a left from Highway 5 onto Bridge Street. We passed a church, a general store and post office combo, a gray building with an old red auto seat on the porch and a red plastic kayak affixed to the top of the front overhang.
Passumpsic
was written in white on the kayak’s side. A wooden sign above the door identified the
Passumpsic River Outfitter, LLC.

Just beyond the outfitter was a bridge, a narrow latticework of metal girders and wooden beams painted green. Not the covered New Englander I’d envisioned. The Passumpsic River looked dark and menacing as we crossed over. On one bank, an ancient brick power station.

Soon the road’s name changed to Hale. Forest took over on both sides. Lofty pine, less lofty spruce. Hardwoods, their branches nude, their bark black and sparkly wet.

Then there were no homes, no barns. Just the Hundred Acre Wood.

Seven minutes of silence, I kept checking my watch. Then Ryan made a right beside a battered post that at one time may have held a mailbox. A sign nailed to a tree said
ORNE
in letters sun-bleached to the color of old denim. Below the truncated name, an equally faded fleur-de-lis.

The track was little more than an absence of trees and two ruts undecided between mud and ice. As the Jeep bounced and swayed, I braced myself with palms to the dash. My fillings were loosening when Ryan finally braked to a stop.

Across a clearing, maybe ten yards distant, sat a small frame house that had seen better days. Single-story, once probably yellow with white trim. But, as with the mailbox, the paint was long gone.

The front door, accessed by one concrete step, was propped open with a rock. The windows visible on the front and right were boarded on the inside with plywood. To the left, up a slight rise and nestled under a stand of tall pines, stood three sheds, one large, two small. Dirt paths connected the trio to one another and to the house.

Parked in front of the house was a Hardwick PD cruiser. I assumed it belonged to Umpie Rodas. Beside the cruiser was a crime scene truck. Beside the truck was a black van with double doors in back. My gut told me the vehicle had ties to a morgue.

“Tabernac!”

I swiveled toward Ryan, ready to be livid for what he’d held back. He looked as surprised as I felt.

“What’s the deal?” I asked.

“Damned if I know.”

“Rodas didn’t tell you?”

“He just said they’d found something we needed to see. Sounded distracted.”

“No doubt. He was busy making a whole lot of calls.”

I raised the hood of my parka to cover my head. Pulled on gloves. Got out and started toward the house. The wind was gusting hard, blasting sleet at my face like fiery little pellets. My mind was racing, running possibilities. Senseless. I’d know in seconds. Behind me, Ryan’s boots made swishing sounds in the slippery leaves and grass. Mimicking my own.

A uniformed cop stood inside the front door, thumbs hooked in a belt half hidden by a substantial roll of fat. His hat and jacket bore insignia patches saying
Hardwick PD.

The cop straightened upon seeing us.

“Dr. Temperance Brennan.” I flashed my LSJML security card as Ryan badged him. “Rodas requested our presence.”

The guy barely glanced at our IDs. From another room, I heard the sound of drawers opening and closing. “He’s in the big shed out back.”

“Thanks.”

“Tight security,” Ryan said when we’d rounded the corner of the house.

“It’s rural Vermont.”

We followed the path up the hill. Added ours to dozens of boot prints in the half-frozen muck.

The shack was made of unpainted boards barely maintaining contact. The roof was rusted tin, louvered at the top, curling free of the nails securing it at the bottom.

The shed’s two barnlike doors were thrown wide, and its interior was visible in bright detail. The scene looked surreal, like a movie set lit by an overzealous gaffer. I assumed portable lights had been brought in and set up.

Set up for what?

In a far corner, partly in shadow, two figures stood talking beside a blue plastic barrel. One was Umpie Rodas. The other was a tall woman with a red knit hat pulled low to her brows. A full-length black coat obscured her shape. Both turned at the sound of our footsteps. Rodas was hatless, and his jacket was unzipped. He may have had on the same red shirt he’d worn in Charlotte. Or maybe he had a collection.

“Glad you made it. Sorry about the weather.”

Ryan and I entered. The shack smelled of smoke, moist earth, and something sweet, like a pancake house on a Sunday morning.

I was right about the lights. There were three, the standard tripod variety often used at crime scenes. The generator was gas-powered, the kind you can buy at any Home Depot.

Rodas made introductions. The woman, Cheri Karras, was with the chief ME’s office in Burlington. Instead of mittens, she wore surgical gloves. So did Rodas.

I felt a knot begin to form in my gut.

Behind Karras, a man in a thick padded jacket was snapping photographs. His breath glowed white each time his flash went off.

I took a quick look around. The floor was hard-packed dirt, filled with a hodgepodge of items. Enormous cauldrons, blackened by fire. An open box containing blue plastic bags. Beside it, dozens of identical boxes, unopened. Circling the walls, rusty buckets, saucepans of differing sizes, screens, juice and milk cartons, five-gallon white plastic tubs stacked to form wobbly five-foot towers.

Crude shelving held wooden boxes filled with small metal implements that had a spike at one end and a downspout opposite. Others held metal hooks. Two drills. An assortment of hammers. A half-dozen coils of blue tubing. Jugs of household bleach.

At the shack’s center, directly below the vented part of the roof, was a three-by-five brick-lined pit with iron bars running between the long sides. On the bars sat a rectangular flat-bottomed metal pan, empty, its interior yellowed by some sort of residue. The bricks and bars were fire-blackened and covered with soot. Ditto the outside of the pan.

I was stumped. But one thing was clear. Whatever the shed’s purpose, cobwebs and grime suggested years of disuse.

“—got word no one was occupying the property, I decided to take a look around, be sure vandals weren’t up to mischief. We get squatters sometimes, folks find an empty summer home, decide to move in for the winter.”

My attention refocused. On Rodas. On Karras. On the ominous blue barrel between them.

“House had been breached, all right. Lock was jimmied. That was my green light. No damage inside, nothing worth stealing, so I took a peek out here.”

“Cabane à sucre.”
For some reason, Ryan said it in French.

Of course. The shed was a sugar shack, a place to convert maple sap into syrup.

I eyed the barrel. The knot tightened.

Rodas nodded. “A Quebecer would know, eh?”

Karras’s phone buzzed. Wordlessly, she stepped outside. I watched her as Rodas continued talking. She seemed untroubled. A raccoon in the barrel? Or just another day with death?

“The property’s deeded to Margaux and Martin Corneau. Ten acres, eight of ’em mixed red and sugar maple. Until the late ’80s, the Corneaus ran a small operation, provided ten, twenty gallons a year to an outfit that bottled and sold locally.” Rodas arced an arm at the paraphernalia around us. “The old stuff’s theirs, cauldrons, aluminum buckets and lids. The plastic collection bags and polyethylene tubing, now, that’s something else.”

“Meaning?” Ryan asked.

“Meaning they’re new.”

“Suggesting a more recent operation.”

Rodas nodded, his expression grim. But something else. Excited? Eager?

“By whom?” Ryan asked.

“I’m working on that.”

“What’s in the barrel?” Not trying very hard to hide my impatience.

“We’d best wait for Doc Karras.”

“Where do you buy sugaring equipment?” Ryan asked.

“Anywhere. The barrels are widely used for food storage. The tubing’s multipurpose.”

“The taps and bags?”

“Sugaring supply companies. The capture bags aren’t expensive, maybe forty cents each. Most small producers now prefer them to buckets. Slip the bag over a collar, run the tubing straight in from the tap, empty the sap into a collecting point, toss the bag, repeat until the tree runs dry. Bags are also better at keeping out bugs and debris.”

“Can’t be that many sold.”

“More than you’d think.”

“Can you purchase them online?”

Rodas nodded. “Got someone making calls.”

Karras was still on her phone.

I wrapped my arms around my torso, hands tucked under my armpits for warmth. Cold was rising through the soles of my boots and spreading through my bones. The chill coming from more than the weather.

“That an evaporator?” Ryan chin-cocked the fire pit.

“Yeah. Better than the cauldrons, but still takes a lot of fuel.”

“Seriously?” I snapped. “We’re discussing advances in the art of syrup production?”

“The woodshed’s beside this one.” Rodas ignored my outburst. “Not much left. I suspect the neighbors helped themselves over the years.” Turning to me. “You know much about maple syrup?”

“We’re wasting time here.” Rude, but I was freezing. And anxious. And fed up with the male-bonding routine.

“Then let’s use it to learn something.” Rodas took my nonresponse as invitation to continue. “During the growing season, starch accumulates in the roots and trunks of maples. Enzymes transform the starch into sugar, then water absorbed through the roots turns it into sap.

“In the spring, alternating freezes and thaws force the sap up. Most folks tap once daytime highs hit the forties. Around here, that’s usually late April.

“The sap then has to be processed to evaporate out the water and leave just the concentrated syrup. That means boiling between five and thirteen gallons of sap down to a quarter of a gallon of syrup. You can do that entirely over one heat source.” Rodas gestured at the fire pit. “Or you can draw off smaller batches as you go, and boil them in pots.” Pointing at the pots.

“Is this really relevant?”

Rodas grinned at me. “You need some coffee? I have a thermos.”