Terry Odell - Mapleton 02 - Deadly Bones (35 page)

Gordon knew that denim jacket. Angie kept it in the backseat, calling it her “just in case” jacket when she needed an extra layer.

“Thanks.” Gordon trotted over to the patrol car and spoke to an officer. “I need you to get down to the car, photograph everything, then bag it. When Solomon and Buster get here, have them use the jacket for Angie’s scent. And I want that car hauled up and delivered to the county forensics lab. I want them to look at every damn inch of it.”

What he wanted to do was go with Solomon, but he had to trust his officers to do their jobs while he and Colfax worked the rest of the case. He climbed back into the SUV, where Colfax was doing something with his cell phone. Colfax snapped the phone shut. “We need to get moving. Code three would be nice.”

Chapter 39

Gordon flipped on lights and sirens.

“You might want to station an officer or two at the bone site until we get there,” Colfax said.

For half a second, Gordon thought they’d found Angie in one of the excavations, but Colfax, irritating as he could be, would have said so. Gordon radioed Tessa to comply with Colfax’s request. Colfax was busy on his phone again, and all of Gordon’s attention was needed to navigate. If not Angie, what had they found?

Pink clouds heralded sunrise as Gordon hit the outskirts of Mapleton. He killed the siren as he drove through town. Minutes later, he arrived at the site and pulled in behind a Mapleton patrol car and a county crime scene vehicle. His officer stood at the now-trampled trail leading into the woods. “You solo?” Gordon asked.

“Second unit’s on the far side. The techs are already working.”

So, Colfax must have requested them well before he’d told Gordon to cover the scene. “What are we looking for?” Gordon asked Colfax.

“Missing bones. Or, more likely, evidence of whoever took them.”

“I thought all the bones were already excavated.”

“Techs couldn’t be sure. What they’re sure of is how they left the site when the fire hit. And it didn’t look like that when Kennedy took his pictures.” With daylight lifting the darkness, Colfax led the way through the woods.

When they arrived at the site, two techs were photographing, digging, brushing, and sifting. One stopped working at their approach. “Got anything?” Colfax asked.

The man pointed to several evidence bags. “A couple of vertebrae, three ribs, and some phalanges. A kid. Four, five years old. Based on what looks like new excavation, my hypothesis is that someone came in, tried to dig up this other skeleton, and missed some of the smaller bones.”

“What about the fact that our guy was burying the bones in separate graves? You think we might find arms where the other arms were?” Gordon asked.

The tech shook his head. “We’ll look, of course, but this is the arm site. Torsos were over there.” He pointed to yellow crime scene tape flapping in the morning breeze.

“Was there any evidence of new excavation at the other sites?” Colfax asked.

“We gave them a quick look. Didn’t see anything.”

“Estimate of how long these bones have been in the ground?” Colfax said. “More recent than the others?”

“Not likely, considering they were buried deeper.”

Gordon knelt by the evidence bags. “Did you notify the Coroner’s Office?”

“As soon as we found the new bones,” the tech said. “Pierce Asel told us to proceed and he’d get here as soon as he could, but given what we’d already found, he said as long as we had photographs, we didn’t have to wait on him.”

“We’ll let you work,” Colfax said. “I’m going to call in a couple deputies to help control the site.”

Gordon and Colfax wandered to the other sites. Aside from the smell of smoke and some charred deadfall, things seemed the same as the last time they’d been here. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Colfax asked.

“That we were right about the firebug? He set the fire to clear the way for digging up the bones?”

“Great minds,” Colfax said. “And based on that, I’m assuming—with all the risk that entails—that your break-ins were done with the same end in mind.”

“And the same person was behind both?”

Colfax lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that we’re working on the same wavelength.”

“Let’s get back to the station. I want to pick up Megan.” Gordon figured Tessa had updated her, but he wanted to escort her to Angie’s apartment. Between the two of them, they should be able to tell if anything was amiss.

“I’ve got my laptop this time,” Colfax said. “Easier to access the county databases, so no more dirty looks for using your computer.”

Gordon left Colfax in his office and found Megan in Dispatch, her chair scooted closer to Tessa’s station, following the action as if she could will the results she wanted. She jumped when she saw him, concern etched on her face.

“They’ll find her,” she said. “Buster’s the best.”

“No argument there. You have a key to Angie’s place, don’t you?”

Megan looked at him as if she were surprised that he didn’t. “Yes, but it’s in her apartment.” She nibbled on her lower lip. “But there’s one downstairs at Daily Bread.”

Her eyes popped wide open, glanced in the direction of the clock, and back to Gordon. “Ozzie. Someone should tell him Angie’s not coming in. He might already have gone upstairs to check on her.”

Gordon told Megan and Tessa his plan to go to Angie’s. Megan rushed to the door. “Well, what are you waiting for? We might find a clue.”

After a quick pit stop, he and Megan set off for Daily Bread. They arrived, as expected, to a concerned Ozzie. The early morning breakfast and coffee crowd turned in synchrony, all eyes expectantly fixed on Gordon. Ozzie wiped his hands on his apron and came around the counter. His dark face seemed to go several shades lighter. He stopped inches in front of Gordon and spoke in a whisper. “Something bad wrong happened, didn’t it?”

Gordon rested a reassuring hand on Ozzie’s broad shoulder. “We don’t know, Ozzie. Did you go upstairs?”

He nodded, his chins wobbling. “Yes. Wanted to see if she was sick, or overslept. But she wasn’t there. I knew Megan”—he acknowledged her presence with a nod—“had spent the night. Thought they might have burned too much midnight oil, what with them having a bottle of champagne and all.”

“Did anything look out of place?” Gordon asked.

“Nothing ransacked or trashed,” Ozzie said. “I don’t have cause to go up there, so I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like.”

“That’s fine,” Gordon said. “I’m going to go take a quick look, and then ask Megan to join me. But until I make sure it’s absolutely safe, I want her down here with you.”

“I understand, Chief. Come on, Miss Megan. I’ll fix you some breakfast.” Ozzie lumbered toward the counter.

Megan gave Gordon one more of those concerned looks before following Ozzie. It dawned on him that her concern was as much for him as it was for Angie. Was that what the other diners were thinking? But why would they know? The only indication Angie wasn’t here was the lack of fresh cinnamon rolls.

Without meeting anyone’s eyes, Gordon picked up the key from Ozzie and wove his way through the diner to the storage alcove where a staircase led to Angie’s apartment. As soon as he was in the stairwell, out of sight of anyone in the diner, he released the catch on his holster. Ozzie had said there was nothing out of the ordinary, but Gordon’s pounding heart said otherwise. When he reached the small landing at the top of the stairs, he drew his weapon.

The key slipped easily into the lock, and, standing as far to the side as the tiny landing permitted, Gordon shoved the door open.

Silence, and the familiar aroma of Angie greeted him. He did a quick check of the rooms, finding them empty. Windows were all closed. Relieved and disappointed at the same time, then wondering if he’d actually have preferred finding Angie bound or injured, he holstered his pistol and trotted down the stairs. He peeked into the diner and motioned for Megan to join him.

Standing at Gordon’s side in Angie’s doorway, Megan rested her hands on her hips. “Looks the same as when we left.” Room by room, she perused and gave him the same response. “Nothing. Is that good or bad?”

“It would have been nice to find a note from Angie saying she got an emergency call from her parents, but I can’t say I expected it to be that easy. This was one more thing we had to rule out.”

“Call.” Megan darted across the living room and picked up a purse from the end table. “Maybe she tried to call me.”

And why not him? was Gordon’s immediate thought.

Megan extracted her phone and pressed buttons. Her downcast face was all the reply Gordon needed. “I’ll call her,” Megan said before aiming her eyes his way. “But I suppose you already did that.”

Feeling like a complete idiot, Gordon shook his head. “But let me do it now.” He punched in her number, waited, and the call went straight to voicemail. “Call me,” he said. He checked his own messages on the off chance he’d missed something while he was en route to the crash site, but nothing was there, either.

“Would it be all right if I went back to the motel?” Megan asked. “I promised Justin a ride to the airport. But his suitcase is still at Rose’s. I’d need to pick it up first. And I could stay at the motel, with Sam. Nobody’s threatened me.”

Yet. Gordon hesitated, but couldn’t find a reason not to let her go. “I’ll follow you to Rose’s.” He sensed that Megan would have argued, saying she didn’t need a bodyguard, but she simply shrugged and accepted his offer.

At Rose’s, he made sure the house was clear, then gave her strict instructions to call when she got to the motel, and to notify him if she heard anything, thought of anything, or saw anything.

“Same goes for you,” she said, standing on tiptoe and kissing his cheek.

Feeling like he’d swallowed a swarm of hornets, he returned to his office to worry and wonder about where Angie was.

“Nothing,” he said before Colfax could ask. “What about you? Looks like you’ve made some progress.” Gordon pointed to the white board, where Colfax had added pictures to go with some of the names. Driver’s licenses, high school yearbooks, and what he assumed were images taken from Google. Not recent, most of them, but it helped to have a face to go with the name.

“I’ve had my people working on reconstructing the lives of every damn one of the names on the board. They’re good, but they’re not miracle workers, especially the ones from the pre-computerized generation. We can scratch Robert Browning—died of emphysema in ‘seventy-eight, and my team never found any connection beyond that newspaper picture.”

Gordon drew a big X through the name on the white board. “One down, although I kind of hoped he’d be our guy. Name like Mad Dog seemed to have potential. Anything hooking Fred Easterbrook to the Osterback cousins? They all went to Mapleton High.”

“We can trace Easterbrook back three generations in Mapleton. The Osterbacks arrived, at least according to when the kids were enrolled in school, in 1962, when the boys were ten and eleven. Clark went on to the University of Denver, majored in Business.”

Gordon studied the picture Colfax had added by Clark’s name. Black-and-white, grainy. Two young men, one with his arm looped around the other’s shoulders. Taken in 1977 according to the caption. “Clark and Hal?”

“Yep.”

“Where are they now?”

“Clark’s pushing up daisies at Denver Memorial Cemetery. Prostate cancer.”

“And Hal?”

“He worked for a janitorial service, also in Denver, was fired, collected unemployment for a while, then, as of 1978—poof.”

“Poof?”

“Technical term for off the grid. No drivers license, no property taxes, didn’t file income tax.”

“Death certificate? Prison system?”

“Can’t find that, although it’s a big country. Haven’t hit everything yet. Nor have we found the Osterback-Easterbrook connection, but if it’s there, we’ll get it. What are you working on?”

Not going crazy.
But he had to trust his people to do their jobs.

Gordon thought about his last words with Doc Evans and told Colfax he’d work that line. He lost himself in database searches, tracing Doc’s history. He discovered where Doc had gone to medical school easily enough, and worked backward from there. Born in 1941, small town in New Mexico. No father, mother did odd jobs. How did he get enough money to get into med school? Scholarship?

Gordon called the University of New Mexico Medical School. After introducing himself to a young-sounding, gum-snapping female voice who said she was Trixie, he passed on the news that Doc Evans had died. “Our local paper would like to do a memorial issue. One piece of information that would be interesting to our readers would be how Dr. Evans got into medical school. I know he’d have been in one of your first graduating classes. You know, overcoming his humble beginnings, being one of the pioneers of the school, so to speak. Stuff like that. Did he work in the kitchen, get a scholarship—the little details, you know?”

Colfax glanced his way and gave an approving smirk. Gordon grinned. Anything was worth a shot.

“Those would be old records. Can I call you back?” she said.

“Gee, we’re kind of on a deadline here. I can hold, if you don’t mind.” When she snapped her gum, sighed, but said she’d try, Gordon put the phone on speaker and went back to work. Doc had established his Mapleton practice in 1972 after a brief stint in an Albuquerque medical office.

Trixie came back on the line. Gordon left the phone on speaker. “It seems that Dr. Evans’ tuition was covered in full by the Abraham Pinkerton Foundation. That’s all I can find.”

Gordon tried to keep the shock out of his voice. Then again, the medical community was close-knit. He thanked Trixie for her time and set the handset in the cradle.

“I’m already on it,” Colfax said. “Let’s see what kinds of things this foundation supports.”

Considering Pinkerton had founded the regional hospital, a foundation in his name didn’t seem too far-fetched. Made sense that Doc Evans had applied for financial aid. But that niggling in Gordon’s brain was back, full force. Angie would have called it a
feeling.
He plugged Abraham Pinkerton into Google and was rewarded—or cursed—with an image of the same portrait hanging in the hospital gallery. As if to prove it didn’t creep him out, Gordon stared back.