Death Falls (21 page)

And not getting caught, of course.

“You still keeping a lookout?” he asked James, who stood a few feet away, facing Glenn Stewart’s house.

“Yeah,” the boy said. “Coast is still clear.”

“Good. Keep looking. If you see a light come on, just run back to my house. I’ll take care of everything else.”

Eric felt uneasy about bringing James along. Kat would be livid if she ever found out, which is why he had made James promise not to tell her. But the extra set of eyes helped, and James seemed to be relishing his role as official lookout.

“I feel like a pirate,” the boy whispered. “This is fun.”

“Glad you’re enjoying it,” Eric whispered back. “Now, no more talking. He might hear us and wake up.”

James nodded and ran his pinched thumb and index finger across his mouth—the universal symbol for zipping his lips. He then turned back to the house, hand over his eyes like Captain Jack Sparrow surveying the sea.

Just to be sure, Eric also eyed the house, moving his gaze from the first floor all the way up to the widow’s walk on the roof. Every window was dark. The only noises were the drone of the nearby falls and Eric’s shovel as it invaded the ground once again.

That was followed by another noise—a slight crunch of steel on cardboard.

James heard it, too, and whirled around to face him. “What was that?”

“That,” Eric said, “is what we’re looking for.”

Carl was the one who found it. After digging for about ten minutes, he plunged his shovel into the dirt and struck something hard and impenetrable. The unexpected force of the collision made the shovel vibrate.

“You hit something,” Earl Morgan said, stating the obvious.

Carl dropped the shovel and shook the numbness out of his arms. “It seems that way.”

Something big and heavy, by the sound of it. As Earl used his shovel to clear away larger patches of dirt, Kat got down on her knees and used her hands to sweep away the rest. Running her grime-smeared palms over their find, she realized it was a child’s coffin.

Earl saw it, too, and said, “You told me there was no one buried down there.”

“There isn’t. At least, there shouldn’t be.”

The top half of the coffin was mostly intact, its lid firmly in place. The bottom half had succumbed to time and nature, swamping the interior with dirt. Leaning over the coffin’s upper lid, Kat had a flashback to the previous year. Opening all those coffins built by the Grim Reaper. Seeing all those gruesome surprises. She had thought those days were over.

Lifting the lid slightly, she tried to peek inside but couldn’t. There wasn’t enough light to see by. In order to get a good look, she had to open the entire coffin. Taking a deep breath, she yanked on the lid. It creaked just as loudly as the door leading to the Clarks’ bomb shelter earlier that day. But, just like that stubborn door, the lid eventually yielded.

The first thing Kat saw was dirt, which had flowed in from the breached bottom half. It filled the upper portion of the coffin, making the satin pillow that sat there look like a white island in a sea of brown. Resting on top of the pillow was an unmarked tin box.

It was in remarkably good shape for something that had spent the past four decades in the ground. Only a few blotches of rust marred the lid. When Kat picked it up, something inside rattled.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Carl asked.

It was certainly tempting. But what the box contained was personal. It had enough meaning to Maggie Olmstead that she chose to bury it in lieu of her son. If it was going to be opened, it needed to be done by family.

“No,” Kat said. “That’s a job for Eric.”

Sitting cross-legged on the damp grass, Eric rested the shoe box between his knees. The impact of the shovel had dented the lid slightly, but it was otherwise intact. That was a good thing. He would have been angry with himself had he damaged whatever was inside.

James stood behind him, looking excitedly over his shoulder. “Go on. Open it up.”

Removing the lid, Eric peered inside. James did, too, craning his neck for a better view. What they saw was both surprising and more than a little sad.

“What is it?” James asked.

“It’s a ferret,” Eric replied.

He gazed down at the animal that lay on the bottom of the box. Its fur was light brown, punctuated with bits of white. A band of black surrounded its closed eyes. The way it was positioned, curled into a tight ball in one of the box’s corners, made the animal look like it was sleeping. But Eric knew better.

James, still curious, asked, “What happened to it?”

“It died.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

The only thing Eric did know was that invading Glenn Stewart’s yard had been a bad idea. Clearly, the ferret had been his pet and he had braved the storm the night before because the animal, having just died, needed to be buried. Hence the late-night digging and the quick prayer when it was over. What Eric had spied from the window was nothing more than a lonely man saying good-bye to a beloved companion. Knowing that his suspicions had gotten the best of him made him sweat with shame.

James crowded him from behind. “Can I touch it?”

“No.”

Eric yanked the box away, causing the dead ferret inside to slide to another corner. Something else slid with it. He had missed it earlier because it had been hidden beneath the animal. Now it was exposed, sitting askew against one of the ferret’s front paws.

A flat disk, it was roughly the size of a plate from a child’s tea set. Eric picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It was made of clay and surprisingly heavy for its size. One side was unadorned. The other had been coated with a thin layer of white paint. Dark traces of clay could be spotted through the paint job, giving the whole thing a blotchy, stubbled look. It wasn’t until Eric examined it at arm’s length that he realized what the disk resembled.

It was a full moon.

“What’s that?” James asked in a manner that came close to resembling awe. For him, this really had become a treasure hunt.

“Just a piece of clay.”

“Can I have it?”

“No can do,” Eric said. “We need to leave it where it is and bury the animal again. Quickly.”

Eric returned the disk to the box and put the lid over it. Climbing to his feet, he grabbed the shovel and used it to widen the hole he had pulled the box from. When it was big enough, he laid the box inside and, with much guilt, began to rebury it.

He was almost finished when James tugged on his arm and whispered, “He’s awake.”

Eric looked to the house, where a light had brightened a second-floor window. He caught sight of a silhouette behind the glass, apparently looking out over the yard.

“Go,” Eric hissed to James. “Run.”

The boy sprinted away, streaking from Glenn Stewart’s yard. Eric soon did the same, running with the shovel as fast as he could until he was back in his own yard. He caught up with James on the back porch. There was a giddy smile plastered on the boy’s face as he breathlessly said, “That was so cool! Do you think he saw us?”

Eric shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

It was a lie. Eric knew without a doubt that Glenn Stewart had seen both of them. He also had a dreadful sense that his neighbor knew exactly what they had been up to.

The bones lay on the stainless-steel table like parts of a jigsaw puzzle ready to be pieced together. The skull Nick had found in the water sat at the head of the table. Just below it was the lower jaw with its row of browned teeth. The rest of the bones that state police divers had found were arrayed below that in a fair approximation of what a full skeleton would look like. Ribs in the middle. Two arms—one of them broken in half at the elbow—resting alongside them. Legs pointing to the bottom of the table.

Years underwater had stripped the skeleton clean. There were no traces of skin, organs, even tendons. Time had wiped away most of it. Fish had done the rest. All that remained were the bones.

Nick took a slow walk around the table, studying them. The hand of the right arm, the one that was in two pieces, lay flat against the table’s surface, fingers slightly spread. The left hand was balled into a fist, the bones of its fingers tight against each other. He had just reached out and touched it when a woman sailed into the autopsy suite, leaving its double doors swinging wildly behind her. She looked first at the skeleton and then at Nick.

“Are you in charge?”

Lieutenant Vasquez, who had been sitting quietly in the corner, stood. Like Nick, he was still damp from their unexpected dip beneath the mill. Unlike Nick, he had removed his shirt and approached the woman with a bare-chested swagger. The show-off.

“I am,” he said, extending a hand and introducing himself.

“Lucy Meade. We spoke on the phone.” To Tony’s disappointment, the woman had gone back to looking at Nick. “Who’s he?”

“Nick Donnelly. He’s helping out with the case.”

“If you want to help,” Lucy said, speaking directly to Nick, “then don’t touch my fucking bones.”

The way she verbally took possession of the skeleton informed Nick that she was the forensic anthropologist brought in to examine the remains. She was younger than he was expecting—early thirties, tops—and too pretty for someone who spent most of her time with the long dead. Her eyes were blue. Her auburn hair was tied back into a ponytail. She wore jeans, Nikes, and a CIA T-shirt.

“You were once with the CIA?” Nick asked.

Lucy Meade covered the shirt with a white lab coat she pulled from a hook next to the door. “Yes, but not the one you’re thinking of.”

“What other CIA is there besides the Central Intelligence Agency?”

“Culinary Institute of America,” Lucy replied. “I was going to be a chef.”

“What happened?”

“Bones are more interesting.”

She shooed Nick away from the table with a flick of her hand and swooped in to replace him. Then she took a long look at the bones arranged in front of her.

“It’s a boy,” she said. “Taking a wild guess, I’d say he was no older than eleven.”

Nick was impressed. “How can you tell?”

“Pubic bones.” Lucy pointed to a series of bones held together in a butterfly shape. “There’s hardly any wear and tear of the pubic symphysis, indicating the skeleton belongs to someone who died very young. The pelvis is narrow and deep, telling me it’s a male.”

“That sounds like our boy.” It was Tony, who had put on his shirt and joined them at the table.

“And just who is ‘your boy’?” Lucy Meade used air quotes as she said it, a gesture that normally annoyed the hell out of Nick. In her case, however, he found it charming. Mostly because she was smart. And pretty. And didn’t hesitate to throw her weight around.

“Noah Pierce,” he said. “Nine years old. Went missing in 1971.”

“Where did you find him?”

“In the lake next to the state park where he disappeared.”

“We’ll need a dental anthropologist to try to match the teeth with dental records,” Lucy said, “but I have a feeling this really is your boy.”

“Would you be able to determine how he died?” Nick asked.

Like the others, he also was going on the assumption that the bones pulled from the water had once belonged to Noah Pierce. What he really wanted to know was who killed him and why. But since there was no way Lucy would be able to tell them that, Nick would gladly settle for a cause of death.

“Maybe.” Lucy’s eyes never left the bones on the table. She looked at them the way an art critic studied a Picasso—curious, probing, searching. “It depends on how he was killed. Since you found him in the water, wouldn’t logic dictate that he drowned?”

Nick and Tony had discussed that possibility while toweling off in the back of a CSU van at Lasher Mill State Park. Both already knew that serial criminals rarely drowned their victims—the horrible truth being that it was less fun for them that way. When a victim of a serial killer was found in the water, there was a good chance it was merely a dumping ground and that the victim was killed by other means.

Snapping rubber gloves over her hands, Lucy moved to the head of the table and picked up the skull. She held it at eye level, tilting and turning it.

“I don’t see any sign of skull fractures or contusions,” she said. “I’ll spend the night doing a more thorough examination, but off the bat it doesn’t look like any blunt force trauma was involved.”

Lucy set the skull down as gently as she had picked it up. She then moved to the side of the table, swiping a stray lock of hair behind her ear as she bent over the bones. She looked at each one closely and methodically, gaze skipping from rib to rib.

“What are you looking for?” Nick asked.

“Damage to the bones that could have been made with a weapon. Stabbing victims sometimes have slices on their bones made by the knife blade. Shooting victims have notches from where the bullet passed through. The good thing about the remains belonging to someone so young is that there’s not a lifetime of skeletal damage to make things confusing.”

Nick morbidly thought of his own leg and how it would have looked after four decades underwater. He suspected the titanium pins would still be there, unless the fish had been especially ravenous. It would certainly be enough to throw off even someone with Lucy Meade’s expertise.

“With children,” she continued, “there are fewer fractures to contend with. Fewer broken bones. The bad part—”

Nick volunteered an answer. “Is that the remains belong to a kid.”

Lucy looked up from the table and smiled sadly. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

She resumed her examination of the skeleton, pressing her fingertips against the bones of the right leg and running them down to the toes. Then she moved to the other side of the table, doing the same to the left leg, fingers now working upward.

“So tell me, Mr. Donnelly,” she said, “is this one of your foundation’s cold cases?”

Nick, whose gaze had been following Lucy’s hands, now looked at her face. It remained mostly blank, her eyes squinting with concentration. Had she been studying his face, she would have seen surprise that she knew who he was.