Spackled and Spooked (26 page)

I shivered miserably, just thinking about it.

“So what are you guys doing here?” Shannon wanted to know, finally looking up. Josh explained that Kate and I had come to see what progress he’d made with his forensic facial approximation software.

“And?”

Josh’s voice turned frustrated. “And nothing. Dad’s right, a lot of it is guesswork, and the results are often less than accurate. Still, both Avery and I thought we had something there for a second.” He glanced at me. I nodded.

“How could you have something?” Shannon wanted to know, with the same logic her mother had displayed earlier. “Avery’s only been in town for a few months. The skeleton’s been in the ground for years. Avery can’t possibly have seen her before she died.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. “But maybe I’ve seen a picture of her? In the newspaper or on TV? Or even on the back of a milk carton? It could be a long time ago. She could have been a runaway, maybe. A teenager. The TV stations in New York could have shown her photo when she disappeared, and it’s still stuck in the back of my head somewhere. Or she could have been featured on one of those
Unsolved Mysteries
programs. I watch them once in a while.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Josh said. “You should suggest it to my dad. If the dental records don’t help, maybe he can have someone look through databases of runaways and missing teens. I’ll volunteer.”

“That’s very nice of you,” Kate said, “but I don’t think your dad would want you to take time away from your school work to work on his case.”

“So I’ll do it on my own time,” Josh said with a shrug. “Or maybe I can spin it into an extra credit assignment of some kind. Like this reconstruction thing. Professor Alexander is good that way.” He grinned.

We ended up staying in the cafeteria and eating lunch before heading back to the lab. On our way across the quad, we ran into Brandon Thomas on the same errand.

“What’s going on?” Josh wanted to know. Brandon’s usually pristine uniform was wrinkled and dirty, and his usually open and friendly face wore a frown. If I sniffed deeply, I thought I detected the pungent odor of garbage. Or rubbish, as they say in Maine.

Brandon shrugged helplessly. “What isn’t? Skeletons, murder victims, car accidents . . . and now I’ve just had to crawl all over the dump looking for Avery’s old kitchen appliances!”

“How’s Wayne holding up?” Kate wanted to know. If Brandon was overwhelmed, Wayne must be equally so. Except Wayne Rasmussen never seemed overwhelmed.

Brandon seemed to agree with me. “He’s OK, I guess. Seems OK. But then he always seems OK, doesn’t he?”

“Haven’t you seen him?” I asked Kate. She shook her head.

“Not for a couple of days. These murders have really kept him hopping.”

“I’ve seen him,” Josh said, “and if it makes you feel any better, he’s worried, too. But he’s been through a lot more. After processing the Murphy crime scene all those years ago, I guess not much could be worse.”

“He wasn’t chief of police back then, was he?” I asked.

Josh shook his head. “Just an officer. But pretty much the whole force was involved in that case, from what he’s told me. It was a big mess.”

In more ways than one, I reflected.

“But at least they knew who did it!” Brandon said. “This could be anybody!”

“Not quite anybody,” Shannon said, flipping her mahogany red mane over her shoulder. Josh sent her an appreciative glance. “If the same person killed both people—Miss Rudolph and the dead woman in the crawlspace—then it’s someone who was here two, or four, or six, or eight years ago, whenever the skeleton was buried there, and who’s still here now.”

“But that’s most of Waterfield. People don’t leave here that often.”

“New people come in, though,” Shannon pointed out. “For instance, if the skeleton was put in the ground eight years ago, my mom can’t be the killer, because we weren’t here yet.”

“Why would your mom be the killer?” Brandon began, and then stopped when he saw Shannon’s impish grin. “OK, so some people are exempt because they weren’t here. Or were too young. But it all depends on how long the skeleton’s been there, doesn’t it?”

We all nodded. “Once you know who she is—or was—you’ll know that, though,” Kate said. “And it’s someone who knew that the skeleton was discovered, and who knew that Venetia Rudolph knew, or might know, who the dead girl was and also who killed her.”

“How do you figure that?” Brandon wanted to know. We took him through the reasoning, and he nodded. “That makes sense. Although there may not be a connection. There could be two different killers. Someone who was at the site yesterday, and who noticed that Miss Rudolph lived alone, might have decided to take advantage of that to break in and rip her off.”

“Was anything missing from the house?” I asked. “Was there any evidence of a break-in?”

“Nothing we’ve discovered.” It seemed to answer both questions.

“If whoever it was didn’t break in,” Josh pointed out, “Miss Rudolph must have opened the door for him. Or her. That makes it seem like it was someone she knew. Or trusted.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” Shannon said. Josh shook his head.

“Not always. There are people I know that I wouldn’t trust any farther than I could throw them, and there are people I don’t know but that I’d automatically trust, just because of who they are. Like cops.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I killed Miss Rudolph,” Brandon said after a beat. Josh rolled his eyes behind the glasses.

“Don’t be an idiot. But if you knocked on her door one night, in your uniform, and told her you needed to ask her a couple of questions, don’t you think she’d have opened the door for you?”

Brandon acknowledged that she probably would. “So it was either someone she knew or someone she didn’t know but thought she could trust anyway. Like me, or the chief, or Reverend Norton. I’m not sure you’re helping, Josh.”

“Sorry,” Josh said with a shrug.

I hid a smile. “I doubt either Wayne or Bartholomew Norton bashed Venetia Rudolph over the head,” I said. “But someone did, and it could have been someone she didn’t know but that she thought it would be safe to let in anyway. Someone in a uniform, maybe. It happens once in a while, that someone pretends to be a cop. Remember the guy who cruised around in what looked like an unmarked police car and pulled single women over at night and made them do him sexual favors instead of getting tickets?”

“That was a real cop,” Brandon said stiffly.

“Oops,” Shannon grinned.

I made a face. “Fine, but there have been lots of others. Every month or so, you hear about someone somewhere getting caught pretending to be a police officer. And if they catch that many, just think of all the ones they probably don’t catch.”

“She has a point,” Josh said. Brandon shrugged, apparently loath to admit something he couldn’t in good conscience deny.

“Did you find the stove?” I asked, in an effort to change the subject. Brandon sighed.

“Eventually.”

“Stove?” Kate repeated. I explained about the appliances that had been in the house when we bought it, and the substance that had been encrusted on the corner of the stove, then Brandon told the story about how he and Derek had stumbled around the dump for a good, long time looking for the discarded appliances before finally stumbling over them, almost literally.

“They’re downtown at the cop shop. I dropped Derek off at Cortino’s Auto Repair, so he could get his truck back, and then I came out here to officially sign over the skeleton to the ME’s office. They’re on their way.”

“I’ll take you down to the anthropology lab,” Josh said. “But come with me first. I want to show you something.” He gestured Brandon toward the building with the labs. Shannon, Kate, and I tagged along behind. Josh continued the conversation as we walked. “Any word from Dr. Whitaker?”

“Nothing yet,” Brandon answered. “I guess maybe he can’t match the records, and now he has to contact other dentists to see if they can. If he can’t figure it out, then I guess we’ll have to start tracking down dentists outside the state.”

“Things would be a whole lot easier if she was a local woman,” Kate remarked.

Josh nodded. “But if she was local, we’d know that she was missing. Waterfield isn’t the sort of place where someone just disappears and nobody notices. It’s more likely that Avery’s right and she was a runaway, maybe, or somebody on her way to or from Canada. Maybe she was hitch-hiking and got picked up by someone who killed her.”

“Someone local,” Shannon said. And added, before anyone could challenge her statement, “How else would the killer know that it was safe to bury her in the crawlspace under the Murphy house?”

“And how else would the killer be around to know that the bones had been found now?” I added.

Brandon grimaced. “I grew up here, you know. I really hate the idea of having to arrest someone I know for murder. Arresting them for DUI or fishing without a license is one thing, but murder . . . !”

“Maybe you’ll feel different once you know who it is,” Kate said encouragingly as Josh pulled open the door into the lab building and stood aside to let us all file in ahead of him. “And even if you don’t, I know you’ll do the right thing anyway.”

Before Brandon could answer, his cell phone rang. Excusing himself, he stepped back outside to take the call. “Probably the ME’s office to tell me they’re running late. I’ll catch up.”

When we got up to the computer lab, someone else was at Josh’s computer. Ricky Swanson was manning the keyboard, head bent over his work, fingers flying, totally absorbed. When he finally registered our footsteps on the concrete floor, he jerked around, startled, blue eyes peering out at us through strands of dark hair.

“It’s just us,” I said needlessly.

“Hi, Ricky,” Shannon added. “Wow.” She put a hand on his shoulder but looked past him to the face revolving slowly on the screen, her voice hushing. “Is that what she looked like?”

Ricky shrugged.

“Wayne says these thing are not very accurate,” I offered, also looking past Ricky to the finished bust. “But this looks like a real person, anyway.”

It did. She also looked very different from earlier, when Josh had been the one in charge of creating—or recreating—her. Blue eyes were set in a pale face with high cheekbones and a perfect nose. Ricky had made the eyes deep set and slightly almond shaped, and had given his creation long, dark eyelashes and brows, and a bow-shaped mouth. Long, dark hair framed the face.

“Blue?” Josh said. “Why did you give her blue eyes?”

I guessed the reason Ricky had chosen to give his creation blue eyes was probably that his own eyes were blue. He didn’t admit that, though. “Looks right,” he just said, with a shrug.

“Are you sure she was this young?”

The girl on the computer didn’t look a day older than twenty, and might have been as young as fifteen or sixteen.

“No way to know. But you said she had long hair and a navel ring, so I don’t think she was very old.”

“She looks familiar,” I said, tilting my head. “Even more than when you were playing with her, Josh. I have no idea who she is, but I think I’ve seen her before.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Kate scoffed as Ricky looked from one to the other of us. “You’ve only been in Waterfield a couple of months, Avery. There’s no way you could have seen her.”

“True,” I admitted.

“Maybe she looks like someone else,” Shannon suggested. “Like an actress or TV personality. Angelina Jolie. Ashley Judd. The weather girl on channel eight.”

“Maybe.” We all looked at her again. “I think her mouth needs to be different.”

“How so?” Ricky wanted to know. I said I thought it needed to be bigger and not so pursed, and Ricky did his best to form what I wanted. The result was more Ashley Judd than Angelina Jolie, but Shannon nodded.

We all contemplated the screen, our heads cocked to one side, then the other.

“I don’t know her,” Kate said eventually.

“Me, either,” Shannon admitted. “For a second there, I thought I recognized something, but now I’m not sure. Maybe I’ve been looking at her for too long.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She still looks familiar to me.”

Kate turned to me. “But you’re the only one of us—except Ricky—who couldn’t possibly have seen her when she was alive, so if you recognize her, then she’s probably all wrong.”

I shrugged. Maybe, maybe not. Behind us, at the far end of the room, the door opened, and Brandon came in. “. . . when I leave here,” Brandon said. We heard his shoes move across the concrete floor, the muted thumps of police-issue Oxfords.

Kate, Shannon, and I moved aside to give him an unobstructed view of Ricky’s reconstruction. Its creator looked a little defiant, his eyes furtively peering through the overlong bangs, but his jaw pugnacious.

Brandon stopped in front of the table. As I watched, the color leached slowly out of his cheeks.

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