Inherit the Bones

Chapter Forty

If you’re talking an eon, hell, if you’re talking a century, two days is nothing, a single grain in a gallon jug of sand.

If you’re talking a missing young woman, just out of childhood really, forty-eight hours is an agony. A minute feels like an hour, an hour a day. Time passes and you look at the clock and you realize it’s only noon, and not five or six or seven o’clock, as you’d hoped.

I was worried. The Annika I knew was sensible and sensitive. I couldn’t fathom her up and leaving without a word to her parents; not after what they had just been through as a family. There was some piece of this puzzle that was missing, something that didn’t add up, and it scared me. I felt like we were puppets being strung along by forces I could not identify, allowing us to see just enough of the final picture and then pulling us away.

Finn and I waited until we couldn’t wait any longer, and then we tried to push Annika to the back of our minds and refocused our attention on her brother; on Nicky. But to do that, we needed to recover the original case files, the files I’d asked Sam to look into.

We parked across the street and stared at Sam’s apartment building. Sam had woken from his coma but had no memory of the crash. He was just starting to understand what he’d lost-his leg, possibly his livelihood.

Finn said, “This is weird.”

I nodded. “Tell me about it. Did you ever come here with Sam?”

“No. We met up a few times after work but always out at a bar. Do you think our guy was here?”

I shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Guess we’ll see.”

We locked the car and entered the building, a three-story World War II construct. The lobby was uncomfortably warm and heavy with the smell of stale disinfectant and burning incense. One wall contained twelve tin mailboxes, each with a locking door and a neatly printed label. On the opposite wall, hanging askew next to a faded watercolor of a pack of wild horses, a pockmarked bulletin board held business cards and a few brightly colored fliers.

The manager, a Vietnamese man with sad eyes and poor English, met us in the lobby. We followed him to the second floor and down a narrow hallway until he stopped in front of a door crossed with yellow crime scene tape.

Reaching under the tape, the manager slipped a key into the lock and then stepped back. The door opened with a sigh, releasing cool air out into the warm hallway.

“We got it from here, bud. Thanks,” Finn said. He gave the man’s back a hearty thwack. “We’ll let ourselves out.”

The manager nodded and moved away, his slipper-clad feet sliding across the parquet floor as quietly as feathers falling to earth. Finn pulled a switchblade from his back pocket and sliced the yellow tape, then held it to the side and motioned for me to enter. I squeezed by and found the light switch.

The apartment was nothing special. It was neither large nor small, with a living area, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. I started there, as it was closest to the front door, while Finn took a bedroom that seemed to double as an office.

Cabinets stained in a color last popular forty years ago held canned goods, plates and bowls, a few boxes of rice and cereal. But the appliances had been updated in the last few years, and the steel refrigerator hummed along, keeping milk, eggs, cheese, and deli meats cold for someone who wasn’t coming home anytime soon. On the counter sat a juicer, its glass pitcher reflecting the cherry red of a toaster on its left and the deep black of a Mr. Coffee machine on its right. I left the kitchen and went to the other bedroom.

I glanced over a double bed, dresser, and nightstand. Sam’s closet was organized and neat; clothes on hangers all hung to face the same way, and his dress shirts and uniforms were pressed and crisply ironed. On the dresser, a shallow bowl held a watch, a half-empty box of matches, a few dimes and a nickel, and a pair of cuff links. These I fished out of the bowl and felt the heaviness of solid silver. They were engraved with Chinese or Japanese symbols, and I wondered what they said.

On the bedside stand, a couple of paperbacks-an old Michael Crichton and a newer Stephen King-were stacked under a half-empty bottle of water. The nightstand had a drawer and I hesitated a moment, not wanting to invade Sam’s privacy, but Sam was beyond caring and I couldn’t leave the apartment without a thorough search.

The drawer stuck halfway open, caught on its tracks. I gave a mighty tug and a bottle of lubricant rolled forward and hit a box of condoms. The condoms were unopened; the lube expired by a few months. I thought of the pretty turquoise-eyed woman Sam had met at the bar, and a weight like a rock hit my chest. I sat on the edge of the bed and willed the tears that fell from my eyes to stop. Sadness comes in strange packages sometimes; today it was in the form of a box of condoms. I ached for what was taken from Sam, and from Nicky, too. And then I thought about Brody, and wondered if it was a sin to mistrust so much of our relationship.

I wiped my eyes and then reached my hand into the drawer and stretched to the back, grasping empty air with my fingers until I was sure I had covered the whole space.

“Got anything good?”

Finn stood in the doorway, a look of amusement on his face. He watched me untangle myself from the drawer and I looked away as I answered, not wanting him to see my tears.

“No, you?”

Finn shook his head. “Not yet. In the office, the paperwork is mostly bills and correspondence with his dad and his grandfather. There are lots of letters to and from the reservation. Luckily, the original Nicky case files all seem to be here. If our guy came by, he either couldn’t get in or he wasn’t looking for the files.”

I nodded. The apartment had felt undisturbed.

“Avondale PD didn’t come through, did they?”

“No, the chief asked them to lock-and-leave it until we’d done a sweep.”

I left the bedroom and went to the living room. There, I paused a moment and then turned in a circle.

Sam was everywhere.

They say you can tell what’s essential to a person by what he surrounds himself with, in the sacred spaces of his own home. If that’s true-and I think it is-Sam’s culture and ancestry were of utmost importance. The place was filled with tribal textiles and artwork.

Black-and-white photographs, portraits mostly, covered the wall above a maroon leather sofa, framed in different metals and woods. I knelt on the couch and looked up at them. All of them seemed to have been taken on some reservation; the same run-down government-issue buildings and dusty, dirt roads appeared in the background of most of them.

I pushed off the couch and bumped into the coffee table. On it, a wooden tray held a half-dozen candles, some melted down into mere puddles of wax; a handful of incense sticks; and a bundle of what looked like horse hair, wrapped into a short switch. In the center of it all was a chipped ceramic ashtray filled with bits of burnt paper, tissue-thin.

A breeze blew in then and lifted the crisp black pieces a few centimeters and then floated them gently back down. As the air caressed my bare shoulders a rash of goose bumps broke out across my flesh. The breeze retreated and I heard a whisper at my ear, one word said so faintly I might have imagined it.

Go.

Finn came out of the bedroom that doubled as an office, his arms heavy with files and folders. “This is everything, every damn note and file Moriarty and I wrote three years ago.”

“Sam was thorough. He would have been a good cop.”

Finn said, “Hey. He is a good cop.”

“Yeah. Let’s get out of here, we’re wasting time.”

“Do you want to look through this stuff, make sure we’re not missing anything?”

I shook my head, more chilled by the second. “This doesn’t feel right, being here. Close that window, would you, and let’s go.”

Finn tilted his head to the right and peered around me. “The window’s closed.”

I turned around; he was right. I walked to the glass and looked at the clasp. There was no need for a lock; thick putty-like paint held the latch shut. The view out of Sam’s living room was uninspired: a parking lot with an army green Volkswagen bus parked at an angle, taking up three spots. A few slots down, a hot pink Vespa sat in the shadows of a Harley. Dumpsters, two for trash, one for recyclables, completed the tableau.

I jogged to the bedrooms and checked the sliding glass doors in each. Locked as well, each leading out to a narrow balcony.

“Gemma?”

I spun around. “Did you open these?”

Finn shook his head, watched me. I went back to the living room and reached up, waving my hand under the ceiling vents. Nothing.

“Gemma?”

I was fatigued and emotionally spooked. My stomach growled. “Forget it, I’ll buy you lunch at Frisco’s.”

We ate a silent lunch at the restaurant, our hands and mouths busy with the steaming platters of enchiladas and fajitas until finally, we were sated. Finn waited until our server had refilled our iced teas and whisked away our plates before he pulled an interoffice manila folder out of his briefcase.

“What’s that?”

Finn opened the flap and withdrew a black-and-white photograph, eight and a half by eleven inches. He took a look and then slipped it across the Formica table to me.

The photograph was of two objects: a necklace, and a notecard-sized piece of paper, with a single line written on it in block print.

“I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.”

Finn took a long swallow of his iced tea. “Yup. The actual necklace and notecard are in the evidence room, at the department’s offsite storage center. We can go look at the real thing, but if we don’t, at least you’ve seen what the necklace looks like and the note. No idea if they’re relevant but they were sure hidden up high under Nicky’s bed.”

I stared at the photograph and then swore. “Finn, I’ve seen this necklace somewhere.”

Finn tore open a pink packet of sugar substitute and poured it into his tea. He stirred it with the straw. He looked at me and said, “Yup.”

“Tell me.”

He sighed. “The other day, at the library? You showed me her driver’s license. The forgotten one.”

“Rose Noonan. Of course! The pendant is a rose, isn’t it?”

The photograph of the necklace was blurred, but once you knew what you were looking at, you could see the petals and the budding leaves on the stem of the flower growing up the gold chain like it was a vine.

Finn said, “The question is, what was Nicky doing with a dead woman’s necklace and a D. H. Lawrence quote on rotting corpses?”

He saw my look and continued. “I got curious after we found it, I looked it up on the Internet.”

“You continue to surprise me, Finn, you really do.”

He shrugged, finished his tea. I sat back in the booth, the faded teal leather squeaking as I moved.

I closed my eyes, watching the scene unfold, like a silent film produced for an audience of one. It’s late in the day, but in the dark, cool basement, it might as well be midnight on the moon. Time moves slowly here, and Nicky has found an entire afternoon can pass by in the blink of an eye. Since that lady cop found the kids-the bodies-he’s been here most days reading these old, dusty case files from the ’80s.

If asked, he would be unable to explain his fascination.

He prays to God that he is never asked.

He thinks it has to do with the fact that life, for him, has always run so smoothly. Good looks, enough talent and smarts to get by, money to waste; yes, he was handed not just the silver spoon at birth but the damn golden ladle to boot. He’s never known cold, never known tragedy, never known loss, except for the death of his grandmother, of course, and well, she’d been so sick, it was really a blessing, wasn’t it?

But these kids, the McKenzie boys. The Woodsman. They represented another side to life that Nicky had no knowledge of but was desperate to understand. The dark, grim, real side, what the rest of the world experienced on a daily basis.

So he loses himself down here, asking the same question the cops did in 1985, and again in 2011: why these two? What made them special to him, to the Woodsman?

Because they were special to him, they had to have been. For if it was just random, what did that mean? What kind of a universe-what kind of God-allows that?

Then one day, he stumbles on a newspaper article about another special one, a woman, Rose Noonan. He looks at the picture they’ve included in the article, an old black-and-white photo that is obviously a reprint of a driver’s license.

He stares at the picture, and then he sees it.

Nick’s heart seizes for a second, two seconds, three seconds, and then it lets out a mighty beat and the blood and the heat and the oxygen race through his body and he gasps.

He has to hide this article, but where? That old librarian upstairs checks the workspace every night after he leaves, he knows she does. She’ll know something’s missing. He thinks and thinks and then realizes, duh, that if he puts it back in the same place no one would ever be the wiser.

And no one is.

I opened my eyes and slapped the table with the palm of my hand. “He recognized the necklace. Finn, he recognized the necklace. He must have.”

Finn nodded and drained his iced tea. “It feels right. He recognizes the necklace, and puts two and two together and instead of four, he gets Rosie Noonan’s killer. But how does he know it’s the same prick that killed the kids, too?”

I thought on that. “Maybe he doesn’t know for sure. Maybe he thinks it would be a hell of a coincidence if it weren’t the same guy. Think about it, Finn. How many unsolved murders do we have in Cedar Valley? Three. Every death, every other death in the whole damn town, we can account for.”

Our server, a cheery man in a sombrero, returned with the bill and I fished a twenty out of my wallet and laid it on the black tray, weighing it down with the pen he had provided in case of payment by credit card. Finn added a five for tip and we left.

At the front door, though, I stopped and then backtracked to a wall I’d noticed when we first came in.

Portraits, dozens of them, lined the wall. Taken over decades, they depicted different threads of the same family. The same dark eyes and heavy brows filled many of the faces and I thought about what gets passed down, parent to child, year after year, generation after generation, the visible lines of paternity and fidelity, and the invisible strains of legacy.

With one hand on my belly and the other at my mouth, worrying at a cuticle, I returned to Finn. He had continued on outside and waited by a bench, a toothpick in his mouth, hands in his pockets, briefcase at his feet.

I pulled him by the elbow toward the car. “We’ve got to find out how Nicky got that necklace. It’s the key to everything.”