Inherit the Bones

Chapter Four

I typed my notes, describing the awful scene inside the circus tent. I let the images of the dust and the dirt on the ground wash over me, the way they swirled around the dead clown like finger paintings. The acrid, ripe stench of fresh manure and heavy sweat that could mean only one thing: farm animal.

The way the air tasted of copper when I inhaled.

Nine times out of ten, the sensory details like this didn’t matter. But the tenth time, the time when your early notes record a faint trace of almonds in the air, or the fact that you noted a pair of gleaming, oily-looking shoes tossed together with a dozen battered and dirty pairs… you just never know what, days or weeks down the road, will break a case wide open.

And so you notice and record everything.

At my side, Sam Birdshead was quiet; he’d stopped on the first page of the Woodsman murder book. After four years with the binders, files, and folders, I knew them by heart.

I knew what caught his attention: a photograph, shot on an old Polaroid camera.

Taken quickly, the picture is nonetheless striking in its composition. The object in the foreground is small, weighing less than two pounds. The background is snow and forest and boulders. The snow is a white so bright that it mutes the greens and browns of the forest into a murky blend, that is broken only by the speckled boulders that stand like sentinels, and by the small skull, its jaw open in an obscene grin.

It was frigid that day.

Brody and I stuffed our backpacks with fleece jackets and thermoses of hot coffee. At the last second, I’d thrown in a small flask of whiskey and my old Polaroid. The skies were blue, the true blue of a sunny Colorado winter day, and clear, without the cloud cover that might have warmed us.

We loaded up our skis and gear and were at the trailhead within thirty minutes. It was our second date and Brody led me off the trail and into the deep fresh powder of the backcountry.

After an hour of hard skiing, we peeled off our outer layers and scrambled up a boulder and rested at the top, puffy jackets spread under our butts to prevent the cold of the stone from seeping through our ski pants. He kissed me, very gently, and told me he’d wanted to do that for months. His mouth was warm and I kissed him back with an urgency I didn’t know I felt. We talked between kisses and I fooled around with his camera, and he teased me for using an old Polaroid.

I still have the picture I took of him that day, his dark hair wavy from sweat and his beautiful hazel eyes obscured by sunglasses. He is standing on the boulder, posed, an elbow on his knee, his chin resting on his fist. Then he took a shot of us together, his long arm holding the camera out as far as he could.

We look happy, the way couples do, when they still think their mate can do no wrong.

After a while, I left him on the boulder and trekked a few hundred meters into the woods to find a place to pee. On a hill that sloped gently down, I grabbed hold of a pine limb to balance. I squatted and did my business. When I was done, I stood and struggled a moment with my ski pants. The tiny catch on the zipper was stuck and it took a few curses and tugs until finally the metal teeth caught.

To this day, I don’t know what made me look to my right.

The forest was quiet with the stillness that blankets an open space after a heavy snow. There was nothing to catch my eye or my ear: no tan flash of deer, no witchlike crow’s cackle.

I was eager to get back to Brody and hit the trails before it got dark, but I turned and looked and my life changed forever.

It could so easily have been an elk or deer bone. I had seen hundreds of them over the years, scattered across meadows, half buried in the vines and pine needle carpets of the forests that dot the Rocky Mountains. But this bone had an angle and curve to it that struck at something primal in me.

I took one step forward, and then another. When I was five feet away, I stopped and pulled out my safety whistle, one of a pair that Brody insisted we carry around our necks in the backcountry. I blew once, then twice more.

I stood and waited and stared at the human skull until he reached me.

“So you took this?” Sam Birdshead asked, turning the scrapbook around to show me the image, an image I’d be able to describe in perfect detail until the day I die.

I nodded. We took the picture and used Brody’s GPS to calibrate our location. Then we skied like hell back to the car and drove straight to the police department. I had only been on the job a year, but Chief Chavez was no fool. He took our story seriously. Could be an old hunter, some drunken deerstalker who’d taken a fall, he said.

I knew there was a part of him that didn’t believe it was a hunter.

Sam flipped through the album. I wanted to tell him to slow down, to take in the details and minutiae, but I held my tongue. He’d either get it, or he wouldn’t. As we liked to say around the station, cops aren’t made, they’re born.

I glanced at the clock and swore. My notes would have to wait; I needed to get to the morgue to witness the preliminary stages of the autopsy. It wasn’t standard operating procedure for the state, but for homicides, Ravi Hussen insisted on a police presence in the room. She said it was easier to engage in dialogue as she went along, instead of presenting a formal report to the police department post-autopsy.

Cedar Valley had so few homicides, none of us minded sitting in on the autopsies.

“Sam, tell you what. Come with me to the morgue and I’ll get you up to speed on the Woodsman murders,” I said.

I grabbed my bag and took the case file from Sam’s hand before he could object.

Sam gulped. He hadn’t been in the Death Room yet.

“C’mon, it doesn’t hurt. I promise. Anyway, you can’t let a pregnant lady go alone. What will the rest of the guys think?” I asked him.

Sam looked around at the other cops, all of whom were suddenly engrossed in their computers or on the phone. He sighed and slammed his department-issue hat on his head.

“Yes, ma’am. Lead the way.”