Speaking in Bones

Larabee was on the far side of a gurney, studying a corpse still packaged in its going-for-a-ride bag. The zipper was closed, but the contouring of the lumps told me the occupant was a good-size adult.

The man on my side of the gurney had his back to me. The silhouette looked familiar—tall, with shoulders too narrow for the waist and bum. Yet it was wrong, somehow.

As I paused, palm still pressed to the door, the man turned. And confirmed what I’d hoped had been a case of mistaken identity.

Eyeing me coolly was Erskine “Skinny” Slidell, CMPD homicide squad. And a magnum-force legend in his own narrow mind.

Slidell graced me with a nod.

“Detective.” Discreetly assessing what was off about Slidell’s appearance.

His face was clammy and gray. Autopsies did that to him. Otherwise, he looked better than I’d seen him in years. Perhaps ever. I guessed he’d lost fifteen to twenty pounds. He was rocking a suede jacket, shirt with no tie, and khakis combo, and his hair was buzz-cut, Bruce Willis style.

“Come here.” Larabee gestured me to him with an agitated curling of gloved fingers.

“Doc, this don’t—”

“Bear with me, Detective.” Larabee was clearly not up for attitude from Slidell.

As I rounded the gurney, Larabee picked up a clipboard holding an intake file.

“Sixty-one-year-old white female. Height: seventy-one and a half inches. Weight: one hundred and eighty-two pounds. Spotted by a neighbor at eight-oh-seven this morning wedged under a dock in the lower pond at the RibbonWalk Nature Preserve.”

“Where’s that?” Charlotte is lousy with parks. I hadn’t heard of this one.

“Derita neighborhood, off Nevin Road. It’s got a couple of ponds, a wetland bog, trails.”

Across the gurney, Slidell cleared his throat. Loudly.

Larabee ignored the not so subtle prod. “The victim lived a few blocks away. According to the neighbor”—checking one of the sheets clipped to his board—“Franco Saltieri, she liked to walk there.”

“Any history of depression?”

Larabee shrugged. Who knows?

Realizing the significance of Slidell’s presence. “You’re thinking murder?”

“Unless Granny opted for a midnight dip.”

Larabee did not acknowledge Skinny’s attempt at humor. “There’s an awful lot of facial trauma.”

“How long was she in the water?”

“Saltieri says he saw her around seven Saturday morning. She must have died sometime after that.”

Given the cool weather and the short period of submergence, the body would have undergone little postmortem change. I wondered why I’d been summoned. Was about to ask when Larabee flipped back to the cover page and read off a name.

“Hazel Lee Cunningham Strike.”

The room receded around me.

“Isn’t Hazel Strike the woman who came here to see you?” I sensed Larabee’s eyes on my face, narrow and watchful. “The websleuth?”

I could only nod.

“That’s what I thought.”

I heard a clipboard clatter against stainless steel. The buzzy rip of a zipper. The whistle of air in Slidell’s nose.

“Is this Strike?”

I took a second to clear my head. Deep breath. Then I looked down.

The garish hair lay wet against the right side of Hazel Strike’s face. The skin was morgue white, shadowed where the underlying bone had caved in—the cheek, the upper rim of the orbit. The lips hung slack, revealing bruising and broken teeth.

“What’s he mean, she came to see you?” Slidell demanded from the far side of the gurney.

“He means she came to see me,” I said, not looking up.

At that moment Hawkins pushed through the door. Larabee gestured him in, then refocused on Slidell and me. “How about you two take this elsewhere so we can get on with the autopsy?”

I cast one last glance at Hazel Strike’s face. Recalled the messages on my phone. Urgent. Pleading that I call.

Mind already packing for a guilt trip, I brushed past Slidell and headed out into the corridor. Skinny hesitated a beat, then followed.

In my office, I took up position behind my desk. Slidell sat facing me, shoulders and jaw tight, already in confrontational mode.

“When’d she come here?”

“A week ago.”

“Why?”

Words and images were spinning wheelies in my mind. I tried to force them into alignment. To arrange them into some sort of meaningful pattern. Slidell granted me at least thirty seconds of patience.

“We gonna do this today, Doc?”

“Fine.”

I relayed what I hoped was an accurate chronology. Strike’s hobby as a websleuth and her visit to the MCME. Cora Teague. My trips to Burke County, the Lost Cove Cliffs, and Wiseman’s View, the three overlooks for Brown Mountain. The printless fingertips, the fragmented skeletal remains, the Devil’s Tail trail concrete with its contents now hardening in autopsy room four. Deputy Zeb Ramsey. John and Fatima Teague and the Church of Jesus Lord Holiness. The suspicious death of their youngest, Eli, at age twelve. The insistent calls from Hazel Strike the previous Saturday.

Slidell listened, taking not one single note. When I’d finished he looked at me as though I’d said Elvis was tone-deaf.

A comment was coming at me when Slidell’s mobile buzzed at his belt. Without excusing himself, he got up and strode from the office. For the next ten minutes I could hear the cadence of his voice through the door. A pause. Then a new conversation. Perhaps act two of the previous one.

I’d moved on to paperwork when he finally returned.

“So the old lady called you.”

“Hazel Strike was sixty-one.”

Slidell gave a derisive twitch of his chin.

“She phoned several times,” I said. “Left messages requesting that I call her back.”

“When was this?”

“Last Saturday.”

“Times?”

“One was early morning. One was afternoon, the other I’m not sure.”

“Did you call her back?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was busy.” Again a pang of guilt. What had Strike wanted? Had she been afraid for her life? Whom else might she have contacted for help?

“You’ve not seen her since this little skip through the woods?”

“No.”

Slidell began ticking points off on his fingers. To my surprise the nails were, if not manicured, uncharacteristically clean and trimmed.

“Here’s how I see it. One, Cora Teague is a big girl and free to diddle whoever she wants. Two, no one’s filed an MP—”

“She was reported missing.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“Her disappearance was entered on a websleuthing site called CLUES.net.”

“Online.” Voice triple-coated with disdain.

“Yes.”

“By who?”

“Someone posting as OMG.” Though tempted, I didn’t correct his grammar.

Slidell’s brows rose ever so slightly.

“You know. Oh my God.”

Not a flicker of understanding.

“I assume OMG is cyberjargon. Like LOL. Laughing out loud. Or G2G. Got to go.”

Slidell took a deep, long-suffering breath. “So you’ve no clue who this nutbucket is.”

“No.”

Slidell’s knowledge of the Internet is limited to running data such as prints, weapons, or vehicle registrations, tasks he usually shunts off to subordinates. He doesn’t own a computer. Fully aware of the folly, I surged on.

“I tried Twitter, found no user with a handle containing just the letters OMG. That’s as far as I got before I had to move on.”

“And you’ve no clue who this Hazel Strike is. Was.”

A mental image popped. Strike sitting in the chair now occupied by Slidell, elbows on her knees, face vibrant with compassion for the forgotten dead.

“Lucky,” I said.

“What?”

“She went by Lucky. You know. Like the cigarette—”

“Yeah, yeah. Poetic.”

“Strike was investigating Cora Teague. She even spoke to the family. It can’t be coincidence. There has to be a connection between Strike’s murder—”

“Maybe murder.”

“—and Teague’s disappearance,” I continued.

“Maybe disappearance.”

“Deputy Ramsey is not too busy to exert some effort.” Glacial. Read: not too pigheaded.

“This ain’t Avery County. Here’s how it’s gonna play out here in the big city. Doc Larabee says someone offed Strike, the bastard’s going down.”

“What can I do?”

“Stay out of my hair.”

I let a few moments pass to indicate how distasteful I found his attitude. Then, “I am not an amateur.”

“You’re a squint.” TV cop lingo. Classic Slidell.

“I have been helpful in the past.”

“We’re not talking bones here. Nothing personal, but if this drops to me, I prefer to work it without interference.”

Interference? I wanted to smack his surprisingly clean-shaven face.

The landline rang, saving me from the impulse. It was Larabee.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“As I suspected.” I heard water pounding a sink in the background, a male voice I assumed to be Hawkins. Larabee said something to him I didn’t catch. “I found significant cranial, facial, and thoracic trauma, the result of at least seventeen blows with a blunt object.”

“That suggests a whole lot of rage.”

“It does.”

“Cause of death?”

“Massive intracranial bleeding.”

“Any defense wounds?”

“None.”

Slidell’s eyes were riveted on me.

“Water in the lungs?”

“No. She was dead before she went into the pond. Is Slidell still there?”

“He’s here.”

“Tell him I’m signing Strike out as a homicide.”

“I’ll send him back to see you.”

“And it’s not even my birthday.”

“Your reward for a job well done.”

I hung up and relayed what Larabee had said.

As Slidell was pushing to his feet, a synapse fired in my brain.

“I did some Internet research,” I said. “There’s a side to websleuthing I found disturbing.”

“People playing Whac-A-Mole with virtual mallets?”

The comment was inane, so I ignored it.

“For some, not all, the pursuit is ego-driven and intensely competitive.”

“Whac-A-Sleuth?”

“Are you interested in this?”

Slidell sighed and chest-crossed his arms.

“Hazel Strike engaged in a lengthy and bitter dispute with a websleuth calling himself WendellC.”

“What’s that short for?”

“The man’s name is Wendell Clyde.” I described Clyde’s role in identifying Quilt Girl. His resulting stardom. “Strike accused WendellC of taking credit for discoveries they’d made together.”

“So?”

“The exchange was beyond nasty. Much of the language was truly vicious.”

Slidell blinked, then opened his lips to blow me off.

“News reports said Clyde was living in Huntersville.”

Slidell’s belt vibrated again. This time he ignored the call.

“So you’re saying there was bad blood between Strike and Clyde?”

“The two hated each other.”

“And the guy’s living right up the road.”

“He was in 2007. That’s when the articles ran.”

“You’re suggesting Clyde whacked Strike?”

“Far be it from me to interfere.” Childish, but Slidell sparked that in me.

“Snotty don’t suit you, Doc.”

“I’m suggesting Wendell Clyde is a good place to start.”