The Bones She Buried

Forty-Four

Within the hour, Brody Wolicki’s tiny cabin was swarmed with sheriff’s deputies and state police as well as a coroner’s van. Josie and Luke sat on Luke’s tailgate and waited while the scene was processed, answering questions whenever necessary about why they had come to Wolicki’s property. They watched men and women go in and out of the cabin, some racing out and vomiting outside the scene perimeter. Every so often the horrific smell wafted over to where they sat, and Luke would get up and pace for several minutes while Josie checked her phone and texted Noah again—still getting no response. For the fourth time, Luke sat beside her again on the tailgate, one hand scratching at his beard. It had taken time, but the color had come back into his face and he seemed more composed, for which Josie was glad. A few years back, during the case that ultimately ruined his career and sent him to prison, he had walked in on a crime scene involving his best friend. Josie hadn’t realized how deeply the experience had affected him until she saw his reaction to finding Wolicki’s body.

From behind the cabin, dressed in a white Tyvek suit, State Police Detective Heather Loughlin emerged. She pulled off her skull cap as she approached them, shaking her long, blonde hair loose. Josie had already briefed her when she arrived. They’d worked together before, most recently on a case involving Gretchen. Heather said, “Looks like this guy was burning documents out back.”

Josie groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Heather shook her head. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll get you a suit and you can come around back and look.”

Once Josie was suited up, she and Heather logged into the crime scene with the sheriff’s deputy guarding the perimeter, and Heather took her to the back of the cabin where two large, rusty metal barrels stood about thirty feet away from the cabin’s back door. Empty cardboard boxes were piled up next to the barrels. Beyond that, about fifty feet away was a small shed, its brown siding also covered in moss, and its door standing open.

Heather said, “Apparently Wolicki was a bit of a hoarder. The cabin’s filled with things—some photo albums, old cassette tapes, a gun safe, and a bunch of taxidermy animals in his bedroom.” She pointed to the shed. “He had a lot of stuff in the shed, which appears to have been burnt in these barrels. He lived alone out here, as I’m sure you can guess. Most of the local folks knew him—like Luke out there—and he let a lot of people use his shooting range. He doesn’t have any relatives. No one nearby who would check on him regularly. I think eventually someone coming to use the range would have found him.”

As they stepped up to the two barrels, Heather motioned inside of one which was filled with blackened ash and slips of paper. “It’s not hot,” she said. “Looks like it’s been there a while.”

“By the looks of his body, it’s possible he’s been dead as long as ten days,” Josie said. “Has it rained in the last ten days?”

“Last rain here was nine days ago.”

“So whoever did this must have done it within the last eight days.”

Heather cocked her head to the side. “You think someone else could have burned all this stuff?”

Josie sighed. “Yes.” With gloved fingers she probed some of the paper inside the barrel. Most of what remained appeared to be handwritten notes. One scrap had a couple of shooting club names which Josie recognized from her library research, along with a list of guns. The more scraps she turned up, the heavier her heart felt. The killer—or killers—had been way ahead of her. They obviously knew the significance of the belt buckle and had known it long before Josie discovered it—before she had even sent Mettner to Rockview to ask the residents about it. They had come here and murdered Wolicki and destroyed all documentation he had of his former shooting league and any evidence of who the belt buckle had belonged to. For just a moment she wondered if they had some kind of leak at the Denton Police Department, or even if Noah’s sister and brother-in-law were somehow involved. But that didn’t make sense since Laura and Grady hadn’t known they were going to talk to Beth and Mason Pratt, and both of them had been attacked before Josie and Mettner could get to them. Wolicki had been murdered long before Denton PD even knew about him. Plus, the only people in the department who knew Josie was coming to see him were Chitwood, Mettner and Gretchen.

She picked her way over to the shed and peeked inside. All the walls were lined with wooden shelves. One whole wall was completely empty. That would have been the one that held all of Wolicki’s old records. The other walls were filled with tools, weed-killer, potting soil, rakes, shovels, pruners, extension cords and an air compressor. Josie turned back to Heather. “Any idea of the cause of death?”

“Hard to say, especially given the shape the body is in, but there’s no obvious trauma we can see. We can’t even say this is a murder at this point.”

Together they walked back to the front of the house. “Oh, it’s a murder all right. When you get that coroner’s report it will say he was asphyxiated. Just you wait.”