Skye Cree 03: The Bones Will Tell (23 page)

B
y Monday evening, Josh was ready to sit down and have a beer, maybe watch a replay of the Mariners preseason game from Arizona. He pulled his Fusion into his parking space about the same time Edna Grossman did hers.

Edna was
n’t yet ready to give up the job she’d had for a quarter of a century. At sixty-seven her brown hair might be almost completely gray but she still got up every morning to go to work five days a week at the marketing company she’d founded twenty-five years earlier.

Her husband had
died the previous year of cancer, leaving her with a sizeable estate as well. But Edna wasn’t one to trot out her bank account. Other than the ten-year-old Mercedes she drove and the prestigious loft address, she much preferred downplaying her lifestyle. A testament to her thrifty nature was the fact she still wore the same coat she’d bought in 1998.

Glad to be home
after a long day, Josh grabbed his briefcase from the passenger seat and started for the elevator. When Edna joined him in the wait for the car, he nodded at her in polite fashion and asked, “How’s it going?”

“Did you hear about Selma
Tolliver?”

Josh’s radar went off.
The hair stood up on the back of his neck. “What about Selma?”

“
She went out Friday night with friends, never made it back home. No one’s seen Selma since she left that bar over on Pike where they were partying.”

“Maybe
she met up with someone, went back to his place.” But even as he tossed the theory out there, he didn’t believe it.

“And not call anybody the
entire weekend, especially her sister, Suzanne?” Edna leaned in toward him. “You don’t know those two women. Suzanne spends almost as much time here with Selma as she does back in Sammamish.” Edna shook her head. “No, you don’t know Selma at all if you think she’d get lucky at a bar on Friday night and not tell Suzanne first chance she got on Saturday.”

Josh had to admit he’d lived in the building for years and hadn’t done much to get to know any of his neighbors
, let alone the perky brunette he’d only met a few weeks ago. “What do the police say?”

When the elevator doors
dinged opened, Edna let out a harrumph. “Don’t know their asses from a doughnut hole if you ask me. With all these murders and abductions of young women in the news, you’d think the cops would do a whole lot more than blow smoke up the family’s ass.”

“Is that what they’re doing?”

“Oh, the police eventually found Selma’s Lexus parked on Valiant this morning—two days later. That’s seven blocks from here, but right around the corner from the bar. They told Suzanne that maybe Selma had car trouble and someone gave her a lift.” Edna made another noise in her throat. “Selma’s Lexus was less than a year old, not a thing wrong with it.”

“When did the sister call the cops?”

“Suzanne came in from Sammamish Saturday afternoon, went through Selma’s apartment herself to see what was what. That’s when she got scared, when she knew Selma hadn’t made it back to the apartment.”

By the time Edna stepped off on the fifth floor, Josh was doing a checklist in his head of all the coincidences since that box of bones had showed up. Vanessa Farrington, Maggie Benne
tt, Willa Dover, and now Selma—all people connected to them in one way or another.

As soon as he got to his penthouse, he dropped his briefcase and went in search of Skye. He found her in the kitchen layering noodles in a pan to make deep-dish lasagna.

“Were you aware that Selma Tolliver vanished Friday night and hasn’t been seen or heard from in two days?”

Skye stopped
what she was doing long enough to look over at Josh. “Your neighbor? The one from the lobby? No, I hadn’t heard.”

“Our neighbor,” Josh corrected. “And yeah, the woman who was heading out the door
that night and found the second package. This guy’s hitting us close to home, Skye. Too damn close to home.”

“And doing a damn good job
of it,” she groused.

“
Neither of us has bothered touching base with Dawson Hennings the last few days. I think it’s time we rattled his cage.”

Inside the Artemis
Foundation, for the first time, Skye had volunteers. Zoe, Lena, and Velma were joined by Karen Houston and her daughter, Shawna Langley. Today, they were all hard at work stuffing flyers into envelopes. To accommodate them she’d had to borrow chairs from Ander All Games to make sure everyone had a place to sit.

When
the door opened Skye looked up and was surprised to see Dawson Hennings standing in the doorframe with another man she didn’t recognize. Dawson was his usual awkward self, but Skye got the sense that the man he’d brought with him was anything but.

“
After getting your message last night, I thought about returning your call this morning to let you know what we found over the phone.” Dawson looked around the room. “But I wanted to see this place for myself. As it turns out, so did Kevin Holt, the forensic geologist I mentioned. So here we are. Kevin, meet Skye Cree.”

Skye stood up
, shook the sandy-haired man’s hand, made the introductions all around to the others. “As you can see, we’re mailing flyers complete with pictures of the missing along with information packets about the Foundation. Businesses from Vancouver to San Francisco will receive them in an attempt to get them more active within their own neighborhoods. We hope to get owners to agree to put up flyers in their front windows or near the cash register on a regular basis, get them more involved. That way, we keep a higher profile across the western states, maybe increase visibility and awareness.”

She
spread her arms out wide. “So what do you think?”

“
That it’s an incredibly good idea,” Kevin concluded. “But you know there’s bound to be some who get the letter and just toss it out with the trash.”

“
I’m sure they will,” Skye agreed. “But if we get even fifty percent participation, it’s more than we had before.”

“I didn’t expect so many people here,
” Dawson confessed.

As t
he phone jingled on the desk, Skye looked on proudly as Lena stopped what she was doing to pick it up. “We’re growing,” Skye proclaimed. “Lately it seems like all at once. We’re still taking baby steps though. I’m sure we’ll stumble along the way somewhere.”

Dawson
adjusted his glasses. “Is there someplace we could talk? We have some news. And I think you’ll be interested in what we have to say.”

“Sure
, let’s go in the kitchen.” The small coffee bar area was a little crowded with three people but Skye felt determined to make them feel at home. “How about coffee?”

“I never say no to caffeine,” Kevin proclaimed.

After she’d filled up three mismatched cups she’d brought from her apartment and passed them off, she motioned for the two men to sit down at the little round ice cream table she’d used on her balcony.

“Kevin
here, identified the dirt particles on the bones you were sent.”

“And?”

Kevin took a taste of the hot liquid before putting down his mug. “The soil contained microscopic traces of Camassia quamash, a perennial herb that predominantly grows in marshy areas. Quamash is actually a Nez Perce term for the bulb at the end of the stem that’s edible. It tastes similar to a sweet potato. But I guess you probably knew that.”

Skye sent him a grin
before she sipped from her own mug. “I did but it’s good to know you’ve done your homework. If you’re about to disappoint me, Kevin, I need a disclaimer. I’m not sure I can handle any bad news today.”

“
Understandable. But there’s much more to what I have to say than about the quamash. Most people don’t realize you can log a lot of interesting stuff, minerals and chemicals and particles, out of the smallest amount of a dirt sample. Dirt can tell us a helluva lot more than just the organic nitrogen and carbon makeup.”

“Okay.” Maybe she’d misjudged Kevin. He seemed as nerdy as Dawson. But
what he said next, proved her wrong.

“
The government has even started making the most of the data. Geologists launched the U.S. Geological Survey Project in 2001. Ever since then, there’s a lab in Denver that maintains a database with a collection of soil samples taken from one end of the country to the other. Like your Foundation, the database is small, but growing.”

“You’re a fascinating guy
, Kevin.”

“I try to be. Forensic science is just now beginning to recognize the importance of dirt. Like the bones you were sent, if a victim has dirt under the nails, it can tell us a lot. Was the person killed there or were they dumped?”

“You’ve got my attention.”

“
Good because I’m not trying to confuse you. No, I’m trying to lead up to what I think is very good news. As for the Camassia quamash, or camas as they are commonly known, the only problem with the plant is that it’s found growing from British Columbia down the coast of Washington, in abundance. On that alone, it would be almost impossible to pinpoint a precise location of where exactly those bones rested for all this time.”

“
But you found something else?” Skye asked with hope rising in her chest.

Kevin grinned.
“Oh yeah, something significantly identifiable. The soil tested positive for traces of BTEX, an acronym we use for benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene—all four make the components in aviation fuel. Wherever those bones were buried, the ground was contaminated with the stuff. If you take into account the traces of quamash, I’d look for an airport or military installation near marshland. BTEX will take the path of least resistance until it finds a water table. A marsh or wetland area has a very low water table. That’s why I sent what I found off to Denver. I’m encouraged that my results may help you solve this case or at the very least, lead you to a location.”

Hope went from
resting on the bottom of the floor to a blast of optimism. She felt like hugging Kevin. Instead, she said, “Encouragement is putting it mildly. For the first time in weeks, we have something solid to follow up on.”

“Then I hope it helps. I realize
you might consider it like looking for a needle in a haystack at first, but if you stick to the parameters I’ve outlined, I think you’ll be surprised. Besides, I’ll send you more data as it comes in to help you narrow the area down more.”

As soon as the men
said their goodbyes, Skye snatched up her case binder and took the elevator upstairs to Ander All Games.

As usual, when she
strolled inside the busy office, she saw programmers with their heads down. Each seemed chained to their laptops until they polished up the beta application of the new game. She spotted Leo hanging out with Winston and Reggie. Their heads buried together comparing lines of code.

With that dedicated attitude
, Skye had no doubt they’d stay on schedule for a Christmas release.

Once inside Josh’s office, she
slapped down the binder on his desk. Everything Kevin Holt told her came tumbling out. “You know what this means, right?”

“Joint Base Lewis-McChord has an airstrip.”

“You bet it does. But we shouldn’t rule out the area around Sea-Tac Airport either.”

Josh scowled into his coffee mug.
“That’s a lot of ground to cover, Skye.”

“I know.
So we narrow it down. I wonder…”

“
Might as well lay it all on the table.”

“
In the not so distant past, I read that sections of the base had an overabundance of abandoned buildings. They’ve demolished a lot of them but not all. Maybe this nutcase has specific knowledge of the region and has found one he utilizes for his sick torture chamber.”

“
On base? I don’t think so. But he is familiar with the lay of the land. Maybe he snapped up a tract of it when the government sold off part of the base to individuals.”

“
We have to figure out a way to check out the area without raising suspicions. How do we get near a military base without anyone charging us with trespassing?”