The Buried (The Apostles) (24 page)

Time to play the invisible game. We can’t let anyone see us. Fun, huh?

She crouched, dashing behind the pine trees lining Harbor Park.

Look Momma. Quiet as a cat. Into the black.

As she slipped from tree to tree, she wondered where else she could find a small person. Maybe she’d try the ball field. So many bright field lights, but there were bound to be little ball players walking home from night games.

With a rush of excitement rising in her chest, she dashed through the pines, where something growled. She jumped back, using her hands to fend off a dog.

“It’s okay,” the man said as he rubbed the top of the dog’s head. “Ramsey here won’t bite, will you, old boy.”

“Get it away!” She backpedaled until her heels hit the trunk of a pine tree. “Just get it away!”

“Seriously. It’s okay. He’s fourteen years old and half blind.”

She knew she looked ridiculous. The dog weighed less than ten pounds. But it terrified her. “I…I’m allergic to dogs.”

“Sorry.” The man tugged the dog’s leash, pulling him away from the tree. “Have a good night.”

She nodded and ran deeper into the dark and away from the dog. Dogs weren’t bad, not evil in the sense that humans were evil. Dogs were…dogs. They did dog things. They barked at mailmen. They chased their tails. They dug holes. They chewed bones.

G
race shook the rag rug and set it in a puddle of early morning sunshine. Allegheny Blue plodded across the porch and settled onto the circle of light. She checked the pads of all four feet and filled the water dish near the porch swing.

“Your dog’s fine.” Hatch slipped out the front door, kissed her cheek, and hurried down the steps to the dock.

She opened her mouth to remind him that technically Blue wasn’t her dog, but she decided to save the fight for something that mattered.

Yesterday another young woman had died, and the killer would soon be looking for a third victim. For Grace, the face Berkley had sketched was key. Something about that face tugged at her. She’d been through her files at work and nothing stood out. She’d shown the sketch to her co-workers, and none of them recognized the woman. She planned to take the sketch to her old racquet club and condo complex and see if anyone there recognized the woman. She planned to dig into her storage unit and pull out old yearbooks and photo albums. But first she would spend the early morning boating with Hatch.

Last night as they lay in bed, spent after a round of lovemaking that picked up where their explosive tennis match left off, Hatch had grown uncharacteristically quiet. She figured like her, he was stewing over the horror of Janis Jaffee’s death, maybe thinking about the young woman’s hands growing cold. When she pressed him, he admitted his mind was on a boat.

“Both times the killer used a small aluminum boat not propelled by fuel,” Hatch had said. “That boat can’t be far away, and there can’t be many of them. We find that boat, we find the killer.”

When she reached the dirt path that led to Lamar’s old dock, she stopped and listened for the rumble of earth movers. With clearance from the forensic crew, the construction crew was supposed to resume digging at sunrise. She tucked her hair behind her ears. Blue snored on the porch, two jays chattered in a pine at the head of the path, and down by the slough, Lamar Giroux’s boat motor coughed and sputtered as Hatch tried to bring it to life.

No rumbles, rattles, or beeps from the construction site.

She’d left a message with her general contractor yesterday letting him know they had the green light from the authorities, and he told her they’d begin work at sunrise. Surely they hadn’t found another reason to halt construction. Another body?

She rushed up the rise. When she reached the site she found the equipment but no workers. Taking out her phone, she called her contractor. “Are you aware your men haven’t shown up?”

“They showed, but I had to call them off. I got an e-mail from my bank this morning. I’m afraid the check you gave us, Miss Courtemanche, bounced.”

“There must be a mistake. I had the money for the payment.” She wouldn’t commit to a project she didn’t have the funds for. Hell, she’d sold most everything she had so she could make the payments.

“You might want to talk to your bank, ma’am, because the check came back to us marked ‘insufficient funds.’ I’m afraid until we get that check cleared, we aren’t working on your house.”

She clenched her teeth so hard her jaw ached. “Fine. I’ll call the bank and get this cleared up. Just make sure your crew is ready to go.”

Grace hung up just as Hatch walked up the rise. “Got the boat started,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to get a house built.”

He ran both hands through the sides of his hair. “Now?”

She looked from her phone to the land. She should be helping track down a killer, looking for a boat or a face, but she was on the phone with a guy who was supposed to build her a spiral staircase, kitchen island, and a central vacuum system. Crazy. She jammed her phone in her pocket. At this moment, the house shouldn’t matter.

She pulled in a deep breath of piney air. But it did. It mattered so much she felt the pull in her toes pressing into the earth, a pull that came from deep inside her, a pull that had nothing to do with the dreams of her long dead father. For the past few days, she and Hatch had been talking in a roundabout way about family. Her passion for this house had nothing to do with her father and a faded sketch on a yellowed cocktail napkin. She wanted five bedrooms and a tire swing. She wanted a dock where she could tie up a skiff like the one she and her mother used to take out and search for flowers for the dining room table. She wanted a tennis court like the one where her father had first showed her how to hold a racquet and be a winner. Even after she’d met Hatch, who told her upfront he’d never have kids, she didn’t throw away that cocktail napkin because she’d always wanted a family. This wasn’t about a house, but family.

She must have made some noise because Hatch settled a hand on her arm. “You okay?”

“I’m not too sure.” She tucked the ends of her hair behind her ears. “But let me make one more call.”

Grace called up her banking account on her phone and saw red. Her check to her general contractor had bounced because someone had emptied her account. Could this be slimy residue from Larry Morehouse? He’d manage to open a bank account in her name in Nevis. The slug, or more likely one of his bottom feeders, could have hacked into her bank account. With a growl, she clicked on the button for customer service and got canned music.

Hatch, who’d jogged to the mailbox, came back with a fist full of mail, including a small, familiar envelope.

The elevator music stopped. “Good morning. You’ve reached First Southern Bank customer service,” a woman with a pleasant voice said.

With the tips of his fingers, Hatch slipped a photo of Janis Jaffee from the envelope, a scarlet X slashed across her face. Grace had been expecting this photo, but the shock of seeing that face made her fumble with her phone.

“My name’s Miranda,” the voice on the phone continued. “What can I do for you today?”

Hatch’s eyebrows bunched as he looked at the back side. She grabbed his arm and turned the back side her way. In chunky red letters were the words:
Three strikes and Grace is out.
Next to the words was a stick person with two Xs for eyes and pearls around its neck.

“Hello? This is Miranda with First Southern Bank. Can I help you?”

“Son of a bitch!” Hatch said with a hissing breath.

The phone fell from Grace’s hand.

Teeth were amazing little body parts. When soft tissue decayed and bones broke and splintered and dissolved into dust, teeth held strong. And long after the heart stopped beating and brainwaves ceased crashing the skull, teeth could still tell a story.

Soft classical music rose from the phone speaker as Tucker took a long swig of coffee and waited for the dentist in St. Paul, Minnesota. After talking to the head coach of the Hornet high school baseball team last night, Tucker contacted Lawrence Lassen, father of the Stinger and possibly son of Grandpa and Grandma Doe who’d been found in Collier’s Holler five days ago. Lawrence Lassen reported he hadn’t heard from his parents in more than two weeks, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. His parents were healthy, wealthy, active sixty-somethings enjoying their retirement and prone to spur-of-the-moment road trips. His mother loved to hike and watch birds, and his father loved to eat. Dad’s favorite food: pie. Last night Tucker had express-mailed dental x-rays of his two unidentified victims to the Lassen family’s dentist.

“I looked at the films of both individuals, Detective Holt,” the dentist said when he finally took up the line, “and they’re consistent with the films we have on file for two of our long-time patients, Oliver and Emmaline Lassen.”

Grandpa and Grandma Doe finally had names.

The simple fact left Tucker’s knees weak with relief. After he thanked the dentist and offered his condolences, he studied the photo on Emmaline Lassen’s Facebook page, the one of her and Oliver standing in front of a Christmas tree surrounded by five grandchildren. Smiling faces, whole faces, faces not eaten away by pool acid.

Why would Asswipe want to destroy these faces? Attacks to the face were common in personal grudges or between victims and perpetrators who had a history. Maybe someone feeling wronged by the Lassens wanted them dead. The couple had money. Maybe the homicides were the result of a simple robbery turned violent.

Tucker chugged the rest of his coffee. He’d dig into the couple’s private and financial backgrounds, talk in depth with family members and former coworkers, but he wanted to unearth another name. For days he’d been itching to get his hands on Oliver and Emmaline’s car, which had been noticeably absent from the parking lot at the trailhead. If he found the car, he might find Asswipe.

Because like teeth, cars could talk.

Tucker called his contact at the Motor Vehicle Division, who patched him through to an MVD contact in Minnesota. In one of her bitchier moods, his soon-to-be ex-wife had suggested he take his phone out for dinner on Valentine’s Day because he spent more time with the thing than her. On some cases, like this one, the damn phone may as well be surgically attached to his right ear.

Within fifteen minutes, Tucker had the VIN and plate number to the Lassen’s car, a late-model, champagne-colored Cadillac. He ran the car through the NCIC database of stolen vehicles and came up empty, but when he ran the make and model through a database of local law enforcement agencies in the Kentucky-Ohio-West Virginia area, he got a possible hit. A group of boys going dirt biking had found a champagne-colored Caddie down a secluded country road. The car had no plates, and the VIN had been destroyed.

Tucker followed the breadcrumbs and discovered the Caddie had been towed to an impound lot in southern Ohio. Within the hour, he was at the lot with the impound manager.

“Car came in unusually clean,” the manager said. “No registration or insurance information. No personal items of identification. Cops found no fingerprints, not even on the steering wheel or door handle. Just a few pieces of trash.”

One man’s trash could be another man’s case breaker. Tucker snapped on a pair of gloves. Time to dig in and get dirty. In the center console he found a box of tissues, a few loose coins, and a set of lightweight binoculars. Didn’t the Lassens’ son say his mother liked to bird watch? In the driver’s door pocket, he found a handful of crumpled napkins, all from Peggy’s Pie Palace. And Oliver Lassen loved pie.

Yes
.

“Got someone who can start her up for me?” Tucker asked as his heart revved.

“Sure, but I can’t release it yet.”

“I won’t be driving anywhere. I want to see the car’s navigation system.” If teeth and pie could talk, Tucker reasoned, imagine what a GPS could tell him.

While a mechanic poked around under the hood, Tucker checked his calendar. Jackson had a ball game tonight. He’d spend the rest of the day in the office, glued to his phone and computer as he dug up information on why someone would kill the Lassens, and then he’d go to Jackson’s game. But that’s where he usually ran into trouble. Days turned into nights, and he wouldn’t even realize it. He set an alarm on his phone thirty minutes before game time.

When the mechanic finally got the Caddie purring, Tucker slipped into the passenger seat and turned on the navigation system, which showed a trip route in progress. He scrolled to the destination point. Cypress Bend, Florida.

He called up a map. Looked like a small town on the coast of the Florida panhandle. A long way and quite a few degrees from St. Paul, Minnesota. Florida? Why did that ring a bell? He went through his notes, now in the hundreds of pages. On one of the early pages he found the list of vehicles seen at the trailhead where the Lassens had been murdered. All from Kentucky and Ohio, but one of the hikers reported earlier in the day he’d seen an out-of-state pickup. He flipped through the pages.

Damn. Colorado, not Florida.

He continued to dig until he found his notes on the interview he’d had with Oliver and Emmaline Lassen’s son. The son had told Tucker his parents had recently bought a new winter home in Florida, a town on Apalachicola Bay called Cypress Bend.

Something about that town nagged at his gut.

L
amar Giroux had built his shack for one man with a Spartan lifestyle. Two people would find the one-bedroom house cramped. Five people should have been tripping all over each other. But Hatch’s team moved and worked like cogs in a wheel.

Grace marveled at the well-tuned machine that was focused on preventing the next abduction, which meant finding the Gravedigger. The killer had left a clear message. Grace was the grand prize. The Gravedigger wanted her dead. The idea terrified her, but more than that, it galvanized her. Bigger stakes meant a bigger effort on her part.

Berkley Rowe, the SCIU’s forensic artist, sat on the back porch where “the light was good,” smoothing clay strips along markers sticking out from a cast of the skull that had been found on Grace’s construction site. The artist’s long, nimble fingers, dry and chafed with bits of pigment hiding under nails, moved quickly and decisively, while a long blond braid poking out from a headband swayed along her back. She reminded Grace of a chic hippy, not a former L.A. cop.

No one had found any connection linking the bodies found on Grace’s land to the Gravedigger murders, but Berkley, like Grace, had been drawn to the woman and child, and she’d spent all day working on a 3-D reconstruction that could help identify the woman.

Berkley wiped her hands on a towel around her waist. “Okay, I’m ready.” She untucked the towel, set it on the table, and motioned to the clay bust. “Take me to her home.”

Grace walked Berkley to the construction site, still temporarily on hold while the bank worked out where her money had gone. The artist trailed her fingers along a row of camellia bushes then sat cross-legged at the edge of the gaping hole. Her fingers dug into the ground, lifting and sifting through the sandy earth. Her eyelids lowered.

Grace waited because frankly, there was nothing else she could do. It was a good thing she’d been working on patience with Hatch.

“This is where your new home is going to be built,” Berkley finally said.

“That’s the plan.” But not all plans worked out the way they are initially envisioned. She wanted a home filled with children’s laughter and Hatch’s silly sea songs. It wasn’t about the land or fulfilling her daddy’s long-time dream.

The artist tucked her legs against her chest, rested her chin on her knees, and stared out at the river. “It’s beautiful here, Grace, and so peaceful. A good place to live”—her gaze slid to the excavation site—“and die. Whoever buried the mother and baby here loved them very much.”

Despite the high sun, Grace shivered. “And then I had to bring out the bulldozers and rip them from the earth.”

Berkley’s braid dangled to the ground as she tilted her head in confusion. “And that upsets you?”

“I destroyed the peace.”

Berkley brushed sand from her hands, unfolded her legs, and stood. “Or perhaps you’re bringing peace.”

“By disturbing a decade-old grave?”

She motioned to the hole. “We’re looking at an isolated image. Sometimes we need to step back and look at the entire canvas. Perhaps that woman and her child have a different destiny. Perhaps this land has a different destiny. You have to be open to what the universe sends you.” She tucked her hand through Grace’s arm and strolled along the camellia bushes.

Grace pictured what the universe had sent her way: a sun-soaked sailor who would never put down roots and give her forever and a speckled hound with bleeding feet. She laughed. “The universe must have mixed up a few deliveries lately.”

Berkley patted her arm. “The universe usually gets these things right.”

So much about Hatch was right. She loved his passion for life, his dedication to fighting the evils of this world, and the way he made her feel like she wasn’t alone anymore, like she was part of something bigger and better. Here she was walking arm and arm with one of Hatch’s teammates. She’d held hands with Ricky and Raymond and invited Alex out for a boat ride. Her life was no longer all about whorehouse kings and baby killers named Helena Ring. And the crazy thing? It wasn’t bothering her. Her father might be turning over in his grave, but she was the happiest she’d been in years, in a decade. She raised her face to the sky and laughed.

When she and Berkley reached the shack, the artist glided on her beaded sandals to the back porch while Grace lingered in her kitchen, where Agent Jon MacGregor had set up a command center complete with three computers and four phones at her kitchen table.

“Anything yet from the final number?” Agent MacGregor asked the RF engineer from the phone company.

“Nothing, but the minute anyone turns on the phone, we’ll jump on it. We’re assuming that once again mobile positioning will be unavailable,” the engineer said. “But we can begin triangulation of the signal as soon as the phone’s turned on.”

“And the cell sites on wheels?” Jon asked.

“We put four COWs in place, all in remote areas. Concentration of base station cells is low because the area’s so desolate. The COWs should help us pinpoint location more accurately.”

Grace didn’t understand this language, but she was grateful for the crew at her kitchen table. She strolled into the living room and searched for Blue. With all the people, he must have slinked off to find a quiet place to nap.

She stepped onto the front porch and immediately her skin prickled. Someone was watching her. She spun and found Hayden Reed, the SCIU’s criminal profiler, sitting in the corner on the porch swing.

Hayden motioned to Blue, who was stretched out on his back in the middle of the porch, showing his belly to the sun. The skin around the dog’s mouth sagged, exposing his gums and teeth. “He looks like he’s smiling,” Hayden said.

Grace sat on the top porch step and rested her back against the post. “Most upside down dogs look like they’re smiling.” Blue had every reason to smile. He’d had a long life, a full life, a life doing what he loved on land he couldn’t leave. Right now he was making the most of the time he had left. She stretched out her leg and rubbed her foot along his belly.

Hayden closed his laptop and Grace noticed a pair of wicked scratches down the back of his hand. “What happened?”

“Ellie the Devil Cat,” he said. “She’s not quite as docile as your friend Blue here. On my way to the airport, I dropped Ellie off at the boarding kennel because my fiancée is out of town helping an old friend who’s having some problems, and the cat from hell let me know of her displeasure.”

The screen door opened and Hatch stepped onto the front porch with Agent MacGregor. “The teams are heading out,” Agent MacGregor said. “Lieutenant Lang is putting extra patrols on the rivers, local police departments are on high alert, and the media is working with us to alert the public to be ultra watchful, particularly young women walking alone. The sun’s going down in a few hours, and I want everyone ready.”

Because at night the Gravedigger comes out to play.

The peace she’d found at the grave of the mother and child flitted away on the wind. It could be tonight, tomorrow night, or a week from next Tuesday. The only thing they were sure of was that she’d strike at night.

Hatch took a seat on the step below her, his shoulder brushing against her knee. He might not be saying much, but she welcomed his solid, steady presence, two words she never thought she’d use to describe Theodore Hatcher.

“Professor, what do you have on our gal?” Jon asked.

Grace shook her head. “I still struggle with the idea of the killer being a woman. In general, men are much more competitive.”

“Really?” Hatch asked with a lift of both brows. “You’re the most competitive person I know.”

Finally, Hatch said something. His absolute silence unnerved her, but the accusatory look on his face only made her smile. She had a deep, wide competitive streak that colored almost everything she did, and she’d never apologize about that.

Hayden straightened his cuffs. “Grace is right. Men are traditionally more competitive, but we have a victim who claimed to have heard a woman. The evidence backs that up. The wading boot prints found at the first victim’s grave are size eight, too small for most men. Given the depth of the impression and the relatively constant moisture level, we’re looking at an individual around one hundred pounds. As for the actual abductions, they were far from physical attacks. According to our second victim, she was hit with a stun gun and incapacitated long enough for the unsub to inject her with a substance to render her unconscious. A needle mark on the first victim’s upper shoulder points to a similar situation. Our unsub is not a person with brute physical strength, but she is agile and in relatively good health.”

Grace shuddered. No, the Gravedigger was sick, twisted sick. No one could do what she did and be called healthy.

“Good
physical
health,” Hayden amended with a smile in her direction, as if he could read her mind.

“So we’re looking at a woman,” Hayden continued. “Age twenty to thirty-five, around five feet tall and one hundred pounds. She’s local or has spent a considerable amount of time studying the area, but she doesn’t like the water or the outdoors in general. As a child, she was a loner and never played team sports, but she’s extremely competitive. She played computer games as a kid for hours on end, the kind with complex and fully-developed worlds. She isn’t gainfully employed but has access to money, either family money or ill-gotten. She may be a computer hacker. She’s not involved in any committed relationship and hated her mother.”

While the men on the porch mulled Hayden’s profile, Grace shook her head in awe. She’d worked with criminal profilers before, but never one who made such detailed claims with such confidence. “Amazing.”

Before anyone could say anything, Berkley opened the screen door and popped her head out. “Camellia’s ready.”

While the woman found at her construction site had nothing to do with the Gravedigger, Grace was anxious to put a name to the mother’s face. The bones were real and visible, unlike the invisible woman they were chasing.

On the back porch, late afternoon sun flooded the air, and Grace let her eyes adjust to the brightness. Once she did, her mouth fell open. “That can’t be right,” Grace said. Maybe the Apostles weren’t miracle workers, or maybe Berkley Rowe was having a bad day.

“This is her,” Berkley insisted. “This is Camellia.”

The clay skull had a narrow face, thin lips, and big eyes with lush lashes that looked uncomfortably familiar. Berkley had outfitted her with a thick black-haired wig and chocolaty brown eyes. “She looks like your sketch of the Gravedigger,” Grace said. “Are you sure you aren’t getting the two projects confused?”

Shaking her head, Berkley packed clay and tools and slipped them into a large silver suitcase.

“I agree with Grace, Berk,” Hatch said. “The two could pass for sisters. You haven’t gotten any sleep in the past forty-eight hours. Maybe you’re a little fuzzy.”

Berkley shook her head as if she were dealing with young children. “
This
is Camellia.”

“But—” Hatch started.

“What’s wrong with you, Hatch?” Berkley asked. “You know how this works. I relied on tissue depth markers tied to age, sex, and race. The bony substrate of the skull told me what kind of nose, mouth, and ears to make. This is science.”

Maybe Black Jack was wrong. Maybe there was a place in death for science.

“She’s beautiful, in a wild, earthy sort of way,” Grace said. “Why did you give her dark, curly hair?”

“That was just a hunch. Same thing with the eye color. The blackish-brown felt right with a strong face like this.”

“And the Ronnie Alderman/Gravedigger sketch?” Grace asked. The coincidences in appearance were too hard to swallow. “Were the dark curly hair and brown eyes just a hunch?”

“No. Direct observation. In separate interviews both members of the cleaning crew reported with a fair degree of certainty that the woman calling herself Ronnie had brown eyes and dark, curly hair.”

Hayden, who’d joined them on the porch, crossed his arms over his chest. “I’d be shocked if they’re not related.”

Berkley shrugged. “Very well could be. They could be mother-daughter, aunt-niece, even sister-sister.”

“That makes for quite a coincidence,” Grace said.

“Or does it?” Hatch paced along the railing, his hands in the back pockets of his long shorts. “When did you talk to Lia Grant?”

Eons ago, long before Hatch and bacon and old buried bones, when all that mattered was putting a whorehouse king in jail and notching another win. “On Wednesday,” Grace said. The day would be forever imprinted in her brain.

“And when was construction slated to begin?” Hatch continued, walking faster, so fast his hair fanned back from his forehead.

“Thursday.”

“So maybe the Gravedigger wanted to distract you. Maybe she didn’t want construction to begin because digging here would disturb what was essentially a sacred burial ground.”

“I’m all for positive thinking, Hatch,” Jon said. “But there are much easier ways to derail a construction project.”

Grace turned to the land beyond the porch, to the construction site with the silent machines.

“What is it, Grace?”

“The land. When Lamar Giroux put this land up for sale, there were six initial bidders, including me. Four of them dropped out quickly, but one was a serious contender, beating my four initial offers. I had to scrape together every dollar I could find to make that final bid.”

“But in the end you won,” Hatch said in a tone that was anything but victorious.

Every hair on Grace’s body stood on end. “And the other bidder lost.”

“Get the name of the real estate agent who brokered the deal, Grace. We need to find out about the other person who desperately wanted this land.”

Hayden tucked the name of the real estate agent into his jacket pocket and motioned Hatch to follow him to his rental car.

“Who is she?” Hayden asked when they reached the driveway.

Hatch slipped his hands through his hair. He could pretend he didn’t know what his teammate was talking about, but it was hard to bullshit a man like Hayden who saw everything. “Nothing gets by you, does it?”