The Hiding Place Page 18

  “Thanks for that.” At least her grandmother had someone watching over her. “How did you find the guy?”

  “He came forward on his own when he heard about the bombing,” said Thrasher. “He’s just a kid. Eighteen-year-old student at Northshire Community College. Lives with a couple of roommates in one of those Victorian triples on Elm Street. He says they found the kittens under the porch, and the mother was long gone, so he dropped them off at Patience’s house.”

  “How did he know about the rescue drop-off?” asked Gil.

  “Everyone in town knows about it,” said Mercy. “Patience sees to that.”

  “Did the kid see anything?”

  “He said he didn’t notice any cars on the road when he drove up, but that he wasn’t really paying any attention. He parked at the bottom of the driveway on the side and walked up to the front door with the box of kittens. Rang the doorbell and left the way he came.”

  “And he saw nothing on the way back?” asked Mercy, stamping her feet to keep warm. It was growing colder now that dusk was approaching.

  “No.”

  “I suppose it was always a long shot,” said Troy.

  “Not so fast.” Captain Thrasher smiled. “He heard a snowmobile, and he reckons it was either an old model or a modified one, because it was very noisy.”

  “Noisy?”

  “There are noise restrictions on snowmobiles,” said Thrasher.

  “For most snow machines, that’s a noise level specification of not more than seventy-three decibels on the A scale at fifty feet,” rattled off Troy.

  “Nice recitation,” said Mercy.

  “I’ve given countless tickets to hot-doggers who tamper with their snowmobiles’ exhaust systems so that they can scream down those paths. Thereby inciting the displeasure of their neighbors.”

  “So how does this help us?”

  “We’re tracking down the owners of antique models and those who’ve received tickets for noise.”

  “Don’t forget the racers,” said Gil. “They don’t have to follow the same rules on the racetrack, and they like ’em loud.”

  “Good point,” said Thrasher.

  “How about George Rucker?”

  The captain shook his head. “Thousands of tips coming, but all false sightings so far. But something may still turn up.”

  “The sooner, the better,” said Mercy, thinking of her grandmother.

  “He’s out there somewhere,” said Troy. “Sooner or later someone will see him and we’ll get him.”

  “Any word on the forensics at the blast site?” asked Mercy.

  “Not yet. Nothing traceable. Nothing at your cabin either. At least not yet.”

  “What about Colby?” asked Troy.

  “Still trying to find that camera.” Thrasher frowned. “Or anything else that might qualify as a real lead. All dead ends so far.” The captain looked around the crime scene. “Although this may change everything.”

  “If the two deaths are related.”

  “Harrington would be very pleased if they were,” said Thrasher.

  “He could kill two birds with one stone,” said Gil.

  Thrasher cleared his throat. “Harrington is working as hard as I’ve ever seen him. He’s committed to getting to the bottom of all this as soon as possible.” The captain paused. “As is the governor.”

  “That’s good news,” said Mercy. The more the governor pressured Harrington for results, the better.

  “The media are doing their part, too,” said the captain. “Hounding Harrington. I think he’s actually dreading the spotlight these days.”

  Mercy tried to picture the PR-hungry Harrington ducking the camera, and failed.

  “Here comes Dr. Darling,” said Gil.

  The conversation came to a dead stop as they all watched the medical examiner make her way to the winterberry bushes. Mercy found herself holding her breath, and deliberately exhaled. She reminded herself to breathe, even as she hoped against hope that Beth Kilgore had not spent the last twenty years in that steel drum.

  Dr. Darling removed the plastic gloves that covered her winter gloves and tucked them into a wristband of her crime scene coveralls. “We’ve moved as quickly as we can. We’ve bagged what we could and the rest will have to wait until we get back to the lab.”

  She looked up at the darkening sky. “With the storm coming in, the only thing to do is to get this evidence out before the weather takes a turn for the worse. We’ll come back after the storm to make sure we haven’t missed anything, not that there will be much to find. But we’ve done the best we can under the circumstances.”

  “What did you find?”

  “We opened all the barrels. Only one body.” Dr. Darling looked at Mercy. “The one you found.”

  “What was in the rest of them?” asked Gil.

  “Mostly household and construction waste. Old cans of paint, motor oil, chemicals.”

  Mercy bit her tongue. All she cared about was the body, and whether or not it was Beth Kilgore.

  “And the body?”

  “Not much left of it. Mostly skeletal remains. Just bones, some hair, scraps of denim from the victim’s jeans, and polyester fibers from what looks like a shirt. And a pair of boots—duck boots—that are in pretty good shape.”

  “Those rubber soles last forever,” said Gil.

  Dr. Darling nodded. “And even the high-grade leather uppers are more or less intact.”

  “That’s what you get with L.L. Bean,” said Gil. “When they say those boots last forever, they’re not kidding.”

  “Which means our victim was killed how long ago?” asked Mercy.

  “At least a decade. Maybe two.”

  That would mean this body could indeed be Beth Kilgore, thought Mercy. The timing worked. “Any indication how the victim died?”

  “There’s what looks to be a bullet hole in the skull. Low on the forehead, centered, right above the eyes. I’m guessing .38 caliber. But I’ll have to take a closer look. I’ll know more later.”

  “But you do believe that the victim was murdered.”

  “That’s still a guess at this point. All I can say for sure right now is that he was pushed into that barrel headfirst, however he died.”

  Mercy stared at her. “He?”

  “From the pelvic bone and the brow ridge, it looks like an adult male. And the duck boots were definitely men’s boots. Around size eleven.” Dr. Darling smiled at Mercy. “This is not your Beth Kilgore. This is a man.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Mercy didn’t know what to think. Part of her was relieved that Beth Kilgore had not been shot and stuffed into that barrel. But another part of her was bewildered. If this were not Beth Kilgore, then who was it? And what, if anything, did it have to do with everything that had gone wrong for her family in the past forty-eight hours?

  “Was there anything to identify the victim?” asked Thrasher, cutting right to the heart of the matter as he always seemed to do.

  “No wallet, no ID,” said Dr. Darling. “Nothing left of whatever was in his pockets.”

  “So whoever killed him didn’t want anyone to know who he was.”

  “The only thing that we’ve found that might be traceable is a man’s wedding ring. Plain gold band. Tarnished due to the other metals used in the ring, but not too badly. And it looks like there may be an inscription inside. I’ll let you know when I’ve had a chance to clean it up a bit.”

  “That might help,” said Troy, “depending on what the inscription is.”

  “Failing that,” said Thrasher, “do you think you’ll get enough DNA from what’s left of him to make a clean identification if we can find a match?”

  “I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Dr. Darling. “Now we’ve got to get packed up and out of here, pronto.”

  The crime scene techs packed up their evidence and their gear and Mercy and Gil and Troy and the captain helped them carry it all to the Sno-Cats. By the time they were finished, it was dark
and cold and the first flurries had begun. Mercy waved goodbye to the captain and Dr. Darling and her team as the noisy snow tanks took off with a roar, their bright headlights illuminating the old logging road stretching through the forest before them.

  “Let’s follow them at a distance,” yelled Troy over the din.

  She and Troy clipped waterproof red LED lights onto Elvis and Susie Bear’s collars so they could keep track of them on the way back to the ranger station.

  “Good to go,” said Troy. “Stay with us.”

  Mercy, Gil, and Troy mounted the snowmobiles and took off, the dogs running along in their wake. The forest loomed all around them. Above them just a slim sliver of sky mirroring their path through the woods but hidden now in a swirl of snow. Mercy focused on the taillights of the snow machine in front of her, and the solid figure of Troy, its driver. As the snow fell like a veil between them, she found herself wishing that she could reach out and touch him.

  * * *

  THE MOOD IN Troy’s Ford F-150 on the long ride home was restrained. Maybe it was the lingering echo of the snowmobiles’ blare on the trail that silenced them. Or maybe it was the effort required to ignore the current that ran between them, charged with longing that seemed to intensify with every mile. Mercy didn’t dare look at Troy; she didn’t trust herself to hold back if he in any way acknowledged the electricity in the air.

  Troy was quiet, too, his eyes on the road as they drove on as the snow whirled all around them. She wondered if he were keeping his distance and waiting for her to make the first move.

  Or she could be reading him all wrong and he was simply preoccupied with thoughts of the investigation.

  She tried to train her brain on the case, but she found her thinking clouded by the conundrum of variables and unknowns and suppositions. She let the flow of facts and figures, assertions and assumptions, detours and distractions wash over her. Stones skipping across a stream. Fog billowing over the sea. Starlings flocking through the sky.

  It didn’t help. She needed to get home and get organized. That always helped her think it through.

  * * *

  TROY DROPPED MERCY and Elvis off at her grandmother’s house to pick up her Jeep. She didn’t expect to find anyone at home, as Patience and Claude were staying at Lillian’s house and the hospital was closed for the night and snow was still falling heavily. But there was a light on in the clinic, so Mercy and Elvis went in to investigate. Bea Garcia was there, coaxing recalcitrant felines into carriers. A tattoo of two red cherries on twin stems on the inside of her left wrist peeked out from the long sleeve of her blue silk jacquard blouse as she reached around one of the cat carriers to zip it up.

  Bea didn’t look like the kind of woman who’d have a tattoo of anything anywhere, much less one like that. Mercy had a roommate in college who was really into ink; she knew that cherry tattoos were favored by gamblers into Lady Luck, rockabilly fans into nostalgia, and women into symbols of innocence, sexuality, and fertility.

  But cherry tattoos always reminded Mercy of women and friendship, like Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So we grow together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition; Two lovely berries moulded on one stem.… Mercy wondered what Bea’s cherry tattoo meant to her.

  “Interesting tattoo,” she said.

  “A youthful indiscretion,” said Bea with a smile. “As I imagine most tattoos are.”

  “I don’t know,” said Mercy. “Seems like everyone’s getting ink these days.”

  “You?”

  “No,” said Mercy. “I thought about it when I was in the Army, but I never got around to it.” Martinez had a sugar skull tattooed on his left arm, which he said represented the thin line between life and death. She would trace the intricate lines of the death mask when they were in bed together. The image fascinated her. He’d gotten the tat when he was a teenager to honor his grandfather after he passed on to the other side. Martinez was a man of faith, and while she used to tease him about his religiosity, she was glad that he’d been a believer, and had died secure in the knowledge that he’d gone to his maker. When he was killed, she’d thought about getting one of her own to honor his death. She didn’t do it, but from time to time she still dreamed about that tattoo, and Martinez’s arms around her.

  “Are you all right?” Bea stood there, balancing the cat carrier against her slender torso.

  “Sorry, it’s been a crazy couple of days.”

  “I understand,” said Bea sympathetically. “Maybe you should go home.”

  “I’m fine,” said Mercy for what felt like the hundredth time that day. “What are you doing here in this weather?”

  “The Cat Ladies are full up. And Ed went home to his family to ride out the storm. So I’m taking your grandmother’s cats and the kittens you found to stay with me.”

  “That’s great. But that’s a lot of cats. Are you sure you have enough room?”

  “I’ve got a big old Greek Revival home,” Bea said. “Early nineteenth century. Plenty of space.”

  “You live there by yourself?”

  “I lost my husband six years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.” Everyone has lost someone, thought Mercy. Everyone has secret sorrows casting shadows on their hearts and their minds and their souls.

  “It is what it is.” Bea shrugged. “I’ve been on my own since then. Well, except for the animals. I have two rescue black labs and a couple of rescue tabbies of my own, and I foster when your grandmother or the Cat Ladies call.”

  “Have you seen Patience today?”

  Bea busied herself with the kittens, avoiding Mercy’s gaze.

  “You may as well tell me,” said Mercy.

  “She was here earlier, working,” said Bea. “She didn’t want you or Grace to know.”

  “I bet she didn’t. What about Claude?”

  “He didn’t leave her side.”

  “And the police detail?”

  Bea gave her a blank look.

  “She’s supposed to have twenty-four/seven police protection.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Okay.” Mercy whistled for Elvis. “Let’s get this place locked up and get you and the felines on the road.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go talk to my grandmother.”

  “You’re upset.”

  “She needs to be more careful.” Mercy punched the back of the padded office chair. “That pipe bomber is still out there.”

  “Of course.”

  Mercy helped load the carriers into the back of Bea’s Subaru SUV.

  Bea closed the hatch. “Look, I can see that you’re worried. I didn’t know she was supposed to stay at Lillian’s house with a police guard. I didn’t mean to enable any risky behavior on her part.”

  “Are you a shrink?” Mercy’s mother, Grace, had dragged her to more than one therapist and she recognized the jargon. Or maybe Bea was in therapy herself. Which was all well and good; Mercy knew it worked for some people. As long as they kept her out of it.

  “No. I’m a copy editor with a weakness for self-help books and nineteenth-century French novels.”

  Mercy laughed. “I have a weakness for dog training manuals and Shakespeare myself.”

  “Then you understand.”

  “Goodnight. Drive safe.”

  Bea waved goodbye as she got into her SUV, and Mercy waved back.

  “Come on, Elvis,” she said once Bea had driven away. “Let’s go scold Patience.”

  * * *

  LILLIAN JENKINS LIVED in a big white Colonial built on the two-hundred-acre farm that had been in her family since the mid-1700s. Her son Ethan and nine-year-old grandson Henry lived with her. Mercy was very fond of Henry, and when he answered the door with his dog, Robin, by his side, she and Elvis were glad to see them both. Henry was small for his age and liked numbers better than people and had a tendency to wander off when you weren’t looking, but his
service dog—a smart and loyal Great Pyrenees and Australian shepherd mix—made sure that he stayed out of trouble.

  “Hi, Henry.” She looked past him down the hall. “Why are you answering the door? Where are Officer Becker and Officer Goodlove?”

  Henry ignored her and went straight for Elvis, oblivious to the cold billows of snow blowing into the house.

  “Let’s move this inside.” She whistled and the shepherd untangled himself from Henry. She stepped into the foyer, closing the door and locking it behind her. Robin herded Henry down the hall toward the den.

  Mercy and Elvis hurried after them into a large wood-paneled space with a game table and a big dark-red leather sofa. Lillian Jenkins and her son, Ethan, rose from the couch to greet them. For mother and son they couldn’t have been more different; she was short and lively and outgoing and he was tall and serious and reserved. But together they were raising young Henry, whose mother had left and wasn’t coming back.

  “Mercy, how lovely to see you,” said Lillian.

  She didn’t answer, surveilling the room and not seeing what she wanted to see. She felt her face redden with fear and panic and anger. “Where is my grandmother?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Lillian frowned. “I thought she was with you.”

  Mercy felt her heart sink. “And Claude?”

  “Claude, too.”

  Ethan stepped forward. “Is there a problem?”

  “They’re not with me. I’ve been upstate all day. I just got back, and when I went to the animal hospital to get my Jeep, Bea Garcia told me that Patience and Claude had been at the clinic earlier but were here now.” She pulled out her cell and texted both Patience and Claude:

  Where r u? Call me NOW.

  “I haven’t seen them since late afternoon,” said Lillian. “They did go into the clinic, and then they came back here for an early dinner. Afterward Patience said that they were going to talk to you.”

  Mercy glanced at her cell. She could see that the texts had been delivered, but not yet read. “They’re not answering.” She called her grandmother, knowing that she preferred calls to texts. “Straight to voice mail.” She tried calling Claude. “Same thing.”