Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

“Sam? Not the Doritos, hon.”

“Christ. Your ass is going to be bigger than a house by the time this baby’s born,” Finn said. “Don’t you want to maintain your figure? Maybe get Brody to put a ring on it after all?”

He slid his lanky body out of his chair and joined me at my desk. He sat on the edge of it and as I looked at the manicured black eyebrows that framed his baby blue eyes, groomed as carefully and obsessively as a woman’s, I felt the first ache of acid reflux flood my chest.

“You know, that kind of language could be considered sexual harassment in many work places,” I told him. “But I’ll forgive you, I know you haven’t been laid in what? Six months? Seven?”

I picked up the last pickle and bit it in half as the grin fell off his face. He stalked back to his desk. Hitting below the belt wasn’t my usual style but Finn brought out the worst in me. Part of it had to do with the fact that at his core, Finn was actually more than a decent cop. He was a damn good one. But he didn’t know when to shut up and he walked a moral line that weaved a little too much for my taste. I saw a boatload of talent slowly going to waste.

If I was honest with myself, though, which I try to be, what really bothered me the most about Finn was the power he had over my future.

A few months back, he’d almost cost me my job.

We were partners on a home invasion case, high up in the mountains above Cedar Valley, in a subdivision where houses started in the low seven-figures, and four and five-car garages were the norm, not the exception. It was a burglary that went south when the homeowner pulled a knife; not a great idea when the bad guys have guns. The wife and son managed to escape but the six-year-old daughter was shot and killed by a stray bullet. The bad guys were not especially bright and they were caught a few days later.

There were problems from the start, though, with the whole case. There was a jurisdiction question, as the property line of the house butted up against Avondale County, where the cops are hungry for action. They were first on the scene and one of them, a real sweetheart from Butte, Montana, found cocaine in the master bathroom. He called in his brother, a DEA agent, and by the time Finn and I arrived on the scene, it was chaos. It didn’t help matters that the homeowner was a former Cedar Valley City Council member, close to Mayor Bellington. The wife blamed the coke on a foreign housekeeper long since fired. Other things, important things, began to get covered up.

There was enormous pressure to close the case. In the chaos, though, the evidence collection had been shoddy. It wasn’t any one person’s fault, just the way things go when you’ve got three agencies duking it out at a crime scene. Just when it looked like the case would be dismissed, new evidence appeared. I couldn’t prove it, but I was certain the prosecutor and Finn colluded together to ensure a conviction. Finn took an enormous risk, both for him and for me; had he gone down on charges of planting evidence, as his partner I’d have gone down with him.

Justice was served but the law was twisted and I was reminded of an important lesson, one that I’d seen time and again but never at such risk to my own career. At the end of the day, no one really cares how you put the bad guys away, as long as you get it done. I hated knowing that at any time, on any case, Finn’s actions might blow up in our faces. That’s the thing about partners; you hold each other’s lives in your hands.

I hit the power button on my PC and waited for it to boot up. Before I headed to the morgue to observe the autopsy, I wanted to write up some notes while the crime scene was still fresh in my mind.

Sam Birdshead returned with my chips and he tossed them to me, then sat down and took out his steno notebook. Sam had only been with us a few weeks, a rookie from Denver, fresh meat. He was better than an intern because we didn’t have to shield anything from him and he was willing to do the grunt work, the odd jobs and the messy stuff. We took turns babysitting him. This first year was critical to the success or failure he would have as a cop. Sam was a quick study. If I could minimize his time with Finn Nowlin, he might have a chance of becoming a halfway decent officer.

I logged into my desktop and waited for the half-dozen programs to load. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sam eyeing the wooden shelves that lined the wall behind me. They sagged with half a dozen large binders, each stuffed to capacity with documents and photographs and topographical maps, and I knew what the next words out of his mouth would be.

“Are those the Woodsman books?” he asked.

Nodding, I opened the word processing program and created a new file. I named it “RTolliver” and added a subtitle with the date and time. The document that popped up stared at me, blank and empty and waiting to be filled with the sad details of Reed Tolliver’s final moments.

“Mind if I take a look?” Sam said. Without waiting for a reply, he reached around me and took the top binder, thick and black like the other standard-issue casebooks we bought wholesale from a distributer out west. The department had been buying them for years. Decades.

I didn’t fault Sam’s curiosity; he hadn’t grown up around here.

When tragedy strikes a small town, it leaves a scar that never heals. Months and years may pass and the scar may fade, but it never goes away. It becomes a part of the town, marking it as different, a permanent reminder of what may have been, what could have been.

The Woodsman murders were as much a part of Cedar Valley’s culture as the ski chalets and hiking trails. You couldn’t go a dozen steps in town without seeing the tattered remains of posters, battered all these years by wind and rain and snow and time. Mostly time.

A few of the posters were still intact, the black headline of “Missing” faded to pale gray, the pictures of the children blurred together so that you couldn’t tell who was who anymore. They were simply the McKenzie boys, which makes them sound as though they were a singing group from the ’50s, except of course they weren’t.

They were Tommy and Andrew McKenzie.

They were cousins, two years apart, with pale hair. They liked chocolate ice cream and Matchbox cars. They rode bikes along the river and chased rabbits with BB guns. They disappeared in the summer of 1985.

Most of what remained of the posters were small corners and narrow strips of paper, the glue and tape pressed so hard to the telephone poles and storefront windows you could feel the panic and urgency with which they had been plastered up.

The disappearance and murder of the McKenzie boys defined Cedar Valley in a way that is hard to explain to an outsider. Perhaps it was the fact that children were involved; maybe it was the fact that the murders were never solved. Unanswered questions take root in people’s hearts and burrow in, rearing their heads up every so often.

You go on, but you don’t forget. Ever.

It happened with the McKenzie boys and it happened again, twenty-seven years later, with the death of Nicky Bellington. Nicky was a little different; there was no crime, no blame to place on someone. He was there one minute and the next he was gone, a quick slip followed by a long fall. But for the mayor, and his family, it was a fact they lived with every day; them, and countless others whose lives have been torn apart in a single moment.

I typed my notes, describing the awful scene inside the circus tent. I let the images of the dust and the dirt on the ground wash over me, the way they swirled around the dead clown like finger paintings. The acrid, ripe stench of fresh manure and heavy sweat that could mean only one thing: farm animal.