Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

He sighed and thought a moment. “Look, I’m only telling you this because we’re partners, now, right? All for one, and one for all? I know you’ve been holding that home invasion case against me, but the truth is, I got nothing against you, except when you don’t shut up and listen when you should. No one was going to answer for that little girl who got killed, and the DA and I did what we needed to do to make sure those assholes didn’t hurt another kid. Am I proud of what we did? No. Would I do it again? You bet! You can quote Chavez’s little rule book all you want, Gemma, but when push comes to shove, it’s our job to put the bad guys away, no matter what it takes.”

“Even when that means crossing the line yourself?”

Finn nodded. “It’s always been about the lesser of two evils, Gemma. Always.”

I understood his rationale. I just wasn’t sure I could ever live it.

“Who’s pissed at me?”

“Yesterday I heard Moriarty bitching to someone on the phone that maybe Chavez put you on the Bellington case as the department’s fall guy,” Finn said. He shrugged. “That was all I heard.”

I was stunned. First, that Moriarty would say that. I’ve never had a problem with Moriarty. And second, that there was even the slightest possibility that the chief would do that to me… give me a case, thinking that I’d fail him.

Fail the department. Be the fall guy-for the family, the press, and the town. The guy the shit rains down on when the case goes unsolved.

“Who the hell was on the other end of the line?”

“It doesn’t matter. When Moriarty saw me, he got off the phone real quick.”

As if I didn’t have enough to deal with already. Well, Moriarty could just sit tight and watch me solve this case. And just maybe solve the Woodsman murders, too, with a little help from Nicky Bellington.

We got into my car and I tried to shrug off Finn’s words. I relived our conversation with Lisey.

“Do you think Lisey was telling the truth? About that being her dad on the phone?” I asked.

Finn didn’t answer, and I looked at him as I started the ignition. He lifted his right index finger to his lips and dialed a number on his cell with his left hand.

“Ah, yes, sir, this is Mr. Smith with the U.S. Census department. We’ve had a bit of a sticky situation with our records, and I’m just calling folks in town, confirming current residents,” Finn said with a perfect Boston accent. He listened for a moment and then held the phone away from his ear.

“All right then, sorry to trouble you, sir. You have a great day.”

Finn clicked off the phone and smirked at me. “Well, she’s a good little liar, I’ll give her that much.”

“How on Earth-” I began and the image of Finn holding Lisey’s phone flashed across my mind. “You sneaky son of a bitch.”

“The sneakiest,” he said, and leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Dude was pissed. Said he didn’t have to talk to no fucking census department because he didn’t fucking live there and was only a fucking renter because the fucking government couldn’t get him a fucking job and fuck you, motherfucker, for ruining my beautiful fucking day.”

“Wow, that’s some real pretty language. Get a name?”

Finn shook his head, his eyes still closed. “Nah. But we can trace the number when we get back. I don’t think the dude’s going anywhere.”

While Finn’s charms may have worked on Lisey, they had no effect on Tilly Jane Krinkle. I introduced the two of them and she paid about as much attention to him as a cat would to a saucer of sour milk. The librarian led us down into the basement archives, and as she stroked the stuffed parrot and cooed to it, I saw Finn’s mouth open.

I quickly elbowed him and shook my head. The last thing we needed was to piss off Tilly.

She said, “All right, kiddos, the space is all yours. Now, there are a couple of rules and yes, I know you are police officers but I don’t give a god dang rat’s butt, you follow the same guidelines as everyone else. And I ain’t asking, I’m telling.”

Tilly waited until we nodded our heads and then continued.

“There will be absolutely, positively, no marking, drawing, or otherwise writing on these materials. There’s a copy machine around the corner. If you remove something from a box, place it back in the same god dang spot. Don’t shelve or return anything yourselves; you’ll put it in wrong and then we’ll never see it again.”

Tilly cocked her head and closed her eyes and then jerked to the side with a violent spasm. Finn and I jumped at the sudden movement.

“Petey says go deep or go home,” she said. “She says you’ll know what that means.”

With that, she left us in the basement.

As before, the space was dark save for our small corner. In the stillness, I smelled Finn’s cologne, and old paper, and a musty odor, like the air inside a summer cabin that’s been closed up all winter.

Finn pulled a second chair over from another study carrel. He removed his wallet and cell phone and keys and placed them to the side and then sat down and took a stack of newspaper clippings from the top of the messy pile.

“What did she mean by that? Who’s Petey?”

“Petey is the parrot,” I said. “And I have no idea.”

I joined Finn and reached for one of the heavy, gray three-ring binders on the table. When I opened it, a dead black spider, its desiccated corpse as light as air, fell into my lap. I brushed the bug away and it struck me that the last person who had touched this stuff was Nicky.

Had he really found something here, in these old articles and photos and scraps of a forgotten time, something the rest of us had missed?

The binder was stuffed with newspaper clippings from the spring and summer of 1985. A few of them covered the sad story of Rose Noonan, the young woman whose strangled body was found tangled in the reeds on the banks of the river in August. Her murder, like the Woodsman murders, remained unsolved. The police always figured her killer was a drifter, a highwayman. Rose had lived in town only a few months, and judging from these clippings, her death, while shocking to Cedar Valley, didn’t light a candle to the disappearance earlier in the summer of the two local boys.

I held up a black-and-white Xerox copy of Rose Noonan’s driver’s license. She was pretty, with dark curly hair and laughing eyes. She wore a necklace with a dangling charm, and earrings that kissed her jawbone. “Remember her?”

Finn nodded. “The forgotten one.”

I looked at him. After a moment, he spoke again. “You know what I mean. She’s the forgotten one. When you think of 1985 and Cedar Valley, you think of the McKenzie boys. But there were three victims that summer. Four if you count the mayor’s death. I always figured the stress from everything that happened brought on his heart attack.”

“You think it was the same guy?”

Finn laughed at my expression. “Now hang on, that’s not what I meant. Different M.O. She was assaulted and strangled and thrown in the river like a piece of trash, a month after the boys disappeared. The kids weren’t touched that way. They were kept somewhere, killed, and then buried, properly, in the woods. I just meant that no one ever talks about her. You know they couldn’t even determine a date of death for her? Her body had been in the water too long.”

He was right; no one did talk about the woman.

“Do you think it would have made a difference three years ago, if you and Moriarty had gone through all this stuff?”

Finn shrugged. “I don’t know. Bottom line is that Nicky was gone. I suppose it would have been interesting to know about, but really, the only reason we’re down here now is because Nicky was murdered. Back then ‘all this’ would have been just a quirky footnote to Nicky’s life and tragic accidental death.”