Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

He sneezed into the phone. “I don’t know, I just know it’s creepy as hell. What am I supposed to do with this thing? Fingerprint it?”

I sighed. “Keep the ticket, bag the bird. Bring both to the station tomorrow.”

“Where the hell am I going to put a dead bird?”

“I don’t know, Finn. Put it in a box or something. Jesus. You sound like a twelve-year-old girl. Don’t you have an empty shoe box? Double-bag it and put it on your porch. Maybe the raccoons will ignore it.”

He muttered a few words I chose to ignore, then he was back on the line. “What are you doing anyway? Eating bonbons? Watching Sex and the City ?”

I rolled my eyes. “I think we need to take a closer look at the parents.”

“The Bellingtons? The mayor’s a little busy with chemo treatments and collecting votes. He’s hardly out trolling the streets and nailing dead birds on his officers’ doors.”

“No, the McKenzie boys; their parents. Finn, what if… what if the kids were killed because of their parents?”

It sounded so crazy when I said it out loud. This was old history.

Finn was silent.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, I’m thinking. They were all cleared, weren’t they?”

I paced the house, stepping over Seamus, who watched me like I was an idiot. Any walking other than outside was sort of pointless in his mind.

“Yes, they were cleared. And on the surface, they don’t have any one thing in common, not all of them together. But what if there’s something else? What if, I don’t know, there’s some event, something in their past, that ties them and the Woodsman together?”

Another cough. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. What’s with all the hacking, don’t tell me you’re getting sick.”

“Nah, it’s the damn cat. Fucking allergies,” Finn said.

I stopped pacing. “I thought you said it was a bird?”

He replied after the briefest of pauses. “It is a bird. The cat is Kelly’s.”

And then I heard another voice in the background, screechy and squeaky like a tire taking a bad turn, and I laughed.

“Don’t tell me Kelly Clameater is back to Kelly Maneater?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

“Don’t be crude,” Finn said. “You know her name’s Clambaker.”

Finn must have walked into another room; I couldn’t hear the squawk anymore. Kelly had what you might call a five-alarm set of pipes, the sort of voice that stopped people in their tracks and made them pray to the Lord to just make it stop.

“I thought after she went, um, after she decided she was more into girls, you guys were finished?”

“She’s had a change of mind,” Finn replied, and I could hear the smirk in his voice.

“Uh-huh. She brings her cat?”

“Sometimes.”

“Uh-huh.”

A double beep saved me from any more details. I checked the caller.

“Finn, it’s Sam. Let me call you back,” I said, and changed lines. “What’s going on, Sam?”

“I’m not calling too early, am I?”

His voice was muffled by a low whirring noise that suddenly picked up in intensity.

“No, not all-but Sam, what is that? A blender? Can you turn it off? I can barely hear you.”

The noise stopped. “Sorry, yeah. It’s a juicer; I just bought it. I had one of those coupons for Bed Bath and Beyond. So listen, I was going over the inventory from Nick’s room, you know, the one Moriarty and Finn did? Three years ago?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, back at the dining-room table. I glanced over at the thick stack of files I had yet to go through.

“Everything seems pretty typical, normal, you know, for a kid,” he said. “But under his bed, they found a piece of paper and a gold necklace, both items tucked up into the mattress, sort of hidden. The necklace has a pendant, maybe a daisy. I’ll read you what was on the piece of paper. You got a pen?”

I grabbed my notebook and ripped out a clean spiral-edged sheet. “Go.”

Sam cleared his throat, then said, “I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.”

“Is it Nicky’s writing?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sam said. He chugged something and swallowed thickly. “Creepy, though, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “So they found a necklace and a note under the bed. Anything else?”

“I’m still looking. Oh, and Gemma, I got a message at the station. Some lady called looking for the chief and that new temp, what’s her name, Angie, she passed the message on to me. The lady’s name is Kirshbaum, with a K. She said she’s got important information, for the chief’s ears only. Ring any bells?”

I flipped through a mental Rolodex and paused at the K’s, then kept flipping through. “No, I don’t think so…”

“You sound unsure,” Sam said.

I snapped my fingers. “You know those late-night lawyer commercials, where they get you off a murder charge for two hundred bucks? I swear, that’s the guy’s name. Kirshbaum. Carson, or Kyle. Something like that.”

“Hang on,” Sam said. “I’ll Google it.”

I waited and gnawed at a dry cuticle.

“Canyon Kirshbaum?”

“That’s it. Canyon Kirshbaum. Is there a photo? He’s kind of a big guy.”

Sam grunted. “No photo, just a crappy Web site. What kind of a name is Canyon? So, what? Maybe it’s his wife that called?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Might not even be the same Kirshbaum. I’ll give them a call tomorrow. I’m sure it can wait a day. She’s probably some local busybody playing Agatha Christie.”

“You mean Miss Marple. Agatha Christie was the author,” Sam said.

He grunted again and then in the background I heard a doorbell ring. “Just a sec, Gemma.”

There were voices and then Sam was on the phone again. “Hey, can we talk later? A couple of the guys are here, we’re going fishing.”

“Sure. Have fun. Oh, and Sam-”

“Yeah?”

I was about to tell him to be careful, considering Finn’s dead bird.

“Nothing. Catch a beaut, ok?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and clicked off.

Hours later, I would recall that moment, how the click was like a period at the end of a sentence.

I would recall how I almost called him back and told him fishing could wait, that we should call Kirshbaum right now and make something out of our Sunday.

That’s what cops do, after all. They chase the leads while the leads are white-hot.

But I didn’t. Not that day.

Instead, I picked through the weekend paper and read about war and famine in Africa and a super-strain of malaria resistant to all drugs and George Clooney’s latest blockbuster.

I wondered, later-much later-if I had called Sam, if he would have stayed, and gone with me to Kirshbaum’s house.

I think he might have.

I met Chief Chavez in the hospital waiting room. He came straight from his daughter’s soccer tournament, and under the fluorescent lights, he was pale, his legs surprisingly skinny in black and white gym shorts. Dark stains under his armpits made half-moons on his gray T-shirt, and when he removed his Nike visor, patches of hair stood up in a half-dozen cowlicks.

Chavez said, “His parents are on their way in. The dad was in Cheyenne, his mom in Denver. I got hold of the older sister, too, she’s swinging down to the Springs to pick up the younger one.”

“Where is he?”

Chavez leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. “He’s in surgery. Gemma, it’s not good. He lost a lot of blood, and…”

He sagged down to rest on his heels, and put his head in his hands.

“And what?”

Chavez shook his head and bit his lip. “They might not be able to save his leg. If he makes it through surgery, they’ll likely amputate as soon as he’s stable.”