Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

Bull was shaking his head but there was a light in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. He leaned forward. “Something has bothered me about that woman’s murder, Gemma, for years. I read the autopsy report on Rose Noonan. Her body wasn’t, uh, fresh when it was dragged out of the river.”

I’d never read her autopsy report but I remembered Finn had said something along the same lines, something about difficulty determining her date of death. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, maybe the boys weren’t the first victims that summer. Maybe Rose Noonan died first.”

I chewed on the inside of my lip, thinking. “So Rose first, then the boys. I don’t know that it does make a difference.”

Bull shook his head, frustrated. “Of course it makes a difference, Gem, if it was the same killer. He kills her first, then the boys. But he purposefully stages it so her body is found second. Why do that? She was new to town, lived alone in a studio apartment south of the tracks. She had no friends, knew only a few people. No one reported her missing. She could have been dead a month or two before her body was placed in the river. Maybe her body was dumped, sometime after the boys went missing, to throw us all off. Looked at that way, it changes things, doesn’t it? You’re the detective; doesn’t it change things?”

“I don’t know. She was raped and strangled. The boys were killed by blows to the head. She was dumped. The boys were buried. Either it makes a difference, or it doesn’t. If the Woodsman killed both Rose Noonan and the McKenzie boys, what’s the connection? What’s the motive? Crimes of passion are usually single events. Rarely do we see someone progress to a serial killer based on one heat-of-the-moment killing,” I said, thinking out loud. “Did you know Louis Moriarty’s son was interviewed for the McKenzie murders?”

Bull took another sip of his hot cocoa and nodded. “Everyone was, Gemma. Me included.”

“Louis has been giving me grief about digging around in the past,” I said. “Jesus, that would be something, if Lou’s son was the Woodsman and Frank killed Rose Noonan. And they all went right on living here in town, innocent as could be.”

Bull stood. He tightened his bathrobe belt and went to the window, his hands deep in his bathrobe pockets. An expression crossed his face that I remembered well from watching him on the bench. It was the expression of a man at odds, wrestling with his base instinct to trust and love his neighbor, and his seasoned experience that no man is above sin.

I waited.

“Gemma, I wish I had more answers for you, but I don’t. Lou struggled with Danny for years. He was a headstrong young man, and he gave Lou and Ella a real tough time. I think Lou himself always wondered if Danny could have killed those boys. It was a relief when Danny graduated high school and left Cedar Valley. He was sort of the town bully, but we didn’t call it that in those days. He was just the tough kid everyone shied away from,” Bull said. He scratched at the back of his head and then checked his fingernails. “As for Frank, well, you’re right, of course. I never thought he was a killer. I never should have thought I knew him well enough to say one way or the other.”

Bull paused, then continued. “But just because a man is weak in the bedroom doesn’t make him a killer, Gemma. You know that better than anyone.”

My face flushed and I stood up and grabbed my purse.

“Thanks for the breakfast, Bull. Say hi to Julia when she gets home. And thanks for talking to the police, finally. I hope it’s a weight off your self-righteous chest.”

Bull stared at me, sad. “I’m sorry, honey, that came out all wrong. Brody is nothing like Frank Bellington. He adores you. He regrets what he did.”

I nodded. “Sure. I’ll see myself out.”

Frank Bellington’s funeral was a few days later. Like most funerals, the telling of the dead brought equal parts tears and laughter. Sorrow for the loss, joy for the life. I decided the measure of a life well lived must be how easily the tears and the laughter ebb and flow from each other. How the sweetness of a single memory is strong enough to push away, even for a second, the tragedy of it all. Terry Bellington and his sister, Hannah Watkins, both gave eulogies that were full of references to Frank’s quick wit, his love for his wife-their mother-and his fondness for the town.

I left the church halfway through the service and waited for my partner. He had taken a phone call from Avondale PD.

It was Thursday.

The skies were hazy, the breeze gentle. Across the street, in a neighborhood park, a man in an orange and purple Lakers jersey chased a little girl with tiny pigtails. She squealed as he caught her and then the two posed for an older woman holding a camera.

Nearby, a man in a wide-brimmed hat shuffled along with a German shepherd, their steps in unison. They had gray in their faces and weariness in their steps and it was hard to tell who was walking whom.

Finn met me outside. In the reflection of his mirrored sunglasses, I saw a weary-looking woman, heavy in the belly, her dark hair loose around her face.

“Anything?”

He shook his head. “Avondale’s a joke. They got very little, barely even a skid mark on the road. One good piece of news, they did retrieve a few shards of broken glass from a front headlight. No way to tell if it’s our guy, but the preliminary reports put it at a Toyota, late model. Whoever hit Sam did it nice and slow and hard. They interviewed Ferrari Man again, nothing else he can tell us. I called the hospital, too. Sam’s still in a coma.”

“So we’re looking for a late-model white Toyota. Great, only about a million of those in Colorado. It doesn’t make any sense, Finn. This guy’s a schizo, a real nutjob. He starts with homicide, downgrades to silly threats and tire slashing and a dead bird, and then bounces back up to attempted murder? I don’t get it.”

I followed him to the parking lot. At my car, we stopped and Finn cleared his throat. I looked at him over the roof.

“What?”

Finn said, “Are we even sure it’s the same guy? I mean Sam barely had a finger in the Nicky Bellington case. He wasn’t a player.”

He pulled a toothpick from his breast pocket and stuck it in the corner of his mouth and shrugged. “What if the one has nothing to do with the other?”

“You’re joking. Get in the car.”

We slid in and I continued. “You’re telling me you honestly think the two are unrelated? That in the midst of investigating a murder one of our partners randomly happens to be the victim of a hit-and-run?”

I started the car and checked my mirrors. The lot was clear; I figured there were another ten or fifteen minutes left to the service. Unlike the reverend at Nicky’s funeral, this minister was a real character. He worked the altar like it was a stage.

Finn talked around the toothpick, rolling it cheek to cheek and back again.

“I’m just saying, we’ve got nothing that ties the one to the other. We need to be careful.”

I peeled out of the lot, my brand-new tires taking the turn like a bastard. “Careful? I will tell you who needs to be careful. Our guy. I think he’s scared. I think we can’t see it yet, but somehow, we’re closing in on him.”

Finn listened as I told him what Sam had discovered, the necklace and poem found in Nicky’s bedroom.

“Yeah, yeah, I remember that. It was some kind of flower pendant, I think. But that doesn’t mean anything. He probably found the necklace at school. Maybe the poem was part of a love letter. You’d be shocked if you knew half of what kids are into these days, Gemma.”