P. Parrish - Heart of Ice

Ross Chapman let out a tired breath and pushed himself from the chair. “I guess I better get over there,” he said. “Would you call and let them know I’m coming?”

“Yes, Mr. Ross.”

He nodded his thanks and went to the door where he had dropped his suitcase. She followed him and closed the door behind him. She stood at the window and watched him walk down West Bluff Road toward town.

She watched until he was out of sight, then picked up his bag and took it upstairs.

Rafsky slammed the door to Flowers’s office and slapped down three newspapers with such force it scattered the other papers on the desk.

“How the hell did this happen?” Rafsky asked, jabbing at the headline on the top newspaper.

Louis leaned forward in his chair. It was the Lansing State Journal. The story was at the bottom of the page, but the headline couldn’t be missed.

SKELETAL REMAINS FOUND ON MACKINAC; CHAPMAN FAMILY HOPES FOR CLOSURE

Rafsky gestured toward the outer office. “Who the fuck is talking to the press?”

Flowers rose from his chair. “Look, Rafsky, you can think what you want about me, but I have good people here. None of them would talk to a reporter.”

Rafsky’s eyes swung to Louis. “What about you? You got any friends at the State Journal ?”

“I have one friend in this whole state,” Louis said, “and she’s not a reporter.”

Louis picked up the paper. The article, bylined Sandy Hunt, was short, offering sketchy details about the discovery of bones in the Twin Pines lodge by an unnamed trespassing tourist. There was no comment from anyone official, just the line “Although a positive identification has not yet been made, sources close to the investigation say police are proceeding on the theory that they belong to Julie Anne Chapman, who disappeared from her Bloomfield Hills home twenty-one years ago.” It went on to summarize the missing persons case and ended with a quote from Ross Chapman about bringing closure to the Chapman family.

Louis set the Lansing paper aside and picked up the two others. A quick read told him that both the St. Ignace News and the Mackinac Island Town Crier had picked up the Lansing State Journal story from the wire services-which meant the story had gone out all over the state. Four days and they had already lost control of the press.

Louis tossed the paper on the desk. “My guess is this was leaked by Ross Chapman,” he said.

“Why would he do it?” Flowers asked.

“Grieving brother swoops in to bring his sister home after twenty-one years,” Louis said. “Should be good for a couple of sympathy votes.”

Rafsky was looking at Louis but then turned to Flowers. “It’s your leak, Chief. Plug it,” he said.

Flowers was about to argue, but Rafsky turned away and began reading a report. Louis noticed that Rafsky’s right hand, turning the stapled papers, was trembling. Rafsky discreetly pressed it against his side to stop it.

Joe’s voice was a sudden whisper in Louis’s ear.

I knew from the moment I saw Rafsky that I liked him. He was different. . he respected me, respected my idealism and my position as the only woman in the department. In fact, there was a moment when I thought we might find something else, but he was married and I was. . well, too young.

Joe Frye was a woman with class and smarts, and Louis couldn’t help but think that to get her attention Norm Rafsky must have been a very different man fifteen years ago.

“Ross Chapman’s going to be here soon,” Rafsky said. “The three of us need to figure out where we’re at with this case. I want us all on the same page when we talk to him.”

Flowers nodded, waiting. Louis was finding it hard to hide his annoyance that Rafsky had taken the lead.

“How did you make out with the missing persons list I gave you last night at the Mustang?”

Flowers picked up a folder. “We’re almost finished. Most of the girls on the list turned up alive. Two were murdered, but there was no evidence to tie them to our case. We have two we couldn’t find, but neither had a connection to the island here or Kingswood.”

Rafsky nodded as if finally satisfied with something Flowers had done.

“I’ve got more crime scene analysis and ME reports,” Rafsky said, flipping back to the first page of the report he had been reading. “First, they concluded that the remains were not moved after death. This is confirmed by the residual bodily fluids they found soaked into the concrete.”

Louis remembered the ghostlike stain he had seen on the basement floor.

“More important,” Rafsky went on, “they also found a highly degraded stream of pure blood-no decomp contamination-that ran from where the skull would have been to a drain. Which means she suffered a severe head wound that probably caused her death.”

“Any indication of other injuries?” Flowers asked.

“No,” Rafsky said.

“What about the missing skull?” Louis asked. “Was she decapitated?”

“All of the vertebrae were found with the remains,” Rafsky said. “There were no cuts or nicks on any of the neck bones. The ME believes the head detached naturally during the decomp process.”

“Okay, I know I asked this once before,” Flowers said. “But isn’t it about time that we started thinking about where the hell the skull is?”

“I’d guess the killer took it,” Louis said.

Rafsky looked up from the report.

“Killers, especially sexual predators, often come back to relive their crimes and take trophies,” Louis said. “Usually it’s within days, but this guy could have waited months.”

“Why wait?” Flowers asked.

“Julie Chapman disappeared in December, so the body didn’t start decomposing until at least spring,” Louis said. “The killer was patient. I’m guessing he waited until she was skeletonized, then came back to get the skull.”

Flowers sat back in his chair. “That’s really sick,” he said.

“Let’s move on to the pregnancy,” Rafsky said, digging out another report. “The anthropologist estimates the fetal bones are sixteen to eighteen weeks.”

“If this is Julie Chapman and she died around New Year’s, then she got pregnant in August, when she was here on the island,” Louis said.

“And that the father of the baby is our first suspect,” Rafsky said.

Louis knew the stats, knew that murder was the number one cause of death for pregnant women, and the odds were better than 50 percent that the father was the killer. Violence in intimate relationships was always about power, and a pregnancy put a woman in an even more vulnerable position. For the father who had something to lose-be it a married man worried about exposure or a kid scared of being tied down for life-killing a pregnant girlfriend was all about self-preservation.

Which meant that if the bones belonged to Julie Chapman, they needed to know everything about her life. Especially the secret parts.

Flowers had picked up the file folder. He was leafing through it when he suddenly stopped.

“Oh God,” he said.

He set a photograph on the desk, turning it so Louis and Rafsky could see it.

It was a picture of the fetal bones. Louis had seen fetal bones before, but they had always been neatly laid out by sections-long bones together, ribs fanned out, and the skull bones gathered like broken eggshells.

But someone in Marquette had taken the trouble to reassemble the bones so they looked like an actual fetus, and a ruler had been placed beside the bones for sizing. The skeleton-just six inches long-looked like a delicate newly hatched bird.

The three men were silent as they stared at the photograph.