Jonathan Kellerman - Guilt

A deep voice behind and above us grumbled, “Milo has begun pulling up real estate records. Afternoon, Elizabeth.”

Liz looked up. “Hi, didn’t see you when I came in.”

Milo said, “In the house making calls.”

And taking the detective walk through the empty space. His expression said that nothing obvious had come up. “So what do you think, kid?”

Liz repeated her initial impressions. “Not that you need me for any of that.”

He said, “Young Moses needs you, I appreciate your input.”

Detective I Moe Reed was her true love. They’d met at a swamp full of corpses.

She laughed. “Moses appreciates me, too. Say hi when you see him, which is probably before I will.”

She stood. “So what else can I do for you?”

“Take custody of the bones and do your wizard thing. If you need the box, you can have it, otherwise it’s going to the crime lab.”

“Don’t need the box,” she said. “But I’m not really sure I can tell you much more.”

“How about age of victim?”

“I’ll get it as close as I can,” she said. “We can also x-ray to see if some sort of damage comes up within the bones, though that’s unlikely. There’s certainly nothing overt to indicate assault or worse. So we could be talking a natural death.”

“Natural but someone buried it under a tree?” He frowned. “I hate that- it .” His shirt had come loose over his paunch. He tucked it in, hitched his trousers.

Liz said, “Maybe covert burial does imply some sort of guilt. And no visible marks doesn’t eliminate murder, asphyxiating a baby is way too easy. And it’s not rare in infanticides.”

“Soft kill,” he said.

She blinked. “Never heard that before.”

“I’m a master of terrible irony.”

Milo and I returned to Holly Ruche. Her husband was gone.

She said, “He had a meeting.”

Milo said, “Accountant stuff.”

“Not too exciting, huh?”

Milo said, “Most jobs are a lot of routine.”

She scanned the yard. “I’d still like to know why a psychologist was called in. Are you saying whoever lived here was a maniac?”

“Not at all.” He turned to me: “You’re fired, Doc.”

I said, “Finally.”

Holly Ruche smiled for half a second.

Milo said, “That woman in the white coat is a forensic anthropologist.”

“The black woman? Interesting …” Her hands clenched. “I really hope this doesn’t turn out to be one of those mad-dog serial killer things, bodies all over the place. If that’s what happens, I could never live here. We’d be tied up in court, that would be a disaster.”

“I’m sure everything will turn out fine.”

“Just one little teensy skeleton?” she snapped. “That’s fine?”

She looked down at her abdomen. “Sorry, Lieutenant, it’s just-I just can’t stand seeing my place overrun with strangers.”

“I understand. No reason to stick around, Holly.”

“This is my home, my apartment’s just a way station.”

He said, “We’re gonna need the area clear for the dogs.”

“The dogs,” she said. “They find something, you’ll bring in machinery and tear up everything.”

“We prefer noninvasive methods like ground-penetrating radar, air and soil analysis.”

“How do you analyze air?”

“We insert thin flexible tubing into air pockets, but with something this old, decomposition smells are unlikely.”

“And if you find something suspicious, you bring in machines and start ripping and shredding. Okay, I will leave but please make sure if you turned on any lights you turn them off. We just got the utilities registered in our name and the last thing I need is paying the police department’s electrical bill.”

She walked away, using that oddly appealing waddle pregnant women acquire. Hands clenched, neck rigid.

Milo said, “High-strung girl.”

I said, “Not the best of mornings. Plus her marriage doesn’t seem to be working too well.”

“Ah … notice how I avoided telling her how you got here. No sense disillusioning the citizenry.”

Most homicides are mundane and on the way to clearance within a day or two. Milo sometimes calls me on “the interesting ones.”

This time, though, it was a matter of lunch.

Steak, salad, and scotch to be exact, at a place just west of Downtown. We’d both spent the morning at the D.A.’s office, he reviewing the file on a horrific multiple murder, I in the room next door, proofreading my witness statement on the same killings.

He’d tried to avoid the experience, taking vacation time then ignoring messages. But when Deputy D.A. John Nguyen phoned him at mid-night and threatened to come over with cartons of week-old vegan takeout, Milo had capitulated.

“Sensible decision and don’t even think of flaking on me,” said Nguyen. “Also ask Delaware if he wants to take care of his business at the same time, the drafts just came in.”

Milo picked me up at nine a.m., driving the Porsche 928 he shares with his partner, Rick Silverman. He wore an unhealthily shiny gray aloha shirt patterned with leering sea lions and clinically depressed angelfish, baggy, multi-pleated khakis, scuffed desert boots. The shirt did nothing to improve his indoor pallor, but he loved Hawaii so why not?

Solving the multiple had taken a lot out of him, chiefly because he’d nearly died in the process. I’d saved his life and that was something neither of us had ever imagined. Months had passed and we still hadn’t talked about it. I figured it was up to him to broach the topic and so far he hadn’t.

When we finished at the court building, he looked anything but celebratory. But he insisted on taking me out for a seventy-buck sirloin-T-bone combo and “all the Chivas you can tolerate, boy-o, seeing as I’m the designated wheelman.”

An hour later, all we’d done was eat and drink and make the kind of small talk that doesn’t work well between real friends.

I rejected dessert but he went for a three-scoop praline sundae drowned in hot fudge syrup and pineapple sauce. He’d lost a bit of weight since facing mortality, was carrying maybe two forty on his stilt-legged seventy-five inches, most of it around the middle. Watching him maximize the calories made it tempting to theorize about anxiety, denial, masked depression, guilt, choose your psychobabble. I’d known him long enough to know that sometimes gluttony was a balm, other times an expression of joy.

He’d finished two scoops when his phone signaled a text. Wiping his chin and brushing coarse black hair off his pockmarked forehead, he read.

“Well, well, well. It’s good I didn’t indulge in the firewater. Time to go.”

“New case?”

“Of sorts,” he said. “Bones buried in an old box under an older tree, from the size, a baby.”

“Of sorts?”

“Sounds like an old one so probably not much to do other than trace ownership of the property.” Tossing cash on the table, he got up. “Want me to drop you off?”

“Where’s the property?”

“Cheviot Hills.”

“No need to drive all the way to my place then circle back.”

“Up to you,” he said. “I probably won’t be that long.”

Back at the car, he tucked the aloha shirt into the khakis, retrieved a sad brown tweed sport coat from the trunk, ended up with a strange sartorial meld of Scottish Highlands and Oahu.

“A baby,” I said.

He said nothing.

Seconds after Liz Wilkinson left with the bones, Moe Reed beeped in.

Milo muttered, “Two ships passing,” clicked his cell on conference.

Reed said, “Got all the deed holders, El Tee, should have a list for you by the time you get back. Anything else?”