Brian Freeman - The Bone House

Hilary hesitated. She knew they had nothing of any weight to tell the police. Gary Jensen may have been creepy, but creepy wasn't a crime. Even so, she shared Katie's fears that something was wrong. If Amy was at Jensen's house when she made that odd call, then she might be in danger, particularly if Jensen was in some way connected to Glory Fischer.

'OK,' Hilary said. 'If I make the ferry, it'll still take me a couple hours to get there. In the meantime, don't do anything, OK? Just wait for me.'

'Call me when you're getting close,' Katie said.

Hilary hung up. She glanced at the foreboding sky and realized she'd be driving into heavy rain as she neared Green Bay. A wicked storm was coming. She turned the car around and accelerated toward the ferry harbor. As she drove, she punched the speed dial for Mark's number. The phone was already ringing when she remembered the message he'd left on their answering machine.

He'd lost his phone.

She was about to hang up when someone answered on Mark's line. It wasn't Mark.

Cab found the dead end at Peter Hoffman's house and followed the edge of the dirt driveway toward the house. He brushed past tree branches, and his black shoes sank into mossy ground. He noticed boot prints in the mud of the driveway; someone else had come and gone recently. The house was situated in a clearing that had been carved out of the woods, in the middle of a lawn littered with leaves, acorns, and branches. The log beams of the building glistened. Steam from the furnace spewed out like smoke from a pipe through a white exhaust vent. Behind the house, where the woods began again, Cab could see a glimmer of the blue water beyond the cliff.

He noticed something else, too. From the woods at the rear, a second set of footprints made impressions in the long grass leading toward the back door.

Two visitors. One in front, one in back.

Cab approached the porch warily. He saw tools strewn across the floor and patches of sawdust. The front door was closed. He climbed the steps, but he couldn't see inside, because the drapes were closed across the windows.

He rang the bell. When no one answered, he pounded loudly.

'Mr Hoffman!' he called. 'It's Cab Bolton.'

There was no response from inside.

Cab nudged the door with his shoulder. When it didn't open, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully twisted the knob. The door was locked. He stood on the porch, hands in his pockets, and surveyed the yard. To his left, beyond the house, he saw a detached garage. The door was open; a car was parked inside. Rutted tracks led in and out, but they didn't look recent. Hoffman hadn't driven anywhere today.

His gut sounded an alarm. He reached inside his coat and extracted his service Glock, which he cradled loosely in his hand. He descended the steps and followed the house to the rear, noting the footsteps in the grass, which were mostly indistinguishable, with no visible tread marks. The rear door of the house was ajar. Beyond the door, the frame of the roof angled upward, and huge windows looked out on the water. In the yard, he saw a lonely deckchair beneath the shade of a mammoth oak tree, near the sharp drop-off to the shore. In the stretch of gray-blue on the horizon, he spotted a dot of white where a ferry cruised through the passage toward Washington Island.

Cab approached the open door and called again. 'Mr Hoffman!'

The door led into the dinette area of the kitchen. At the doorway, he stepped out of his loafers and crossed the threshold in black socks. He was near a butcher block table placed in front of the windows. The kitchen was on his right. The house was warm, and in the shut-up space, he smelled the metallic smoke of gunpowder. Above it was something fetid, a dead smell of excrement and blood.

Cab swore under his breath.

He followed the hallway toward the front of the house, passing doors for two bedrooms on his right and stairs to a loft. At the end of the hallway, the house opened up into a large living room with a high ceiling. He saw the body lying halfway on the carpet behind the front door. Unspent shotgun shells gleamed in the floor. Blood made a spider on the tile of the foyer and soaked into a pool in the fibers of the carpet. Peter Hoffman was a limp mess of sprawled limbs. He had no face. The blast from the gun had obviously been dead on into his skull while the man lay on the ground.

Cab reached for his phone. He was about to call Felix Reich when he stopped.

He knew what would happen when the crew from the sheriff's department arrived. Reich would take a statement and get him out of the house, which was exactly what Cab would do if it was his own turf. Before he was banished, Cab wanted to know if Hoffman had left behind any clues about what he intended to tell him. Whatever information the man had, it had been enough to get him killed.

He backtracked to the kitchen. Based on the cane and pushed-back chair, he concluded that Hoffman had been sitting at the dinette table before he made his way to the front door and was shot. There was nothing on the table except a pen and an open bottle of Jameson's. On the kitchen counter, he saw the man's bulky key ring and a pair of glasses. He checked the master bedroom, which was impeccably neat, and spotted a computer and printer on one wall. When he lifted the top of the printer, the glass was clear. The wastebasket beside the desk was empty. He pulled open the top drawer and found pens, paper clips, staples, and a neatly folded Door County map. That was all.

He did a quick review of the filing cabinet near the man's desk, but the folders mostly revealed tax and property records, which would take hours to study in detail. He nudged the computer mouse with the knuckle of his finger, but the computer had been powered down.

Cab frowned. Nothing.

He checked his watch and knew the clock was ticking. He needed to call the sheriff. He made his way back to the living room and stared down at Peter Hoffman.

'What did you want to tell me?' he said aloud to the corpse at his feet.

At that moment, the body began to sing to him in Steven Tyler's voice. It was an Aerosmith song. 'Dude Looks Like a Lady.'

Cab started in surprise before realizing that the music came from the dead man's pocket. It was a phone. Cab bent down and used two fingers to reach inside Hoffman's right pocket and slide the phone into his hand. He answered neutrally. 'Yeah?'

'Hello? Mark? Who's this?'

'You first,' Cab said.

'This is Hilary Bradley. I don't know who you are, but I think you've got my husband's phone.'

Cab shook his head in sad disbelief. This wasn't going to be a happy call, it's Cab Bolton, Mrs Bradley.'

'Detective? ' He could hear her freeze with shock and surprise. 'How on earth did you get Mark's phone?'

He didn't answer her question. 'Do you know how he lost it?'

'No, I don't.'

'Where is your husband now?'

'As far as I know, he's on the ferry back to the island. What's going on? Where did you find his phone?'

'I can't tell you that right now.'

'Excuse me?'

'You won't be able to get it back.'

'Why not?'

'I'm sorry,' Cab said. 'That's all I can say.'

'Is something wrong?'

'I'm sorry,' he repeated. 'I have to hang up now. It would be better if you didn't call this number again.'

He ended the call before she could say anything more. She'd know what it was all about soon enough. The sheriff was going to be out for blood, finding Mark Bradley's phone in the pocket of Peter Hoffman, lying dead in his own house. Peter Hoffman, who was Reich's lifelong friend. Peter Hoffman, who swore he had information that could help put Mark Bradley behind bars.

He bent down next to Hoffman's body. As he slid the phone back into the dead man's pocket, his fingers grazed something else. Paper. He extracted a single folded sheet with his fingertips, and when he unfolded it, he found an enlargement of a map showing a small portion of the NorDoor section of the county stretching west to east from the town of Ellison Bay to Newport State Park. Nothing was written on the page itself.