Brian Freeman: The Bone House

He wasn't fooling Lala with his jokes, though. He was deliberately keeping her at a distance, and she knew it. They'd had a brief affair not long ago that was the equivalent of a supernova: super-charged, blindingly bright, collapsing with a big bang. Their attraction hadn't gone away, but what was left between them was a black hole, with both of them fighting against the pull of gravity.

'OK, Ms Mosqueda, what do we know so far?' he asked her.

She had a very pretty Cuban face, but there was definitely no light escaping from it now. Black hole.

'A jogger found the body before sunrise,' she told him. 'She was face down in the water, topless, with her bikini top wrapped around her neck. He pulled her out of the water and tried mouth-to-mouth, but she'd been dead for a while. Preliminary estimate on time of death is between two and four o'clock. From the ligature marks on the neck and bruising on the backs of the shoulders, it looks like someone held her down and strangled her in the water. The ME isn't sure yet whether asphyxiation resulted from the rope of the bikini top or the water itself.'

'But she didn't just get drunk and do a bellyflop in the surf?' Cab asked.

'No, she definitely had help. The girl had been drinking, though. We found an empty bottle of Yellow Tail near the body, and her teeth and tongue show discoloration from red wine. We won't know how much she had until we get the blood analysis back. Maybe she was drunk, maybe she wasn't.'

'Did she have sex?' Cab asked.

'She was still wearing her bikini bottom,' Lala replied in a monotone, 'and the fabric wasn't ripped or otherwise disturbed. There was no bruising, blood, or external injury consistent with vaginal or anal rape, at least based on a visual inspection.'

Cab wasn't convinced. 'You're talking about a teenage girl who's drinking and topless on the beach. That sure smells like sex was involved.'

'I'm not saying she didn't have sex, but there isn't any evidence yet of sexual assault.'

'Fair enough. I get it. Did you find anything else near the body?'

Lala gestured up and down the beach with frustration. 'We're combing the sand, but you've got a few thousand people along here every day. We'll bag and test what we find, but don't get your hopes up.'

'How about the body itself?' Cab asked.

'We're checking for DNA under her fingernails, but her hands were lying in the water. Even if she fought back, I'm not sure what we're going to find.'

'See, this is why I hate beach bodies,' Cab repeated.

Lala opened her mouth as if she had more to tell him, but he held up a hand to stop her as he let the details soak into his mind. His way of approaching an investigation was to add layers of fact to his brain like coats of paint. He liked to let one coat dry before slapping on the next one. Lala was different. She preferred to blurt out her whole report at once and sort through the puzzle pieces.

Lala was dressed all in black. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black sandals, all of it matching her shoulder-length black hair. She was in her mid-thirties, like Cab, and had spent her entire career with the Naples Police. She was intense about everything that Cab wasn't. Her Cuban family. Her Cuban politics. Her Catholic heritage. Her job. Her temper. She was fire; he was water, always flowing downhill, always running away. Still, she was about the only cop in Florida he considered a friend.

Not that he would ever say so to her face.

'Cab?' Lala asked impatiently.

'Yeah, OK, keep going. Do we know who this girl is?'

'We got lucky about that. Her name's Glory Fischer. Sixteen years old.'

Cab exhaled in dismay. 'She's just a kid.'

'Sixteen's older than you think these days.'

'Yeah, yeah, thirteen is the new eighteen, sixteen's the new twenty-one. How'd we make the ID?'

'Her sister and Glory's boyfriend were looking for her in the hotel grounds when we showed up. The sister said Glory wasn't in their room, and when they heard about the body, they both freaked. The sister confirmed Glory's ID from a photograph. We've got them with a policewoman now. A counselor's on the way.'

'What about a parent?'

Lala shook her head. 'The girls are from rural Wisconsin, an area called Door County. Mom's back home, Dad's deceased. The sister already called the mother and gave her the news. She's flying down here today.'

'Wisconsin,' Cab said. 'Remind me, that's north of Michigan, right?'

'No, the place north of Michigan is called Canada, Cab.'

'Same difference. What were these girls doing here anyway?'

'The hotel is crawling with college dancers,' Lala told him. 'There was some kind of competition this week with student teams from all over the country. The sister — her name is Tresa, T-r-e-s-a — she goes to school at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. She came down here on a bus with her teammates. Her mother couldn't come, so it sounds like Glory and her boyfriend — his name's Troy Geier — drove down here separately to cheer for Tresa during the program. They were all supposed to be heading back home today.'

'The victim, Glory, she wasn't part of the competition?'

Lala shook her head. 'Nope.'

'Did you get any more info about Glory out of the sister or the boyfriend? Do they have any idea what she was doing on the beach last night?'

'They say no.'

'Do you believe them?' Cab asked.

'If one of them was involved, they put on a good act. Most of the time, you can see through kids if they're lying.'

'I pretty much assume everybody's lying,' Cab said.

That was part of his legacy growing up with a mother who worked as an actress. If someone was moving their lips in LA, they were probably lying. Being a cop had done nothing to change his conviction that people were dishonest at heart. He'd learned that lesson the hard way.

'How old is the sister Tresa?' he added.

'Nineteen. She's a freshman at River Falls.'

'How about the boyfriend? Did you pick up anything about his relationship with Glory?'

'Nothing about Glory,' Lala said. He saw a self-satisfied smirk on her golden face. She knew something. She'd been aching to tell him from the beginning.

'Spill it, Mosquito,' Cab said. 'What did the boyfriend tell you?'

Lala didn't blink at the nickname this time. 'Troy followed me so we could talk in private. He didn't want Tresa to hear what he had to say, because she wouldn't let him talk about it.'

'About what?'

'Apparently there's another couple from the same part of Wisconsin staying at the resort this week. Their names are Mark and Hilary Bradley. I checked, and he's right. They have a room that opens right on to the beach. It's not even two hundred yards from where the murder took place.'

'OK,' Cab said, waiting for more.

'Troy told me that we needed to talk to the husband before he skipped town. He claimed that if there's anyone in the hotel who might have done this to Glory, it's Mark Bradley.'

Cab raised an eyebrow. 'Yeah? Based on what? Does this guy have some kind of connection to Glory?'

'Not to Glory,' Lala told him, 'but to her sister. According to Troy, everyone in Door County knows Mark Bradley. He was a teacher at the high school until he was let go under a cloud last year. The police couldn't bring statutory rape charges, because Tresa wouldn't say a word against him on the record. But the story is, he was having sex with her.'

Hilary Bradley sat motionless on the sofa in their hotel room as Mark paced in and out of the dusty stream of light through the patio door. They hadn't spoken. She studied the stricken expression on her husband's face. His breathing was fast and loud through his nose; he was scared. It was like a rerun of the previous year, when they'd sat together in their Washington Island home and confronted the rumors about Mark and Tresa.