Alone (Bone Secrets, #4)(31)

He was afraid they’d end up in bed.

Their sex life was good. There was no getting around it. Lying in bed with Seth on a rainy afternoon was heaven. They’d spent hours talking and making love. He’d been her first and had opened a whole new world of intimacy and sharing for her. In the beginning, it’d simply been explosive and exciting, but it’d grown into a tender, loving experience.

And now it was over. No more.

If she could get him in bed, maybe…

She rejected the thought; she wasn’t a manipulator. She wasn’t that kind of woman and she wasn’t about to start. She was strong. Seth was done with Seth and Victoria. And her logical brain screamed at her to accept it.

She stood up, shoved her books into her backpack, and pushed in her chair. Slinging her pack over one shoulder, she stared Seth in the eye. “I loved you. I loved you a lot and was committed to the future we’d planned together. Good-bye, Seth.” She strode out of the coffee shop with her chin up and her heart in pieces on the floor.

Never again.





Seth noticed Lorenzo Cavallo had managed to rake his leaves in his yard before he died. Lorenzo’s home looked like every other small Portland home from the fifties. The entire street had one-story white homes with single-car garages. Only the yards were marginally different. Some with bushes, some with trees, some with nothing. A shiny classic Chevrolet stood visible in Lorenzo’s garage. Someone had opened the garage door and the vehicle gleamed against the dreariness of the wet day.

The clouds had been high and gray during Seth’s commute to the office. Enough to make him wonder if the day would actually be dry. But his hopes were dashed as black clouds rolled in. Dr. Campbell had assigned him to visit the Cavallo death, doling out assignments among his deputy examiners and himself. It’d been less than a week, and Seth felt like he belonged in the Portland office. His working interview time was almost up. If he was offered the job, he was taking it. No question. He liked Portland. It was quirky, and the ME’s office ran like a smoothly oiled machine.

A uniform held a log out to him at the front door. He signed and slipped on a pair of sanitary booties, studying the young officer out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t look green or ashen, so hopefully the scene wasn’t a bad one. Detectives Callahan and Lusco had already signed the log. It didn’t feel like ten hours had passed since he’d parted from Callahan at the bar.

Seth moved down the narrow hall of the house toward the voices in the kitchen. He smelled the familiar odor of death. The coppery scent of blood and the stench of released bowels. A wave of sadness washed through him as he stepped into the kitchen and examined the body on the floor.

Lorenzo Cavallo was covered in blood from head to toe. He wore what Seth thought of as old-man underwear. The white stretchy tank top and baggy white undershorts. Neither had been truly white in a long time; instead they were a bad yellowing cream color. Browning blood stained Lorenzo’s silver hair. Detectives Callahan and Lusco leaned against a counter in the tiny kitchen. A female uniformed cop nodded at Seth, and a crime scene tech snapped scene photos.

“Morning, doctor,” Callahan greeted him. “Welcome to the party.” His grim expression belied his words.

“Morning,” Seth answered.

“As soon as you can get us a time of death, we’d appreciate it,” Lusco added.

Portland was no different from Sacramento. The cops always wanted that fact first.

Seth stepped over to the corpse, carefully avoiding the blood, and squatted down. Now closer, he could see the tears from a knife through the old man’s shirt. And a spot at his temple that looked… sunken. Seth scanned his surroundings, looking for a baseball bat or similar weapon. Callahan noticed his gaze.

“Whatever he was stabbed and hit with, the killer took with him,” Callahan stated.

“Can you get a picture right here?” Seth asked the photographer as he pointed to a spot just below the ribs on the right side of the body. The old man’s tank was ripped wide open as if it’d been prepared for Seth to take his liver temperature. The tech snapped a shot, and Seth made a half-inch slit with his scalpel and slid a thermometer in four inches. He waited and the tech took a shot of the inserted thermometer. Looking around, he noticed Lusco watching in fascination along with the female cop, but Callahan seemed focused on making notes in his pad.

“We just talked with him yesterday,” Lusco offered.

“What for?” asked Seth.

“He came in to offer a lead on the old Forest Park case. He thought his sister might be one of the victims,” said Lusco.

Seth looked at the body. The old man had been brutalized. Did someone not like him talking to the police? “You think it was related to the killings from the other night?”

“Don’t know,” stated Lusco.

“A neighbor was walking by about seven this morning and noticed his door was wide open,” Callahan added. “She came up to the door, rang the bell, yelled his name, and finally entered the house when no one answered. She immediately backed out when she saw he was dead and called nine-one-one.”

Seth didn’t ask why the neighbor didn’t physically check to see if Lorenzo was dead. It was obvious. This was a case of overkill. Seth saw multiple blows to the head and too many stab wounds to count. Any of them could be the cause of death.