My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(4)

Calloway entered the conference room and shut the door. His deputy, Finlay Armstrong, stood at the head of the rough-hewn wood table wearing his khaki uniform. Finlay looked pale beneath the fluorescent lights, but his complexion was robust compared to Vance Clark’s pallid coloring. The Cascade County prosecutor sat at the far end of the room looking sickly, his checked sport coat draped over a chair, the knot of his tie lowered, the top button of his shirt undone. Clark didn’t bother to get up. He gave Calloway a subtle nod.

“Sorry you had to come back for this, Chief.” Armstrong stood in front of a paneled wall containing a photo gallery of Cedar Grove’s sheriffs. Calloway’s photograph had hung last on the right for thirty-four years. At six five, he still maintained the barrel chest of the man in that photograph, though he couldn’t help but notice when he looked in the mirror each morning that the weathered lines on his face, which had once been hard edges to complement chiseled features, had become soft creases, and that his hair had thinned noticeably and turned gray.

“Don’t sweat it, Finlay.” Calloway tossed his cap onto the table, rolled out a chair, and sat. “Tell me what you got.”

In his midthirties, tall and lean, Armstrong had been with Calloway for more than a decade, and was next in line to have his picture hung on the conference room wall. “Call came in this morning from Todd Yarrow. He and Billy Richmond were cutting through the old Cascadia property to their duck blind when Hercules took off on a scent. Yarrow said they had a hell of a time getting him to come back. When he did, Hercules had something hanging from his mouth. Yarrow grabs it thinking it’s a stick and gets this white, slimy stuff on his hand. Billy says, ‘That’s a bone.’ They didn’t think much of it, figured Hercules dug up a deer carcass. Then Hercules takes off again, barking and making a hell of a racket. This time they chased after him and found him pawing at the ground. Yarrow couldn’t call him off. Finally had to grab him by the collar and pull him away, and that’s when he saw it.”

“Saw it?” Calloway asked.

Armstrong played with the buttons of his iPhone as he stepped around the table. Calloway removed the half-lens reading glasses from the pocket of his fishing vest—he could no longer thread the flies onto the line without them—slipped them on and took the phone, extending his arm to focus. Armstrong leaned over his shoulder and used his fingers to enlarge the picture. “Those white lines there, those are bones. It’s a foot.”

The bones were encased in dirt, like a fossil being unearthed. Armstrong flipped through a series of photographs showing the foot and the grave site from various distances and angles. “I told them to mark the spot and meet me at their vehicle. They had the bone in the back of Todd’s Jeep.” Armstrong slid his finger across the screen until he came to an image of a single bone beside a flashlight. “The anthropologist in Seattle wanted it to scale. She said it looks like a femur.”

Calloway glanced to the end of the room, but Vance Clark’s gaze remained focused on the table top. Calloway directed his question to Armstrong. “You called the medical examiner?”

Armstrong took back his phone and straightened. “They had me talk to a forensic anthropologist.” He checked his notes. “Kelly Rosa. She said they’d send a team, but they couldn’t get here till tomorrow morning. I had Tony sit on the site so no other animals could get to it. Going to need to send someone to relieve him.”

“She thinks it’s human?”

“Doesn’t know for certain, but she said it’s the right length for a femur, a female. And you see the white stuff, the slimy stuff Yarrow got on his hands?” Armstrong rechecked his notes. “She called it adipocere, decomposed body fat. Stinks like rotting meat. Body’s been there for a while.”

Calloway folded his cheaters and slipped them back into his vest. “You up for walking them through it when they get here?”

“Sure, no problem,” Armstrong said. “You going to be here too, Chief?”

Calloway stood. “I’ll be here.” He pulled open the door, in search of coffee. Armstrong’s next question stopped him.

“You think it could be her, Chief? You think it could be that girl went missing back in the nineties?”

Calloway looked past Armstrong to where Clark remained seated. “I guess we’re going to find out.”





[page]CHAPTER 4





Shafts of morning light filtered through the thick canopy of trees, casting shadows on the rock wall climbing straight up from the edge of the county road. A century before, tons of the mountain had been sheared away by dynamite, picks, and shovels to carve the road for mining trucks, revealing hidden springs that wept like tears down the stone face, streaking it with rust and silver mineral deposits. Tracy drove on autopilot, the radio off, her mind numb. The medical examiner’s office had not had further information. Kelly Rosa had been out of the office and the minion Tracy had spoken with could only confirm what Kins had told her—a deputy from Cedar Grove had called with a photo of what appeared to be a human femur, unearthed by a dog belonging to two hunters on their way to their duck blind in the hills above the town of Cedar Grove.

Tracy took the familiar exit, made a left at the “Stop” sign, and a minute later turned onto Market Street. She stopped at downtown Cedar Grove’s one and only traffic light and contemplated what had once been her hometown, but which now looked so tired and worn that it was foreign to her.