Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(27)

“Suit yourself,” she replied. “If you’ve got the money, honey . . .”

I was old enough to know the missing lyrics, and if Twink did too, maybe she was a bit older than I had first thought.

“Mind if I smoke?” she asked after stowing both the phone and the chip reader in one of her jacket’s many pockets.

The interior of the Travelall already reeked of so much secondhand smoke that adding in a little more to the mix hardly mattered. “Okay by me,” I said.

Although the heater in the antique vehicle was clearly history, much to my surprise the cigarette lighter worked perfectly. Twink lit up and then, with a satisfied sigh, blew a column of smoke into the air. My side window and hers were both cracked open. When I reached to close mine, she stopped me.

“You’ll need to leave it open,” she said. “With the heater core busted, if I don’t leave the windows cracked open, the place steams up so much that I can’t see a thing.”

Driving around in Anchorage in the snow with the windows open? Calling TW Transportation “nothing fancy” was one thing, but this was ridiculous. Maybe I shouldn’t have signed up for the full day after all.

“Where to?” Twink asked.

I read off the address on the UAA campus, including the name of the building.

“You a detective?” my driver asked as she put the Travelall in gear and eased out into the plowed but almost deserted traffic lanes.

Her question startled me. I wasn’t exactly walking around wearing a name tag and a badge.

“Private investigator,” I answered. “How’d you know that?”

“You’re going to see the bone lady, aren’t you?” Twink asked. “Harriet Raines is famous around here. Everybody in Anchorage knows about her. I saw her interviewed on one of those true-crime shows once. She said that it’s her mission in life to see that the bones of the people she deals with end up going back to wherever they belong. That’s especially true when it comes to the bones of indigenous folks. No matter how long those dead bodies have been lying out in the weather, she likes to see to it that they end up where they’re supposed to be, back with the right people. Makes sense, of course. I understand she’s half Tlingit and half white. I believe those Tlingit folks are of the opinion that once someone is dead, they’re best left alone.”

I felt a shiver up my spine. I knew something about those kinds of indigenous beliefs. Years earlier, back when goths were the big thing in Seattle, some of them had collected a set of bones from over on the Kitsap Peninsula west of the city. The grave robbers laid the bones out in a forested area of Seward Park, using them as props to scare the hell out of stupid people who were willing to pay good money to be terrified.

Unfortunately, said bones were those of a beloved medicine man, and they carried with them the long-held belief that anyone who handled or disrespected them was subject to a curse. In the course of the next several days, more than one of those Halloween pranksters met untimely deaths, as did Sue Danielson, who happened to be one of the detectives assigned to collect the bones from Seward Park. I was out of town at the time and hadn’t been part of that crime-scene investigation. Yes, Sue might have died as a direct result of a gunshot wound in an act of domestic violence perpetrated by her former husband, but a part of me still believed that the curse from being in close contact with those sacred bones also had something to do with it.

“That’s what homicide investigators do, too,” I said after a long pause. “They try to make sure that the remains of loved ones go back to where they’re supposed to be and, if they happen to be victims of foul play, that whoever did it gets what’s coming to them.”

“I thought you said you were a private eye instead of a homicide cop,” Twink offered.

“I was a homicide cop,” I corrected, “for most of my career. One way or another, I guess I still am. Right now, though, I’m working a missing-persons case.”

We rode in silence after that while Twink finished one cigarette, ground the stub out in an overflowing ashtray, and promptly lit another.

“Here we are,” she said at last, pulling up in front of a low-rise three-story building that would have looked perfectly at home in any self-respecting business park in the country. “The campus cops don’t much like visiting vehicles hanging around on campus, but maybe on a snow day they’ll give me a pass. If I end up having to move and park off campus, though, you can call me when you're finished.”

“I have no idea how long I’ll be,” I said. “I don’t know for sure if Professor Raines is in today, but what number should I use?”

“You called me earlier, right?” Twink replied.

I nodded.

“Use that number,” she advised. “I only have one. That’s all I need.”

Someone on the UAA campus had been busy. The walkway from the street to what turned out to be the anthropology building had been shoveled clean and deiced. I pushed the entry door open and stepped into a tiled and polished interior that mirrored buildings of higher learning all over the planet—mixed-use arrangements with classrooms and offices scattered throughout. After tracking down a building directory and learning that the Alaska State Department of Forensic Anthropology was located on the basement level, I went in search of an elevator.

When the door slid open on the B. Level, I found myself in a surprisingly chill corridor with industrial-chic overhead fluorescent fixtures lighting the long, narrow hallway. From the looks of it, I guessed this had originally been wasted space that had eventually been repurposed.