It was going to be one of those weeks. I was sure of it. Heather was off sick. Bob had broken his ankle over the weekend, falling on the icy steps outside his home. Leslie Rhodes had informed us all with great delight that she was pregnant. Mike was already bleating about heading home for the holidays. I felt lousy; I had a head cold and sore throat.
So, I was sitting behind my desk, shoes off, feet up, nursing a cup of scalding hot cider. I stared at the gifts stacked under the ten-foot Christmas tree that Jacque had insisted on putting up in my office. Bah humbug!
No, I didn’t mean it; it was just a thought that bounced in and out of my head. I actually love Christmas. Most years, I shut down the office a couple of days before the holiday and we take the eight or ten days off through New Year. I usually head out to the mountains of Colorado. They do it right up there: snow, skiing, grand lodges, huge fireplaces with logs burning, and all the food and drink.... Well, you get the idea.
This year, though, my heart wasn’t in it. I needed rest more than I needed a vacation, especially one that would leave me more tired than I was before I left.
Hmmm, I have a nice home. I’ll get some sleep, cook some good food, listen to some good music, and play a couple of rounds of golf with the old man. He’ll like that, and so will I; it’s been a while. I’ll keep a log fire burning and enjoy a little good company....
The cell phone next to my feet on the desk rang, jerking me out of my reverie and startling the hell out of me. I almost fell out of my chair when my feet dropped to the floor as I reached forward to grab it. I really didn’t want to talk to anyone... but it was Lieutenant Kate Gazzara, Chattanooga PD.
“Hey, Kate. What’s up?”
“I need for you to do me a favor.” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I’m at a crime scene, and I need you to take a look. It’s not far. Can you come, right now?”
“Crime scene? What sort of crime scene?”
“You’ll see when you get here. Can you come? I mean right now?”
I heaved a huge sigh. I was really warm and comfortable where I was, and it was sleeting outside, for God’s sake.
“Where are you, Kate?”
“I’m on McCallie. Hill House. You know the old three-story house on top of the rise, the one they decided to demolish?”
“Huh, yes.”
“I’m there. You’ll see the tapes. I’m round back, and hurry the hell up. I need you here while the techs are still on site.”
“Gimme five minutes. That’s if the traffic allows.” I disconnected without waiting for her to answer, grabbed my heavy L.L. Bean Storm Chaser boots, slipped them on, climbed into my Fjallraven coat, and adjusted the Blackhawk holster on my hip. I put on a pair of black leather gloves, looked longingly at the big leather chair, and sighed.
My name is Harry Starke. I run a private investigation agency in Chattanooga. I have a small suite of offices with a staff of nine just a couple of blocks from the Flatiron Building on Georgia, close to the action: the courts and law offices.
“Back soon,” I said to Jacque as I headed out into the parking lot. “Cover for me, okay?” I didn’t wait for an answer from her either.
The drive took a little more than five minutes. I swung right off McCallie and parked on the side street. It was kinda crowded: three cruisers, a crime scene rig, a couple of unmarked police units, and now me. I slammed the car door and walked up the driveway to the rear of the house. An old, dilapidated red and white Ford 150 pickup truck with a small trailer attached was parked close to the rear entrance. A Honda generator in the truck bed was running quietly.
The house and its environs were a mess: overgrown, strewn with old concrete blocks, bricks, and chunks of concrete balustrade. Trash of every shape, size and composition littered the entire backyard and driveway. The house itself, a once proud antebellum mansion, was a ruin, a pre-Civil War structure that had seen many a renovation and just as many owners. But all that was long ago. The house had been vacant for almost ten years. Much of the concrete stucco had fallen off the walls, leaving the bricks exposed and the exterior facade looking like a vast jigsaw puzzle. The steps to the rear entrance were long gone. The semi-circular rear porch and the balcony above it were in a dangerous state of disrepair. The concrete balustrades had collapsed, and the entire porch structure appeared about ready to fall in on itself. So sad. With the steps gone, the only access to the house at the rear was down through the basement.
Kate was standing at the top of the basement steps, gnashing her teeth with impatience, and she wasn’t alone. Detective Sergeant Lonnie Guest was at her side, that stupid, shit-eating grin plastered all over his face.
“Hey, Kate,” I said. “That egg on your shirt, Lonnie?” He looked down. “Gotcha, Lonnie.”
“You’re an ass, Starke. One of these days....”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, slapping him affectionately on the shoulder. “When you’re man enough, you’ll be too old. Now, Kate. What the hell is this all about?”
“For Christ’s sake, you two.” Kate really was exasperated. “Don’t get started. I’m in no mood for that kinda crap today. If you can’t be civil, Sergeant, you can go wait in the car, and you, Starke,” she said, grimly. “You can show him a little respect, too.”
Hmmm. Not so easy, that. Respect has to be earned, and that fat son of a bitch hates my guts. I don’t like him a whole hell of a lot myself either. Starke? What’s that about? She never calls me that.
“Now, Kate,” I said. “When did I ever not show the good sergeant the respect he deserves?” A kind of sideways question, but what the hell.
As always, even dressed for the weather as she was, she looked terrific. Almost six feet tall, slender, long tawny hair tied back in a ponytail, an oval face with high cheekbones, huge hazel eyes and a high forehead. She was wearing jeans tucked into a pair of Timberland boots, a white turtleneck sweater under a heavy, black North Face Denali coat, and a black wool hat.
“Save it, and come on.” She started down the concrete steps into the basement. I looked at Lonnie. He stared back at me, shrugged, and started down after her. I followed as he picked his way carefully down the ten broken steps. The wooden door at the bottom was shattered, hanging off its hinges at a drunken angle. Someone had strung lights from the generator on the truck. It wasn’t much, but there was enough light for us to pick our way through the filth and trash that littered the basement floor.
Kate led the way up a second set of concrete steps to what, back in the day, must have been the kitchen. Now it was a shell. Whatever wallpaper there might have been was long gone. The plaster was falling off the walls and ceiling, and there were holes in the floorboards. The cabinets and appliances were also long gone; even the doors were missing.
“Be careful,” Kate said, as she started up the stairs to the second floor. “Only one of us on the stairs at a time. They could collapse under the weight of more than one person, so tread carefully.”
One by one, we negotiated the rickety, wooden stairs until finally we stood together at one end of a long passageway that led from one side of the house to other. There was another floor above, but for now, we were where Kate wanted us to be.
The walls on either side were punctuated by doorways that led into what once must have been bedrooms, maybe even a bathroom or two. The rooms themselves were uninhabitable, except perhaps by itinerant crackheads and the inevitable rats. Here and there among the ruins lay filthy, befouled old mattresses, discarded clothing, used condoms, needles, and filthy rags that once might have been blankets. The air was rank with the stink of decay, rot and putrefaction. Obviously, until recently, the place had been a vast squat.
Lonnie and I followed Kate along the landing to a doorway that led into a huge room that took up the entire width of the house. It was at least forty by twenty-five, with twelve-foot high ceilings. The master bedroom, maybe? It was cold, icy cold. Most of the glass in the big windows was gone; the sleet blew in unrestricted and lay in inch-deep white semi-circles beneath the window openings.
Five techs and the medical examiner, Dr. Sheddon, were gathered around a section of the floor in front of a huge bay window. Lights on stands, powered by the generator outside, surrounded a section of the floor where the boards had been taken up. The boards now lay in a pile in the middle of the room.
Two more rough-looking individuals were seated on old five-gallon drums at the side of the room farthest from where the techs were at work. Owners of the truck, no doubt.
“Grab some covers,” Kate said, reaching into a large open case.
I took off my coat and hung it on a nail on the doorframe, shivering. Damn. It’s too goddamn cold for this crap.
It took no more than a couple of minutes before all three of us were dressed head to toe in Tyvek coveralls, booties, and gloves. For the most part, we covered up in silence, aware of the sullen stares from the two creatures sitting on the oil drums.
“Okay,” I said. “What do we have?”
We joined the group at the hole in the floor. All of them, including Doc Sheddon, were on their knees, three on either side of the hole. The exposed, rough-sawn joists were heavy, at least four by twelves on twenty-inch centers. Sheesh. They built ‘em to last back in the day. Something was wedged in the gap between two of the joists. It was wrapped in clear polythene sheeting, though age had not treated it well. It had degraded to a point where it was all but impossible to see through the several layers that surrounded the... thing.
“Hello, Kate, Lonnie,” Sheddon said. “Hey, Harry. How’s it hangin’?” I had to smile. Doc had been greeting me the same way for years and, as far as I knew, I was the only one he greeted that way.
“I’m good, Doc. What do you have?”
“See for yourself,” he said, inching his way sideways on his knees to give me room to join him. The others made room for Kate and Lonnie, although he remained standing.
The polythene had been torn... no, it had been slit, and then pulled apart to reveal the skeletal remains of.... Christ! I wonder if we’ll ever know.
“She was young, Harry,” Sheddon said, staring thoughtfully down at the skull. “Sixteen to eighteen, I should say, from what I can see here, but young, for sure.”
“She?” I asked. “You sure?”
“Yep. The ridges — temporal, orbital, super ciliary — are almost non-existent. They never are well defined, even in males, but in this case....”
“Any idea how long she’s been here, Doc?” Kate asked.
“Hah. That’s a difficult one, and one I’m not prepared to answer here, at least not with any precision. Could be as little as two years, or as many twenty. I’d gravitate to midway between the two: ten, maybe twelve years. She’s naked, so clothing will be no help. I don’t know. We may have to send her off to Knoxville for a definitive answer. Even then I’d say they wouldn’t be able to date the PMI – the post mortem interval - conclusively, maybe within one or two years.”
He looked up at Kate. “Catherine, my dear. I think you’ll have to figure this one out using good old detective work, but that’s what you two are good at, right? Well, good luck with that, my friends. I’ll see what I can do to help, but we’ll need to identify her first. I hope there’s enough left of her to do so. I’ll have her taken to my lab; we’ll begin there. I don’t have much on right now, so we can start as soon as you like. After lunch be okay? Say one o’clock?”
“Harry?” Kate asked.
“I... guess,” I said, shaking my head.
Christ. The last thing I need is an afternoon in a freezing lab with a bag of old bones and... Lonnie.
“No pay, I suppose?” I said it to Kate, with a smile.
“Just the pleasure of my company,” she replied.
We rose to our feet, walked a few steps, stopped, turned, and together we watched as Doc Sheddon stripped off his covers, bagged and sealed them, then gathered up his gear. He shambled off, muttering to himself, his long black overcoat and heavy case barely clearing the floor.
“I’ll have the techs pull the rest of the boards. See if there’s anything else hidden away.” Kate looked thoughtfully around the big room and shrugged. “I suppose we need to have the entire building processed. Could be more bodies. Damn. That will take days, if not weeks. The chief will have a conniption. Shit.”
She went and gave the instructions to the team, then came back shaking her head. “They are not happy. What with the weather and all, and I don’t blame them, but it has to be done.”
We stripped off our covers and left the techs working the scene. I grabbed my coat, put it on, fastened it all the way up to the neck, and then put on my gloves.
“So,” I said to Kate. “I’m assuming those two lovely-looking characters over there found her, right?”
“Yeah. Apparently they’d heard that the house is to be demolished and figured they would steal the floorboards — heart pine, more than 150 years old, worth a fortune — but they got a nasty shock.”
“So let’s talk to them.”
She nodded. “Okay, but they’re not going to know anything.”
We walked the few yards to where they were sitting, shivering. They had their elbows on their knees, hands clasped together, blowing on them. They looked up at us, scowled, but said nothing.
“So,” Kate said. “What were you two heroes doing here?”
“We done tol’ the officer,” the bigger of the two said, waving a hand in the general direction of a uniformed policeman who had recently appeared in the doorway. “We tol’ ‘im we was gettin’ a foo boards fur a frien’ who makes furniture. Nice wood these; old-growth pine. Worth a dollar or two. Hell, they’s gonna pull ‘er down anyway. We’d gotten a foo of ‘em up,” he waved toward the pile of floorboards in the center of the room, “‘an we figured just a foo more ‘an we’d be outa ‘ere. An’ we finds it. Dint know whut it wus, till we cuts the plastic, like. Sheeit. Ah ‘bout ‘ad a ‘art attack.”
Good lord. Now those are two good old boys, that’s for sure.
“Did you move anything; take anything off the body?” I asked.
“No sir,” he said, shaking his head, vigorously. “Ah jus’ cut the plastic, ‘an then Ah jumped outa there and called 911. They tol’ us to stay put, an’ we did. Dint we, Chester?”
Chester nodded enthusiastically, chewing vigorously on something nasty. He turned his head, spit a stream of dark brown fluid onto the boards beside him, and looked up again, still chewing rapidly.
“Then you won’t mind if we search you, right?” Kate asked.
They both looked warily at her, then slowly shook their heads.
“Stand up. Both of you,” Kate said. “Lonnie.” She twitched her head in Chester’s direction.
Lonnie stepped forward. “Do it!” he growled, and they did.
He’s an intimidating presence, is Lonnie Guest; a big man, not big tall, big fat. He’s maybe five feet eleven and could probably do with losing fifty, maybe even sixty pounds. He’s obnoxious, arrogant, and an enigma. He’s not quite as stupid as he would have you believe; he’s often given to rare and always unexpected bursts of brilliance. He doesn’t like me worth a damn, but he tolerates me. Mostly because he knows Kate wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s useful, sometimes, when he’s not wearing his perpetual shit-eating grin.
So, the two would-be floorboard thieves stood quietly while Lonnie slowly and thoroughly searched them. By the time he’d finished, they were standing before us wearing nothing but socks and filthy underwear, shivering.
“Nothing,” Lonnie said, stepping away from them.
“Get dressed and get out of here,” Kate said. “And be quick about it.”
“Whut about our wood?” the big man said, through chattering teeth.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said. “The wood is not yours. It belongs to the property owner, and I’m sure he, or she, has plans for it. If you’d been caught stealing it, you were looking at a couple of years in Silverdale. As it is, you can go, and be thankful. Oh, and we’ll need to borrow the generator. You can pick it up at the lot tomorrow morning.”
“But, but, but....”
“No buts, dickhead,” Lonnie said. “Just go take the genny out of the truck and leave before the lieutenant changes her mind. Gimme your full name, address and phone number, and I’ll see the supervisor at the lot has it when you go pick it up.”
They shambled off, along the landing toward the stairs, muttering to each other.
“That was a little harsh, don’t you think?” I said to Kate. “After all, they did call it in. God only knows when and what we would have found if they hadn’t.”
She didn’t answer. She just shrugged and walked back across the room to the hole in the floor where the techs were easing the fragile package out from between the joists.
They laid it gently on the floor and stepped away. We all stood in a circle around it, looking down upon the pathetic little bundle that once had been a young woman, full of life, and maybe dreams of something special. It never failed to affect me.
How do they do it? I’ve seen it so many times. How does someone intentionally take the life of another human being? Assuming it was murder, that is.
I looked at Kate. Her face was pale, her lips clamped tight together, and her brow furrowed. She must have felt me staring at her, because she looked at me, turned the corners of her mouth down, and shook her head.
“C’mon,” she whispered. “Let’s get out of here. I need a drink.”
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