4 Impression of Bones (12 page)

He sighed.

“I am willing, but must be paid for my labors.”

“Okay.
Pumpkin cupcakes?”

“And coffee.
There must be coffee.”

“It’s a deal.”

“Do you want Raphael to join us?”

Juliet sighed in turn.

“Yes. And that makes me the most selfish woman on the
planet. Let me call him. I may as well find out how many cupcakes this will
cost me and phone in an order to go.”

Raphael cut into Juliet’s apologies and said he could be
ready in fifteen minutes. Esteban was at her bungalow in five and had to wait
while she brushed her teeth and fed an annoyed Marley who could tell that Juliet
was planning on another day away.

They made a quick stop in town and then ate their cupcakes
in the car. Juliet forced herself to partake though her stomach was tied in
knots.

“Are you afraid that we will find something in the pond?”
Raphael asked. “Or that we will not?”

Juliet laughed a little ruefully.

“I am going to look like an idiot if nothing is there. But
that would be better than what I fear we shall find. There had to be a reason
for cutting that fence and for the ducks and geese to disappear.”

They parked at the back of the castle on the service road since
it was closer and let themselves in through the opening cut in the wire
enclosure.

“Juliet,” Raphael began.

“I know.” She got out her phone. “I’ve been putting it off. Manoogin
is going to hate me for this.”

The detective didn’t say anything to indicate annoyance, but
she had the feeling that her request for him to meet them at the duck pond did
not make him happy.

“We are going to need something to drag along the bottom. A
hook of some kind,” Juliet said when she tucked her phone away. The morning was
glorious and peaceful since work hadn’t started yet. A glancing ray of early
sun on the dark water seemed substantial enough to touch as it reflected back
into the air.

They finished off the coffee in Juliet’s thermos while they
waited, staying upwind of the dark pond, and after a couple moments Esteban
went to the castle to find some kind of dragging tool.

Manoogin, also having parked at the back fence, arrived just
as Esteban was returning from the castle with a twelve-foot piece of rebar. He
had bent the end to a more or less ninety degree angle.

“How cold is the water?” Raphael asked Esteban as he watched
the detective picking his way over the ground. “
It’s
spring fed?”

“It’s not cold enough,” Juliet answered. “It’s fed by a
spring but the level is falling and the algae would not be this thick if it
were cold enough to preserve a body.”

They all took a bracing breath.

“So rigor will have worn off. That will make it more
difficult to retrieve the body,” Esteban said calmly and bent the rebar into
more of a hook. He began removing his shoes and socks, setting them on a clean
rock. The ground was slimy with goose droppings. “The body will probably be
weighted.”

The odorous pond had been shrinking and at that point was no
more than twenty feet across. The rebar was about eleven feet long. It wasn’t
enough to drag the entire bottom of the pond since it sloped at about a twenty
degree angle but it would get close. And it didn’t seem likely that the killer
had waded out into the middle of the muck to dispose of the corpse.

“Start over there,” Juliet said, pointing. The water seemed
completely calm but the detritus and algae had gathered on one side, suggesting
there was some underwater current. It was also the side closest to the fence.

“It isn’t the best place to hide a body. Not permanently,”
Raphael said.

Manoogin
stayed quiet.

Esteban removed his shirt, folded it tidily, and then cast the
hook into the water. The pole brought up nothing but rotting sludge.

“I don’t think the killing was planned,” Juliet said. “And
the murderer wanted a place to hide the corpses away from the castle at least
for a while.
Someplace that the vultures wouldn’t find.
At a guess, I would say they were ultimately headed for the old cemetery. The
ground would be easier to dig and one wouldn’t have to run the risk of being
found with a body in the trunk of a car.”

“Corpses?”
Manoogin finally spoke.
“More than one?”

“I think Dolph would have ended up here too if there had
been more time. Sandra spoiled things by showing up early from lunch. She’s
lucky the killer didn’t have it in for her as well.”

Esteban cast the hook again. Under other circumstances
Juliet would have enjoyed watching him work. The scars on his torso did nothing
to detract from his beauty and he moved with an efficiency that bordered on
grace. She wondered if Raphael was also wishing he had a sketch book on hand.

Manoogin had noticed the scars, but he said nothing about
them. He would have had Esteban’s biography by then and known what each bullet
hole meant.

“I’ve noticed that you are a little focused when you work,”
Manoogin said at last. The tone was conversational and Juliet was grateful that
he wasn’t the type to show a lot of unrest and emotion.

Juliet had been told that she went so dead in the face when
she communed with her inner oracle that she looked like something attacked by
the Medusa.

“You take the good with the bad,” she said, shrugging. She
didn’t want to talk about her methodologies. Her new life was supposed to be a
refuge, a garden she cultivated for her crushed spirit. It pissed her off that
murders kept cluttering it up. How was she ever going to regrow her soul?

Except she was
regrowing
it.
Slowly, unevenly, but her spirit was healing in the quiet, with her
art and with her friends.

“Build thee more stately mansions, o my soul,” she said to
herself.

Manoogin would not understand, but Raphael would. Did. He
had had to rebuild his life too.

“
Revenge,
or money?” Raphael asked.

“Revenge.
Mostly.
But I think money played a part too.”

“It’s a shame that really complete revenge almost always
involves a body count. Most people simply aren’t that inventive.”

Juliet nodded agreement.

“As we all know, Dolph was into casual sex. The trouble was
that he forgot to mention this to his partners. Some women and men, even in
this day and age, don’t do casual anything. Not relationships, not investments.
And especially not the two together.
Artists, though I
hate to say this, are especially emotional and this time he picked the wrong
woman to scorn. Dolph probably never realized that he had entered into a
non-survivable relationship. He was unobservant that way. If he had guessed, he
would have gone down fighting instead of to an ambush.”

Juliet didn’t say anything more about Dolph or the women he had
been involved with. It would have been redundant.

“So, we are looking at a female killer?” Manoogin asked.

“Probably.
Though there is still
room for argument that it could be a man. Some women come with protectors.” She
refrained from looking at Raphael.

The sun rose higher and Esteban was about one-fifth of the
way around the pond when Weston came stomping out of the castle. The potential
for a bad scene was yawning like the Grand Canyon.

“I don’t believe it,” Weston began, speaking to Manoogin and
ignoring Juliet and Raphael. “You’re here because she called with another hunch,
aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Manoogin’s voice was mild.

“What’s wrong with you? Listening to this broad and some freak
puppet maker and now a fucking cripple!” Even from a distance it was apparent
that Weston’s breakfast had included whisky. The red veins around his flushed
nose suggested the habit was chronic.

Juliet wasn’t fond of being condescended to, especially by
an inferior—and Weston was, inferior in intelligence and as a human being—but when
someone was actually stunted enough to make a comment out loud, she usually
felt pity for their ignorance and limited horizons. However, Weston’s
assumption that Raphael’s brains and ears were located in his legs and also
apparently damaged made Juliet feel contempt and rage in almost equal measure.
Rage had it by a nose.

She rounded on him. Only a stupid or very drunk person would
fail to read the threat in her posture.

“Go ahead! Stare—but I can read you like a book. You ball busters
are all alike.”

“That is an unoriginal turn of phrase,” Raphael said. His
voice could have frosted glass.

“And I very much doubt that it’s true since I don’t come
with illustrations,” Juliet said softly. “But you are easy to read. You are a drunken,
shriveled-brained bigot. Why do they let you out in public without a keeper?
Stand over there and keep your mouth shut.”

Manoogin apparently guessed that Juliet was close to doing
something painful to his moronic partner and was torn between alarm and
amusement.

“Shut up before they report you,” he said quietly. “You’ve
been drinking and I’ll back them up if you say another damned thing.”

Weston finally got that everyone meant what they were
saying. He might still have been dumb enough to push the issue, but Esteban
interrupted them. The discarded rebar clanged as it hit a rock.

“I have something.”

He had rolled his pants up, but they were splashed with muck
as were his lower arms, but he had a hold of a piece of filthy rope and was
hauling something heavy from the water. He stopped when he had the graying,
bloated mass far enough out of the water that there was no chance of it sinking
again. It was a woman in a short dress. Her body was wound tight with rope
which secured some kind of cement pedestal to her torso. There were deep
scrapes on her face as if she had been dragged. There would be blood traces in
the tunnel and probably the basement visible under forensic light sources, even
if the cellar had been power-washed. It was amazing what luminol and a UV light
could find.

If the body had been brought out that way.
She was sure it had been. No way had she been carried through the castle.

“Recognize her?” Manoogin asked Juliet, interrupting her
thoughts. They were about six feet back from the corpse but her view was
unimpeded. “Is that our missing person?”

The damaged face had ballooned and was covered in pond gunk but
it was still recognizable. It was also apparent that her neck was broken. Just
like Dolph’s had been.

“Yes. It’s Stephanie Gillard.” Juliet’s voice was calm
though she was full of frustrated sorrow.
Carnivorous attractions were dangerous to more than the heart, but
most people didn’t find this out until it was too late. She added softly, “You’ll
want to check the tunnel and basement for traces of blood. Those scrapes on her
face happened somehow and some of the blood might have escaped power-washing.”

“Yeah.”

Manoogin and a shaken Weston approached the body. Esteban
got out of their way.

Raphael held out a towel to his friend. It would hardly be
adequate for removing the sludge, but Esteban could hose off in the castle courtyard
before he changed clothes. That he had a change of clothing was due to Juliet’s
foresight.

“You may not come with illustrations,” Raphael said. “But
you are illuminating.”

“That’s because you see the teacher’s edition. It comes with
annotations, glassine cover, and footnotes.”

Friendship with
her own
species had
been impossible on the job. Outside of it, the relationships worked well.
Even when there were dead bodies.

A tractor started up by the castle, making the point that
this was all very real and not a bad dream, however surreal the scene they
found themselves in.

“You have been terrorizing the yokels again,” Esteban said,
casting a glance at Weston. “I thought you would strike him.”

“I only intimidate to good purpose,” she replied. “And
anyway, he started it.”

“Well, I’m glad we had breakfast,” Esteban said. “Because I
think we’re going to be a while explaining this for the official record. One
gets the impression that the lieutenant is not overjoyed to have another corpse
on his hands.”

Juliet nodded, wondering how she was going to make her dream
sound like some reasonable form of intuition. Maybe she should make up
something about clues she had seen around the pond.

“Let’s hope Manoogin can keep your names out of this,”
Juliet said. “A third body in three days is going to have the press drooling.
They’ll be all over it like white on rice.”

Esteban grunted agreement. He had a colorful history and
didn’t really want it revisited. Still, he was there.

“Greater love hath no man,” she said. “Thank you both. I’ve
never been good at field work.”

Her alleged
coffee was black and undrinkable. The police station did not run to extraneous
luxuries like milk and sugar and Juliet had not yet fallen to powdered creamers
and artificial sweeteners.
Especially when they likely
wouldn’t make the charred beverage any more drinkable.

Though Esteban
had expected some tough questions about their activities, Juliet’s face time
and cooperation with Manoogin had paid off. While unhappy with having a third
homicide dropped on his plate, the lieutenant was wise enough not to try
shooting the messenger. He was also probably confident that if he gave her free
rein that she would find a shortcut to the killer.

Weston,
perhaps starting into his hangover but more likely wanting a bit of the hair of
the dog, let Manoogin take care of taking their statements. Again, Juliet did
most of the talking. She kept it simple, using the word “suspicion” and not “revelation
in the form of a dream” or “message from a revenant spirit” to explain her
impulse to examine the pond.