"We have pictures," Dallas said. "From Lindsey's locker, shots of Nina wearing it."
"Nina told me once," Lindsey said, "…it was at a party, when she'd been drinking…that the bracelet held the key to great wealth. I have no idea what she meant. She said it as a sort of drunken bragging, but of course she didn't explain."
John Bern looked away toward the distant rose garden, where its overgrown bushes crowded among the Pamillon family headstones. Saying nothing, he moved toward the old, neglected cemetery. Everyone followed him but Dallas, who remained with the grave-and Joe Grey on the roof above.
The tomcat watched across the far rubble as Bern eased in among the tangled rosebushes, carefully pulling aside thorny branches to examine the old headstones and marble slabs. Three ornate marble angels stood up among the sprawling bushes and the figure of a little winged child. Bern moved among the Pamillon dead slowly until at last he paused, not beside a headstone but at an unmarked patch of earth that, Joe could see, had settled into a shallow concavity. The tomcat, dropping down a honeysuckle vine, out of sight, fled through the morning shadows between the fallen walls and up onto a pile of stones where he could see better-could see that at one end of the unmarked, sunken grave the soil had been disturbed. As if a marker had been removed?
Both Bern and Davis photographed the area from many angles, capturing shadows and indentations. Then they both dropped to their knees as if praying for the souls of the surrounding dead, and carefully searched the hard earth around the unidentified concavity for fragments, for minute shreds of cloth or a lost button, for footprints or any foreign debris.
Watching from among the tumbled stones, Joe grew increasingly impatient because he couldn't examine the grave site himself to sniff out scents that no human would discover. He waited, fidgeting, for nearly an hour before Bern and Davis returned to the grotto and the body to finish labeling and boxing up the bones.
Only when everyone had left the family cemetery did Joe conduct his own investigation. Sniffing every inch of the unmarked grave and its surround, he found very little. Once he caught a whiff of an unfamiliar perfume or shaving lotion, but it was so faint and so entwined with fresh human scents now, and with the smell of the few roses that still bloomed, that even a cat couldn't sort it out; he returned at last to the roof above the grotto, having learned nothing.
Bern and Davis were packing up their equipment, preparing to leave. Joe watched Dallas cross the grotto, dropping into his pocket a small paper evidence bag containing the last item Dr. Bern had found: two minuscule lumps Bern had unearthed beneath the body, at the bottom of the grave.
If these were what Joe thought, they must have settled during the preceding years, possibly falling as the flesh decayed around them. He'd gotten a clear look as Bern bagged them, and he was sure they were bullets crusted with detritus and earth.
Joe found it interesting that as Ryan and Clyde helped carry the coroner's cases to his car, the newlyweds moved close together, as if, in the face of death, they needed to touch, to reassure each other of their own well-being and safety. And when Joe looked at Mike and Lindsey, they were behaving the same, Lindsey leaning into the tall, lanky Scots Irishman, his arm protectively around her. They glanced up when Detective Davis looked in their direction, then turned away as Davis headed for Detective Garza.
Joe watched Davis slip a small plastic bag from the pocket of her dark uniform. He could see a half sheet of paper inside. Was that the note Ryder had brought in earlier? But why bring it here? It was already logged in, and Lindsey had already seen it. The look on Davis's face was one of half annoyance, half amusement. As she handed Dallas the small evidence bag, Joe slipped silently along the edge of the roof until he was just above them.
Whatever this was, it wasn't the letter Ryder had brought, this wasn't hand printed, but typewritten on smooth white paper.
"Brennan found this at the back door this morning," Davis said. "Just after change of watch. No one saw who left it, and there are no latents." The look between the two detectives was one the tomcat knew well, that wry glance of frustration that heralded another anonymous tip, both welcome and highly frustrating.
But this wasn't Joe's tip. Nor, surely, anything Dulcie or Kit would have taken to the station. Edging farther over the lip of the roof, Joe read the letter over Dallas's shoulder, watched Dallas glance across the grotto at Lindsey, much as Davis had done.
Lindsey was watching them, the end of her scarf thrown back over her shoulder, her tan very appealing against the white tank top. At that moment, Joe would have given a brace of fat mice to know her thoughts.
But he would give a lot more to know them if the detectives shared the letter with her.
Police Chief Max Harper:
Regarding the reopened investigation of Carson Chappell's disappearance: When Lindsey Wolf reported Chappell missing, she lied to the detective about where she was. She was not in the village. She rented a car from Avis and was gone all week. Here is a photocopy of the dated rental receipt in her name. I do not know where she went. Good luck in this investigation.
The letter was indeed like something the real snitches might have discovered and stolen and taken to the detectives, and that angered Joe. He wanted to know who had left this, wanted to know if the message was true or if the killer had written it to lay the blame on Lindsey.
He didn't want to think she'd killed Carson. Despite his uneasy questions about her, he wanted to believe her. Wanted her to be telling the truth. Below him, Dallas was saying, "I'd like Lindsey to read this."
Davis said, "You think that's wise?"
"In this case, yes."
She nodded, and he motioned Lindsey and Mike over. They read the printout together. Lindsey stood a moment staring at it, then looked up at the detectives, flushed and scowling.
"Who gave you this? Where did you get this?"
"It was left at the station this morning," Davis said. "We don't know who left it."
"Can you fingerprint it?"
"I tried," Davis said. "There's nothing-we'll see what the lab can pick up."
"It's not typed," Lindsey said, examining the paper through the plastic. "It's too even. Looks like a printout. Is there some way you can trace a printer?"
"We'd have to have something to go on," Davis said. "Another example from the same printer, and even then…Were you out of town the week Carson disappeared?"
"No. That was the week of the wedding. May I see the receipt?"
Davis turned the plastic over, to show the Visa receipt. Lindsey looked at it, and nodded. "That's my credit card number. But there've never been any forged charges against it, I check carefully. I've never had any theft."
"Would you still have that Visa bill?" Davis said, clearly not expecting that she would.
"I would if there were any business expenses on that one," Lindsey said. "And there usually are. It would be in my tax returns for that year." She looked at Dallas. "They're in the locker, in the file cabinet." Her hazel eyes were still angry, her cheeks flaming. "This is…What's he trying to do?"
"Who?" Davis said.
"Ray Gibbs," Lindsey said, looking at Davis. "If that body is Nina, then this note has to be from Gibbs. Or…" After a moment, she said, more quietly, "Or…Oh, not my sister?"
"What makes you think it was Gibbs?" Davis said. "Or your sister? This could have nothing to do with them."
"It has to do with Carson's death, and maybe with Gibbs's wife, with Nina," Lindsey said, glancing away, toward the grave.
Davis said, "Why are you so certain the body is Nina?" Davis had taken over the interview, and Dallas seemed content to let her run with it.
"She always wore that bracelet, I don't think I ever saw her without it. Wore it all the time, just as her aunt did, before her. Unless…," she said, "unless the story about there being only one bracelet wasn't true, unless there was another."