At first.
Pete was no biologist, but he’d butchered enough game to know the basics of bone structure.
Even so, it took a good twenty minutes for his mind to accept what his eyes were seeing. Even then he harbored some doubts.
Until he found the remains of a tom tennis shoe...
DeNoux was so shaken, he wasn’t sure who to call. So he rang up the conservation department. And they called me.
Ordinarily, the district attorney would check out a crime scene personally, but Derek Patel’s skeletal remains were tied to a case Todd Girard had stepped away from. I guessed he’d be stepping away even farther now. Faster than a buck on the run.
A.D.A. Harvey Bemis arrived at the coyote den dressed for heavy weather. In his L.L. Bean down-filled parka, with matching tanker cap and furred ear-muffs, he looked ready for a trek across the polar ice cap. I was wearing my usual leather car coat and jeans. In the shelter of the tall pines, twenty degrees doesn’t seem that cold. Especially when you’re seething.
“Is there any question the remains are the Patel boy’s?” Harvey demanded.
“Not much,” I said. “We haven’t found the skull yet, but the shoe is the brand and size described by the family and the blood type’s a match.”
“Why haven’t you... found the skull?” Harvey asked, glancing around the savaged ground as though my officers and the state police CSI team had overlooked it somehow.
“This isn’t the original dump site,” I explained. “My partner and a conservation officer are backtracking it now. Most likely, the body was ditched out near the shore highway. The coyote pack found it there, tore it apart, then carried the pieces back to the den.”
“I thought coyotes were afraid of people.” Harvey said.
“That was before the Internet boom, when folks realized they could do business anyplace you can plug in a laptop. The population along the north is exploding, Harve. We’re crowding onto their habitat and coyotes don’t read Darwin. As they get used to seeing us around, they lose their fear. If they find us dead on their turf, we’re lunch. Like roadkill, chickens in a coop, or a fawn frozen in the snow.”
“Coyotes didn’t kill this boy,” Bemis said grimly. “We both know who did this.”
“Actually, we don’t. Whatever the time frame for the killing turns out to be, I guarantee you Carl Novak’s going to have an alibi the KGB couldn’t break. A family reunion, a christening? He was there, surrounded by fifty witnesses.”
“Then he hired it done!”
“You’re exactly right. He did. And we helped him.”
“Helped him? What—?”
“Novak was working two jobs just to keep his daughter Julie in school, Harvey. He didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Then she was killed and Avery wrote him a check. Tipped him like a bellhop. Two hundred thou for his daughter’s life. And now?” I gestured at the savage clearing. “Look what a backwoods boy can accomplish with a few bucks.”
“He’s not going to get away with this,” Bemis said furiously. “Alibi or no alibi, I want that sonofabitch arrested! I want him hauled into the House in cuffs—”
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean I’m not going to bust him, Harvey. Hell just lawyer up, and well get nothing. Novak’s not the one I want anyway.”
“Of course he is! What are you talking about?”
“His daughter died in the snow, and nobody was held accountable. And now we’ve got another dead kid, or what’s left of one. We gave Novak money instead of justice. So he used our cash to buy his own justice.”
“He bought murder!”
“Damn right. And that’s the guy I want. The sonofabitch who killed this boy for money. And Novak is going to give me his name. Because he’s angry and hurting, but most of all, because he feels justified! He thinks he bought retribution. When I tell him the truth, that he killed the wrong boy, he’ll unravel like a cheap suit.”
“But you can’t tell him! It was revealed in confidence!”
I almost decked him. It was a near thing. I snatched up a piece of Derek Patel’s shattered femur instead, and dragged the jagged end of it across Harvey’s new parka, smearing his coat with blood and slime.
“What—? What the hell are you doing?” Bemis stammered, staggering back, horrified.
“Take a deep breath, Counselor. That’s what justice smells like in the deep woods. Avery cut Novak a check for his daughter and expected him to take it. I warned you it would blow back, and now it has. I helped make this mess, so I’m going to fix it, but I’m done playing games. I’m going to tell Novak the flat-ass truth about what happened. And he’ll give me a name and I’ll bring that bastard in. It won’t be justice, but I’ll have to live with it. This,” I said, tossing the bone at his feet, “is the part you have to live with.”
As I turned away, Bemis grabbed my arm.
“Just a damn minute, LaCrosse—”
Pure cussedness on my part. As he jerked me around, I used the momentum to slap him across the face. Harder than I meant to. He went down like a sack of cement, staring up at me in stunned disbelief.
“I’ll... I’ll have your badge for that!”
“No, you won’t. I’d love to tell a judge about this mess, Harve, but your boss wouldn’t like it. And just so we’re clear? If you ever lay hands on me again, I’ll break your goddamn jaw. C’mon, get up.” I offered him my hand but he brushed it away angrily, and staggered to his feet.
A black carrion beetle the size of my thumb was working its way through the muck on his overcoat.
“You’ve got a bug,” I said, pointing at the beetle.
“What? Oh!” he gasped, horrified. He tried to brush it away, but the beetle clung stubbornly to the fabric, scarfing its lunch.
Harvey plucked it off and cast it aside, but his fingertips came up smeared with Derek Patel’s remains. It was too much. Stumbling into the brush, he dropped to his knees in the snow, retching up everything but his spleen.
I almost felt sorry for him.
But I couldn’t spare the time. I needed to get to Novak fast.
To tell him the truth. And destroy him with it.
I picked up my partner at the shore highway, where patrolmen were taping off the original dump site. Racing back into Valhalla with lights and sirens, we crossed the river to Poletown, to Carl Novak’s run-down double-wide.
I carried the femur with me. Technically, it was evidence, but the forest den wasn’t really a crime scene. The coyotes were only guilty of being coyotes.
When Carl Novak answered my knock, I simply handed him the savaged bone, explained what it was and where I’d found it. And what had actually happened the night his daughter died.
It took a moment for the horror of it to sink in. But when it did, Novak sagged against the doorjamb like he’d been slammed across the knees with a Louisville Slugger.
And then he gave us the hired killer’s name.
A familiar one.
Joni Cohen was right. When you do police work in your hometown, you’re bound to run into people you know.
“Holy crap,” Zina said, scanning the screen of her laptop. We were in my Jeep, idling in Novak’s driveway, waiting for a prowl car to show, to take him into custody.
“What have we got?” I asked, keeping an eye on Carl Novak, as he said his goodbyes to his wife and remaining kids on his porch. Dry-eyed now, but he looked decades older. In utter despair.
“Oskar Sorsa, Big Ox,” Zina read. “Six foot seven, two-eighty. Two-time loser, both busts tied to the meth trade, three years on the first fall, four more on his second. Ganged up in prison with the Aryan Militia. The LEO lists him as a violent offender. Presume to be armed, approach with caution. Paroled to Valhalla after his latest hitch. Elkhart Road? I don’t recognize that address.”