The Quiet Bones Read online

  “Yeah,” said Maliah. “Well, that would be your area of expertise.”

  “Something about this whole case is off,” said Wren. “Something big.”

  Maliah leaned back in her office chair. “And you’re telling me this because…?”

  “Never mind.” Wren left Maliah’s office and went to Reilly’s.

  He was on the phone.

  She listened while he told them to check YouTube. Then he got put on hold. He moved the receiver of the phone away from his mouth. “I’m on hold. Can I do something for you?”

  “Something about this isn’t right,” said Wren. “I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s wrong. It’s all wrong.”

  “Okay,” said Reilly.

  “I just… you agree with me? There’s something we’re missing here?”

  “I guess so,” he said. “Otherwise, we’d know who did it.” He put the receiver back to his ear. “Yeah, I’m here. It’s Reilly…. No, I’m not saying that, exactly. I’m saying that there could be, though… Well, the woods around the school seems like the place to look, don’t you think? Everything else has been on the campus of the high school.” He waited. “Yeah, okay, call me back.” He hung up the phone.

  “So, I take it they haven’t found a body?”

  “They’re putting together a team to comb the woods.”

  “Should we go out there?” she said.

  “Might be a late night,” he said.

  “If they find the body, we’ll just have to go out there anyway.”

  “True,” said Reilly. “All right, let’s go.”

  * * *

  Four hours later, every inch of the woods around the campus had been searched, along with every room in the school. They’d secured help from the faculty and staff of the school. Everyone in the community was pretty horrified by the tragedy that was unfolding in their town. They all wanted to help.

  But there was no body. Nowhere in the school.

  Tomorrow, the police would be expanding their search to the surrounding areas, but Reilly and Wren headed back home. Wren asked Reilly if he wanted to get a drink with her, but he said he was going straight to bed.

  He dropped her off at Billy’s.

  Instead of driving home, though, he drove to Janessa’s. He got there and he didn’t go inside. He sat out at the end of the driveway, and he looked at the house. This used to be his home. When he’d bought it, he’d imagined growing old there, kids playing in the yard, a whole life. The driveway was long and winding, surrounded by trees that blossomed in the spring—big, pink flowers.

  Nothing had gone the way he’d imagined it.

  They hadn’t had any more kids, even though they’d planned on it and bought this big house with room to grow. Right around when it was time to start trying, when Timmy was a year and a half old, that was when it was starting to become clear something wasn’t right with him. He wasn’t talking. He wasn’t making noises. He wasn’t cooing. He wasn’t pointing or interacting with adults.

  He remembered the arguments he’d have with Janessa about whether or not it wouldn’t be a good idea to lean into getting some kind of diagnosis. The doctors themselves were very hesitant about everything. At this point, they kept saying, “Let’s wait and see.”

  Eventually, they referred Timmy to a program called Birth to Three, in which speech therapists came into the house to help Timmy. They would be there for an hour once a week, and most of that time was spent in trying to get Timmy’s attention or interest him in interaction, which was next to impossible. They strapped him down and tried to entice him with sweets and bubbles, trying to get him to make sounds and be rewarded for them.

  Timmy’s progress was slow.

  When he was three years old, there was a crazy breakthrough, and he suddenly started babbling nonstop. Unintelligible stuff, but he seemed to be talking. Only a few months later, they realized all he was saying was lines from Thomas the Tank Engine.

  Reilly still remembered the despair of it, how there had been hope. Because three years old wasn’t too late to start talking. He’d thought that maybe Timmy would catch up with his peers and that he’d be playing baseball with other boys in a few years.

  And then, realizing that Timmy wasn’t getting anywhere.

  It had hit both him and Janessa pretty hard. He knew she’d been crushed by it. Devastated.

  Years passed, and Timmy’s speech got clearer, but he never really started to speak on his own. He just regurgitated things he heard. He slipped further and further away from them, and they stopped trying so hard to reach him.

  Reilly grimaced.

  He waited in the driveway for a little longer. He knew it was Timmy’s bedtime and Janessa would be busy giving him a bath and tucking him in.

  When enough time had passed, he pulled the car up to the house and got out. He went to the front door and knocked.

  Janessa opened the door a few moments later. “Caius?” A crease appeared between her eyebrows. “What are you doing here?”

  He pushed past her into the house, bouncing on the balls of his feet. It always disturbed him how everything looked the same in here. The only thing different from when he’d lived here was that there were no longer any framed photographs of him on the wall.

  “Listen, you can’t just barge in here,” she said.

  He turned on her. “You’re having another child so that you get another shot.”

  “What?”

  “Timmy came out broken, but this time, you’ll have a normal kid, one that’ll be easier to love. And then Timmy will be relegated to some back room to rot away, watching his freaking videos, and you’ll continue to refuse to get him the help he needs.”

  She gaped at him. “Get out.”

  “No,” he said. “I think we need to get a real diagnosis for our son. I saw a guy today who could talk. He even was able to have a job for a little while. The job was a little much for him, and he couldn’t stay there, but there could be hope for Timmy. And you’re wasting all your hope on this new baby that you’re going to have. You’ll just move on and have another life.”

  “Caius,” said Janessa. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You always wanted a do-over.”

  “I did not,” said Janessa, shaking her head. “I didn’t want anything other than our perfect, beautiful boy. I love him. I spend every single day with him. How dare you—”

  “He’s the failed experiment,” said Reilly. “This baby will be the baby you always wanted.”

  “He’s not a failed experiment.” Janessa was shaking. “Maybe that’s what you think of him.”

  For some reason, the words felt like a slap to the face.

  So, when Janessa pointed at the door and said, “Get out of this house,” he left. He slunk out back to his car, which he drove down that long, winding driveway, away from the place that had been his home, and out to a world in which no place was home.

  * * *

  Wren looked up to see Reilly come into Billy’s after all. She waved at him from her bar stool.

  He came for her, lumbering through the bar looking as if he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He fell into a bar stool next to her. “Hey, Delacroix.”

  “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t think you were coming out.”

  “Neither did I.” He turned to signal the bartender, who caught his eye and brought over the beer he usually drank. Reilly handed over his credit card to start a tab. He took a long drink of his beer.

  “You okay?” said Wren.

  “No,” said Reilly.

  She nodded. “I guess you don’t want to talk about it?”

  He shook his head, taking another long drink from the bottle.

  She took a drink too.

  They sat next to each other, in silence, for a while.

  Reilly spoke up. “Where’s Marner?”

  “I don’t know. We’re not really together like that.”

  He raised his eyebrows. He didn�
�t believe her.

  “I mean, it’s, you know, casual. I don’t keep tabs on him.” She felt hot bits of embarrassment enveloping her as she said this, but she didn’t know why. Why shouldn’t she be allowed to define her own relationship? Why should she be ashamed? Was it because it was Hawk? She sighed heavily.

  “I went to see Janessa.”

  “That’s your ex, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I take it that didn’t go well?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You having second thoughts about being apart from her now that she’s moving on? You want her back?”

  “No.” Reilly drank some beer. “No, of course not. That’s not what it’s about.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I’m jealous,” he said. “I’m jealous that she gets to have another baby, and that she gets a shot at having a normal kid, one that can talk to her and hug her and tell her what he wants for breakfast. She gets another shot, and I want another shot too.”

  Wren licked her lips.

  “And I feel guilty for wanting that, because it’s a betrayal to Timmy. Because he’s my favorite person on earth, but I don’t even feel like I really know him. I feel like I can’t know him. I always wanted to be a father. I had ideas of what kind of father I could be. But I can’t be that kind of father if I have the kind of kid that I have. And I guess I’m still angry about that.”

  Wren didn’t say anything.

  Reilly peeled off the label of his beer in one quick movement. It shredded it, leaving behind half the label and half white residue.

  “You know, I don’t know anything about having kids,” she said. “But I do know that you can’t always control what you feel. You just feel it. You can control how you deal with that feeling, but the feeling itself, it just happens. It’s okay to feel whatever you feel. So, I think, what you feel about your son, it’s okay. You don’t need to feel guilty about it.”

  “Oh, that’s an easy thing to say, but—”

  “My mother was pretty much a terrible parent,” said Wren. “And if I found out that she felt guilty about how she treated me, guess how much that would change things for me?”

  “Uh…”

  “Zero change,” said Wren. “I never needed guilt from my mom. I just needed her to make better choices.”

  Reilly gripped his beer. “Look, I don’t know if I make the greatest decisions—”

  “You’ve got be doing a thousand times better than my mom,” said Wren.

  He snorted.

  She laughed. “And look how great I turned out, right?”

  He downed the rest of his beer.

  She took a long drink of hers.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It took five days for the body to be found, and when they did, it was all the way out in the woods near I-70, practically in Frederick. The location of the body would have typically meant it was out of the jurisdiction of the tri-state task force, but the Frederick police decided to cooperate with them. They were pretty clear about being in control of the scene, though. It wasn’t anything like the crime scenes in the more rural areas. These guys had a tighter ship going on.

  Both Reilly and Wren had to sign in, and they had to be escorted to the scene by another detective. His name was Ford. He had a first name, obviously, but they never did find out what it was.

  Detective Ford wore a long trench coat, like Columbo or something, and he was mostly quiet. He would stand behind Reilly and Wren ominously while they looked over the scene and the body, listening to everything they said but rarely saying anything himself.

  The scene was pretty similar to the first scene. The girl was naked, face down on the ground in the woods. Her body was dirty and streaked with blood. She’d been shot in the back of the head.

  The bullet could have come from the same gun, but like all the bullets thus far, it wasn’t in great shape for analyzation, so they hadn’t been able to determine specifics from it.

  It was confirmed that this corpse had been raped with an object. Maybe not the same shovel handle that had been used for the other murders, however. It seemed like a smaller object had been used in this case.

  The girl was very thin. She had obviously dyed hair. It was white blond and the edges looked frayed. The blood that was matted in her hair looked bright red. Her roots were coming in, and they were dark. She was older than the other victims. She didn’t go to Lingandale High School.

  Wren knelt down next to her, examining her arms with gloved hands. “Tracks.”

  “What’s that?” said Reilly.

  “She was an intravenous drug user,” said Wren.

  “Huh,” said Reilly.

  They both looked up at Ford, who was staring down on them.

  “Has the body been identified?” said Wren to Ford.

  “Yes,” said Ford. “We know her pretty well. Her name’s Tammi Mancks. She’s been in and out of jail for the past ten years. Prostitution. Drugs. Petty theft. She was pretty mouthy. Everyone on the department has picked her up for one thing or the other. I’m actually kind of sad to see her go.”

  That was the most that ever came out of Ford’s mouth the entire time they were out there.

  Wren stood up immediately. “She’s a prostitute?”

  Ford only nodded.

  Wren threw her hands into the air. “I give up.”

  “What?” said Reilly.

  Wren stalked off from the scene, out into the woods, away from both of them.

  “Wren?” called Reilly.

  “Leave me alone!” Wren snapped.

  * * *

  Later, as they were driving back home, Wren leaned her head against the window of Reilly’s car. She had a headache. “It’s a devolution. It makes entirely no sense at all.”

  “Well, we know why the video went up,” said Reilly. “He killed her five days ago. She was lying out there for all that time. So, that still fits with the pattern.”

  “There is no damned pattern, Reilly,” Wren exploded.

  “Okay, calm down,” said Reilly.

  “I can’t.” She clenched her hands into fists. “Listen, if you’re a serial killer, you might start by killing animals. And then you might work up to people that you don’t think anyone will notice, like prostitutes. And then, maybe, maybe, you’d work your way up to high school students. But you definitely don’t start with high school students and work your way down to prostitutes.”

  “Well, but that’s what happened,” said Reilly. “I mean, I recognize that you had all kinds of training at the Academy and that they gave you textbooks and they told you how serial killers acted, but sometimes there are people who break the mold.”

  “Right,” said Wren. “And in that case, I am useless.”

  “Look, forget the Academy,” he said. “Forget the textbooks. When you look at the scenes, at the victims, what’s your gut on this guy?”

  She sighed. “I…”

  “Do you get anything at all?”

  “I think he’s… disgusted with the bodies,” she said. “Because of the way they’re tossed out.”

  “Even though one was laid out in the library?”

  “Well, he didn’t clean her up or anything,” she said. “He arranged her on the table, but he didn’t show the body any respect. He dumped her there, made the video, and left.”

  “Okay,” said Reilly.

  “But if he’s disgusted, why rape them?”

  “Well…” said Reilly. “He doesn’t actually rape them, he uses an object.”

  “Why do that?”

  “I don’t know, maybe he hates the people he’s killing.”

  “Or what they represent?” She bit down on her bottom lip. “That could be, I guess. Maybe it’s some kind of symbolic thing, some kind of hatred acted out…”

  “Age?” said Reilly.

  She shook her head. “I got nothing on age. I would have said young, just because the other bodies were at the high school, but then this…” She rubbed her e
yes. “I don’t know, Reilly.”

  “Well, you think he’s really going to go on hiatus?”

  “If he does, we’ll probably never catch him,” said Wren. “We have nothing to go on.”

  “Maybe we catch a break and get some DNA this time,” said Reilly.

  “There’s been nothing thus far. I doubt it.”

  They were quiet.

  “When are you leaving for your dad’s wedding again?”

  “Oh, um, Friday evening.”

  “You know, maybe time off is going to shake something loose,” said Reilly. “Maybe it’s what you need. You go off and relax a little, get your mind off this case. See what that does for you.”

  “Honestly, Reilly, I don’t think I’m going to be thinking about serial murder while I’m at my father’s wedding,” she said.

  “No, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” he said. “Don’t think about it. Get your mind off it, and then when you come back to it, you know, see if you have any insights.”

  She leaned back against the seat, resting her head against the head rest. “I don’t know that there are even insights to have,” she said. “I’ve been saying it for a while. Something about this case is wrong.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “I don’t know either. But something… we need to go back to the beginning and examine all the assumptions we’ve made about this case, especially the ones we did without thinking about it at all.”

  “What assumptions are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s helpful.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You mean, like, assuming the killer’s a man?”

  She sat up straight furrowing her brow. “Like that, yeah, but not that.”

  “You sure? Maybe it is a woman.”

  “Women don’t kill like this,” she said.

  “What if it’s some kind of revenge thing?” said Reilly. “Like… I don’t know, some woman finds out her husband is a cheating bastard and she kills all the women he’s had sex with. That’s why the prostitute was in there.”

  “You watch too much TV,” said Wren. “Besides, what about the videos?”