The Quiet Bones Read online

  “But why would someone go to the trouble of killing three people if he wasn’t really getting something out of it?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to figure out, like, a motive or something. That’ll be your job. You’re the one who used to work homicide. You can tell us why regular people kill.”

  Reilly suddenly got it. “Oh, wait. I do know this. I have seen this. It is an Agatha Christie thing. He killed the other people to cover up his murder.”

  “Exactly,” said Wren. “One of the murders is significant. The others are just there to camouflage that one.”

  “Right,” Reilly murmured. “I mean, that’s why he used an object to rape the corpses.”

  “Yeah, because he was grossed out,” said Wren. “He knew that serial killers would do sexual things to their victims, but he wasn’t going to actually touch the dead body.”

  “So, Megan Wallace,” said Reilly. “That’s got to be the significant murder, right?”

  “Absolutely, because it’s the first murder committed.”

  “And because he didn’t actually molest the corpse until after rigor set in, probably because he didn’t know what he was going to do with the body.”

  “Then he came up with the serial killer idea, and he molested her body.”

  “Why do you think we found her second, then?” said Reilly.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he dumped her somewhere out of the way, and no one found her, so he moved her. Maybe he really thought that if we found her second, we would think she’d been killed after Bristol Cannon. Maybe he came up with the idea of having the videos and then made one for Bristol and decided that Megan needed one too.”

  “You think he devolved to killing prostitutes because it was harder than he thought to kill high school girls?”

  “Could be,” said Wren, nodding.

  “Yeah,” said Reilly. “He kills Megan, and maybe it’s a heat-of-the-moment thing. Crime of passion. Then she’s dead, and he’s upset. He decides to kill Bristol, but it’s horrible. He hates it. He can’t bear the thought of killing again, but he knows he has to, so he kills someone less objectionable.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Boom,” said Reilly. “You solved the case.”

  “Well, not really,” said Wren. “I mean, we don’t know who did it.”

  * * *

  Reilly was erasing everything that had been written on the marker board in the bullpen. “None of this matters. We don’t need a profile. We need to start from scratch.”

  The uniforms in the bullpen had all cleared out to the sides of the room, where they were standing, watching this go down.

  Reilly scrawled on the board, Megan Wallace. He put a cap on the marker and looked out at them. “Okay, who has a motive to kill Megan Wallace?”

  “Did we talk to the dad?” said Wren. “You start with male figures in the victim’s life, right?”

  “The dad wasn’t in her life,” spoke up Marjorie Jaid.

  “That’s right,” said Wren. “She was an emancipated minor.”

  “But who was in her life?” said Reilly. “The boyfriend.” He turned around, uncapping his marker and writing THE BOYFRIEND underneath in all caps.

  “I thought the boyfriend’s dad’s gun was stolen,” spoke up one of the uniforms.

  “Yeah, stolen by the boyfriend.” Reilly tapped the board. “Genius, right? He stole it from his own dad, and his dad filed a report. Looks great for him.”

  Wren rubbed her hands together. “I guess that’s possible. He was the one who was all, ‘Anything you need,’ right? He was real cooperative.”

  “I thought he was the sullen one who wanted his mother there for the interrogation.”

  “No, that was Bristol’s boyfriend,” said Wren.

  “You sure?” said Reilly.

  “Pretty sure,” said Wren.

  “Hold on,” said Jaid, who had gone over to fire up one of the laptops in the bullpen. “Let me pull up the reports you guys filed.”

  Wren and Reilly waited.

  Jaid nodded. “Bristol’s boyfriend, Peter Baker, asked for his mother to be there. Noah Adams claimed to have been looking for Megan while the murders were taking place. We had to call to check on his alibi.”

  “Oh, right.” Reilly pointed at Jaid. “And it didn’t check out, did it?”

  “No,” said Jaid.

  “He’s our guy,” said Reilly. “He’s got to be our guy.”

  “But, what’s his motive?” said Wren.

  “Oh, come on, there’s always some reason to kill your girlfriend,” said Reilly. “Besides, we’re working under the crime-of-passion theory here. Maybe they were fighting and—”

  “And he shot her in the back of the head?” said Wren.

  Reilly considered. “Well, we still need to look into him. He’s our best suspect. It’s him.”

  “What about the principal or the teacher or the janitor?” said Jaid.

  “Yeah, yeah, okay.” Reilly turned around and wrote all that on the board underneath THE BOYFRIEND.

  “Reilly,” said Wren.

  “Yeah?”

  “If he stole the gun, that’s not a crime of passion.”

  Reilly raised his eyebrows. “You’re right. That’s premedi-fucking-tation. The plot thickens.”

  * * *

  “You know, I was wondering when you were going to come and talk to me,” said Alyssa Jennings. “On TV, the cops always come and talk to the friends of the people who died and ask if they had any enemies, that sort of thing. But you guys never did.”

  They were out at Lingandale High. It was late afternoon. School had just gotten out.

  “Right,” said Wren, “well, we thought we were dealing with a serial killer, and serial killers don’t kill for the same sorts of reasons as other people, so we didn’t do the typical kind of questioning.”

  “Which may have been a mistake,” said Reilly. “But the important thing is that we’re here now.”

  Alyssa surveyed them both. “Well, she had broken up with him. Like two weeks before she went missing.”

  “Broken up with Noah?”

  “Yeah, it was ugly,” said Alyssa. “He was, like, in a bad way over it, and he would call her at all hours of the night and come by her apartment and bang on the door and beg her to let him in. One night, she said she made the mistake of answering the phone and he told her that he was going to commit suicide if she didn’t take him back. She told him to cut the shit or she was going to call his mom, and that seemed to shut him up. But if you had talked to me, I would have told you that I never trusted that guy.”

  “Well,” said Reilly, “you could have called the police yourself, you know. Taken initiative.”

  Alyssa wrinkled up her nose. “I mean, I could have, sure. But it’s your job to go out and interview people, you know?”

  “It’s not important,” said Wren. “So, what you’re saying is that he might have killed her because she broke up with him.”

  “She didn’t have anyone, you know?” said Alyssa. “She was an emancipated minor and she lived on her own. There was no one for her to call.”

  “You know, in the future, if something like this happens, you can tell a teacher or the school counselor,” said Reilly. “Or you can call the police. We do take this kind of thing seriously.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Alyssa. “That’s why you’re just now talking to me.”

  * * *

  “He’s not talking to you,” said Pamela Adams, standing in the doorway to her house. Behind her, Noah was trying to get her attention.

  “Mom,” said Noah. “Mom, come on.”

  “He doesn’t have to,” said Pamela. “Apparently, you already talked to him at school, and I wasn’t even notified, and he’s my son, and that makes me angry.”

  “Mom,” said Noah. “I think we should cooperate with them. If we don’t, it’s only going to raise their suspicions. I didn’t do anything wrong, so if we cooperate—”

  “You be
quiet, young man,” said Pamela. “Out of the room.” She pointed.

  Noah didn’t go anywhere.

  Reilly smiled at Pamela. “Mrs. Adams, your son is right. If he is really is innocent—”

  “Now, that’s just not true,” said Pamela. “I know that sometimes, you police just get an idea in your head, and you make the evidence fit. Noah told me you eliminated him.”

  “We couldn’t,” said Wren. “He didn’t have an alibi.”

  “He was sleeping,” said Pamela. “We were all under this roof.”

  “If you were sleeping too,” said Wren, “then you can’t really verify that, can you?”

  “Oh, everyone was sleeping at that time of the morning.”

  “Except Bristol Cannon,” said Reilly. “Except the murderer.”

  “Who is not my son,” said Pamela. “Noah would never do such a thing. He’s a gentle soul. You’re completely barking up the wrong tree here. If you want to talk to him, you’re going to have to place him in custody. I’m not allowing you into our house.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Oh, I shouldn’t be talking to you about this,” said Wren to Hawk.

  “It’s fine,” said Hawk. “I promise it won’t go any further. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “I just… I mean, I couldn’t help but feel as if his mother had a point. Reilly honed right in on Noah Adams. He was like, ‘It’s the boyfriend.’ I mean, I know a lot of times it is the boyfriend, and there’s evidence there, but…”

  “What do you think about it?” said Hawk.

  “I can’t be sure,” she said. “That’s not my area of expertise. I make profiles and try to match people to profiles. I’m not good at this motive stuff. And I get that people get angry after breakups, but it’s a lot of trouble to go through just because someone dumped you, you know?”

  “So, you don’t think it’s him?”

  “Well, we need to be sure,” said Wren. “We need a piece of evidence. If we could find the gun he used, that would be something. That would nail it. If we could link him to one of the phones used to make the videos. Hell, if he’d confess, that would be perfect.”

  Hawk laughed. “I bet it would.”

  She sighed. “I’m going to tell Reilly that we need to go and talk to some of the other suspects. And that maybe we need to widen the pool of suspects. Like, this is a whole new ballgame here. I think we felt like we had a breakthrough, but we’re not really that much closer to finding the murderer.”

  “You said the kid, he, uh, he threatened to kill himself?”

  “Oh, that’s what Megan’s friend said,” said Wren.

  “So, maybe this kid, maybe he got the gun to, uh, to make himself look serious. And maybe while he was trying to show his girlfriend that he was actually going to kill himself, maybe that’s when she somehow got shot,” said Hawk.

  “Wait, you think he did it?” she said.

  Hawk shrugged. “I don’t know anything about this stuff. That was Reilly’s theory, though, right, and he’s good at his job. I mean, if he says it’s the guy, maybe you should believe him.”

  She shook her head. “It’s bizarre how you two are, like, bros now.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Hawk. “He thinks I’m creepy.”

  “Creepy? He said that?”

  Hawk nodded.

  “Did you do something creepy?”

  Hawk looked away. “I don’t know.”

  “You okay?”

  He turned back to her. “One thing I know, little bird, is that it’s sometimes so much easier to snuff out a life than it should be. Like, this Noah boy you’re talking about. He maybe had no idea how quick the lights could go off.”

  “Hawk, you’re being creepy now.” She waggled her eyebrows at him.

  “I’ve seen it,” said Hawk. “One minute, a person is alive, moving around, breathing, talking, loving, thinking. And the next…”

  Wren was quiet. She knew this too. That quick, violent moment with Kyler Morris. She’d ended him, taken his life. It had been quick, but powerful. “I know,” she finally said.

  He looked at her for several long seconds. Then he turned away. “Well, it’s one of those things that shouldn’t be. When you think about it, it doesn’t make any kind of sense. How can something so intricate as a human being be so easy to obliterate?”

  Wren got up and walked into the other room. “Let’s not talk about this anymore, huh? Let’s talk about something else.”

  Hawk got up too. He followed her. “Like about when you’re going to go and press charges against Oliver Campbell?”

  “Oh, no, Lord, Hawk, not that.” She glared at him.

  “You’re not going to press charges at all, are you?”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  “That’s a mistake, little bird.”

  “Noted,” she said. “Can we talk about TV or something, now? Can we watch TV? I’m done with this serious stuff.”

  * * *

  “So, we can bring him in for questioning,” said Reilly. “We can hold him for seventy-two hours. That’s a lot of time. We both go at him, we’ll get him to crack.”

  Wren was sitting on a chair in Reilly’s office, slowly turning back and forth, trailing one foot against the ground. “Well, don’t you think he’ll have a lawyer? His parents aren’t going to let us lock him in a room and batter him with questions.”

  Reilly pointed at her. “We deputize Hawk and get him to talk to the guy.”

  Wren snorted. “What the hell? I swear, you have like a guy crush on Hawk these days.”

  Reilly let out a high-pitched laugh. He collapsed in his chair behind his desk. “What can I say? It’s those blue eyes of his.”

  “They’re gray,” she said.

  “I’m not feeling your enthusiasm for this, Delacroix. What’s wrong? You need more coffee?”

  “I’m just saying, we’re all in on this guy, but we don’t have anything to prove that it’s him,” she said. “I would feel better if we had some physical evidence or…” Or a profile, she finished silently. But this was a different kind of case now. Maybe she didn’t know what was going on. Maybe she should trust Reilly.

  “Or what?” said Reilly.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “Look, we don’t have evidence,” said Reilly. “He didn’t leave evidence. He cleaned the scenes.”

  “Well, he used things,” said Wren. “The shovel handle. The gun. Can we get a warrant to go and look for the shovel at the Adams house?”

  Reilly rubbed his forehead. “A warrant? On what? The fact he’s the boyfriend and he has no alibi and that they broke up?”

  “Well, see, this proves my point,” said Wren. “We’re grasping at straws here. We can’t know it’s him.”

  Reilly got up from his desk. “It might be enough for a warrant. The problem is that things with Lopez and me are weird, and he’s got the best ins with the judges.”

  “Why are things with you and Lopez weird?” she said.

  Reilly blew out a breath. “Maybe weird is putting it strongly. Look, here’s what we do. We go to see the Adams and we convince them to let us search their property for the shovel.”

  “Why would they do that?” said Wren.

  * * *

  “I don’t have to let you on our property,” said Pamela Adams. “I would be an idiot to let you on our property. You know, Noah has been so upset about this that he hasn’t even come out of his room. I knocked on his door for breakfast. He didn’t even answer. You can’t fathom the kind of damage—”

  “Listen,” said Reilly, “you say your son is innocent. If that’s true, then there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be able to examine your shovel. If your shovel wasn’t used on the murder victims, then that’s another strike in favor of your son.”

  “Look, our shovel has gone missing,” said Pamela.

  “What?” said Wren, stepping forward. “When?”

  “I don’t know, it’s been a while now,”
said Pamela.

  “Before the murders started?”

  “Yes, weeks before they found that first poor girl, Bristol,” said Pamela. “My husband Hank was complaining about not being able to find it. So, you see, it can’t have been Noah, because he wouldn’t have had a shovel—”

  “Unless he took it and hid it somewhere else,” said Wren. “Just like he took the gun.”

  “He didn’t,” said Pamela. “Oh, my God, I’m sure the shovel is in the shed on the other end of the property. I’m sure Hank just lost track of it. I’m going to go and look for it right now.” She pushed out the front door of her house, pulling it closed behind her, and stalked past the both of them.

  Reilly started to follow her.

  She turned around. “You two stay right there. I am not authorizing you to come on my property, you got that?”

  Reilly stopped.

  Pamela rounded the corner of the house and disappeared from view.

  Wren and Reilly exchanged a glance.

  Together, they slowly walked across the lawn. When they reached the side of the house, they could see Pamela walking back into her yard. All the way on the other side of the yard, probably an acre and a half away, they could see a squat green shed.

  Pamela turned around again, saw them, and yelled for them to stay right where they were.

  “Should we leave?” said Wren. “I mean, she’s not letting us search.”

  “I’m thinking she’s coming to a realization about her son,” said Reilly. “She’s not sure how to deal with it.”

  “Really?” said Wren.

  “Yeah, when you said that thing to her about hiding the shovel, I saw the light in her eyes die. I think she knows something’s up with Noah. She’s always known. But she loves him, even though he’s damaged. Of course she does. She’s his mother. She’d do anything to protect him. She wants to go back there and find that damned shovel, because if it’s there, Noah didn’t take it. If that’s the case, then she knows he didn’t do it. That’s what she wants. But I think she knows it’s not there, and she knows that Noah’s guilty. Still, she’s never going to turn him in. She’ll fight to protect him with everything she has. She can’t not do that, you know?”