08-A Thousand Bones Read online

  “I’m guessing this is an arm bone and maybe a rib.” Sheriff Leach pulled himself up.

  Joe was scanning the ground around the tree. Something odd and clumped caught her eye and she squatted down to reach for it, then remembered she shouldn’t touch it.

  “Sheriff,” she said.

  Both Mack and Leach came up behind her, bending to look over her shoulder.

  “What is that?” Leach asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “Maybe a piece of jewelry?”

  Mack picked up a stick and poked at the caked dirt. A glint of tarnished silver appeared. And what looked like a tiny cross.

  “Don’t touch it,” Leach said. “Let the tech get it.”

  The sheriff was staring out at the forest, a squint to his eye.

  “What are you thinking, sir?” Joe asked.

  “That this is going to be a helluva investigation,” he said.

  National acclaim for the bestselling crime fiction of P. J. Parrish

  “If you haven’t discovered the fast-paced action, terrifying suspense, and hairpin twists of P. J. Parrish yet, now’s the time.”

  —Mystery Guild

  “I’m hooked on P. J. Parrish. Nobody else creates such a compelling mix of real characters, genuine emotion, and fast-paced suspense.”

  —Barbara Parker, author of A Perfect Fake

  “A pretzel-like plot…an ambitious and engrossing tale. The likeable, persistent Louis Kincaid and P. J. Parrish get better with every book.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “A stand-out thriller…intriguing and atmospheric…. Suspense of the highest order.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “An invigorating ride.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “P. J. Parrish is a superb writer.”

  —National Book Critics Circle

  “Edge-of-the-seat suspense…. Kincaid is a welcome addition to the literary landscape of crime fiction.”

  —Michael Connelly

  “A really fine writer.”

  —John Sandford

  “Parrish is an author to read, collect, and root for.”

  —James W. Hall

  “A masterpiece of shock and surprise…from the startling opening to the stunning finale.”

  —Ed Gorman, Mystery Scene

  “A superb, highly atmospheric, thought-provoking thriller…. Tense, exciting scenes.”

  —Lansing State Journal (MI)

  Pocket Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by PJ Parrish

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Collection: Photographer’s Choice/gettyimages

  Photographer: Tony Hutchings

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5957-3

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-5957-4

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To Daddy,

  who took us up north

  and left too soon.

  But oh, the memories.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I Somebody’s Daughter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part II A Walk In The Woods

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Part III Hunger Moon

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 54

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  Captiva Island, Florida

  December 1988

  He was waiting for her. She could see him there in the shadows, but he hadn’t spotted her yet, hadn’t seen her car pull in. She had a few seconds to prepare herself.

  God, her heart was hammering.

  Her hands, resting lightly on the wheel, had gone cold. She had a sudden flashback to the guy she had busted last week, a PCP-crazed kid who came at her with a cardboard-box cutter, slashing at her face as she and the other detective drove him face-first into the concrete of Biscayne Boulevard while the bankers toting briefcases gaped. The kid could have killed her. It hadn’t even fazed her.

  But this…

  Joe Frye looked back at the man waiting in the shadows. This was going to be the hardest thing she had ever faced.

  She picked up her Glock from the passenger seat.

  The slam of her Bronco’s door made him look up. He watched her as she came across the sandy yard, but he didn’t move. Except his face. There, in the brightening of Louis Kincaid’s eyes and in the slight tilting up of his lips, she saw all his love for her.

  “You’re late,” he said as she came up onto the screened-in porch.

  “Paperwork,” she said.

  He reached down to pick up a glass of red wine from the floor and held it out. “It got a little warm waiting for you.”

  She clicked the Glock onto her belt and smiled as she came forward to take the glass. One sip told her he had taken the trouble to go to the wine store in Fort Myers to get her favorite, the new Ironstone zinfandel.

  Louis was sitting in a wicker lounge, his black cat, Issy, lying on his stomach. She didn’t want to make him move the cat, so she bent down to accept his kiss. It was a long, lingering kiss.

  “Cherries and pepper,” he said, coming away with a smile.

  “You’ve been reading Wine Spectator?”

  “Just trying to keep up with you.”

  She kissed him again. He had been gone only three weeks, but it had been too long.

  She dropped down into the chair next to him, kicked off her shoes, and put her legs up across his calves. He was wearing jeans and a heavy sweatshirt, despite the fact it was still eighty degrees at four o’clock. He had told her on the phone that since his return from Michigan, he still felt as if he hadn’t been able to warm up. He had told her, too, that he needed to talk to her about something important.

  But she had something she needed to tell him first. Maybe it was because he had been in Michigan. Or maybe it was because she had been holding this inside her for so long now that she finally had to tell someone. And maybe it was because she finally trusted him enough that he was the one who had to hear it.

  Whatever the reason, there could be no kind of future for them unless she could unlock her heart.

  He put his Heineken on the table and reached down to touch her bare ankle, just below the cuff of her slacks. His hand was cold and wet from holding the beer bottle.

  “Louis—” she began.

  “God, I missed you, Joe.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “When I was up there,” he said, “all I could think about was getting back here, getting home, and seeing you.”

  She opened her eyes. Not trusting herself to look at Louis, she focused on the gulf, a silver-blue sliver visible through the swaying sea oats in front of the cottage. She loved this place, loved coming over here to be with Louis. Her apartment in Miami was just a three-hour drive across Alligator Alley, but it was like a different world over here on the west coast. The moment she hit the tollbooth at Sanibel Island, she could feel her muscles begin to unclench, feel the adrenaline sting in her blood easing. It was as if her first glimpse of the gulf washed away all the grit and hard glamour of Miami, leaving her feeling cleansed and able to breathe again.

  The thought that had been hiding in the corners of her brain for weeks now was pushing forward. Had it come to this? She was the only woman detective in Miami-Dade’s homicide division. She had worked hard for this. When had she started hating her job?

  “Joe?”

  She looked at Louis.

  “Something wrong?”

  She let out a long breath. “Let’s go down to the beach.”

  Louis got
a fresh beer and topped off her wine. Barefoot, they walked through the sea oats and down to the water. Off in the distance, Joe could see a shrimp boat, its net poles extended, making its way back south to its home in Snug Harbor. Silhouetted against the cloud-striated sky, it looked like a water bug skimming across a pond.

  “Louis, we have to talk,” Joe said.

  “I know,” he said.

  She turned toward him. God, she loved his face. Forceful, high-cheekboned, black brows sitting like emphatic accents over his gray eyes, the left one arching into an exclamation mark when he was amused or surprised. And his skin, smooth and buff-colored, a gift from his beautiful black mother, whose picture he had once shown her, and his white father, whom he had never mentioned.

  She brought up a hand to cup his cheek. She squinted against the tears she felt threatening. “I need to talk first,” she said. “Please. There is something I have to tell you.”

  “Should I sit down for this?” he asked.

  She let her hand drop and nodded.

  They sat down on a low dune. Louis stuck his beer bottle in the sand. Joe cradled the wineglass between her palms as she stared out at the water.

  “Before I came to Miami, I worked in Michigan,” she said.

  “Michigan? I thought you were always with Miami PD?” Louis asked.

  She shook her head. “No, my first job was with a sheriff’s department in northern Michigan. A small town called Echo Bay. I was only there a short time. Then I got the job down here.”

  Louis was quiet, waiting.

  Joe took a sip of the wine. “Something happened up there,” she said. “Something happened to me. And I did something that I have never…”

  She closed her eyes.

  “Joe, what is it?”

  “I did something that makes me think I shouldn’t be a cop anymore,” she said.

  “But this was what, ten years ago?” Louis asked.

  “Thirteen,” she said softly.

  “But why now?”

  She faced him. “Because I have never told anyone. And if I don’t tell you now, I can’t do this anymore.”

  Louis was quiet for a moment. “Do what? The job? Us?”

  “Both,” she said.

  She carefully wedged the wineglass down in the sand and closed her eyes. She heard Louis let out a long breath.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  She opened her eyes. The gulf was smooth, the waves coming in with the softest hiss. She concentrated on the sound for a moment, trying to time her heart to it, trying to slow the beating down. She closed her eyes again, this time concentrating on trying to bring it all back—the sounds, the sights, the feelings, every horrible moment.

  “I was just a rookie…” she began.

  I

  SOMEBODY’S DAUGHTER

  1

  Echo Bay, Michigan

  October 1975

  The sharp buzzing noise filled her ears, coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It took her a moment to realize it was coming from somewhere outside her brain.

  She looked up into the green lace of the leaves. She knew that was where they were, up there in the trees. That’s where the cicadas were hiding as they sang their dying summer song.

  A bead of sweat fell from her brow and into her eye. She blinked and looked down to the yellow crime-scene tape hanging limp between the trees. Down to where the men worked over the dirt. Down to where the clean white bone had been found.

  “Joe?”

  She turned toward the deep voice.

  “You want to come take a look?”

  Cliff Leach was standing at the bottom of the gully inside the yellow tape. The three other officers had all glanced up when he spoke, looked first at him, then up to her. She wished the sheriff had not singled her out, but her curiosity was stronger than any worries she had about how the others felt about her.

  Joe slipped under the tape and came down the hill. The three other deputies didn’t give way, and she had to stand behind them to see.

  Not that there was really much to look at. Set in a shallow hole with a light covering of pine needles, the bone looked more like a shard of a broken white plate. Joe felt a small stab of disappointment.

  When the call had come in that two boys walking in the woods had found the bone, a current had crackled through the station. She had been in the women’s bathroom changing into uniform, and through the thin walls she could hear the others talking about it, their deep voices rising in pitch as they speculated about how a human bone had found its way into a remote scrap of woods up by Bass Lake. Things like that didn’t happen in places like Echo Bay. Echo Bay was just a mosquito bite on the tip of the little finger of the Michigan mitten. That’s how folks in Echo Bay pinpointed their place in the world. They’d hold up their right hand, palm forward and point to the tip of the little finger. “That’s where I come from,” they’d say, “Echo Bay.”

  The cicadas had stopped. No sound, not even the rustle of a leaf in the still October air.

  “That don’t look like no human bone,” one of the men said.

  “Deer maybe,” another said.

  “We came all the way out here for a fucking deer carcass?”

  Joe glanced at the last man who had spoken. Unlike the rest of them, Julian Mack didn’t wear the dark brown uniforms of the Leelanau County sheriff’s department. He wore gray Sansabelts, and a thin black tie hung like a dead snake down his sweat-soaked white shirt. Joe knew he was just a deputy like the rest of them, but he was the closest thing the seven-man department had to an investigator, and he affected the casual dress of one.

  Mack’s brown eyes met hers. For an instant, she could see resentment in them. She had seen it before, whenever Cliff Leach made it a point to include her in conversation or ask her opinion on how something should be handled. Part of that came from her status as a rookie. Most of it was because she was a woman.

  She looked back down at the bone, inching closer so she could see better.

  Leach squatted down and inserted a stick into one of the bone’s cavities, pulling the bone clear of the needles. They all fell silent.

  Joe took a deep breath. “Sir?”

  He looked up at her.

  “I think it’s a pelvic bone,” she said.

  She could feel the damp press of the polyester uniform on her back and thighs. She could feel all their eyes on her.

  “And I think it’s from a female,” she said.

  A snort and a chuckle, but she wasn’t sure which of them it had come from. She kept her eyes on the sheriff.

  “Why female?” Leach asked.

  When she hesitated, he motioned her forward with a small nod. She squatted next to him and picked up a stick.

  “See this?” She pointed to the base of the butterfly-shaped bone. “This is the pubic arch. In a man, it is real narrow. But a woman’s arch is wide, like this one. It’s part of the birth canal.”

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  She shrugged, her eyes willing him not to press it.

  Leach tossed his stick aside and let out a sigh. “Great,” he said softly, his eyes wandering over the pine needles and dirt before he looked up to Mack. “This looks like it was dug up. Did the kids do it?”