South Of Hell lk-9 Read online

  Louis slipped off his jacket and set it on a desk. He looked back into the interview room.

  Owen Brandt had been answering questions for more than an hour. He wasn’t under arrest yet. Louis knew they would need to make a positive ID on the bones first, which wouldn’t be too hard. They hadn’t found anything in the grave to help confirm the ID. But Shockey had pulled Jean’s dental records nine years ago and had already handed them over to the county medical examiner.

  Once the dental records were matched to the skull, Brandt would be arrested and charged. With Amy’s testimony of both prior abuse and what she recalled of the murder, it was a lock.

  Brandt’s initial shock at seeing the skull had disappeared. Now, as Bloom and Horne peppered him with questions, he showed nothing but arrogance. And he kept to the same story he had told the cops nine years ago.

  She just left. She had a boyfriend. They found her car at the train station. Don’t you fuckers know nothing?

  Louis felt a nudge at his arm. Shockey was holding out a Styrofoam cup filled with muddy coffee. Louis took it and drank some.

  “Your ass is in trouble, Jake,” Louis said. “Brandt’s going to sue you for everything you’ve got. You know that, right?”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Shockey said. “As long as he goes down for this.”

  Louis shook his head.

  Brandt finally said the magic words: I want an attorney. Bloom cut off the interview and left the room through a side door. He appeared in the hall with Louis and Shockey a few seconds later.

  Bloom was a big man, his face ruddy from the Michigan winters, his golden hair cut square on his head. He wore a yellow dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, and a gold badge on his belt.

  “I thought I smelled something out here,” Bloom said.

  “Cut the crap,” Louis said. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “I have to let him walk,” Bloom said. “That should come as no surprise to either of you. Illegal search, police brutality, trespassing. Anything else happen out there you want to tell me about?”

  “That’s about it,” Louis said.

  Bloom eyed Shockey and shook his head. “I understand how Kincaid could pull this stunt, but you’re a law-enforcement officer, Detective Shockey. Fifteen years in. How could you possibly think you’d get away with this?”

  “Took a chance,” Shockey said. “The way I read it, that little girl had every right to be there. And all she did was invite us in that gate with her.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Maybe so,” Shockey said, looking back at Brandt.

  Brandt was staring at the window. Louis knew Brandt’s side was mirrored and he couldn’t see Shockey, but still his stare was unnerving.

  “Can I ask you how that girl knew where to tell you two assholes to dig?” Bloom asked.

  Louis and Shockey exchanged glances.

  “Well?” Bloom asked.

  “She had a dream or a memory or something,” Shockey said. “Being in the barn must have brought it all back.”

  “And she was how old when her mother disappeared?” Bloom asked.

  “Four,” Louis said. “We can’t find any records for her and-”

  “She’s smart,” Shockey interrupted. “She’s real smart, but she’s also kind of strange sometimes.”

  Bloom raised an eyebrow.

  “I think she might be a little psychic, too,” Shockey added.

  Louis looked at Shockey quickly. Psychic?

  “And I think you’re nuttier than a squirrel turd,” Bloom said. “Stay here, both of you.”

  Bloom left them. Louis finished the coffee and tossed the cup into a nearby can. His thoughts, as they had done last night until about three a.m., started to drift again. Away from Amy and Jean Brandt and back to Lily. Eric Channing still hadn’t called him. As much as he wanted to see Lily, he was afraid he was bringing Kyla more pain. He didn’t want to break up her marriage. It seemed to be a pretty good one.

  “Damn it,” Shockey muttered.

  “What?”

  “My pager again,” Shockey said, angling himself so he could see the display of the beeper on his belt. “My lieutenant’s been paging all morning.”

  “You didn’t call him last night?”

  Shockey shook his head. “Nope. But I’m sure Bloom did. Bad part is, you know how I told you getting inside that barn was all my lieutenant’s idea?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t. He didn’t even know we were going.”

  “Jesus, Jake,” Louis said. “Why don’t you just mail your badge in now?”

  Shockey looked again to the interview room. Bloom was holding the door open for Brandt. Brandt gave a sneer and left the room. Less than a minute later, Brandt appeared down the hall, emerging through another door. He still wore the same dark T-shirt, denim jacket, and filthy jeans Louis had seen on him two days ago.

  He came toward them, his eyes locked on Shockey. Brandt stopped in front of Shockey, hiked up his pants, and smiled. Louis braced himself for a confrontation.

  “I know who you are now,” Brandt said. “You’re a cop. You live in Ann Arbor, and you were fucking my wife nine years ago.”

  Louis put a hand on Shockey’s sleeve. The muscle was tight, but he didn’t think Shockey was going to swing at him. Not here in the state police station.

  Brandt shook his head, his eyes moving over Shockey’s body disparagingly. “She had real lousy taste.”

  “Get out of my face before I rip your fucking tongue out,” Shockey said.

  Brandt was unfazed.

  “Go, Brandt,” Louis said. “Get out of here.”

  “I didn’t kill my wife,” Brandt said, “but if there was ever a bitch who needed to die, it was that slut.”

  Shockey started to lunge at him. Louis stepped between them and gave Brandt a shove.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Louis said.

  Brandt walked away. Louis kept a hand on Shockey’s chest until Brandt had turned a corner. Shockey pushed away from him.

  “Sonofabitch,” Shockey hissed.

  Louis headed down the hall and through a door that led outside. Brandt was climbing into the green Gremlin. Margi Ames was behind the wheel, and when she leaned over to give Brandt a kiss, he pushed her away and made an irritated gesture toward the street.

  “Hey, Kincaid,” Bloom hollered.

  Louis turned. Bloom was walking toward him. He had put on a brown jacket.

  “The ME wants to see me,” Bloom said. “You and dickhead want to come along?”

  Louis almost shot back a smartass response, tired of Bloom’s crap. But he suddenly realized that Bloom didn’t have to offer the invitation at all. In fact, Bloom could have confiscated his gun and probably locked him up for a few hours on trespassing charges. In exchange, Louis knew Bloom probably wanted to save himself a few hours of reading by having them bring him up to speed on Jean Brandt’s history.

  “Yeah,” Louis said. “We’d appreciate that.”

  “It’s only a block, so we’ll walk,” Bloom said. “You up for that?”

  “Let’s go.”

  There were two hundred and six of them. That’s what Joe had told him. Two hundred and six bones in the human body.

  Louis looked down. The brownish-yellow bones were laid on a stainless-steel table, forming a disconnected but perfect skeleton. There was no quick way to count, but Louis guessed that all — or almost all — of Jean Brandt’s bones were here.

  They were waiting for the ME to join them, and Louis took the time to look for signs of a fracture on one arm bone. Shockey had told him Jean had endured two broken arms. He finally turned away and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to capture a minute of lost sleep.

  The double doors bumped opened, and the ME came in. His name was P. Ward, according to the sign on the wall. He was fiftyish and slim, with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair matching a Van Dyke beard. He wore green scrub pants over an old T-shirt that said WET WILLIE ’
74 TOUR: “KEEP ON SMILIN’ THROUGH THE RAIN, LAUGHIN’ AT THE PAIN.”

  “Detective Bloom,” Ward said. “Nice to see you again.”

  “Ditto, Phil.”

  “Phillip.”

  Bloom stared at him. “What?”

  “Phillip. My name is Phillip.”

  Bloom tried hard not to roll his eyes. “Yeah, right. So what’s the word here, Doc?”

  Ward looked down at the bones. “Exquisite, aren’t they?”

  “They’re bones,” Bloom said.

  “Yes, but it’s not often we find every one. The techs did an exceptional excavation. Please give them my praises.”

  Louis heard something of the South in Ward’s melodious voice. Maybe it was the cadence or the choice of words, but Louis’s stay in Mississippi had been long enough and he had spent enough time at his old boss Sam Dodie’s home for him to develop an ear for the Delta’s special music.

  “So, is it our victim or not?” Bloom asked.

  Ward turned and flipped the switch on a wall-mounted light box. He shoved the copies of Jean Brandt’s dental X-rays into the clip. Then, next to it, a larger X-ray of the skull.

  Louis stepped closer.

  They didn’t match. It was so obvious even he could see it. The skull from the barn had a wider jaw and large teeth — a perfect full set. Jean’s teeth were small and uneven, with several missing in the back.

  “Talk to us, Doc,” Bloom said.

  “The victim is a woman, probably between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But these bones do not belong to the owner of this dental X-ray,” Ward said, pointing to the screen.

  Louis looked at Shockey. He had turned away and was staring at the bones on the steel table.

  Ward carefully picked up a long, slender bone. “I was told the Brandt woman had two arm fractures,” he said. “There are no breaks in this humerus or in any of the arm bones.”

  Shockey’s eyes closed. “You must be wrong.”

  “I am never wrong, Detective,” Ward said. “Not about things like this. Oh, and by the way, the woman you found in the barn was most certainly African-American.”

  Louis’s gaze snapped back to the X-ray of the skull.

  “A marked alveolar prognathism,” Ward said, pointing to the X-ray. “Flat nasal region, broad nasal aperture, retreating zygoma, somewhat truncated nasal spine and a retreating forehead.”

  “All right,” Bloom said. “We get the picture. This is not Jean Brandt.”

  “Precisely.”

  Louis heard footsteps, and he turned to see Shockey leaving through the double doors. He turned back to Ward. “Can you tell how she died?” he asked.

  “As I said, there were no fractures in the arms,” Ward said. “I found one old leg fracture that was well-healed. But I did find six other breaks in the legs and ribs that were all perimortem fractures, meaning they were inflicted minutes or hours before death.”

  Ward picked up a plastic container. “Plus there is this. Your techs brought back a dirt sample from the gravesite. It was saturated with blood.”

  “The woman was still bleeding when she was put in the grave?” Louis said. “Buried alive?”

  “How alive, I can’t be sure,” Ward said. “But dead people don’t bleed.”

  Louis closed his eyes.

  “So I’m pretty certain this was a homicide,” Ward said.

  Bloom let out a grunt. “Well, ain’t this a kick in the nuts,” he said. “We got a missing woman and no body. Got bones and no victim. And on top of all that, she’s a black woman in an area that don’t have but a handful of black folks in it.”

  “Maybe it won’t be too hard to find someone who’s been missing, then,” Louis said.

  “It may be harder than you think,” Ward said. “You might be looking for a woman who’s been missing for quite some time.”

  “What do you mean?” Bloom asked. “How long have these bones been in the ground?”

  “Well, there’s no way to know for sure without carbon dating,” Ward said. He picked up the arm bone. “But see how brittle and chalky this is? As bones age, they lose the proteins that make up the matrix that holds the calcium.”

  Ward gently pressed a fingernail on the bone. Louis was surprised to see it leave an indentation. “If I were to try to break this humerus in two, instead of splitting like a green twig, it would break and crumble,” Ward said. “So I’m guessing they are quite old.”

  Ward set the bone down and picked up a plastic bag, holding it out. “Then there’s this, which-”

  Bloom grabbed the bag. “What’s this?”

  “A piece of shoe leather with some buttons that the techs found with the bones. The style seems to date back to the mid-eighteen-hundreds.”

  Bloom stared at the black clump in the plastic.

  “Do you want me to send the bones out for dating?” Ward asked.

  Bloom tossed the plastic bag onto the table. “The state’s not paying for that,” he said. “This isn’t a homicide case anymore, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “But the shoe doesn’t prove anything for sure,” Louis said. “Don’t we want-”

  Bloom cut him off with a raised palm. “I don’t care about a hundred-year-old homicide. And if what Phil here says is true, she was probably just a servant anyway, maybe even a slave.”

  “What did you say?” Louis said.

  Bloom’s ruddy face colored a deeper red. “Sorry, Kincaid. Didn’t mean it like that. I just meant there wouldn’t even be any records for a woman like that. That’s all.”

  “Right.”

  “And who the hell has the time to work a case like this, anyway?” Bloom asked. “Where you going to find any damn witnesses?”

  Louis looked back at the X-ray, trying to imagine a woman’s face on the skull.

  “Well, I’m out of here,” Bloom said. “Kincaid, you tell Sheriff Frye I’d like a word with her before she goes home. I got a bone to pick with her boss, too. If you’ll pardon the pun.”

  Bloom left.

  “Asshole,” Ward said under his breath.

  Louis rubbed his brow, looking down again at the bones. He was concerned about Joe’s job, but he was even more worried about Shockey. He had put everything on the line to get into that barn, and it had been for nothing. Brandt was going to remain free, and they had only eight more days to find a way to keep him away from Amy.

  “What kind of cop wouldn’t be interested in something like this?” Ward said.

  Louis looked up at him. Ward was holding a second plastic bag. Inside was something that looked like jewelry.

  “What is that?” Louis asked.

  Ward opened the bag and pulled out a necklace. “This was also found in the grave with her,” Ward said.

  “May I see it?”

  Ward handed the necklace to Louis. It was a silver chain and what first looked to Louis like a cameo, until he turned it over. It was a plain round silver locket, about the size of a man’s pocket watch. There was no engraving.

  He opened it.

  Inside was a lock of black hair.

  Chapter Twenty

  Owen Brandt stood at the gate, staring at the farmhouse. He never should have come back here. Should’ve just stayed in Ohio after he got out, or maybe should’ve headed down to Florida or somewhere where it was warm, at least.

  He’d never liked this place, never wanted anything to do with farming, even though his old man, when he started to get sick and old, tried to get him to take over. Like he was going to spend his life getting up before dawn, driving a tractor in the freezing rain, standing in pig shit, and then dying before his time.

  Then why did I come back?

  Brandt turned up the collar of his denim jacket and started across the yard. He stopped, his eyes fixed on the bright orange foreclosure notice on the front door. He had tried to rip it off once already, but the damn thing was glued onto the glass.

  He turned away. A couple of yards from the side porch, he stopped again. Through t
he window, he could see Margi in the kitchen, taking the groceries out of the bags. After she’d picked him up at the police station, they’d stopped at the Kroger in Howell, spending their last eleven bucks on beer and stealing the rest of what they needed, the bread, baloney, and toilet paper.

  The thought of the police made Brandt grind his jaw in anger. They wouldn’t tell him anything about the bones in the barn, but since they’d let him go, he knew they must have somehow figured out they didn’t belong to Jean.

  Brandt turned and surveyed the barren, fog-shrouded fields beyond the barn. That meant the bitch was still out there somewhere.

  He shoved his cold hands into his pockets, turned away from the house, and began to walk. There was no clear pattern to his path, and he didn’t even know where he was heading. He just felt the sudden need to walk, like maybe it would clear all the shit out of his head somehow and help him think better. He wasn’t thinking too good these days, and that bothered him.

  He was back behind the barn now, and his eyes took in every warped board, every rusting piece of machinery lying dead in the weeds.

  Why did I come back here?

  This place had never brought him any luck. Never brought his old man, Jonah, any luck, either. Wore his bones down with arthritis before he was fifty, wrecked his heart before he was sixty and killed him when he was sixty-one.

  And his mother, Verna…

  That crazy bitch couldn’t stand it here, either. A couple a times a year, usually in the fall, she used to wither up, get funny in the head and lock herself up in the attic. For weeks, she’d stay up there, crying and moaning and talking about things only she could see.

  At first, his father didn’t know what to do about these spells. Ashamed probably, he would let his kids tend to her. Leave it to his son to set the plates of food outside her locked door. Left it to his daughter to dump the shit pot and give Crazy Verna her bath, if she’d even let Geneva in.