A Conspiracy of Bones Read online

  An hour later, I sat back, pulse humming even more.

  No hog poop. No doubt.

  AΛG HonΓd NE R48.

  Code? Shorthand? In English? Another language? Meaning what?

  I studied the string, wondering if the sequence was complete. Were the gaps intentional? Or had information been lost to the elements? To the pocket?

  I tried googling a few of the letter sequences. Got nothing useful. Honored. Nebraska.

  Wind beat at the annex like an angry landlord come for overdue rent.

  Why the underlining of R48? I googled the number-letter combo. Got the following.

  A road in South Africa.

  An expressway in the Czech Republic.

  A risk phrase meaning danger of serious damage to health by prolonged exposure.

  HMS Wrangler, a British World War II W-class destroyer.

  A diagnosis code for dyslexia and other symbolic dysfunctions not elsewhere classified.

  That cleared it up.

  I thought about a suggestion Ryan had offered before disconnecting. A comment he’d made. Until then, I’d been unaware of friction between Slidell and Heavner. Had to admit. The revelation didn’t displease me. Not that it takes much to irk Skinny, whose ego is the size of a small African nation.

  Ryan’s idea made sense. During his tenure with the CMPD, Slidell had notched far more solves than any of his colleagues. And his role as a volunteer with the cold-case unit gave him access to resources that I didn’t have.

  I picked up my phone and hit speed dial.

  Four rings, then, “Yo.”

  “It’s Temperance Brennan.”

  “Hell-ooo, doc. I got caller ID. Besides, who else would nag my ass on a Sunday?” To say diplomacy isn’t Skinny’s strength is like saying plague was a minor health issue in the Middle Ages.

  “I’m sorry to—”

  “Anyone tip you what Sunday means? Like, watching NASCAR, maybe tying some fishing lures, or enjoying a little sheet time with my lady?”

  “You fish?”

  No response. In the background, a woman asked who was calling. Verlene, the live-in girlfriend. Another mind-blowing development.

  “I’m phoning concerning a situation with Dr. Heavner.” Cool. “Ryan thought you might be interested.”

  “Yeah?” I heard rustling, then the commentator’s voice and the roaring motors grew fainter. “I was wanting another brew, anyways.”

  I described the faceless man, providing less detail than I had for Ryan. The dossier, the photos, the Russian word, the code.

  “You want to fuck Heavner up,” Slidell summarized when I’d finished. “Expose her for the rodent turd she is.”

  Sounded about right. “I want to get this man ID’d.”

  “How’s that my problem?”

  “Ryan admires your”—I sought the right word—“skills.”

  “You asking to hire me?”

  “Maybe.” I wasn’t.

  I heard a refrigerator door open, close. The whoosh of a pop-top. Swallowing followed by an expressive belch.

  “First thing I’d do is figure out how the vic got onto Poston’s patch.”

  “He’s the Cleveland County sheriff?”

  “Bill Poston. A real wankwad.”

  I had no idea what that meant.

  “Find out if Poston has people canvassing the hood, looking for wits, searching for a vehicle, whatever.”

  “The incident report is pretty basic.”

  “That’s ’cause it’s Old MacDonald and the E-I-O squad out there. But you take my meaning. See if Poston’s looking for a driver who picked up a hitchhiker, a snoopy neighbor who spied a stranger on foot, a mysterious car off-loading a rolled rug.”

  “Apparently, Sheriff Poston wants no part of the case. Shortage of funds and personnel, blah, blah, blah.” Hawkins had shared that earlier.

  “Your guy didn’t fly out to that creek.”

  “If I start asking questions, word will get back to Heavner.”

  Following another pause to refresh, “I guess I could make a few calls.”

  “That would be helpful.”

  “But my opinion? Right now, you got jackshit. If Poston’s not on it and Heavner’s playing games, you’re dead in the water.”

  We both waited out a long, staticky intrusion.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “My phone has issues.”

  “You ever think of maybe getting a new one?”

  “All the time.”

  When we’d disconnected, I went back to my pic of the scrap. Found no more inspiration than when I’d first pondered the Russian word and the almost illegible code.

  Frustrated, I made myself a salad, picked out and ate the feta and turkey, threw the rest in the trash. Every few minutes, I glanced at the clock. Slidell didn’t call.

  As the afternoon wore on, the wind diminished. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact time. It was the absence of noise that eventually caught my attention. The silence seemed more deafening than all the grating and creaking.

  At six, antsy and having no better ideas, I pulled out the photocopy of the Cleveland County incident report. After rereading the description of the body location, I got online and opened Google Earth. Alternating between bird’s-eye and street view, I zoomed in and out, studying the locale.

  The area was mostly woodland and fields. A railroad paralleled NC-198 just to the west. Another two-lane ran to the west of the tracks.

  Could the faceless man have arrived by rail? Might he have been a modern-day hobo hopping free rides? Was his body tossed from a boxcar? Did trains still have boxcars, or had cargo containers replaced them entirely?

  Smaller roads cut from the larger highways, most dead-ending amid farm buildings or looping into empty cul-de-sacs. Some were paved, others weren’t. Some had names, some didn’t. One track led to a fair chunk of acreage enclosed in chain linking. Just one small, ramshackle building. Didn’t seem much point to the fence.

  My eyes followed the snaking brown line labeled Buffalo Creek. The smaller thread marked Lick Branch. The white dashes indicating the border between North and South Carolina.

  A few businesses straggled along the sides of the blacktops. Some churches. A pest-control company. A farm-supply store. A garage and auto-salvage operation.

  Directed by an impulse my conscious mind didn’t grasp, I zoomed in on the latter. Considered the name. Studied the layout.

  My breath escaped in a little rush.

  I grabbed my jotted notes.

  My eyes ran laps between the screen and the page.

  Check. Check. Check. Check.

  Current spitting from nerve ending to nerve ending, I punched a key on my phone.

  7

  MONDAY, JULY 2

  “You better not be wild-goosing my ass.”

  “I can’t be certain, but everything fits.”

  I’d called Slidell to share my idea. He’d responded like a yellow jacket smoked from its nest. Which I’d expected. But he’d listened, then agreed to go with me to Cleveland County. Which I hadn’t expected.

  Predictably, Slidell insisted on driving. He’d pulled up in a spit-polished, fully tricked-out silver Toyota 4Runner. The interior was junk-free and crammed with cloying sweetness oozing from an air freshener clipped to an AC vent.

  Buckling myself in, I’d complimented his new wheels, masking my shock with reasonable success. As long as I’d known him, Slidell had vehemently disparaged Japanese cars. His series of Fords and Chevys, both personal and official, had been rolling landfills, stacked with the unimaginable and smelling of forgotten fast food, sweaty gym gear, stale tobacco smoke, and Skinny himself.

  It was now eight twenty on Monday morning. We were on I-85, barreling west from Charlotte. The temperature had already climbed into the eighties. We were drinking tepid coffee purchased by Slidell at a Greek diner that reliably earned C+s on its annual health inspections.

  “You said it yourself,” I added. “The guy did
n’t fly out to that creek.”

  “Run me through this again.”

  “OK. Picture it in your mind. A—tent symbol—G. Then H-O-N—hangman symbol—D. NE R48. Got it?”

  “I ain’t brain-dead.”

  Not totally, I thought.

  I said, “I think the tent symbol is an upper-case A missing the crossbar. So AAG. There’s an auto-salvage yard about a half mile from where the body was found. Art’s Affordable Garage. I think the hangman symbol is a partial upper-case R. So HonRd. The garage is on Honeysuckle Road.”

  Slidell started to speak, but I cut him off.

  “The cars are parked in four clusters, with wider access lanes running between. I think the rest of the code refers to the northeast, NE, cluster, fourth row, eighth slot. And yes. There’s a vehicle parked there.” At least, there was when the Google image was captured.

  We exited the expressway onto S-11-65, a state road squirming through the northern part of Cherokee County, South Carolina. I watched a fireworks factory, a towing service, a whole lot of soybeans and cows flash by my window.

  Slidell was quiet. Contemplating the code. Or the faceless man. Or last night’s lamb chops. Yellow slashes clicked up his Ray-Bans, dark splotches as we passed underneath trees.

  “So this mope hikes out to the woods to off himself but leaves directions how to find his ride?”

  “We don’t know it was suicide,” I said. “That’s Hawkins’s opinion.”

  “I dimed the place.” Slidell reached for his cup, and the slashes veered wildly. “Got a recording saying they’re closed for the Fourth. Apparently, Art’s a patriotic guy.”

  “And affordable. Did you phone Cleveland County?”

  “They told me to piss off.”

  “They did not.”

  “They said Art’s a moron, have at it. They’re waiting for word from Heavner.”

  We rode in silence again, Skinny slurping, me wondering what his issue was with the Cleveland County sheriff. Or if he’d offended one of Poston’s deputies. Maybe all of his deputies.

  Every now and then, my eyes flicked sideways, checking the validity of my first impression. Slidell wasn’t toned, far from it, but he’d definitely lost weight. And the bags under his eyes looked a little less packed. Credit to the lovely Verlene?

  Slidell turned north onto NC-198. We’d just reentered the Tar Heel State when my cell chimed an incoming text. I raised my shades to my head to better see the screen.

  The message contained a photo and three words: Back of scrap.

  I tapped the image.

  Printed text. Unlike the jotted code, remarkably sharp. I used two fingers to enlarge it.

  “It’s from Hawkins.” Mumbled.

  Slidell shoved the Ray-Bans higher onto his nose. Said nothing.

  “Looks like I was right about it being torn from a book.” Mostly to myself.

  “The scrap with the tips on how to find Art?”

  “Mm.”

  Though the letters were clear, the words made no sense. The alphabet was Roman, not Cyrillic, but the language wasn’t any I spoke. Not English, Spanish, or French.

  I felt the 4Runner purring around me, knew we were rolling through the landscape I’d eyeballed via the Google Earth satellite view the night before. Paid no attention.

  Foreign yet somehow familiar.

  Suddenly, a synapse. Another. Then a blizzard.

  Jesus. Could that be it?

  Slidell must have sensed the change of tension in my spine.

  “What?”

  Words were careening at me. Symbols.

  “Yo. Doc? You sick? No hurling on the new upholstery.”

  “The book isn’t in English.”

  “You saying your vic was Chinese after all?”

  “It’s written in Latvian.”

  “That like the place your ex is from? What’s his name?”

  “Pete. And yes. Latvia is one of the Baltic republics. Until ’91, it was part of the Soviet Union.”

  “Thanks for the geography lesson.” Tip of his head. “What’s it say?”

  “I recognize the language, but I can’t give you a word-for-word. Except for a few English borrow phrases.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “There’s mention of NATO, of a Gulfstream-Privatjet, of an amerikāņu firma, of Estonia, and of 27–29 septembri. Those translations are obvious.”

  No response.

  I scrolled down. Teased out a word here and there.

  My fingers halted as two recognizable bits hit hard. I swallowed.

  “There’s reference to biologiske un ķīmsko ieroču and to dekontaminācijàs specialisti.”

  “Right. I get it. You’re bilingual.”

  “Biological and chemical weapons and decontamination specialists.”

  The Ray-Bans slowly swung my way, Slidell’s brows floating well above the rims.

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “Biologic—”

  “I heard what you said. What’s it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Our gaze held for as long as Slidell felt comfortable with his eyes off the road. When he refocused, I went back to prying what I could from the text.

  Nogrimšanas diena uz kuğa …

  “There’s a phrase that translates something like ‘on the day of the sinking, aboard ship.’ ”

  “Aboard what ship?”

  “Hold on.” Checking my memory by going online. “The passenger ferry Estonia sank while crossing the Baltic Sea to Stockholm on September 28, 1994.” I paraphrased. “Eight hundred and fifty-two people died.”

  Slidell flashed me a glance. Then the dark lenses swiveled back, and his face shut down.

  I tried wrestling more from the text, gave up, vowing to seek help from Pete. Born in Riga, he was fluent in Latvian.

  “That it?”

  I looked up. Slidell was pointing at an unpaved road T-boning in from the right.

  “Slow down,” I said.

  He did.

  The sign was twisted off-angle from the pole but readable. Honeysuckle Road.

  “The garage is a couple hundred yards down, after a curve to the left.” I gestured a wide arc.

  Slidell made the turn.

  The road cut like a dull yellow wound through the scrub vegetation bullying up to its edges. Starlings watched mutely from utility lines overhead. Our tires hummed on the hard-packed clay.

  Running along each shoulder, had there been shoulders, were the remnants of ancient wood fences. Vines wormed and coiled around the crossbars and posts, filling every millimeter of open space, turning the tumbledown structures into thick, green walls. After the openness of the highway, the narrow corridor felt close and confining.

  Slidell cursed as the 4Runner bounced and lurched over potholes deep enough to bottom out in Antarctica. An eon, then the curve, and the tight passage opened up.

  The clearing was large, at least an acre across, ringed by forest rising dark and leafy against the impossibly blue summer sky. The ground was bare and the same dried-mustard color as the road.

  The 4Runner ground to a stop. Slidell scanned with cop eyes. We both did.

  No voice shouted a warning. No mongrel charged out to challenge our presence.

  The garage lay off to the left, a big metal box with a flat roof and two sliding bay doors on the road-facing side. Beside the bays, a customer entrance with a window on the upper half, covered on the inside by closed venetian blinds.

  Cars and trucks were parked between us and the garage, maybe fifty in all, arranged in rectangles. The northeastern cluster was the farthest away.

  Off to the right, past the southeastern rectangle, squatted a trailer that had probably rolled off the assembly line sometime in the sixties. Toothpaste-aqua below, pus-gray above, the exterior was as dinged and rusty as a retired battle tank. The windows, one on the end and one on the side, had cracked panes barely hanging on to their frames. The wheels were gone, and weed-wra
pped cinder blocks supported the corners.

  “Looks like Affordable Art ain’t big on security.” Slidell’s eyes were still roving.

  It was true. There was no chain linking, no gate, no barrier of any kind. Not a single security camera in sight.

  We both got out, leaving the doors wide. The air was hot and still and smelled faintly of skunk.

  “Yo!” Slidell yelled.

  Several starlings winged off.

  Slidell cupped his hands to his mouth and tried again, louder.

  More startled birds.

  I strode to the customer entrance and tried the knob. Locked. I knocked. No answer.

  I looked at Slidell. He shrugged. We met at the northeast rectangle. It was organized like a pair of parallel centipedes, the vehicles parked headlight to headlight, with a driveway between the two double rows.

  Slot 8 was the last in the uppermost string. In it was a black Hyundai Sonata. Slidell said it was a 2014 model. The plate said it called West Virginia home.

  Slidell tried the doors, found all four locked. Reaching below the left front wheel guard, he ran his hand over the top of the tire. Withdrew a set of not-so-cleverly hidden keys. Used the fob to disengage the locks.

  I took surgical gloves from my shoulder bag and handed a pair to Slidell. He rolled his eyes, I think, but pulled them on before sliding behind the wheel. I gloved and dropped into the passenger seat. The car’s interior smelled of overheated plastic and vinyl. The seat felt like a griddle burning my jeans.

  Slidell found nothing on or under the dash, nothing in the center console. The glove box was empty. The back seat was empty.

  “What kinda clown drives around with no ID?” Slidell, gruff. “No registration, no proof of insurance.”

  “Think it’s a rental?”

  “No paperwork on that, either.”

  Slidell used one key to start the engine, then checked the car’s GPS history. Found no record of previous trips.

  We got out and circled to the rear. Slidell used the second of the two keys to open the trunk.

  Standard jack and spare. Standard folding windshield sunshade. Not-so-standard neon-green duffel.

  “Come to Papa, sweetheart.”

  Slidell snagged the handles and dragged the duffel closer to the back bumper. The whuurp of the zipper triggered another avian flurry.