Vanished in the Night (2 page)

Ben gave him a little-two finger salute. Zach nodded back. It was good to know that if he needed a friendly outlet in the media, he’d have one. He’d pay for it in insider information and a scoop or two, but the price wouldn’t be exorbitant. He’d probably get a free beer out of it, too. Ben did an awful lot of his investigative reporting in bars.

Ducking the reporters yelling questions, Zach got into the unmarked car with Frank and headed back to the police station. They’d let the crime-scene techs do their thing and figure out what to do after that.

Meanwhile, he had the tags. Maybe this wouldn’t be quite as big a pain in the ass as he’d thought.

Veronica Osborne saw flashing lights up ahead—it looked like J Street was blocked off. That was going to make the morning commute charming for most people. Luckily, she did the reverse-commute thing. An hour before the capital area filled up with government officials
in suits and ties, she was on her way home from her eleven-to-seven shift in the emergency room.

It was one of the many things she loved about working the night shift. There was also getting to go to the bank and the grocery store during uncrowded daytime hours, and a great reason to leave blind dates early. The easy commute was just gravy on the fluffy mashed potatoes of her life.

As she drove closer to where the road was blocked off, she saw news vans. It must be something juicy. But no ambulances were screaming in or out, so it wasn’t anything life threatening.

No one needed her to leap out of her car and stop the bleeding or administer CPR, so she might as well go home and get some sleep. She turned on her blinker and cut to the left. She’d swing around to Alhambra and avoid the whole mess. It didn’t have anything to do with her, after all.

Several hours later, Zach stared at the computer screen in his cubicle at the Sacramento Police Department headquarters. He should never have told Frank it would be easy to identify the body; he knew better than to taunt the Investigation Gods. Pride goeth, indeed. Might as well have tugged on Superman’s cape.

The dog tags had belonged to a Jamal Shelden. A
quick database search revealed that Shelden had been born in Sacramento to Lois Shelden on March 3, 1949. He died in the jungles of Vietnam on February 23, 1974, a few months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. He was awarded the Purple Heart posthumously and his remains were buried at the Veterans Memorial Grove Cemetery in Yountville. Jamal’s mother had died in a car accident in 1987. He had no siblings, and no father was listed on any of the paperwork Zach could find.

Zach supposed a quick drive by the cemetery was probably in order. He’d call the police department up in Yountville and ask them to check into it, though someone probably would have mentioned it if a veteran had been dug up recently. Things like that tended to piss people off. He didn’t have much hope that the bones at the bottom of the pit were those of Jamal Shelden.

So . . . whose were they? And if they hadn’t been attached to Jamal Shelden, how the hell had his dog tags ended up in the construction pit?

Mr. Shelden’s next of kin at the time of his death was his wife, Celeste Shelden, also of Sacramento. After bouncing around a few databases, Zach learned that she had died in 2003, after giving birth to two children. Max Shelden had been born in 1974, a few weeks after his father died in Vietnam. Celeste had remarried a George Osborne in 1979 and had given birth to a Veronica Osborne in 1983.

Before Zach could start looking those two up, his talkie buzzed on his hip. “Yeah?”

“Come to the AV room. I got something to show you,” Frank said.

Zach pulled a roll of Tums from his desk drawer, pounded down two of them, then headed downstairs.

He found Frank in front of a television screen with a cup of bad station-house coffee and the previous night’s surveillance tapes from the construction site. Frank looked up at Zach as he walked in, his eyes bloodshot from staring at the screen. “I found the dump.”

Zach slapped his shoulder. “Nice.”

“Yeah. Don’t get too excited.” Frank hit the play button.

A blurry image of the construction site came up in grainy black and white. Based on the angle of the view, Zach figured the camera must have been on top of the office trailer. After a couple of seconds, a figure wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt with the hood up and baggy, shapeless sweatpants came into the frame pulling something behind itself. Its burden looked like it was wrapped in a black plastic tarp or maybe a big yard-size garbage bag. The figure pulled it to the edge of the pit and rolled it in, brushed the dirt off its hands, and walked out of view.

“Not exactly Oscar material, is it?” Frank mused.

“I’m not giving it a thumbs-up.” The tape gave them damn close to nothing. The figure was shapeless, featureless, sexless. Maybe, if they were lucky, one of the lab geeks could figure out approximate height and weight.

Frank snapped the tape off. “Whoever it was knew the security guard’s schedule pretty well, too. Showed up about half an hour after he swung by and about forty-five minutes before he’d be by again. Optimum time for a dump. That’s no accident.”

“Not looking up at the camera was no accident, either.” Zach rubbed his hands over his face. Not much about this smelled like an accident. He came back to the question Frank had asked him earlier. “Why dump this body there now? You think there’s something special about the site? Or was it just convenient?”

“It’s as mysterious as the Loch Ness monster,” Frank pronounced.

Zach gave him a baleful look.

“Big Foot?”

Zach remained silent.

Frank shrugged. “I’m just sayin’.”

“Where do you think the body was before this?” Zach sat on the desk next to Frank.

“How the hell should I know? Let’s go talk to the lab rats and see if they found anything good we can chase down.”

*     *     *

“I don’t care what the dog tags say. There’s no way this body belongs to a man of twenty-five.” Eric Dins-more shoved away from the autopsy table and rolled backward on his wheeled stool. Dinsmore was six feet and three inches of skinny forensic pathologist. Freckle faced and pale as a ghost, he also had a wicked jump shot that made him wildly popular with most of the squad. He also knew what he was talking about, and was accurate and efficient. “Whoever he was, he was still growing. The growth plates in the long bones hadn’t fused yet. He was definitely under twenty-one and probably younger than that.”

Zach wasn’t surprised; he hadn’t expected the bones to be Jamal’s. “Any idea when he died?”

“Not yet. But I’ve got enough teeth that I should be able to get a positive ID eventually. I’ll have more later today.” Dinsmore turned back to his bench.

The dog tags had to mean something. Zach knew exactly where his dad’s tags and old police shield were: in a box on top of his dresser—high on the list of what he’d grab on his way out the door if his apartment caught fire. “The guy had a kid I haven’t been able to track down yet. The name was Max Shelden. See if that helps.”

“Got it,” Dinsmore said, scribbling the name on a pad of paper. “When did the kid die?”

“He hasn’t, as far as I know. I didn’t see any death certificate on file.”

Dinsmore looked up at him. “The kid in the pit is really most sincerely dead.”

“I noticed. The lack of actual flesh on the bones was a dead giveaway.” He shrugged. “It’s what I’ve got so far.”

Dinsmore nodded. “I’ll call when I get more information. There’s a lot to process here.”

“We’ll take whatever you’ve got as soon as you’ve got it,” Zach said as he and Frank headed toward the door.

They’d found him. They didn’t know who he was yet, but they’d found him. Susan Tennant leaned back in her chair and snapped off the small TV in her office. The local news stations had been playing the tape of the shapeless body bag being loaded into the coroner’s van over and over since eight o’clock that morning. Every news program throughout the day had led with it, and she wouldn’t be surprised if they led with it again tomorrow.

Something else was bound to happen somewhere that would bounce Max off everyone’s radar. It was the story of his life, in a way: too much attention when it would be better to be ignored, and not enough when he needed it.

With the TV off, the clinic was silent. Susan was the last one here. The staff was used to her being first in and last out, since it was her operation. Her baby.

She hadn’t doubted that they would find Max right away; they could hardly have missed him. She couldn’t have done much more to make sure of it, short of planting spotlights over him.

Of course, they’d been missing him for almost twenty years. Maybe “missing” wasn’t the right word. Someone would have to have been searching for him to have missed him. No one had even been looking for Max. She shook her head. It was too easy for someone to fall through the cracks. Even now, with all the computers and linked databases, people slipped off the face of the earth and no one noticed. No one cared. Too many people were deemed dispensable. Half the people who came in and out of this clinic every day were people no one was looking for, who could cease to exist one day and no one would notice.

But
she
would notice. She would care. That was the vow she’d made to herself. Twenty years ago, she’d been too frightened and too stupid to act, but she’d tried to make up for it. She thought she had in many ways, but she could never fully erase what had happened all those years ago. It would always haunt her soul.

She was finally doing something for Max now, though. She had brought that terrible secret out of
the grave along with those bones, and exposed it all to the world. The police would have to care now, too. Bones showing up in construction sites forced people to pay attention.

Susan sighed and pushed back from her old metal desk. There was nothing more she could do now. Not without destroying everything she’d worked so hard for—the clinic and all the people she helped. The legacy of her cowardice had ended up being a pretty good one.

It was the least she could do to make up for the things she hadn’t done, for not having stopped the things that still haunted her dreams and made her wake up gasping and sweat drenched, heart racing. It didn’t undo the things she’d done and seen done, but it helped balance things out. She hoped and prayed, so, anyway.

She also hoped it would stop more wrongs from being done. Some people should never be allowed to have power over others. Their true natures came out, and nature wasn’t always pretty. It was often harsh and brutal.

“Rest in peace, Max,” she whispered. “Finally, rest in peace.”

2

Oh, joy of joys. Cops on her doorstep at seven o’clock in the evening. They were illuminated by her porch light and by the little blinking pumpkin lights she’d hung outside.

Veronica could tell the two men were cops without seeing their badges or their guns. The shoulders were a little too square. The jaws a little too set. Their attitudes a little too alert. She’d seen it enough in the emergency room.

She’d seen it enough away from work, too. She’d dated one or two cops, but no more. She and Tina had sworn off them. It was like giving up sweets or white flour. At first you felt deprived and a little desperate, but you knew you’d feel better in the end.

Then, of course, there was the time she spent with
cops because of her father. You hadn’t really lived until you’d used your condo as collateral to bail your father out of jail. And this visit was probably about dear old Dad.

What had he done this time? Seven
P.M
. was a little early for a fight. He didn’t usually loosen up his fists until ten o’clock or later—all the better to drag her out of work. It wasn’t too early for a DUI, though. Dad occasionally laid down a base buzz at home before he ventured out to the bars. It was more economical.

Whatever it was, she wasn’t going to be sucked in this time. She was going to stand firm. She’d had enough. She’d warned him and warned him and warned him. This was it, though. She was drawing her line in the sand.

The short dark-haired cop, who looked like a mournful basset hound, was sniffing around her stoop as if flying monkeys might pop out of her Halloween decorations. The taller one wasn’t as jumpy. Maybe he got it all out at the gym, where he clearly spent a lot of time.

The tall one rang the bell again. Maybe she could pretend not to be home?

He rang a third time. Tenacious bastard, wasn’t he?

Veronica opened the door. “Can I help you?” She pulled her sweater tighter around herself and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Veronica Osborne?” the short one asked.

She nodded. “You got her.”

“Could we come in?”

She took a deep breath. “Look, I don’t know what he did this time, and I don’t care. He’s a grown man. He can take care of his own troubles. I’m not bailing him out.”

Both men went carefully blank faced. “What him do you think we’re here about?” the tall one asked.

Could she have this wrong? She knew that blank-faced look. She’d said something unexpected, and they were not reacting until they figured it out. Total cop behavior: assess the situation, give nothing away.

“My father. George Osborne. This isn’t about him?”

“No, ma’am,” the tall one said. “This is in regards to your brother, Max Shelden.”

“Max?” she gasped and took a step backward. “If it’s about Max, I guess you’d better come in.”

Zach glanced around the living room. Would any of the furniture hold his weight? It all was made out of that woven wicker stuff he associated with fancy patios. He chose the chair by the end of the glass-topped coffee table. Sure enough, it creaked beneath him as he lowered himself into it. If Veronica Osborne had a boyfriend, he was a little guy.

She looked like the kind of girl who would have a boyfriend, the sort of girl who would have a regular date for Saturday night. She was cute. No more than five foot four. Button nosed, with a spray of freckles, and big hazel eyes peeping out from under reddish-brown bangs.