Unfinished Business (36 page)

He lifted his hands to his nose and sniffed,
and his face twisted. “I smell like shit.” It probably wasn’t
intended to be a pun, so I suppressed my giggle. “I gotta go
wash.”

He set off for the house, holding his hands
as far away from his nose as possible.

José, the only one of the three who still
looked pristine, glanced at the woods behind the house. “So we
gotta go in there.”

Grimaldi nodded. “Come over to the car.”

She grabbed a file folder from the front
seat and opened it on the hood of the car while we circled around.
“I didn’t get a chance to update you yesterday,” she glanced at me,
“but these are the women we’re looking for. Mr. Collier—” she
nodded to Rafe, “identified the pictures yesterday afternoon. “This
is Maria Elena Figueroa,” one of the Hispanic Marias I had found,
“and this is Krystal Ellison.” A young blonde with an oversized
nose and shoulder-length hair. “Krystal left home five years ago;
most likely willingly. She was seventeen, and from Pittsburg. Not
the one in Pennsylvania; the one about two hours south of here,
just before Chattanooga.”

We nodded.

“Her mother reported her missing. There was
no father. She had a boyfriend, and left with him. I tracked him
down last night. He’s still in Nashville. He said he didn’t make
Krystal sell herself, but at this point, there’s no way to know
whether he’s telling the truth or not. His story is they got here
and had a fight. Krystal said she was going home. She walked away,
and he never saw her again. Could be the truth, could be a
lie.”

“But he’s not a suspect,” José said, “since
we know who killed her.”

“Correct. But I’d still nail him for
trafficking if I could.” She moved on. “Maria Elena grew up in El
Salvador. The family came to Oklahoma when she was fourteen. At
sixteen, still in high school, she vanished.”

“From Oklahoma?”

Grimaldi nodded. “In Maria’s case, we
suspect a violation of the Mann Act.”

She had mentioned the Mann Act once before,
so I knew what it was. Born during the ‘white slavery’ hysteria of
the early 20
^th
century, the Mann Act makes it a crime to
transport someone across state lines for immoral purposes. Taking
Maria from Oklahoma to Tennessee to make her a truck stop
prostitute was definitely a violation. Not that there was any
chance at all of finding who was responsible after all this
time.

“They won’t look like this now.” Grimaldi
tapped the photographs. “More than likely, we’re looking for bones.
We probably won’t find clothes, and we have no idea what they were
wearing when Hernandez grabbed them, anyway. That happened months
after each girl disappeared from home. They could have been wearing
anything.”

We nodded.

“Maria had a chain with a gold crucifix
around her neck when she left home. She might still have been
wearing it when she died. We didn’t find it among the things in
Hernandez’s van. She also had pierced ears, so there might be
earrings. Krystal had pierced ears, as well, and favored big hoops.
It isn’t likely we’ll find anything like that, but keep an eye out
for anything shiny.”

We nodded.

“I don’t expect a thorough search,” Grimaldi
said. “We’ll most likely have to bring in the K-9 unit to get
results. But we’re here. We may as well have a look around.”

We nodded. Jamal had joined us now, so he
nodded, too. “Let’s do this,” he said, chivvying his fellow rookies
toward the tree line.

“Spread out about twelve feet apart,”
Wendell called after them. “Holler if you find anything.”

They nodded, scampering off into the woods
like three puppies let off the leash.

Wendell turned to the rest of us. “They make
me tired.”

Rafe’s mouth twisted. “How d’you think I
feel?”

“You’re gonna heal and get better, boy.
Ain’t no fixing old age.” He nodded to the woods. “Shall we?”

We should. I’d even put on halfway-sensible
shoes, just in case. By which I mean low heels. Although pushing
through the brush wasn’t going to do my exposed calves any
good.

“You can stay here with the cars,” Rafe
said. “I don’t want you overdoing in the heat.”

I didn’t want him overdoing in the heat,
either. “If you’re going, I’m going.” We’d just take it slow. As
Grimaldi had said, we weren’t likely to find anything anyway.

But for once, we got lucky. If you can call
it luck when you’re looking for a couple of dead women. Only about
ten minutes had passed when José’s voice rang out between the
trees. “I think I got something!”

We all turned in his direction. He was on
the far end of the line, with Jamal between him and Clayton, then
Wendell, and finally Grimaldi. Rafe and I were together, both of us
no doubt thinking we’d help the other across the rough spots. He
was moving easier today than yesterday, but ‘slow’ and ‘careful’
were still watchwords.

When José called, we all waded through the
brush toward him, still keeping a sharp eye out for anything that
might be bone instead of twig.

Rafe and I got there last, and by then,
everyone else was crowded around José’s find.

At first glance it looked like another
branch. Stripped of bark and bleached by sun and rain. But—
“Femur,” Grimaldi said.

The back of my neck prickled. “Thigh bone,
right? Are you sure it’s human?”

Wendell nodded and raised his head. “Spread
out from here. Look for anything else that might relate.”

It was Jamal who found the next clue. “Gotta
pink rubber band over here,” he called out. “And... shit!”

He took a step back.

We all converged on Jamal’s location. He was
standing there shaking, not over the dirty pink elastic band—the
kind a girl (or boy) with long hair might use—but over the skull
sitting a foot away, staring at us through empty eye sockets.

Even I couldn’t mistake that for a twig. Or
think it was anything but human.

“Maria had long hair,” I said. My voice was
hushed, and sounded weird in the silence under the trees.

Grimaldi nodded. “Time to call in the dogs.
And the crime scene crew.” She reached for her phone.

“Can we keep looking until they get here?”
Clayton asked when she’d finished her call. He hadn’t found
anything, so maybe he was feeling like he needed to prove himself.
Or maybe he just wanted to help. “If she’s here,” he glanced at the
skull, “maybe the other girl’s here somewhere, too.”

“It’s been four years,” Wendell said to
Grimaldi. “Not like they can compromise the crime scene. Rain and
snow and animals already did that.”

“And it isn’t like we don’t already know who
the killer is,” I added.

Grimaldi nodded. “Keep looking. For now,
we’ll assume this is Maria. Let’s see if we can find Krystal.” She
took a handkerchief out of her pocket and tied it to a branch above
Maria’s head. Above the skull.

We fanned out again.

Several more bones were found within a
minute or two. Pieces of Maria, we assumed, since they were within
six or eight feet of her head.

“He didn’t cut up the body,” I whispered to
Rafe, “did he?”

He shook his head. “She’s been here four
years. Water may have moved some of the bones around. And animals
prob’ly got at her and took some of the bones away.”

“What kinds of animals?” We don’t have
anything too scary around here. No bears, no wolves, no
cougars.

“Could be dogs,” Rafe said with a shrug as
he examined the ground. He must have sensed my horrified
expression—
dogs?—
because he looked up. “They don’t know no
better, darlin’. To them it’s just a bone. They don’t know that it
used to be a person.”

“I suppose.”

“Or it could be raccoons or maybe coyotes.
We get those around here sometimes.”

We did. “It’s horrible,” I said, shuffling
through the brush. “Those poor girls. First they’re tortured and
then they’re killed and then they’re tossed out here like so much
garbage. And then dogs and coyotes rummage through their
bones.”

Rafe had his eyes fastened on the ground.
“We’ll find’em. And then they can go home to their families and go
in the ground with some dignity. There.”

He stopped.

“Where?”

He pointed. I looked. “Oh, God.”

It was an almost entirely intact skeleton,
laid out in the brush as if in a coffin. Legs straight, hands on
its chest. A glimmer of gold nestled among the vertebrae of the
neck, just below the grinning skull.

“This is Maria,” Rafe said. “That back there
must have been Krystal.”

Or someone else, someone we didn’t know
about.

But yes, this was Maria. A slender crucifix
on a thin gold chain circled what had been her neck. And another
hair elastic, this one green, rested in the vicinity of her third
rib, curled three times. Maybe she’d had her hair in a braid that
day, with the green elastic at the bottom. I thought about asking
Rafe if he remembered a braid, but I decided I didn’t really need
to know. This was Maria. The crucifix proved it.

Grimaldi agreed. “That’s both of them. If
there are any more, the crime scene crew can find them. We’re done.
Good work, y’all.” She marked the location of Maria’s body the same
way she’d marked Krystal’s, and we turned back to the duplex, still
visible in the distance, between the trees.

“He didn’t carry’em far,” Jamal
remarked.

No, he hadn’t. Although in the middle of the
night—which was when I would have gone out to dispose of a body—and
carrying dead weight through brush and trees, concerned that the
noise he was making would wake up the guy sleeping in the apartment
next door, maybe it wasn’t such a surprise.

“Far enough that nobody found’em till now,”
Clayton answered, which was certainly also true.

José didn’t say anything, and when I turned
to look for him, I saw that he was still standing over Maria’s
body. His head was bent and his hands clasped in front of him.

Jamal opened his mouth, but Wendell shook
his head. “He ain’t doing nothing wrong. Leave him be.”

We trudged out of the woods and back to the
house in silence.

Grimaldi immediately got busy on the phone.
José joined the rest of us after a minute—nobody gave him a hard
time about praying, at least not in my hearing—and the three
rookies piled into the SUV with Wendell and took off, leaving the
rest of the body detail to Grimaldi and the MNPD crime scene crew.
Rafe, it seemed, had the rest of the day off to rest and
recuperate.

“Gee,” I said, “a whole day. Are you sure
you won’t be bored, being idle so long?”

He grinned. “I’m sure we can think of
something to do.”

“I was being sarcastic,” I told him. “After
being kidnapped and tortured and almost killed, and had your
girlfriend and son and future mother-in-law held hostage and almost
killed, I would have thought they’d give you more than twenty-four
hours off.”

He shrugged. “There’s stuff I can do there
that’ll keep me off my feet. Like teaching Jamal to pick
locks.”

Sure. “Maybe we can go buy a new mattress,
since you don’t have anything to do today.” And since the one at
the house still had Kelly’s blood on it.

“I think we might could do that,” Rafe said.
“And then maybe we can break it in later.” He winked.

“I think we might could do that,” I
answered, and made him grin.

Mother called on Friday morning to inform me that everything was
ready to go for Saturday. “The tent is arriving this afternoon,
along with the chairs. The caterer will be here tomorrow morning.
So will the flowers. When are you coming?”

I blinked. Part of me had suspected the
whole get-married-at-the-mansion/leave-everything-to-me bit had
been a joke, suggested in the heat of the moment and forgotten by
now. “I don’t know. Rafe’s at work until five.”

Mother wrinkled her brows. I could hear it.
“Perhaps you can drive down by yourself. I don’t think the dress
will need alteration, but just in case.”

“I’m not leaving him here,” I said.

“You can’t spend the night together in any
case, darling. It’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride before
the wedding.”

“I’m not leaving my boyfriend in Nashville
and driving to Sweetwater by myself,” I informed her. “Last time we
didn’t spend the evening before the wedding together, he didn’t
show up the next morning. I’m not taking any chances.”

Mother huffed. At least it sounded like a
huff. “I suppose Rafael can spend the night with your brother.
Dixon has a large house.”

He did. And he liked Rafe well enough that
dumping my boyfriend on him, unexpectedly, for the evening, might
not be a big deal. Maybe the two of them could have their own
bachelor party—minus the strippers—in Dix’s kitchen tonight. Or the
treat-my-sister-right-or-else talk, since I didn’t have a father to
set my boyfriend straight.

“That would probably be acceptable,” I
said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Mother answered
dryly. “You’ll be staying here, of course. Audrey, Catherine, and I
will be on hand to help you get ready in the morning.”

Audrey, Catherine, and Mother had been on
hand to help me get ready for my wedding to Bradley, too. This was
going to bring back memories.

“What do I need to bring?” I asked.

“Just yourself,” Mother told me. “The groom.
And the rings.”

“You’ve done everything else? Dress for me?
Suit for Rafe? Wedding bouquet?”

“The groom brings the wedding bouquet,”
Mother said. “But it’s been ordered. I’ll have it delivered to
Dixon’s house later today.”

I’m almost certain I heard the scribbling of
a pen as she wrote a note to herself.

“Guests?” Maybe that was the joke. Rafe and
I would get married at the mansion, but nobody would be there to
see it.

“It will be a fairly small and intimate
gathering,” Mother said.