Heart of Ice by P. J. Parrish Read Free Book Online Page B

feet.
    Flowers opened a door leading to steep wooden slat steps. Louis went down first, surprised to see the ceiling was lower than he remembered. He was starting to wonder exactly how he had found his way back out to the sunlight carrying Lily.
    At the bottom of the stairs they paused. The portable lights revealed the basement to be a large open area with stone walls and a series of small rooms. The boiler that Louis remembered seeing stood in the corner like a huge rusting robot.
    But it was the place where the bones had lay that drew Louis’s eyes. There was a faint whitish outline on the concrete floor, and, for a second, he took it for a chalk sketch left by the techs. But then he realized what it was. Sometimes, if the conditions were just right, the fluids from a decomposing body would soak into the surface beneath it, leaving a pale ghost image.
    Louis glanced at Flowers, but he didn’t even notice the stain. He was just standing there, hands on hips, surveying the scene.
    “I need to confess something to you,” Flowers said. “I’m not sure where to go from here. Any ideas?”
    “Let’s start with the basics,” Louis said. “How’s the identification going? You find anything else besides the ring that could link the bones to this Julie Chapman?”
    Flowers shook his head. “No clothes, no purse, nothingelse here so far, but we’ll learn a lot more when her father gets here tomorrow.”
    “Her father?”
    The new voice made Louis turn.
    Rafsky was halfway down the stairs, and as he ventured forward his face came into the harsh light. “You called her father?” he asked.
    “Why not?” Flowers asked. “We can’t ID the bones without teeth. When we find the skull I figured her father could get her dental—”
    “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
    Flowers glanced at Louis, then back at Rafsky. “I’m just trying—”
    “Do you know what parents go through when their children go missing?”
    “Detective Rafsky,” Louis started.
    The sharp blue eyes caught the light as they swung to Louis. “You shut up,” Rafsky said. He turned back to Flowers. “They live for any shred of news, so when you give them something you better be damn sure you’re right.”
    Flowers’s face had gone tight.
    Louis felt a twinge of sympathy for Flowers, but Rafsky was right. Flowers should have researched other missing girls, talked to someone at Kingswood to see if the ring had ever been lost or given away. He should have waited until he had the Bloomfield Hills police report in his hands. On the basis of just the ring he had assumed the bones belonged to Julie Chapman, and now there was no way to take back whatever hope he had given her family.
    Rafsky suddenly turned to Louis. “What are you doing here?”
    “Chief Flowers hired me on as a consultant,” Louis said.
    Rafsky shook his head slowly, drew a deep breath, and opened the envelope he was carrying. “I have the preliminary lab reports from Marquette.”
    “I’ve been waiting on those all morning,” Flowers said.
    “You don’t wait, Chief Flowers,” Rafsky said. “You get off your ass and get them, even if it means driving to Marquette yourself.”
    Flowers started to say something, but Rafsky cut him off.
    “Every bone was here,” Rafsky said.
    “Except the skull,” Louis said.
    “Which means the body was not ravaged by animals,” Rafsky said. “Other bones would be missing and the skeleton would be scattered. Except for the slight disturbance from your daughter’s fall, the skeleton was intact.”
    “So the killer decapitated her and took the head?” Flowers asked.
    “The ME hasn’t been able to determine yet whether the head was cut off at the time of death or detached naturally during decomposition.”
    “Either way, where the hell is it?” Flowers asked.
    Rafsky gave him a hard stare. “It’s too early to speculate.”
    “What else did you get from Marquette?” Louis asked.
    Rafsky’s eyes slid to Louis, then