The Bone Man by Vicki Stiefel Read Free Book Online Page B

None.
    “This is creepy, Rob. Didi wrote the word ‘
bloodfet
.’ ” I pointed to where she’d inscribed the word. “Right there. I saw it.”
    “Hey, Bruce,” Kranak said to the guy on the ladder. “You find any words? Anything like that?”
    Bruce shook his head. “Nope, Sarge.
    “What about under that pool of blood,” I said. “Maybe it oozed over the word or something.”
    The blood spatter specialist peered down at us, shaking his head. “When we get there, I’ll look again. But I doubt it.”
    “Well, don’t doubt it. Just find it.” I turned and left.
    Kranak said something I couldn’t hear, then followed me. “Bruce’s the best blood guy I know, Tally.”
    I stood in the hall, my body flushed with anger and a touch of fear. “Whatever. What about the crime scene photos?”
    “They show nothing like you describe.”
    “I know what I saw.”
    “Bruce’ll check. Promise.”
    “Sure. He sounded awfully certain he’d find nothing.” I walked through the keyed door and into the lobby, headed for MGAP. Kranak stopped me with a hand on my arm.
    “Hold up, Tally,” he said.
    I faced him. “Something hinkey’s going on. I know what I saw. I don’t much enjoy being treated like a three-year-old. Or doubted. Or questioned.”
    He snorted. “You’re not. But the word may be gone, Tally. You, of all people, know how the mind imagines stuff.”
    “I didn’t imagine this.” I got a pen and a pad at the front desk and wrote out the word I’d seen scrawled in Didi’s blood. “Here. She wrote it. I don’t know why it’s gone, but it matters. Understand.”
    “Sure do. But you know as well as I that I can’t do anything without evidence.”
    “Just keep an eye out, okay?”
    “Promise.” He looked at the paper. “Promise.”
    I kissed his cheek, nodded, and looked down. The toe that peeked from my open-toed pumps was stained with Didi’s blood. “Oh, hell.”
    It was hard handing off Didi’s sister and brother-in-law to Gert and her team. But I didn’t work there anymore.
    Still, I ached for them, for Didi, for her friends and family at OCME. She was this wild-haired wonder, and she didn’t deserve to die that way. Not at all.
    Right after the viewing and ID, I slipped back inside the far reaches of OCME to say my farewells. They mattered, at least to me they did, those good-byes. Funerals and such were different. The remains were embalmed to waxy perfection and often dressed and dolled up in clothes and makeup they’d never have worn in life. I remembered seeing a good friend’s nails painted bright red in her casket, her newly manicured hand clutching the Bible, King James Version. She never would have used red on her nails. Nor would she have allowed a Bible in the casket with her.
    The remains we all saw at funeral homes were really about the bereaved, not the deceased. Or so I believed.
    So I made it a point with my cases and with my friends to say my good-byes privately.
    I stood in the large refrigeration room, a place I knew intimately. Didi lay on a steel gurney, just like all the others. She was encased in a white plastic bag, and, I guessed out of respect, someone had covered her with a sheet. Shehadn’t been autopsied yet. I didn’t envy the ME that one. Cutting one of your own was hard.
    I sighed and rested my hand on her forehead. I stroked her wiry gray hair that was still matted with blood. “You were crazy, Dee. Just nuts.” I ran my hand up and down her arm, as if that soothing motion might help her. One truth—it helped me to deal.
    She was frozen in time, just like one of her reconstructions. I slipped two fingers over the bruise that had bloomed on her cheek. “Who hit you? Why? Who did this to you?”
    The mole she’d always talked about removing remained beside her left eye. It was sexy, but Didi was not.
    Had the Zuni governor come back? Or maybe the Geographic people? Someone else—who?—wanted to possess that which he shouldn’t. I saw Didi