The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber Read Free Book Online Page A

ranger station and called Jimmy Meads at home. The two were friends; Meads trusted Hankins and had given him a bit of law enforcement authority that park rangers didn’t ordinarily have.
    Meads drove from his tidy Cape several blocks to what served as the police station those days: a dank, mold-infested labyrinth of offices and holding cells in the basement of Town Hall. He collected two detectives and drove with them to Race Point. They transferred to a jeep—a police sedan would have sunk in the sand—and drove on to the clump of scrub pines.
    Meads saw the mutilated body and immediately thought of drug dealer and former police informant Antone “Tony” Costa, although he knew that Costa couldn’t have had a hand in this murder.
----
    Jimmy Meads was a sergeant in March 1969 when two young women went missing. One cold day, his boss, Chief Francis “Cheney” Marshall, was combing the woods not far from the Truro Old North Cemetery with a couple of Massachusetts police detectives and a state trooper. They were searching for the women from nearby Providence, Rhode Island, who hadgone to Provincetown for a winter weekend getaway and never returned home.
    The three men left their vehicles near the road and followed a rutted dirt track three hundred yards into the woods to a clearing on the edge of a knoll. Marshall noticed a large pine tree at the edge of the mossy clearing. Six feet off the ground on the tree’s trunk, a knob and the remnant of a broken limb protruded.
    Strands of rope stuck to the bark of the knob; there were rope fibers on the trunk, and bits of stained rope on the bed of pine needles. Near the base of the tree the trooper saw something glitter in the dirt. He picked it up and brushed it off: a single gold earring with a dangling square of black onyx.
    He cleared leaves and turf, revealing the outline of a recently dug hole, then grabbed one of the shovels the men had brought. Three feet down, the cold earth softened, but the roots of the tree made for rough going. He knelt, scooping out dirt with his hands. One of the detectives knelt beside him; the others walked over. Seeing nothing but soil, a detective was about to tell the men to stop digging when suddenly the trooper yanked his hand out of the dirt as if he’d been bitten. “There’s something down there,” he said.
    Something white was visible under a layer of sandy soil. “Jesus Christ,” Marshall said. An arm protruded from the hole. A ring decorated with alternating turquoise and orange beads circled the little finger of the hand. A detective pawed the dirt aside, revealing a mat of brown hair. It came away in his hand like a Halloween fright wig. He carefully loosened the dirt around the hair and cupped his hands around the head. He lifted it from the ground.
    As author Leo J. Damore related in this scene from his 1981 book, In His Garden , the detective “cradled the head in his arm. He brushed sand and gravel clinging to the open eyes and took dirt from the gaping mouth. The face was a mask of terror, lips drawn back in a grimace of surprise and pain. The face was bluish, the left cheek discolored and swollen. The nose had been broken by the force of a powerful blow.” The detective thought he recognized Mary Anne Wysocki, one of the missing Providence women.
    In a sandy area up a slight rise around two hundred feet away, the men dug through two feet of frost before uncovering a tangle of female body parts: the lower portion of a young woman severed just above the hips, the upper half of the body. The skin of the chest had been cut open and pulled back like the front of a cardigan. The face was swollen and badly mauled, but the detective had pored over the photos of the two missing women enough to know the body in the grave was Wysocki’s companion, Patricia Walsh.
    The base of the tree was where Tony Costa hid his drug stash. That and other evidence linked the victims to