mind, as the bones were recovered amid the seaweed and silver-colored driftwood that had also cradled the remains of Samantha Maxwell. The it was like the grandfather clock in her parent’s Tacoma home, always ticking, always there. The it was like a kind of leech that had planted itself on her skin and just never let go. She drew a deep breath as she tried to put it out of her mind. While Samantha Maxwell’s case was never considered foul play, only a terrible accident, the scene had to be processed with the skill and decorum befitting the tragedy that had stolen the pretty young teenager’s life.
The clouds had darkened and rain began to fall through a tear in the sky. The techs were dressed in dark blue rain gear as they methodically worked over an area that had been cordoned off with bright yellow tape. No telling how long the bones had been there. One young cop suggested they wait out the rain.
“Not like this is a fresh kill and there’s any evidence to be had,” he said.
“Are you an idiot or is your brain running low on fuel because you skipped a meal?” Grace asked. “We don’t wait for the weather when we find a body.”
The tech turned defensive. “You don’t have to get all high and mighty with me. I’m just saying the obvious. Bones that old probably belong to an Indian or something.”
Grace held her tongue. She could have reminded him that “Native American” was the preferred term, but there was no point in coming off as a bitch.
Or high and mighty, as the twerp put it.
By the end of the day, the bones recovered-nine of them-were tagged and bundled in a plastic lidded box of the same kind many home owners use to store their Christmas decorations. The femur had been the largest bone; ribs and fragments of a pelvis were also recovered from the beach. Techs moved up to the top of the cliff, at Grace’s request.
“No telling what happened,” she said, “but if those bones are from a homicide victim I’d say it was a good bet that the body was buried up there.”
The cliff had sloughed off a van-sized chunk of earth.
Paul Bateman nodded.
“We don’t even know if the remains are human, you know. And don’t you go thinking that it’s her.”
Grace nodded. Her partner knew her so well.
“Hadn’t even crossed my mind,” she lied.
CHAPTER 2
The Salmon Beach neighborhood of Tacoma was all about the eclectic. The different drum. The doing your own thing. The charm of the neighborhood just north of Point Defiance had long been its hippie and hipness factor. Some of the houses had been brought in by barge, rejects that found new lives and the astounding view that came with being on the beach. Most, however, had been built there on stilts over the water as fishing cabins. It was a tiny village of some eighty homes with wind socks and birdfeeders, and people with strong hearts. They needed them. No cars could make their way down the sharp cliff to anyone’s front door. It was a couple hundred steps down, and more important, when there was something to carry up, a couple hundred steps to get to the top.
Grace and Shane Alexander weren’t at all like the couples on either side of their 1940s house perched on pilings. She was a Tacoma Police detective, he an FBI agent working out of the Seattle field office. Their lives were certainly law and order, but they were very much a live-and-let-live couple. If they smelled a little pot smoke from the older couple with the tie-dyed curtains a few doors down, they never said a word about it.
Their house, a cabin really, was only twelve hundred square feet. Cozy or cramped? That always depended on the mood of its occupants. When they disagreed-which was more than occasionally-no house, not even Aaron Spelling’s former mansion in Hollywood, would be large enough for either to find solace in a quiet corner.
The discovery of Samantha Maxwell’s body and the sad call she and her partner had made to the Maxwell home in nearby Spanaway had left Grace edgy. Telling a mother the worst possible news always did. And yet as bad as that was, Shane knew what was really percolating around his wife’s mind.
“When will the lab have the results back on the bones?” he asked, finishing a beer and slipping past his wife for another in the refrigerator. He opened the freezer and retrieved a second ice-cold pilsner glass, a habit he’d had since college days at the University of Washington.
Grace, who had been mincing some chives snipped from a deck planter for Dungeness crab cakes she was making, looked up, but only for a second.
“A few days,” she said. “They’ll be in Olympia tomorrow.”
The state crime lab was located in Olympia, a half hour’s drive from Tacoma.
“Are you doing all right?” he asked, putting his hand on her shoulder and stopping her from her task.
“Fine,” she said.
“Slim to none,” he said.
Grace stopped a beat. “Excuse me?”
He took a drink and swallowed. “Chances are the bones aren’t hers.”
Grace scraped the chives from a wooden cutting board into the bowl of luscious pink and white crabmeat.
“I know,” she said.
He looked at her with those eyes, the eyes that could tap in to her soul like no others.
“Do you really know that?” he asked, taking that first foamy sip from the second beer.
“Yeah,” Grace said, looking up as the news came on. “Hang on.” She reached for the remote and turned up the sound on the wall-mounted TV over a living room fireplace that was as fake as a reality show. Fireplaces were not a good idea in a place as hard to get to as Salmon Beach. Several beach homes had burned to the ground over the years because the fire department couldn’t reach them in time.
“Tonight the coroner identified the body of Samantha Maxwell, missing from Point Defiance. While there has not been an official ruling, sources tell KING-5 News that the death will likely be ruled as a swimming accident.”
Behind the reporter was a shot of Grace and the other police at the scene.
“Hey, you’re on TV,” Shane said.
Grace held her hand up. “Shh! I need to hear this.”
“While investigators were at the beach,” the reporter said in the kind of exaggerated earnestness that never seemed even remotely genuine, “they made the discovery of human remains, unrelated to drowning victim Maxwell.”
Colette Robinson, the woman jilted by her husband for a dog sitter, appeared on the screen.
“I saw the dead girl first,” she said, her eyes wandering from the camera lens to the interviewer. “Poor thing. I’ve seen her picture on TV. Beautiful. So, so tragic. I never saw the bones, but I watched the police detectives collect them.”
The reporter finished the short segment by saying that “the bones are of unknown age and origin. They might not even be human.”
Grace turned on the stove and poured some olive oil from a ceramic decanter.
“Have you talked to your mother about it?” he asked.
“Of course I did. She had a right to know before it came on TV, Shane.”
Shane took another drink. “You shouldn’t get her hopes up.”
The skillet smoked. Grace reached for it and in doing so, knocked over the oil.
“Damn! Look what you made me do!” she said, going for the dishcloth that hung on the oven door’s handle.
Shane took the skillet off the heat to let it cool a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he knew he really hadn’t done anything wrong. “I just want to be a help to you and your mom. I’m on your side.”
“What side is that?” she asked, immediately wishing that her tone had been absent of any impatience or sarcasm.
To his credit, Shane ignored it.
“The side of truth and peace,” he said.
