Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [531]
“I’ll let these others boil,” he told her while he heat-sealed the two newly filled plastic bags and crossed the room to place them in the freezer. He stopped at the sink to pull off the gloves and wash his hands. He reached for a small bottle of what Maggie could see was vanilla extract, dabbing some onto his hands and rubbing it in. Then he started removing his goggles and mask, but hurried back to the stove when one of the pots started boiling over.
He lifted the lid and grabbed a clean wooden spoon to stir. He turned down the flame and then absently scooped out a spoonful and brought it to his lips, blowing on it before he did the unthinkable—he took a sip from the spoon.
“What the hell are you doing!”
He glanced at her, then quickly back at the stove and pot before his face flushed with embarrassment. “Oh, jeez! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out. It’s my lunch.” But her look mustn’t have convinced him, so he scooped up more as evidence, showing her what she could now identify as carrots, green beans, maybe some potatoes. “It’s just vegetable beef soup. Really.” He fumbled around the countertop and finally held up the can. “See. It’s just soup. Campbell’s. Mmm-mm…good.”
CHAPTER 41
“I guess I get so used to being around this all day, I forget. Sorry about that,” Bonzado apologized for the third time. “Let me make it up to you. How ’bout I take you out to dinner?”
“You don’t have to do that. Really. It’s not a problem. It just surprised me, is all.”
“No, really, I insist. There’s a place called Giovani’s close to the Ramada.”
“Okay, if you insist.”
“Now, let me show you some stuff.” He finished peeling off the mask and shoved the goggles up atop his head, messing his hair and not caring. Finally he returned to his enthusiastic self. “On to our body-snatcher case.”
“Body snatcher?”
“That’s what the kids are calling him. Actually, I think that’s what they’re calling him in the news media, too. You have to admit, it has a ring to it. Don’t you FBI types nickname your killers?”
“I think everyone watches too much TV.” But it was true. They often did give killers nicknames. She remembered some of her most recent ones: the collector and the soul catcher. But it wasn’t a matter of policy or even morbid name-calling. Perhaps it came out of a need to define, maybe a need to understand and control the killer. Body snatcher seemed appropriate. Appropriate but too easy.
Bonzado waved her over to a table where freshly cleaned bones lay on a white drop cloth.
“This is the young man from barrel number three.” The numbering was one of those things that unfortunately had come from necessity. She had watched Watermeier request the number be painted onto the barrel and its lid. And now she saw that all the paper tags with strings attached to each of the skeletal remains were also given the number three.
“Young man? How can you tell?” This was one of the barrels that she hadn’t seen inside. The one Stolz had said was a bunch of bones. She wondered if there could have been enough tissue to indicate sex, let alone age.
Bonzado picked up what Maggie recognized as a thigh bone, or the femur. She did, after all, have a medical background, not that bones had been a favorite subject.
“At birth there are several places where there is an epiphysis, or a separate element, separate pieces of bone that throughout childhood and into young adulthood end up getting larger and slowly ossify…or rather, it eventually joins or unites. The end of the femur is one of those places. Right here—” he pointed “—at the knee. Can you see the slight separation? It’s just a groove now, sorta looks like a scar on the bone where the growth has occurred. In adulthood it disappears.”
He bent over the bone so that his forehead almost touched hers, his elbow brushing her side. For a brief