Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [538]
“We kept searching every stinking day, as if we’d rescue them though all we’d find were scraps, bits and pieces. Thirty years on the force and I thought I’d seen it all. But there wasn’t anything could prepare me for that mess. Faces melted off. A foot left in a laced-up boot. A severed hand still gripping the melted impression of a cell phone. I’ve seen a lot of crap, O’Dell. So this,” he said, nodding at the roasting pot on the stove, “doesn’t shock me. Neither does anything we’ve found in those barrels.
“But the difference here—” and now he looked at Maggie, making sure he had her attention “—this here I’m being asked to explain. Like there is some fucking explanation. I’m expected to figure this out. And then I’m expected to stop this asshole.”
Maggie wasn’t sure what he wanted her to say. Was she supposed to tell him it’d be okay? That, of course, they’d find the killer? That she already had a more detailed profile drawn up in her mind? That her profiles were always right? She wasn’t even sure they could protect Luc Racine.
Adam Bonzado came in the back door, checking over his shoulder. Racine stayed seated on a bench on the stone terrace, his Jack Russell on his lap. The two of them stared out at the pond, the dog’s head turning and following the geese as they flew overhead, but Racine continued to stare straight ahead.
Bonzado looked at Maggie and then Watermeier. “Mind if I take that back to the lab?”
“Help yourself. Stolz’s not gonna be much help with this one. I need to get one of the techs to bag the roaster. O’Dell here thinks it might have the killer’s fingerprints.” There was no sarcasm in Watermeier’s voice this time.
“What about the old man?” Bonzado asked the sheriff.
“What about him?”
“You have anyone to stay with him tonight?”
“My guys are pulling double duty as it is. I can’t be asking—”
“I’ll stay with him tonight,” Maggie said, surprising herself with the offer almost as much as she surprised the two men.
CHAPTER 46
Agents did it all the time—looked out for one another, covered one another’s backs. Oftentimes that extended to one another’s families. But Detective Julia Racine was with the District Police Department, not the FBI. And although she and Maggie had worked a couple of cases together, they were far from friends, tolerating each other as colleagues. Detective Racine had climbed the career ladder by breaking rules that stood in her way. She could be reckless at times, ruthless at others. But last year in a park rest room in Cleveland, Ohio, Julia Racine had stopped Maggie’s mother from slitting her own wrists. Maggie didn’t like owing favors. She owed Julia Racine. It seemed appropriate that she pay her back by protecting her father from a killer. Besides, Maggie sort of liked the old guy. He was nothing like his daughter.
She brought a tray out to him where he continued to sit and stare despite the fact that the landscape he seemed so interested in was disappearing into the night shadows. He had refused to go back into the house until the skull was removed and the smell of boiled human flesh could no longer be detected. Maggie had left the stove’s ventilation fan on High and opened all the windows that weren’t painted shut. She honestly couldn’t smell it anymore, but Luc said he could.
“I made us sandwiches,” she told him as she set the tray on the bench between them. Other than milk and juice, the cold cuts, mayonnaise and bread were all there had been in the refrigerator.
“I’m not hungry,” he said with barely a glance at the food. Then he went back to what looked like a vigil, sitting straight-backed as if on alert and listening for something out of the ordinary. Instead there were only crickets chirping and nocturnal birds calling out to one another. Scrapple sat on Luc’s lap, previously content but now interested in the tray of food, wiggling enough to get his owner’s attention. Luc reached over and pulled off the edge of some ham for the dog, instructing him, “Chew it. Don’t just swallow.” But the dog gulped and waited for more.
“So I wasn’t imagining things.