Cold Feet

He saw her pushing through the crowd as she made her way toward him. And then she was there, smiling in obvious relief. “Caleb, I’m so glad you came.” She reached up to hug him, and he allowed it but quickly moved on, following the flow of the other passengers toward the baggage claim.

“You haven’t heard from Susan?” he asked, glad to finally stretch his legs. First class had been full. He was too big for the narrow, cramped space allotted him in economy, but without advance booking he’d had to take what he could get.

“Not a word. I check my answering machine every hour, just in case. But…” She blinked rapidly, and he hoped she wasn’t going to cry again. He hadn’t come to be her emotional support. He just wanted to find Susan and get back to San Francisco.

“Have the Seattle police assigned any detectives to the case?”

“Two. Lynch and Jones. Do you know them?”

“I know Lynch better than Jones.”

“They’re driving me nuts,” she said. “They keep talking about searching for fiber evidence and what not, but it doesn’t seem like they’re doing much of anything.”

“This isn’t television, Holly. Fiber evidence takes a long time. You have to track down all the people who visited Susan’s apartment, and collect samples before you can send them to the lab for comparison. And you generally don’t have a lab tech sitting there, twiddling his thumbs while waiting to help you. You have to take your place in line.”

He dodged a woman who’d stopped right in front of him to dig through a bag. “Have you talked to your parents again?” he asked. Caleb knew relations between Holly and her adoptive parents were strained. They had been for most of her life. She hated her birth mother for giving her up, even though her birth mother had been barely sixteen. She hated her adoptive mother for not being her birth mother. And she was frequently jealous of Susan, who’d been born with the assistance of fertility drugs when Holly was seven.

“I called them last night to tell them you were coming,” she said.

“What did they have to say about Susan’s disappearance?”

“At first they said the same thing you did—she’s done this before, she’ll turn up. Now that it’s been almost a week, they’re worried. They’re willing to hire a private investigator, if you think that’s the best way to go. They wanted me to talk to you about it.”

“I think we should do whatever we can as soon as possible.”

“Okay.” She scratched her arm through her sweater, looking uncertain. “You know how we were talking about the Sandpoint Strangler?”

“Yes?”

“There was something on the news earlier….”

They’d reached the luggage carousel. He slipped through the crowd to grab the small bag he’d packed in San Francisco. Besides a few clothes, he’d brought only his cell phone, his day planner and his laptop, so he could work if he got the chance. “What?” he asked, when he had his bag slung over his shoulder.

“Someone desecrated the grave of Ellis Purcell.”

Caleb stiffened in surprise. “How? From what I remember, his widow and daughter went to great pains to keep its location a secret.”

“I don’t know. I just caught a clip while I was eating breakfast.”

Caleb rubbed the stubble on his chin. He hadn’t showered or shaved this morning. He’d had such an early flight, he’d simply rolled out of bed, pulled on a Fox Racing T-shirt, a pair of faded jeans and a Giants ball cap and headed south to the airport.

“It’s probably just a coincidence,” he said. But he had to admit it was strange that a woman would go missing from the Sandpoint Strangler’s old hunting grounds a year after Ellis Purcell was dead. That she’d be related to Holly. And that Purcell’s grave would be desecrated in the same week.

A LTHOUGH M ONDAY AFTERNOON was warm, with a rare amount of sun for Seattle in September, the mortuary was cool. Too cool. It smelled of carnations, furniture polish and formaldehyde, which dredged up memories of every funeral Madison had ever attended—Aunt Zelma’s, Grandma Rayma’s, the skeletal-looking man who’d lived next door when she was five. She couldn’t think of the old guy’s name, but she remembered staring at his waxy face as he lay in his coffin.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to deal with any memories of her father’s funeral. They hadn’t given him one. She, her mother, Tye and Johnny had simply sent out notices of his death to the few friends and family who’d remained supportive, and buried him without any type of viewing or wake. Because of the ongoing investigation, and the damage he’d done with his old rifle, it seemed prudent to handle things as quickly and quietly as possible.

Lawrence Howell, the manager of Sunset Lawn Funeral Home and Memorial Park, had helped make the arrangements. He sat across from Madison and her mother now, his short blond hair neatly combed, his face wearing the same somber expression he always wore.

Fortunately, Madison had been able to reach Joanna Stapley, a senior at South Whidbey High School who often baby-sat for her, in time to have her pick up Brianna from school, so she didn’t have to cope with a wriggling six-year-old during such a difficult meeting.

“How could this have happened?” she asked when Mr. Howell had finished explaining what he’d told her on the phone when he’d reached her at her office earlier—that someone had dug up her father’s coffin last night. “How could anyone have figured out where he was buried?”

Howell rested his elbows on his mahogany desk and clasped long white fingers in front of him. “As I told the gentleman who called me this morning—”

“What gentleman?” Annette demanded.

Madison put a comforting hand on her mother’s arm. “Tye, Mom. I phoned him as soon as Mr. Howell contacted me. I thought he might want to be part of this.”

“Is he coming?” she asked, obviously not pleased that Madison had included him.

“No, he said he has to work.”

“What about his wife? Is she going to be here?”

“Sharon and the kids are visiting her mother in Spokane.”

“Ellis never could count on his boys,” Annette said, her lips compressed in disapproval. She didn’t want Tye or his wife involved, yet she sounded affronted by their lack of support.

Mr. Howell, who’d waited politely through their exchange, cleared his throat. “As I was saying, I have no way of knowing how this happened. There was no headstone or anything else to mark your father’s grave, Ms. Lieberman, just as you requested. Our files are kept private and are always locked up at night. There was no sign of forced entry into the mortuary here, where we keep the files. And it’s been a year since the burial—a year in which we’ve had no hint of trouble.”

“That’s what I don’t understand,” Annette said, her eyes filling with tears. “Why now? What would anyone want with Ellis’s body after all this time?”

“A year’s not so long, Mom,” Madison said before Howell could respond. “Whoever it was wants the same thing we’ve encountered before, to express their anger and contempt for…for what happened.”

“I just want my husband to be able to rest in peace,” her mother said. “Ellis was innocent. He never hurt those women.”

Madison wished her mother’s words didn’t sound so hollow to her. She still wanted to believe them. But the locket she’d discovered under the house yesterday threatened the last of her faith, was leaching away the righteous anger that had sustained her so far. Without a strong conviction that her father was innocent, she had nothing to cling to, except the desire to protect her mother and Brianna from what was, most probably, the truth.

“Of course he was innocent,” Howell said, his tone placating.

Madison was willing to bet Howell believed more in the extra money they’d paid him to keep her father’s burial place a secret than he did in her father’s innocence. Just as she thought the call he’d made to them this morning, and what he might shortly suggest for her father’s reburial, would come with a hefty price tag. They should’ve gone ahead with the cremation Madison had suggested from the first. But her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Annette had never known anyone who’d been cremated. It seemed foreign to her—certainly nothing she was willing to do with her beloved husband’s body.

“Fortunately, our security guard frightened the culprit away before he could open the casket,” Howell added.

Madison rummaged through her purse to get her mother a tissue. Annette didn’t used to cry so easily, but the past twelve years had taken quite a toll. “Why didn’t the security guard catch him sooner?” she asked.

Howell politely turned his attention her way. “As you know, this is a big cemetery, Ms. Lieberman. Anthony, our security guard, circles the entire area several times a night, but he focuses mostly on the outer reaches. We buried your father close to the mortuary here, to throw off the media and anyone who might be looking for a fresh grave. Most folks buried near the mortuary have been dead sixty or seventy years, which means they’re pretty well forgotten.” He propped his fingertips together. “The lights on the building also serve as a deterrent.”

“Did your security guard get a look at this guy?” Madison asked, handing the tissue to her mother.

“Anthony said he was wearing jeans and a blue jacket with a red Chinese dragon on the back, and he looked small, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds. But that’s all he could see. As soon as Anthony started toward him in the security cart, he threw down his shovel and ran off.” Howell bent to one side to cover a small cough. “We gave these details to the police this morning, of course.”

“So this…guy, he—he just unearthed the coffin?” Madison asked, her muscles aching with anxiety. How many other people had to deal with such a parade of unsettling incidents? “That’s it?”

“He made a few pry marks on the coffin, but Anthony came along before he was able to get it open. We could have reburied your father easily enough, but I thought I’d better check with you and your mother to see if you’d like him moved now that…well, now that the media and everyone else seem to have taken a renewed interest.”

“The media? How did the media find out?” Annette asked, her eyes wide with panic.