Bone Deep

“Then…” Kat found herself voiceless for a long moment as she tried to imagine this week replaying over and over and over again, the tension stretching thin but never disappearing entirely. “Then,” she whispered, “I live with it.” She knew she could; after all, she’d had plenty of practice after Hugh’s disappearance.

“Ms. Riley?” It was another of her employees, a beefy young man named Chad Harris who wasn’t awfully bright but who could lift anything and worked uncomplainingly from the minute he arrived in the morning. “I’ve got those rhododendrons you ordered. Where shall I put them?”

“Excuse me,” she said to Joan, and went with Chad.

The day didn’t improve, either, because this was the every-other-week Thursday when she had to do payroll. There was no putting it off. Friday was payday, and everyone expected their checks. She’d added a time clock a couple of years ago, which should have made calculating hours a breeze but didn’t. Employees forgot to clock in, or clock out. Sometimes they clocked in and out for lunch, sometimes they didn’t. Now she had to figure pay down to the minutes they worked, not just the hours. The whole thing was a giant headache.

Kat reluctantly collected the time cards from the small employee room that had space for a bank of metal lockers salvaged from the old middle school, a microwave on a cart, a dorm room-size refrigerator and a plastic table with chairs that allowed people to sit to eat lunch. Then, after signaling to Joan, she closeted herself in her office.

It took her an hour and a half with paper, pen and calculator to figure out how much to write the checks for. After swearing for about the tenth time, she thought as she did every other week about how maybe it was time to consider computerizing. How hard could it be to learn QuickBooks or some similar program? Let it do the calculating, and she could even print the checks instead of writing them out by hand. Or maybe she was getting to the point where she could afford a part-time bookkeeper, although she didn’t really have office space to spare.

She opened the left hand drawer in her ancient desk where she kept the checkbook and was reaching in with barely a glance when her brain caught up with what her eyes were telling her.

A skeletal hand lay there. Not just a bone, or even a couple, or a jumble. An entire hand, laid out as carefully as her paths on the nursery grounds. A few of the ivory bones, she saw with horror, were strung together with dried gristle.

And—oh God—the hand wore a man’s plain gold wedding ring.

“YOU CALLED IN TO SAY you were taking a break at 10:32.” Grant glowered at one of the two young officers standing stiffly in front of his desk. “You, Erickson, never called in at all.”

Blond and skinny, the kid had an enormous Adam’s apple. It bobbed a couple of times. “I guess I forgot. Sir.”

Grant transferred his gaze to Dennis Porter. “I drove past the Starbucks at 11:18. There were then two patrol cars parked out in front. Your break had extended to forty-six minutes. We had only three officers patrolling this morning.” He let his voice rise. “Two of you were sitting on your asses sipping cappuccinos for damn near an hour this morning.”

Erickson was stupid enough to say, “Sir, I wasn’t there that long. I was only—”

Porter gave him a dirty look before turning his flushed face forward again.

“At least dispatch knew where Porter was. You, now—” The cell phone at his waist vibrated. Grant looked down and saw a number that he’d programmed in, just in case.

Shit.

“I have to take this call,” he said. “Consider yourselves warned. Now get out of here.”

They scuttled so fast, they had to wrestle briefly to decide who was getting out the door first. Grant swung away to look out the window at the parking lot.

“Haller.”

“Grant, this is Kat. Um, Kat Riley, from the nursery.”

“I know who you are.”

“I have more bones.” She sounded eerily calm, which meant she was scared to death.

“Where this time?”

“My desk drawer.” She paused. “It’s a whole hand this time. And…and I think it’s wearing Hugh’s wedding ring.”

“Oh, damn,” he said, his eyes closing briefly. “Kat…you haven’t touched anything, have you?”

“No.” There was a tremor in her voice now. “I can’t think of anything I less want to do than touch those.”

“Okay. Stay where you are. Don’t tell anyone else. I’m on my way.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He didn’t run any of the red lights downtown, but it was a close call. He sure as hell wanted to. He kept picturing her sitting behind that desk in her dim little hole of an office, staring fixedly at the skeletal remains of her dead husband’s hand. God almighty.

We still don’t know that these bones are Hugh Riley’s.

The hell they didn’t, he thought. He’d reached a point where he’d be willing to bet a year’s pay that Kat’s husband was being returned to her piece by piece. Nothing else made sense.

Was she being blackmailed? Was that what this was about? If someone had retrieved Hugh from wherever she’d stashed him—say, in a storage locker—this was a dandy way to scare her into paying up, and continuing to pay.

Except, she clearly wasn’t. And that begged the question of why she was calling him every time a bone appeared.

Thwarted by the last traffic light on the main street, he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and stared, willing it to turn green. As if to piss him off, it stayed red for an eternity.

When he finally got there, the parking lot in front of the nursery was almost empty. They were only an hour from closing, he realized, and rain clouds darkened the sky although they hadn’t opened up yet. It had been the wettest damned spring so far that he could remember since he moved to the Northwest. It was a good thing no one was around to notice his fourth visit in not much over a week.

He entered the main nursery building, greeted the woman behind the counter—Joan Stover—and went directly to Kat’s office. When he knocked, she called, “Come in.”

“You should have locked,” he said brusquely as he entered. “And asked who I was before you invited me in.”

Kat wasn’t behind her desk. She stood in the corner, almost pressed against the wall, as if she’d been trying to get as far from her discovery as she could while staying in the office. Her face was skim milk pale. He’d noticed before that she didn’t tan well, even working outside year-round as she did. She was more likely to have a constantly peeling nose during the summer. Her pallor today, though, had more to do with her shock than it did with naturally pale skin.

“I’m sorry,” Grant said more gently. “I shouldn’t yell at you.”

“No, you shouldn’t. Nobody’s tried to attack me. It’s ridiculous to think—” She swallowed. Remembering, he suspected, the heavy door to the greenhouse bouncing on its hinges after she discovered the second bone.

“You don’t think this is an attack?” He nodded to her desk.

She shuddered and stayed where she was, her gaze on the desk rather than him.

He circled it and saw the drawer half-open, as she must have left it. And, damn, all the bones in a hand laid out. Or, he amended, enough of the bones to make an effective tableau. A human hand had twenty-seven bones, some tiny, and he wouldn’t swear there were that many here. Grant leaned closer.

“I’m going to get some pictures,” he said, opening the case of the camera he’d carried in. “We can try for fingerprints on the drawer handle—”

“Why bother?” Kat said dully. “Do you really think whoever did this is that dumb?”

“Criminals can be remarkably stupid.” He began snapping pictures. “That’s why most of them get caught. Haven’t you read about bank robbers who use one of their own deposit slips to write the holdup note on?”