Lacey Campbell stared across the hazy field of snow at the big tent pitched against the rundown apartment building. She inhaled a breath of icy air, letting it fill her lungs and strengthen her resolve.
There. That’s where the body is.
Her stomach knotted as she trudged toward the site, carefully watching where she placed her feet. She yanked on the sides of her wool hat and tucked her chin into her scarf as she strode through the fluff, blinking away the swirl of snowflakes. Snow was great, unless you had to work in it. And six inches of new snow covered the grounds of her current assignment. This weather was for skiing, sledding, and snowball fights.
Not for investigating old bones in a frosty tent in Boondocks, Oregon.
Two big boots appeared in her downward line of vision. She hit her brakes, slipped, and landed on her rear.
“Do you live here?” The cop’s voice was gravelly and terse.
From her ungraceful, sprawling seat on the ground, Lacey blinked at the meaty hand he held out.
He repeated his question and her gaze flew to his scowling face. He looked like a cop who’d stepped straight out of prime-time TV. Solid, tough, and bald.
“Oh!” Her brain switched on and she grabbed his offered hand. “No, I don’t live here. I’m just—”
“No one’s allowed near the apartment complex unless you’re a resident.” One-handed, he smoothly hoisted her to her feet as his sharp eyes took a closer look at her leather satchel and scanned her expensive coat.
“You a reporter? ’Cause you can turn right around. There’ll be a press conference at the Lakefield police station at three.” The cop had decided she was an outsider. Not a difficult conclusion; the neighborhood reeked of food stamps and welfare checks.
Wishing she were taller, Lacey lifted her chin and then grimaced as she brushed at the cold, wet seat of her pants. How professional.
She whipped out her ID. “I’m not a reporter. Dr. Peres is waiting for me. I’m a . . .” She coughed. “I work for the ME’s office.” No one knew what she meant when she said she was a forensic odontologist. Medical examiner’s office was a term they understood.
The cop glanced at her ID and then bent over to stare under the brim of her hat. His brown eyes probed. “You’re Dr. Campbell? Dr. Peres is waiting for a Dr. Campbell.”
“Yes, I am Dr. Campbell,” she stated firmly and tilted up her nose.
Who’d he expect? Quincy?
“Can I get by now?” She peered around him, spying several figures moving outside the big tent. Dr. Victoria Peres had requested her forensic skills three hours ago, and Lacey itched to see what the doctor had found. Something unusual enough to demand Lacey come directly to the site instead of waiting to study the dental aspect of the remains in a heated, sterile lab.
Or maybe the doctor thought it’d be amusing to drag Lacey out of a warm bed, force her to drive sixty miles in crappy weather, and squat in the freezing snow to stare at a few teeth. A little power trip. Lacey scowled as she scribbled her name on the crime-scene log the cop held out and then shoved past the male boulder in her way.
She plodded through the snow, studying the old single-story apartment building. It looked deflated, concave along the roof, as if it was too exhausted to stand up straight. She’d been told it was home to seniors on small pensions and to low-income families. There was warped siding on the walls, and the composite roof sported bald spots. Irritation swirled under her skin.
Who dared charge rent for this dump?
She counted five little faces with their noses smashed against the windows as she walked by.
She forced a smile and waved a mitten.
The children stayed inside where it was warm.
The seniors were another story.
Small groups of gray-haired men and old women in plastic rain bonnets milled around in the courtyard, ignoring the cold. The rain bonnets looked like clear seashells capping the silver heads, reminding Lacey of her grandmother, who’d worn the cheap hoods to protect her rinse and set. She trudged by the curious lined faces. Without a doubt, today must be their most exciting day in years.
A skeleton in the crawl space under their building.
Lacey shivered as her imagination spun with theories. Had someone stashed a body twenty years ago? Or had someone gotten stuck in the crawl space and was never missed?
A half dozen Lakefield cop cars crowded the parking lot. Probably the small town’s entire fleet. Navy-blue uniforms gathered around with hot cups of coffee in their hands, an air of resignation and waiting in their postures. Lacey eyed the steam rising from the paper cups and unconsciously sniffed. The caffeine receptor sites in her nerves pleaded for coffee as she pushed aside the flap door of the tent.
“Dr. Campbell!”
At the sharp voice, Lacey popped out of her coffee musings, froze, and fought the instinct to look for her father—also Dr. Campbell. The bright blue tarp at Lacey’s snowy boots framed the partial recovery of a skeleton. Another step and she would’ve crushed a tibia and sent Dr. Peres’s blood pressure spiking through the tent roof. As she ignored the doctor’s glare, Lacey’s gaze locked on the bones and a sharp rush surged through her veins at the sight of the challenge at her feet.
This was why she accepted assignments in freezing weather. To identify and bring home a lost victim. To use her unique skills to solve the mystery of death. To put an end to a mourning family’s questions. To know she made a difference.
The cold faded away.
The skull was present, along with most of the ribs and the longer bones of the extremities. At the far end of the tent, two male techs in down jackets sifted buckets of dirt and rocks through a screen, painstakingly searching for smaller bones. A huge, gaping hole in the concrete wall of the crawl space under the building indicated where the remains had been discovered.
“Don’t step on anything,” said Dr. Peres.
Nice to see you too.
“Morning.” Lacey nodded in Dr. Peres’s general direction and tried to slow her racing heart. Her eyes studied the surreal scene. Bones, buckets, and bitch.
Dr. Victoria Peres, a forensic anthropologist, was known as a strict ball breaker in her field, and she didn’t take flak from anyone. At six feet tall, she was an Amazon incarnate. A recovery site was her kingdom, and no one dared step within breathing distance of her sites before she gave her assent. And don’t dream of touching anything without permission. Anything.
When she grew up, Lacey wanted to be Dr. Peres.
Lacey had worked with the demanding doctor on four recoveries before the doctor trusted her work. But that didn’t mean Dr. Peres liked Lacey; Dr. Peres didn’t like anyone.
Black-framed glasses with itty-bitty lenses balanced on the narrow ridge of the doctor’s nose. As usual, her long black hair was in a perfect knot at her neck. No stray hairs had escaped the knot, even though the doctor had been on-site for five hours.
“Nice you could make the party.” Dr. Peres glanced at her watch and raised one brow.
“I had to wait ’til my toenails dried.”
A sharp snort came from the woman and Lacey’s eyes narrowed. Wow. She’d actually made Dr. Peres laugh. Well, sort of. Still, it should give Lacey some bragging rights among the ME’s staff.
“What’d you find?” Lacey’s fingers yearned to start on the puzzle. This was the best part of her job. A mystery to decode.
“White female, age fifteen to twenty-five. We’re pulling her, piece by piece, out of the hole that leads into the building’s crawl space. Over there’s the guy who found her.” Dr. Peres pointed through a plastic tent window to a white-haired man speaking with two of the local police. The man clutched a wiener dog with a graying muzzle to his sunken chest. “He was taking his dog out to do its business and noticed several big chunks of concrete had broken out of the cracked wall. The dog crawled into the hole and when grandpa stuck his hand in to haul out the dog, he got a surprise.”
Dr. Peres gestured at the gaping hole. “I don’t think the body’s been here all that long, and it was skeletal when it was placed.”
“What do you mean?” Lacey’s curiosity rose to code orange. So much for her idea of someone getting stuck under the building.
“I think the hole was recently made and the skeleton shoved in. It was a pile of bones. An undisturbed, decomposing body doesn’t end up in a heap like that.” Dr. Peres’s brows came together in a black slash. “Bones scatter sometimes, depending on the scavengers in the area, but these look like they were dumped out of a sack and pushed into the hole.”
“One skeleton?” Lacey’s gaze darted back to the skull. What kind of freak dumps a skeleton? What kind of freak has a skeleton to dump?
Dr. Peres nodded. “And it looks pretty complete. We’re finding everything—phalanges, metatarsals, vertebrae. But what I don’t understand is why it wasn’t hidden better. They had to know we’d find it. They left the hole wide open and the big concrete chunks on the ground for anyone to trip over.”
“Maybe they were interrupted before they could finish. Cause of death?”
“Don’t know yet.” Dr. Peres’s tone was short. “No obvious blows to the skull and I haven’t found the hyoid, but both femurs are broken in the same spot. The breaks look similar to what you see in a car accident where someone hits a pedestrian with the front bumper.” She frowned. “A high bumper. Not a car. A truck, maybe.”
Lacey’s thighs ached. “Antemortem breaks?”
“Either postmortem or just prior to time of death. No signs of the slightest start of healing.” The doctor was curt, but bent to indicate several wedge-shaped fractures on the femurs.
Lacey’s gaze locked on the cracks as she crammed her mittens into her bag and knelt, automatically slipping her hands into a pair of purple vinyl gloves from a box by the skull. The thin gloves were second nature to her hands.
“Someone hit her with a vehicle and hid the body,” Lacey muttered, drawing a look of disgust from Dr. Peres. Too late, Lacey remembered the woman hated speculation on the cause of death before an exam was finished. Victoria Peres voiced only facts.
Mentally cringing, Lacey stood and self-consciously brushed at her knees. She’d stepped out of line. Not my job to figure out the who, what, where, when, why, or how of the death. She was here to focus on a minute aspect of the skeleton: teeth.
The dirt-sifting technician let out a whoop and added a patella to a growing pile of tiny bones. Dr. Peres picked it up, glanced at it briefly, spun it in her fingers, and assigned it to the left leg on the tarp.
“She seems small.” Too small. She looked like a child.
“She is small. She’ll be around five feet tall or so, but she’s a fully mature woman. Her hips and growth plates tell me that.” Dr. Peres lifted a black brow at Lacey. “Her teeth indicate that too. But that’s your department.”
“Hey, I can empathize if she was that short,” Lacey stated, unconsciously shifting onto her toes and stretching her spine. Standing next to the tall doctor, Lacey’s petite height was making her crane her neck as she spoke. “Can you tell how long she’s been dead?”
Dr. Peres shook her head as she turned back to the bones. “There’s no clothing to work with. All that’s left is bones and blonde hair, and I won’t make a guess. I’ll know more after I study her in the lab.”
“My father said you’d found some interesting dental work.”
Dr. Peres’s face brightened a degree. “Maybe that could help give us a time line. It was removable, so I bagged it already.” She strode six steps to a plastic storage case and started rooting through a pile of evidence bags.
Lacey’s shoulders relaxed a notch. Victoria Peres wasn’t one of the people who’d mutter “nepotism” about Lacey’s job. Maybe the doctor understood the job was tougher when your father was the chief medical examiner of the state. And your boss.
Lacey pressed her lips together. Anyone who’d worked directly with her knew Lacey was damned good at her job.
“That’s a rock, not a bone.” One of the techs peered at an ivory chunk on his partner’s outstretched hand.
“No way. It’s gotta be a bone,” argued his counterpart.
Lacey glanced at Dr. Peres, expecting her to referee the dispute, but the doctor’s attention was still buried in a storage case. Curious, Lacey carefully stepped over the tiny skeleton and held out a hand.
“Can I take a look?”
Two startled faces turned her way. Lacey stood her ground and tried to look like a competent forensic specialist. The men were young. One dark, one blond. Both bundled up as if they were working in the Arctic. Probably college students interning with Dr. Peres.
“Sure.” Acting like he was handing over the Hope diamond, the dark-haired tech handed her a narrow piece, shorter than an inch. He cast a quick look at Dr. Peres’s back.
Lacey studied the piece in her hand, understanding their confusion. She couldn’t tell if it was bone. She lifted the piece to her mouth and gently touched her tongue to it, feeling its smoothness.
“Jesus Christ!”
“What in the hell . . . !” Both men rocked back, identical shock covering their faces.
Lacey handed back the little piece, hiding her smile. “It’s rock.”
Porous bone would have stuck to her tongue. A trick she’d learned from her father.
“She’s right.” Dr. Peres’s close voice made Lacey jump and turn to face her. The doctor glanced at the men over Lacey’s shoulder. “I can never shock those two guys. I guess I need to start gnawing on skeletons more frequently.” Her eyes narrowed at Lacey. “Don’t repeat that.”
Dr. Peres’s reputation was hard-assed enough without a rumor circulating that she gnaws on bones.
“I’m still looking for the dental work I removed first thing this morning. Why don’t you take a look at the rest of her teeth while I check the other bin?”
Lacey nodded and kneeled by the sparse skeleton, the tarp crinkling loudly. She scanned the lonely remains, feeling quiet sadness ripple through her chest.
What happened to you?
The skull silently stared at nothing.
Lacey’s heart ached in sympathy. The dead woman was the ultimate underdog, and Lacey was a sucker for the vulnerable.
Whether a long shot in a football game or an injured animal, she instinctively threw her support to the weakest. It was the same with her job. Every victim sparked Lacey’s utmost effort.
But this situation felt different from other recoveries. Was it the freezing weather? The depressing location?
This feels personal.
That was exactly it. The examination felt personal.
Was it because the body was so small? Petite like herself? Young. Female. A victim of a horrible . . .
Stop it. She was projecting herself onto the remains. Lacey mentally pulled back and hammered down her emotions, swallowing hard.
Do the job. Do your best. Report the findings and go home.
But somewhere, someone was missing a daughter. Or sister.
Resolute, she gently lifted the mandible from the tarp and focused. Perfectly aligned teeth with no fillings. But the first molars were missing. Strangely, the second molars behind the missing ones were in perfect placement. She touched one of the empty spots with her little finger. It fit perfectly. Usually when teeth have been extracted, the proximal teeth eventually tip or shift into the empty spaces. Not on this mandible. And the extraction sites weren’t new, because the bone had fully regenerated in place of the removed roots.
“Something was keeping the spaces open,” she mumbled as she set the mandible down and reached for the skull. She ran questioning fingertips over the smooth, bony surfaces that shaped the head. Definitely female. Male skulls were lumpy and rugged. Even in death, the female form demonstrated a distinctive, smooth grace. She tipped the skull upside down and saw a perfectly aligned arch with all teeth present.
Braces. Or else great genes. The woman’s smile had been beautiful.
Large silver fillings covered every surface of the upper first molars.
“She managed to keep the upper set of first molars,” she muttered to no one. Lacey squinted as she scanned for any elusive white fillings. “But the bottom set was beyond saving at some point. Something probably weakened her first molars during their formation,” she theorized. Lacey eyed the central incisors, looking for any signs of odd development, since those teeth formed during nearly the same time period as the first molars, but her front teeth were white, smooth, and gorgeous.
Lacey touched the bone posterior to the second molars. Bare hints of wisdom teeth poked through the bone. Without X-rays to check the root lengths of the wisdom teeth, she wasn’t quite ready to agree that the woman was in her late teens or early twenties, but she hadn’t found anything to counter Dr. Peres’s premise.
The roar of an approaching vehicle seized her attention.
Her freezing fingers clenched the skull as she watched through a hazy plastic window while a man on an ATV ripped into the snowy parking lot and spun, deliberately covering one group of cops with thick snow.
Lacey jumped to her feet, pushed aside the tent flap, stepped out, and stared, sucking in her breath.
The cops weren’t going to appreciate that stupid prank.
The men in blue brushed off the snow, and their disgruntled rumblings reached Lacey’s ears. The driver of the ATV gave a shout of laughter as he hopped off and strode toward the incensed group, casually pulling off his gloves.
Was he crazy?
He was tall and walked with confident strides, apparently not concerned with the wrath of the cops. He faced away from her, showing trim black hair below his baseball cap, and she wished she could see his face. To her shock, the circle of cops opened to let him enter, slapping him on the back and shaking hands all around. The knot in Lacey’s spine relaxed.
They weren’t going to kill him.
Fifty feet away, the rider abruptly turned his head and a laughing, steel-gray gaze slammed into hers. Lacey stepped back at the instant onslaught, her eyes blinking. A solid jaw tensed briefly as he looked her up and down. He gave a deliberate wink and grin, and turned back to his group.
Lust in Lacey’s brain jumped up and took notice. Did he just flirt with me?
Very nice. Her limbs warmed.
Lacey’s fingertip slid into an empty eye socket and she gasped, dropping her gaze to the forgotten skull, terrified she’d crunched a delicate bone. She studied it frantically, searching for fresh cracks. Finding none, she exhaled in a low whistle.
Dr. Peres would have her head if she damaged the skull.