FLINT STOOD AT the edge of the autopsy room, trying to breathe normally. He’d never liked the morgue, especially early in the morning when the smells always got to him.
Today the morgue reeked of eggs and sausage. Sonny had been eating a breakfast sandwich when Flint had come in.
“Busy morning. They brought in a homeless man.” He nodded toward the second table where the naked corpse lay, its chest cavity open. “Looks like a heart attack given the condition of the heart.” He made a motion as if offering to show it to him, but Flint waved that off.
Sonny, making a “your loss” face, put aside his sandwich to move to the other table where the skeletal remains had been placed in the positions where each had once been when connected.
“Amazingly, she’s only missing a few fingers,” Sonny was saying. “But the deputy who brought back the earth she’d been found in is still sifting through it, so he might find them yet.”
Flint merely nodded.
“You can tell a lot from bones. Like this fibula,” Sonny said, picking up the left leg bone. “The length of the long bones tells us about what age she was—early twenties. From measuring the femur, tibia, humerus and their radii, I can tell that she was about five foot six. She was medium boned. If you look at the state of the bones, you can get a pretty good indication of how long she was buried along the creek bank. Fifteen to twenty years, but closer to twenty years.”
“You’re sure it’s been that long?” Flint asked, thinking how impossible it might be to identify the woman, let alone locate next of kin if they did.
“It’s not an exact science. It takes a while for the body to decompose to the skeletal stage.” Sonny started to put the leg bone back but held it up one more time. “Looks like she broke her left leg. It’s an old break that was long healed before she went for a swim.”
He put down the bone and picked up another one. “These bony ridges form where the muscles were attached to the wrist. She could have had a job where she used her hands, like a waitress.” Putting that bone back, he picked up the skull.
Flint saw that tufts of long blond hair were still attached to it. “What about DNA from the hair?”
“Already sent some over to the lab. But look at this.” He pointed at the teeth. “Not a great diet. She had cavities and not much dental work.”
“So what killed her?” Flint asked.
Sonny shrugged. “The obvious would be drowning, right? But this is what I really wanted you to see. I thought you’d find it interesting.” He turned the skull. Flint had to move closer to see what Sonny was pointing to. “Wood. See, some of the wood splinters are still embedded in the side of the skull. I’m betting that’s what killed her.”
“Wood?”
He nodded and began to walk him through it. “Assuming she either jumped into the river to swim or fell, depending on what time of year it was, her head made contact with a tree limb violently enough to kill her.”
“Is it possible the blow to her head didn’t kill her instantly? Her remains were found a dozen yards from the creek.”
“She might have been able to get out of the water, but she wouldn’t have been able to go far. She wouldn’t have survived long with that kind of head injury. Certainly not long enough to hide herself under a pile of driftwood.”
“So it appears to have been an accident, but someone covered up her death by hiding her body,” Flint said.
Sonny gave that some thought. “Had that one a few years ago, you might recall, where the fisherman slipped on the rocks, fell and hit his head. Made it almost back to his car before he died. His wound wasn’t as severe. I supposed she might have been able to get out of the water and crawl a few yards. Seems more likely someone helped her and, when they saw that she was badly hurt or dead by then, hid her body. At least she wasn’t swimming in the creek alone.”
“My brothers and I used to go fishing and swimming by ourselves all the time. Never even considered that we might fall and hurt ourselves badly enough to kill us.”
Sonny shook his head. “Kids. But this woman was old enough to know better. I have to wonder why her companion tried to cover up her death. Must have felt responsible. Well, whoever it was, he’s had to live with it all these years. Guess it’s come home to roost now, though, huh.”
“Maybe,” Flint said, not as optimistic as Sonny apparently that justice would get done on this case. Fifteen to twenty years was a long time. The case was ice-cold. Not to mention the fact that the statute of limitations had run out for the crime of hiding a body.
He said as much to Sonny. “No hurry on this case since no one reported a woman this age missing fifteen to twenty years ago.” He frowned as he looked at the coroner and realized what he’d said. “What makes you think it was a man who buried her?”
“No woman would cover up her friend’s death,” Sonny said with confidence.
“You ever meet my ex-wife, Celeste?” he joked.
The coroner laughed. “I have five dollars that says it was a man.”
“You’re on, but more than likely we’ll never know.”
“Oh, you’ll find him. Want to bet that I’m wrong about her age?” Sonny asked.
“No. I’m not going to let you hustle me.” Flint took one last look at the bones on the table. “What I don’t understand is why someone didn’t report her missing,” he said more to himself than to the coroner. “A family member, a friend, someone. I’ve checked and there are no missing-persons reports that match up from that time period.”
“Could be she wasn’t from here. Or maybe family tried to report her missing. It was before your time as sheriff. Anyway, as you know, law enforcement doesn’t get too involved when the missing woman is in her early twenties unless there is reason to believe it might have been foul play.”
Flint knew that to be true. Often missing persons that age simply have hit the road and don’t want their relatives to know where they’ve gone. Kind of like his brother Tucker.
“Could be, too, that she didn’t have any kin looking for her,” Sonny said. “Or they had some reason they didn’t want the law involved.”
* * *
AS TUCKER HEAVED up the last of his breakfast and wiped his mouth, he heard Flint’s concerned voice behind him.
“Tuck?”
He turned slowly to look at his brother. All the years, all the fear and pain, rushed at him like a locomotive barreling down on him. “It’s my fault,” he said, his words coming out as broken as his heart. “The remains you found in the creek? I killed her—and our baby.”
Minutes later, Tucker slumped into the chair his brother offered him. He pressed the cold can of cola Flint had gotten from the vending machine down the hall against his forehead. After a few moments, he opened the can and took a sip as he tried to gather his thoughts. He’d known this would be hard. But after seeing what was in that package...
Flint had looked into the box but hadn’t touched the doll. Instead, he’d moved the package and the paper that had been inside to the floor beside his desk and waited.
“I don’t know where to begin,” Tucker said, although he knew his story began the moment he saw her. Summer, twenty years ago. He and his friends had taken a road trip. They’d stopped for gas in a small town in another county to the northwest.
“I got out to take a leak. It was one of those old gas stations with the restrooms along the side. When I came out, I saw her. She was coming from behind the building, crying and looking behind her like someone was after her. When she saw me, she stopped, wiped her tears and gave me this smile that rocked my world.” He shook his head. “I was hooked right there. She asked for my help. I had some money, so I gave it to her. I could hear my friends loading up to leave. She asked if I had to go or if maybe I wanted to go somewhere with her. She offered me a ride home.”
He looked up to see Flint’s expression. “I know. I was young and foolish and she was...” He shook his head. “Mysterious. Mesmerizing. Amazing. She had long blond hair and these wide blue eyes that when I looked into them I felt as if I was diving into an ocean filled with things I’d never seen before. Things no one had ever seen before. She was captivating and yet so vulnerable. I’d never met anyone like her. I couldn’t have stopped myself even if I had wanted to. I fell hard.”
“You couldn’t have told me what was going on?” Flint asked.
“We had to keep it a secret from everyone, even you. Her father and brother... She said she wasn’t allowed to date until she was eighteen. Her father was very strict. The day we met, she’d had an argument with him. She said she wanted to run away. She couldn’t live in that house any longer and as soon as she turned eighteen... She said she’d graduated early, but he wouldn’t let her leave until her birthday.”
“So you were going to run away with her,” Flint said.
Tucker shook his head and looked away for a moment. “I was going to marry her as soon as I graduated. But then she told me that she was pregnant. We didn’t use any protection that first time.”
“The day you met her.”
He nodded. “I... She was my first. We spent that summer seeing each other every chance she got to sneak away and meet me. Three months in, she told me she was pregnant. I was determined to marry her right then and there, but she said her father would kill her if he found out she was pregnant—and he or her brother would kill me. She said there was only one thing to do. She would leave, get settled and send for me.”
Flint groaned. “She asked for money.”
“I scraped up what money I could.”
“You sold your pistol and your saddle. When I realized that you’d sold those, I thought you had been planning to leave home for months before you actually did.”
“I gave her the money with the understanding that she would contact me after she ran away and I would drop out of school and meet her. Months went by without hearing from her. I couldn’t eat or sleep. Going to school was killing me. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I drove up to the town where I’d met her.”
“Let me guess,” Flint said with the shake of his head.
“Yep, there had never been anyone by the name of Madeline Ross in Denton, Montana. No father, no brother that I could find.” He shook his head. “She’d lied to me about her name and, it seemed, everything else. I went by the library, looked through the school annual for the year she said she’d graduated—a year ahead of me. Nothing. I thought I’d never hear from her again.”
“You aren’t the first man to be conned by a good-looking woman,” Flint said.
He nodded. “Like you, I thought the whole thing had been a scam, especially when I got a message from her that she needed more money.” He raked a hand through his hair, avoiding Flint’s gaze. “She said she’d had to lie out of fear, but that she would tell me everything when we met and I gave her the money.” He sighed. “I told her I couldn’t raise any more, but that I would graduate soon and get a job and... She told me to forget it and hung up.”
“I suspect she didn’t let you off that easily.”
Tucker shook his head. “I knew I’d been played, but a part of me wanted desperately to believe at least some of it was real. I held out hope that there really was an explanation. Later that night, she called to tell me to meet her at the bridge over the creek near our ranch and she would tell me everything.”
Flint sat up a little in his chair. “I remember that night. When you came back to the house, your clothes were soaking wet. You were so upset. You said you were just angry with yourself because you’d fallen in the creek and to leave you alone. I wish now that I hadn’t listened to you.”
“I went in the creek, all right. When I reached the edge of the bridge she was waiting for me in the middle holding something in her arms. She told me not to come any closer or she would jump. Remember, I hadn’t seen or heard from her in months.” His voice broke. “She was holding our child. She said she’d had the baby prematurely, a little boy, and that he was sick and that’s why she’d asked for the money. I promised I would get it, but she said it was too late, that I’d ruined her life. She said that her father and brother were demanding to know who the father of the baby was, but that she hadn’t told, couldn’t, because she loved me too much. I kept moving toward her. I had to. I thought if I could hold her... I tried to get to her, but before I could, she jumped.”
Flint frowned. Tucker knew he had to be asking himself if all this had been just a scam, then why would she have jumped?
“There’d been a storm a few days before so the creek was running high,” Tuck said. “I dived into the water but...” He bent over in his chair to stare down at his boots for a moment as he tried to blot out that night. The pain had stayed with him for all these years. Being back here just made it worse.
“She was gone,” he said finally. “I found a torn piece of the blouse she’d been wearing and the baby blanket caught in some limbs.” He wagged his head, unable to go on.
“That’s why you came back now,” Flint said with a curse. “The skeletal remains that were found in the creek. You think they belong to this Madeline Ross. You’ve been waiting all these years for her body to turn up?”
Tucker nodded slowly.
Flint shook his head. “I left earlier to go next door to the coroner’s office. He estimates the woman was in her early twenties, but he doesn’t believe that she drowned. Sonny says she died of a head wound from crashing into a log.”
He stared at Flint. “So she must have hit a limb as she was being carried downstream by the current.” Was that supposed to relieve his mind?
“The reason it took nineteen years for her remains to turn up—if they are hers—is because she was found under dirt and driftwood yards from the creek. The coroner doubts she could have gotten that far with the head injury that killed her. This spring the creek got so high it overflowed into that old drainage and washed out the side of the bank along with the driftwood or the remains might never have been found that far from the creek.”
Tucker sat back. His head was spinning. “I don’t understand.”
“It appears it was an accident. She must have hit her head while being swept down the creek.”
“Still, it’s my fault.”
“Tuck, it was all a scam. She wasn’t alone that night. She didn’t hide her own body under the dirt and driftwood at the edge of the old creek bank. Someone was waiting for her downstream. They probably pulled her out, panicked since Sonny says the blow to her head would have killed her quickly. So that person buried her body and covered the grave with driftwood away from the creek.”
“What? No, she came alone that night.”
Flint sighed. “If she had come there alone, her vehicle would have been found when she didn’t return to it.”
Why hadn’t he thought of that? Tucker felt sick to his stomach all over again. “Someone could have dropped her off.”
“Right, with plans to pick her up. Tuck, she wouldn’t have taken such a chance jumping in that creek with it running so high unless someone was waiting downstream to help her out. Whoever pulled her body from the creek that night was working with her. The person would have driven whatever vehicle they’d arrived in that night—after they hid her body.”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Of course she wasn’t working her scam alone. He was such a fool. All these years of believing he’d been responsible for her death and that of their son...
“I’m assuming the remains belong to the woman you knew given what you’ve told me,” Flint said. “But until we get a positive ID...”
“I thought I killed her and the baby. Were her remains all that were found?”
“No sign of a baby. Did she ever show you any proof that she was pregnant?”
“No, but—”
“So you don’t know that what she had in her arms that night was even an infant.” Flint nudged the box on the floor with his boot. “It could have been a doll. It could have even been that doll. Do you have any idea who sent this to you?”
He shook his head. “Someone who wants me to still believe that I killed her. I’m surprised they didn’t try to blackmail me.”
“Tuck, I think whoever sent the box was trying to tell you that it had all been a scam—including the baby. But there is one way to find out.” Flint picked up the phone and dialed.
“There was no note in the box?” the sheriff asked as he waited for an answer on the other end of the line.
Tucker shook his head.
“But they had to know that when the remains were found it would bring you home,” Flint said. “You left town so soon after that night, they might not have known where you’d gone. Or they were so upset about what happened, the game was over—at least for a while.”
“Well, they know where I am now, if that package is any indication.”
Flint seemed to consider that. “The coroner, please,” he said when someone answered on the other end of the line. “Did anyone else know about the two of you?”
“Madeline swore me to secrecy. I never told anyone.” His head was spinning. Madeline hadn’t survived the raging waters of the creek that night just as he’d feared. She’d apparently brought about her own death by misjudging the creek’s current. “When will we know for certain that it’s her?”
“The coroner is having DNA run on the hair follicles. If we knew where she was really from, we could check dental records. You met her in Denton? Then there is a good chance she’s from somewhere around this area. Also, if she has family, they might come forward now.”
“She said she had a father and brother. But she could have lied about that, too.”
“Sonny?” Flint said into the phone. “I have a question for you.”
Tucker hardly listened. He was staring at the box with the doll in it, trying to make sense of everything. It had been a scam. Even the baby, though? But if Flint was right and Madeline hadn’t come alone that night...
His brother hung up. “Sonny says the remains of the woman he has at the morgue never had a child. He can tell from the pelvic bones.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Tucker said and rubbed a hand over his face, his brain fighting to reevaluate what he thought had happened that night. It had always been about money for Madeline. The plan must have been for her to disappear and whoever was working with her to blackmail him all these years. Only Madeline had hit something in the water and died. None of the rest had been real.
“You must think I’m a complete fool,” he said.
“You were young and vulnerable. She targeted you. If the remains are hers, then she was a lot older than she told you, and I’m betting that you weren’t her first—just her last. But her jumping into that creek...” Flint shook his head. “That was gutsy and dangerous. She must have known you were getting suspicious so she pulled out all the stops. But like I said, she couldn’t have done it alone. Someone had to be waiting downstream to fish her out of the water. Except she hit her head and died. Between that and you leaving town, it threw a monkey wrench into their plan.”
“They had me right where they wanted me.”
Flint nodded. “They would have bled you dry with blackmail. There are a lot of limbs hanging over that creek. It’s ironic, but it would appear she got cocky and wasn’t able to pull off her last deception. All this assuming the remains are hers.”
“Still, if the creek hadn’t overflowed, she would have never turned up and I would have gone on waiting, believing I killed her and our son.” Tucker glanced at the box on the floor with the doll inside. “Whoever sent that box knew I would come back to Gilt Edge now.”
“Sure looks that way. If anyone contacts you, thinking they can still cash in, don’t leave me out of the loop this time.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to you all those years ago. Before you saw me, I’d gone down to the pay phone at the edge of town and made an anonymous call. I said I’d seen a girl fall into the creek.” Tucker gave his brother a sad smile. “I was scared, filled with guilt.”
“You were just a kid. Nothing you could have done would have saved her. Sonny said she couldn’t have survived her head injury.” Flint frowned. “Now that you mention it, I remember Dad saying he’d seen sheriff’s deputies down at the creek. When they didn’t find a body, they would have assumed your call had been a hoax.”
“Whoever she was working with had already hidden the body and cleared out by the time the sheriff’s deputies got there.”
“Tuck, you didn’t kill her. She jumped in the river trying to get money out of you. Her death was an accident.”
He rubbed the back of his neck for a moment. “Still, I’ve always felt I should have done more or at least done things differently. If I’d just raised the money and given it to her...”
Flint shook his head. “She would have come back for more. You have to realize that. She was a con artist.”
He knew he’d been a damned fool from the moment he’d met Madeline. She’d been his first. She’d made him believe that she loved him as much as he did her. He thought he was going to save her from her horrible family.
And now, if those skeletal remains in the morgue were hers, she was dead—and had been for nineteen years. Not just dead. Caught up in her own scam. But who hid her under the driftwood that night downstream? Whomever she’d been in league with. The man she was really in love with? A man who had talked her into jumping off a bridge into raging water in the dark as part of a con? Or had that been all her idea?
He had felt responsible for her death and the baby’s for so long it was hard for him to let go of the guilt. He’d been played. And not just by the woman he’d known as Madeline Ross. He’d been played by whomever she was working with.
“The worst part,” he said with a bitter bark of a laugh. “Is that I really thought I loved her and would never love anyone else the way I had her.”
But a completely different emotion was bubbling up inside him like a geyser in Yellowstone National Park. If whoever had been working with her thought they could blackmail him... He hoped they would try. He wasn’t that teenager they’d tricked all those years ago. This cowboy was more than ready for them now.