“Hell if I know.” Bud checked with Mona. I could hear their voices low and tense.
“No, Mona says she doesn’t.” He came back on the line, sounding almost relieved. I didn’t share the feeling.
“Hmm. Still no idea who she got a ride with from the school?”
“Mona and I keep thinking it should have been Portia. She was in the play, too, but she says she didn’t see much of Hattie afterwards.”
“Okay, Bud. Listen, I need you to release Hattie’s dental records to my office. I’ll have Nancy stop by with the form and you’ll be the first to know about this girl one way or the other. I promise you that.”
He made a sound like a shaky acknowledgment and hung up the phone.
Before I could think too much about what I’d just asked of my best friend, I called Rochester and confirmed the autopsy was scheduled first thing tomorrow. It didn’t matter that tomorrow was Sunday; morgues didn’t keep business hours.
While Nancy took care of the paperwork and pictures, I opened the case file with Jake’s fancy new software that made it impossible to get any work done. Couldn’t grumble about it now. After getting the damn thing open, I filled in the few details we had. It was bleached bones, almost nothing.
Female.
Caucasian.
Stab wounds and possible head trauma.
Body found by two local juveniles at the old Erickson barn on Saturday, April 12, 2008, 4:32 p.m.
I swallowed and rubbed my jaw, looking at all those blank fields. I was worried for the first time I could remember, thinking about what I might have to type in there. Girls didn’t get murdered for nothing, not in Wabash County. There were no drive-by shootings here, no angry boys unloading an arsenal inside the high school. All that crazy city shit was a world away from us, and that’s why a lot of the folks who lived here stayed. Sure, the Pine Valley storefronts were always half empty. When crop prices were down, people might not scrape out their mortgage payments, but this was a community. A place stuck on the idea that people still mattered. Something certainly had mattered enough to draw this girl out to the Erickson barn in the middle of nowhere. And whatever it was had also mattered enough to someone else to kill her over it.
It was getting late so I walked home, but who knew why. I ate most of my meals at the station and hardly slept anymore. It used to be just during big cases, but lately I was only down about four hours a night. I owned the top half of a duplex a block off Main Street. The Nguyens, the folks who ran the liquor store now, lived downstairs. They were practically the only Asians in the county and although their cooking smells were downright pungent—nothing like Chinese restaurants—they were quiet and never banged on the plumbing to tell me to shut up like the last old woman did before she had a stroke and died. I kept it down anyway, especially in the middle of the night when I wasn’t sleeping. I played records sometimes, but I never watched the TV anymore; it just made me feel dead already. I got my news in the paper and listened to ball games on the radio, so there was no point even having the thing except the Nguyens’ cat liked to jump in through the window and lie on top of it. Even though I’d never liked cats, this one was all right. He didn’t strut around demanding food or rub his fur all over the place. He just sat on the TV on one side of the living room and I sat on the couch on the other side, and we were okay.
I sat up all night long thinking about that body. If I dozed off a little, I didn’t remember it. I made notes and lists of people to talk to and watched the clock turn slowly toward 7:00 a.m., while the cat’s tail twitched.
“Well, Sheriff Goodman, whose remains should I thank for the honor of this visit?”
Dr. Frances Okada hadn’t changed. Sure, her hair was a silvery bun now and there was a stoop in her back, but she still sauntered around the morgue like the unholy queen of the dead and she still separated my name—“Good man”—like it was some great joke nobody got except her.
“That’s the same question I’ve been waiting to ask you for an hour while I sat in that damn lobby, Fran.”
“Yes, such a shame for you that this young man”—she tossed her head in the direction of a body in the corner that a technician was working over—“had the nerve to have an aneurysm during his baseball practice last night. He should’ve had the courtesy to check your schedule first.”
I walked over to the table wordlessly. My mother always told my sisters and me that silence ends an argument quicker than words. It worked pretty well with snooty medical examiners, too, and pain in the ass or not, Fran was going to give me an ID. Bud and Mona were waiting.
The body had changed again. She was gray under the lab lights and the bloating had gotten worse. She didn’t look like anyone anymore, let alone Hattie.