Chapter 11
By the time we reached the police department, the evidence bag holding the bone fragment was weighing on my mind. I couldn’t help but wonder if there were more fragments back at the cabin, perhaps even an entire skeleton.
Giovanni parked out front, and we stepped inside. The place was buzzing with the usual noise. Phones ringing, conversations flowing, the copy machine humming.
Foley sat behind his desk, his glasses perched low on his nose as he read through a stack of reports. Whitlock leaned against the filing cabinet, arms folded, watching us with mild curiosity. I’d called on the drive over, letting them know we were coming and what we thought we’d found.
Foley didn’t look up when we entered, instead saying, “Take a seat.”
He continued perusing the papers in his hands for a moment, then slapped them down on the desk, giving me his full attention.
“Well, where’s this discovery of yours?” he asked.
I reached into my handbag, pulling out the bone fragment and handing it to him.
He held it up to the light and frowned. “Where’d you find this again?”
“At the cabin. There’s a hole beneath the bed where some floorboards used to be.”
Foley raised a brow. “Hard to know if this is what we think it might be. If it is, it’s hard to know how long it’s been there and how it got there in the first place.”
“I’m surprised the cabin wasn’t searched better when your crew was there.”
He looked at me as if I’d insulted him, and I realized I had.
“I wasn’t trying to say you should have—”
He raised a hand. “Yes, you were. Don’t bother backpedaling now. It’s too late.”
“If I offended you, I’m sorry.”
“The cabin was searched, and yes, we could have been more thorough. But aside from the carved initials, we have no evidence linking it to Audrey’s murder. It wasn’t the crime scene. It’s in the same woods, sure, but it’s a different area with different terrain.”
“When we were at the cabin, we poked around the place for a bit, but we didn’t put much effort into it,” Whitlock said. “Even so, this bone fragment is intriguing. I’ll admit we could have done a better job searching the place.”
Foley glared at Whitlock. “Thank you for stating the obvious. You’re not helping, by the way.”
“It’s possible someone went to a lot of trouble to bury human remains beneath the old floorboards, thinking the cabin was abandoned and the remains would never be found,” I said. “That’s not nothing.”
Whitlock pushed off the filing cabinet, studying the bone again. “How sure are we that it’s a human bone?”
“We’ll let the lab confirm,” Foley said. “But it looks like part of a spine to me. Let’s get Silas on the phone, see if he’s free.”
About thirty minutes later, Silas entered the office dressed in khaki pants, a long-sleeved button-up shirt with surfboards all over it, and clogs. He smoothed a hand down the side of his hair and smiled at me. “You rang?”
“Has anyone told you about the cabin in the woods not far from where Audrey was found?” I asked.
“They have.”
“I found what I believe to be a piece of a human bone when I was there today.”
Foley grabbed the evidence bag and handed it over, and Silas took a look.
“Is there any way for you to tell if it’s human, and if so, how long it may have been in the ground?” I asked.
“Have you shown it to Simone? She used to be a forensic anthropologist, right?”
I nodded. “She’s on vacation. I don’t want to bother her.”
“Well, let’s see here … We’ll analyze it, focusing on its condition and chemical makeup. I’ll want to see where you found it, so I can assess the soil conditions in the area.”
“Is there anything you can tell me as far as initial observations?”
“Bones go through different decomposition stages. Fresh, crunchy, dry, smooth, ripple, and flake, to name a few. This helps establish time of death, but it’s not exact. Did you find anything else around it?”
“We dug around for a while, but no, nothing. Do you think it’s real, a human bone?”
“I do, but it doesn’t mean I’m right. I won’t know more until I run a few tests.”
“The sooner, the better,” Foley said. “In the meantime, we need to get back out to the cabin and see what else we can find.”