Down to the Bone (Digging Up Bones #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

“Isaw him back there first,” Madison Smith, seventeen years old and babysitting in star-shaped acne stickers and SpongeBob pajamas, said as she pointed down the yard.

The sweep of her finger, nail polish bright blue and chipped, took in the unruly undergrowth that poked through and over the chain-link fence that marked the property line of the neat ranch-style home on Buckthorn Road.

“I thought maybe he’d lost his dog or cat or something? You know?”

Nerves made her seem younger than her years as she looked at Cloister for backup on her statement with an earnest, uneasy expression.

Madison was too distracted being charmed by Bourneville to answer for a moment.

She went “um” and then sat down on the back step, bare feet crossed over each other protectively, so she could pay proper attention to Bon’s ears as she talked.

She traced the furry outer edges up to the point and then down the other side.

“So I watched him for a while, and he just stood there,” she said. “For ages. Then I realized he was talking to someone.”

The two deputies who’d caught the call glanced at each other.

Cloister hadn’t worked with either of them before, but he at least knew Boyd.

Even if the rookie was so new that she still had a pleat pressed into her buff-colored uniform trousers.

He didn’t think he’d ever met Gardner before, even from before he was stationed in Plenty.

Things had changed while he’d been away. It had only been four weeks—the longest he’d ever been off work, admittedly, still not that long—but apparently that was enough.

Boyd pulled her notebook out of her belt and flicked it open.

“There were two men?” she asked as she licked the nib of her pencil and tapped it against the page. “You said ‘one’ on the call.”

Madison’s fingers stopped moving on Bourneville’s ears as she tried to redirect her train of thought to follow Boyd’s question. She looked up as she tried to recall.

“Umm,” she mumbled. “I guess…maybe? I mean, I didn’t see anyone else. There could have been someone. Do you think there was someone?”

Boyd scribbled something down. “Well, if he was talking to someone, then—”

“We don’t know,” Cloister interrupted. “If you didn’t see anyone, that’s all that matters.”

Madison looked back at him. “There could have been someone crouched next to him?”

It was still a question. Give her ten minutes and she’d have a better description of the “maybe” second prowler than she did the first. Cloister cleared his throat to get her attention on him so he could get her focused on what he needed.

“What happened next?” he asked as he dropped to his haunches so he didn’t loom over her.

Much. There were times when being six-three and having a face that looked like it was spoiling for a fight was an advantage.

Interviewing a spooked five-foot-nothing seventeen-year-old wasn’t one of them.

“Did the man stay at the fence? Or did he move?”

Boyd gave him an annoyed look as she scribbled on her page.

Cloister ignored her. The only rookies he dealt with were the trainee K-9s; everyone was happier that way.

While he waited for an answer, he reached up to rub the back of his neck where the collar rubbed.

His shirts had gotten bundled in with Javi’s dry cleaning by “mistake,” which he wasn’t entirely sure he believed, and now everything was starched to an inch of its life in a way he wasn’t used to.

“Oh no. He didn’t stay there,” Madison said.

She sounded more confident as she went on.

“I wouldn’t have called you if that was it.

He could have just been on Bluetooth, right?

No, I watched him, and he talked to himself, and then he climbed the fence.

And I know this sounds stupid, but it was really creepy.

He got down on the ground and crawled into the playhouse. ”

She pointed again. This time at the plastic princess fort that was staked out in the garden between the trampoline and the swing set.

They all looked at it. Madison kept her hand up for a second and then went back to petting Bourneville.

“That’s when I freaked out,” she said. “I called Mr. and Mrs. Giles first. They said to get in touch if anything happened, because there’s been a bunch of robberies in the area and they’ve only just moved here, but when I called, they didn’t answer.

I tried again, and that’s when I heard him open the back door. ”

“I would have shit myself,” Cloister said matter-of-factly.

Gardner lifted his hand to casually hide his smirk. Boyd couldn’t have boggled at him more if he had.

Madison gawped at him for a moment, mouth slack with surprise, and then gave an inelegant snort of laughter. “Chat, me too!” she said through the nervy giggle. “I swear the back door was locked. It was. I’d been out earlier for some…fresh air….”

The verbal edit couldn’t have telegraphed the lie more.

Cloister watched as Madison took one hand off Bourneville’s head to check something vape-shaped was securely tucked into the pocket of her pyjamas.

That wasn’t his problem. It was weed, he could smell that, but this was Plenty.

If it wasn’t fentanyl or meth, he left it to parents to bust their kids.

“But he still got it open,” Madison went on quickly. “That’s when I screamed that if he didn’t leave, I’d call the cops, and he did, but I called you anyhow.”

Gardner leaned down and patted Madison’s shoulder reassuringly with a freckled hand.

“That was the right thing to do,” he said. “Why don’t you go inside with Boyd and call your parents. How does that sound?”

Madison hesitated, her hands clenched in Bourneville’s ruff, fingers buried in the dense black fur.

“Am I in trouble?” she asked.

“Not at all,” Gardner said. His smile crinkled the skin around his eyes into a spray of sun-worked squint lines that looked genuine. “Deputy Witte and his pretty dog just need to get to work. Boyd.”

If Boyd resented being lumbered with babysitting duty, she didn’t show it as she offered Madison a hand to pull her back to her feet. They disappeared back inside, and Gardner looked at Cloister.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Did she really see someone?”

Cloister stood up and dusted his hands off absently. “You have any reason to doubt her?” he asked.

That got him a world-weary huff of exasperation.

“A few,” Gardner said. He paused, checked over his shoulder, and lowered his voice as he stepped off the porch. “The last month or so, we’ve had a dozen unfounded calls to this side of town. Suspicious vehicles, prowlers, a woman over on Chamise who thinks someone is living in her walls.”

“Did you check?” Cloister asked. He patted his leg to call Bourneville back to heel. She sighed, stood up, and gave herself a quick shake to get back into game mode before she trotted over. A cold nose bumped his fingers as she leaned against his leg.

Gardner snorted. “I checked,” he said. “There wasn’t.

Look, the reason me and Boyd got here so quickly is because there was a wellness check a few streets over.

Twenty-two Cuyamaca Way. Some woman was concerned about her home-alone adult son not answering the phone or emails.

We gave the lesbians who live there a real scare. They were fine, by the way.”

“That’s good,” Cloister said mildly as he unclipped the long line from his belt and shook it out.

Gardner snorted. “Yeah, I get it,” he said. “You’re the hotshot that got the Crime Scene Killer and the Hippy High Kidnapper, right?”

The statement made Cloister itch under his skin.

It wasn’t the fact that he didn’t like the spotlight, or the resentful relish in how Gardner dropped the names.

It was…what made those two cases special?

A lot of people went missing in Plenty. It was the perfect melting pot of wealthy but transient upper classes and an underemployed, rural underclass for people to just…

vanish. Cloister had found some of them.

Not enough, but he could list them if anyone asked.

No one ever did. They were just gone…and sad. No one wanted to think about how easy that was. It was the killers who were the draw, at least as long as someone could come up with a headline-ready moniker for them.

The Crime Scene Killer—embarrassed as whoever coined the nickname should be—got a podcast. Cloister’s brother, no matter how blond, six, or his mom’s little cowboy he’d been, did not.

But that wasn’t the sort of thing people wanted to hear from Cloister. He was too big, blond, and broken-nosed to come out with stuff like that.

“The dog does most of the work,” he deadpanned instead as he bent over to snap the clasp onto the metal loop in the harness.

Gardner just snorted. “Right,” he said.

The distinct click of metal catching on metal made Bourneville quiver with excitement under his hand. Her weight shifted, planted on her front feet, and her ears flicked back as she waited for the “go” word.

It was her first shift back in the traces, and she was eager to get back to work. Cloister had worked with her while they were benched—reinforced her training, took her on SAR gigs out in the desert—but it wasn’t the same.

Bourneville was a dog with a job. She knew that, and she was happiest when she could get her teeth into it.

Literally.

“I’m just saying,” Gardner persisted as he hooked his thumbs into his belt.

“It’s like they say, look for horses, not zebras.

We don’t have a crime wave on our hands out here, just some hoax calls, a bunch of middle-class commuters clutching their pearls over a coyote, and a kid who spooked herself watching horror movies in the dark. ”

Cloister straightened up and scratched his jaw with his thumb. He’d missed a bit when he’d shaved before shift; he could feel the scrape of it against his pad.