The Buried (The Apostles) (5 page)

“Not likely,” Grace said, even though she would prefer her crew had discovered a family’s burial plot, a place where the dead rested peacefully amid flowers, shade trees, and prayers of the living. “Lamar Giroux lived here for more than sixty years. No wife, no kids.”

“But we did find this.” Another forensic tech held up what looked like a small black pebble. “Bullet slug. Discovered it lodged in the back of the skull.”

Lieutenant Lang raised her weary face to the sky and let out a tired laugh. “You’re doing wonders for my job security, Grace. Got any other buried bodies I need to know about?”

Grace was about to laugh—because with all she’d been slammed with in the past twenty-four hours, she needed to laugh—when she sucked in a gasp. “The bones.”

With a tight knot in her stomach, she led the lieutenant from the construction site, past the black gum and myrtles, and to her shack, the one with the sagging front porch and a dented metal garbage can. She lifted the lid with one hand and pointed to Allegheny Blue with the other. “He’s been digging them up and dragging them home for months now.”

The lieutenant took a step back. “What kind of place is this?”

This was the land coveted by developers and half the town, the earth she’d paid for with every dollar she could scrape together, the place where she wanted to put down roots. Her home.

“You should probably head into town for a few days,” Lieutenant Lang said. “Until we find out what’s going on here.”

Were there other human skeletons on the property, literally under her feet? Did any of this have to do with Lia Grant? The idea shook her to the bone. The brutal reality was Grace had nowhere to go. Her parents and grandparents were long gone, and she had no brothers or sisters. She had colleagues at work and tennis partners at the club, but not the kind she could phone and ask to crash in their spare bedrooms. She spent most nights with case files and her computer, which led to limited romantic entanglements. And she had no money to rent a hotel room.

She settled the lid on the garbage can with barely a clank. “I’ll be fine, Lieutenant, right here.” For now she had no choice but to stay on her land amid the garden of bones.

As Hatch and Alex walked out of the sheriff’s station, the boy was quiet, but his gait, the set of his face, spoke volumes. Correction. Only three words.

Fuck you, world!

Hatch knew that hateful glare, the swagger, the attitude, and the words. Hell, he’d shouted them on a regular basis when he’d been Alex’s age, and his old man had answered with the back of his hand. A ghost of pain rammed his jaw.

But Hatch would never raise his hand to his child, any child. He had other resources. “You want to stop and get some lunch before we go to the cemetery.”

Alex kicked at an empty soda can that went flying across the parking lot, nearly missing a small blue Ford pulling into a space near the front door. “I want you to go to hell.”

Hatch jammed his hand into his pocket and took out the keys to the SUV he’d sweet-talked out of the front desk clerk. Welcome to a whole new generation of father-son dysfunction. “Fine, we’ll meet with Black Jack and—”

A woman in matched pearls the color of frosted ocean swells stepped out of the blue car, and Hatch forgot what he was going to say. Hell, he forgot to breathe. The edges of the world blurred and dimmed. His heart slammed his chest, rattling his ribs.

He opened his mouth. No words, except for the tiny voice in the back of his head.

Back away from the pearls, and no one gets hurt.

He wanted to laugh. He should have laughed, but he couldn’t. His throat was too dry, too tight. The woman tugged at the pearls, as if she, too, couldn’t breathe. At last she cleared her throat and managed to say on a breathy rush, “Theodore.”

The boy at his side asked, “Who the hell is Theodore?”

The blonde didn’t move. Hatch didn’t breathe.

Alex stabbed his elbow into Hatch’s gut. “And who the hell’s the hot chick in pearls?”

Hatch focused on the jab, on the pain, on the distraction. After removing Alex’s elbow from his ribcage, he winked at Grace Courtemanche. “I’m Theodore, and this is Grace, my wife.”

E
x-wife.” The single word rushed over Grace’s lips as she steadied herself against the side of her car. She hadn’t seen Theodore “Hatch” Hatcher for more than ten years, not since the day he’d sailed out of Apalachicola Bay with the wind in his hair and her broken heart in his hand.

Hatch continued to stare at her with eyes the color of a steamy July sky. But then, Hatch
was
summer. Lazy days and lustful nights. Sun and sand. And heat. A heat so intense, even with a decade’s distance, warmth crept along her cheeks, rushed down her neck, and pooled in her belly in a bubbly geyser.

Hatch’s dimples deepened. God, she’d forgotten how easy it was to get lost in the depth of those creases, for a man like Hatch knew how to wear—and work—a smile.

She straightened the pearls at her neck.

“Yep, Alex, the lovely prosecutor is correct as usual. Tell me, Grace, do you ever get tired of being right?” He lowered his voice, his words pouring over her like honey, sweet and wild and golden.

For a moment she forgot everything and simply listened to his words, the words of a charmer. Grace tried to go to the calm, cool place in her head, but her heart slammed triple time, beating up a heat that left her dizzy. From the moment they met on St. George Island the summer after she graduated law school, Hatch Hatcher had left her off balance. She’d spent the summer teaching tennis at an exclusive children’s camp, and he’d taught sailing. That hot, whirlwind summer led to a disastrously short marriage. It took them all of ten weeks to learn the universal truth: Mind-blowing sex does not a marriage make.

She’d come a long way since then. She was older now, stronger and harder. She straightened her pearls, centering the clasp at the back of her neck.

“What are you doing here?”

Hatch gave her a breezy shrug. “Just taking care of a little crisis situation.”

The boy standing next to him, the one he called Alex and who was Hatch’s spitting image, said something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like
asshole
.

Hatch’s jaw flinched. The boy’s nostrils flared.

“I see you ended up with the Bureau,” she said to break the tension.

“Keeping tabs on me, Princess?” He waggled his eyebrows, the wicked grin back.

Hatch and his stupid nicknames. “It’s hard not to. One of the country’s premiere hostage negotiators receives a good deal of media attention.” When she’d known him, he’d been a sun-soaked sailor without a paycheck or a plan, and she’d been shocked when she first heard he was working for Parker Lord’s elite team of Apostles. “I saw the talk-down in Atlanta last month of the high school boy with the bomb. It was all over the news. Good for you.”

“Good for the twenty kids in that boy’s science classroom.” Hatch rested his backside against her car, crossing his legs at the ankles.

To any bystander, he was just a guy kickin’ back and catching up with an old flame. But this man was an Apostle. He was one of the best crisis negotiators in the world. And she damn well knew every movement he made and every word he uttered served a purpose. She crossed her arms over her chest.

“And you?” Hatch said. “I hear you’re working as an assistant state attorney and destroying bad guys with your lovely little hands.”

“I’ve had a few successes.”

“A few?” He laughed, but there was an edge to it. The edge surprised her. The old Hatch had been smooth, like the mirrored glass of a windless ocean. “You got what you always wanted, Princess, success so grand, so high no one can touch you. I bet your daddy’s right proud.”

Grace’s back straightened. Hatch knew where to land a punch. “My daddy’s dead.”

Hatch’s head dipped in a slow nod, and he remained conspicuously silent. He offered the respect the dead deserved but no condolences. No surprise there. Her daddy had despised Hatch. According to her father, Hatch was too light-hearted, lazy, and lethal to her future. Ultimately her father had been right. Marrying Theodore Hatcher had been a gargantuan mistake that had almost lost her not only her father, but her career.

“From what I’ve heard, you’re on top of the world.” Hatch uncrossed his arms and raised his palms to the sky. “And someday I bet you’ll
own
it.”

“And you’ll simply
drift
through it.”

The air grew still, and the afternoon clamor of the swamp silenced. It was like the heavy, pressurized seconds before a summer storm, before the swollen clouds and electric sky clashed in a thundering display of power.

He was the first to break. His mega-watt smile lit up his face, and he motioned to the building behind them. “And what brings you to the sheriff’s office? Are you here for business or”—his dimples sharpened like tiny scythes—“pleasure?”

“Business.” The short, tense word catapulted her to the present. She shouldn’t be wasting precious time talking to Hatch. She’d spent the day in the swamp searching for Lia Grant, and with each passing hour, the girl’s voice grew fainter.

It’s cold. And dark. I can’t breathe.

Hatch uncrossed his ankles and took a step toward her. She backpedaled. He’d always been so intuitive. He knew how to read people, especially her. This skill, coupled with his gift of words, gave him the power to unnerve her like few ever could.

She nodded at Hatch then the boy. “You’ll need to excuse me.”

“Of course. I’ll leave you to your
business
.” A light flecked in his eyes, like little whitecaps in a sea of blue. “But before you go, I have something for you.”

Hatch fanned his fingers, reached behind her ear, and pulled out a small sprig with long, waxy leaves and tiny white flowers.

A gasp escaped the O of her lips.

“The sweetest flower of all.” Hatch placed the small cluster of tupelo flowers on the hood of her car. “As always, Princess, seeing you has been an exquisite pleasure.”

With those words, Hatch and the boy climbed in an SUV and disappeared. And so did her breath. With him out of sight, she leaned against her car, thankful for her temperamental Ford. How like Hatch. Waltz in. Send her world spinning. Waltz out.

She shook off the dizziness.

She had no time for dancing.

Lia Grant had been missing almost twenty-four hours, and finally, they’d gotten a break. One of the deputies had found a witness who saw Lia Grant last night in the hospital parking lot.

Kentucky State Police Detective Tucker Holt heard bells, and not just any bells—giant church bells clanging right behind his eyes.

He grabbed the pillow and crammed it over his head, but the damn clanging wouldn’t stop. His right hand snaked out, groping along the nightstand until he found his cell phone. He sent the call to voicemail and sunk deeper into the mattress, hoping he still had enough Wild Turkey left in him to burrow deeper into oblivion.

The giant bells clanged again.

He snatched the phone, ready to throw the thing across the room, when he saw the number. Damn. “Holt,” he said around a tongue that was two sizes too big.

“Hey, Tuck,” his boss, Henderson Rhodes, said. “We need you at Collier’s Holler. Got a double.”

Not only was his tongue too big, it was wearing a woolen sock that scratched the roof of his mouth. “A double?”

“Collier’s bird dog found two bodies in the holler this evening.”

Two bodies? He was too hung over to take on two bodies. Hell, he was too hung over to take to his own two feet. “Call Wilkinson.”

“He’s on vacation. Alaskan cruise with the missus.”

“Greggs.”

Henderson cleared his throat. “Tuck, I’m going to make this as clear as possible, because you need clarity in the form of a slap upside that head of yours. Get your nose out of the bottle and back into your work. You lost your house, your wife, and your kids. One more fucked-up case, and you’ll lose your job. See you in the holler.”

Tucker jammed his thumb against the side of the phone and the line went dead. For a moment he wished he could flick a similar switch on the side of his head. Tucker was a screwup and a drunk. The two were intertwined. He drank, he screwed up. He screwed up, he drank. He threw the phone on the nightstand where it slammed into a photo frame that toppled over and crashed to the floor. Dragging himself to the edge of the bed, he winced at the splintered glass spidering across Hannah’s chubby cheeks and Jackson’s toothless grin.

“Can you fix it, Daddy?” Hannah would have asked.

“Daddy can fix anything,” Jackson would have said with the unwavering conviction of a six-year-old who hadn’t yet learned how fucked up the world really was.

He picked up the photo, staring at the faces of his kids who, no matter how bad he screwed up, thought he could fix the world. Setting the photo on the nightstand, he dragged his hand across his face. Henderson was wrong. He hadn’t lost his kids. Mara, his soon-to-be ex, had filed for full custody, but she hadn’t won. Not yet.

With a groan, he dragged his ass out of bed, the bells clanging with every step he took toward an ice-cold shower.

Thirty minutes later the bells still clanged as he climbed out of his police cruiser, the one marked Detective Unit. He slipped on his aviator glasses, but they did little to block out the sharp lances of sun needling his pickled skull. An officer led him through the thick woodlands toward a ravine.

“Collier’s dogs spotted up on ’em an hour ago,” the patrol officer said. “Older couple, man and a woman, dressed in hiking gear. By the looks of the bodies, they’ve been here a few days.”

“Any reports of missing tourists?” Tucker asked as he ducked under the crime scene tape.

“Nope, and no locals MIA, either.”

Tucker grabbed a huckleberry branch and lowered himself into the holler. Already he could smell the obscene sweetness. He swatted a cloud of no-see-ums and picked his way through the steamy, tangled brush, hoping like hell this would be a simple tag and bag.

This time of year they got plenty of day hikers and bird watchers in the northern Kentucky woodlands. Beautiful country. Beautiful place to raise a family. He drew up before the first set of flags. Beautiful place to die.

Pushing aside a thistle bush, he spotted two legs with springy gray hair sticking out from khaki hiking shorts. The bloating body wore cross trainers and a fanny pack. He swatted at another branch, and a cloud of flies swarmed from the upper body. He swallowed a drunken chunkiness as he studied what was left of the old man’s face, bone and cartilage bleached and dried by the sun. A grainy white powder clung to a few remaining strips of flesh hanging from the temples and neck. Likewise, the white, grainy powder had eaten away the flesh on the fingertips.

“The woman’s over there.” The officer pointed past a downed log where Tucker could make out a single white tennis shoe and veiny calf. The bells rang louder as he climbed over rocks and brambles to the second body. As on the male, the white powder had eaten away the female’s face and hands.

He ground the palm of his hand into the center of his forehead in an attempt to stop the bells. No go. With the “Hallelujah Chorus” clanging in his head, he radioed the officer at the top of the holler. “Call in the crime scene boys.”