had a knot in my stomach and I was beginning to feel sick. The war had been put behind me. Jack and I had used our faith to heal us from the things that happened there, including the loss of our beloved friend, Ted. I hated it, but what Irini was saying was right. What she wasn’t saying was that I owed this to Ted because of his friendship to me and for bringing me to Jack. I had a great marriage for all those years, and Irini had lived alone, raising their children and having no closure over the death of the only man she had ever loved. I sighed. My chest felt tight.
“They have the skull, all of it?”
“Yes,” she said. “All of that part of the bones are in good shape. The rest they say is bad, but you don’t need the rest to make the face.”
“Okay, give me the name of the person in charge so I can call and set this up.”
There was a momentary silence on the other end of the phone. I heard the rustling of some paper, and then, choking back tears, Irini read the name and phone number to me of the man at CILHI who was in charge of “Ted’s case.”
She could barely speak when we hung up, but her last words to me were, “May our Savior bless you and guide your hands.”
I was noodling around in the garage with an old carburetor, trying to work through my angst, when I heard a vehicle pull to the curb and stop in a hurry. When Lieutenant Leonie Driskill drove her official vehicle, a rather cumbersome van loaded with equipment, she drove like the law enforcement officer that she was. When Leo got behind the wheel of her Jeep, tires would screech and squeal.
She bailed out of the Jeep with her sandy hair swinging in a ponytail down her back. She had just gotten off work. She was still wearing navy trousers and a white shirt, and her badge and gun were clipped to her belt. She was about five-five and she walked with a slight limp from her last fire battle in active combat. It had almost cost her her right leg. The doctors had said she probably wouldn’t walk and definitely wouldn’t be able to do anything more physical than that. No one ever told Leo Driskill she couldn’t do something without her trying that much harder. She had rehabbed her way back to health and extreme fitness. She lifted weights and ran and water-skied, and proved the doctors wrong.
Her limp gave her just a little bounce when she walked fast, and today there appeared to be an extra spring in her step besides the limp.
“What are you working on out here, Toni?”
“Just a carburetor overhaul on my old Jeep.” I wiped some of the grease off my hands with a rag and headed for the Go-Jo canister. I smeared Go-Jo all over my hands, loosening all the grease, and then wiped my hands clean with a dry rag.
Leo sauntered over to the workbench and started to inspect the carburetor.
“Touch that and you’ll be sorry.”
“I-eeee…wasn’t…” Her voice trailed off as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
“I just spent half an hour getting all those needles lined up just right so I could get that thing back together,” I told her. “You knock it over or mess it up and your name is mud.”
I turned around to see that Leo was leaning over the workbench with her hands behind her back, eyeing the carburetor closely. She looked like a heron perched on a log.
“You know, Toni, most people take stuff like this to a mechanic.”
“Yeah well, four things are true, kid. Most people don’t have a mechanic for a dad. Most people weren’t practically raised in a garage. Most people don’t know a thing about carburetors, and I’m not most people.”
“That’s the truth—the ‘you’re not most people’ part, anyway.”
“Are you here to harass me and disturb my auto-mechanican therapy session or do you have something important you’d like to impart?”
“Grump. You call me in the middle of my busy day and ask me to go look at a bunch of old bones dug up out of the river bottom, and when I come by to give you the benefit of my report, this is how I’m treated.”
I sighed. “Truce already. I can’t spar with you anymore today.”
“Hey, lighten up. I was kidding. What gives?”
“It’s just been a bad day. It has to do with old times in Vietnam. I’ll work it out. Distract me by giving me your brilliance on our Red Bud case.”
Leo nodded. “I’m afraid there’s no brilliance yet. There’s not much I can say because there’s not much to go on. But there were a few things that came to mind based on the apparent cause of death and the reburial.”
“Lay it on me.”
“Well, I looked at the photos of the burial site and I looked at the bones themselves and talked to Chris about the autopsy. I definitely tanked any idea that they were moved because someone thought they’d be discovered where they were. I think it’s significant that they were reburied in a shallow grave on the dam side of Red Bud. According to the photos, the bones were in a place where they would have washed away in the first floodgate release. The kayaker was the unknown quantity that foiled that plan.”
“Okay, so why do you think they were reburied and not just discarded—thrown into the river, for instance.”
“I think the fact that isn’t what happened is very significant. I think the deceased either meant something to the killer and he couldn’t do that, or maybe he felt too much guilt to do that, or maybe a little of both. I suspect he wanted to be rid of her, but he wanted nature to do the ultimate dirty work so he wouldn’t be responsible for it.”
“So, why dig her up and try to get rid of her after all this time?”
“That’s the twenty-five-thousand-dollar question. Something changed in the killer, or something else happened that caused him to dig her up and move her like that. He may have just wanted to be rid of the memory of it, or it could have been a combination of things that happened at once. When we figure that out, we’ll have all the answers.”
“What about the way she was killed? You said you thought she might have meant something to the killer, but it looks to me like he just executed her.”
“I think he did, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t mean something to him. In fact, he had more of a reason to kill her if she meant something to him. He may have even planned it out in his mind before.”
“Elaborate.”
“Maybe the killer believed she did something to him for which she deserved to be ‘executed’—and it’s possible that the deceased may not have even actually committed the offense for which she was killed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if the killer was paranoid, which is totally possible, and thought she did something to deserve being killed, then he probably thought about killing her for a while. It satisfied the paranoid feelings he had. In fact, it may all be in his mind anyway, and we may find in the end that this victim didn’t even do what the killer thought she did. This kind of killer would kill for some offense with or without any real proof, based solely on what he believed, because he convinced himself in his mind that it’s absolutely true, that someone is to blame, and he believed
