might be ninety percent sure it was human, but he was praying for the other ten percent. Despite what he’d told Kat, he had an uneasy feeling about this. No human bones had turned up in Fern Bluff since he signed on as police chief. Now, assuming one had, it was at the nursery owned by Hugh Riley.
Who so happened to be the only person who had gone missing locally in Grant’s tenure.
He never had believed in coincidences.
CHAPTER TWO
“OH, DEFINITELY HUMAN.” Sitting behind her desk, Dr. Arlene Erdahl turned the single bone over in her hand. “Likely male, because not many women have hands the size this suggests.” She held out her own as a comparison.
Grant nodded. He’d guessed as much.
Dr. Erdahl was a brisk woman with a stocky build and close-cropped graying hair. Grant put her at about fifty. Murder victims went to the county coroner, not the pathologist at the hospital in Fern Bluff, but she was always willing to answer questions when he called or stopped by. Her husband was an E.R. doc, an interesting pairing. One fought to keep people alive, the other explored them once they were dead.
She took a magnifying glass from a drawer and scrutinized the bone. “No sign of trauma. If this finger was cut off, it happened below the knuckle. Age…? Not juvenile, no obvious osteoarthritis… Twenties to possibly mid-forties, tops. More likely this came from an individual in his twenties or thirties.”
He didn’t want to push his luck, but asked, “I don’t suppose you can tell which finger it is?”
She set down the magnifying glass with a decisive movement and handed the bone to him. “Gut feeling, not the pinkie. Likely the second or third digit.”
“Ah…middle fingers?”
“No,” she said patiently. “Your first digit is your thumb. Index finger is second.”
“Oh.” Grant contemplated his own hand. So. Some one had lost either the finger he pointed with, or the one he used to give people the bird.
Unless, of course, that person was dead, and this bone had become separated only after death.
“Given the lack of tissue, whoever this came from—” she nodded at it “—either lost the finger at least a couple of years ago, or has been dead that long. But I’ll tell you what. That bone hasn’t been in a compost pile for two years.”
Jolted, he asked, “What makes you say that?”
“Look at it. The most interesting thing about it is the lack of any stains or discoloration. It’s more likely to have been kept in a drawer than buried unprotected in the ground.”
Grant stared at the single finger bone lying in his hand. He should have noticed how pure the ivory color was. “What the hell…?” he muttered.
“I’ve heard of instances where someone’s cut a finger off accidentally and kept it.”
“Yeah, so have I. But then how did it end up in the compost at the nursery?”
“A joke?”
His gut tightened. Remembering the shocked expression on Kat Riley’s face and the tremble in her voice, he said grimly, “If it’s a joke, it’s a nasty one.”
He thought about that as he walked to his car. A joke—if you could call it that—meant the bone had been planted there for her to find. But from what she’d said, it hadn’t been lying on top of the compost in her wheelbarrow, or on the worktable. In theory, she could have dumped it in a plant pot without ever spotting it. Which would have meant a nice surprise for someone else.
An innocent explanation would violate his rule regarding coincidences, but shit did happen, right?
He took the bone to Wallinger’s the way he’d planned. It got in that damn compost somehow, and Grant would be a lot happier to find that had happened here rather than at the nursery.
Fred Wallinger himself came out of the office. A backhoe was turning one steaming pile of compost behind them, while a couple of guys were feeding yard debris into a shredder that crunched up its meal, choked occasionally, and spewed digested bits in a plume.
They had to raise their voices to be heard over the din. A middle-aged, bulky man wearing quilted coveralls over a red buffalo plaid wool shirt, Wallinger shook his head at Grant’s question about stray fingers. “Haven’t heard of any such thing in a long time.” He grunted. “Well, ’cept over at Northland. Guy lost four fingers to a saw. Maybe six months back? Didn’t you hear at the time? You could ask over there. Seems they might have reattached ’em, though. Doubt they lost any.”
The sawmill, the only one left in Fern Bluff despite the town’s logging past, was less than a quarter of a mile down the road.
A logging truck rumbled past as Grant parked and got out, breathing in the tangy smell of sawdust. The piles of logs went on and on and on, a giant’s version of pick-up sticks.
He stepped into the office and found the receptionist, a busty blonde, happy to talk to him. She abandoned her headphones and computer and leaned against the short counter, arms crossed on it.
“Oh, that was Wally Camp.” Her eyes widened in remembered distress. “It was awful! I guess he just got distracted, and that saw sliced clean through. He’s on disability right now.” She lowered her voice. “From what I hear, he’s not going to be able to come back.”
“Were they able to reattach his fingers?”
“Only two of them.” She wrinkled her nose. “The other two were practically ground up, is what I heard.” Her tone brightened. “But at least he didn’t cut off his thumb, too.”
“Do you have an address for him?”
She did, and shared it.
Wally lived a good fifteen minutes outside of town, deeper in the Cascade foothills. The two-lane, yellow-striped road wound along the river by new developments of outsize, suburban houses that looked misplaced in this rural setting even if they did sit on five-acre lots, dairy farms held on to by stubborn old-timers and second-growth forest. Not far above, snow clung to the trees, defying the promises of spring at the nursery.
He found the address scrawled in white paint on the side of a dented mailbox and turned onto a rutted dirt driveway that led to a run-down, single-wide mobile home and rusting metal shop or garage. A couple of enormous mixed-breed dogs came howling from a hole beneath the porch to circle his car, froth splattering the window and claws scratching the paint job as he slowed.
Since their tails wagged furiously as they waited for him to get out, Grant took a chance and opened the door. Apparently he was the high point of their day. He petted, told them they were good dogs, and they happily bounded ahead of him across the frozen yard to the trailer.
He’d have thought the pandemonium would bring someone out, but when he knocked a voice yelled over the din of a television, “Leave it on the porch!”
“Mr. Camp?” He knocked again.
After a long pause, the door opened. Grant’s first thought was to wonder why this kid of Wally Camp’s
