and filling it with compost and peat moss. Kat herself vanished long before he handed over his debit card and winced at the total, then drove away with bags of both peat moss and compost in his trunk and the shrub on the floor next to him, its sweet smell damn near sickening in the confines of his car.
No wonder business was booming if all the customers were as easy to manipulate as he’d been.
Putting the car into gear, Grant shook his head at his own idiocy. He didn’t want to plant anything, but now he’d spent so much money, he had to take care of the shrub as though it were a baby. Planting it would have to wait until Sunday, though. If it could sit safely in a plastic pot at the nursery, it could sit a few more days at his house.
So…home to unload, shower and put on a clean uniform and at least one bandage, then up to the community hospital to find Dr. Arlene Erdahl, the pathologist, and get answers about the bone in his pocket.
He 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
