Threads of Suspicion(75)
Fifteen
Evie brushed her hair the next morning, a Wednesday, ignoring the tired face and eyes in need of makeup looking back at her in the mirror. She was relieved when her phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. “Yes, David,” she said absently, setting the brush aside.
“Evie, I just got a fascinating call from Sharon. There’s a body in Englewood, or more accurately, a skeleton.”
It took a moment to reorganize her thinking away from her own problems and Jenna’s disappearance. The missing PI. “Bones?”
“In a wall. A classic wall-up-the-problem crime scene. Want to come?”
Her mood brightened at the question and the total change of focus. “Sure. I can meet you in the lobby in ten minutes.”
“I’ll have the heater on max.”
“Thanks.”
Evie added another layer of socks before pulling on her boots. “God,” she whispered, “if you arranged this just for David, it’s so cool. I appreciate the distraction too.” She needed the break. She could put both Rob and Jenna on the shelf for a while.
She made sure a pair of gloves were in her coat pockets, picked up a new notebook, ignored the pad now resting upside down on the table, and headed out.
The directions Dispatch provided led to an older section of Englewood and a long, brick three-story building surrounded by a high chain-link fence. The multiple dumpsters, debris chutes, and scaffolding anchored to the roof on the north side all indicated the place was undergoing a much-needed renovation. A gathering of marked and unmarked cars at the south end of the building told them this was their target.
David pulled in beside the coroner’s vehicle, and Evie got out with him, turned up the collar of her coat. The press was already on-site, for she recognized the vans with logos and call letters. The officer holding the logbook for the scene wrote down their names and badge numbers at the door. “You’ll find the excitement on the second floor, south end,” he said, waving them toward a stairway.
Upstairs, it was easy to locate the crowd at the end of the hall, clustered around a small restroom, one marked with a W. The toilets in the four stalls and the wall with sinks remained, but construction workers had cut out a side wall and taken down the stall doors—with haste over neatness from the looks of it. They had more carefully cut out a six-by-six-foot section of the concealing drywall for better visibility. That piece, along with what looked like a hammered-out hole in it, was being examined by crime-scene technicians with bright handheld lights.
“Those are definitely skeletal remains,” David said dryly beside her, and Evie couldn’t help but smile.
The skeleton leaned to the right, held up by the collar of a leather jacket that seemed to be caught on a nail. The rest of the clothing had disintegrated for the most part, with some short strands of hair remaining around the skull. The bones were still mostly in place and visible because gravity had been stopped by something that appeared to be chunky gray clay.
“Is that cat litter?” David asked as they got closer and could see the detail of what had solidified into honeycombed chunks around the skeleton.
The technician worked something out from the wall at about the height of the skeleton’s pelvis, turned at the question, held out a handful of the gray matter. “About twenty bags of it is the working theory.” Other technicians were carefully removing more of it from either side of the remains, placing softball-sized lumps of the material in rows on a clean piece of canvas laid out on the floor.
Evie glanced around. The scene had been a busy one for at least a couple of hours, she thought. Cops were now mostly waiting for assignments, the newness of the discovery worn off, but still interested in watching the work while doing other business by phone or text. The detective in charge stood off to one side, supervising the process.
David walked over to make introductions, Evie following more slowly since it wasn’t her case.
“Captain Whistler,” David said, reading the man’s nametag, “I’m David Marshal with the Missing Persons Task Force. My partner, Evie Blackwell. You’re the one who called our boss, Sharon Noble?”
Whistler nodded. “They found a wallet with an expired driver’s license about where his back pocket would have been. It made sense you’d want to see the body in context”—the captain passed over an evidence bag—“seeing as how you’ve been trying to find this guy.”
David checked the license. “That would be my Saul Morris.” Obviously relieved, he offered the evidence bag to Evie, then looked again at the skeleton. “I’m going to guess he was dead before he went inside that wall.”