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I walked over to the spot where the medical examiner’s investigator and a crime-scene tech were carefully uncovering the graves that had been identified. The investigator from the medical examiner’s office was around fifty and had a big ruddy nose and a belly straining against a short-sleeved button-down shirt. He wore a New England Patriots clip-on tie. Anytime I saw someone in a tie like that I knew it meant that he was loosely following a dress code from his office. I assumed he was wearing the tie as some sort of protest.
The investigator looked at me and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Mike Bennett. I’m working with Sandy Coles.”
“You the NYPD guy?”
I nodded.
He stuck out his hand. “Bob Carbone. I retired from the Boston PD. I’ll save you the effort. Yes, I know what I’m doing. No, I don’t need any help. And yes, I do think Boston is a much better city than New York.”
He immediately turned and focused on the graves once again.
I either liked this guy immensely or thought he was a dick. I wasn’t sure which.
After more than an hour, the two bodies at the markers had been uncovered. Another grave had been found not far from them in the woods. We had stumbled into something serious.
Sandy, Bob Carbone, and I met at the back of Sandy’s car, where a plain blue portable canopy had been set up.
Carbone’s accent was so thick it was distracting as he said, “We got two adult males from the first graves. Pretty good deterioration because they were just in open soil, but we should be able to identify them.”
Sandy said, “How long have they been there?”
He shrugged. “Maybe two years.” He turned and pointed in the direction of the third grave. “That one is a female around twenty years old. She hasn’t been there as long as the others. Maybe six months to a year.”
I said, “Any idea how they died?”
“No obvious trauma, but that doesn’t mean much. We’ll have to get the medical examiner’s full report. An autopsy should tell us a lot.”
The tubby former Boston cop was starting to explain that he wanted to excavate the bodies completely and transport them when I heard someone shout from the far end of the clearing.
All three of us started to trot that way. The uniformed K-9 officer was trying to pull his golden retriever away from something. Two of the crime-scene techs were standing next to him.
As we got closer, I saw that they were looking at something on the ground. My stomach tightened up as I realized they had found two more graves. These were new. Even I could tell that. The dog had become so excited that he had uncovered the end of one of them.
I could clearly see the exposed feet sticking up out of the dirt and pine needles. One foot had a dirty white sock over it. The other was wearing a bright green Nike athletic shoe.
It was Tricia Green. Shit.
Chapter 63
Sandy and I raced back to the Ghost House. Everything Sadie had told us was true. Now we needed to see if she could help us put the pieces together and make a case against Dell Streeter.
As soon as I stepped in the front door I found Sadie sitting on the floor with Bridget, working on some sort of epic arts-and-crafts project involving pinecones, an old sheet, and a lot of glue.
“What are you girls up to?”
Bridget looked up at me with the kind of smile she only had when satisfying her addiction to arts and crafts. “I’m showing Sadie how we can make portraits of animals using just pinecones and pine needles.”
Sadie looked up and smiled. She didn’t say a word, but I could tell she was enjoying it. She had never experienced a family life like this before. Just the thought of it made me a little sad.
It took a few minutes to get Sadie away from the other kids. We ended up in the downstairs bedroom, where Sandy and I sat on mismatched chairs while Sadie faced us from the edge of the bed. She didn’t seem nervous at all.
This was the sort of thing you approached slowly. You couldn’t do a straight interview. We intended to just let Sadie unwind once we started talking. We would let her tell things at her own pace.
Before we even told Sadie what we’d found in the woods, Sandy started asking her questions about growing up. Not just to put her at ease but also to understand her thought process. This sort of thing was vital to cops if they wanted to make a case that would go to a jury.
Sadie told us a little about her childhood. She said, “I remember when my mom worked at the Target in Bangor. We had fun together. Then she hurt her back, and the doctor gave her pills. Then she started using. She called it mud or sometimes smack. But I knew what it really was. She used to say it was like taking a vacation.
