Buried: A Bone Secrets Novel Part 16

His attacker was old. The voice was scratchy, and the movements were of a weak man. Easily overpowering the attacker on the floor, Gerald rolled the old man onto his stomach and knelt on his back, yanking his head up by his hair.

"You the baker, you useless piece of s.h.i.t?" he hissed in the man's ear.

The man struggled underneath him, and he pulled harder on the hair, overextending the man's neck.

"You want me to break your neck? Is that what you want me to do? Because I can. I can do it so fast you'll never even know." Gerald punctuated his threats with more yanks, and the old man gasped for air. "My f.u.c.king head hurts! You old b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

He squinted in the dim light and spotted an electrical cord plugged into the wall. Stretching, he jerked it out, and a phone fell to the floor. He wrestled the old man's arms behind him and spun the cord around his hands. He grabbed the old man's head with both hands and slammed it into the floor. The baker went still.

He slid off the man's back and collapsed on the floor, gasping for air, trying to slow his heart rate.

Jesus Christ! He'd nearly been taken out by a senior citizen.

He'd been sloppy and overconfident. He was lucky he wasn't flat on the ground with a metal bar sticking out of his skull. Gerald spotted the bar across the room and rose on shaky legs to retrieve it. It was rough and heavy in his hands. Rebar.

Primitive.

He rubbed at his skull. But effective.

His foot kicked his gun. He put it back in his shoulder holster and eyed the prostrate body on the floor.

Dead? He'd smacked his head pretty hard.

Gerald squatted and held two fingers to the old man's neck. A weak pulse fluttered.

Good. Not dead. He needed some answers.

He stood up and blew out a breath. He was still seeing stars and desperately needed a drink of water. By the light of his cell phone, Gerald found a tap and a gla.s.s and drank deep. He filled the cup again and poured it over the old man's head.

Nothing.

He checked the pulse and barely yanked his fingers away from the snapping teeth of the old man.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it!" He gave the baker an angry kick in the ribs and was rewarded with the sound of a painful grunt. He hauled the old man up and thrust him into a chair. Finding some twine, he tied the man to the chair rungs and flipped on the single light bulb over the kitchen sink. Gerald slammed a chair directly in front of him and sat, staring the old man full in the face. The man shrank away in horror, averting his eyes.

"Diablo blanco," he whispered.

"Ah. I see you've heard of me." Gerald grinned. Apparently, Juan was closer to Chris than the townspeople knew. Gerald doubted Chris shared stories from the old days with many people. Gerald kept the memories to himself, visiting them late at night when he was alone. It'd been an addiction, that intoxicating rush of power to his brain back then. Nothing else had ever matched the high of those boys under his thumb.

Now, he was seductively close to having Chris again.

"You can guess why I'm here."

Old Juan was silent, his gaze on the floor. Blood oozed from a cut above his eye and from his nose.

"Where's my buddy Chris?"

Nausea crossed Juan's face. Gerald stood and grabbed him by the chin, forcing the man to look in his direction. "Look at me! Do I look like I'm f.u.c.king around? Where is he?"

Terror widened the old man's eyes, but he looked straight at Gerald.

Silence.

Gerald smiled. "Fine. We'll do it your way."

Mason had showered twice last night but swore he could still smell the ME's office stench clinging to his skin. He shifted restlessly in his office chair, checking his e-mail, hoping Dr. Peres had sent some reports. No dice. It was too early in the day to expect something. Heck. He'd just been there yesterday. He lifted his wrist to his nose and sniffed.

"Why in the h.e.l.l do you keep doing that?"

He looked up to find Ray glowering at him from across their desks. Their two desks were pushed together, divided only by their computer monitors and various other desk c.r.a.p. On his desk, the c.r.a.p was messy piles of files. On Ray's desk, the c.r.a.p was neatly stacked horizontal dividers with the files perfectly tucked inside. Mason kept forgetting to requisition some to clean up his desk.

"I keep smelling the medical examiner's office. I swear it's fused to me."

Ray sniffed the air. "I can't smell it."

"I can. I f.u.c.king showered twice last night. What is the deal with that place?"

"I hate going there." Ray shook his head.

"Don't we all. I don't know how they work there."

"My wife would kill me if I came home smelling like rotting death every day. She doesn't like the way I smell when I go to the practice range. And I think that's a good smell."

"Do you think they have showers available? And maybe a laundry for their regular clothes? I mean, I know they wear scrubs and have them laundered. But what about their own stuff?" Mason asked. "It's got to pick up the odor."

"Christ, I'd build a room in my garage for taking care of it. I wouldn't want that laundry getting washed with my kids' stuff." Ray tapped on his keyboard. "Hey, speaking of...just got an e-mail from the ME."

Mason refreshed his e-mail and opened the new message. He scanned it quickly. "Dental records have identified two of the others from the pit. Both with arrest records. Old arrest records."

Ray made a celebratory horn-like noise with his mouth. "We're getting closer."

Mason kept reading. One skeleton belonged to a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had two arrests for prost.i.tution in Portland back in the eighties. The other was a twenty-five-year-old male. One arrest for prost.i.tution. Same city, same decade.

"Our unsub is a perv," stated Ray.

"Already knew that."

"Looks like he swings both ways."

"Or we're looking for more than one guy," Mason countered.

"s.h.i.t. Why do you always complicate things?"

"I call it being thorough. Makes sense, though, handling all those kids? I would think that would take more than one person."

Ray sighed. "Give me five minutes alone with one of them."

"Amen, brother."

"Anything on those tattoos yet?" Ray scratched at his chin. "I like that lead a lot."

Mason shook his head. "My tattoo guy over at the gang unit was real interested. He couldn't tell me anything at the first look. Said he was going to have the symbols interpreted and then dig through the archives and run them by other big-city gang units."

"Think one of the symbols stands for child-killer or pervert?" Ray muttered.

Mason snorted. "I'll put my money on bed wetter."

"I'll settle for one being his name."

"That'll work, too. Doubt he'd let that be photographed."

"c.r.a.p." Ray's tone lost its teasing note, and Mason looked up sharply. Ray was focused on his monitor. "That Jules Thomas lead the senator gave you? The nutcase who threatened him?"

"Yes?"

"He's been dead for ten years."

Mason mulled that over. "Any mention of tattoos? Obviously, he wasn't the guy who attacked Jamie Jacobs the other day, but he could still be our guy in the Polaroids. Like I just said, we could be looking at more than one guy."

Ray shook his head. "I'll get someone to contact next-of-kin and ask about tattoos. All I have here is a date of death."

Mason mentally shifted Jules Thomas to the Unlikely but Not Eliminated column in his brain. "I still don't have any news back on Cecilia Brody's Korean patient. Jeong."

"Aw, f.u.c.k! What if those are Korean symbols on the wrists? Why the h.e.l.l didn't we think of that before? That would lend a h.e.l.l of a lot of weight to her lead!" Ray started digging through one of his files.

Mason blinked. What the h.e.l.l? He'd been asleep at the wheel. How had he missed something so obvious?

Ray pulled out the Polaroids, handing half to Mason. "Any other evidence we've missed that can indicate our guy is Asian? Outside of the marks on the wrists? I see so much of that sort of thing tattooed everywhere these days that I didn't even consider that the wearer could be Asian."

Mason stared at the photos while mentally running through other evidence from the underground bunker. Had they missed something huge?

The photos had discolored with age. The colors were faded, the whites yellowed. He studied them carefully, trying to ignore the pain of the children in the pictures. Mercifully, the children were dead. No longer suffering at the hands of the monster.

He remembered Jamie's words.

My brother's nightmares...

No doubt Chris Jacobs was still suffering. Suffering emotionally and mentally from this killer's hands. Mason and Ray had tried to locate Chris Jacobs. They'd hit dead ends. The man knew how to stay off the grid. Frankly, Mason was content to wait until Jamie contacted her brother. She'd convince him to come in for some questions. If not, Brody definitely would. Brody would tie Jacobs up and lash him to the roof of his Range Rover to get some answers on his brother's death.

Was Daniel Brody dead? Why hadn't his body been with the others?

In his gut, Mason believed the boy was dead. The odds were not in the child's favor.

Mason studied one photo and ground his teeth. Their killer's wrist and forearm with the tattoo was laid across the scrawny naked back of a young boy. The boy's face was not in the picture, so it could have been any of the boys. The boy's back was a mess of bruises, the colors deep purples, yellows, and browns. Small round red and pink marks indicated possible burns with a cigarette.

He tightened his grip on picture. Something was hovering just out of his subconscious, something important. Bruises, burns, colors...

He blinked and focused on the tattooed arm. Stark black and white. Even though the photo colors were discolored, the colors on the arm were distinct.

"Say, Ray..." He paused, searching for the words to describe what he was seeing. "Do any of your pictures show the unsub's arm against the skin of the kids?"

Ray grimaced. "Yeah. Several."

"Let me see them."

Ray pa.s.sed over a small stack. Mason scanned them, feeling a small victory start in his chest. "Look at the color of his arm compared to the kids' skin. I don't mean to sound racist, but that skin doesn't look very Asian to me. h.e.l.l, it doesn't look Caucasian to me, either. It's f.u.c.king whiter than snow. It's like see-through white."

Ray held out his hands for Mason's pictures.

"h.e.l.l, I'll use the term Dr. Peres used to correct me yesterday. I don't think this a.s.shole's ancestry falls anywhere near Asian."

Ray nodded, flipping through the pictures. "Even with the distortion of the colors because of the age of the pictures, he is consistently one very, very white motherf.u.c.ker."

Mason grinned. Ray rarely swore. When he did, it was an event.

"Jamie Jacobs stated in her report she thought the guy colored his hair and wore colored contacts-"

"-and she said he wore long pants and shirt sleeves on a hot day." Mason cut off Ray's sentence. "I thought he was just covering up tats, but what if he was covering up something more distinctive. Like baby-b.u.t.t, lily-white skin?"

"You're thinking he's an albino?" Ray asked. "People still have that?"

"I think so. It's not a freaking disease that we immunized for. You're born with it."

"I know that," grunted Ray. "I'm just saying you don't see much of it. Now all I can think of is that Tom Hanks movie with the sicko priest who was an albino."

Mason reached for his phone. "I'm gonna check with Jamie Jacobs. See if she thinks there's a possibility that her attacker was albino."

Mason felt good. Real good. His gut said they were headed in the right direction.

"Do you think this is it?" Jamie whispered. She gripped Michael's hand tightly. They'd stopped in front of a dingy, tan mobile home, flanked by some large firs. The bushes and plants in front of the home were neat and organized but lacking in color. Jamie didn't see any indication that a child lived here. She was glad they hadn't tried to find it in the dark last night. The roads weren't marked at all.

Michael honked his horn, making Jamie jump. She glared.

"The sheriff said not to sneak up on him. I'm just letting him know someone's here. It's pretty early in the morning for some people." He squeezed her fingers in rea.s.surance.

"I don't see anyone. Or a vehicle." Michael scanned the area with a hawk-like intensity, still holding her hand. "Let's give him a few minutes. I'm gonna honk again." He laid on the horn as the words came from his mouth. At least it was a partial warning.

Jamie took a deep breath and forced herself to sit still. She wanted to leap from the truck and pound on the door, demanding to see her nephew.

"Relax. Your brother is going to be happy to see you, and your nephew will love you on sight. How could he not? Look at the beauty you're going to bring into his life. He doesn't know how lucky he is."

She turned toward Michael, distracted by his words. He was smiling, his gaze studying her face, making her lips tingle as if he'd touched them. She was discovering that he often said random things, indicating their brains were on different wavelengths. She was worrying about her brother, and Michael was giving compliments. It was slightly disconcerting but also slightly erotic.

"You're not thinking about Chris," she stated.

"Nope. I'm thinking about you. Us. Last night. Awesome."

Yes, last night rocked. "I'm thinking about Chris."