Page 31 of Making His Bones

“Holmes. Hey . . . is that Galileo?”

It had to be. Alongside a much shorter man, Galileo looked like a bad guy in a western advancing through the heatwaves. Long arms dangling at his sides, he even looked like he wore cowboy boots, the tall gangly bronc buster with his quirky sidekick.

“Who’s that next to him?” I asked.

Gray shaded his eyes with his hand. “Is that . . . the Mexican kid he works with? Tiago?”

I waved at the duo. “Bro!” I shouted.

Galileo waved back. By now I could even see his gnashed-teeth grin. “Bro!”

I held my open arms out to Tiago. He didn’t seem to know what I was doing, but I hugged him anyway. “What are you guys doing here?”

“Bro,” Galileo said to Gray. He turned to me. “Ho.”

Gray said, “Well, not really. What’s up, guys?”

Galileo clapped Tiago on the shoulder. “Well. Tiago here wanted to volunteer to take down the Reverend Pitchfork. Tell them.”

“I want to help. That pendejo killed a lot of my friends. I want to help find the spot where they make luz de la luna. I want to get my hands on that pinche güey so I can kill him bare hands. I want to—“

“Okay, okay,” I soothed, putting my arms around the little guy. “We’ll see what we can do. But we can’t allow you to kill him.”

“No, that’s my job,” said Gray. “Me and Galileo, anyway. We’re the adults. Right, Galileo?”

“Oh, oh,” said Galileo, putting his hand to his throat. “You’re going to let me kill him? Such a pileup of emotions. I feel elation and misgiving you’d promote me to such a position. I feel panic I won’t do the job right, but empathy for Elektra’s loss. Oh, Galileo, you’ve come unhinged!”

I felt concern for his mental state, but Tiago plowed on ahead. “Tobiah found a bunch of land owned by Pitchfork. There is one he is certain has a bunch of cookers.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I don’t want any killing going on. There’s been enough of that for awhile. Besides, if we kill Pitchfork, how do I ever find out what really happened to my daughter? You don’t know what I went through ten years ago, even after I was exonerated. Blood samples were analyzed. Polygraphs given. Suspects interrogated, then released. The whole fucking case went cold. I want to see this fucker fry.”

Gray added, “Or whoever he knows who did it.”

“Oh.” I nodded. “Right. Whoever he knows.”

Galileo asked, “So this is where it happened? I have bad memories of being in a suitcase.”

We all turned toward the water, although there was nothing to see there. We stood shoulder to shoulder as though challenging the pond to spit up its latest meal. We were formidable, all of us together, and each in his own way. I was more confident than ever we could nail Pitchfork or whoever he was covering for. I could start by taking some pizza or donuts from his garbage can and FedExing it to my lab.

Gray said, “I thought you were rolled in a rug and put into someone’s trunk.”

Galileo said, “No, that was another time.”

Gray whistled, as if to say, “what a doozy.”

Something just occurred to me. “The actual murderer can’t be Bud Pitchfork.”

Shocked, the other three men hissed in air.

I continued, “I didn’t know much about autopsies at the time. But it was easy enough for the pathologist to figure that imprints on the strap muscles of her neck directed them to state manual strangulation by a right-handed perp. And Pitchfork is left-handed.”

“Well,” said Gray. “DeFreeze did say Pitchfork knew more about it than he let on.”

“Oh, I have no doubt,” I agreed. “I’ll run his DNA again to see if it’s someone in his family.”

Galileo offered, “We could follow his family members around, seeing which one is right-handed.”

That actually wasn’t a bad idea, although Pitchfork seemed to have a wide-ranging troop of relations. I couldn’t get the image of Delilah’s neck strap muscles out of my head. Reading the autopsy report now, it all made perfect sense to me. Bloody strap muscles are a powerful sign of manual strangulation. “When I saw Delilah in the suitcase, her throat had very few signs of throttling. But when the doctor pulled the skin up, she could count the killer’s digits pressed into the bloody muscles.”

“The smell of a dead body is hard to define,” said Galileo. “It’s not like having a rat die inside your dashboard while you’re sleeping in the passenger seat.”

Tiago threw in his five cents. “It’s like being punched by gore. The germs of a public bathroom that hasn’t been cleaned in years.”

“Yes, yes,” Galileo agreed eagerly. “As though you need a flame thrower to go inside.”

I had to give my team points for trying. I was glad Gray didn’t have any ideas to toss into the mix. It was a good thing at least he had never had to sniff a decomposing body.

I said, “It blasts your taste buds, soaks into your throat. Stings your eyes.”

We all appeared to be pondering this as a peregrine falcon swooped overhead. Behind us, a couple of prairie dogs barked. But we were silent as the trees.

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