A Merciful Silence Page 8

  Rose sat back, her face clearing as she nodded. “True. I’ve had dreams that I can’t get there and it’s just me and the baby alone at the farm. Something is wrong, and I can’t take care of her.”

  Mercy reached across the table and took Rose’s hand. “That won’t happen. No apocalypse is scheduled before the baby is to be born.”

  Her sister laughed, and Mercy sighed in relief, but part of her brain immediately started to make plans in case a national crisis happened before Rose’s baby was born.

  I’ll bring Rose to my cabin. Shit! The cabin won’t be done by then.

  Her heart sped up and her lungs tightened.

  I’m unprepared. Rose’s baby could suffer because of it. I need to check my medical supplies—

  Stop it.

  Mercy took deep breaths and searched for a different topic. “Are you familiar with the Hartlage family?”

  Rose finished her grilled cheese sandwich as she considered the question. “First names?”

  “Corrine and Richard.”

  Her sister shook her head. “I don’t recognize them. Do they have something to do with you getting a cat?”

  “They own the home I was at this morning. That’s where I found the cat.”

  “They’re the missing family?”

  “Yes. Do you know Kenneth Forbes?”

  Understanding flashed. “I do. He’s in a wheelchair, right? Got thrown from a horse and can no longer walk.”

  “That’s him.”

  “He’s an SC. Whole family is.”

  Sovereign citizen.

  “No wonder he didn’t want to talk to me this morning.” Mercy sighed. “I don’t care what he believes. I just want to find out what happened to this family.”

  “Is this missing family related to the bones found at the road on March Mountain?”

  “We don’t know yet. It’s possible. Hopefully we’ll find out soon.” Mercy checked the time. “Do you need a ride home?”

  “No, Dad is at the feed store. He said he’d drive me when I was ready.”

  Mercy pictured her father exchanging gossip and shooting the breeze with the other men who tended to congregate at the feed store. The constantly brewing free coffee probably had a lot to do with the frequent gatherings. How many times did I wait for him to finish his conversations when I was little? As a kid she had explored every inch of the feed store to fight her boredom. Sometimes there had been baby chickens to hold. Mercy could still feel the yellow fluff under her fingertips. Those had been the best days.

  Mercy hugged and kissed her sister goodbye and headed toward her vehicle. She was tempted to wait and see her father, but it wasn’t the right time yet. He’ll let me know when he’s ready to accept me back into the fold. It’d already been six months. It’d been fifteen years and six months since they’d parted ways because she’d refused to live under her father’s iron fist. Hopefully it wouldn’t take much longer.

  Truman called as she drove back to her office. “How’s your day?” she asked.

  “Good. Only one bar fight so far.”

  “Already?”

  “It’s five o’clock somewhere. Say, I wanted to ask you if you’ve ever received a letter from a sovereign citizen claiming you owe them money for trampling on their rights.”

  Mercy grinned. “Not me personally, but I saw a few when I worked in the Portland office. We had a few judges get them.”

  “I got one from the guy I pulled over with the fake ID and plates yesterday.”

  “Awesome! How much money does he want?”

  “Three million.”

  “You just made my day,” she stated. The letters had been a big source of amusement at her old office. “Did he use a funky signature?”

  “Yep.”

  “The lure of never paying taxes is very strong. People will subscribe to any scheme, no matter how convoluted it is.”

  “Do I need to do anything about this?”

  “No, but email me a copy. I’ll file a report and check the FBI’s records to see if your guy has done anything else. SCs love to create stacks of paperwork and bog down the legal systems, but they rarely take physical action.”

  “According to your brother Owen, this guy is also creating and selling diplomatic licenses.”

  “Isn’t that like Owen, to keep that little piece of illegal activity to himself?” Mercy wasn’t surprised. Her older brother wouldn’t report someone unless physical harm had happened. “Sounds like I need to open an investigation. Get that letter to me, and I’ll go from there.”

  “He’s being arraigned tomorrow. I plan to be there.”

  “Let me know if anything else crops up about him.”

  “Will do.” He sounded relieved. “I love you. I’ll miss you tonight,” he said in a husky tone.

  His voice sent good shivers up her spine, and she ended the call. She blew out a breath and leaned back in her seat.

  What was my life like before Truman Daly?

  She barely remembered. She recalled faint memories of quiet evenings in front of the TV and weekends full of work on her cabin. Now he was an element of her life as routine as breathing and eating. She’d been comfortably independent and alone for a long time until Truman showed up and disrupted her normal. She’d fought her growing need for commitment for months, worried that loving him would mean losing herself.

  How wrong she had been.

  Thank God he was persistent.

  ELEVEN

  “You found the Hartlage girls’ dental X-rays but not the parents’?”

  That evening Mercy questioned Dr. Harper, the forensic odontologist, in the room where the remains were being studied. The dentist had two skulls sitting near the computer screen where she was talking to Mercy. One was the tiny skull. Mercy tried not to look at the destroyed teeth; she’d seen them enough. The skulls had haunted her dreams.

  “We got lucky when we called a pediatric dentist,” said Dr. Harper. “Hopefully we’ll find out that the parents were patients at one of the dental offices where I left a message. The adult skulls had dental work done, so somewhere there are records. I was happy to have found the kids’ dentist on the eighth phone call.”

  “What about patient privacy laws?”

  “The dentist hesitated because of those. I had your boss give him a call. He convinced him.”

  Jeff could talk anyone into anything.

  Mercy looked at the computer screen in front of Dr. Harper. To her eye, it showed a jumbled mess of small gray films that had no rhyme or reason. “How did you take those precise X-rays of the teeth? You don’t have that kind of dental equipment at this location, do you?”

  “I called in a favor,” said Dr. Harper with a sparkle in her brown eyes. “A local dentist I graduated with from dental school let me use her machine. Saved me from driving back to Portland just to take films.”

  “Smart.”

  “Always.” Dr. Harper turned back to the screen. “Now,” she said in a teaching tone of voice. “Across the top of my screen are Alison Hartlage’s films I received from her dentist’s office.”

  “Tiny little films,” remarked Mercy. The images showed white-and-gray shapes that she knew were teeth. How does Dr. Harper know which teeth they are?

  “Normal for a child of this age. Below those are the films that I took on the smallest skull.”

  “You took a lot more films.”

  “It’s typical for pediatric offices to only take two or four films of the molars at Alison’s age. I shot a lot of views of the skull’s teeth for our records.”

  Even Mercy’s unpracticed eye could see the broken and jagged teeth on Dr. Harper’s recent films. Anger tightened her throat. “Fucking asshole,” she whispered.

  “Breaks my heart,” said Dr. Harper. She cleared her throat and touched the screen. “If you look here at the film I took, there is a whiter mark on this tooth. It’s a composite filling—a white filling—on her six-year molar.” Her cursor dragged the film next to one of Alison Hartla
ge’s films. “This film from Alison’s dentist has the exact same-shaped filling.”

  Mercy held her breath. “Is that the only thing that matches?”

  “No. There are two other composite fillings that match.” The dentist touched the screen again, pointing out the similarities. “And even if there weren’t any fillings, the shape of her first molars is distinctive. It’s clear to me that this is positively Alison Hartlage.”

  “Even though he broke her front teeth?”

  “Oh yes. In a child this age, the front teeth change the fastest anyway . . . the kids are constantly losing baby teeth, and the adult teeth are growing in. She wouldn’t have lost her deciduous molars for a few more years. Right here, you can see the adult premolars below the baby teeth. They wouldn’t have grown in until she was much older.”

  “Can you tell how old she was?”

  “Kids lose and grow teeth at different rates. Looking at the films, I can make an educated guess of her age.” Lacey smiled. “But her dentist gave me her date of birth. She’s six and a half.”

  A sense of finality washed over Mercy. This was Alison. No question.

  “What about her sister?” Mercy asked.

  “Amy.” Dr. Harper brought up more films on her screen. “I’m also positive one of the other female skulls is Amy. She was fifteen.”

  “Two people identified.” The accomplishment tasted sour in Mercy’s mouth.

  “No doubt two of the others will turn out to be her parents,” said Dr. Harper.

  “I’m not assuming anything,” said Mercy. “A neighbor said the brother-in-law who was living with them wasn’t Asian. So—”

  “So either the brother-in-law or the father could still be alive.” Dr. Harper’s eyes opened wide.

  “Maybe his skull washed down the bank.”

  “I know they searched the area for a long time. They’ve brought in some more bones,” said Dr. Harper, “but I don’t know if they’re done. You know there was a creek way down the slope, right?”

  “I heard that. I wonder if some bones made it that far. Is Dr. Peres around?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Did she find evidence that there were more than five skeletons?”

  “Like more than ten femurs?”

  “Exactly.”

  “My understanding is that she’s annoyed so many bones are missing. She hasn’t mentioned finding too many.”

  “A lot of bones could have been completely washed away.” Mercy sighed. “That would include skulls.”

  “Very true.”

  “It’s also possible none of those skulls are the parents of Alison and Amy.”

  Dr. Harper nodded with sympathy. “Until I have dental X-rays to compare them to, we won’t know.”

  “Hopefully one of your calls to a dentist will yield some results. It’s late, so I assume you won’t hear anything more until tomorrow. Are you sure you called all of them?”

  “I called every one within thirty miles of Bend. It’s possible they traveled farther than that for dental care, but it’s not typical. Especially since their kids went to one in town.” She frowned. “I will say that the Asian skull has had some horrible dental work. He had two amalgam fillings done, and they have huge overhangs and decay underneath them.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Someone didn’t know what they were doing . . . or they didn’t care if they did a decent job. He also has several teeth that should have been repaired. I imagine they were giving him serious pain.”

  “Then it’s possible he avoided the dentist for several years. I’ll have to concentrate on another way to identify his remains.”

  “Do you really think these are related to those cases from twenty years ago?”

  Mercy made herself look at the destruction on the skulls. “We have to consider it. I’ve never seen abuse like this outside of those other two cases, and all of them happened in the same county.”

  “But the bodies were left in their homes twenty years ago. These were moved.”

  It was a primary difference between the old cases and new.

  “Maybe the parents weren’t killed.” Dr. Harper’s sad gaze met Mercy’s, and she knew exactly what the odontologist was thinking. It was a possibility she couldn’t ignore.

  Who would do that to their children?

  TWELVE

  The next morning Mercy yawned at her desk for the tenth time.

  She’d slept poorly, unable to get the small skull and broken teeth out of her mind. She’d woken up too early and paced in her home. The cat had curled up with Kaylie in the teen’s bed, and Mercy hadn’t held back her smile as she watched them both sleep. The cat was affectionate and had immediately attached herself to Kaylie. The thought of the sweet animal shivering alone during the winter made Mercy want to cry.

  I hope no one claims her.

  She checked the time. Her phone call with Grady Baldwin was in one minute. She cleared some papers off her office desk and mentally ran through the questions she wanted to ask the convicted mass murderer.

  Her desk phone rang. She answered, identified herself, and was soon connected with Baldwin.

  “What does the FBI want with me?” Baldwin bluntly asked without exchanging pleasantries. He sounded as if he’d smoked cigarettes for the last twenty years in prison.

  Mercy eyed the old mug shot of Baldwin on her screen and wondered what he looked like now. In the mug shot, the tendons stood out on his thick neck, and his glower made her shudder. He looked as if he had spent a decade lifting weights. Or was the muscular build from his physical work? Grady was now in his fifties, and she pictured him with softening jowls and graying hair.

  “I have questions about the Verbeek and Deverell murders.”

  “Doesn’t everybody? I’ll tell you the same thing I tell everyone else. I got nothin’ to say because I wasn’t there.”

  Mercy had expected the statement. “You’ve had a lot of time to think about it. Who do you think did it?”

  “Do you have a suspect?” A faint glimmer of hope was in his tone.

  “No.”

  “Then why the fuck are you talking to me?”

  She and Jeff had discussed whether or not to tell Baldwin about the new victims. The discovery of the skeletal remains had already made the news, but the empty Hartlage house and the identification of the Hartlage children had not. They’d agreed to only tell Baldwin the information that was already public.

  “Is this about those remains found on March Mountain?” he asked.

  How did he instantly connect that case to my phone call?

  “You heard about that?”

  “I’m popular recently. A reporter tried to schedule a visit with me yesterday. I turned him down, but I looked up what he’d published recently.”

  “Who was the reporter?” asked Mercy through her teeth.

  “Something Winslow.”

  Chuck Winslow. How did he connect the dots to Grady Baldwin?

  Probably the same way she had. Her memory had recalled a common factor between the cases. No doubt Chuck had talked to a local who also remembered.

  “The remains have raised some questions,” Mercy admitted. “There’s a few similarities between the new case and the two old ones. Enough to make us take a second look at the old murders.”

  “Probably because whoever murdered the Verbeeks and Deverells is still walking around. Drinking beer. Going fishing. All the shit I used to do.”

  The bitterness in his tone struck Mercy deep inside. So many freedoms were taken for granted. Until they were taken away.

  “Take a look at the Verbeek girl,” Baldwin suggested. “I think she’s hiding something.”

  “Britta? She was unconscious.”

  “So she says,” he snapped.

  “She was a child.”

  “She had eyes, didn’t she? She’s still scared of something.”

  Mercy gripped her phone, Britta’s description of the anxiety she lived with echoing in h
er head. She was scarred for life. “What do you mean, she’s still scared? How would you know?”

  Baldwin was silent.

  Suspicion filled Mercy. “Mr. Baldwin, do you know where Britta is now?”

  “I know she’s moved back.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I have a little bird on the outside.”

  Mercy briefly closed her eyes. “Why would you bother keeping tabs on Britta Verbeek?”

  “She goes by the last name of Vale now. I’ve got nothing better to do with my time. I’ve always thought that girl knew something. Her behavior tells me she’s nervous.”

  “You have someone following her?”

  “Nah, nothing like that. My brother Don keeps tabs on her movements through the internet.” His tone turned coy. “She’s moved around a lot, hasn’t she?”

  Mercy was stunned into silence. Does Britta know he’s watching her?

  Maybe she has a reason to feel paranoid.

  She moved Don Baldwin’s interview up her to-do list.

  “Mr. Baldwin,” she finally said, “are you saying you’ve been watching her for over twenty years? Don’t you think that’s a bit . . . abnormal?”

  “If there was one thing that might lead to your release from prison, wouldn’t you keep tabs on it?” he said angrily.

  “But twenty years—”

  “It feels like seventy to me. I don’t belong in here, and I have the right to keep my eyes and ears open. We’re not doing anything illegal.”

  “Have you contacted her?”

  Silence.

  If Grady Baldwin had been sitting in front of her, Mercy would be tempted to kick him. “Jesus Christ,” she exclaimed. “Why would you do that? The girl is a victim.”

  “She knows something.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because she’s the most likely person.”

  “But what if no one knows anything?”

  “I haven’t contacted her since she was a girl.”

  “What did you do back then?”

  “I sent some letters begging her to tell the police what she knew. It was easy enough to get her aunt’s address.”

  Mercy wondered if Britta ever saw the letters. If Mercy had been her aunt, she would have taken them to the police and never told the girl.