Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

and a leather lawyer’s briefcase in the other. Ready to walk out the door, he wore a raincoat and rubber boots over jeans and a powder-blue button-down.

“Shred these,” he said, handing off the files to Elaine, before peering up at the two women standing in his lobby. He gave Lola the once-over, as men often did, and then glanced back at Elaine, obviously feeling like he’d walked into something that was beneath his interest.

“These are detectives,” Elaine said, as if warning him not to say anything that would get them all in trouble. “Asking about Dean Schimmel.”

Lola caught a flash of something in the man’s eyes. She was relatively new compared to everyone else on the task force, with just over three years on the Marshals Service, but she had an instinct for creeps – and this guy was one. He set off all manner of I-got-somebody-chained-up-in-my-trunk alarms as soon as he came around the corner. She’d misjudged bad people before, by hoping they were decent, but she’d yet to be wrong when she thought there was something “off” about someone.

Lola fished her credentials out of her rain jacket. “She’s a detective. I’m with the US Marshals.”

“Ah,” the creepy dude said. “The Marshals… I suppose they’re calling in the big dogs for the murder.”

“We were already here,” Lola said. “Sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”

“Ephraim Dollarhyde,” the man said.

“And what’s your position here, Mr. Dollarhyde?”

“Lobbyist, adviser, that sort of thing.”

Van Dyke showed him the screen shot.

“That does look like Schimmel.” He looked genuinely surprised. “What happened to his hands?”

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Van Dyke said. “So you know everyone who works at the mine by name? Even the laborers?”

“I should,” Dollarhyde said. “I oversee the background checks when they’re hired, but I confess that I don’t know that many. I only know that’s Schimmel because we were just talking about firing him.”

Elaine turned and looked at him, eyes blank.

“And why is it that you were talking about that?” Lola asked.

“I’m afraid I’d have to talk that over with our lawyers before I went into any details about an HR matter. Can I ask why you’re interested in him?”

The receptionist spoke up now. “He killed a little kid.”

Dollarhyde recoiled as if he’d been slapped – a little heavy on the dramatics, like he wanted them to think he was just hearing the news.

“The kid didn’t die,” Lola said, locking eyes with Dollarhyde. “But she could have. If he calls in, tell him the police and the US Marshals are looking for him. Tell him this place is far too small for anybody to hide very long.”

Dollarhyde excused himself and disappeared out the front door. He walked briskly to the parking lot, where he got into a white pickup and drove away.

Lola and Van Dyke thanked Elaine and tried to look nonchalant as they hustled out to their vehicle.

“He turned left,” Lola said, buckling her seatbelt. “Hope he’s not going to the airport.”

Van Dyke stayed well back, taking an outside lane when the white pickup made a U-turn to head south.

Lola slid down in her seat as he passed, going the opposite direction. “You think he saw us?”

“Probably,” Van Dyke said. “I mean, those girls would have called and told him we bolted out the door as soon as he left.”

“I wonder,” Lola said. “That one chick was too busy with her game to be bothered, and I get the sense that Elaine isn’t a big Dollarhyde fan.”

“Hope you’re right,” Van Dyke said as she made a U-turn of her own and then punched it to bring the white pickup back into view. It was still going south, past the turn off to Mendenhall Glacier.

“Not for nothing,” Lola said. “But your sister-in-law seems like she’s trying awfully hard. I have a couple of alcoholics in my family. Staying sober for a year is… well, that ain’t no small deal.”

Van Dyke clutched the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white.

“What do you want me to say? That she’s not a piece of trash? I can’t do that. Because she is. She was in Anchorage for over two weeks last year doing God knows what all, while my brother stayed at home with the kid sick with worry because he didn’t know where she was.” Van Dyke turned to look Lola full in the face. “That kind of worry can kill you. Did you know that? It killed my brother. The artery in the side of his head just delaminated. Cut off the blood flow to his brain. He was probably dead before he hit the ground.”

“And Lori was still in Anchorage?”

Van Dyke shook her head. “No, she was home. My stupid brother took her back. She boohooed and told him she was getting sober. But the damage was done. Just because you ‘make amends’ with someone after you cut their throat doesn’t make everything all hunky-dory.”

Lola stared out the window at the dense evergreen forests that lined the road. The white pickup was the only vehicle that she could see, ahead or behind.

“Shit!” Van Dyke pounded on the wheel. “I should have thought of that.”

The pickup made a left into Auke Bay.

Lola craned her head, looking for some hint as to where he was going. “What?”

“That’s the way to the marina,” Van Dyke said. “He’s going to get on a boat.”

Chapter 38

Dallas Childers was a strong man, but he hadn’t focused much on cardio since he’d separated from the Marine Corps. It took him a while to make the hike up to the agreed-upon section of the old Treadwell Ditch, not far off the Mount Jumbo trail and the Treadwell Glory Hole pit, long since flooded when the mine collapsed on itself in the early nineteen hundreds.

The eighteen-mile ditch was an engineering feat in and of itself, especially when you considered that it was built in the late nineteenth century. Cut horizontally along the side of the mountain, it collected runoff through dams of timber and rock and a series