At The Stroke Of Madness. Alex Kava

his scalp would help him remember.

      “Others?” Henry checked Luc’s eyes. Was this part of the disease? What was he talking about? Did he forget where he was? Did he forget what had just happened? “Other what?”

      “Bones,” Luc said. “I think ole Scrap maybe brought me some others. He’s always bringing me stuff, scraps, bones, old shoes. But the bones … I just thought he found leftovers from the coyotes’ kill. You know, from down by the pond.”

      “Do you still have any of them?”

      “I don’t.”

      “Damn.”

      “But Scrapple probably does. I’m sure he’s got some of them buried around our place somewhere.”

      “We’ll need to look. You don’t mind us doing that, do you, Luc?”

      “No, no. Not at all. Do you think the bones belong to that lady in the barrel?”

      Before Henry could answer, one of his deputies, Charlie Newhouse, yelled for everyone’s attention. Charlie and two of the crime lab guys had been trying to carefully lift the barrel with the woman still inside down off the rocks. All the photos had been taken, the evidence gathered, and the assistant M.E. had made his initial examination. It was time for the transport, but Charlie seemed all excited about something. Charlie Newhouse, the one guy Henry remembered never getting excited except after a few beers and then only when the Yankees managed to make a triple play.

      “Okay, you got our attention.” Henry joined the others and looked up at Charlie, putting his hand to his forehead to block out the sun. “What the hell is it, Charlie?”

      “Might not mean a thing, Sheriff,” Charlie said, securing his balance as he paced from rock to rock, looking down into the pile as if trying to locate lost change. He then squatted to get a better look. “Might not mean a thing at all, but there’re more barrels under here. And something sure smells to high heaven.”

      CHAPTER 9

      Adam Bonzado shoved aside Tom Clancy with one hand while he maneuvered the winding road with the other, twisting and pulling at the stubborn and cracked vinyl steering wheel. At each incline the old El Camino pickup groaned as if there were another gear it needed to be shifted into. Adam stirred up the pile of cassettes strewn across the passenger seat, the pile that somewhere included the other three cassettes for Tom Clancy’s Red Rabbit. He searched with stray glances for something else, something that fit his mood. All he knew was that Clancy wasn’t going to cut it. Not today.

      Sheriff Henry Watermeier had sounded strained, maybe even a bit panicked. Not that Adam knew Henry all that well. They had worked a case last winter. A skull found under an old building that was being demolished in downtown Meriden. All Adam could determine was that it was a small Caucasian man older than forty-two but younger than seventy-seven who had died about twenty-five to thirty years ago. It was difficult to tell with only the skull. The body must have been buried somewhere else. With all their digging, they had found nothing more, and so, the time of death had been a major guess, based more on architectural facts than archeological ones. Despite the lack of evidence, Watermeier seemed convinced it had been a mob hit.

      Adam smiled at the idea. He couldn’t imagine the mob operating in the middle of Connecticut, although Watermeier had quickly filled him in with a couple of tall tales. Or at least that’s what they sounded like to Adam, who had grown up in Brooklyn and figured he knew a little something about mob hits. But he also knew Henry Watermeier had begun his career as a New York City beat cop, so maybe ole Henry knew a thing about mob hits, too.

      Adam Bonzado couldn’t help wondering if that was what they had on their hands this time. Dead bodies stuffed in rusted fifty-five-gallon drums and then buried under several tons of brownstone in a deserted rock quarry sounded like something the mob might come up with. But if there were bones scattered around the area, as Henry reported, somebody didn’t do a very good job of disposing of the victims. The mob wasn’t usually that careless.

      Adam reached for the cassette caught between the door and the seat. He read the spine. Perfect. His fingers fumbled with the plastic container. He slowed down to wind around another S in the road as he pried open and freed the Dixie Chicks from their confinement. Then he gave them a gentle shove into the cassette drive and cranked up the volume.

      Yes, this was exactly what he was in the mood for. Something upbeat to get the feet tapping and the blood flowing. He couldn’t help it. Digging up bones got him excited. Pumped up his adrenaline. There was no better puzzle. Sure, he enjoyed teaching, but that was only to make a living. This—dead bodies in barrels and scattered bones—this was what he lived for.

      Unfortunately, after ten years, his parents still didn’t get it. He had a Ph.D. in forensic anthropology, was a professor and department head at the University of New Haven, and his mother still introduced him as her youngest son who was single and could play the concertina, as if those two things were his most admirable characteristics. He shook his head. When would it no longer matter? He was a grown man. He shouldn’t care what his parents thought. The fact that he cared—no, not cared but worried about what they thought—he could even track back to their influence. For Adam Bonzado knew he had inherited his quiet, rebellious spirit from his Spanish father and his stubborn pride from his mother’s ancestral Polish blood.

      After creeping up the S in the road, it was time to come back down, and the old pickup flew. Adam didn’t brake. Instead, he sat back and enjoyed the roller-coaster ride, working the rigid steering wheel, twisting, turning and pulling to the sexy rhythm of the Dixie Chicks. The intersection appeared suddenly. Adam slammed on the brakes. The pickup came skidding to a halt inches in front of the stop sign and seconds before a UPS truck rolled through.

      “Crap! That was close.”

      His hands were fisted, his fingers red and still gripping the steering wheel. But the UPS driver simply waved, full hand, no choice fingers extended, no lips moving to the tune of “fuck you.” Maybe the guy simply hadn’t realized how close Adam had come to plowing into him. He reached over as an afterthought and turned down the volume on the Dixie Chicks. As he did so, he noticed the metal pry bar that had slid out from under the passenger seat.

      Adam checked his rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t holding up traffic, then he leaned down, grabbed the pry bar, slid open the rear window and tossed the tool into the enclosed pickup bed. It clanked against the lining and he cringed, hoping he hadn’t cracked the makeshift shell he’d just installed. It was a tough, waffle-weave polyurethane that was supposed to be easy to clean and would protect the bed from rust and corrosion, no matter how much mud and bones and blood he stuffed back there. It was just another measure he took to keep his pickup from becoming a smelly mobile morgue.

      He checked the floor for more tools. He needed to remind his students to put their tools back whenever they borrowed his pickup. Maybe he shouldn’t complain. At least the pry bar was clean. That was a start.

      CHAPTER 10

      Maggie juggled her briefcase in one hand, a pile of mail under her arm and a can of Diet Pepsi and a rawhide chew bone in the other hand as she followed Harvey out onto their patio. Harvey had convinced her as soon as she walked in the front door that they should spend their first afternoon of vacation in the backyard.

      She had only planned on making a brief visit to her office at Quantico to finish up some paperwork. She’d had no intentions of bringing work home with her. Now, as she unloaded the files from her briefcase onto the wrought-iron patio table, she wished she had left these back on her desk, hidden under the stacks where they had been for the last several months.

      She watched Harvey, nose to the ground, doing his routine patrol of the fence line. Her huge two-story, brick Tudor house sat on almost two acres, protected by the best electronic security system money could buy, as well as by a natural barrier of pine trees that made it difficult to see even her neighbors’ roofs. Yet the white Labrador went into guard duty every time they stepped out of the house, not able to relax or play until he checked out every inch.