“Good luck to Bertie, then,” Anna said.
Breaker’s Hill
Maestro, Virginia
Sunday morning
Billy Boynton, third baseman on Maestro’s high school team and a good friend of Dix Noble’s older son, Rob, was on his knees, clutching his belly, still dry-heaving, since his stomach was empty. “He barfed his guts out,” his friend Jonah said. Jonah was green, his voice thin as a thread.
For once the weatherman was right. The snow had stopped in the middle of the night, and now the sun shone brightly, warming both land and people. If it weren’t for the dead man at his feet, Dix might have admired the postcard beauty all around him, the trees and rolling hills covered with pristine white as far as the eye could see. He’d already examined the body and stepped back for Griffin and Ruth.
Dix went down on his knee in front of Billy. “Tell me,” he said.
“I-I touched him,” Billy said, raising tear-filled eyes to Dix. He was still shuddering, his face pale against the white of the snow. “I didn’t know what it was; I mean, it looked like a dark patch covered mostly with snow. I saw lots of animal prints and figured something had tried to uncover him, and so I leaned down, and I touched him. When I realized, I yelled for Jonah to stay back. I knew it was the guy everyone’s looking for. I saw the sketch of him Miss Mavis did. And I knew I’d found him.”
Jonah said, “We were snowboarding down the hill, and Billy tried a backward flip and lost control, headed off-trail into the woods. I saw him bounce off a tree, and his snowboard whacked against a rock. Billy was lucky he landed in a pile of snow.”
Well, not so lucky, Dix thought. He helped Billy to his feet, hugged him against his side. There was no need for Old Bertie now. “You did good, Billy. Listen to me now. It will take you a while to forget this and put it behind you, but I promise you, it’ll fade over time. Remember, you found him for us, and that makes you a hero. Now, the two of you get your snowboards and head on home. I’ll call your folks, tell them you were a big help to us.”
Griffin saw Billy was torn. He’d been terrified, but he was getting hold of himself now, not sure he wanted to leave. The dead guy was his find, and the dead guy’s gross arm lying on top of the snow wasn’t making him sick anymore. He wanted to keep talking about it.
Having two sons the same age, Dix held to his patience. Limelight like this didn’t come along every day for a teenage boy. “Billy, Deputy Claus is down on the road. You hook up with him and he’ll take you home. If I have more questions, I’ll come see you, all right? We’ve got to take care of him now. Go home.” Billy knew when an adult meant it, and so he hung it up. He and Jonah carried their snowboards down the hill, Billy talking a mile a minute about how the dead guy’s fingers curled around his hand when he fell on him—I heard the finger bones snap—Dix knew it was a story that would glitter with epic detail by nightfall.
The bright yellow crime scene tape his deputies had placed marked off the man’s body. At least there was no more snow in the forecast. Processing the scene with snow pelting down on them would have been a nightmare.
When the Loudoun County forensic team was finally through, the ME’s van slogging through the hard-packed snow to the road at the base of Breaker’s Hill, Ruth turned to her husband. “If animals hadn’t disturbed the site, if Billy hadn’t fallen in the woods, maybe not even Bertie would have found him.”
True enough, Dix thought. He’d brought the portable fingerprinter and wondered what the chances were the man’s prints would be in AFIS. He replied, “It’s still too cold. Let’s get ourselves out of this weather.
“Now that we have his body, we’ll find out who he was. Maybe then we’ll know why he was here in Maestro, and what he was doing in Delsey’s bathtub.”
Ruth looked up into the brilliant sun. It was odd, still feeling so cold with the sun so bright overhead. She counted the steps to Dix’s Range Rover.
Dr. Hayman’s House
Deer Ridge Lane
Maestro, Virginia
Sunday morning
Griffin pulled his Camry into Dr. Hayman’s driveway, the first tire tracks of the day. He’d read that Stanislaus had provided Dr. Hayman with a director’s residence for the duration of his contract, an old shingled bungalow set in the middle of an expansive tree-filled lawn. He saw the information wasn’t exactly accurate. Calling it a bungalow was a misnomer. The original house had been enlarged and modernized. After his initial take on Dr. Hayman, Griffin thought the new version of the house suited Hayman pretty well. Two more perks he’d read about—a gardener and a housekeeper. No cook? Griffin grinned as he walked up the six front steps to press the doorbell.