Don’t Look Behind You

afternoon slipped into evening. On the way, he contacted the Pierce County medical examiner’soffice. They needed all the experts they could summon to establish the bones’ species.
    As the investigators on the scene waited, one of the men standing nearby said his family owned the property. He said his name was Owen Carlson and that he owned the True Value hardware store that was located nearby. Carlson gave Deputy Tate a quick history of some of the myriad tenants who had rented the yellow house over many decades.
    “My family’s had the old place here for years,” he explained. “My sister has been in charge of renting it out since back in the seventies. She leased it to so many people, but she’ll probably remember most of them—at least those families who stayed for a year or so. Myself, I only recall one family offhand. They lived here sometime in the midseventies; as I remember, it was a married couple and their daughter—or, rather,
her
daughter. They lived here about a year, I guess.
    “There was kind of a strange thing, though,” Carlson continued. “More than a year after they moved out, some women came by my store and asked me if I knew where they might be able to locate the older woman’s husband and the younger women’s father. They was trying to find him because, I guess, he’d just plain disappeared.”
    The store owner didn’t think the women who contacted him were related to the family who had lived there; the little girl whom he’d seen actually living there was much younger than the two sisters, and the grown daughter was years older.
    “They told me that they were from someplace in NewMexico, I believe, and that their dad suddenly quit keeping in touch. Evidently, that wasn’t like him. They wanted to walk through the property because this was the last location they had for him—our old house.”
    “So you took them through it?” Tate asked.
    “Yeah—as I recall, I did, but I couldn’t answer their questions; I just told them that everyone from that family had been gone for a long time. I had no idea where.”
    Asked if he knew the allegedly missing man’s name, the witness shook his head. “It was odd, though …”
    “What was odd?” Deputy Tate asked.
    “One of the daughters said that her father’s new wife was the type of person who would
kill
him.”
    “Kill him?” Tate asked, surprised. “Was she serious?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t know her—never saw her again. Don’t even know her name—but I recall that her first name sounded like a nickname. She could have been exaggerating. My sister would know more, but she’s on a trip and won’t be back until Thursday evening.”
    Forensics chief Steve Wilkins arrived and studied the bones in the black trash bag. He verified that in his opinion they were not animal bones after all. They were human.
    As Wilkins delicately examined the bones, Jason Tate looked down at the ground beneath the excavator, which was about fifteen feet away from the first bone find. He saw that there were several more bones lying there. He pointed them out to Wilkins and they marked their location with evidence flags.
    A Pierce County medical examiner’s deputy—Bert Osborne—agreed with Wilkins’s opinion. Osborne had nodoubt that these scattered bones had come from a
human being
. How long they had been buried in the earth was anyone’s guess; it surely had been a long time as they were all denuded of any soft tissue. It would take a meticulous laboratory examination by a forensic anthropologist to determine if they were male or female, the possible ethnic background of the deceased, along with height, weight, and other characteristics that had existed when they had been part of a living frame.
    Osborne and criminalist Wilkins made the decision to leave the bones where they were. In the morning, they would come back and set up a grid, beginning where the first bones were found and extending throughout the property so they could be sure they had discovered any bones that remained, as well as other items that might give them some clue to who the dead man (or woman) had been. They didn’t know yet if they were looking at what had been a natural death, an accident, a suicide, or a murder.
    If this
was
a homicide case, the investigators hoped against hope that a killer might have left something behind that would identify him—or her—too.
    It grew late. The sun had set and it was murky dark when the investigators cleared the