The Bone Bridge- Chapter 20

(The Christianson Home, Quincy, MA)

By the time I got to the Christianson home, Adam was a sight to behold. He was hunched over in a chair wearing just one sneaker because the other had been impounded as evidence. Ordinarily, I would’ve been a fish out of water because Quincy was way out of my jurisdiction. To the Quincy PD, I was no better than a civilian but the fact that Adam had called me from a house phone to tell me what had happened put me squarely in the middle of this. When the poor kid called me at my office in Boston and gave me his hysterical statement over the phone, I immediately called the Quincy PD and let them take over while I hightailed it north.

It couldn’t have looked any worse for the poor kid and while I didn’t know whether to believe him, all I knew for sure was that he didn’t do it. Adam sat on the couch opposite the bodies, which had been covered up but not moved. With his one shoeless foot, he looked tinier and more fragile than when he woke up from that coma.

“Adam, what happened?” He just told me what happened and sort of how it happened but he was crying and screaming over the phone and I couldn’t make out half what he was saying.

“He was so fast, Detective Coffey. He was so Goddamned fast.” He never looked up at me but just kept rocking back and forth.

“Who was? Who did this?”

“Hey!” I heard from across the living room. “Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck is this? Hey, put down the fuckin’ donuts and someone tell me who the hell this guy is?” I took it to be the lead detective on the case, some tall, slightly overweight guy with too much gel in his hair. His face was almost as red as the shag carpet under us.

I guess I committed a breach of protocol and didn’t give the lead dick the courtesy of a heads up before approaching the kid. In his mind, he’d be the lead suspect, at least a material witness, and he didn’t appreciate some bozo coming out of left field and interrogating his collar, even though I was the bozo who phoned it in to them. As I did when I got to the front door, I pulled my badge and showed it to him.

“Boston PD? A little outta your jurisdiction, ain’tcha, Coffey?”

“Don’t forget, I’m the one who called in this 187. The kid called me.”

“You know him?”

“Yeah. He’s helping me with another case.”

“Another case? Did he wax another family in your back yard?” Adam looked like he was ready to burst into tears and anger began rising up inside me like a wellspring.

“Whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’? Does this kid look like a killer to you?”

“I don’t know, hot shot. Why don’t you tell me what a killer’s supposed to look like? It would make our jobs a fuck of a lot easier.”

“From where I’m standing, Detective Sassoon,” I said, looking at his overly gelled hair, “you couldn’t make your job easier if the killers made appointments and sold ring side seats.”

“Alright, get the fuck…”

“Did you bother looking at the preliminary evidence?”

“We have our CSI guys looking it over right now, hot shot.”

“Can I see the kid’s sneaker?”

“Fuck you. You don’t even belong here. Do I have to have my chief call your chief to get you out of here?”

In other words, my Dad can beat up your Dad.

“Just show me the sneaker and I’ll show you what I’m talking about.” The lead detective looked at me sardonically then held out his hand behind him.

“Marv, show me that shoe.” Adam’s sneaker, in a plastic evidence bag, was put into his waiting hand and he passed it to me. “I’m just doing this to humor you and get you the fuck outta here. Don’t take it out.” Then he added condescendingly, “That’s what we call… ‘evidence’.”

I gave him a shitty look and turned the sneaker this way and that and my suspicions were confirmed. “Look at this bloodstain on the carpet,” I said as I squatted down on my haunches and pointed to a peninsular-shaped, still-wet blood stain right in front of Adam’s stocking foot. “Did you measure it? It looks like it’s about half, maybe three quarters of an inch wide.”

“Yeah, so?”

“OK, look at his sneaker. There’s a bloodstain on the toe consistent with the same type of blood, I’m guessing arterial considering how bright it is, and the same width as that arterial spray.”

“So what?”

“That means the kid would’ve had to have been sitting right where he is when the murders took place, not behind the victims or right in front of them as he would have to be but at least four and a half feet away from the victims. Do you see any blood on his hands, on his clothes?”

“That doesn’t prove nothin’! He could’ve had an accomplice. He could’ve washed and changed clothes. He coulda done any number of things.”

“If he changed his clothes, where are the bloody ones? If he had an accomplice, then why did he stay behind and call me from the family’s house phone? Come on, even a neanderthal like you can’t believe that.”

“Alright, that’s it. Get out of here, you fat fuck, before I have you arrested for disturbing a crime scene and tampering with a material witness.” I spread my feet and was about to slug this prick into the next dimension when I heard a female’s voice.

“You won’t do any such thing, Detective O’Brien.” Laura Moss walked into the place as if she’d just passed papers with the Christiansons and flashed her creds. I took note that she got a somewhat wider berth than I had with my shitty Boston PD ID. I never thought I’d be so glad to see her and especially Oliver Blood, who followed Adam’s sister. Blood never even had to reach for his own creds. I assumed the kid called his sister at around the same time he called me and she brought Blood with her before he hopped back on a jet to DC. Considering that he’d had his little coffee klatch with Adam over two days ago, I was surprised that he was still in Massachusetts and not back in our nation’s capitol running his agency. In fact, I was tempted to ask him why he was still hanging around until I reminded myself of two things. One, I wasn’t supposed to know who he was and Two, he and Laura were still mine and Adam’s two best and only bets out of this mess.

Laura went directly to her brother and O’Brien was about to get between them when Laura showed him her ID again and said in a low voice, “This is my kid brother. Back off.” She had her back turned to me but I could imagine the pure venom that must’ve been quivering behind her corneas because when he saw her straining at the leash with the weak link O’Brien backed off and pulled the uniforms away from the immediate area.

“Honey, are you alright? Adam, look at me.”

Adam’s eyes finally locked with his sister’s as if just becoming aware that she was in the house.

“Sweetie, tell me what happened.”

“Where’s Mom and Dad?”

“I called them. They’ll meet up with us later. You’re coming with Oliver and me.”

“Who are you?” Oliver Blood was looking right at me, squinting his large hazel eyes at me in curiosity.

“Detective Ed Coffey, meet my boss Oliver Blood. Oliver, Ed.” She went back to her brother without offering any other explanation as to why we were associated.

“Oh, you’re the Boston city detective on the Ritz task force.” He acted as if he knew about me, which made sense. I’m sure that Laura had reported back everything she’d learned from our skull session.

“Well, I’m just one of several.” Neither one of us offered our hand. We were taking each other’s measure just as he and Adam did a couple of days ago. “May I ask what’s your interest in the Ritz Carlton case?”

“Sure.”

We both let that four letter answer hang between us. The inference was clear: “Sure, you can ask, but will I actually tell you? Ha ha ha.”

It would’ve been easy for me to dismiss Blood as a typical federal prick who looks down on us local yokels as charmingly provincial at best, the kind of prick that wouldn’t think twice about peeing in everyone’s back yard just to mark their territory. But there was something more to this guy than just that. Plus I was thinking of that voice that I’d heard yesterday on Adam’s mp3 file, the disembodied one that said, “Don’t trust him.”

I almost shook my head. I can use my own judgment in human nature without having to be informed by ghost whispers. Still, I couldn’t account for the identity of the person who said it but I got the unshakable sense that whoever it was was talking about Blood. I never had the chance to ask the kid if he got a glimpse of who’d said it.

---

“Adam, sweetheart, look at me. Who did this?”

“Yodel.”

“Yoda?” O’Brien said as he shambled into the living room? “Who the fuck’s this Yoda guy?”

“Jodl,” Elle corrected him with barely-concealed impatience. “J-O-D-L. How do you know it was Jodl?”

“He was wearin’ a Nazi uniform and he used a scalpel. I could see every detail, even the Iron Cross on his chest.” He looked into his sister’s eyes again. “And he told me who he was. Like he wanted someone to know. Just before he…”

“A Nazi did this? Are you shitting me?”

“Detective, please! If my brother said he saw a man in a Nazi uniform and that he killed these people, then he did.”

“Oh, well, since he’s your kid brother and all, what the fuck. Let’s all just call it a day and go home!”

“Detective, you’re acting very unprofessionally,” Elle said standing up.

“I am? Alright, listen up, Agent Moss: We did some checking up on your brother’s background. Seems he’s already spent time in the Laughing Academy a few years back for, guess what? Cutting himself with a razor. Then he wound up back there again just this past month. I know doin’ background checks on capital crimes suspects looks a little unprofessional on the surface, but…”

“Alright, Detective O’Brien, you made your point. But my brother’s medical history has no bearing on this case.”

“Really, now? Let’s see,” said O’Brien as he warmed up, counting off on his fingers. “He’s the only witness to a double homicide, he’s the only other person in the house and he’s got the victims’ blood all over his shoes. He’s already shown a fondness for sharp-edged weapons and now he’s blaming it on Nazis. And he just got out of a loonie bin. Did I forget anything?’

“Yeah,” said Blood. “The part where we take custody of him, asshole, while you stand there with your greasy thumb stuck up your ass.”

Which is exactly how it worked out after some interdepartmental cockwanding, calls to the mayor of Quincy and more to both state and federal attorneys. Whoever Blood and Adam’s sister were, they had more juice than Ocean Spray and Jamba combined to get Adam sprung from police custody considering how guilty he looked. It wasn’t really a matter that the federal government was taking into protective custody someone about to be charged with a capital crime in a municipal jurisdiction. What it all came out to was whose badge was shiner than whose and mine and O’Brien’s were made out of pewter as far as Moss and Blood were concerned.