The Mystery of the Bones (Snow & Winter Book 4) Read online

  “The Whiskey Wars. After the Civil War, a large population of Irish immigrants in this area became infamous for their moonshining business and what became the IRS battling them over not paying taxes on the alcohol.”

  Neil didn’t say anything, but I heard the quietest chuckle escape his lips.

  We’d turned onto Bridge Street, and out of the darkness, an all-brick—count them—seven-story warehouse appeared. It was nearly the expanse of the entire block in length, and the boarded-up doors on the ground floor suggested it was still sitting empty and unused, despite being prime real estate in the next “big neighborhood” to turn into apartments or a rooftop bar or even an art gallery.

  “Stop! Neil!”

  He slammed on the brakes. “What?”

  “This is it.” I turned my head and pointed. “Look there—the power plant. You can hear the humming from here.”

  Neil shut the engine off and quickly climbed out from behind the wheel.

  I followed suit, still clutching Cope in one hand and moving around to the trunk of the BMW as Neil opened it. I watched him grab a pair of bolt cutters and shut the top. “Really?”

  “I’m CSU,” he said with a wide, easy smile. “We’re prepared for anything.”

  We quickly moved from the side of the cobblestone road and toward the nearest door, which had a heavy chain wrapped around the handles. Neil put the cutters on it and managed to slice through the hefty links after a few attempts. He grabbed the broken chain, pulled it free, and threw it into the dead grass. He silently handed me the tool, removed his weapon and a small pocket flashlight, then took the lead up the dark, crumbling set of stairs inside.

  “This place ought to be condemned,” he whispered in between each creak and groan.

  “Historically—”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Neil stopped at the landing of each floor and opened the door to the main work room. They all mirrored one another—a massive expanse with nothing but occasional support beams to break up the shadows and give any sense of depth to the room. The walls on the right side were entirely bare brick, and the left were massive, probably antique glass windows that in the daytime would at least make this place not so spooky.

  The floors were a mess that hadn’t survived the test of time as well as the walls had. The second and third levels were okay. But the fourth was littered with broken floorboards and swatches of dark on dark, suggesting areas had simply begun rotting away.

  Neil opened the door to the fifth-level floor and flashed his beam inside. I hiked up the next several steps in order to get a better vantage point over his shoulder. In the silence between us echoed a snap, a crack—

  “Seb!”

  I lunged forward, throwing myself up the stairs, which was not an easy task, just as a portion of the wall and roof over the stairwell literally caved in on itself, effectively separating the two of us.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, trying to suppress a cough from the hundred years of dust now in the air.

  “Seb?” Neil called again, voice muffled through the collapsed brick.

  “Shh. I’m okay,” I said in a low voice.

  A portion of his face appeared through the debris. “Don’t move. I’m going back downstairs. There’s doors on the other side of each room—it’s probably a matching stairwell. I’ll come around to meet you.”

  “What if the boogeyman gets me?”

  “Don’t move,” he replied with a touch of exasperation.

  Neil’s steps receded until I was alone between the fifth and sixth floors. Stay here. Like hell. I held up Cope in my hand, only to realize his jaw was… somewhere in the wreckage behind me. I’d lost it in my juggle to save the bolt cutters.

  “Shit.”

  I hesitated for about a nanosecond before continuing up the remaining steps without the mandible. I reached the landing for the sixth floor and, with one hand feeling along the wall, found the threshold for the main work area. The door was slightly ajar, which, considering all the floors before had been securely closed, was warning enough for me. Gripping Cope and bolt cutters big enough to kill a man, I slipped inside.

  This level was above the rooftops of surrounding buildings. Sickly city glimmerings and fragile moonlight mixed together and filtered in through the bay windows. The floor was illuminated enough to make out the odd machine here and there. Textile tools probably. Definitely from a lifetime ago.

  And there, second support beam deep, closest to the windows, was the crumpled figure of a man.

  My man.

  I was so close. I wanted to run toward Calvin with open arms and save him from this hellhole. But the floor was likely to be as dangerous as the others. So I carefully, silently, slid along the wall behind me, reached the corner, and then moved the same way along the windows. In passing each plate of glass, I blocked out the light enough to silhouette my figure on the dusty floor. Eerie, with the cutters and Cope in either hand.

  My teeth chattered from the cold, and my breath came out in shaky puffs. But I reached Calvin. Tears ran down my face as I dropped my belongings to the floor and bent down beside him.

  “Calvin?” I whispered. It took considerable strength to hoist up a completely limp brick wall. “Cal? Honey?” I hefted him around enough in order to rest his back against the pillar. I put my numb fingers to his neck and checked for a pulse.

  Alive. I could barely feel it. But he was alive.

  I moved my hand to his cheek, stroking the cold, pallid, bristly skin. “Calvin?” I tried again, a bit louder.

  I watched his face carefully. One eye twitched. Then both. In a droopy, drugged-out manner, they slowly opened. He didn’t seem to register at first that I was me or that I was even a person crouched in front of him. But then he jerked suddenly, tried to bring his arms up to fight, before I realized they were tied around the back side of the beam.

  “Calvin.” I took his face into both hands, holding him firmly. “It’s me.”

  Calvin stilled. His breath was shallow. “Baby….”

  I smiled as if it were the very first time I’d heard that nickname. “Hey. How are you?” I whispered.

  Calvin let out the saddest attempt at a laugh. “Tired.”

  “You know,” I said, quickly wiping my cheeks with the sleeve of my coat and grasping for a playful tone, “if you didn’t want an extravagant wedding, you could have said so. This is a little extreme.”

  Calvin smiled, even as his eyes fell shut. “Get… me home. Please.”

  I leaned forward and kissed his chilled, chapped lips. “Copy you, Major.” I got up, knees cracking as I collected the bolt cutters, and moved behind the beam. I snipped the zip ties off Calvin’s wrists, and his arms fell to his sides.

  There was no way I could carry him out like this. Maybe with Neil’s help, but not in the sort of condition Calvin was in. He was dehydrated, overdosed, and in shock from the cold.

  I don’t know how in hell Asquith managed to drag him inside. Unless she’d quite literally… dragged him. In which case, God only knew how many bumps, bruises, or possible breaks he may have had.

  I got down beside Calvin again as I pulled out my cell phone to call Neil. The light on Calvin’s face shifted, as if someone had stepped past the windows from farther behind me. Jesus, Neil had been fast.

  I lowered my phone. “Neil. I found him!”

  “Mr. Sebastian!”

  The shudder that rippled through my body was as if someone had just taken a step over my grave. Even Calvin cracked open an eye and turned his head toward the voice.

  Asquith stepped out from the shadows along the brick wall. Had she been here the entire time? Hiding in perfect darkness and watching everything I’d done?

  She leaned over, her hands on her knees. “I believe you have something for me.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off her, instead reached behind me and blindly felt around until I’d touched Cope. I stuck my fingers into his eye sockets and held out the skull. “Here. Edward Drinker Cope’s skul
l. Game is played; mystery is solved.”

  She whistled and quickly snatched the skull. “Wowie. This is pretty incredible. I have a collection he’s going into. Now, I know what you’re thinking, ‘You’re a medical examiner, of course you have some super creepy display of human body parts!’” She chuckled, snapped on a flashlight in her hand, and examined Cope. “I have a fragment of Lincoln’s skull—it was removed when doctors attempted to treat his wound. A brain section of Albert Einstein—”

  “Those are in a museum,” I retorted.

  “Yeah,” she chuckled. “And they’re missing one.”

  Asquith raised the light directly at me. I winced and blocked the beam with my hand.

  “I don’t own it, sadly, but I did travel to St. Petersburg to see Rasputin’s penis. It’s pretty neat. Still has hair on the sac.”

  She lowered the light. Spots danced in my line of vision, and I hastily blinked them away.

  Asquith straightened her posture. “But Cope. I’ve wanted to meet him my entire life. He donated his brain and skull to science, as a bet.” She held Cope as if he were Yorick. “To prove even in death that he was superior to Marsh. He wanted their brains weighed and measured.” She looked at the two of us and explained, “He was super racist. A true congenital prick. Marsh never did take him up on that bet. So Cope was sitting on a shelf in UPenn for a hundred years. And then some selfish motherfucker took him so I never had the opportunity to visit him in medical school. I have been searching for Cope ever since.”

  I got to my feet but froze when Asquith shifted the flashlight and skull to one hand and removed a small compact pistol from her coat pocket. I slowly raised my hands. “Please let me get Calvin out of here. He needs medical attention.”

  Asquith grinned widely. “Did you like the puzzle?”

  I heard Calvin slump to the floor behind me, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off Asquith. “If you tracked down Dover on your own, you must have seen the skull in his apartment. It was sitting right out in the open.”

  She nodded solemnly. “I did. I could have taken it then and there. But these museums, so chock-full of useless administrators and self-centered curators, were more concerned over passing the blame for who lost Cope instead of finding him. They needed to reevaluate their priorities.”

  “So you started with Frank.”

  “Sure!” Asquith agreed. “I read about the visiting exhibit. That’s how I figured out UPenn was finally in a frenzy over Cope. And Frank Newell should have gotten the puzzle immediately. The clues were so obvious, and he was a paleontologist, for Christ’s sake! He should have known the story of Cope’s skull. If he’d actually cared at all, he’d have gone to visit UPenn like me, to find it not available in their artifacts catalog!”

  Calvin was dragging himself along the floor. It pained me not to look, not to check on him.

  Asquith didn’t seem concerned about his movements. “Frank was a loser. And that intern. He wanted a doctorate, right? He should have known.”

  I swallowed hard. “He was a kid in love.”

  “He should have been in love with learning,” Asquith chastised. She showed me those pearly whites in another huge unnerving grin. “Like you, Mr. Sebastian. Owner of the popular one-stop shop for Victorian gizmos and gadgets. Smart, sassy, sexy, if some people are to be believed.” She added the third comment as if it were a scandalous secret between us. “And after that Moving Image case—seeing the things you could do. The dangers you would face. Oh, I knew. I knew you cared.”

  “I cared for Calvin.”

  She shrugged and cocked the hammer on her gun. “Whatever. You still played. Do you feel smarter? Did your ego get sufficiently stroked?”

  I opened my mouth. To say what, I didn’t know. I was trying to accept the fact that I was about to be shot again. And with a cheap, dangerous gun like that, I wouldn’t live.

  But at least I’d seen Calvin one more—

  A shot rang through the room, just about piercing my eardrum. A half a second later, or before—it was hard to gauge—Asquith screamed. The Cope skull in her hand shattered as a bullet went through it, and half her hand was blown completely off. She dropped her weapon and grasped the profusely bleeding appendage to her chest.

  I turned to see Calvin had dragged himself to a discarded pile of boxes under the nearest window, where his weapon and badge had been resting the entire time. He lowered his hand, dropped the SIG to the floor, and appeared to fall unconscious.

  “Fucking ginger bastard!” Asquith cried. She bent down and grabbed for her pistol with her good hand.

  I picked up the bolt cutters from the floor and charged at her, the floor cracking and shattering beneath my feet.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’D KNOCKED Asquith upside the head with the cutters and promptly fell through the disintegrating floor. Clawing frantically on my way down, I’d caught hold of a support beam on the fifth floor, slowed the descent, then toppled the remaining six or so feet like a rag doll. It was enough to render me unconscious after whacking my head. When I came to, I was strapped to a stretcher and being rolled toward an ambulance. The block was lit up like a party—lights strobing, people calling, radios blaring. I hated parties. I hated people. I wanted to go home.

  I remembered asking about Calvin. Remembered harassing the confused EMTs about my fiancé and whether he was safe and that I didn’t need a damn ambulance and to let me go. Neil had been there. At some point he’d simply… appeared. He’d taken my hand and given it a firm squeeze before I was lifted into the bus, swearing that Calvin was okay. I’d faded out after that. Although I briefly recalled waking in the hospital. Not opening my eyes—it was always too bright—but hearing my father’s gentle voice as he spoke with a doctor.

  It seemed another concussion had been the worst of my aches and pains. I’d been kept under observation overnight because of my history of being conked on the head. But I was okay the next day. No worse than how my mysteries usually played out. I’d discharged myself the first chance I had, dressed in clean clothes Pop brought for me, and gone to visit Calvin’s room. It was flanked by uniformed officers standing guard, but upon seeing me, I was let inside without question.

  Calvin was propped up in bed. He was awake—a sort of exhausted alertness about his features. He startled when the door opened, turned his head abruptly, but then the rigidness of his posture eased. Calvin cracked a weary smile. “Hey, beautiful,” he whispered.

  I sat down in the chair beside the bed. “Hey, handsome.”

  Calvin reached his hand out. I took it and held on. His familiar warmth and grip all but undid every frayed and worn thread I had left keeping me together.

  “Please don’t cry,” he murmured.

  I shook my head, sniffed loudly, and brought his fist up to kiss his knuckles. “I’m not.”

  Calvin brushed a bit of hair from my eyes with a finger. “Thanks for being a busybody.” His voice was still rough. Worn out.

  But he was alive.

  I took a deep breath and smiled. “Sure, anytime. You won’t get rid of me that easily.”

  “I did put a ring on it,” Calvin said thoughtfully.

  I laughed. “Yeah, you did.” I sandwiched his hand between mine. “I like you,” I murmured.

  “I like you too.”

  I’d been right about Asquith. The obsession with Victorian medical history led to a body part collection. Quite impressive, Neil and Quinn later informed me, after having been reinstated and finishing the case where I’d left it abandoned like a car on fire. It sounded as if Asquith, even after having found Edward Drinker Cope herself, still grew as easily bored as I did and was never satisfied for long.

  The only difference was, I didn’t kill people to quench the thirst for adventure.

  The fact she was destined to rot in a jail cell forever was of little solace to the families of Dover, Newell, and Howard. But at least I’d stopped her. If that meant anything.

  I WOKE up to the gentle murmur of B
ing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” on the record player downstairs. I cracked open an eye, glanced at Calvin’s vacant pillow, and reached out to touch it. Cold. After sitting up, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood. I tugged my arms through the sleeves of a sweater, put my glasses on, and stumbled half-awake down the stairs.

  “Hey. Mom and Dad said we had to wait until at least seven o’clock before opening presents,” I teased.

  Calvin sat on the floor of our living room in front of the Christmas tree. The supposedly rainbow lights wrapped around it cast snowflake-like shapes across his face as the illumination filtered through the boughs of the tree.

  Calvin rubbed Dillon’s stomach as he looked up at me. “I didn’t want to toss and turn you awake.”

  “I promised the doctor you would rest,” I told him, moving around the lazy dog and sitting on Calvin’s right.

  “I’m fine, Seb.” He set his coffee mug down in front of him and touched my face. “I’ll be fine,” he corrected. “Really.”

  “You’re not lying?”

  “I don’t lie to you.”

  I smiled and rolled my eyes playfully. “Yeah, I know. Your heart is too pure.” I stared at the humble number of wrapped packages under the tree. “Well, when in Rome.” I grabbed one and offered it.

  “Second Christmas in a row we didn’t do so well on the gift-giving front.”

  “Third time’s the charm.” I watched Calvin take the small box with a knowing expression on his face. “That’s from me,” I added.

  “I’d certainly hope it’s from you.”

  “There were nurses fighting over who got to take your temperature at the hospital,” I stated as Calvin tore the Emporium gift wrap from the jewelry box.

  “Stop,” he said with a chuckle.

  “I had to sleep with one eye open at your side. I thought for sure they were going to take me out in order to be your future plus-one.”

  Calvin snapped open the box and stared at the contents.

  I glanced between him and the ring. “Is something wrong with it?”