Page 34 of Cougar Point

“Not a problem,” Lucas said. “It’s on the way.”

They bought coffees to go at a place in the terminal, and Mac added a breakfast burrito to his order, paying for both of them with a crumpled twenty he dug out of his pocket. He was still eating it when they reached Lucas’s car in the short-stay parking structure. Lucas had tried to slow the walk from the terminal down a little to avoid just this, but Detective Anderson had set the pace, striding forward, steadily clutching her go-cup like she was competing in an egg and spoon race.

Lucas wound his window down as soon as they got in and hoped Mac wouldn’t drop any of the filling from his burrito in the passenger footwell. As it was, the car would be smelling of egg and grease for a week.

He pulled onto the on ramp for I-5 and merged into the northbound traffic. The sun was still low in the sky.

“First time in the Northwest?”

“First time for me,” Mac said, then craned his neck around to address Anderson. “How about you?”

“Closest I’ve been is San Francisco,” she said, staring out of her window.

Lucas let Mac fill him in on their activities since they had spoken the previous afternoon.

“We brought the husband in for questioning.”

“How did he take it?” Lucas asked.

Mac shrugged. Neither of them had gone into this side of things in detail on the call yesterday, but that was because a lot of it went unsaid. Even in a homicide case with slightly more everyday parameters, the first person you look at is the victim’s spouse. The fact he had apparently covered up his wife’s disappearance made him look even guiltier, though Lucas was keeping an open mind until he spoke to the man personally.

“If he was acting upset, he’s a good actor. We didn’t have to say anything. He went to pieces when he saw us at the door. Didn’t ask for a lawyer, either. Not at first.”

“What’s his story?”

“Same as it was a week ago, minus the part where his wife showed up safely.”

Mac consumed the last inch and a half of the burrito in one mouthful, then crumpled the foil and the wrapper together and stuffed it into the pocket of his pants. He reached for his coffee in the cup holder and took a sip, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“She checked into the hotel and then vanished. The husband called everywhere he could think of and then contacted us. A couple of hours later somebody contacted him and told him to call us off, say his wife was back home.” He turned to fix Lucas with a hard stare. “A couple of days after that they checked in again to make sure he wasn’t going to spill. They made a compelling argument.”

“His wife’s little finger arrived in the mail?” Lucas asked.

“FedEx,” Anderson said from the back. “The box arrived with the finger and a note with a phone number on it. Greenwood called it and they told him they had his wife and if he didn’t want more digits arriving, he would call us off.”

“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight,” Lucas said.

“What?” Anderson said.

“Before your time, kid,” Mac said, before winking at Lucas. “The younger generation, huh?”

“Is he going to ID the body?” Lucas asked. He was interested in the answer.

“He assumed it was being transported back to Cincinnati. When I told him it was staying here for the foreseeable, he demanded to come with us. Thankfully I got to pass on that. He’s on his way out here.”

They ran out of shop-talk after a while, and Mac started talking about his hobby of breeding pit bulls. Lucas tuned him out and made the occasional comment to make it seem like he was paying attention. Detective Anderson didn’t even try to pretend she was interested, tapping out emails on her phone from the back seat the whole time.

Eventually they reached the outskirts of Bellingham and the dump site. The creek ran across the county, passing under a bridge on a back road. As Lucas slowed, he could see that the area around the bridge was taped off, even though the forensic work had been completed and there was no longer anything to see here.

He parked in the wide spot at the side of the road, and the three of them got out.

Lucas led them to the start of the slope down to the creek and indicated the spot where the body had been found, and told them the timeline. The initial discovery by the kids, the 911 call, Deputy Cooney attending, and then Lucas and Longbow arriving at the scene.

The two Ohio detectives did just as Lucas had done the morning before. They took a moment to take in the immediate surroundings, judged why the site had been chosen for a body dump, then climbed down to the spot where Olivia Greenwood’s body had been found. Anderson asked a couple of questions relating to timings: if they knew roughly how long the body hadlain there before discovery, whether there was any clue on the vehicle that had been used to transport her here; and Lucas told her what he had been able to discern, which wasn’t a lot.

It was a good dump site: miles from anywhere, no cameras or tolls, no mud on the road to show up tracks, and the creek could have carried away trace evidence remaining on the body. The coroner’s best guess was that time of death was at least twenty-four hours before the body had been found. The body could have been left in the creek at any time in that window, though logically overnight would have been the safest time for the perpetrator to do that.

“All right,” Mac said, clearly bored already but satisfied that he had checked one item off his itinerary, “let’s go say hello to the deceased.”

---