Page 9 of Cold, Cold Bones

I grabbed paper and pen and jotted as she deciphered. When she’d finished, we looked at the string, then at each other. Neither of us had a suggestion as to the meaning of the sequence.

Katy was repositioning the lens when my phone rang. I crossed to the table to pick up. It was Hawkins. A transport van would be by within the hour.

When I returned to the counter, Katy had rolled the eyeball. I didn’t reproach her for touching it with bare fingers.

“There’s more on the right side.”

I picked up my pen and tablet.

“Eight. One. Period. Zero. Four. Three. Three. W.”

Katy’s head snapped up.

“GOFO.” Slapping her forehead with her free palm.

My face must have registered confusion.

“Grasp of the fucking obvious,” she translated. “Those are probably GPS coordinates.”

I read what I’d written. “Thirty-five point two six one six north. Eighty-one point zero four three three west.”

“That’s beyond freaky,” she said. “Why would someone carve coordinates into an eyeball?”

“To indicate where it came from?”

“Tell me the carving was done after the owner was dead.”

“Certainly after the eyeball had been removed.”

I didn’t go into detail. Katy didn’t request it.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now we eat dinner and wait for the ME van.”

“No black-eyed peas.”

“Not a chance.”

“And you call the cops.”

She was right.

“Fine.” Mimicking her tone from earlier. “There’s spaghetti sauce in the freezer, pasta in the pantry.”

I was punching another auto-dial number when the device rang in my hand. My eyes went to caller ID. Mixed feelings.

Bracing myself, I clicked on.

“I see you’re having a wild Saturday night,” I said, hearing a frenzied sports announcer in the background.

“And I’m catching you between sets at the Roxbury?”

Erskine “Skinny” Slidell, for decades a detective with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, had recently retired and gone into a cross-border PI partnership with Ryan. The strategy was that Slidell, being barely fluent in English, would work cases in the States while Ryan, fully bilingual, would handle those in which French would facilitate communication. So far, the concept was working. Business, though not exactly booming, was steady enough.

But, unlike Ryan, Slidell couldn’t totally cut the cord. A cop since emerging from the womb, and having zero outside life of which I was aware, Skinny continued to volunteer with the CMPD cold case unit. Also, unlike Ryan, the guy had the personality of a canker sore.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked, ignoring Slidell’s comeback to my opening dig. And astounded that he’d heard of the Roxbury, a hip nineties dance club.