Page 64 of The Bone Code

Always were, I thought. “Any word on Jeben?”

“The boyfriend’s a guy named Thomas Slinger. Age twenty-six. Went by Slick.”

“Slick Slinger?”

“Tells you all you need to know about the little worm.”

“That and the fact he was dating a fifteen-year-old kid.”

“And that.”

“What’s his story?”

“Guy’s a walking charm school.”

“Meaning?”

“His juvie sheet is long and uncreative. Mostly petty stuff—DUIs, disturbing the peace, vandalism, shoplifting. The Marines bounced him with a dishonorable in 2015.”

“Why?”

“The gentleman has a fondness for blow. My personal favorite: the Beaufort County sheriff busted him in 2016 for feeding live chickens to pit bulls he was training for the ring. Record ends there.”

“Jesus. Have you talked to him?”

“Ex-Private Slinger is currently in the wind.”

“Let me guess. He vanished about the time Jessica Jeben went missing.”

“Bingo. Look, I’ve got some door-to-doors to wrap up and a shitload of ass-in-the-chair follow-ups to do.”

Dead air.

Again, all I could do was wait.

Three thirty p.m. Outside, the clouds were now so low they seemed to be kissing the river. Dark and swollen, they promised delivery soon.

I’d just finished another report. The tweaker in the culvert was, indeed, Marie Cloutier, the suspected mental case. Though I couldn’t state cause of death, I could say that Marie’s knitting needle had inflicted impressive damage to her temporal lobe.

The instant I hit send, my mind toggled back to the woman and the child washed ashore in Saint-Anicet. I pulled the file up on my computer and stared at the crude renderings of both faces.

The two stared back. A woman with a narrow nose and a prominent chin. A child with a high forehead and wide-set eyes.

I was assaulted by the usual tumult of thoughts. While I attempted to sort through them, a cluster of neurons issued a provocativepsst!

What?

I tried coaxing the subliminal synapse to the surface.

The neurons remained hunkered down.

Studying the features on my screen, I asked myself, what minutiae had my lower centers noticed that I was missing?

Unexpectedly, my mind flashed an image of Polly Beecroft.

Was this synaptic alert similar to the one I’d received as I viewed Beecroft’s mask? What had triggered the alarmist cells then?

I closed my eyes and tried to reconstruct my pre-hurricane meeting with Beecroft.