Page 43 of Whistle

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said as Harry helped her to her feet.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go in and put on some coffee. I know I could use a cup.”

He walked her back into the house and guided her to the kitchen. She pointed to the coffee maker. The carafe was already full, the red light on.

“I must have had some kind of sixth sense,” she said, sitting down. “I just made that ten minutes ago.”

“What’s your daughter’s number?”

She told him and he made the call on his cell. He asked Patrice if she could come to her parents’ house, and if she could pick up her brother on the way. Patrice didn’t have to ask why. She said, simply, “On my way.”

Harry poured himself a cup, sat down across the table from Gloria. Her hands were flat on the table, trembling. Harry moved them together and placed his on top.

“We found Angus very early this morning,” he said. “South of town, on Miller’s Road.”

She seemed not to comprehend. “But he didn’t take his car with him.”

“He wasn’t in a car, although we haven’t ruled out that one might have hit him. He was off to the side of the road.” He was going to sayin the ditchbut pulled back the words. They sounded too brutal.

“A hit-and-run?” she asked.

“We’re in the early stages of the investigation,” he said. There were things she would have to know eventually, details that wouldbecome painfully clear when her husband’s remains were delivered to the funeral parlor. But did she need to know now that many of her husband’s bones had been surgically removed from his body? No, that could wait.

“I know I asked you these kinds of questions when your husband first disappeared, but I need to ask them again. Did Angus have any enemies? Did he know anyone who might want to cause him harm?”

She shook her head. “He’s a good man. He’s in the Rotary Club, he raises money for the cancer drive. Everyone likes him.”

It might be some time before she could bring herself to speak of him in the past tense, Harry thought.

“Where is he?” she asked. “I have to see him.”

“Not yet,” Harry said. “He’s with the coroner. There has to be a full autopsy. When that’s done, he’ll be released to the funeral home of your choice.”

“Do I... do I have to identify him?”

“There’s a tattoo that matches the photos you showed us. When a further identification is needed, I’ll let you know and we’ll find a way to go about that.”

Maybe one of her kids, he thought. But no member of the Tanner family should have to view what was left of Angus.

“Why are you asking about enemies?” Gloria asked. “Did someone deliberately do this to Angus? It wasn’t an accident? Did someone kill him?”

If only it was just that, Harry thought.

“We are treating this as a suspicious death.”

Suspicious, Harry thought. If that wasn’t the understatement of the year.

Harry stopped in at the Hillmans’, too, figuring once they knew Angus Tanner had been found, Walter might be next. He said theywere still looking for Walter, and that there was, so far, nothing to link the two disappearances.

Then he went to the station and asked Mary Walton, who worked the front desk and handled various communications details, to come into the office so they could hammer out a press release on Angus Tanner. Mary was pushing sixty but could easily pass for seventy. Thin and wiry, she’d lost, two years apart, one lung and then a breast to cancer and kept on beating the odds, coming back after both operations and explaining that she was too mean to kill. Tough, without a doubt, but Mary was a sweetheart under her weathered exterior.

Harry told her what they could and couldn’t say, and Mary went back to her computer and had something printed out for his approval in fifteen minutes.

“Press is gonna want a quote from you, so I made up a couple,” she said.

Harry had a read of them. “Sounds like something I’d say. Let ’er rip.”

“And this won’t be enough. TV types are gonna want you in person, looking all chief-like.”

---