Page 44 of Whistle

Harry didn’t enjoy going before the cameras but knew it was likely inevitable. “You can set it up for later today.” He told Mary to fax the release to the usual list of media suspects while he headed off to the Lucknow Public Library.

He was relieved to have been able to put off, at least for now, telling Tanner’s widow about the deboning of her husband’s body, but he couldn’t get the word out of his head. Wasdeboningthe most accurate, the mostclinical, way to describe what had been done to the man? Was there no more dignified description than what one would do to a brook trout or a chicken breast?

Maybe he’d find the answer at the library.

He was pretty much a stranger to the building, not being much of a reader himself, but Janice and their son, Dylan, were regulars. On an almost weekly basis, they were here to borrow reading materials or attend special programs. Dylan, unlike his father, went through books the way Harry went through bad coffee, primarily paperback novels based on characters from theStar Warsuniverse. Chewbacca was his favorite.

The librarian helped Harry find several medical reference books, and when she showed some curiosity about what he might be researching, he simply smiled and thanked her for her help.

He thought if he knewwhat, exactly, had been done to Angus Tanner, he might have a lead onwhocould have done it. Was there a murderous surgeon out there? A homicidal butcher?

He learned of a procedure called an osteotomy, but that involved cutting bone just enough to realign joints. It could be performed on jaws or knees or shoulders or spines or any number of other places on the human body. This struck Harry as more of atrimming, not a deboning. And then there was a carpectomy, the removal of carpal bone, designed to keep small, delicate bones in the wrist from rubbing up against one another and causing pain. Again, this did not involve slicing open a limb and removing a length of bone that ran from the ankle to the knee or the elbow to the shoulder.

As best as Harry could tell, the medical community wasn’t spending a lot of time relieving individuals of their skeletal structure. It struck Harry that he’d have to come up with his own term to describe what had been done to Angus Tanner:

Sick.

What kind of sick, twisted bastard did that to another human being? And for what possible reason? This was new territory to Harry. Oh, he’d dealt with a handful of homicides in Lucknow over the years, but they were never what you’d called whodunits. No need tobring in Columbo. One drunk dickhead stabs another drunk dickhead at a tailgate party in front of twenty witnesses. There was that time a kid in a Chevy pickup cut off a guy in a souped-up 1970 Dodge Challenger. The guy in the Challenger then rammed the tail end of the pickup, running it into the ditch. Then he grabbed a gun from the glove box, got out, and shot the kid in the neck, killing him. When he got back to the Dodge, intending to flee, it wouldn’t start, so he called Triple A for a jump.

You couldn’t make this shit up.

But this Tanner case, this was different.

Harry made some discreet calls, to the state police, to the FBI, asking if they’d seen anything like this before. There was one agent at the bureau, Melissa Cairns, who said something about it rang a bell, a case out in Des Moines, maybe another down in Florida somewhere, and she’d love to help out, she really would, but ever since the eleventh of September, the bureau’s focus had been on terrorism, and anyone with something less outlandish than a jet flying into a skyscraper would have to take number. But if she had a chance, she would look into it for him.

So, at least for now, Harry was pretty much on his own.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?”

Harry had been sitting at one of the library’s long tables, closing the last of the medical texts he’d been poring over, when he sensed someone standing behind him.

He knew that voice. Even before turning around in his chair, he said, “What can I do for you, Rachel?”

“Those are medical reference books,” said Rachel Bosma.

“I’m thinking of switching fields,” Harry said, turning around and getting to his feet. He bundled up the books under his arm. “Gonna lose the badge and start carrying around a six-pack of tongue depressors.”

“You’re funny,” she said. “You should be writing forSeinfeld.”

“What can I do for you, Rachel?”

Rachel was the top reporter for theLucknow Leader, although, given the size of the town and the paper’s circulation, that also meant she was the only reporter for theLucknow Leader. They had a couple of other staffers who put together the births and deaths and wedding announcements and Little League scores, but when it came to writing about actual news, Rachel had that job pretty much to herself. Lucknow wasn’t even large enough to have a daily paper. TheLeadercame out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Anyone who wanted a decent weekend read with plenty of sections went to the local smoke shop or convenience store and picked up aBoston GlobeorNew York Timesor theBurlington Free Press. Where Rachel had it over them was, none of those papers cared what happened in Lucknow.

Rachel was in her mid-thirties, with two kids in elementary school and a husband who taught high school chemistry, and if she’d ever entertained thoughts of making it to the big leagues, she had abandoned them long ago. Harry didn’t want to talk to her right now, but he liked her. She was tireless in her efforts to keep the good citizens of Lucknow up to speed on what was going on, and whatever the editor was paying her, it wasn’t enough as far as Harry was concerned.

“I got the fax on Angus Tanner,” she said. “Anything you’d like to add?”

“Nope.”

“It was a little light on detail.”

The phrasebare bonespopped into Harry’s head and he suppressed a grimace. “When we know more, you’ll be the first person I call.”

“Come on. Guy’s been missing for weeks, and you put out something that’s a basic hit-and-run story. What was he doing? Wandering Miller’s Road all this time? Where’s he been? What’s he been up to? And was he hit by a car or dumped there or what? Is it officially a homicide? And I’m hearing stuff I can’t go with until you confirm it, like his body was like rubber or something and that he was naked as the day he was born.”

Harry had kept back the details for good reason. He didn’t want to start a panic in Lucknow. If word got out that there was some nut on the loose who had a thing for removing bones, no one would answer their door without a gun in their hands. Vigilante groups would form. Nutcases who shouldn’t be allowed anything deadlier than a peashooter would be carrying in public, guns slung over their shoulders and hanging from their belts, lining up for coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. Also, when they did bring someone in for questioning—and Harry prayed that would be sooner rather than later—they didn’t want to poison the well. Fake confessions could be pretty convincing if the whole story was out there.

“What were you looking up, anyway?” she asked as Harry walked over to the counter, returned the books, and gave the librarian a nod of thanks.

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