Page 29 of The Bones in the Yard

I shot a glance at Ward, who shrugged. Maybe Madeeha was sensitive to the presence of the dead. Or maybe she just got the willies knowing there’d been a dead dog under the raspberries.

She’d definitely found more bones. Once she led me over to the dug-up ground where the tangle of prickly berry canes had been, I crouched down beside the hole, carefully digging the dirt out from around a longish probably-leg bone.

“Any more seashells?” I asked her.

She looked surprised. “Actually, yes.” Then she pointed over at a small pile of dirt, out of which one half of a whelk shell was poking.

I jumped when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

It was Mays.

Dog bones,he’d sent.Probably a couple years old.

Any idea what breed?I shot back.

“Our first set of bones was canine,” I told Ward and Madeeha, not bothering to wait for whatever Mays was going to send me in return.

I nodded once, then took the bone over to Ward.

I knew immediately that what he held wasn’t a dog.

But I could also see with my own two eyes that it wasn’t human, either.

Fucking hell.

“What do we have?” I asked Ward, falling into a familiar pattern, and I grimaced a little at the fact that I’d basically forgotten who worked for whom, although Ward didn’t seem in the least bothered by it.

He sighed, then blinked once, slowly, before his eyes focused slightly to my right.

My phone buzzed.Greyhound I think, was Mays’s response.

So not Xoloitzcuintli, probably. Still a dog, though. A dog whose body was a lot like a Xolo’s. I wondered if Mays would be able to tell the difference.

Thanks, I texted back. I didn’t ask him if he knew a Xolo dog’s skeleton from a greyhound’s, mostly because I wasn’t prepared to think about it too hard.

Ward spoke, then, drawing my attention back to what we were doing. “His name is Theodore Newton. He was killed… two years ago.”

“Mays said the dog was a couple years dead, too,” I told him. “So they could have been killed at the same time. What was he?”

A pause. Then, “Wolf.”

“Another canid,” I mused.

“What are you thinking, Hart?” Ward asked me.

“Dogs. Do you think there are more?”

Another pause.

“He thinks so. On the far side of where the patch was.”

Fucking hell.

“Are we going to dig them all up?” Madeeha asked, sounding nervous.

I shook my head. “Nope. Because our dead friend here means this is now a homicide case, soweare not going to dig up anything.” At least not just yet, although I had the suspicion that I was going to get roped into it.

I tapped my phone, calling Dan Maza.

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