Birdy Waterman 01 - The Bone Box

what she did, maybe not.”
    “What did she do?”
    “She cheated on Tommy. She was seeing someone else. I think that’s why Tommy killed her. He must have found out.”
    The disclosure came out of nowhere. Birdy had thought that Iris was going to say something against Tommy, another reason why no one should forgive him, or that he’d gotten what he deserved.
    “I didn’t know she had another boyfriend,” Birdy said. “I’ve never heard that before.”
    Iris’s eyes were back on Birdy’s. “Well, she did,” Iris said. “She had two guys on a string. Tommy and the other guy.”
    Birdy got up. The intensity of what Iris was saying made her feel silly sitting in her chair while Iris stood, coat on, ready to drop the bomb and run away.
    “Do you know his name? Was it someone from home?”
    Iris shrugged a little. “I never saw him. She never said his name. Not to me. I don’t think he lived on the reservation, because I’d never seen him or his car. Whenever he came to get her, she had to walk all the way down the lane to be picked up. I don’t think she wanted our parents to meet him. Maybe he was black or something. I don’t know. My dad was kind of a racist and that wouldn’t go over real big with him.”
    Black?
    “What makes you think he was black?”
    Iris looked around the room. “Nothing really,” she said. “I was a kid and I just tried to figure out why it was that my sister hid him from everyone in the family.” Iris shifted in her chair. She was on a roll now and Birdy wasn’t about to stop her. “I thought we’d meet him after she died, you know, he’d come over and pay his respects at the house. That never happened. We never saw him. Not even one time.”
    “So you think Tommy killed her because he was jealous of this other man?”
    “That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I remember my mom telling me that the police caught Tommy red-handed. He must have killed her for something. Anna Jo was hurt pretty bad. He must have been mad.”
    Twenty-seven-stab-wounds mad to be exact.
    “Did you ever see Tommy threaten her? Act jealous? Angry?”
    “That’s the hard part. I always got the impression that he loved her, was gentle with her. The other guy always made her cry. One time I remember going into her bedroom when she was on her bed crying. I asked her what was the matter and she said she was in big trouble. I asked her what kind, and she said, ‘boyfriend trouble.’ ”
    “What do you think she meant by that?”
    “I don’t know. That was the last time I saw her. The next day she was dead.”
    After Iris left, Birdy went home to the Bone Box.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    The next day Birdy Waterman got in her car to drive to the morgue. She hadn’t slept well. She’d been unable to shut down her thoughts about Tommy. Yet duty called.
    A car accident the night before had taken the lives of a middle-aged couple from Bremerton. They had left a party in Port Orchard and the women crashed their late-model Jeep just outside of Gorst, a tiny town clinging to a hairpin turn of highway populated by a strip club and coffee stands with half-naked baristas. Investigators theorized that the driver had been drunk. Birdy Waterman would examine the bodies, take the blood, look at stomach contents, and send tissue to the lab to determine if alcohol had been a factor.
    As she dressed for work, she kept thinking about Tommy. She’d called the prison to confirm his illness with the medical staff there—from one doctor to another. Just as Sgt. Holloway had, the doctor on call said how much everyone liked Tommy and how “it is a shame he never got out of here.”
    Instead of turning up Division Street and heading toward the morgue, Birdy did something she’d never done in her entire life.
    She called off work.
    “Joe, you can handle the crash all right? I’m taking a personal day.”
    Birdy despised the “personal” day excuse, but it seemed more legitimate than lying and saying she was ill.
    “You under the weather or something?” the assistant asked.
    Birdy pressed the gas pedal and headed toward Highway 16 along Sinclair Inlet.
    “Or something,” she said, still refusing to out and out lie. “I should be in the office tomorrow.” She hung up her phone and started toward the highway for the long drive to the Makah Reservation near Neah Bay. Home. The scene of the crime. In her mind it was now both places, linked like that forever.
    Birdy had two things on her mind, one