Bones of the Lost

messages, some useful, some crackpot, some the sad ramblings of bereaved next of kin. Over the years I’ve developed an instinct for those to take seriously. This call was among them.
    I checked the messaging system information. The call had comeinto the switchboard the previous Friday, the day after Stallings’s piece ran in the
Observer
.
    I studied the few words I’d scribbled. My gut told me Passion Fruit did not refer to a produce market.
    I hit Google. Bingo. The Passion Fruit Club was located on Griffith, along a stretch that catered to adult male tastes.
    I picked up the phone and punched Mrs. Flowers’s extension.
    “Yes, Dr. Brennan.”
    “I got a call last Friday at one thirty-one P.M. It rolled to voicemail. Could you check the log to see if the number was recorded?”
    After a few seconds, Mrs. Flowers read off a series of digits that began with 704, the local area code. I ran the number through a 411 reverse-lookup site, but got zip. No name, no address.
    I was dialing Slidell when the man himself appeared at my door.
    “Yo, doc.” Dropping heavily into the chair opposite my desk, feet out, ankles crossed.
    “Detective.”
    “How’s it hanging?”
    “Did you get my messages?”
    Slidell reached out, snatched my tester safety pin from the blotter, and began cleaning a thumbnail. The scritching sound grated like a mosquito whining in the night.
    “Didn’t tangle with one of those mean-ass desert wolf spiders, did you?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Big as golf balls.” Slidell stopped excavating to splay his fingers. “Legs spread, they’re big as dinner plates. And the little fuckers can jump. Guy told me—”
    “Can we discuss my hit-and-run case?”
    “Topping my dance card.”
    “It is?”
    “Found our MP.” More scritching.
    “Cheryl Connelly.”
    “Ee-yuh. Car went off West Arrowood into a pond in the Moody Lake Office Park. Water barely covered the roof.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.” I was. Though I was glad Slidell was now free to focus on my Jane Doe. “Did you get my messages?”
    “Seventy-two by my count.”
    “You received the DNA reports?”
    “The many loves of Juanita Doe.”
    “That statement is presumptive and offensive.”
    Slidell raised a placating palm. “I’m just saying.”
    I leaned down to rub my ankle, which, for some reason, had begun to throb.
    “Hurt your foot over there?”
    “I’m fine. What do you know about Creach and Majerick?”
    Slidell drew two printouts from an inside jacket pocket and tossed them onto my desk. Then he slumped back and reengaged with the thumb.
    I unfolded and laid the papers side by side.
    Two faces stared up at me. Mug shots in black and white.
    CC Creach had close-set eyes above a nose that had clearly taken more than one hit. His lips were thick and hung partially open. A patch of depigmentation trailed from his right temple to his cheek, a pale footprint in a background of dark, acne-pocked skin. Descriptors said Creach was African-American, seventy-four inches tall, one hundred and eighty-nine pounds.
    Ray Earl Majerick stared straight into the lens, smug and self-assured. His curly hair, square jaw, and straight nose made him handsome in a nondescript sort of way. But there was a coldness in the pale eyes, a meanness not tempered by the cocky smirk. Descriptors said Majerick was white, seventy inches tall, one hundred and seventy-five pounds.
    “You know them?” I asked.
    “I know the type.”
    “Meaning?”
    Slidell leaned forward and jabbed a thumb at Creach. It was bleeding.
    “In the way a rat catcher knows his rats. This guy, CJ—”
    “CC.”
    “CC, CJ, PJ, BJ, who gives a flying fuck? Creach is your standard low-life dealer. If the turd has two working brain cells, which I doubt, he can’t rub them together to form a thought. But he thinks he’s slick, which will make it easy to run him to ground.”
    “Have you talked to his PO?”
    “Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The address she had forCreach was a flophouse off Freedom Drive. She hadn’t seen him in several months.”
    “Creach is on parole. Shouldn’t he report in regularly?”
    “Yes.”
    “She didn’t follow up?”
    Slidell shrugged.
    “And she’d made no random house calls?”
    “The lady said she was real overworked.”
    Jesus.
    “And the other guy?”
    “Ray ‘Magic’ Majerick. Him I do know. Paranoid and mean as a snake, which makes for a dangerous combination.”
    “What’s his history?”
    “Considers