Wilmington, NC 05 - Murder On The ICW

folks had to go through just for their six o'clock cocktails.
    Derek bent to pick up the last of the bottles. "Well, that's all of them. Mind if I take a look around before we leave. Some of the stills might have been left behind, in one of those outbuildings, maybe."
    "Sure. Help yourself ," I said. "What does a still look like? We might stumble upon one and not even know."
    "Basically, it's a copper pot. A pipe will be attached to it, and the worm. The copper would have tarnished after all this time so it'd be green and blackish. If you do come across one, you'll have to dismantle it. It's against the law to possess an operational still."
    He dragged his boot back and forth through the broken glass as if a valuable bottle might be lurking there unseen. "Well, guess we're done here," he said, almost sadly.
    The sun passed behind a cloud and for a moment the glittering, reflective quality of the glass vanished and I was looking at an ordinary blanket of broken glass. I blinked. Was that a face peering up at me through translucent shards?
    Derek stroked the shards with his boot one last time.
    "Stop!" I shouted and pointed. "Look! There's ... someone ... something ... down there."
    Derek started, withdrew his foot and leaned in. Jon, so attuned to me, stared intently at the bottom of the shed. If I saw something, there was something there to be seen, would be his attitude. Clyde, who had been securing the top of the last crate, stopped what he was doing and moved up to join us.
    I laughed nervously. "It's just that ... I thought ... oh, Lord. There's a face down there." I crouched down and squinted into the layer of broken glass. There was something. If only. If only I had my heavy gloves. And then I realized that I did. I pulled them from my back pocket, slipped my hands inside the leather, and began pawing through the glass -- gingerly so as to avoid a sliver of glass piercing my finger painfully.
    I had not been seeing things. What I thought I had seen was real. A bony face looked up at me.
    The moan that escaped my throat sounded anguished to my ears. I stood up. "We have to get the authorities."
    No one said a word but three men whipped out three cell phones faster than I could unclip mine from my waistband.

3

    The first detective to arrive on the scene was Homicide Detective Diane Sherwood with a uniformed officer in tow. Diane used to partner with my husband Nick before he left Wilmington PD to take an assignment with Homeland Security, followed by, to my chagrin, a move to the CIA.
    "You've done it again, Ashley," Diane said accusingly as she strode from the Wilmington PD cruiser. She was dressed in a loose fitting camel jacket, brown tailored slacks, a man-tailored shirt in brown and white stripes. The loose-fitting jacket concealed a bulky weapon.
    I wasn't biting. While it is true that my restoration of old properties sometimes yielded macabre findings, that was certainly not my fault. "Anyone who opened that shed and removed those bottles would have discovered that corpse," I said in my defense. "Don't blame me."
    She arched an eyebrow and gave me a smirk as if to say: But you have a history of doing this.
    "How do you think it got there?" I asked.
    Diane lifted her soft brown wavy hair off her neck, then let it fall gently back onto her collar. "I doubt that he crawled in there to die like an old sick cat," she said with sarcasm, and gave her hair a shake. "Someone put him there. So we're assuming homicide. Sure is hot out here in the sun. And to think in a few weeks it'll be Thanksgiving. Okay, so fill me in: what happened here? Who owns this place anyway?"
    I gave her our client's name and cell phone number which she diligently copied into her note book. Then I explained the situation about the shed and the bottles, and introduced Derek and Clyde who were eager to get back on Interstate 40 to Raleigh. A corpse was more than they had bargained for. Me too.
    A dark blue van that resembled a hearse drove up the lane and parked near the police car. We would soon run out of parking places if any other vehicles arrived. Diane introduced the woman who got out of the van/hearse as Dr. Jamie McAllister, a forensic anthropologist on the faculty at UNC-W whose specialty was Human Osteology -- the study of human bones. I knew Dr. McAllister by reputation but had never met her.
    She must have left her laboratory at UNC-W immediately upon receiving word that her expertise was needed at a gravesite of old bones.