Free Skeleton's Key (Delta Crossroads Trilogy, Book 2) by Stacy Green Page A

the house is safe?”
    “I’ll take care of the house,” Cage said. “I probably won’t be allowed to be directly involved in the investigation, but Adams County is a small staff, and I have a feeling they’re going to need every set of hands on this.”
    She ran her hands over her pulled-back hair. “Okay. As long as you’re here. And I’ll find somewhere. I saw a bed and breakfast in town.”
    “No need to pay money. You can stay in the carriage house.”
    “That’s your place.”
    “You also own it. And I can stay with a friend. This way, you’ll get to stay on the property.”
    “You’d do that for me?”
    He searched her eyes, the hard planes of his face softening. “Good old Southern boy, remember?”
    She forced herself to smile instead of cry. “Thank you.”
    Voices rose in the basement–it sounded like Landers and Jeb were arguing. “I’d better get down there. Why don’t you gather your things and head over to my place, get some sleep? I’ll check in when I can.”
    She nodded, and he turned for the kitchen.
    “Cage?”
    “Yeah?”
    “The stairs. Make sure they’re secure before anything is brought up. I don’t want someone getting hurt.”
    *     *     *
    He hated to kill the pissed off raccoon, but it was faster than trapping it, and the police needed the finger, not to mention whatever evidence it had consumed. The animal was bagged and set aside while the body was recovered.
    Cage hoped Dani hadn’t heard the gunshot from the carriage house.
    More lights had been brought down, sitting precariously on whatever surface investigators could use. The result was a garish yellow glow that made the entire scene even more alien. Cage stood on the periphery, the humidity making the white paper mask Jeb had given him stick to his face. That was about all the flimsy paper had done. The smell was unholy. But the sight was even worse.
    A blue tarp stretched from the wobbly stairs to the new dig site, and a second tarp covered the skeleton’s grave. Jeb had told Landers to keep his people off the skeleton’s area, and from the pouting look on Landers’s fat face, Gina backed the coroner up.
    Every person at the scene wore booties and latex gloves, and Jeb and Billy had donned blue Tyveck suits that made them look like rejects from the Blue-Man Group.
    “How did you people not find this when you were digging up the skeleton?” Landers demanded.
    “Because we weren’t digging in that area.” Disdain colored Jeb’s tone. “This body’s buried at least two feet deeper than the skeleton was–and obviously out of our original dig site. I’d bet my ’67 Mustang one doesn’t have anything to do with the other. The skeleton’s old, bones worn away from time and earth. Could have been here before the house was built.” Jeb gestured to the dead arm still sticking out of the ground. “That poor soul was buried here a lot more recently.”
    “I agree,” Gina said. “It’s pretty obvious we’re looking at a murder. Let’s get started.”
    Inch by inch, the two men carefully sifted through the earth, piling the dirt on a separate section of tarp. A dirt sample would be sent along with the body to the medical examiner’s office in Jackson in hopes of finding trace evidence. The raccoon had torn a pretty good sized hole in the plastic, and Jeb had tried to reseal the tear, but enough decomposition fluid had leaked out to make the smell strong enough to gag a maggot. A yellow-gray substance that was a stinking cross between wax and slick grease had formed over most of the body, and tears in the plastic provided an outlet for the smell and the fluid.
    “What is that?” Cage spoke into the elbow he’d pressed against his nose.
    “Adipocere,” Billy said. “Forms in damp conditions when the fatty tissues of the body undergo a chemical reaction. Suppose the humidity combined with the plastic is what did it here.”
    “We’re not even attempting to unwrap,” Jeb said. “This