“I’m pretty sure that’s the right case number,” he says.
“Where’s the rest of it?” I mumble.
“It’s got to be around here somewhere. Bones don’t have to be fully refrigerated,” Sam says, glancing around the office. “Why were you so sure they were keeping him here?”
“Where else would he be?” I ask. It’s the only morgue in town.
Sam shrugs. “Hospital in Elmott? That’s where they took my grandfather. He hated Catholics. He put it in his will that he didn’t want to be transported to this morgue because it used to be a Catholic church.”
Holden and I both stare at him. Our father was partial to the Catholic church because of our mother’s affiliation with it. This is where he was brought after he died.
“I didn’t know that was an option,” Holden grunts. “But this is taking way too long, and if we’re taking time to search the whole church, we need an alibi that’s better than justclaiming to be home all night. We have no chance of getting to it if it’s in the hospital.”
“We should vandalize the church, maybe steal something to mislead the motive for the investigators,” Sam suggests.
Holden taps the small box, pensive. “You think Dolly would come pick us up from Old Harry’s if we got too drunk?”
I nod, but Sam groans. “Yeah, but I’d get shit for it. And I don’t have a phone to text her.”
“Call her from the bar. It’s the best alibi we’ve got. Rosie was planning to say I was home all night and we were trying for baby number three, but this would be better. If we’re seen at Old Harry’s, it gives us an alibi away from the scene. Go in there and take a few shots and dance with a girl or two while I search. After twenty minutes, I’ll come find you and we’ll switch out. After we find it, we’ll burn the bodies together.”
“Burn both bodies? Why?” Sam asks.
“Because Fleming was an old-school Catholic,” Holden explains, holding up the paperwork he found on the desk.
It clearly states DO NOT BURN in block letters.
“Ah, shit. They didn’t believe in cremation,” I mutter. “We’re going to hell for this.”
“Maybe, but at least it’ll be after we die instead of before. Go into Old Harry’s and drink and hang out. Talk to as many people as you can. Duke, you can flirt and act like your usual whore self so that people remember it. If we rotate out like that we’ll all be seen at different times, and they can’t place any of us at the scene for long enough to have done it.Hopefully the alibis will be good enough for them to pass the crime off as random.”
“Why not just burn Jed’s bones?” I ask.
My brother shakes his head. I can see the fear in his eyes. He spent three and a half years in prison for murder. He suffered tremendously because of the orders to keep him in isolation for a good chunk of time. If this investigation reveals who this body belongs to, we’re fucked. We both might be going to jail, even though he’s the one who shot Jed. I don’t know if he’d even let me take the fall for it.
“Because it’s way too fucking obvious. We’ll burn him first, then add Fleming’s corpse on top of the ashes and burn it at a lower temperature, so there’s some left. If we burn it hot enough, maybe they won’t realize the ashes at the bottom belong to someone else. They’ll think it was a random act of corpse desecration with no connection to us.”
“No body, no crime,” I add.
Sam and I make the best show of it that we can. I buy shots for at least three women, feigning interest in all of them. Internally, I’m panicking.
Not because of the felony we’re about to commit, but because I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to explain it all to my girlfriend.
After twenty minutes, Holden walks in grinning at me and loudly ordering a whiskey sour.
“No luck,” he leans in and whispers.
Fuck. We have to find those bones.
Sam dips out next. It’s almost midnight, so most of the people in the bar are already drunk.
Sam finds the rest of the bones tucked away in a larger cardboard box. It was in a classroom that had been converted into a lab.
When he comes back after Holden and I have taken shots and talked to more people, I go back to the morgue and carefully place Jed’s bones in the incinerator. I start it up, hoping it doesn’t take too long. I manage to find some handwritten instructions that say to burn a skeleton for two hours, if the desire is complete ash. We’re cutting this shit close.
I pull my mask off on the dark walk back to Old Harry’s. Not a soul seems to be aware that we’ve been sneaking in and out of the back door one by one. We used to party here all the time together. It’s been a while, and the women have definitely missed us. The three of us dance and party and drink every ounce of liquor that’s shoved into our hands. The Redford brothers’ reputation precedes us, and people expect to see us party.
It makes my stomach turn when one blond girl I hooked up with a few years ago rubs her hand across my abs, then moves it lower.
