Tainted Evidence (Evidence Series Book 10) Read online

  Tainted Evidence

  Copyright © 2020 Rachel Grant

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 9781944571344

  Copyediting by Linda Ingmanson

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in encouraging piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Some family secrets are deadly…

  Inventorying human remains can be difficult at the best of times without a creepy security guard hovering over Maddie Foster’s shoulder. Nervous about being stuck in the crypt with the strange man, Maddie asks a friend of a friend to drop by and pretend to be her boyfriend to force the guy to back off.

  Raptor operative Josh Warner recently moved to Oregon to take over as guardian to his troubled niece and open a new private security branch in the Pacific Northwest. Josh doesn’t hesitate to help Maddie and is intrigued by the brainy museologist. His protective nature kicks into high gear as he discovers she may be in very real danger.

  Tensions run hot in the summer heat as Josh’s work puts everyone he cares about at risk, and Maddie’s research into the museum collection raises questions better left buried. As their city teeters on the precipice of violence, Josh and Maddie find themselves embroiled in a deadly scheme that could reshape the nation.

  Books By Rachel Grant

  Flashpoint Series

  Tinderbox (#1)

  Catalyst (#2)

  Firestorm (#3)

  Inferno (#4)

  Flashpoint Series Collection

  Evidence Series

  Concrete Evidence (#1)

  Body of Evidence (#2)

  Withholding Evidence (#3)

  Incriminating Evidence (#4)

  Covert Evidence (#5)

  Cold Evidence (#6)

  Poison Evidence (#7)

  Silent Evidence (#8)

  Winter Hawk (#9)

  Tainted Evidence (#10)

  Evidence Series Box Set Volume 1: Books 1-3

  Evidence Series Box Set Volume 2: Books 4-6

  Romantic Mystery

  Grave Danger

  Paranormal Romance

  Midnight Sun

  20.06-a

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  Tinderbox Excerpt

  Rachel Grant’s Flashpoint Series

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This one is for Paula Johnson

  It’s been 29 years +2 days since our friendship began. From those first minutes in the van on the drive to archaeological field school and our first-ever dig, to dig bumming, volunteering at NB, that weekend in Montana when we both fell in love (with our now-husbands!), through grad school (for you), and moves to DC and Hawaii (for me), bridesmaids and births (two each), to owning our own businesses in different fields. This has been an amazing journey made possible thanks to your friendship.

  Love you!

  1

  Troutdale, Oregon

  July

  Some people might freak out at the prospect of being alone in a crypt with over two hundred skeletons—remains of people who had good reason to be pissed off at the living, no less—but not Madeline Foster. No. Maddie would give anything to be alone in this spooky, hellish basement right this very minute.

  Bring on the haunting of angry bones if it meant peace from the living, breathing, flesh-covered Troy Kocher.

  She took a deep breath and tried to quell the shaking of her hands as she opened another vault, knowing Troy was watching her every move. Inside the vault were bones identified as B-14, collected from a rockshelter in the Palouse Canyons region in 1923, according to the yellowed note card in the vault with the remains.

  The skull had wispy hair and an open mouth with yellow teeth. Hair was extremely rare on skeletons, but rockshelters offered excellent preservation, so this wasn’t surprising. Now, if the note card said “Painted Hills,” she’d have questions about the accuracy of the card’s information.

  A DNA test—the kind that didn’t destroy bones—would be possible thanks to the intact hair roots, but that wouldn’t be necessary in this circumstance. It was obvious these remains were ancient and indigenous.

  From the slope of the forehead, she guessed this person was male, and from the closure of the cranial sutures, he was probably over thirty-five at the time of death, but she wasn’t skilled enough in that area to make more than basic guesses. Her job was to inventory the collection and research the remains to determine where they’d been originally buried. If she could show the remains had been removed from federal land, these bones and any associated funerary objects would be repatriated to one of several Native American tribes. Not all the remains had a handy note card like this one, but there were file cabinets upstairs full of field notes that would aid her research and—even better—piss off Troy.

  The actual physical remains wouldn’t be analyzed for anything beyond trying to determine which tribe had the right to repatriation of the bones so they could be laid to rest again, after having been looted by the Kocher family patriarch, Otto Kocher, eighty to a hundred years ago. The jury was still out on which Kocher was the more vile, Otto or Troy.

  Maddie was betting on a hung jury on that score as Troy, who happened to be Otto’s great-grandson, was now acting as security guard, supposedly protecting his great-grandfather’s legacy, but the only threat that concerned him was clearly Madeline herself, who, thankfully, had federal law on her side as she dismantled Otto’s legacy and collection bone by bone, artifact by artifact.

  Troy wore a full utility belt—gun, Taser, big-ass flashlight—all to guard a museum that had closed to the public a year ago. She knew exactly who he’d donned the belt to intimidate, and it wasn’t the bones in the crypt. He wanted to scare Maddie, and, unfortunately, he was doing a damn good job.

  Troy, his sister Anne, and a half dozen Kocher cousins Maddie hadn’t met yet, were angry, first at the closure of their inherited privately owned museum, and then at the fact they were subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act at long last.

  In Oregon, it was illegal for human remains to be put o
n display. The Kochers had circumvented that law by storing all the skeletons in these vaults and claiming they never used human remains in the upstairs exhibits. But everyone knew they rotated exhibits in the back room, which was always magically closed when tribal members or other authorities showed up. But with the advent of social media, tourists couldn’t resist the skeleton selfie—horrifying photos of museum visitors playing with the bones as if they were movie props and not human beings who’d been stolen from their final resting place.

  Enough photos appeared online that the state of Oregon could no longer look the other way. After more than six decades of operation, the museum closed for good.

  Now the family wanted to sell the house, but they couldn’t sell a house with a basement full of human remains that weren’t part of an historic or otherwise legal cemetery, burial ground, or crypt. So they’d decided to donate the entire collection of artifacts and remains to the Columbia Legacy Museum, another small, privately owned museum, but on the Washington side of the river. Conveniently, Washington didn’t have a law on the books that prevented displaying of human remains.

  The Kochers had managed to avoid a NAGPRA reckoning when the federal law was enacted in 1990, but once the papers were signed with CLM, they discovered that the donation made the collection subject to a NAGPRA inventory because CLM had just been awarded a federal grant to upgrade their climate control system. Once federal dollars were in play, museums—even privately owned ones like CLM and the Kocher Collection—became subject to federal law.

  Hello, NAGPRA. Goodbye displaying human remains like trophies for tourists. At least she hoped that would be the case. If she could show the remains had been collected from federal land, then federal agencies—in this case likely the Bureau of Land Management—would be forced to repatriate the remains to culturally affiliated tribes.

  Oregon and Washington tribes had been trying for decades to reclaim the remains of their ancestors from the Kocher family, but NAGPRA had no bearing on private collections. Now, at last, Maddie could help see justice was done.

  Ironically, it was the Kochers themselves who’d hired her. They’d had no choice and were paying a hefty price for the inventory that would dismantle the collection. To say the Kocher family was not pleased was putting it mildly. They felt they owned the bones—to which they had no genetic tie—and returning them to the tribes was theft of their property. Bones Otto had stolen from the ground.

  So yeah, Maddie wasn’t a fan of Troy, or any of his klan with a K. And now, on day one of her inventory, he was doing his best to scare her, even to the point of wearing a gun and Taser and sneaking up on her in the quiet crypt.

  She’d be working in this house alone with him for at least ten more days, and the hell of it was, she was scared. Any guy who’d wear that kind of weaponry in this situation probably wouldn’t hesitate to use them and claim his actions were justified.

  He hovered over her shoulder. She could feel his breath on her neck. “You get nightmares after handling so many bones all day?” he asked.

  While instinct would have her stepping to the side and ceding the territory to him, she wouldn’t retreat or he’d end up backing her into a corner. She elbowed him as if by accident and ran the note card through her portable document scanner, annotating the file with a quick count of how many bones were in the vault and a checklist of which elements were present.

  Her goal today was to have a look inside every vault and scan any documentation. She wouldn’t put it past the family to have removed remains if they thought they could get away with it, so she needed a baseline inventory.

  Starting tomorrow, she’d do a more detailed catalogue, with a goal of recording the contents of at least twenty-five vaults a day. She would record every last button and bead in this museum.

  Troy moved too close again as she scanned another card from another vault. She stepped on his foot, not accidently.

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry,” she lied. “You’re standing too close. I need room to do my job.” He didn’t move or say a word, so she turned to face him and held his gaze. She didn’t smile or pretend she didn’t know exactly what he was doing. “You need to step back and let me work.”

  He glared at her, then finally stepped back. He looped his fingers through his utility belt, one hand close to the gun, the other by the Taser. “You didn’t answer my question. You get nightmares?”

  “No. I don’t scare easily, Mr. Kocher.” That was a damn lie. She was scared of Troy, and he’d likely seen her shaking hands. She’d claim it was due to hunger—which was partially true. She had at least forty more vaults to open before she’d be done and could get out of here. She wouldn’t stop to eat a protein bar. Anything that prolonged this time with Troy looming over her wasn’t worth it.

  “We’ll see about that,” Troy said.

  She set down her tablet and faced him again. “Are you threatening me?”

  His eyes went wide and fake innocent. “What? No. Of course not. I just meant you might get nightmares tonight.”

  “Mr. Kocher, this will go much faster if you leave me alone.”

  “Why do you care if this goes fast? Aren’t you paid hourly? Take your time.”

  “I’d think you’d be eager for me to finish for the day so you can go home.”

  “Darlin’, this is my home.” His gaze raked her from head to toe. “And I like having you here.” He gave her a mocking grin. “Usually, it’s just me and the stiffs.”

  Her scalp tingled as her fear ratcheted up a notch. “Well, my boyfriend will be upset if I’m late for our date tonight.” The lie came easily. Anything to let the guy know there was someone out there who knew where she was and who expected her at a particular time.

  He cocked his head. “Boyfriend? Too bad.”

  What did he mean by that? Too bad that she had a boyfriend? Or too bad that she would never leave this crypt alive?

  She pulled out her cell phone. Given that this was a real, underground crypt beneath the 1890s-era Victorian mansion in a rural area with spotty cell phone service, she had zero bars down here. “Speaking of, I’d better call him and check in. He’s eager to hear how my first day is going.”

  She headed for the stairwell to the exterior exit before Troy could stop her and hurried up into the sunlight. Her mind raced as she tried to figure out who she should call besides her boss. She didn’t want to freak out Sienna Aubrey Vaughn, co-owner of Aubrey Sisters Heritage Preservation, because the woman was on bed rest for the last weeks of her pregnancy. This stress wouldn’t be good for mother or baby.

  Unfortunately, Larkspur Aubrey, Sienna’s sister and co-owner, was out of the country for the next month. Maddie needed to handle this herself.

  She stepped outside and held out her phone, divining for cell service bars. She glanced to the north, toward the driveway, shaded with giant trees that predated the house by fifty years, and the high riverbank to the east. She opted for the river in hopes that the lack of trees would deliver a stronger signal. She glanced back and saw Troy had followed her outside and now stood watching her from the porch of the old house.

  At least he was too far away to overhear.

  She scrolled through her contacts list. She considered calling her brother. He probably had a staffer he could send to play boyfriend. But she’d never asked Alan for a favor like this before and didn’t like the idea of starting now. The rift might be new, but it was wide and deep.

  Inspiration struck when she saw Trina’s name. She quickly hit the call button and turned her back to the house so Troy couldn’t read her lips. It was seven p.m. in DC. She prayed Trina would answer. Leaving a message wouldn’t be enough.

  Relief rippled through her when she heard her old college friend say, “Hey, Madds! What’s up?”

  Maddie wasn’t a casual caller, so the concern in Trina’s voice was warranted. “Hey, Treen. I’m in a bit of a bind.” She glanced over her shoulder and confirmed that Troy remained on the porch, watching her. “Y
ou know that Raptor operative who just moved to Portland, the one you were hoping to fix me up with?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  Maddie shook her head and smiled. “Yes, you were, but it’s cool. I sort of need him, if he’s available, to show up at this place where I’m working and pretend to be my boyfriend. I’ve got a security guard slash angry looter’s descendant who’s giving me the creeps.”

  “Is this that NAGPRA project for the looter museum?”

  “Yep. The security guard is Troy Kocher, Otto’s creepy great-grandson. Today is my first day, and he’s setting off all sorts of alarm bells. I’m stuck working here for the next ten days and then have months of follow-up work, so I need to shut him down now. I’ll pay whatever Raptor’s rate is for this kind of thing.”

  A few weeks ago, Trina had told her the guy had moved to Portland because he was opening a Raptor office in the city. She’d never be able to afford an actual bodyguard, but surely she could cover a one-hour fake-boyfriend drive-by?