A Merciful Silence (Mercy Kilpatrick #4)

A Merciful Silence (Mercy Kilpatrick #4)

Kendra Elliot



ONE

There it is.

Eagle’s Nest police officer Ben Cooley hit his brakes, thankful he’d been driving a cautious thirty miles an hour. He squinted, trying to see through the smears created by his windshield wipers. Ahead of his car, one-third of the road was gone, washed down the steep side of the hill. It looked as if a monster had bitten a ten-foot-wide chunk out of the asphalt. The last three days had dropped several inches of rain in Central Oregon, and he could swear the cities were about to float away. This sort of continuous downpour happened all the time in the Willamette Valley on the other side of the Cascade mountain range, but not in his beloved—and usually dry—high desert.

To the left of the road was a gut-turning drop-off that vanished into a forest of pines. On his right the rocky hillside sloped upward, and several impromptu waterfalls cascaded down, flowing across the road. The water was supposed to feed into the ditch and funnel beneath the road to flow safely out the other side, but the quantity of water had overpowered the culvert.

“Don’t know how the other side of the state puts up with months of this rain.” No one was around to hear Ben mutter to himself. He made a conscious effort not to do it within listening distance of the other guys in his department. The last thing the police chief needed to hear was that his seventy-something officer was losing his mind.

Ben hit his flashers, called in his location, and popped his trunk.

The highway department tried to keep up with the weather, installing nets and culverts and natural drains to keep the streets safe, but every year something happened to this poor road. And since its vehicle traffic was quite low, it ranked near the bottom of the state’s priority list.

Ben set out cones and flares, wondering if anyone would even use the road before the flares burned out. He went back to his car and got Lucas on the radio.

“We need the highway department out here to assess the safety,” Ben told the Eagle’s Nest dispatcher and office manager.

“That bad?” asked Lucas.

“Definitely. The guardrail along the south edge is gone. A car is going to come by, not see the hole in time, and end up forty feet down the hill, stuck in the pines. They need to close the road.”

“I’ll call it in.”

“Send Royce or Samuel out here with some roadblocks right away because the highway department will take hours to get here. I’ve blocked the road in one direction with my car, but we need something else.”

“Will do.”

Ben carefully walked to the edge of the wide gap, always curious about the engineering of roads. He saw the dirt-and-rock support under the asphalt had simply washed away, defeated by the continuous power of the water. The thick border of the black asphalt looked like a broken Oreo cookie wafer.

He moved as close as he dared, aware he didn’t know what supported the asphalt under his feet . . . if anything.

Peering into the giant washed-out section, he spotted the edge of a huge concrete culvert six feet below the road. A slow rivulet flowed out of it while a hundred times the amount of water surged outside the culvert.

The culvert is probably jammed with rocks and dirt.

He bent over, resting his hands on his thighs, and craned his head to get a look inside the culvert.

His gaze locked on one round, pale rock.

With eye sockets. And teeth.





TWO

Twenty-four hours later, FBI Special Agent Mercy Kilpatrick watched as bones were removed from the culvert. The Eagle’s Nest Police Department had reached out to the state police for help with the removal and investigation of the remains. The team from the state police had gotten a good look inside the large pipe and immediately requested a medical examiner, who had asked for a forensic anthropologist, who had then suggested the FBI be brought in.

A long chain of requests for assistance had landed Mercy on the site.

Beside her, Eagle’s Nest police chief Truman Daly stood with his arms folded across his chest, his sharp gaze watching every move of the forensic anthropologist’s team. What had started as his case had ended up being Mercy’s. The chance of that happening had been small, and she was slightly amused, considering they’d been dating for about six months. Mercy had heard about the situation the moment Ben Cooley reported the skull to Truman and had been aware of every step of the investigation after that. A perk of sleeping with the police chief.

“That’s the fifth skull,” she whispered to Truman, knowing he could count just fine.

He nodded, his stance stiff.

It looks a lot smaller than the others. A shudder rippled through her.

The entire group of observing professionals was quiet and respectful. Two state police troopers were there to handle any traffic—which meant they stood around a lot. A forensics team from the state carefully removed the remains under the watchful eye of a tall, elegant black-haired woman Mercy knew was the forensic anthropologist, Dr. Victoria Peres.

The anthropologist ran the scene, giving orders and being in three places at once. Mercy watched her gently accept the fifth skull and study it for ten seconds longer than she had the others. Dr. Peres’s jaw tightened, and she passed it off to one of her assistants.

The rain had stopped overnight, and the water rushing under the road had slowed to a trickle. Mercy knew their respite wouldn’t last long. More rainstorms were expected, blowing in from the Pacific and down from Canada. A double whammy of weather.