Alone (Bone Secrets, #4)(10)

“A photo shoot? At night?”

“I know, right? That’s what didn’t make sense.” Trinity’s voice cracked.

“Who’s taking pictures?”

“This guy. I don’t know who he is. A friend of hers from a different high school put her in touch with him. He was looking for a girl with long dark hair for modeling. He made Brooke darken hers. He said everything about her was perfect for his pictures, but her hair needed to be a little bit darker.”

Red flags were waving in Victoria’s head. “Some guy? Another student?”

“I don’t know! Brooke never said. I think he was older. He had all sorts of photography equipment and had already done some other photo shoots with Brooke and some other girls—”

“He took pictures of her with other girls? Did you see them?”

Trinity shook her head. “No, I saw pictures of just Brooke. They were really good.”

Victoria glanced at her watch. She needed to get Trinity to talk to Detective Callahan. Now. “Do you know Brooke’s parents’ phone number?”

Trinity shook her head. “I know where she lives.”

“Get in the car. We’re going to stop by there. And then I’m taking you to talk to the police. Let your foster mom know what’s up, okay?”

“I’ll call her.”

“Trinity.” Victoria paused. “Do you have a current picture of Brooke?”

The girl’s eyes widened as she nodded. “She texted me one of the professional shots. It’s still on my phone.”

Victoria doubted the man was a professional. “Good. The police will need to see it.” She didn’t want to look at the photo. The girls last night were too similar to each other, and they’d blended together in her memory. She was the wrong person to ask if Trinity’s friend was one of the bodies.

She’d let someone else break her young neighbor’s heart.





Victoria passed through the quiet halls of the medical examiner’s building. She wasn’t early, but she’d beat almost everyone else. According to the cars in the parking lot, only the office manager, Anita, and Dr. Campbell were here along with his assistant, Jerry. She’d left Trinity with Anita to wait for the police detectives, writing up what she knew about her friend’s activities last night and a description of Brooke. Usually only a few employees worked the weekends at the ME’s, but more people would show up today. The deaths of kids brought an urgency to the job, driving people to search for answers as quickly as possible. She unlocked the door to her tiny office and flipped on the light switch with a sigh, appreciating the peace. It wasn’t going to last. Soon the place would be buzzing.

She wouldn’t want to be in Dr. Campbell’s shoes today. It would be a triple P day. Press, police, and parents. He was already hard at work with the victims.

She estimated she’d had four hours of sleep. She, Lacey, and Dr. Campbell had left the eerie scene close to midnight, but she hadn’t crawled into bed until 2 A.M. And then she’d spent the next hour thinking about Seth Rutledge and those girls. It’d been a difficult night. Anyone who’d seen the circle of girls would never forget that image.

The crime scene tech had been right. It’d looked like a fairy tale.

The beautiful girls waiting to be awakened by a prince. But these girls were never going to wake up.

Six sets of parents would endure the worst day of their lives. Hopefully one pair would have a happy ending if their daughter survived. Victoria knew the sixth girl had virtually no blood pressure or respirations when she’d been discovered in the woods. Something chemical had depressed their systems, slowing them down. Victoria suspected phenobarbital overdose. The heart slows, the breathing slows, everything crawls to a stop. It’d take some fast action to overcome. Possibly the surviving girl had been the last to ingest the drug or not taken as much.

Victoria said a silent prayer for the girl and her family.

Last night she’d Googled mass suicide, wondering what other drugs had been used in suicides. Surprisingly, the episodes with the Heaven’s Gate cult, Waco, and the women long ago in Portland were the only mass suicides on American soil, but she wondered how many deaths it involved to be classified as “mass.” The well-known Jonestown suicides took place in South America, although they involved many Americans.

“Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” she mumbled. She’d learned it hadn’t been Kool-Aid used in Jonestown, but its less popular cousin, Flavor Aid. How had Kool-Aid become embedded in American memory?

She wasn’t surprised to find that phenobarbital had been used in Heaven’s Gate, but cyanide had been used in Jonestown. Phenobarbital was a little easier to find. It was still widely used worldwide for treating seizures in humans and dogs. And it was low in cost. Unsurprisingly, the main complaint about taking phenobarbital was that it caused sleepiness.

The articles about the long-ago deaths of women in Portland’s Forest Park were scarce. She found some old references in The Oregonian’s archives, but it’d never been a national story. Maybe there were other mass suicides that hadn’t become part of the national memory? Her curiosity was piqued. The detectives had mentioned the old suicide case would be looked at again, and Victoria planned to be one of the lookers. She wanted to be hands-on with this case. Looking for clues to identities in deaths this old fell under her umbrella of expertise.