Alone (Bone Secrets, #4)(20)

Ray Lusco kneeled beside Trinity’s chair, patting her back. “Hey. We don’t know that. But you need to be ready in case that’s how it turns out. If it helps at all, it would have been like falling asleep. We don’t know what exactly killed them, but I can tell you it wasn’t violent.”

Trinity nodded, wiping at her eyes. She sniffed, and Callahan nudged the tissue box closer to her. To Victoria, he looked completely out of his element. Plenty of men froze at the sight of a woman’s tears. She knew Lusco had a daughter and a wife. He knew how to handle this type of situation.

“We’ll find out what happened to these girls. And we’ll find out who was responsible.” Callahan promised.

Trinity looked up and held his gaze, searching for truth in his eyes. She nodded.

Victoria met Callahan’s brown gaze. He was on a mission.

She believed him, too.





Ray hung up the phone on his desk. “That was an odd one. We’ve got a guy who just came in claiming to know one of the original women who was found in the circle decades ago.”

“Seriously? Where the hell’s he been all these years?” Mason was irritable after the long morning at the medical examiner’s office and glad to be back in the familiarity of his office. Watching beautiful girls get sliced up did that to him. He’d left with an overwhelming sense of urgency to solve their senseless deaths. And figure out what’d happened in the same spot decades before.

Digging into the old case, Mason was amazed at how little information there was on the original women. Like the recent scene, the old photos showed women with long dark hair, wearing white dresses. The bodies were arranged in the same circle. The main difference was the women hadn’t been discovered for nearly a week. Back then, Forest Park hadn’t been the mecca of popular hiking trails it was now.

The three girls who had been claimed all had similar sketchy histories. They hadn’t gotten along with their parents and had run off, or they’d simply wanted a fresh start and left town for a new life. One had been arrested for prostitution in Seattle and Portland in the months before her death. Her arrest photos were in his growing file. Susan Wilbanks had been an attractive young woman from Idaho. Her dark brown eyes had stared blankly at him from the photo, her mouth downturned. She looked like a woman with a lot of regrets.

What had driven her to prostitution?

It bugged the hell out of Mason that no one had stepped forward, looking for the other three women. The detectives from the old case had been unable to draw any connections between the three women who were identified. Besides Susan from Idaho, one had been from Montana and the other from Pendleton in eastern Oregon. The women back then had been slightly older than last night’s teens. The original women had been in their early twenties, possibly late teens. He wondered if Dr. Peres had made headway on clues into the women’s history. Old bones could tell amazing stories through science and technology in ways they didn’t know about in 1968. And if anyone could find something new, Victoria Peres would be that person.

How much crap would they dig through to find the truth? The story was bringing the nuts out of the woodwork, claiming they had information on the old crime.

What were the chances the guy in the lobby was legit?

The desk sergeant had screened walk-ins with stories all morning. This was the first one he’d put through since the transient, Simon Parker. A preliminary search on Simon had turned up an honorable discharge from the military and a work history in construction until three years ago. Mason wondered if an injury had put a halt to the construction jobs. Or was it the recession? No priors, nothing suspicious at all. It confirmed Mason’s gut feeling that Simon wasn’t their man.

Mason stood up and pushed in his chair. “Let’s see what he has to say.”

Ray slipped on his sports jacket over his long-sleeved peach Polo shirt. Mason eyed his own wrinkled jacket on the back of his chair and decided to skip it. He followed Ray down the hallway and into the same interview room where they’d talked to Simon.

A man paced the small room as the detectives stepped inside. His hands were clamped behind his back, his shoulders stooped, and his face set with heavy lines that spoke of a life of stress. His hair was a pure white, but his eyebrows were thick and black. Old-man brows. Coarse and spiny. Mason made a mental note to check his own brows when the interview was over. Usually Ray was good about letting him know if he was looking straggly. Ray noticed things like that.

The man eyed them from under the thick brows. His dark gaze assessing. He stepped forward and held out a hand. “Lorenzo Cavallo.”

He pegged Lorenzo’s age at late seventies. His speech was thickly accented. The detectives both shook hands and introduced themselves. Mason gestured at the chairs and Lorenzo sat heavily, sighing. He had an old manila envelope that he set on the table before him. Mason eyed it as he and Ray sat.

“What can we do for you, Mr. Cavallo?” Ray asked.

“Lorenzo, please. I heard on the news this morning about those young women they found in the forest.” Lorenzo met Mason’s gaze.

Mason nodded but said nothing.

“The newscasters talked about women who’d been found the same way there a long time ago.” Lorenzo lay a gnarled hand on his envelope but didn’t open it. “They’re saying these young women had long black hair like the women did back then. And that no one had ever identified three of the women from before.”