When You See Me (Detective D.D. Warren #11)(26)

I pull a little too hard and it plunges from the opening onto the ground. I gasp, jump back, then immediately crouch down. It looks like bones. So many tiny, tiny bones.

I’ve done it. I’ve found . . .

“A mouse skeleton,” Keith says. I glare up at him, then poke the pile a bit more.

Dammit, the bones are too small, and now that he’s mentioned it, they do form more or less the shape of a mouse.

“Probably an owl’s den,” he says. “Looks like the guy had a good dinner.”

I scowl. “Don’t owls swallow the entire thing? Produce owl pellets or something like that?”

Keith blinks at me. “Oh. You might be right.”

“Score one for rural education,” I tell him. “I even touched one of those pellets at the local nature park, so whoever left behind these remains wasn’t an owl. But you’re right, they appear to be mice bones.”

Just then we hear something. Barking in the distance.

D.D. jogs closer. “Sounds like the dogs made a discovery.”

The barking goes on and on.

“Kind of a big discovery.” D.D. reaches for her phone just as it starts buzzing. She glances at the screen. “Quincy,” she informs us, then places it to her ear.

“Yeah. Got that. Dogs made a hit. What? You’re sure? Okay. We’re headed over.”

She punches off the call, turns to us with renewed intensity.

“The dogs found missing bones,” Keith says instantly.

“No. The dogs found another body.”

For a second, none of us speak. None of us can speak.

“There are more?” I ask softly.

“At least one more grave. Quincy wants us to go help.”

“A dumping ground,” Keith exclaims. “We’ve found a serial killer’s dumping ground.” He sounds excited. I know he can’t help himself.

But just for a moment . . .

I am sad. I am scared. I am lost.

I am one of those girls all over again.

“You can go back to the hotel if you want,” D.D. tells me gently.

As if I really could.

I shake my head. I turn back toward the direction we came from. Keith makes some adjustments to his compass. Then as one, we move toward the dead.





CHAPTER 11





KIMBERLY





THINGS WENT A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY than expected,” Kimberly Quincy said into the phone.

It was nine P.M. She was finally back in her motel room after one of the longest days of her career. She’d spent the past few hours in conversation with her supervisor, plus the taskforce team. Now, she needed fifteen minutes of sanity before the next round of logistical planning. Through the phone, she could hear her girls chattering away in the background. Nine P.M. was bedtime. No doubt they were taking advantage of Mac’s distraction to launch one last misadventure.

The sounds of real life. Kimberly could never decide if such normalcy was the most beautiful or most disconcerting noise after a day such as this one.

“You find more bones?” Mac asked from their home in Atlanta.

“Bodies. We found more bodies.”

A pause. “Girls,” he said to their daughters. “Go pick out something to read. I’ll be back in a sec.”

“Last time you tried that, they beat each other with the books instead.”

“But it did wear them out,” Mac countered.

She heard a click. A door closing. Mac retreating from the girls’ adjoining rooms in order to head to the master for a moment of privacy. She closed her eyes. Let herself picture it. Their modest ranch-style home with its open family room, overstuffed sofa, jumbled floor. One bedroom awash in purple (Eliza’s). A second room adorned in shades of blue (Macey’s). Both filled with an assortment of sports trophies, stuffed animals, and well-thumbed reads. Then there was her and Mac’s space, where the bed was never made and family photos lined most surfaces and the treadmill sat in the corner where it was genuinely used during the hot, humid days of summer but served as a substitute clothes hanger the rest of the year.

She kept meaning to paint an accent wall in the bedroom. And to organize the closet and tidy up the master bath. But the truth was, she never had that kind of time, and probably wasn’t even that kind of person. She and Mac lived for their family and their jobs. Which she liked to think made them perfect for each other.

“From the beginning,” Mac said.

“The cadaver dogs found three more bodies.”

“Three more?”

“At least. We dug down enough to unearth three skulls, but withdrew to wait for the forensic anthropologist, Dr. Jackson. Maybe there’s more underneath? I don’t know. Best we could see was a tangled mess of bones.” Kimberly’s hand shook slightly holding her cell phone. “A mass grave, Mac. When was the last time you heard of a serial killer burying three victims at once?”

Mac didn’t answer right away. She didn’t expect him to. She still didn’t know what to make of the day’s discovery and she’d had hours to ponder it.

“How old is the grave?”

“The remains appear fully skeletal. We’ll need to wait for Dr. Jackson and her team for additional details. I’m wondering about the shallow burial. Most things people want to keep secret, they bury deep. But all four of these bodies were barely interred. Meaning our perpetrator is someone who knows the area well and was confident the graves wouldn’t be discovered? Or didn’t have the time or strength to dig a full grave? Flora says Jacob Ness wasn’t the fittest guy around. I don’t know.”