Cut and Run(52)

Faith glanced up at Hayden, and he glimpsed fear and worry in her expression before she dropped her eyes, squared her shoulders, and walked out of the house. She stepped out with no hint of emotion on her face.

The warming sun was climbing in the sky now, and it reflected on a new red flag stuck in the ground and gently flapping in the breeze.

Neither spoke as they crossed the dusty yard to the ground-penetrating radar machine. Pollard turned on his computer display and showed them the image. Faith leaned forward, took one look, and instantly knew.

Hayden had seen several images like this over the years, and he knew the odd, apparently random waves demarked bones. “Do you think the remains are human?”

“Hard to say at this point,” Pollard said.

It was easy to assume buried remains must be human, but people did bury pets—or perhaps it was a trash pit with animal remains. These bones were in close proximity, not scattered.

Faith said, “They were discarded in holes like trash.”

Hayden had been to his share of horrific murder scenes, but hearing Faith’s quiet outrage threaded with pain struck him to his core. She was hurting, and that bothered him.

“The spot was marked with a stone, correct?” Hayden said.

“Yes,” Pollard said. “All the stones appear to have been pulled from the area. There’s nothing special about them individually.”

“But arranged as they are, they look like headstones,” Hayden said.

“I know some serial killers like to return to the scene of their crimes and visit their victims,” Faith said. “He would have had no problem remembering where he buried them.”

“Two more stones doesn’t mean two more bodies.” He said the words for her benefit.

“You’re wrong.” Faith reached for her cell. “They’re all headstones, and if Macy had been a few weeks later, there’d be a fresh hole with another dead girl in it.”

“Jack Crow was tortured for a reason,” Hayden said. “Someone was looking for something.”

“This place?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

“I’ll call the medical examiner’s office and have them send a crew so we can start excavating the sites.”





Josie Jones, 1988

Things I like. Flip-flops. McDonald’s french fries and hamburgers. Rain on my face. Cheers. My birthday. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” Whitney Houston. My sister. And you, most of all. None of this is your fault.

Things I hate. Broccoli. English class. Parachute pants. Perms. My foster family. This room.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Wednesday, June 27, 10:00 a.m.

Faith leaned against the medical examiner’s van, studying the collection of three red flags that now fluttered in the warm wind. Officer Pollard had found bones buried under each of the stones, and all appeared to have been in the ground for a long time.

The three grave sites were cordoned off, with a crew working on the first site. The team had decided to start at one end and work to the other, handling one grave at a time.

The excavation process was tedious because it wasn’t a matter of digging up what the ground-penetrating radar had located. The soil would have to be carefully removed layer by layer so that no evidence, including clothing and jewelry, was lost.

The crew had dug down eighteen inches into the soil. The grave had been shallow, but excavating it had taken nearly an hour.

Hayden hadn’t spoken to Faith for a couple of hours. He’d been busy searching the house and the grounds and coordinating a more extensive background search on Sam Delany. But she was glad for the solitude. So far she’d done a good job of controlling her emotions, but as Pollard had planted each flag into the ground, she had found it harder to keep her mind on point. Three sets of initials. And now three graves.

Pollard was working with Angie Chesterfield on the first site. Faith and Angie had crossed paths several times, and she’d found Chesterfield, a petite redhead, to be efficient and smart. While Pollard methodically scraped away the soil, she documented the discovery with her digital camera. She never looked in Faith’s direction or spoke in tones louder than Pollard could hear.

The community that took care of the dead was a small one, and news had traveled quickly that the body in the grave might be related to Faith. She understood why they distanced themselves from her while they worked. She’d have done the same. But she didn’t like it. It made her feel vulnerable.

Minutes later Pollard and Chesterfield stopped work. Stillness fell over the technicians as they leaned back and glanced at each other.

Faith pushed away from the vehicle, and as she tugged on fresh latex gloves, she strode toward the team. She looked into the eighteen-inch hole they’d dug to find an exposed human skull. Her breath caught in her chest. Everything around her vanished as she mentally juxtaposed the skull to the Josie Jones mug shot.

The tech gently brushed the dirt away from the bone with a soft-bristled paintbrush. Each swipe of the brush perhaps brought Faith closer to the secrets shrouding her birth. She’d always wanted to know, needed to know, her birth mother. Many times she’d imagined their first meeting, but the scenarios had never been anything remotely like this.

She was aware of Hayden moving beside her, and she knew if he touched her, she’d shatter. She may have looked cool and controlled, but she was barely hanging on right now.