Stone Cold Heart (Tracers #13)(11)

“I know.” Sara looked up. “Hand me that mallet, would you?”

? ? ?

It didn’t take all morning but half. After staking out the burial site, they used string to divide it into quadrants. By ten o’clock they were digging, and by noon they were fully immersed in the painstaking process of unearthing the half-buried bones and clothing.

The work was hot and tedious, and Sara lost herself in it. Some people listened to music or audiobooks, but Sara preferred a natural soundtrack. She liked the quiet drone of the cicadas, the whisper of wind through the canyon, and the soft rasp of bristles as she dusted off bones with her boar’s-hair brush.

The sun blazed down. The temperature climbed. Sara ignored the sting of sweat in her eyes as she carefully uncovered an ulna.

“Fractured,” she murmured, more to herself than to anyone. With his earbuds in, Aaron was oblivious to her commentary.

Sara sat back and sighed heavily. Then she reached for the camera sitting under the cool shade of the little tent she’d erected for it. She snapped a few pictures of the bone, careful to document the jagged edge, before using a pair of bamboo tongs to lift the shard from the dirt. She never used metal tools directly on bone, wanting to avoid leaving marks that might later be mistaken for signs of violence.

She placed the bone in a cardboard box beside her.

“He’s back.”

She looked at Aaron. “What?”

He plucked out his earbuds. “And he brought company.”

Sara turned around. Her heart skittered as she saw Nolan coming down the path carrying a pallet of bottled water. A woman walked beside him—dark-haired, petite, dressed almost exactly like Nolan in a navy T-shirt and khaki tactical pants, with a badge and a gun on her hip. Her baseball cap said SPD across the front.

Nolan’s gaze met Sara’s as he deposited the water beside the tent. She stood and shook out her stiff legs, dusting her hands on her coveralls as Nolan and the woman approached.

“I’d like y’all to meet Natalia Vazquez,” Nolan said.

“Call me Talia.” She peeled off her sunglasses and nodded at Sara, then Aaron. She had brown-black eyes and a friendly smile.

“Talia’s the other full-time detective in my department, and she’ll be working this case with us.”

Sara introduced her team, starting with Aaron, who was suddenly at her side, eagerly shaking hands with the pretty detective. From under the tent, the grad students looked up from their sifting screens and waved.

Nolan turned to Sara. “Talia wanted to walk the scene, get a look at your setup here.”

“I’ll show her,” Aaron said.

“And I wanted to have a word.” Nolan nodded away from the group, indicating he wanted a private conversation.

The sun was almost directly overhead, but Sara found a narrow strip of shade close to the wall. Her clothes were saturated, along with her baseball cap and even her ponytail. She pulled the hat off and wiped her brow with her forearm as she looked up at Nolan.

“Thanks for the water,” she said.

“No problem. You’re getting some sun.”

“I just put block on.” She glanced at Aaron beside the excavation pit, then back at Nolan. His hands rested on his hips, and his expression was serious. “What’s up, Detective?”

He waited a beat before answering. “How’s it coming?”

“Slow.”

He nodded. “I heard what you said last night about needing confirmation. But I want to get a look at those personal items.”

“Personal items?”

“Whatever you’ve got so far.”

Sara stared up at him for a long moment, reading the determination in his eyes.

“You seem to think you might know who it is.”

“A young hiker went missing last year,” he said. “Kaylin Baird. There’s a chance it’s her.”

“A chance?”

“Problem is, her backpack was found in another park about twenty miles east of here, so it doesn’t quite add up. But still, there’s a chance, and her family’s hoping.”

Hoping. The word put a pang in Sara’s chest. She couldn’t imagine the nightmare of having a child disappear and going without answers for so many months or years that the discovery of bones was a reason to hope.

“I can show you what we have,” she said, “but you know personal items can’t be used to establish ID.”

“I realize that.”

“For positive identification, I need fingerprints, DNA, or dental records, and in my line of work, I don’t usually see fingerprints, unless I’m dealing with a water recovery.” She paused. “Do you know if she’s in the system?”

“Fingerprints? No. She was never arrested.”

“Not that system. I mean the database. NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Did the family submit a DNA sample?”

“I’m not sure. I know they were made aware of it back when Kaylin went missing, but I don’t know if they ever followed up.”

“Find out.” Sara nodded at the tent. “In the meantime, if you want to take a look at what we’ve got so far . . .” She ushered him over to the folding table where recovered items had been sorted into cardboard trays. Four of the trays contained various bones and bone fragments. The last tray held remnants of gray fabric and a heeled sandal. The leather straps were discolored, but they’d once been white.