Page 38 of Little Buried Secrets

“How bad?”

He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Margot was … she was raped. In my opinion, at least. It’s hard in cases like this one. I based my assessment on the condition her body is in and what I discovered during my examination.”

She was raped.

I stood a moment, letting it set in, wanting to believe it wasn’t true, that there was some other explanation to rationalize his findings.

“What can you tell me?” I asked.

Silas moved the cushion to the side, grabbed his phone, stood up, and walked to his desk. “Best I start from the beginning, after you left us last night.”

“All right.”

He sat in his office chair and leaned back, tapping a finger to the desk, thinking.

I sat across from him.

“It took a couple of hours to dig her body out of the shallow grave she’d been put in,” he said. “When we were able to get a good look at her, the first thing we noticed, besides the careful folding of her sweater over her face, was that she was wearing a tank top and a bra … and nothing else.”

We already knew Margot had been wearing a sweater the day she went missing. The tank top must have been underneath it.

“What do you mean by ‘nothing else’?” I asked.

“She had no panties and no bottoms of any kind. She had socks on both feet, and she was wearing one sneaker, which was a match to the other one Sebastian found.”

“Was there any other clothing in or around the burial site?”

Silas nodded. “A pair of brown pants were laid out beneath her body.”

Similar to the sweater. It seemed so odd, almost like she had been staged or placed there with a level of consideration postmortem.

But why?

“Can I take a look at the crime scene photos?” I asked.

“Of course. I should warn you … I know you’ve seen plenty of homicide photos over the years. Even so, these might be tough for you to look at, given your friendship with Rae.”

“I still need to see them.”

“I figured as much.”

Silas grabbed a file folder out of the top drawer.

“I’ll start off easy, show you the ones I took of the pants first,” he said.

He thumbed through the photos, pulled a few from the stack, and handed them to me. I stared at them for a moment, taking it all in. The pants Margot had been wearing were positioned at the bottom of the shallow grave with such perfection, it was obvious extra time had been spent to arrange them in such a way.

It puzzled me.

The killer could have done anything with those pants. He could have balled them up and tossed them into the hole. He could have burned them in another location. Or he could have taken them and disposed of them later.

And yet … he hadn’t done any of those things.

“Strange,” I said. “Who kills someone and then takes the time to arrange the pants the way they did?”

“Good question.”

My mind swirled with thoughts about the killer’s psyche that night. When killers covered their victims, it often indicated an emotional attachment, like the killer was familiar with the victim. In this instance, it was almost as if he felt some remorse for what he’d done.

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