“No. They’re not appropriate for this gig. There’s a lot of travel, and a lot of risk. They have families. I wouldn’t feel right offering to steal them away. And this is very much up your alley. International intrigue. Stopping crimes before they start. Proactive work.”
“So I’m going to go all Minority Report on the bad guys? I’m in.”
“You don’t even know—”
Marcus huffed a small laugh. “Taylor. You’ve taught me everything I know about how to be a good cop. More than how to investigate, you’ve shown me how to work this gig with compassion and empathy, how to shut off my emotions and do what’s right for the victims. You’ve taught me how to get justice for those who would never otherwise have a chance. I’ve tried to emulate you in all that I do in this job. If you think I wouldn’t follow you down whatever path you lead, you’re nuts. I’m in. You can give me the details later when we’re not—” He waved a hand, and she nodded, pleased no end by his words and his decision.
“All right.”
He tossed her a grin. “Just tell me we’re not going to go be Fibbies. I don’t want to cut my hair that often.”
After what felt like a year, Donna finally said, “Let’s turn her.”
Taylor stood to the side while a Tyvek-suited TBI technician knelt into the soft earth, taking the body’s shoulders. Insects that were still hiding under her body skittered away. Donna eased the head out of the dirt, gently twisting the upper half of the body free, and Taylor’s breath caught. The face was missing, the insect damage and natural decomposition extreme. Too extreme.
“Oh, wow. That’s not her. No way that’s Carson Conway,” Marcus said, kneeling down for a better look.
Donna nodded. “No, it is not. This one’s been here a while. Six weeks at least.” She used the small brush in her hand to gently sweep away dirt from the girl’s hairline. “Who are you, sweetheart?”
“Shit,” Taylor said. “I mean, thank God. Carson’s still out there.” Even in the face of the death in front of her, Taylor’s heart lifted. A chance. They still had a chance to make this right.
It took another ten minutes to ease the body all the way out. The victim seemed to have been buried in an inverted pike position, bottom first into the grave, which was more like a pit, the remains awkwardly wedged in half, which had caused the long femur bone to crack apart and poke through the skin as if waving for attention. As the torso came free with a great spill of dirt, Donna stopped.
“Hold, hold, hold.”
Taylor stepped forward. “What? What’s wrong?”
“Come over here. Shine your Mag under her right arm.”
Taylor listened, shining her Maglite at the dark space under the body. It took her mind a moment to catch up with her eyes. “Oh, God. Is that…there’s more than one?”
“Definitely more than one, and definitely not that old. Older than these remains, but not as old as what I’d expect from these gravestones.”
“Not Carson. Again.”
Donna looked up, the glow from the Maglite and the setting sun casting her face an eerie silver. Taylor was able to clearly see the head and shoulders of another body, also awkwardly bent, also face down. But this body was far less recent, more than a year old, easily, the bones clearly showing inside the rotting fabric of what was probably a pink shirt at one time.
“No. Definitely not Carson. But Taylor, there are more bones in here. A lot more.”
By the dark of the moon, and the white-blue beams of the portable lights, the grave reluctantly yielded seven sets of remains in total, in varying stages of decomposition. Donna quickly determined four had been added in recent history versus the ones that were buried nearly 250 years earlier. It wasn’t hard to tell the difference, even to the laypeople. The depth of the bones, to start, was a dead giveaway. The new remains had been wedged into the ground above the three who’d lived there for so very long.
The nest, as they started calling it, was deep. Someone had taken their time creating almost an oubliette, boring down into the existing graves, stacking the bodies on top of one another, simply pushing down the previous inhabitants as new ones arrived to create a latticework of skeletons. Bones were broken, disarticulated, skulls separated from spinal columns at hideous angles. The burials had been violent, and unseemly. They felt impersonal, though, almost utilitarian. The nest was a disposal site, nothing more. It would be quite some time before they had an idea of the cause of death for these people.
Another tech was running over the whole site with a metal detector and hit pay dirt. A mobile phone, about 100 feet from where Georgia’s body had been found. There was a declination in a fallen root, and the phone was nestled deep inside. The battery was dead, but with any luck, they’d discovered the burner phone.
They launched the drone when the sun came up, and it buzzed overhead like a mechanical hummingbird, searching the areas they couldn’t easily access by foot, trying to find anything else out of place.
Taylor stayed until the bitter end, mainlining caffeine, waiting, watching, hoping, because she had to be sure, until the LIDAR and the dogs and the extremely skilled technicians and their fearless leader assured them all the bodies that rested on this land had been found, and then, with a slap on Marcus’s shoulder and a thank-you to the team, she marched down the hill to break the news to Avery Conway that her daughter was not yet among the newly discovered dead.
Thirty-One
Carson Conway awoke to darkness. The room she was in felt small, and was devoid of light, devoid of sound. The wall she leaned against was covered in what felt like cushy foam, and the whole place reeked of some sort of chemical she couldn’t identify.
The quiet was overwhelmingly claustrophobic. She’d grown up in a house full of noisy boys and their athlete friends, then moved into a dorm full of chattering people who couldn’t care less about quiet hours. She’d been surrounded by a buzzing hive her whole life, and the only time she could remember such silence was the day they buried her father. The graveyard was so still that morning that even the breeze had died, and the birds quieted their trills. It was as if the earth had held its breath while they gave her father over to its eternal embrace.
She’d felt the same sense of claustrophobia then, felt the urge to scream and cry and shatter the air with her wails, and yet nothing would break the pervasive stillness, and its return was overwhelming. She longed for the dorm, for her home, for the bakery, the scratch of a rat, anything, anything. But instead, all she got was darkness and silence.
Is this what it’s like to be dead? She’d wondered that more than once. Alone in the dark, surrounded by a velvet silence so complete she might as well be underwater? She was going to die; she just knew it. Would she meet her father immediately? The thought comforted her. If he was waiting on the other side of the veil, she could manage to stay calm until it was time to go.