Page 62 of The Wolves Come at Night
She was tied to the wall, could feel something like bandages around her head and eyes. She was hungry and thirsty. There had been food and water at least twice, but she’d lost all track of time. She was alive, and for the moment, unhurt, though the quiet clawed inside her and made her want to scream. She’d tried that once when the food came but had been struck so hard she blacked out. She had kept quiet since.
She thought she must have been drugged because today—tonight?—her thoughts came with more clarity. Her memory was fractured, like looking into shards of a mirror, the reflections distorted. She remembered a Jeep. Thinking about the worry line between Simeon’s brows when he talked. The stranger’s face on the mountain, eyes wild and scared. Scared. He’d been scared. Scared that they saw him. But why? He had a gun. Izz! Was Izz here, too? Her mom was going to kill her. Don’t think about death, stupid. Bad luck.
But she was going to die. She knew that. She was oddly at peace with the idea. That must be the drugs, or else she would be fighting to get away.
A scrape, to her left. She turned her face, heart smashing through her chest. She was blind but sensed a draft. The door must have opened.
He was here.
She whimpered.
He laughed.
Thirty-Two
Wednesday: Nashville
They met back in the task force office a week after Carson had gone missing for Donna to give the presentation currently on the screens in front of them. Donna was a forensic anthropologist by trade and a natural leader. She’d kept her team busy, made meticulous notes, written up all the details, and took pictures as the bodies came out. It took a full day for her to work her magic, taking soil samples at every level, bottling the bugs they came across, everything they could find that would give them answers on how long the recent bodies had been there before she was willing to give Taylor more details. She was ready now.
The photos showed four skeletons laid out on the tarps. One was disarticulated entirely, one still semi-identifiable as female because of the remnants of a pink dress wrapped around her legs and the ratio of her hips. One was the girl they’d found first, and there was another, bones broken but still attached.
Donna laid out her conjecture for them. She pointed at each body in turn.
“Jane Doe Four, within the last ten years. Jane Doe Three, with the pink skirt, within five. Possibly a year or two for Jane Doe Two, she’s the broken one. Jane Doe One, the one we recovered first, she’s within the last six weeks, I’ll bet. We’ve had a hot summer, the body was fully decomposed, but there was plenty of adipocere wax for me to get samples of. I have her in the CODIS database, looking for a DNA match. The rest will take me a little more time. All Caucasian, all between the ages of twenty and thirty.”
“And for the record, that also confirms none of them are Carson Conway,” Taylor said.
“Right. Not enough time has passed for this level of decomposition.”
O’Roarke shook his head ruefully. “Man, Captain, I’m sorry I popped off. You were right. There is a serial up there.”
Taylor gave the man a full-watt smile and enjoyed watching him blush. “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We don’t know what’s going on yet. I just had a weird feeling and played a hunch. I’m sorry I was right. I didn’t imagine we were going to find a killing field.” To Christie, she asked, “Do we have any sense that there might be more?”
Christie shook her head. “The dogs and I did a full search, and nothing else showed up. I think this is it.”
“Still, four bodies. I hope we can identify them.”
“We will,” Donna said. “They’re all adult women, so that narrows it down a little. They’re all in good enough shape to do the usual identification methods, and even better, we have four intact skulls with decent dentition. We’ll take radiographs and put those into the dental databases, look for matches, but we’ll also be able to do reconstructions, get an idea of what these folks looked like. Between that, dental records, and DNA, with luck, we’ll be able to ID them quickly.”
“How were they murdered?” O’Roarke asked.
Donna closed the laptop, and the photos disappeared from their screens. “We don’t know that they were. Yes, it’s very strange to be burying bodies in someone else’s grave, but until we get a thorough examination of these remains, we can’t assume anything.”
“But if they were murdered, you will be able to tell how?”
“I think so. It might take some time. We’ll be working on all the angles. Dr. Fox and I have a date in an hour to start the process. It’s long and drawn out, so the sooner I get out of here, the sooner you’ll have your answers.”
“Do you at least know who owns that land?” O’Roarke asked, clearly frustrated.
Taylor got it. Not having answers was always annoying, and this simply added to their workloads.
“The city, I think,” Donna replied.
Marcus flipped open his folder. “Actually, technically, it’s no-man’s-land. Radnor Lake on one side, a new neighborhood on the other. The homeowners association owns the land up to the top of the hill. Richland Country Club is across the street on the other side. See?” He flipped a page and the screens lit up with a topographical map. “The city owns this side of the mountain. The HOA for the golf course owns this side. The graveyard straddles the edge of the HOA’s greenbelt, but Radnor is parkland, and there’s a case to be made that it’s within the easement band that belongs to Radnor. Which means it would belong to the state. Your jurisdiction, O’Roarke.”
O’Roarke threw up his hands. “Hey, I’m not about to start playing hot potato with all this. I was just curious. That graveyard dates back to the 1700s. Do we know who sold the land to the HOA?”
“I’m still digging into that,” Marcus said. “No one has the records, but I’ve got a call in to the city archives. My buddy Kathy Lauder has retired, she would probably know this off the top of her head, but they’re looking. Whoever it is is long gone, I bet. The HOA took over the land back in the ’70s.”
