Page 72 of Never Stay Gone
“She didn’t use drugs, Dakota. The worst thing she did was drink too much these past few months, and that was because of me, because she was unhappy. She picked up smoking at the same time, probably from Danielle.”
“You don’t like cigarettes.” Shane didn’t want to kiss him after he’d smoked, but Shelly got a pass?
“No, I don’t. It was one more thing that drove us apart. I wasn’t… I wasn’t attracted to her in the way a fiancé should be, and when she smoked, that just made her even more unattractive to me.”
Now he felt like an asshole. “’M sorry, Shane. I’m sorry.”
“Whatever you found, it wasn’t hers. I swear.”
Dakota closed his eyes. A broken picture frame, the glass jammed deep into her throat. Drugs in the jewelry box. Khaki fibers under her fingernails. “Are you, uh, comin’ back over tonight?” he breathed.
“Yes. If… that’s okay?”
“’Course it’s okay.”Never be away from me. Stay. Always.“I gotta get goin’. But I’m gonna find who did this. I swear.”
“I know you will. I know it.”
“I’ll call you again in a bit. I love you.” He hung up.
Everything Shane had said rolled around in his head, smashing up against everything else in the case. Six sets of remains in a grave, one murdered woman in her home. Carly Hurst mutilated and left, to the killer’s mind, unidentifiable. A pattern and no pattern at all: of the timing, of the manner of death, of the location of the bodies. An evolution in how the killer hunted? Or a disruption of his dumping ground and MO?
Where the hell was Frank Lynn?
Who the hell was Jessica meeting at that Odessa motel during the rally, when everyone thought she was right there?
Jessica made a call.Drug charges dropped. Joey set free.
Dakota’s mind switched gears, dropping back to the past. Whirring through time, to when he was a brand-new Texas Ranger, newly assigned to Company A out of Houston. He was fresh from the army and dropped onto the cold case desk to cut his teeth. He was supposed to review old cases and take in the investigative steps of the departments that had kicked their files up to the Rangers. Find the cracks others had missed.
There’d been one file… Colder than ice, a missing young woman, supposedly a sex worker with a troubled past. Not unusual for a missing woman, not even unusual for a cold case.
Jessica made a call.
He texted Bennet first, asking for anything he had on the Carly Hurst investigation, before he called Dr. Trevino back.
“Ranger Jennings, don’t tell me you’re on the way to El Paso.”
“No ma’am. Still parked in the desert, in fact.”
“Do you need a tow truck?”
He chuckled. “I wanted to ask you a favor. You know the Texas Killin’ Fields?”
“Of course,” she said. “Who doesn’t? The body dumping ground south of Houston, off Interstate 45. How many bodies have they pulled out of those square miles?”
“A truly depressin’ number. Hey, you think that dirt on those old bones could have come from there?”
She took her time answering. “It’spossible. Gulf Coast hardwood forest regions have generally acidic soil. That would be about the right area.”
“And you said they was a decade old, right?”
“At least a decade.”
He did the math in his head. It was possible. “Can you run those bones against a missing person for me?”
“I don’t see how. I wasn’t able to pull any usable DNA, and the teeth are in too poor a condition to do a quality comparative identification. Besides, I already ran what I have through the databases. If your missing person was a match to what I was able to submit, then there should have been a hit already.”
“The girl I’m thinkin’ of was never put in the system,” he said carefully. Maybe Dr. Trevino would know, with her love of Texas gossip. “She’s an older case. You ever heard the name Holly Holt?”
