Page 23 of Never Stay Gone
“I’m sending another copy now,” Dr. Trevino said as Shane parked the truck on the gravel shoulder.
Dakota scooted across the bench seat while Shane woke his laptop up. They ended up side by side in the middle of the truck, shoulder pressed against shoulder, the laptop stand in front of them.
Dakota rolled his neck as he put his cell on speaker. He tried not to feel Shane’s heat coming through his clothes, bleeding into him. Shane had always run hot. Touching him was like touching the sun, like tracing fire with his fingertips. On nights in Afghanistan, when he was so fucking cold he thought his teeth would break, he was shivering so hard, all he’d wanted was to bury his face in Shane’s chest and feel Shane’s desert-hot body wrap around him. Now, Shane was going to set him ablaze. Ignite the three-by-three portion of his shoulder where they kept brushing, kept touching. He shifted, trying to put some space between them.
Shane’s gaze bored into his laptop screen. His nostrils flared. He didn’t blink as he pulled up his email.
“We’re waiting for the pictures to load, Doc,” Dakota said.
“Mmm.” Dr. Trevino sucked on her cigarette again and blew out the smoke, right across the phone speaker. They heard the crackle all the way in Big Bend. Dakota could almost taste the nicotine.
Shane’s screen filled with a photo of their six victims, arranged in a row in the morgue and ready for their autopsies. It looked like a progression line of decay, like something found in a textbook. “Got the pics, Doc.”
“First things first: what do you see?” she asked.
“Order. Timin’,” Dakota said. “Steady intervals.”
“That was my impression as well. And for the most part, that’s correct. From left to right, starting with the Klein body, the victims appear to be separated by approximately thirty-day intervals.”
“Appear to?”
“Take a look at bodies three, four, five, and six. There are close-ups in the next few photographs.”
He and Shane moved closer to his laptop, both of them squinting at the overview shot before moving forward and studying the individual photos.
Body number three was Amber Serrano. He recognized her tattoo, even through the massive decay and decomposition disfiguring her chest. It was that tattoo and a single skinned finger-glove print that had determined her identification.
Body four was as badly decayed as Amber was, but he didn’t recognize a single distinguishing feature.
Bodies five and six were skeletonized, one calcified and pale, the other brown and mottled with dirt and age. He peered at the bleached-white bones of the fifth skeleton, taking a closer look at the skull. “No teeth in body five?”
“None,” Dr. Trevino said. “They were removed postmortem.”
Huh. Dakota frowned. He scooted closer to Shane’s laptop—which brought him closer to Shane. His whole left thigh pressed against Shane’s hip and leg. He could feel Shane breathing, each expansion of his ribcage pressing into the side of Dakota’s arm.
“Notice anything else about body five?”
His gaze swept the close-ups, moving over the bones of the skull and down to the throat—fractured—the clavicles, and the ribs. He saw hairline breaks everywhere, but he couldn’t tell if they were from the grave and decay or from antemortem violence. The pelvis said female: the U-shaped sciatic notch, the disarticulated composite arch, the wide subpubic angle. He studied the femurs. Moved his gaze and caught the delicate bones of the skeleton’s hand laid out on the steel table.
Theincompletehands. There were the carpals, a handful of metacarpals. No phalanges, though. No finger bones on either hand. He checked the feet. No toes. “All digits missin’?”
“Fingers and toes were all cut off. I found evidence of cut marks through the bones at the first knuckle, where the digits meet the metacarpals and tarsals. What does it say to you, Ranger, when you find a body with all the identifying features removed? No teeth, no fingerprints? And—you see all those cracks in the bones? Those U-shaped fractures indicate fresh bone that’s been burned.”
Dakota whistled softly. He sat back, slumping against Shane’s bench seat and Shane’s shoulder. Shane stayed motionless. “So who the hell is she?”
“I’m pulling all the rabbits out of my hat to try and find out. She was burned for a long time, long enough to calcify most of her bones and remove her tissues, even though she hasn’t been dead that long. I’m trying to find a bone that still has DNA left to extract. I’ll let you know if I’m able to find anything.”
“Not dead that long. What do you mean?”
“I’ll get to that shortly. On to the next intriguing development.” Dr. Trevino lit another cigarette, the sound of her lighter snapping through the speakerphone. “Go to picture number six,” she said.
Shane opened the picture attached to the email report, and a new ordering of bodies appeared. Jessica Klein, again, at the front of the line on the left, followed by Libby Lynn. But instead of Amber Serrano as body number three, the burned and mutilated skeleton came next. Then the unknown, decayed corpse, and then finally Amber Serrano’s putrefied remains. Last in line was a mostly complete skeleton, the brown, dirt-covered set of bones.
“This is the correct chronological order of your victims’ deaths,” Dr. Trevino said. “Klein, approximately thirty-one days ago. I estimate she died the night she went missing. Lynn, approximately sixty days ago, based on decay and insect activities.”
Jackson had said he’d last seen her about two months before, as she was leaving town, when Shane gave her money to get gone.
They needed to get to the truck stop, pull the surveillance tapes. Confirm whether or not she made it from the Montgomery spread out to the interstate. Then, from there, they could check the interstate cameras, see if they could find evidence of her driving. Narrow the circle down to where and when Libby Lynn crossed paths with whoever put her in the ground.
