Page 69 of Scorned Beauty
I was still processing the horror unspooling in my head when someone hollered at the top of the stairs. “The dogs found something!”
I raced up the stairs despite the lightheadedness threatening me with collapse. Despite Trevor yelling my name. Despite the scream that wanted to tear out of my chest.
Across the parking lot, I spotted the K-9 and ran toward it. What did it find? A body? A grave? Clothing?
I reached the fresh grave and what followed was a blur. The rush of the ocean in my ears. My chaotic breathing. The odorof lime and earth. Someone hauled me up. Got in front of me, yelling at me to get a grip. I stood dazed and stared at my hands, at the dirt under my fingernails. I’d been digging with my bare hands.
My fault.
I did this.
I fucking did this.
Sloane’s suffering was because of me.
This wasn’t happening. I wasn’t about to find Sloane in a grave. Never to see her vivid green eyes again or hear her husky voice that lulled me to a peaceful sleep.
Barking around twenty feet away jolted me out of my trance.
“We have another one!”
I closed my eyes, drained and resigned. “Sloane and her brother.” My voice cracked.
Trevor stood silently beside me and put a hand on my shoulder as we waited.
It would takeanother forty-five minutes for the forensic archeologists to arrive. The feds set up a command center under a tent. I didn’t leave the site as they worked. It was a shallow grave and perpetuators had used lime to mask the smell and speed up body decay. If this was what an out-of-body experience felt like, then I was living it. It was as if I’d become two beings. One in my physical form: stoic and emotionless in watching the proceedings. While my soul stood beside it: screaming, roaring, and raging.
They unearthed a black-tarp-wrapped form.
An exhale loosened my chest as my consciousness fused together. The body was too big to be Sloane, but my relief was short-lived when the technician revealed the face of the person who was buried.
Billy.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Sloane had asked for my help to find Billy and I viciously turned her down. But like that night of her disappearance, I willed my mind not to think of regrets. I forced my limbs to take me to the second burial site.
The techs who were dressed in biological hazard suits were carefully laying the body on the ground beside the hole. The shape could pass for Sloane’s build.
God no. I mumbled a prayer despite the desolation drowning me.
“Let me do it,” I said. I wasn’t running from my guilt. If Sloane was beneath this plastic, I wanted her face to haunt me for the rest of my life.
It was nothing less than I deserved.
After donning gloves, I gripped the blade in one hand and sliced the tarp. Exhaling, I dropped the blade and opened the slit.
Oxygen deserted me for a split second and I rocked and fell on my ass, crab-walking backward from the body.
“It’s not her,” I gasped, turning over on all fours as an overwhelming relief washed over me. “It’s not her.”
Hope came flooding back.
Trevor peered at the corpse on the ground. “Wait, is that…?”
“The missing witness.”
The feds toldme it would take them six days to get back the results from the blood in the basement and longer for their coroners to do autopsies on the bodies. Kirill wasn’t happy that I went behind his back, but he was the fucker who was obstructing the progress of the investigation.
But money buys everything including a rushed DNA analysis, and I could have the results within twenty-four hours.
