Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Six

Josie hoisted herself over the gate and walked into the woods. Behind her, Gretchen and Noah followed, twigs snapping beneath their feet. The path was exactly as Josie remembered it, leading them deep into the trees before disappearing where the forest grew too dense. Josie stopped and turned back to Gretchen. “Which way?”

Gretchen pointed to the left and Josie felt goosebumps erupt all over her body; the woods were nearly three miles long and yet she knew, almost instinctively, that they were heading toward the one section she dreaded revisiting the most. Wordlessly, Josie gestured for Gretchen to take the lead, and Noah fell in behind her. They picked their way through brush, weaving through the thick trunks of red maples and northern oaks to a giant Norway maple tree encircled with a strip of yellow crime-scene tape.

Josie felt her stomach sink as she stopped abruptly, and Noah’s chest bumped into her back. “Boss?” he said.

It was hard to say how she knew, how her body remembered, but it did. She had only been six when her father had shot himself beneath this tree. She wouldn’t have known which tree it was had her mother not insisted on marching her through the woods to look at it whenever she was feeling particularly cruel.

Josie heard her mother’s voice like a whisper soughing through the leaves over her head. “This is where your precious daddy came to die.”

Noah’s hand slid under Josie’s elbow, a gentle nudge. His voice was softer this time, meant only for her to hear. “Boss, you okay?”

Josie gave her head a shake. “Fine,” she mumbled.

Tearing her eyes from the tree, she counted up the three foxholes the Price boys had dug in a half circle around the base of the tree. The evidence response team moved around in white Tyvek suits with clipboards, cameras, and evidence flags, documenting everything.

“Those don’t look like foxholes,” Josie said.

“They were dug by kids, Boss,” Gretchen pointed out.

The holes were sloppily dug, and the larger of the three, more of a rectangular shape, had been cordoned off with string and evidence flags. The voice of the county medical examiner, Dr. Anya Feist, floated out from inside the hole. “Chief? That you?”

“I’m here,” Josie called. “What’ve you got down there?”

Dr. Feist’s head shot up, a white evidence cap holding her silver-gold hair away from her face. A camera hung round her neck. “I’ll let you know. You just stay over there. I don’t need any more people traipsing around this hole. With all the rain we’ve had, the soil is pretty soft as is. I’ve just got to excavate without this damn thing collapsing on me.” She held up her gloved hands—in one was what looked like a paint brush, and in the other was a small trowel. “My assistant is on his way. He’s done this kind of work before. He’ll help. What I need you folks to do is keep everyone away from here. And to answer your question, Chief, there’s not much I can tell you until I get these bones back to the lab.”

“You won’t even hazard a guess as to how long the body has been there?” Josie asked.

Dr. Feist rolled her eyes but said, “Nothing but bones, a body buried this deep, unembalmed? My best guess is it’s been here at least eight years, probably longer. Could even be thirty or forty years. All I can tell you is the skull has a hell of a fracture.”

Josie felt Noah’s eyes on her. She could practically hear his thoughts. Two years ago, Denton’s famous missing girls case had unearthed dozens of remains buried in a wooded area on a mountaintop and led to the discovery of two serial killers who had been operating in the area for decades. This scene felt like déjà vu. “It’s not related to the missing girls case,” she said. “We don’t even know it’s a woman.”

He gave her a weak half-smile. “You can read my mind now?”

Josie managed her own wan smile. “I’m getting better at it.” She motioned around them. “We’re at least fifteen miles away from the mountain where those girls’ bodies were found. This is something else.”

Noah frowned. “We have no matching open missing persons files, Boss. None that would be old enough to be this decomposed.”

“I know that,” Josie said. She knew exactly how many missing persons cases there were in her city at that exact moment—and in the county. She even knew their names. Noah was right. The oldest open missing persons case they had was from three years ago, and that young man was a habitual drug user and had been deemed a runaway. She took a careful step forward, her shirt brushing the crime-scene tape, and peered over the edge of the hole where Dr. Feist was painstakingly carving dirt away from a skull. “Then it’s someone who hasn’t been reported missing. One way or another, we’ll find out.”