His Garden of Bones (Skye Cree Book 4) (10 page)

Josh interrupted the young mom. “That’s an awful decision to have to make, whether or not you stay together as a family or sleep in a warm bed.”

“That’s what we thought at the time,” Hank said.

Skye shifted gears, changing the subject back to tour guide. “It’s a bit of a climb. The apartment is a fourth-floor walkup. That’s a lot of stairs to deal with when you have a baby.”

“The stairs are fine,” Melina assured her. “I’m usually in much better shape when I don’t have the flu.”

They scaled the other floors in silence because Melina needed to take a break after the third landing. Once they reached the top floor, Skye took out a key to a unit at the end of the hallway. She swung the door back and let the couple go in first.

“It’s basically a rectangular box. But there’s a little love seat, a bed, a kitchenette with a two-burner stove, a microwave, and a compact-sized refrigerator. As you can see there are dishes, pots and pans, and just about everything else you’ll need for putting together a meal.”

Melina spun around in a circle and blinked back tears. “Oh my God, it’s better than our last place. It’s beautiful. I love it. We can really stay here?”

Skye let out a laugh. She’d never had anyone consider her little studio wonderful or beautiful before now. “Absolutely.”

“Are you sure we aren’t putting you out of your home?” Hank asked, running his hand over the full-sized antique bed that sat in the corner. “This place will suit us just fine.”

Melina dashed to the sliding glass door and eyed the rows of plants lining the balcony. “Are those peppermint plants?”

“Skye loves to grow her own herbs,” Josh added. “You have fresh mint and sage at your fingertips. And I see they’ve all been recently weeded,” he added with a wink.

“So maybe I’ve been here a time or two since Thanksgiving to make sure the tarragon doesn’t die from neglect,” Skye confessed. “Those plants in the corner growing on the mini trellis are cherry tomatoes. They’ll bloom in a couple of months.”

“We want to pay rent on this place,” Hank announced. “We have sixty-seven dollars cash that we’ve been hoarding for food. I know it isn’t much but… It’s yours if you’ll let us stay here.”

Josh noticed Skye’s eyes were almost as watery as Melina’s.  “How about we go back to the job site while Skye helps Melina settle in here with the baby? The two of us will go over the job again, start fresh. We’ll discuss the specifics of your getting back to work and what I expect. Meanwhile, I’ll come up with a lease for you guys to sign and we’ll take it from there.”

When the baby started rubbing his eyes and began to cry, Melina said to Hank, “Before you go, could you bring up the port-a-crib from the back of the car? Alec needs to go down for his nap.”

“Sure. I’ll get the crib and make another trip to grab the box with our clothes.”

As soon as the men took off, Skye looked adoringly at the little boy, itching to touch. Instead of that, she pointed out the best place to stick the crib. “There’s room to set it up right here by the little kitchen table.” She couldn’t wait any longer to reach out and run her fingers through the few strands of hair on the infant’s head. “How old is he anyway?”

“Eight months. Hank and I were doing fine until he lost his job. We aren’t bad parents.”

“Of course you aren’t. People go through rough times. It happens.”

“I’m so glad Hank found this job. I’m glad he didn’t get fired.” Melina coughed several times before adding, “I’m usually pretty busy with the baby but if you ever need help with stuffing envelopes or answering the phone down at that foundation of yours, you let me know. I’d love to do whatever needs doing to help out.”

“Good to know. For now, I’ll get you and Alec squared away before I leave you two alone. You both look exhausted, like you could sleep for a week.”

“Being here makes me feel normal again.” Melina reached into the bag and brought out a bottle of milk. “Look at that. You even have a microwave. I feel like I’m in the luxury suite at the Ritz-Carlton. Would you hold Alec while I heat this up?”

“Uh, sure.” Skye reached out her arms and the baby fell into them, curling up against her chest.

That’s the picture Josh saw when he walked through the door carrying a box of clothes—his beautiful wife clutching an adorable infant up against her heart. He captured that image and put it to memory, knowing full well Skye wanted a baby. Maybe it was time to bring up the subject of adoption and stick to it. So far, they’d tabled that discussion at least a dozen times, using a variety of excuses.

As quickly as he considered bringing it up, he put the idea on ice. Who in their right mind would bring a child into the mix when mommy went out every night to face the bad guys? How would that even work anyway? Better if he stalled. Bringing up that quagmire topic would lead straight to quicksand for sure—for now anyway.

O
nce Josh and Skye got the couple and baby settled into the apartment, they headed to the Artemis Foundation—Skye’s three-hundred-square-foot dot of a space in the same high-rise that housed Ander All Games.

If they wanted to catch the man responsible for mutilating three young women, they had a lot of work to do.

From its inception, the foundation had been set up with one purpose in mind—to locate and bring back the missing: those who’d disappeared under questionable circumstances, who’d vanished without a trace. Their age or gender didn’t matter.

But somewhere along the way, the dynamics of their mission statement had changed. Families with missing loved ones or victims of violent crimes often became disillusioned with the system that couldn’t provide them with answers. When they showed up at Skye’s door looking for help, she didn’t have the heart to turn them away. Assisting law enforcement to solve certain homicides had now become part of their everyday routine.

Skye understood better than most how family members suffered, many times for years without resolution. Her own parents had been in the same boat—heartbroken from the moment they’d learned their twelve-year-old had been stolen off a playground in broad daylight, with them at a barbeque mere feet away.

But thanks to Kiya and the power of her Nez Perce heritage, that little girl had escaped her captor. She’d managed to outsmart Ronny Whitfield, the sexual predator who had nabbed her.

Since that day, she’d grown stronger. And the night she walked down a certain alleyway only to save Josh Ander from a mugging had been her turning point.

Together the two had built The Artemis Foundation into more than a local clearinghouse, more than just a database, more than a physical place to collect and then sit on a pile of useless data.

To make the most of that data, Josh had put together a team of computer hackers—Leo Martin, Reggie Bechtol, and Winston Reeker. They excelled at banging through firewalls to retrieve and accumulate streams of information that often turned into key pieces of the puzzle used to nab the bad guys.

Always up for doing whatever was necessary to crack a case, Leo, Reggie and Winston had taken to hanging out here. Whenever they weren’t upstairs at Ander All Games, they could be found manning the bank of phones or organizing the massive amounts of case files.

This morning, while Josh signed checks, Reggie and Winston tackled the mail together, sorting through mountains of letters containing pictures sent in by families from as far away as Florida.

Skye tacked the photographs up on the map she had on the wall and stacked the letters on the corner of her desk to enter into the database.

Leo strolled through the door, his arms full of books and papers. An imposing figure at six-three, his height made a lot of people gape, but it was likely the dreadlocks down to his shoulders that had them taking a third hard look. Like Reggie and Winston, Leo was young, brilliant, and had shunned the standard path to a nine-to-five job. Working as contractors for Ander All Games, the hours the trio put in earned them plenty of money. Yet each man lived without many of the trappings associated with a six-figure income. They had apartments in the city, and somehow managed to avoid owning a car, although Winston did go everywhere on his ten-speed. All three men shared one valuable trait—a willingness to go the extra mile for the foundation. Each had a good-hearted nature that made for an enjoyable work environment. They often clowned around to cut the tension that built up in the office.

Skye had long decided the place wouldn’t be the same without them or their dazzling technical contributions.

Leo let the heap of folders fall into a vacant chair and slapped down a printout of names onto Skye’s desk. “That list you emailed me after Gwen DeLargo went missing yesterday keeps growing. Take a look at the statistics I extracted last night while Winston ran the names.”

“What am I looking at?” Skye asked, thumbing through the pages. “I gave you the list of Seattle’s missing females I’d accumulated over the last few years. I wanted you to make sure I hadn’t missed any.”

“I improvised and added to your instructions. I went back farther than you had, as far back as fifteen years. Our list shows forty-five young women have gone missing from an area that spans as far north as Bellingham, Washington and as far south as Medford, Oregon. And as you can see, I branched out west to Idaho.”

“But these names can’t all belong to our killer,” Skye stated, not wanting to believe there were so many women who’d gone missing at the hands of their mutilating monster. But something about Leo’s face told her he felt different.

“That’s what I thought, too. But you know what they say about assumptions. Most of these are teens who went missing from schools, malls, parks, public places, even three from a library. I narrowed down the field, chose not to include those over the age of thirty, or who didn’t fit your profile.”

“Leo, I appreciate your initiative but there’s no way to know for certain these are all connected, no way at all,” Skye declared. “Our guy mutilates his victims.”

Stubbornly Leo hung in, clinging to his theory. “Just hear me out. All the women on that list share one common, undeniable denominator. No one has seen or heard from them since the day they disappeared, no bodies located, none ID’d, no activity on their social security number or credit cards. Zero. Winston and Reggie were very thorough on that score. They triple-checked the info against the names and dates of birth. So if they haven’t been found we don’t know they
weren’t
mutilated.”

“We don’t know for sure they’re dead, either,” Josh added from the doorway. “And a fourteen-year-old rarely has her own credit card to follow a paper trail,” Josh continued as he handed Leo a check. “Here you go. Your Christmas bonus.”

Leo took the paper, stared down at the amount. “Contractors don’t usually qualify for bonuses.”

Winston came around the corner. “It’s for our work here, isn’t it?”

Josh smiled. “You guys often work late into the night. You deserve to get paid for it even if it only comes once a year. ” When Winston tried to hand the check back to him, Josh held up both hands. “If you don’t want it, donate it to the charity of your choice.”

“But all of us came on board knowing this is volunteer work,” Winston protested. “Okay, I’m donating it back to the foundation.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Skye added. “Josh and I talked about this. We’re able to keep our overhead and expenses to a minimum. We have a printer around the corner who donates paper stock each time we circulate flyers. You guys donate your valuable time every day to the cause. A bonus is long overdue.”

“If you’re sure. Then thanks, boss,” Winston said, finally tucking the check into his shirt pocket.

Skye shifted the conversation back to business. “If that’s settled, let’s get back to the list. Josh is right, teenagers don’t have much of a credit history.”

Leo picked up his train of thought. “It’s true someone that young wouldn’t but most have social security numbers you can plug into the system to see if they’ve been employed during the years they’ve been gone.”

“And no activity usually indicates… Sinister circumstances,” Josh noted as he used the corner of the desk for a place to sit.

“It doesn’t bode well, that’s for sure. When we compiled the list, we eliminated the ones we came across that you and Skye had already pegged as runaways.”

Josh winced. “That was a call we made based on information the families gave us.”

Skye folded her arms across her chest. “Just so you know, it was a case-by-case decision. We don’t lump kids in that category without strong indicators they bolted on their own. And in some of those disappearances, we’re still open-minded enough to keep them in a separate database.”

Leo shifted his huge feet. “It’s a good move. But after excluding them that left the forty-five names. The most interesting one we ran across is the oldest case and involves the youngest victim. An eleven-year-old girl from Pocatello, Idaho, by the name of Camilla Prentiss who went missing from a neighbor’s house where she’d gone to babysit on a Saturday night. Camilla was never seen or heard from again. She just vanished out of the house, out of the neighborhood, out of town. The police files show she had a good home life and no reason to run away.”

“But I wanted you to focus on Washington State, specifically the Seattle area,” Skye said stubbornly. “So many other unrelated cases complicate matters.”

“I know but… There are four more in Idaho that fit, each about a year apart. It’s almost like every spring he had to… Make some kind of statement. There’s more. There’s a string of missing seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds from Oregon to British Columbia, sandwiched in between is Washington. According to info I retrieved online from websites established by some of the families, each girl seemed happy at the time she disappeared and by all accounts was heavily into school life, extracurricular activities and the like. Yet they went missing without a trace from around schools, football and soccer fields, and public parks. It might be a trivial thing, but some had even been seen partying after a basketball or a football game the night they went missing.”

“Nothing is ever too trivial because it’s an interesting detail we might be able to work into a pattern.”

“That isn’t all. You should know that even though I found a lot of disappearances, I eliminated those names where the ages didn’t fit. Let’s say, anyone on the list older than twenty-two, I excluded.”

“That could be a mistake in the long run,” Josh suggested. “We need to be able to consider all angles. This guy might nab an older girl in a pinch if he couldn’t find a teenager.”

Leo bobbed his head in agreement. “I’ve kept that age group in a separate spreadsheet. So, here’s the thing. I deleted all those missing from the Gary Ridgway era, since he’s been locked up for more than a decade.” Leo paused before going on, as if he dreaded mentioning the name. “I also discounted the ones Skye had already pinned on Ronny Whitfield—those Whitfield grabbed and shipped out to foreign countries, which accounted for a good many already on your list. Because of that, Winston and I wrote a specific program that pulled from two key factors—a young age
and
family stability. No one on our list had a reason to run off on her own. Not a single one. Our program has pretty much kicked out cold cases and narrowed it down to those forty-five that could be attributed to your guy.”

“Impressive,” Skye uttered, letting out an accepting sigh while Josh took the list out of her hands to peruse it.

“Thanks, but keep in mind this list may grow because it doesn’t account for any…”

“Who were never reported missing at all,” Skye finished. “Never passed onto any cop’s radar because they were never put into the system. It’s one of the more frustrating aspects of what we do.”

Josh went over Leo’s paperwork and let out his own pent-up breath. “So this is what was left. If this is the killer’s handiwork it shows he’s been a busy boy. Let’s say he began his killing around the age of twenty. That would make him thirty-five now. I wonder. Does he cover all this area because he lived in all these places or was he moving through these states for work?”

“And now, for whatever reason, he’s recently landed in the Seattle area to spread his perverted kind of…”

Leo was in the middle of his sentence when Skye didn’t wait for him to finish. “There’s just one problem with your leap in logic. While the stats are notable, and probable, the girls on that list are
missing
. We, on the other hand, have three real homicides with bodies that ended up in the morgue, murders that deal with females who disappeared several years back and have now reappeared. That means he didn’t just surface in Seattle last month. He’s been here for quite some time.”

“Then why start leaving them where they’re easily discovered?” Josh questioned.

Skye bit her lip. “That’s the big empty hole we have to somehow figure out how to fill. Obviously our guy isn’t opposed to exploring what other states have to offer. But if Leo’s info is even half accurate this is bad news. I thought maybe the guy was just starting out but now there’s very little chance of that.”

Josh jingled the change in his pockets in an edgy show of deep thought. “Let’s keep in mind that Bundy changed his MO multiple times. He’d break into a woman’s apartment one week, bludgeon her to death with a metal rod, and then go back to kidnapping them off the street or sweet-talking them into getting into his vehicle the next. He’d pull whatever ruse worked to gain access to a victim. The point is he didn’t stay with one method during the years he was active. When his urges got out of control he’d feed them by finding a way to get it done. His victims varied in ages and by the time he landed in Florida, Bundy had become a killing machine like the predator he was.”

“Thanks for that recap,” Skye muttered, sarcasm laced in her tone. “You know what this means, don’t you? We’ll have to contact the families of every woman on here and get the specifics of their daughter’s disappearance for our own benefit.”

She eyed Leo and added, “I know Winston and Reggie did the surface stuff. But I’m suggesting that we delve deeper than the general info you found elsewhere to better understand each victim and come up with a pattern, if there is one.”

“A painful undertaking,” Leo stated. “I’d like to recommend more training for all the volunteers. Interacting with family members is a tricky landmine. All of us struggle to ask the right questions in a professional way while maintaining a balance and avoid crossing an awkward line.”