Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,66
his father. He often mistook them for hawks when they flew high overhead. It was only when they glided closer to the ground and he saw the black underside of their great wings that he knew they were vultures. His father told him to ignore them. “Dirty scavengers,” he called them. “They don’t even have nests. They roost on the ground and in abandoned buildings.”
Alex didn’t see the problem. In his mind, the vultures were the intelligent ones. There was no waste. They fed on things already dead. They were twice as large as most of the other raptors that his father seemed to worship.
“Ugly, stupid things,” Frances called the scavengers. He did whatever he could to ensure they didn’t come onto the land, but there was too much wildlife. Inevitably, a deer or coyote or smaller game like a rabbit or raccoon would die and they would descend on the corpse, picking it clean with savage efficiency.
This was what Alex found awe-inspiring.
He liked to go out by the rocks and leave them a gift—there was no shortage of carcasses in the woods. Then he waited for the vultures to arrive. There was plenty of time since he’d been banished from the house other than mealtimes. One day he was watching them scavenge a red fox when he heard a noise behind him. Expecting Frances, he whirled, on guard for insults and ready to be shooed away from the activities of the “stupid, dirty scavengers,” but it was Zandra.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m exploring.”
“No,” he said. “How did you get out?”
“I told her what he was doing in that room.”
Alex felt a wave of disgust wash over him. He swallowed. “What room?”
“I know you’re not that stupid,” she said. “My bedroom.”
He said nothing.
She picked up twigs that had gathered in the cracks of the rocks and tossed them toward the group of vultures, but they were undeterred. They maintained singular focus. When they were doing their work, very little could disturb them. Alex particularly liked this about them.
Zandra said, “That’s really disgusting.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yeah, it is. It’s gross.”
She couldn’t see the beauty, not just in the majestic black birds, but in the art of scavenging. He didn’t respond.
A moment later, she spoke again. “I want to be outside, with you.”
“You can’t be,” he said. “You hurt mother. I’m supposed to stop you. Sometimes, I don’t really want to. Sometimes I want to let you… do bad things.”
“You do?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I have bad thoughts.”
“About Mom?”
“About everyone,” he whispered.
“Even me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Like what?”
He looked away from the scene unfolding before them where one of the vultures had just loosened a small bone, flying away with it. Alex said, “I want to know what you look like without skin.”
Thirty-Six
Josie didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, especially after the revelations about Trinity’s childhood. No wonder Trinity was the way she was—ambitious, driven to a fault, and almost callous in her pursuit of stories. By all accounts and from the photo albums that Josie had pored over that morning, Trinity’s early childhood had been idyllic whereas Josie’s had been straight out of hell. By high school, when Josie went to live with Lisette and her life was finally getting on track, Trinity had descended into her own special sort of hell. As Josie lay in the guest room, blackout shades drawn, she wondered why Trinity had never told her any of this. Then she realized it was the same reason that Josie never talked willingly about the woman who had kidnapped and raised her. Those horrors were in the past and that’s where they belonged. Josie had no desire to revisit them, not for anyone. Still, as she drifted off to sleep, her heart was heavy with regret for all the conversations she’d never had with her sister.
When she woke three hours later, her phone showed that it was just after one in the afternoon and she had two missed calls from Noah. Josie called him back before she even had a chance to blink the sleep from her eyes. “What’s going on?” she asked when he answered. “Any news?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I’m sorry. But Drake made some calls and got the evidence taken from the scene at the cabin forwarded to the FBI lab and expedited since this is now a serial case. I don’t know what kinds of strings he had to pull, but having all this stuff analyzed sooner rather than later can’t hurt.”