Fatal Exposure - By Gail Barrett Page 0,17
leafing through the pages again, her delicate brows drawn down.
He understood her reluctance to accept the truth. It was always easier to blame someone else than live with relentless guilt. But unless she had evidence she wasn’t revealing, her suspicions had no basis in actual fact.
Suddenly, she sat upright. He snapped his gaze to hers. “What is it?”
It took her a moment to answer. She thumbed back through the photos again, nibbling her bottom lip. Then she slid a photo toward him. “Did you see this?”
Parker focused on the dead girl’s face. Around her neck she wore a necklace, a silver disk on a matching chain. On it was a design—hearts within a heart. “What about it?”
“It’s not in all the photos for one thing.” She flipped back through several shots. Sure enough, in every other photo, her neck was bare—a detail he couldn’t believe he’d missed.
“Maybe it fell off when they moved her.”
“It isn’t mentioned in the report. It isn’t listed with her personal effects.”
He frowned at that. “You think someone stole it?”
“I don’t know. Why would they? It doesn’t look valuable enough.”
True. It looked like costume jewelry, something a young girl would wear. “Maybe one of her friends kept it as a memento.”
“What friends? She didn’t have any, according to those reports. And that design.” She went back to the necklace again. “See how irregular it is? The lines aren’t even straight. It looks as if she engraved it herself.”
“Maybe she did. Maybe she made it at the camp.”
“Maybe.” Heavy doubt laced her voice. “But I’ve seen something like it before....”
She pulled her laptop from her backpack, placed it on the table and turned it on. Then she opened a folder in her portfolio and started browsing through various shots.
Parker returned to the Walker girl’s file and carefully reread the reports, but Brynn was right. There was no mention of the missing necklace. So where had it gone—and why?
Still not sure it mattered, he switched his attention to Brynn’s computer as she searched her files. Faces paraded past, hundreds of poignant faces of emaciated, runaway kids. Everyone looked tormented. Everyone looked lost. Everyone had that unnerving cynicism in his waiflike eyes.
And once again, Brynn’s amazing talent leaped from the screen, the juxtaposition of innocence and despair wrenching the viewer like a primal scream.
No, it was more than talent, he decided. She had the rare ability to erase the distance between the subject and herself. She knew these kids. She was these kids. Their lives had been her own.
Which revealed more about her than she probably knew.
Brynn paused. “Here. Take a look at this.”
Leaning even closer, he studied the photograph she’d brought up. It showed a young girl standing in a row house doorway, her tight top and skimpy shorts emphasizing the stark angles of her sticklike frame. Heavy black makeup rimmed her drugged-out eyes, giving the impression of a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.
But this wasn’t a game. This girl lived a hellish existence, enduring unspeakable acts of depravity to survive.
And she wore the same type of silver necklace with that same multiple-heart design.
“Her name’s Jamie,” Brynn said, enlarging the shot. “I met her a couple of months ago near Ridgewood Avenue.”
Parker scrutinized the necklace. The engraving on this one looked as amateurish as the first. “What do you think it means?”
“Maybe nothing,” she admitted. “It just strikes me as odd that two runaway girls, both drug addicts, are wearing the same hand-engraved necklace. Now one of them is dead—and her necklace has disappeared.”
“You think they both went to that camp?”
“Maybe.” But her skeptical tone belied her words.
“You think someone killed Erin Walker there?”
“I don’t know.”
But she suspected foul play. At the C.I.D. chief’s camp. An allegation that could create a firestorm and torpedo the Colonel’s career.
Not to mention his.
And unless he missed his guess, her doubts didn’t only spring from the missing necklace. She had another reason she wanted to pursue this case, something she didn’t want to divulge. But exactly what that could be, he didn’t know.
“I just want to find out for sure,” she added.
“How?”
“Ask this girl, Jamie, where she got her necklace to start with.”
Parker sat back and rubbed his jaw, mulling over what to do. He didn’t have to help her. He’d fulfilled his part of the bargain and shown her the Walker girl’s file. There was no reason to drag this out, no reason for him to stay involved.
Except that necklace had disappeared. That kid had died at his boss’s