“You know she’d want you out there, looking after our Miri. Don’t let the outsiders treat her as nothing.”
Will rose, got back into the SUV.
It felt as if it took him forever to get to the water, and all the while, the clouds grew blacker and heavier overhead. Scrambling down the pathway after reaching the edge of the cliff, he ran toward Anahera’s seated form. She didn’t get up, just waited for him to come, a silent sentinel with dark hair knotted by the wind and eyes struck by grief. “She shouldn’t be dead,” were her first words to him. “No one as alive as Miriama was should be dead.”
Crashing down onto his knees beside her, he took her into his arms. She resisted, stiff and unbending, but he didn’t let go, and at last, she allowed herself to wrap her own arms around him and hold on tight. There were no tears, but he hadn’t expected any. Anahera was used to holding her pain within.
If and when she chose to share it, it would be on her terms.
When they separated, he did what he didn’t want to do: he went and looked at Miriama’s body. One glance and he knew that she’d been in the water a considerable time. Odds were, since the day she disappeared. The condition of the body eliminated the possibility she’d been thrown in recently with the hope she’d wash up close to when the skeleton was discovered. That didn’t mean the same person wasn’t responsible for both crimes.
One new. One old.
Taking out the slim but powerful digital camera he’d slipped into his pocket before Robert’s arrival, he began to snap. Anahera watched in unmoving quiet. It was only when they heard the sound of a police vehicle getting closer, the siren carrying on the air, that she got up. “I’ll show them the way down. Give me the camera’s memory card.”
He slipped it into her hand, replacing it with an empty one he had tucked into the case, then put the camera back in his jacket pocket. If anyone thought to ask if he’d taken photos, he’d hand over the camera.
But when his colleagues finally arrived, all of them ill-prepared for the sand and the waves and the wind, Anahera wasn’t with them. And he was faced with a surprise. It appeared he was still in charge of Miriama’s case.
“I’ve been sent to assist you.” Short and solid, with a cap of fair hair and wearing a standard dark blue body-armor vest over a light blue uniform shirt, Kim Turnbull was someone Will had worked with on a prior case. “Everybody wants in on the skeleton you found, what with it being all serial killer like, so the junior gets the drowning.” She seemed to realize what she’d implied a second after the words left her mouth.
Going bright red under the freckled paleness of her skin, she said, “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean—”
Will waved off the apology, too damn glad to be insulted. Being officially in charge of Miriama’s case gave him a far better chance of getting her justice. He wouldn’t have to rely on others to access the necessary reports and he could openly interview people of interest.
As for the skeleton so cruelly laid out on the edge of a dump, it had kept for a long time, and the men in charge of that victim weren’t incompetent—though they’d be handicapped by their lack of knowledge about this town and its secrets. Oh, people would talk to Robert and the others, but whether they’d tell them anything useful was another question.
Once Will had put Miriama’s ghost to rest, he’d find a way to do the same for that lost woman’s ghost. Because he had not a single doubt that it was a woman’s skeleton Shane had found. The way it had been displayed, the way it had been discarded, that was a thing too many men had done to too many women across time.
Waving across the new forensic team, he was startled to see Dr. Ankita Roshan with them. “I expected Robert to keep you captive!” he yelled out to the forensic pathologist over the rising wind.
“Told him I can’t do much with bones!”
Today collided with yesterday. Because Ankita had called in a forensic anthropologist in the aftermath of the fire, too. The smallest person in the house, the smallest body, hadn’t survived with enough flesh on his bones for a viable autopsy.
In the now, the painfully thin forty-something pathologist shook his