The Third Grave (Savannah #4) - Lisa Jackson Page 0,36

Her badge was visible, clipped to her waistband, and she carried a slim iPad with her. She let the door close a bit behind her, but the noise from the outer hallway still drifted into the room.

“Take a load off.” He motioned to the vacant chair and desk. “I hear this is yours now.”

“Yeah, I guess.” She glanced at Morrisette’s chair but didn’t move to it. Instead she remained standing, fidgeting and looking uncomfortable. “I, um . . . I just wanted to say I’m sorry. You know. About Morrisette.”

“Me too.” He’d been getting the same sad faces and quick condolences from everyone he’d met at the station.

She plowed on. “Yeah . . . and well . . . I heard, you know, about the baby. The miscarriage. That’s . . .” Biting her lip, she glanced out the window and squinted behind her glasses. Her jaw was tight, her auburn hair catching in the light. “That’s rough.” She was nodding, as if agreeing with herself, as if she’d suffered a similar experience or at least known someone close who had.

“Yeah, thanks.” That unhappy news, too, had swept through the department. Most people had heard that he and Nikki had been expecting, so again, he’d dealt with more than a handful of condolences. Hopefully, this was the last and they all could move on.

“So, what’s up?” he asked, effectively changing the subject as he leaned back in his desk chair. “You got something on the Beaumont victims?”

“A good possibility. Narrowed things down,” she said, adjusting her glasses.

He waited. This was good news. The morgue and ME were overworked, as was everyone after the hurricane, but they’d rushed the autopsies of the decayed skeletons through.

“Dental records confirmed that the girls in the graves are the Duval sisters.”

“Really?” He’d wondered, as had others. He’d known about the missing girls. Almost anyone who had lived in Savannah in the last twenty years had heard their tragic story: three sisters who had disappeared after going to the movies.

“IDs verified on the older two girls,” Delacroix explained, flipping open her iPad cover and checking her notes. “Holly, the oldest, was twelve at the time and the middle sister, Poppy, was ten.”

He said, “But there were three.”

“Yes, Rose, the youngest.” She glanced up at him. “Still missing.”

He felt the muscles of his back tense. “How old was she?”

“Almost five.” Again she looked at her screen.

“So we can assume the youngest was supposed to go in that last spot, the empty grave. That had been the killer’s plan.”

Her lips tightened. “Possibly.”

Of course there were other options, but that seemed the most likely. “Do we have cause of death for the two?”

“Not completely confirmed, but the guess is strangulation.” Her jaw grew hard. “Fractured hyoid bones in both bodies.”

“So they were dead when they were placed in the tomb.”

“And staged,” she said, reminding him of the victims’ interlocking fingers.

“Right.” He rubbed the back of his suddenly tense neck. He’d dealt with his share of sickos. It came with the territory, but the crimes against children really got to him. “Has anyone notified next of kin?” The worst part of the job.

“Happening now,” she said. “The mother still lives in the area. Her name is . . .” Again she referred to the screen.

“Margaret,” he remembered.

“Yeah.” Nodding, she kept her eyes on her device. “Margaret, but no longer Duval. She’s remarried. Her name is . . . Where is it? . . . Oh, here we go: Margaret Le Roy. Her husband is Ezra. He’s a minister at the Second United Christian Church. It’s off of Derenne, not far from the hospital and medical center.”

“I know it.” Reed pictured the building with its prominent white spire and tracery windows cut into sand-colored bricks. “What about the father of the girls?”

“Harvey Duval,” she said. “He moved. Out of state. Now in . . . let me see.” Deftly Delacroix moved her cursor and said, “Okay. He’s in California.”

“Who isn’t?” he asked.

“Right.” She smiled, some of the tension breaking. Leaning a hip against Morrisette’s desk, she said, “Harvey landed in Fremont, which is a big tech center, I think. Southeast from San Francisco, closer to San Jose. Anyway, Harvey was in insurance. For a time after the girls disappeared, he and Margaret hung together and lived here in Savannah. But then the marriage fell apart and they split.” She was reading her notes, skimming details. “So the talk was that he wanted to get over the disappearances and try to move