“Thanks, Nik. I appreciate this.”
The other man shook his head. “No need. This is fucked up. You mind if I get the doc drunk?”
Looking at where Dominic sat blank-faced in his clinic chair, mindlessly straightening the bent arm of his glasses, Will said, “He could probably use a drink or five.” Then maybe he’d sleep, forget for a minute.
Tomorrow was soon enough to face the truth.
Dominic wasn’t the only one who slowed him down. The team dealing with the skeletal remains needed to talk to him about any missing person cases in the region. Will could’ve brushed them off, but he knew Miriama’s autopsy would take time. There was no point in him riding Ankita’s tail.
He met Robert and the others at the dump. The forensic and police teams were only partially into their painstaking search of the area. Will would bet his badge that there was nothing to find, that the skeleton had been left in this location because it was a way to further dehumanize the victim and cause exactly the kind of pain he’d seen in Matilda when she’d thought someone had thrown Miriama’s body in the dump.
“Thanks for this, Will.” Robert took out his notebook, his lanky partner beside him. “Look, to be blunt, we need your help. We don’t understand the area or the politics of this town—and I don’t want to waste time running down information you probably have in your head.”
Will could tell the other man was uneasy about asking, when Will had been pulled off the case, but Will had no desire to play games. “Here’s what I know.”
The older cop tapped his pen against his notebook when Will finished telling him about the missing hikers. “Residents really believe they might’ve had a serial killer running around?”
“It’s not too big of a stretch,” Will said. “Not when you take into account the physical similarities between the three women.” He’d brought his laptop and now opened it up, pulling up the file on the three women who’d gone missing over the course of a single hot summer.
Their ethnicities were different, but all of them had skin of light brown, their hair dark, their bones fine, and their height on the shorter side of average. But it was their smiles that tied them together—there was a primal vitality about the women.
All three were vividly alive.
Robert’s younger partner whistled. “Jesus, I see what you mean. Why wasn’t this picked up on before?”
“I don’t know that it wasn’t—it’s just not in the official files,” Will said. “I tried to get in touch with the detective in charge, but he died of a heart attack a few years ago, and the team that worked with him could—or would—only give me what’s already on record.” Wherever Matilda’s junior detective had picked up his intel, no one was willing to discuss it now.
“How extensive was the search?” Robert frowned. “I’m remembering the cases now, but I’m fuzzy on the details.”
“It went for weeks—and began after the second missing hiker.”
“Not the first?”
“She didn’t file her route anywhere.” Never knowing how easy it was to walk into the bush and never return. “No one knew she was heading to Golden Cove.” A number of the editorials that had come out in the aftermath of that summer had been flat-out cruel, blaming the women for a lack of preparation.
“And the third?”
“Reported as missing by her family, but again, with no filed route, there was no reason to connect her to the Cove.” It was a small place in a country full of wilderness. “Then the media began a series on women who’d gone missing and never been found.”
“Right.” Robert snapped his oddly slender fingers, fingers more suited to a pianist than a cop. “I remember my commander at the time being pleased at the exposure. She was hoping it’d bring closure to some cold cases.”
“It did—an elderly couple came forward to say they’d given the third woman a lift to Golden Cove, while a bus driver remembered the first one getting off at a trailhead just outside the Cove.” It wasn’t an official stop, but most of the drivers didn’t mind a quick stop so hikers could jump off.
He brought up the paltry list of recovered belongings: the pack, the water bottle unique enough to be identified as belonging to the first missing woman, and finally, the identity bracelet found at the “cave” on the beach. “The bracelet was discovered two days after the end of the first official search, which focused on the bush trails.” Will had his own thoughts about the timing, but no proof.
“With the terrain and the lack of any evidence of foul play,” he said, “the disappearances were eventually ruled accidental. Most people thought the women got lost or stumbled into a crevasse or down into the sea. The detective in charge kept making notes in the files after the official accidental death finding, so it’s safe to say he had his suspicions, but he was never able to link another missing woman to the town.”
Robert’s next question was predictable; he’d been staring at the map of Golden Cove on which Will had marked the recovered items. “How far to where the water bottle was found?”
“Only about a twenty-minute walk from here.” Will looked over at where Shane had made his chilling discovery. “The relevant track loops around to eventually join the one on which the remains were located.” The murderer amusing himself with a little game of memory. “It’s overgrown but was walked by volunteers during the search for Miriama Tutaia, so it should be passable.” Nikau hadn’t said anything overt, but he’d made sure the search covered all areas related to the lost hikers. “You want to see it now?”
Robert nodded. “I’ll pull a couple of the SOCOs off the dump—that’s going to take forever. They might as well walk ahead of us and collect any evidence our boy left behind.”
Will was too experienced a cop not to sense the older man’s skepticism beneath his outwardly cooperative response. Robert was wondering if Will wasn’t stretching the truth to make himself more relevant to the case. But skeptical or not, he was doing Will the courtesy of listening, because once upon a time, Will had been a hotshot cop with an instinct for running down predators.
The hotshot was gone, but it turned out his instincts had survived the fire.
Soon as everyone was ready, Will took them to the start of the track and had the forensic people walk ahead about a foot, one on either side of the trail. Tree ferns, their bodies lush and dark and their leaves a silvery light green, grew thick around them, along with taller, more ancient trees that blotted out the cloudy light.
Moss hung from branches and he saw a perfect spiderweb strung between two ferns.
In the shady and cool dark, the freshly trampled undergrowth cushioned their footsteps, creating an eerie silence that Will broke. “The water bottle wasn’t found on the track itself, but about ten feet to the left, just lying on the ground.”
“Like it fell from her pack and she didn’t notice?”
Will nodded at the younger detective’s question. “Or like she dropped it while disoriented after being injured.”