Victoria felt stifled. Lacey had a lovely large home, but stress flowed from the group who’d escaped the shooting an hour earlier. Lacey opened a third bottle of wine for the adults and the tensions slowly dropped along with the wine level. Trinity sipped sparingly at a Sprite; she still looked rattled. Victoria was on her first glass of wine, letting the others use the alcohol to unwind. She preferred to stay on her toes in a group. This crew was just the five who’d attended the service plus herself and Seth. Even though they were relatively close acquaintances, she still wouldn’t risk lowering her guard.
She’d dealt with Michael Brody a few times. Enough to know he was freakishly smart and deceptively casual. She glanced at Seth beside her on Lacey’s couch. He’d taken to Michael right away and vice versa. There were a lot of similarities in the men. Height, stature, intelligence. But Seth’s calm didn’t give her the annoying friction that Michael’s pushy sharpness did.
Right now, some of that pushy sharpness was needed to investigate the history of the dead Forest Park women. Both sets of them. Michael had the nose to do it, and Victoria was all about using him for her own purposes to find some answers. Trinity was under his scrutiny at the moment. Surprisingly, he’d taken a soft tactic with the teen, who gazed at him with a bit of hero worship that made Michael’s fiancée, Jamie, hide a smile.
“I didn’t know Glory,” Trinity repeated. “And I didn’t see anyone at the service I knew except for Dr. Campbell and Jason.”
Michael’s gaze narrowed. “Who is Jason?”
Trinity gave a half-hearted jerk of her shoulder. “I met him through Brooke. He goes to Harrison High School. He was there with some other guys I didn’t recognize.”
“Were they standing toward the back?” asked Michael. “Back where the noise started coming from?”
Trinity wrinkled her nose. “Kind of near the entry doors. It was so squished in there. I only saw him for a moment before we moved over to where you guys stood. He could have been anywhere by the time the fight started.”
“What’s his last name?” asked Seth.
“I have no idea. I do have his phone number. We text sometimes. Well, he’s texted me to ask how Brooke is doing.”
Victoria’s heart softened at the crack in Trinity’s voice as she said Brooke’s name. Victoria knew the doctors were guarded about the teen’s prognosis. Her brain had been oxygen starved; there was no way to assess the damage yet.
Trinity passed her phone to Seth, who thumbed through her contacts.
“You don’t think he’s involved in the shooting, do you?” she asked Michael.
“I don’t know. Police haven’t released the name of the shooter, but rumors say they arrested a teenager. I have someone looking into it,” he said.
Victoria glanced at Lacey, who gave a small eye roll. Michael had a tendency to break the rules and push the boundaries of the law where he saw fit. No doubt his “someone” was a cop buddy or a person who shouldn’t be passing information to a reporter.
Trinity looked tired. Her foster mom sat beside her, occasionally patting her back or holding her hand. Katy knew how to manage teen girls. Victoria gave a small prayer of thanks for her own adoptive parents. Birth was a gamble. You never knew what kind of parents you’d end up with. She’d been lucky, and it appeared Trinity was in good hands after her rotten first decade.
Michael’s hawk-like gaze turned to Victoria. “Tell me again what happened at your break-in.”
“All three skulls were taken. I was in the middle of inventorying everything when this occurred, and now I’ll have to go through it again and make certain nothing else is missing.”
“Lacey mentioned the remains had been mixed together. How can you tell what belongs to who?”
“Skeletal remains are immediately printed with their case number. Every piece. Sadly they used pencil back then, so some of the numbers are nearly illegible or completely missing. I’d touched up several but not all. I’m making an educated guess at the rest.”
“So they may not be completely right,” he stated.
“I’m getting it as close as I can.” The question didn’t bother her. No one else would be able to solve the puzzle of the missing pieces better than her. She had faith in her abilities. She may not be perfectly accurate, but show her someone who could do better.
“If anyone can figure it out, Tori can,” Seth added. He reached out and squeezed her hand. He’d tensed slightly during Michael’s questioning, a defensive tone now in his voice.
Michael turned his probing gaze Seth’s way. He met it with utter calm. “You’ve worked with her for less than a week.”
“I know her reputation. She’s one of the best in the country. And I know her character.” His spine straightened another inch, his molars clenched.
His hand tightened around Victoria’s. When he’d taken it, she’d felt a calming warmth flow from his touch. It’d felt normal. It hadn’t felt like he’d been absent for nearly eighteen years. It’d seemed completely natural for him to touch her in reassurance, and for it to work.
Victoria struggled to remember sitting next to Rory and holding his hand, but the memories were surprisingly far away for a marriage of five years. She’d filed Rory and their life together into a mental box and firmly closed the lid. She’d thought she’d done the same with Seth, but suddenly it was all back at the surface. How had eighteen years vanished?
She blinked and realized Michael was looking at her expectantly, the echo of a question lingering in the room. She’d heard nothing.
“I’m sorry, what?”
His lips turned up in amusement. “How long were you out of the room?”
“It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes. I’d taken a break and got something to eat, and I was on my way back to the lab when the alarm went off.”
“Which was caused by the door opening. Could he have heard you coming back and decided to leave?”
“He could have easily heard my shoes. Everything echoes in those hallways.”
“I wonder if he’d planned to do more damage or if you interrupted him.” Seth rubbed at his chin, a thoughtful look in his eye.
Victoria nodded.
“I still can’t believe no one else has come forward during these years to claim the other women. They must have parents or even children who wondered what happened to them,” said Seth. “How can a family member simply accept that a sister or mother vanished? Maybe the children were told their mothers had died.”
“I was adopted,” said Victoria. “If I hadn’t grown up knowing my mother was dead, I would have searched.”
“Maybe a trusted parent told them their mother was dead,” speculated Michael. “Have you seen your mother’s death certificate?”
Her brain shot into jet speed as she froze. She’d never seen a death certificate. She’d never doubted her adoptive parents’ word. Victoria couldn’t speak.
Awareness flowed in Michael’s gaze as he took in her silence. “I’m sorry. My nature is to question everything. Doesn’t matter the source. If I hear it from one person, I need to have it verified by two other people or sources.”
“My parents wouldn’t lie to me,” Victoria choked out. But her mind was racing in circles. Would her parents lie to her? Parents lie to children all the time.
“I know what you mean,” said Trinity. “My mother and grandmother told me my birth father was dead. When I was placed with Katy, I had her look into it. He wasn’t dead. He was in prison and had signed off all rights. After a lot of time with my therapist, I made the decision not to get to know him. He didn’t seem like the type of person I wanted influencing my life.”
Katy wrapped an arm around the girl and gave her a warm hug. Trinity rested her head on Katy’s shoulder for a brief second, her eyes sad.
Trinity may have made her decision, Victoria thought, but obviously it was a hard one. It must haunt her daily.
Now will I always wonder? Did my parents lie to me? Could my birth parents still be alive?
Her thoughts must have been plain on her face, because Seth spoke.
“We’ll help you find out.”
“Thank you,” Victoria said. A bit of guilt prickled at her, because she doubted the people who’d raised her. Both had passed away more than a decade ago, but she still thanked them every day for giving her a good upbringing.
“It’s okay to wonder,” Trinity said. “You’re human.”
“It’s not that,” said Victoria. “It’s making me doubt everything my adoptive parents told me. And that doesn’t sit well with me. They were good people.” She felt a tear run from the corner of her eye. She wiped at it. Her defenses were crumbling. And she couldn’t blame it on a single slow glass of wine. “Oregon has a law that anyone over twenty-one can request their original birth certificate with their birth parents’ names on it. In adoptions, the original birth certificates are sealed. I requested mine a few years back.” She took a long shaky breath. “But the state said they have no record of mine. My parents had died by then, so I had no one to ask about it. I’ve just gone on with the identity they built for me. All I know is my adoption was arranged through a tiny church that my parents attended for a while in Seaport, near the coast.”
“Ah, shit. I’m sorry, Victoria,” Michael said, dismay clouding his face. “Have you contacted the church to ask for their personal records?”
She noticed he didn’t call her “Vicki,” the nickname he used to poke at her. That was truly a heartfelt apology from Michael Brody. She didn’t know who she was. She had no record of who her birth parents were. The state couldn’t find a record of her adoption, and she’d taken her adoptive parents at their word. “No,” she whispered. Why hadn’t she? She’d thought about doing it but never followed through. Was she scared they’d have no record either?
Seth transferred her hand into his other one and wrapped his arm around her, pulling her close on the couch. Victoria didn’t fight it. In fact, she wanted to lay her head on his shoulder like Trinity had done with Katy. A huge wave of emotions bubbled up in her throat. Embarrassment at crying in front of six people, doubt about her parents, confusion over Seth, relief that Lacey and Trinity were okay, anger over the break-in.
If anyone deserved a second glass of wine, she did.