Michael couldn’t relax. Sitting still while others were working their butts off was making him antsy. He wanted to jump in and help. But he had no role in the excavation.
“Why don’t you go home?” Lacey asked Michael for the tenth time. “I’ll call you if something comes up. There’s no point for you to be sitting here waiting and waiting. It’s not going to speed things up.” Hands on her hips, she glared at Michael as he petted the German shepherd in the shade of one of the little tents.
He shook his head, avoided her eyes, and buried his hand in Queenie’s soft fur. The dog’s tongue lolled in joy. Rule one in an argument with Lacey: Keep your mouth shut. Drove her crazy.
He’d watched her fiancé slowly learn the trick over the last few months. At first the poor sap had actually tried to win arguments with the woman. Impossible.
She huffed at him and turned her attention back to the tiny mandible a tech had placed in her hands moments before. “Too young,” she muttered, and Michael’s spine relaxed. Barely.
But the happy cadaver dog under his fingers had hit on another spot thirty minutes ago, and that Amazon of a woman, Dr. Peres, was supervising the beginning of the unearthing. Fucking amazing dog. Michael had witnessed a lot of things in his life, but watching the dog scent death below the dirt had blown his mind.
The handler, a graying, earthy woman who talked a mile a minute, had been working a grid pattern when the dog abruptly sat and refused to move. A hit. Sherrine had rubbed the dog’s head and given her a hug, gently backing her away from the place of the hit. Sherrine had nodded at a uniform, and he drove a pole a foot into the dirt at the spot three times, leaving small openings over the area.
Michael wondered how many times Sherrine and the cop had gone through the morbid routine. She’d led Queenie by the holes again, where the dog took one sniff, promptly sat, and wouldn’t budge.
No question.
“The holes let out more of the scent,” Lacey had whispered at his side. The cop had promptly whipped out stakes and tape and cordoned off another sad square. Crime scene techs covered the dusty farm like ants. Oregon State Police had thrown everything they had at the site. Skeletons of multiple children motivated everyone.
Now Michael restlessly patted Queenie and waited for the results of the current find. Sherrine returned with three bottled waters. “Thirsty?”
Michael took one of the bottles with a nod. Lacey took the other and ground her heel into his shoe. “Wha—thanks for the water, Sherrine,” he muttered.
The woman chortled and winked at Lacey. Sherrine pulled a collapsible dish out of her backpack and poured half her bottle into the dish for the dog.
“You don’t work for the state police, do you?” Michael asked.
Sherrine shook her head. “Private contractor. Queenie and I have helped out dozens of times. State police, counties all over the state, and at least ten other states.” The talkative woman paused to count silently on her fingers. “Thirteen other states, actually. We had a fascinating case last month in Washington. I’d never officially tried Queenie over water. We’d trained for it, but never had needed to use the skill. She found a missing boater trapped between rocks below twenty feet of water.” The woman frowned. “Too late, of course. He’d been missing for three days. We’ve done searches in Idaho, Nevada—”
“The twin towers in New York?” Michael couldn’t stop the question.
A flat, blue gaze briefly flicked to his and looked away. “Yes.”
She didn’t expound, and the silence filled the tent.
“Sorry,” Michael muttered. Idiot.
“Dr. Campbell?”
Lacey jumped up at Dr. Peres’s question. The tall woman had come up behind them with no one noticing. “I want you to look at something.” Victoria Peres glared at Michael but didn’t say a word. Lacey had gone to bat for him earlier with the woman. Once Dr. Peres had heard about his brother, she’d allowed his presence, but first he’d received a strict lecture on staying out of the crime scenes. Michael had solemnly nodded and replied. “Of course, Vicky.”
He swore the woman had growled.
Lacey had rapidly intervened, distracted the doctor, and then given her own lecture in furious tones in Michael’s ear.
Both women were so easy to infuriate. And he’d needed something to keep his mind off what was being found under the dirt.
This time he kept his mouth shut. He could still taste his foot in his mouth from his question to Sherrine.
Without meeting Michael’s eyes, Dr. Peres flatly stated to the group, “It’s an adult. Female.” She stalked out of the tent.
Lacey followed after a single, silent transmission to Michael with her eyes. Don’t move.
No problem. Michael blew out a breath. An adult. Not another boy.
Beside him, Sherrine stretched. “I think we’ll head out.” She clapped her hands at Queenie, who bounded to her side. “We’re done here.”
Done? “Wait a minute. You can’t be done.” Michael stood, ignoring the sweat that rolled down his neck. “There’s more.”
The woman glanced up from examining her pack. “No. I’m positive we’ve found everything. Queenie and I have been back and forth over this farm all day. Unless the police decide they want to start gridding the forest on the south side, we’re done. It looks like everything was buried in this immediate area.”
“But there’s more. There’s got to be one more.”
The woman blinked at him. “And you know this how…?”
“Because…because…” He leaned closer. “There were nine children taken. One walked out. The rest were never seen again.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Sherrine’s hands froze on the zipper to her pack.
“How long have you lived here?” Michael’s heart was ready to bust out of his chest.
The woman shrugged. “Eight years.”
He swallowed hard. “About twenty years ago, nine kids and their bus driver vanished. The bus, too. One boy showed up two years later, half dead, unable to remember what’d happened to him. The others are still missing. You just found seven children and an adult. This has to be the place. It has to.”
“You think the woman Dr. Peres just mentioned is the driver?”
Michael nodded urgently. “There’s got to be one more child buried here somewhere.”
Sherrine looked ready to blow her stack. “How come no one mentioned this to me? Everyone knows what we’re looking for but me?”
“No, not everyone,” a new voice spoke. “And let’s keep it that way.”
Michael spun at the male voice and turned to find himself nose to nose with Mason Callahan, OSP Major Crimes detective. Michael automatically glanced over Callahan’s shoulder, looking for his ever-present partner, Detective Ray Lusco. Ray flashed him a white grin, his eyes twinkling at Michael’s surprise.
“Detectives. Wondered when you’d show up,” Michael managed to say evenly.
“We’ve been in and out since the first discovery yesterday, Brody. Didn’t realize we were supposed to report to you. What the fuck are you doing on the scene?” Callahan’s dark green eyes glittered dangerously under his cowboy hat.
Lusco fought a cough.
Aw, hell.
“How can you wear that hat in this heat?” Michael asked. At least the hat was a pale straw instead of the detective’s usual black felt. Shitkickers and faded jeans made up the rest of the detective’s uniform. Lusco looked his usual GQ self in khakis and short-sleeved knit shirt. Michael wondered if Lusco deliberately matched his belt to his shoes. No doubt.
No one had ever truly intimidated Michael, but the aging cowboy detective was near the top of the ladder. Vicky Peres stood a rung higher. Not that he’d ever let her or the detectives know that fact.
“When are you gonna stop dressing like a skateboarder? What are you, thirty-five or fourteen?” Callahan fired back.
Michael had a hunch the detective knew exactly how old he was. And his date of birth.
Michael first crossed paths with the state detectives last winter when Lacey had been stalked by a killer. Michael had been standing in the right place at the right time when the detectives had needed an immediate hand. Had he ever gotten a thank you? A note? Nothing.
“These are the missing Condon Academy kids. You know it,” Michael stated quietly.
“We don’t know shit. We’ve got a couple of bodies that are kids. That doesn’t automatically make this related to your brother.”
Callahan knew exactly why he was there.
Callahan also believed it was the missing bus, and he hadn’t been one bit surprised to find Michael on his scene. He probably had wondered what had taken Michael so long. Damned detective probably knew every relative of every missing kid on that bus. Oregon’s saddest mystery was never far from every cop’s thoughts.
Nine children from the elite, private Condon Academy. Returning from a field trip to the state capitol building. The bus never made it back to the school. No kids. No driver. No bus.
Until thirteen-year-old Chris Jacobs walked out of the forest two years later on the other side of the Cascade Mountain Range. Emaciated. Near death. No memory.
“You think this is the place,” Michael stated.
Lusco’s phone beeped, and he stepped away to answer.
Michael held Callahan’s gaze and saw something briefly soften in the cop’s face. “We don’t know,” Callahan repeated carefully. “What my gut says and what the facts are might be two different things.”
“Callahan.” Lusco was staring at the screen of his phone. He looked up, amazement crossing his face. “They just found a decrepit bus in the woods a quarter mile south of here.”
Michael looked at Callahan. “What’s your gut say now?”