“It could have been nothing,” I growl. “What would have been the point in worrying you?”
She glares at me with the intensity of a thousand suns. Not another word comes out of her mouth, but I can tell this matter is far from resolved.
“I can come back later if you like?” Mason says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. Smart ass.
I give him a look that makes the small smile slide right off his face. “Just sit the fuck down.”
He obeys, sitting down opposite Sloane. He gives her a barely visible nod of the head. “So you guys know each other. I guess this explains why you were so frosty when I came back into the room earlier,” he says. “I had no idea. I’m really sorry, Dr. Romera.”
Sloane clears her throat. She looks around the room, before she finally lets her gaze rest on the kid. “I had no idea you were training with Zeth, either. Tell us about Lowell. Why are you helping her? And what does she want to know?”
She’s asked the burning question we’ve been trying to figure out ever since I laid eyes on Lowell again. Sloane has also asked another question I probably wouldn’t have bothered with: what were Mason’s motives for helping her? See, this is the difference between a person like Sloane, a normal person, and a person like me. She cares about the why. She gives a shit about the reasoning behind someone’s actions. I don’t care about that. I only care about Mason’s betrayal, right alongside the consequences of that betrayal.
Mason rubs the back of his neck, shaking his head. “She knew about Millie. She said she was going to have her taken away if I didn’t help her. She wanted me to find out if Zeth ever went up into the mountains. One specific place. They found a body buried up there. Some dog walker’s Lab was going nuts, digging in the dirt. A nearby river flooded in all the rain we had a couple of weeks ago, and a body was unearthed. When forensics did their thing, they found a partial print that belonged to Zeth. That’s all I know.”
My stomach muscles clench tight, as if I’ve just been sucker punched hard to the gut. What the fuck is he talking about? A body buried by a river in the mountains? A partial print? Of course, I know exactly what the fuck he’s talking about, but I don’t want to admit it to myself. This can’t be happening. Just fucking can’t. Less than a few months ago, we buried a body up there in the mountains, but we buried her deep. We buried her in the most secluded spot we could find, where she would be at peace, where she wouldn’t have to suffer any further.
We didn’t count on the floodwaters loosening the soil, though. There was no way to know the storms that hit Seattle recently would unearth her, disrupting her final resting place.
Sloane and Michael exchange a wary look. They both know what this means, too. They found my sister. They found Lacey.
******
SLOANE
I’ve seen Zeth angry before, too many times to recall, but this time it’s different. This time his anger is tinged with a pain he usually tries to tamp down and forget about, but now he’s being forced to face it head on, and it’s more than he can bear. My beautiful, wild Zeth. Still so torn apart inside by grief that he can’t even say his sister’s name. I’m still mad at him, yes, but I’m also hurting so bad for him right now.
“No doubt they found more than a partial print on her,” Michael’s saying somewhere in the distance. “We all touched her. Every last one of us helped lower her into the ground.”
“I’m the only one with a criminal record. My fingerprints are the only ones in their database.” He sounds stunned. None of us ever thought we’d be faced with this problem. We’ve tiptoed around the subject of Lacey because no one really wants to deal with the fresh, brightly burning pain of her loss yet. Not even me, who knew her so briefly. I loved her, though. It was impossible not to. The indignity of her body being dug up by a Labrador is significant; it feels as though we’ve disrespected her in the worst way, allowing her remains to be now poked and prodded at by a forensic team as well.
“And so Lowell just somehow managed to find out about this and came back here?” I say. “It makes no sense. This isn’t her jurisdiction. A murder has nothing to do with drugs. Not necessarily, anyway.”
Mason says, “She said she has homicides in this area flagged. She thinks they’re all linked to some motorcycle gang over in New Mexico who deal weed.”