Page 24

CHAPTER 24

Frankie

We got lucky with the security footage. I’d expected the cameras around the parking lots and the office building, but I hadn’t expected the cameras inside the actual park itself.

Apparently this area was popular for wildlife monitoring and research. If we were really lucky, there’d be something we could use.

I’d honestly had no idea that state parks had all those cameras everywhere and I highly doubted the killer did either. I tucked the drive with all the footage over the last week in my pocket and zipped it up.

They’d send the footage over digitally as well, but getting it straight from the source before anyone else got their hands on it was always our goal.

Too many times digital evidence was tampered with, or edited, and that immediately made it useless.

“You can go through the footage yourself,” I told Soren. “But we have interns to help with this sort of thing. It’s a tedious, time-consuming job and our time is better spent doing something no one else can.”

Like digging into the app I’d planted on the hiker’s phone, or the dash cam on her car.

Soren checked the map on his phone again when we reached one of the trail entrances. “I can also write a program to do it for me.”

“Technically,” I agreed as I tightened my ponytail. “But what if it doesn’t find anything? Are you positive it won’t miss the tiniest detail that might lead us to the suspect?”

He looked up from the map and considered me for a moment. Something about his expression said he wanted to argue with me, but Soren would know better than almost anyone that a guarantee was impossible.

There was always the chance something could be missed.

Obviously humans missed shit all the time too, but a program couldn’t understand nuance.

“I would probably want to do both,” Soren admitted. Then he showed me the route he wanted to take. “If we go through here, we’ll reach a fork in the trail. I want to see what’s between them.”

My father may have taught me how to hunt, but I wasn’t a tracker. I set traps and bait, then waited for my prey to show up rather than track them down. So, whatever Soren wanted to look at was fine with me.

The guy was a damn Eagle Scout after all.

I waved him forward so he could lead me in the direction he wanted to go. “Why didn’t you put that you’re an Eagle Scout in your list of achievements on your resumé?”

Soren shrugged as he led the way with one eye on the trail and the other on his phone. “I didn’t think it would help me get the job.”

Why? Didn’t a lot of those skills correlate to detective work?

“If I said I was an Eagle Scout, that doesn’t necessarily mean I got any of the badges you’d consider valuable,” Soren explained. “We don’t all learn the same skills. Some of them, sure. But a lot of them are specialized.”

“Hm.” I leaned over to check the map on his phone. “There aren’t any cameras around here, are there?”

“No, there aren’t.” Soren handed me his phone but I shook my head.

This was his show. I was just here to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble.

“If Parker were here, would you be doing this?” Soren asked, surprising me.

“Absolutely not.” I smiled, knowing just how much she’d hate this. “Lucy doesn’t like bugs, so she’d be waiting in the car or back in the office, already working on the footage. That is, if she hasn’t decided we should put a tracker on every car that’s been here over the last twenty-four hours.”

Soren didn’t say anything to that and I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking.

Was he constantly comparing himself to Lucy, just like I was? Or was he just trying to make sure he was properly filling her shoes?

“Here.”

I stopped when he did to see the trail split into two. A sign pointed in each direction to tell us the names of the trails, but beyond that was a lot of underbrush. The trees were pretty close together, but not so close that we couldn’t walk through them.

“Let’s go then.” I didn’t like the idea of stepping off the trail, but I had an Eagle Scout with me. We’d be fine.

Soren went around the signpost and I followed, keeping my eyes peeled.

Our footsteps were silent and I couldn’t help but be impressed by his skills all over again. He really looked like a soldier with the way he moved, glancing back every so often to make sure I was still following him.

“What exactly are you looking for?” I asked as I eyed the plants along the forest floor to make sure we didn’t walk through any poison ivy.

“I don’t know,” Soren admitted.

He crouched down to study a plant and I had no idea what he was even looking at. It just looked like a normal plant to me. There were no broken or crushed leaves that I could see. So, why this one?

“You’d be surprised how many crimes are committed right under everyone’s noses,” I muttered. “It could easily be a hiker who carried that head around in a backpack. Pulling it out and setting it up wouldn’t take long.”

“You said they want others to see it, right?” Soren brushed his knuckles over a leaf and then stood.

“Usually.” I followed him farther into the forest and listened for any sound of the ocean or the city, but I couldn’t hear much other than the wind and the birds all around us. “There’s also a lot of missing blood and body parts. They’re somewhere. The ocean maybe? Who knows.”

A single head was one thing, but a body? That would be heavy. And there were three of them that we knew of.

“The other two locations are pretty far from here,” I reminded him.

An abandoned building that used to be a restaurant, right in front of a fading sign, and under the Steele Pier.

Each one was displayed in a way that made me feel like it meant something, but I couldn’t be sure.

The one here in the park had been on a tree stump, but that tree stump had the center hollowed out a bit, like a bowl. For whatever reason, that tiny detail was bugging me and I couldn’t think of any reason why it seemed so significant.

Per the reports Garcia gave us, the one under the Steele Pier was found in an old, abandoned row boat with faded red scarves. Those scarves were dyed that color too. It wasn’t from blood.

And the first one was displayed in front of an old restaurant. One that’s been abandoned for almost a decade now. The head there had been carefully placed in a pile of red daisies.

Lucy would have spent thirty minutes explaining the significance of red daisies to me, but Soren hadn’t said a word about any of the other crime scenes. His focus was single-minded, like he couldn’t think of anything else until he satisfied his curiosity here.

That could be helpful, but it could also slow us down if he ended up focusing on the wrong details.

I watched as Soren studied the trees, his attention going up once more, like he expected to find someone hiding up there.

Shielding my eyes against the sun, I wondered if one of the cameras up there might actually show us something that could help us.

I felt his attention shift to me, but I pretended not to notice.

“It would be faster if we split up,” he admitted. “But not too much that we can’t see each other.”

Checking the time, I decided I’d give it another thirty minutes before calling it. “Sure, what do you want me to look for?”

“Anything out of place,” Soren told me. He looked around like he was hoping to find an example, but then gave up and shrugged. “I know that’s vague, but you’ll know when you see it.”

“Not footprints?” I scanned the earth beneath our feet, taking note of how many leaves and plants there were.

“If you see one, then yes, but it won’t be easy to notice with all this underbrush.” Soren pointed to the right. “I’ll go a few yards this way. You take the left side. When we hit the trail again, we’ll compare our notes.”

Apparently he could take the lead when necessary.

I nodded and studied the area to my left as I processed that.

Despite the fact that he was an alpha, nothing he’d just said came off as an order or a command. It was merely a suggestion, one that gave me the opportunity to veto him if I felt so inclined.

Soren stuck to the facts too. Things that were impossible to argue with.

Sure, I guess I could be difficult and insist I take the right side instead of the left, but I also knew he wouldn’t care and just switch with me if that’s what I really wanted.

My rookie didn’t like conflict.

It made me wonder just how far he’d go to avoid it and how that might affect our partnership…or whoever he might end up assigned to once his training was done.

I grimaced and made a zig-zag pattern, taking my time as I studied the ground and the surrounding area. I was a fantastic liar, but even I couldn’t convince myself I didn’t care who Soren ended up with.

Of course, if given a choice, I’d always pick Lucy, but that might not be an option anymore.

Even if it was, I might not be able to do this job for much longer.

If Francesca Lopez became the alpha of the Lopez pack, she would constantly be in the spotlight.

There was a reason most legacy pack members stuck to jobs that hardly came under public scrutiny, or if it did, they could easily control the perception of the public.

I glanced over at Soren to make sure he hadn’t wandered out of my eyesight and stopped when I saw a ghostbeard flower. I took out my phone and took a picture of it for Lucy, wishing she was here to tell me what this one meant in the language of flowers and how this might be the last one we see for the year.

Flowers weren’t really my thing, but I loved how excited she got about them.

Lucy would even nerd out about something as stupid and common as a daisy, insisting the red version meant someone completely different from the yellow one.

My chest ached when I realized I might never get to hear her do that again. At least, not when it came to a case.

My time as Frankie James was coming to an end and for whatever reason, that fact was finally starting to feel real .

I reached out and ran my fingers over the feathery clusters of tiny, cream-colored flowers. They were kind of spiky, more like a fern than a flower, but the color did make me think of a ghost.

All this worry and stress over a rookie I couldn’t even partner with once his training was over. I would have to take a step back, and if he wanted to work in the field, I couldn’t be his partner.

Sure, I could probably work a job here and there, but not like I have been.

I chuckled, feeling like an idiot. It was truly special how I was always drawn to the ones I could never have. It never ceased to amaze me that I managed it every time.

Maybe I should just do what my father did and marry an omega who’d give our pack the best political advantage.

Sometimes I wondered if he was lonely, but my father never seemed like he was. He was too involved with his pack.

I suppose we were more alike than I wanted to admit.

Glancing down at the base of the flower, I wondered if I could take a cutting to bring back to my father’s greenhouse. He preferred roses, but this thing was tall and wild. It suited him with its spiky yet elegant appearance.

Shifting to the side, I pulled my knife out of its sheath and knelt down to find the root, but there were too many leaves in the way. I shuffled around to the other side and the soil started to give.

I froze, feeling that horrible little flip in my stomach that warned me something shitty was about to happen.

But this was a state park. There was no way, right?

Carefully, I planted my hands on the ground and slowly moved away from the weird shift in the ground.

It could be nothing, or it could be a gopher hole – a snake’s nest…something normal.

Or it could be exactly what I thought it was.

My heart started pounding and I gripped my knife tightly as I tried to convince myself I was overreacting.

One more step and I should be good—the earth suddenly gave way and the sensation of falling overtook me.

I clenched my teeth to keep from screaming and clawed at the dirt – the roots, anything.

When I hit the bottom, the air was knocked from my lungs and I couldn’t inhale, but I could feel the spongy sensation of something horrifyingly familiar.

No, it was highly unlikely. We were in the middle of a state park. Animals dug holes like this all the time. It was probably just plant roots, or…bugs.

Then I finally inhaled and the stench of rot filled my lungs.

Rolling to the side, I grabbed the stick that was digging into my side and held it up to the light, but it definitely wasn’t a stick.

It was a dismembered arm.