Page 120 of Our Daughter's Bones

“So was I.”

She pulled her knees to her chest and stared at the ground. “I haven’t confronted him.”

“Still?”

“You’d think I would have done, right? I’m not the passive kind.”

“You’re definitely not passive. You’re just processing. It’s a tough situation.”

“What would you do if you were me?”

He hesitated. “I would leave him.”

“I would have given you the same advice.” Her eyelids felt swollen from her outburst. “It’s so easy to say that.Leave him.”

“You have to decide what’s easier for you. Leaving him or living with him, knowing everything you do.”

“And you say you don’t know anything about relationships.”

She looked up at the sky. The first drop fell on the tip of her nose. Fat raindrops began to clatter to the ground, one by one. She made no effort to move. The rain drenched her clothes, filled the insides of her shoes, and seeped into her scalp. It washed away her armor. She felt naked, powerless, like everything in her life was unspooling. She waited for the panic to take over. But nothing happened.

“I can’t believe you didn’t run for cover,” Nick said, sitting carefree on the ground.

“I know. I’ve officially gone insane.”

“I didn’t want to say this before, but I’m pretty sure you are sitting in dog pee.”

She grinned.

Sixty-Six

October 9

Rain pounded harsh and heartless on the windows. Mackenzie pinched her forehead as she got off the phone with more disheartening news from the Sheriff’s Office. They had been trying to track Abby from Grayson’s cabin, searching the woods painstakingly for the past two weeks. The women and men of the Sheriff’s Office knew the woods better than anyone. So far, they had nothing.

Nick leaned against the wall of her cubicle. “Another update from Anthony.” As expected, crime scene investigators had found a mass of fingerprints in Grayson’s cabin—over a hundred. They were working with the Latent Print Unit and Washington State Patrol to identify possible matches in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System or “AFIS”. It would take time to run them all. “Still nothing for us to follow up.”

“What about that shoe print?” They had established it was a size eleven, but hadn’t got much further.

“Definitively too faint to reconstruct the specific make.”

“Has Jenna found anything?”

“Nope. Of the sixty-two names Grayson gave us, thirty-one are dead, and twenty-six don’t live anywhere near Washington anymore. She’s now followed up on the remaining five that still live nearby. Two are in wheelchairs. Jenna has gone to check in on the other three, but they’re ancient, Mack. Highly unlikely for them to commit violent and sexual crimes in their early seventies.”

“I know.” Her shoulders sagged. “We have so much more information now, but I still feel like we’re back to square one.”

“Yeah.” He unbuttoned his cufflinks and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, then picked up his coffee mug and pressed it against his forehead. “I’m scared that this is going to end up being one ofthosecases.”

“The ones that are never solved?”

“Yeah. The ones that haunt you forever. Don’t all detectives have one?”

She pressed her thumbs against her eyelids. What was she missing? Was someone hiding in plain sight? The stakes were much higher. This was not just about Erica and Abby. This was about Chloe and Daphne too. This was about the next girl who would be targeted if they didn’t catch the copycat Club 916.

This would be the fourth year they’d failed. Four Septembers they’d gotten away with. She refused to accept that.

“What about Grayson’s alibi?” Nick asked. “Have you finished going through the calendar his assistant emailed?”