Page 57 of Our Daughter's Bones

“One girl was buried alive, and the other is missing!” Mackenzie hollered louder than she had intended to. “Our focus needs to be them, not on politics or the Sharks’ championship prospects.”

“This is how the world works, Mack,” Sully said flatly. “If you don’t like it, tough. This case is delicate. The mayor is up for re-election soon. Do you know the people who contribute the most to his campaign? Perez and Jones. Everything can be affected—promotions, budgets, resource allocation, transfers. You name it.”

Mackenzie let out a breath sharp enough to cause friction inside her nose. Grinding her jaw, she crossed her arms.

Sully sighed. “I’m not asking you all not to do your due diligence. I would never do that. Justice will always take priority. All I’m asking is that you approach this with some…tact. Is that fair?”

“Yes,” Mackenzie mumbled petulantly.

“Good. Quinn and Abby lied about their last conversations with Erica. Someone talked to Abby right before she was taken and hasn’t come forward. Everybody’s hiding something. Find out what.”

Twenty-Nine

Reams of paper sat on Mackenzie’s desk. The Erica Perez file was thick—witness statements, police reports, crime lab reports, exhibit lists, copies of warrants, autopsy reports. Next to it was the Abby Correia file—a lot thinner, but understandably so.

A missing person generated a lot less information.

She pulled up the fifty-one names on her computer and quickly began sorting them. Out of fifty-one, twenty-nine were men. Luckily, their addresses and phone numbers were available. She ran them through the DMV records, and got driver’s license photos and dates of birth. Filtering by ethnicity, she narrowed the list to twenty-four. Assuming the man was below the age of seventy, she eliminated five more names.

Nineteen.

That was a good enough number. She drummed her fingers on the keyboard. Her mind raced. The aroma of greasy Chinese food wafted up her nose. She peeked round the partition to see Troy stuffing his mouth with stir-fry noodles while playing fantasy football. Her stomach growled, but she ignored her hunger.

No time.

It was then she noticed something sneaking out from under a pile of papers belonging to the Perez file. She pulled it out—it was a pack of gum. She frowned in confusion before the realization hit her that it likely belonged to Daniel. He was always chewing this gum.

“Troy, was Daniel in here?”

“Yeah, he was looking for something. A pen, maybe.”

She looked at the five pens she kept on her desk. They looked undisturbed, sitting in the order she liked. Maybe he put it back?

Mackenzie ran the nineteen remaining names on the Washington State Identification System (WASIS) database to check for a criminal record. One name popped up.

Eddy Rowinski.

It wasn’t even a harmless charge like shoplifting. He had been charged with aggravated assault twice and had spent nine months in prison three years ago. The first time he hit his girlfriend on the head with a pipe. He didn’t break any bones, but she was hospitalized with a concussion for several days. She refused to press charges. The county prosecutor did, but it being Eddy’s first charge, he got away with just community service.

Community service?Something wasn’t right. For a charge as serious as this, it shouldn’t have mattered if it were his first offense.

A year later, he pushed his girlfriend through the window. Again, she refused to press charges. But this time the prosecutor made sure that Eddy got prison time.

She looked up the county prosecutor on the case—Isaac DeLuca. He had been the prosecutor on a case Mackenzie had solved last year. She didn’t know a lawyer more obsessed with justice.

Not even Sterling.

She bet that Eddy’s girlfriend waited for him to get out of prison. They were likely still together. And he was likely still beating her. He lived at the same address and did online administrative work for Magnus Pharma, some pharmaceutical company in Canada.

Mackenzie inspected his photograph from DMV records. His face was young and bony. His hairless scalp had a tattoo of a snake. His eyes stared at the camera, dead and cold. His upper lip was thin and curled in a sneer.

But the image began to shift. The eyes tailed into slits and moved further apart. The cheeks got rounder. The hairless scalp retreated into a balding brown. As Mackenzie stared at the screen, Eddy’s face morphed into her father’s.

“It’ll always be like this! We’ll never get away from him.”

“Hush, baby.”

“Do you like this? Do you like being beaten?” She looked at her mother sharply, knowing that the words were wrong. But crying was exhausting. Even as tears flowed unchecked down her cheeks and her hiccups felt like little earthquakes.