Page 83 of Our Daughter's Bones

Forty-Four

A giant knot sat in Mackenzie’s brain, pounding and throbbing. Why had Peck provided Tacoma PD with such scarce information? Aaron Lane was a good cop—he would have had more to offer them. She wished she could ask him, but aside from the case being years old, Aaron had transferred to Tennessee before Daphne’s body had been found.

She gazed at Daphne’s file. A troubled foster kid. The social worker had stated that Daphne was one of the difficult cases. Her foster parents admitted they weren’t close and were thinking of sending her away anyway.

The truth was that no one cared. She was a girl nobody would miss—and the world treated her like that.

Mackenzie felt a burn in her nose spreading to her cheeks. She had mastered the art of detaching from victims. It was the only way to survive this job. But here was a victim no one missed. A young child abandoned by her parents, wronged by the system, raped and murdered, and treated with indignity after death.

“Should we talk to Sully?” Nick asked.

“We should. But we don’t have to.”

“Don’t have to? Becoming a rebel, are you?”

“I’m very confused about what’s happening.”

“Are you saying that I’m the only one you trust now?” he teased.

She flashed him a sour smile. “Yeah. Imagine that.”

His face fell, but he recovered quickly. “What do we have on Chloe?”

Mackenzie pulled up the missing person incident report for Chloe St. Clair, filed on September 19, 2016, when she failed to show up to meet a friend. Chloe was eighteen, and the uniform branch had reported that Chloe’s rental room had been ransacked. It was assigned to Troy. The case was closed—with no arrest logs.

“This was Troy’s first case when he made detective,” Mackenzie said.

For a moment, she considered the possibility that Troy had made a rookie mistake. But as she and Nick skimmed over the details, she realized that the investigation was concluded in six days.

“Six days?” she hissed.

“According to various accounts, Chloe was a drifter. She would crash at friends’ places,” Nick read out.

Chloe had been on her way to Seattle, passing through Lakemore and catching up with old friends. When they found out that she’d booked a bus ticket to Seattle, they assumed that she’d skipped town. The reason her room was messy was because she had packed in a hurry. And since Chloe was an adult, there wasn’t much they could do. Combined with the lack of solid leads, they shut the case.

The more Mackenzie read about it, the more her memory began to sharpen.

“I remember this,” Mackenzie whispered. “Troy was looking for a girl and then he found out that she’d just skipped town. He calls it the shortest case of his career. Why didn’t he make the connection with Daniel?”

“Because she has no family listed,” Nick pointed out. “And there are a lot of St. Clairs in this country.”

“We should talk to Daniel.”

Nick tapped on the glass wall of the conference room and gestured at Daniel to come in.

“Gum?” he asked, walking in. “This feels like an interrogation with you two sitting across from me. Any new information?”

Mackenzie and Nick looked at each other.

“Two years ago, Chloe St. Clair went missing in Lakemore,” she said warily.

The polite smile hanging on Daniel’s lips disappeared.

“Now, I’m guessing that Chloe is your sister. Am I right?”

His eyebrows pulled in a knot. He looked away, staring outside the conference room. But the devastation on his face was palpable.

“Yes. She was. Is.” His voice was thick. “That’s why I’m here.”