Page 99 of Our Daughter's Bones

Now she just had to wait. It was possible that Eddy’s boss was connected to 916. After all, Abby had pointed at someone wealthy and powerful.

Mackenzie picked up speed. The September morning was humid. The air was too viscous to run through. It was easier to be still, but she couldn’t bear it. She feared that if she stood still, her thoughts would swallow her whole.

Suddenly, she came to a halt.

She was at the edge of the woods behind Hidden Lake. The woods where the bones of her father rotted.

A cold caress held her in place. Why had she run here? Her legs had seemed to have a mind of their own.

She tugged out her earphones and rested her hands on her knees. The pain finally seized her. But it was nothing compared to the repulsion she felt.

Who the hell was she to catch the bad guys and lock them up?

She was a fraud, and the world around her was stupid enough to believe otherwise.

Her phone rang. “Hello?”

“Where are you?” Nick asked.

“Get to the point.”

There was silence on the line for a few seconds, and she bit her tongue. Before she could apologize, Nick spoke. “Abby’s phone just pinged.”

“What?” She was already running toward the station. “Where?”

“The woods around Fresco River.”

“That doesn’t help! That area is huge.”

“It turned on briefly before it went dead again. Only the NSA can help us now.”

“Have the Sheriff’s Office dispatch some deputies to begin combing through the woods. I’m on my way.”

It was an unusually noisy day at Lakemore PD. Phones rang incessantly. Rooms were filled with bickering lawyers. An interrogation room was being renovated. Construction workers and janitors invaded the floors with electric drills and hammers. When she reached her office, she saw Nick, Clint, and Jenna huddled around a computer.

“What do we have?”

Nick’s eyes widened. “Did you run here?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Look at this.” He pointed at the computer screen showing a map of the woods. “It’s somewhere within this three-hundred-acre region.”

“Three hundred acres? Clint, you can usually narrow it down much further.”

He shrugged. “Sorry, Mack. Depends on the cell towers and location. This is deep in the woods. Plus, it was on for less than a minute.”

“Damn it,” she muttered under her breath. “There are a lot of cabins in that area.”

“Yeah, we’re not even sure how many,” Nick said. “Patrol can do a door-to-door search?”

Mackenzie turned to her desk and opened the drawer. She picked up the stash of the missing pages they’d recovered.

“What’re you thinking, Mack?”

She gripped the papers hard. “They havesomething, Nick. Why would Abby hide them?”

“You think that whoever took her has a cabin in the woods?”