She took out the bleach and soaked the pan in it. Then she cleaned the sink with bleach too.
Melody returned, breathing hard. She held her daughter’s tiny face in her hands. “You’re doing the right thing, sweetheart. You’re helping your mother. You are so brave. Very brave.” She kissed her forehead. “There’s a shovel here. I’ll do all the digging. I just need help with lifting. Are you ready now?”
Mackenzie didn’t know what disturbed her more: her father’s corpse or her mother’s apparent calmness.
Melody thrust the shovel under the layers of the sheet, on top of the body, and opened the door that led to the backyard. Together they lifted him and carried him out.
As Mackenzie carried the body, her mind wandered into dark places. What if they were caught? Would she be arrested too? Would her school expel her? Would the police allow her and her mother to stay in the same prison?
As they entered the woods, her heart slithered further down her chest. The woods always scared her. It was where the bad men roamed. Now, they were just like them.
She focused on the balmy air, the lingering smell of pine and cedar, the faint glow from the silver moon, and the sticks and stones digging into the bottom of her feet. She hadn’t put any shoes on. The woods were dizzying. Everything looked random and similar. She couldn’t tell where they were, but they were going deeper into the belly. She counted their steps. They were both panting. They were both on edge. Occasionally, they looked around. They paused briefly after every crunch of twigs and flapping of leaves.
What am I doing? I shouldn’t be here.
The woods were notorious for teenagers coming to party at night. But it was a Tuesday.
“This seems good enough.” Melody wheezed and lowered him.
They’d stopped after 317 steps.
“Just sit there. I’ll do everything.”
Mackenzie planted her butt on the wet soil and curled her knees in. She watched her mother start digging a hole.
Melody’s arms were toned. When she flexed, her biceps jutted out. She didn’t break a sweat. She was tall and imposing. Couldn’t she have hit him back before? Would he have stopped then?
Leaves rustled. Crickets chirped. The mountain of dirt beside Melody piled up. Hours later, Melody dropped the shovel and rolled the body into the hole. It fell in with a thud.
Mackenzie swallowed hard. What were Fiona and her mother doing now? Watching the television together? Eating dinner?
Melody scooped the dirt back into the hole to fill it up. Once she had finished, they stared at it. The patch of disturbed land looked innocent enough. Mackenzie knew she would never forget the sight of her mother breathing hard over her father’s grave.
Mackenzie looked down. A sob clogged her throat. She curled her toes in to catch the mud between them and squeezed hard. It felt soft and thick like dough. There was a fleck of blood on her smallest toe. She rubbed it against the soil until her skin burned.
“Sweetheart, you can never tell anyone about what happened.” Melody’s lips quivered. “No one. Not your friends, not your teachers, not the police, not your grandmother. It will put us in danger. This is just between us. No one can know. No one will understand. They will see us as monsters.”
“Yes, Mom.”
Melody offered her a hand. Mackenzie grabbed it and stood up. Together, they walked 317 steps back to their house.
She didn’t feel like a monster; she felt like a ghost.
One
Lakemore, WA
September 11, 2018
Mackenzie picked up the crime scene photograph and stared at it for the billionth time. The prostitute was lying on the bed. Her hair was soaked in blood. She was a blonde, but now she looked like a brunette.
She had been stabbed forty-seven times. There were puncture wounds all over her body. Her thighs, her stomach, her breasts, her neck, her arms, and her buttocks.
She had cheated on her lover forty-seven times.
“Here you go!” A hand blocked her view and placed a bottle of champagne on her desk. She squinted at it then looked up. “What is this?”
Sergeant Jeff Sully leaned his bulk against her desk. “It is Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs. Famous Californian champagne.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Mackenzie mumbled.
“It’s sparkling chardonnay.” He rolled his eyes, his thick unibrow tracking the movement. “Your knowledge of wine is disgraceful.”
“Your knowledge of wine is surprising. You clearly look like a beer person.” She pointed at his large drum of a belly.
Sully ignored the jibe and crossed his arms, his thumb reaching up to scratch at his graying mustache. “How do you even look at that without flinching? One of the worst ones I’ve seen in my career.”
She clipped the picture back into the case file. “I’ve seen worse.”
Detective Troy Clayton pushed his chair back from the cubicle next to hers and came into view with a Cheshire cat smile on his face. He reminded her of a carrot—tall, lean, and stiff, with a mop of light brown hair that looked orange under sunlight. “Guess you saw a lot of dead bodies in New York?”
She froze. She imagined what Troy would look like if his eyelid were swollen to the size of a golf ball. She wondered about the amount of force required to fracture a skull with a frying pan. It needed a staggering amount of rage.
What Mackenzie did twenty years ago needed astounding cowardice.
The phone trilled.
Papers shuffled.
The toilet flushed.
Sully’s stomach growled as he stood up.
The little sounds snapped her out of her spiraling thoughts and kept her grounded. A little trick she learned from the internet. She smiled. “Nah, I just have bigger balls than all of you combined.”
Sully laughed behind her. Troy reddened, but his lips resisted a smile. He tapped a pen against his chin before wheeling back to his cubicle.
The Investigations Division in Lakemore PD consisted of a Special Investigations and a Detectives Unit. Special Investigations looked into robberies, fraud, and drug and gang-related crimes. Sully was in charge of the Detectives Unit, leading six senior detectives and three junior detectives, investigating homicide, missing persons, felony assaults, and cold cases. Located on the same floor, the detectives had cubicles close to each other, with the sergeant’s office right down the hall. It was like being in a fishbowl. There was no privacy.
Mackenzie placed the blue binder back on the shared shelf. She looked at the unoccupied cubicle behind hers. Files were stacked in a corner. Pictures were pinned to the bulletin board on the wall. An empty coffee cup sat on the desk.
Her nostrils flared; her chest pinched. She looked away. “I think I’m going to go home.”
“What? No way!” Sully said incredulously. “The DA charged your guy, Mack. You solved the case. You celebrate here.”
Troy stood up and looked over the screen separating their cubicles. “Care to share some of that booze, Detective?”
“It’s been a long week––” Mackenzie started, but Troy interrupted.
“I’ll finish that entire thing then. We can celebrate for Mad Mack without her here.”
Mad Mack.
It was her nickname in the department. They called her that mostly behind her back and sometimes to her face. She didn’t appreciate the name, but she knew where it came from.
Her desk was always organized. Her notes were always color-coded. Everything in her life was ordered and categorized. She finished first in the academy. She could run one and a half miles in ten minutes. She worked on Christmas and Thanksgiving. She never relied on coffee or fast food, unlike her coworkers. Her red hair was always straight as an arrow. Her pantsuit showed no sign of crinkles. Her eyebrows were perfectly threaded. There wasn’t even a shadow on her upper lip. She never slumped. She never cried. She never lost her cool.
She must be mad.
“Actually, why not? No one wants to see you drunk, Troy,”
she teased him.
Troy smirked. “I’ll find the others.”
Ten minutes later, Detectives Finn, Ned, and Dennis were gathered around Mackenzie’s desk. Becky Sullivan, who led the Medical Examiner’s office, joined them. Having worked with Mackenzie and the other detectives on several cases, she had become good friends with the unit.
Sully stood, facing them, and raised his glass. “We all must be a little mad too for working till midnight. To Mad Mack!”
“To another bastard in prison,” Mackenzie corrected.
“To complaining wives at home!” Dennis raised his glass.
“And complaining husbands.” Becky cocked an eyebrow.
They clinked their glasses. Finn went to his cubicle behind Troy’s and connected his iPod. The song “Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts blasted from his speaker.
Mackenzie sighed, defeated, while they laughed at her expense.
“Mack,” Ned said. “Sterling did a good job with Thatcher. Nailed him. You know how badly I wanted this guy gone.”
Mackenzie’s eyes skimmed over Ned’s aged face. Even though Ned was in his late forties, he looked at least a decade older. His breath was stale with the smell of cigarettes and coffee. The last twenty years of dealing with battered homemakers had left him scruffy.
Did Mackenzie’s scars show? Could someone look at her and guess what she had done? She hoped not. She put a lot of effort and time into looking immaculate. It wasn’t vanity; it was her armor.
“Sterling is good at his job,” she shrugged. “But this was all you, Ned. You’d been building a case against him for months. Don’t let my husband take any credit for your hard work.”
Ned smiled and gave her a pat on the back.
The champagne felt bubbly against her tongue. It wasn’t strong or heady. She sipped it slowly while Troy and Dennis watched the highlights of the football game on the internet, and Ned and Becky discussed their kids, who were in the same grade.
She spotted a water ring on her desk and furiously cleaned it with a cloth.
“Mack, I don’t think you realize how impressed the brass has been with you,” Sully said, taking away the cloth. “Relax tonight.”
“The Lieutenant, you mean?”
“Peck is a hard man to impress. I don’t think he likes me, but I don’t really give a damn about politics. You’re good at your job. I just want you to know that people are watching you. Maybe in the next few years, you’ll have my job. And of course, it helps to be married to an assistant district attorney.” He winked.
She dug her palm into the edge of the table and forced a smile. Being married to ADA Sterling Brooks had several perks—but one day, happiness had stopped being one of them.
Sully looked over his shoulder to the empty cubicle opposite Mackenzie’s and the picture pinned to the bulletin board. “Bruce retired at a bad time. Nick has been under a lot of pressure since he took over the case.”
“I wonder when we’ll find that girl.”
Two
September 12
The scraping sound of a knife slicing through vegetables and the sharp sting of the blade hitting the cutting board was comforting. Mackenzie chopped the carrots into fine pieces and dumped them in the blender.
Next came the tomatoes. The juice spurted and spilled. She stared at the red liquid trickling across the cutting board. It was lighter than her father’s blood. If she added some blueberries to the mix, the color would match.
Heavy footsteps thudded down the stairs. “Baby, have you seen my watch?”
She paused and looked at Sterling. His dark skin was stretched out tight over his strong facial bones. He was clean-shaven—exactly how she liked him. Underneath the gray suit, his muscles were bulging and rippling. He was at least half a foot taller than her. He looked like a cop, not a lawyer.
“Mackenzie?”
“Sorry. I don’t know where it is.” It was in the laundry room.
He groaned. “Dammit. I’m late already.”
“Why? Where do you have to be?” She tried to sound neutral.
“I have a meeting with Ron. He’s in a bad mood. I’ll just go without it then.” He picked up his briefcase and put on his coat.
He cupped her face with his calloused hands. She remembered their first date, when he had touched her like this. He told her she looked like the moon on fire, with her pale skin and flaming red hair.
But Sterling said a lot of things. He was charming, successful, and beautiful. He didn’t let anyone mistreat his wife. He helped with household chores. He liked to go down on her.
Mackenzie was lucky. She had found someone good. She hadn’t made the same mistake her mother had. Sterling was the perfect husband, the ideal specimen.
He leaned in and planted a quick kiss. It left a bitter taste lingering on her lips.
When Sterling walked out, she turned on the blender. The white noise filled her house. She looked up at the box-beam ceiling. She had come a long way from growing up in a house with a cracked and moldy roof. She looked down at the floor. Her kitchen didn’t have dirty yellow tiles. Mackenzie looked around her home—the vast open floor plan, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the front yard. The lack of privacy didn’t bother her; it was easy to look into her house, but there was nothing to hide. No bloodied wives, no dead bodies.
Every day, she admired her garden: the flourishing shrubs, the immaculately mowed grass and the weeping willow that looked like an umbrella. Today, as she gazed out the window, she wondered how he kissed her.
Her stomach churned. Her face turned the color of the tomato she had just chopped. Her bones ached to smash something. She snatched at the blender jug and it slipped from her grasp, spattering the juice over her glistening white counter.
She didn’t bother cleaning it up. Sterling would do it.
She picked up her iPod and went for a run.
Runners usually took the scenic routes in Lakemore. There were plenty—lonely trails through forests or twisting paths along the lakes—but next to Olympia, Lakemore was an ugly mole that couldn’t be surgically removed.
Mackenzie liked to run through the ugliness of Lakemore. Buildings that had no creativity in their design. Parks that were neglected, with broken and vacant swings. Billboards that paraded tacky and half-hearted advertisements.
Lakemore didn’t thrive; it slithered. It didn’t try; it had accepted. It was a city people ran away from, not toward. With Olympia and Tacoma nearby, the brightest minds headed out of town.
But when a town gives up, a few people rise to build it up again.
Detective Mackenzie Price was one of them.
Her breaths came out in short bursts. Drops of sweat popped all over her skin. She ran harder than she had before. The cool but unusually dry air traveled with her. Her feet bounced off the concrete sidewalk. She felt the material of her track pants stick to her legs.
She ran past a boy putting up a poster on a lamppost. She stopped and turned. Breath wheezed in and out of her.
“Hey, kid!” She frowned. “What are you doing?”
The boy froze. He was not even in his teens yet, and he wore a jacket too big. It swallowed his scrawny frame. “Putting up this ad for football coaching.”
Mackenzie snatched the poster from him. He recoiled. “You know you’re covering this missing girl’s poster, right?”
His lower lip puckered. “But this poster is on every lamppost and wall in the city! It’s been a year. Who even cares anymore?”
Mackenzie raised her eyebrows.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
She handed him the poster and folded her arms. “If I see this covering any of the missing person posters, you’ll be in big trouble, kid.”
The boy’s eyes peeked at her toned and muscular arms. He swallowed hard and nodded before running away.
Mackenzie looked at the missing person poster.
Erica Perez smiled, showing her pearly white teeth. Her skin was caramel, and her strai
ght dark hair neatly framed her heart-shaped face. Her red sweater had black polka dots, and a blue pendant rested in the hollow of her neck. Under her picture was the line: Have you seen me? followed by a description of her basic features and what she was wearing when she disappeared.
She was only sixteen years old at the time.
Mackenzie’s fingers grazed the poster. The paper was thick and glossy. It was clear that money had been spent on it. A few weeks ago, the rain had washed down the posters. The next day, new posters made of sturdier paper were stapled all over the city.
Erica Perez was everywhere. Every nook and cranny of Lakemore had her poster up. Her pretty face was carved into the memory of every citizen. Even the people who had never seen her before she disappeared would never forget her face. A few months ago, her face had flashed over the billboards too.
Usually, posters have their edges peeled off or have other posters pasted on top. But not hers. It was partly money and partly fascination that kept them up.
Mackenzie stared at the girl who had vanished from her bedroom and into thin air.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. “Detective Price.”
“Mack?” Sully said. “I’m sending you an address. Justin will meet you there.”
She started walking back towards home. “What’s this about?”
“Another girl went missing.”
She froze. “Shit. Uniform isn’t investigating?”
“No, I want you to go. I have a bad feeling about this. She’s from Lakemore High and went missing yesterday. You remember what day it was?”
A pair of girls walked past her. They were showing each other their phones. One of them giggled. The other one blushed. They were both Erica’s age. Neither of them knew what this world could do to them.
Her blood ran cold. “The first anniversary of Erica’s disappearance.”
Three
Mackenzie breathed on her sunglasses and wiped them with the hem of her shirt. The late morning in Lakemore was accompanied by a sharp sun and blazing blue sky. She regarded the modest two-story house in front of her and checked her phone; the address was correct.
Our Daughter's Bones: An absolutely gripping crime fiction novel (Detective Mackenzie Price Book 1) Page 2