September 21
There was something curious about Daniel St. Clair. He was gentle on the eyes. He spoke in the kind of voice that could swiftly lull a crying baby to sleep. He brought with him an aura of stillness and prestige.
Samuel Perez was content that his daughter’s murder was being treated as it should—with the best resources. But there had also been something fishy about Daniel. Why was the golden boy at the FBI interested in a murder in Lakemore?
Everything about Daniel made sense now. He was in Lakemore because of Chloe St. Clair. She was still missing. She was seventeen years old when she disappeared, would be nineteen now. Daniel was too young to have a child that age, so Mackenzie deciphered that Chloe was his sister.
Mackenzie looked up the Washington State Patrol website, which listed all the missing persons in the state. They showed Abby on their website, but not Daphne or Chloe. She logged into the Homicide Investigation Tracking System. Her stomach dropped when she found the case file for Daphne Cho.
“Chloe’s not there?” Nick sat next to her with his coffee. They’d booked out the conference room, so they could dig deeper without distractions.
“Nope.”
“Maybe she turned up, but outside Washington and Oregon?”
“Then why is he here?” Mackenzie watched Daniel standing by the cooler, talking to Justin. Her eyes narrowed at his smacking jaw.
Gum. Always with the gum.
“Why hasn’t the state patrol listed her as a missing person then?”
“No clue.” She downloaded Daphne’s case files from HITS. “Daphne Cho was a foster kid and had a history of running away. She never returned from a party at Riverwood Rocks on September fourth, 2015. One month later, her body was found in Tacoma, which is why we didn’t have her in our database.”
“2015? Who was assigned the case?”
“Aaron Lane.”
“As a runaway? Not a missing juvenile?”
“Yeah, because of her history.”
It was a case that hadn’t stood out to her, even if she had heard about it in passing. Lakemore dealt with troubled youth and teenage runaways all too often. She’d already checked what cases she’d been working on at the time: a homeless man found dead in the park and a housewife beaten to death. “Did anyone tell you about this?”
He pondered, no doubt trying to remember what he’d been working on. “Come to think of it, Aaron mentioned a runaway had been found dead outside Lakemore, so it wasn’t their jurisdiction anymore. Guess he was talking about Daphne.”
Mackenzie opened the autopsy reports. The screen flooded with forensic pictures of Daphne washed up on the shore of the Saluktuk River. Her skin was covered in bruises and scrapes, but the coroner had concluded that most of them were post-mortem, resulting from being carried by the rough tides of the river. Cause of death was asphyxiation, based on the fractures found in the hyoid bone. Vaginal lacerations, bite marks on breasts, and bruises on thighs indicated rape and sexual assault. The semen had degraded, and they never found any match for the bite marks. Based on the tides, they had tried to estimate where the body was thrown in the river. But they were unable to narrow down the point of entry. It could have been anywhere in Pierce County or Thurston County.
“It says she was held captive, based on the bondage marks on her wrists,” Nick said.
She scrolled down the page and froze. Blood drained from her face.
“Look.”
The number 916 was branded on her thigh. The coroner concluded that the mark was put on her skin ante-mortem using fireplace pokers.
What did that number mean? It now connected three girls.
“Think Erica was branded?”
“Probably.” Nick winced at the picture. “She wasn’t found fresh. Any branding is gone, along with her skin. But she wasn’t held captive either. So, maybe not?”
“Erica had left the house willingly, probably to meet Abby. Maybe ‘916’ was watching her, because of the cocktail napkin found in the room. He followed her. She fought too hard and, in the struggle, he killed her earlier than he had planned to.”
“Or he held her captive but she wasn’t bound as tightly, leaving no micro-fractures. Which is why she was able to escape.”
“But she was found a little over a mile away. Was she being held that close to home?”
“Possible but unlikely,” Nick conceded. “Usually, victims are taken far away from familiar surroundings.”
“What if she went someplace?” Mackenzie suggested. “What if that cocktail napkin came from there?”
“She didn’t go anywhere unusual based on her credit card statements and family and friends’ accounts. No significant amount of time has been unaccounted for. No suspicious behavior.”
“Did they close Daphne’s case?”
The police had arrested a homeless man, Garrett Ward, after they discovered her necklace on him. He claimed that he found it on the shore, but he was incoherent and mentally unstable. They couldn’t match the bite marks either but stated that his excessive use of methamphetamines resulted in tooth decay and hence the match was “inconclusive.”
He had died in prison sixteen months ago, awaiting trial.
She pulled up his picture. He was sixty years old with a silver-gray beard that started just below his eyes and obscured his mouth.
“Think this mentally unstable old man raped and killed that girl?” she asked Nick.
“And came back to life to kill Erica and abduct Abby?”
“They rushed to close this case.” She gritted her teeth. “I can’t believe they pinned it on some deranged man to wash their hands of her, saying meth use interfered with forensic dentistry.”
Nick frowned at the computer and skimmed through the files again. “We submitted information of literally one page to Tacoma PD.”
“What?”
He was right. All Lakemore PD provided Tacoma PD was a basic background check on Daphne—her address, the social worker and foster parents’ contact information, and her brief history of running away. The information was biased. It obviously colored the perception of Daphne to the Tacoma PD.
“Aaron was investigating. Did he not find anything? He must have had witness statements from that night, but that wasn’t shared,” Mackenzie said. “Who signed this off?”
Nick leaned back and linked his fingers behind his head. “Lieutenant Peck.”
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 u
niform 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.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“They would never let me be on this case if they knew I had a personal connection. I could have told you, but I didn’t know you enough to trust you with this.”
“You believe that Daphne, Chloe, Erica, and Abby were taken and hurt by the same person. That’s why you’re here. You withheld important information. You’ve known a lot more about this case since day one.” Mackenzie couldn’t keep the spite out of her voice.
“I didn’t mean to. I don’t know anyone here. The last thing I wanted was to risk getting kicked off this case.”
“You misled us! We could have been a lot closer to the truth by now if you hadn’t chosen to be dishonest.”
Daniel took a shuddering breath and looked away.
“Start from the beginning,” Nick said.
“Chloe’s my half-sister. She grew up with our father in San Diego after our parents divorced. We were close when she was growing up, despite the age difference.” He swallowed hard. “And then she… rebelled. She dropped out of school when she was fifteen. I tried talking her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen. She ran away from home. She was crashing at friends’ places. I sent her money whenever I could. She was just passing through Lakemore, trying to get to Seattle.”
“She was never found, but the case was closed.”
He let out a mirthless laugh. “Yeah. They closed it citing lack of any leads after they found a receipt for some bus ticket dated the day she disappeared. But I know how this works. She was a drifter. She had a reputation. No one cared. I believed the police too, for a few months. But I started looking into it again and found out about Daphne and Erica. Then I had to wait for an opportunity to find my way here.”
“We are trained to keep victim bias out of the equation, but it can find its way in. Did you talk to Troy when you got here?” Nick asked.
“I couldn’t without arousing suspicion. I did access the case file.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “He did everything by the book. Peck recommended shutting it down after reviewing the evidence. There was this big burglary ring running in Lakemore around that time. He was more focused on that.”
Mackenzie remembered. Burglars were targeting rich households. Even the mayor had been burgled. It always irked her that they were never caught. After stealing money and jewelry worth two hundred grand, they disappeared. The Lakemore PD assumed that the ring had moved on to another city or state after looting whatever was worth looting in Lakemore.
“Did you come across the number 916 when you looked into Chloe’s disappearance?” she asked.
“No.”
“When did you find out that Daphne had this number branded on her?”
“Before I came here,” he avoided their eyes. “I have a buddy at the Tacoma PD; I called in a favor.”
“And why did you assume that all these disappearances were linked?”
His shoulders slumped. “I was doing some research and came across this thread on Reddit about girls disappearing in Lakemore. Some anonymous users were discussing how their friend, Daphne, disappeared three years ago from a party. Another mentioned how Chloe went missing the next year. Then, Erica vanished. The only thing that linked them together was the month of September. When I dug deeper, I realized there was a pattern. The way Lakemore PD handled Daphne’s disappearance was… frankly infuriating. Same with Chloe. If Chloe actually skipped town, why hasn’t she been in contact with any of her friends? They didn’t bother to follow up. Hell, the Sheriff’s Office doesn’t even advertise her face anymore. Young, irresponsible girls with no strong roots in the community disappear, and no one gives a shit.”
Mackenzie watched Daniel’s incessant blinking and bobbing knee. A man who was usually cool as a cucumber was on the brink of fracturing in front of them. What many would confuse for pain, she recognized as guilt. Two years later and he was no closer to finding out what happened to his sister. He was an agent at the FBI with tools and skills at his disposal, and still there were powers and bureaucratic tape holding him back. He didn’t do enough to bring her home when she was out in the world, and then she got lost forever.
Pain was seasonal. Guilt, on the other hand, was a constant state of mind. It was that icy weight on the chest. It was the brain bending at an agonizing angle and trying to function.
Mackenzie knew that more than most.
“When you showed me that napkin with the number on it,” Daniel continued, “that was the first tangible proof that there’s a connection beyond the timing. Before that I’d only seen the number on Daphne.”
Mackenzie shot up from her chair and paced the conference room. Suddenly, she felt hot. She wanted to pull her hair and scream till the air chafed her lungs. She knew she was coming undone.
916 had been abducting and killing young girls in Lakemore in September for four years. Mackenzie had never felt this stupid. She wanted to scream at herself. A growl threatened to rip out of her throat, but she swallowed it, knowing she had company. The pieces were right in front of her all this time. They were sitting in the local database. But it took Vincent Hawkins to give her a nudge in the right direction and bring them all together. She remembered what he’d said to her.
“It’s not hard to notice if you’re looking for it. But that’s the problem. No one had been looking till now.”
This was about more than two best friends disappearing a year apart. This was a systematic operation of girls being snatched, raped, and murdered right under the nose of the police.
Daphne was murdered with “916” branded on her skin. Chloe was never found. Erica was found dead but even though her skin was decomposed, a cocktail napkin with the number 916 was in her room. Abby had been missing for ten days. She had the numbers “916” in her journal and locker.
Six months ago, Abby’s behavior had changed. She became paranoid. She stole money from her
mother and dropped it with Erica’s phone at the gas station, probably because she was being threatened. Someone was trying to slow her down by switching out her pills before they took her.
Everything suggested that Abby had started looking into Erica’s death and discovered something about 916, or maybe 916 itself.
“How did the napkin end up in Erica’s room?” Daniel asked.
“We haven’t been able to find out where it came from; without knowing that we can’t know whether she brought it home from somewhere or someone else left it there. But we’re pretty sure she left her house willingly that night. We know she texted Abby right before she left,” Mackenzie said.
“There are two possibilities. Either the culprit had access to Erica’s place or Erica got mixed up with whatever this 916 business is,” Daniel said.
“Erica’s messages don’t show anything 916-related,” Nick said. “Neither does any of the evidence.”
“Could she have had another phone?” Daniel asked.
“Doubt it. We went through her bank statements. She was only paying for her one phone.”
“So, if someone went to her room and left or dropped the napkin, why were they there?” Daniel pondered. “If she left willingly, then there would be no reason to go there. Unless we’ve been wrong about that, and someone took her from her room. But there was no sign of a struggle, and she took her scarf with her…”
Mackenzie’s skin prickled. “Or 916 had access to Erica. Either they were in her social circle and dropped the napkin, or gave her it, or they got into her room because they’d been watching her and picked her as the next target. Whoever they are, Abby got close enough to exposing them that they took her too.”
Forty-Five
Mackenzie watched the sand trickle through the narrow space of the hourglass. The bulk of the sand barely moved in the top section, but closer to the tight space, it showered down furiously. She felt like she was finally approaching that tapered neck.
She and Nick were sitting in front of Sully’s desk while he paced behind his chair. Daniel had explained his connection to Sully in private, and the sergeant had dismissed him from the room before speaking to his own detectives.
Our Daughter's Bones: An absolutely gripping crime fiction novel (Detective Mackenzie Price Book 1) Page 19