Colin thought, I’d spread the bodies around, too. Good way to avoid anybody getting too interested, in case a few of those bodies were found eventually.
If these were related, the few that had been found almost had to be the tip of an iceberg. Think of how much empty country there was out here, with the high desert stretching to the east, the wooded, rugged mountains of the Cascade Range to the west. How many places to dump a body.
He didn’t like this line of thinking, but couldn’t avoid it. He thanked the sergeant and asked him to call if he thought of any more details or heard of anything relevant.
His gaze strayed to the bulletin board and Maddie Dubeau’s picture. Did this explain her disappearance? He didn’t want to think so.
Duane called a couple of hours later. “It can’t be Maddie,” he said baldly. “We’ll check dental records, too, but...Marge says this one is male.”
Relief was sharp, a jab to the chest rather than a gentler flood. Colin cleared his throat. “Age?”
“Can’t pin it down. Apparently some people get wisdom teeth real early, some not until their twenties, some never. Late teens, she thinks, but she wants more bones.”
Colin grunted. “I don’t have good news for you,” he said, starting with what the Crook County sergeant had told him. “Deschutes County had a kid, too, found four or five years ago, buried in the cinders on Lava Butte. Some teenagers were out there at night, drank a few six-packs—climbing up and sliding down, you know how it is—and they uncovered bones. A boy smashed the skull with his foot.”
“Bet that still gives him nightmares.”
“No shit,” Colin agreed. “That one was shot. There was an exit hole in the back of the head. Since, unlike Crook County, they had teeth, they were able to identify the victim. Another runaway, a girl from Vancouver last seen in Portland. Sixteen years old.”
“The one here in town was about the same age, too, wasn’t she?” Duane said thoughtfully.
“There are a hell of a lot of kids that age on the street.”
This wasn’t a problem they had much in Angel Butte. Winters were too cold in central Oregon for anyone to sleep in doorways or alleys year-round, and the town was too small for prostitution and panhandling to hide in shadows. But in larger cities, it was another matter.
“I called Bend, too,” Colin continued. “They didn’t have anything related. They think. A Detective—” he glanced at his notes “—Jacobs is going to do some research. He’s only been with the department for four years. Klamath County’s getting back to me.”
“If this one is a guy and those were girls, there’s likely no tie.” A serial killer was wired to choose victims to meet a certain need, usually at least part sexual, which almost always meant they were of one gender or the other.
“Probably not,” Colin agreed. Which didn’t mean these bones weren’t in some way connected to Maddie’s disappearance.
Duane gave an update on the search, which so far had turned up only a few additional small bones from a hand or foot.
The two men left it at that.
Colin rocked back in his chair. Well, the latest bones weren’t Maddie Dubeau’s. That was something.
She’d be twenty-seven years old now, if she were alive. Twenty-eight in a few weeks. He didn’t even have to think about it. His relationship with his sister wasn’t close, but he’d sent her a birthday card just last month. Like Cait, Maddie wouldn’t be a skinny kid anymore.
Some people didn’t change much from their early teen years, others so much so their own parents wouldn’t recognize them if they hadn’t been there every day while the transformation happened. The plain became pretty, the beautiful, ugly...or just ordinary.
Which way, he wondered, would Madeline Dubeau have gone?
He shook his head at his own foolishness. She was dead. She had to be. It was past time he quit clinging to the stubborn belief that she had somehow survived. How could she have? She had been a kid. A girl, small, fine-boned, physically immature for her age. Injured, snatched late at night and never seen again.
The very fact that she haunted him suggested that she was dead, didn’t it? The living left you alone in a way the dead didn’t. Just look at him; he didn’t give a damn about his mother, who was alive and well in San Francisco, but his father he still actively hated even though he’d been buried four years now.
Colin swung around in his chair to look out the window at a courtyard and the brick back of the jail. Despite the calls he’d made today, this investigation wasn’t his. It was Duane Brewer’s, Jane Vahalik’s, Ronnie Orr’s.
I’ll call Cait tonight, he thought. Arrange to get together with her when I’m in Seattle. He’d be there in two weeks, for a symposium Microsoft was holding on new technology for law enforcement personnel. Cait was his only real family. He could try harder. The fault was as much his as hers.
And right now, he had work to do. He swung back around to his desk and computer, and didn’t let himself glance at the bulletin board again.
CHAPTER TWO
“HEY, THE BOOK lady is here!” Aliyah cried.
Girls jumped up from the sagging sofa and miscellaneous easy chairs and rushed to crowd around Nell Smith. The music video on the TV was forgotten.
Katya, after barely glancing away from the television, said, “Big freaking deal.” Katya had appeared at SafeHold half a dozen times in the past two years. She never stayed for more than a week or two. She had to be nearly eighteen, and Nell worried she would soon be ineligible to stay at the shelter for homeless teens.
“Nell! Cool,” said Savannah, a wispy, pasty-skinned fourteen-year-old boasting three eyebrow piercings, half a dozen in each ear, a lip labret and a belly button ring. If there were other piercings in unseen places, Nell didn’t want to know.
“Did you bring me the new Vampire Academy book?” Kaylee asked eagerly.
More titles flew.
She grinned at their eager faces. “Yes, yes and yes.” All they wanted to read were paranormal romances, but Nell’s selections were written for teenagers, by talented authors.
She volunteered here on a regular basis, typically spending every Sunday afternoon and one weeknight evening just hanging out and talking to the girls. Girls were housed separately from guys, although the two buildings were linked by a courtyard and a shared kitchen and dining room.
Nell also came weekly to represent the Seattle Public Library, maintaining a shelf of books in each of the two buildings and filling special requests when she could. She’d packed other shelves with books that were weeded from the library collection, donated, or picked up at garage sales. Many of the kids who came in here weren’t readers and never would be. Others thought they weren’t but got seduced. Some laboriously studied for their high school equivalency exams, or to catch up with school—if they could be convinced to care.
What she loved most was encouraging reading for the pure joy of it. These were kids who hadn’t had much joy in
