His Garden of Bones (Skye Cree Book 4) (11 page)

“We’ll work on it. That’s why we have a team. When one bumps up against a tough situation, we hand it off,” Josh said, a grim reminder of why they did this job. Thinking of his earlier “baby moment,” he felt this might be an excellent time for a reminder of another kind. He turned to Skye, draped his arm over her shoulder. “It’s time you realize you can’t do everything, be everywhere, and take on every single task that comes into this office.”

Skye knew Josh meant well but it didn’t mean she could let go that easily. Of course, she had to learn to delegate, spread the tasks around to others as the foundation grew and took on more and more volunteers. Practicality had to be a virtue. After mulling it over, she decided it was in the best interest of the missing girls and their families to hand off some of the names.

“I’ve already been working with Judy Howe on how to deal with digging out the delicate information from a family member. Judy’s past with Berkenshaw makes her a great choice to be one of our go-to people able to successfully reach out to relatives. There’s a fine line to it. Making contact is difficult. You don’t want to give them false hope that their daughter is out there somewhere, that she might’ve survived somehow. The balance is about gaining as much info as we can and
not
yanking that hope out from under them. For months now, Judy’s been practicing her people skills and seeing a therapist twice a week. I think she’s ready to tackle this one.”

Josh’s face broke into a grin. “I agree. Judy’s been doing a damned good job of making her way back despite surviving a brutal attack from a sadist. The last time I talked to her, Judy brought up the ordeal herself without any prompting from me. She’s making remarkable progress, to think only months ago she lived her life in a reclusive environment.” 

Skye beamed back. “Recluse no more. I’ll call her and get her to come in early today, call Travis, too. All of us will divvy up the list, start working it, obtaining last known addresses for the teens, exact locations of where they went missing, and get current phone numbers for their next of kin, start setting up face to face appointments if we have to.”

“I’m going out with you tonight,” Josh stated out of the blue. “There’s no point in arguing about it either.”

She narrowed her eyes. “A serial killer delivers flowers to me personally at home and you think I’d be foolish enough to turn down company or go out by myself? Tsk, tsk, after all this time you still underestimate me.”

“Who, me? No way. It’s going up against that hard head of yours time and again that has me prepared for battle each time I mention helping you on the streets.”

Skye took hold of his shirt with both hands, pulled him closer in front of Leo. She smacked his lips with hers in a fierce kiss. “Besides, we make such a good team and you’re my right-hand man,” she cracked. “How could I go out at night without you to protect my back?”

“’Bout time you realized it.”

Assembling the team
was the easy part. Skye had a long list of people willing to help. Longtime friends like Velma Gentry and Lena Bowers had become staples. There were others on standby that could be counted on when the foundation needed to rally ground troops for searches or make phone calls.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty was a piece of cake. But reaching out and touching base with moms and dads who were still hurting from a disappearance was another matter entirely. Some of the couples hadn’t even stayed together. Divorce often occurred after the traumatic loss of a child. Statistics proved that. But these particular instances when a daughter went missing without a trace could put a different kind of pressure on a relationship. No closure, nothing to latch onto, meant it was easier to go their separate ways than to deal with the pain together.

On top of separation and strain, it was a sad fact the families of the missing were often pushed aside by members of law enforcement. The same could be said about the media. Once the case grew cold, interest tended to evaporate on both fronts. Unless a family member took matters into his or her own hands and kept the case alive by giving TV interviews, becoming a regular contributor online, or establishing a website or Facebook page, or became a pest in general with detectives, the file, more than likely, sat in a box somewhere gathering dust. After all, it rarely fell into the “homicide” category because without a body, cops often felt they had no reason to pursue the case. Investigators could only follow available leads. If no leads materialized or didn’t pan out, there wasn’t much more they could do except wait for tips to come in from the general public. Which meant many case files fell into their own abyss, that special circle of hell with no answers.

By early afternoon, reinforcements showed up—Judy, Velma, Lena, and Travis arrived to pitch in. As they mulled over all the names on the list, Velma commented, “Oh, wow. It’s for sure that making these phone calls will be a lot tougher than waitressing. These stories just break my heart.”

Skye agreed. “I know. The families want so much for someone to talk to them, to find them any kind of resolution. They’re usually very cooperative, but tread carefully with the prickly questions.” Skye went over the same spill with these volunteers she’d had with Leo earlier.

Once Lena had gone over all the names there was disbelief. “So many victims. Are these ages correct? Some of these are just kids.”

“Kids are the most trusting and vulnerable,” Skye said. “But let’s face it, any age is susceptible to falling victim to a clever killer. Predators are good at coming up with the perfect ploy to fit the occasion.”

“If the phone numbers the team gathered still work and you get to talk to a family member, suggest a meeting, either at their place or coming in to the foundation,” Josh directed. He glanced around the room and into the faces of the group. “We don’t expect the ones out of state to make the trip here, but any who are close, bring it up in conversation. Let them know our volunteers are here for them if they need to talk.”

“You need to mention to the volunteers that many families have already resigned themselves to bad news,” Judy added. “So when the phone rings in, let’s say Spokane, and you start talking about their case, prepare for a lot of emotion.”

“Good point,” Skye noted.

“If nothing else, maybe stirring things up, we’ll rattle some cages in law enforcement,” Travis said as he looked over his portion of the list.

Skye glanced at her father. “That’s one reason I think it’s time we bring in Emmett Cannavale.”

Travis shifted in his chair, stared back at his daughter. “You know he’s part Chinook. He has an interesting heritage and ties to the area.”

Josh rounded into the room from the little kitchen area catching the last part. Holding a freshly brewed pot of coffee in his hand he toured the room, refilling cups. “I read something about that in his bio. His Chinook mother married an Italian farmer who’d settled here after the war to start a farm, grow olive trees.”

“I can’t wait to ask him about that,” Skye retorted.

The door opened and Harry popped his head inside but stopped short of walking in. Instead, the detective looked around the front office, saw the crowd there, and motioned for Skye and Josh to come out into the hallway.

Sensing a problem because of the look on Harry’s face, Josh made it to the hall first. “What gives? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I’ve got a report of bones washing up on the beach at Alki Point. I’m headed there now, decided you guys might as well ride along. So I swung by, took a chance that you’d want to see what’s what for yourself. Get your gear and let’s go.”

It was on
this same strip of Alki Beach that Chief Seattle waited on its shell-strewn shore to greet the first white settlers, arms open in hospitality, heart full of hope for a long, enduring friendship. The year was 1851 when he first shared the food he had on hand, taught the newcomers how to build the huts that would keep them dry and warm during winter and showed them how to make the best use of the vegetation and surrounding prairie land.

Members of Seattle’s tribe—a mix of Suquamish and Duwamish—were practiced farmers who tended the land, making sure it yielded a generous bounty of fruits and vegetables each season. The Natives willingly shared whatever they had on hand. Since the coastal land around Puget Sound gave up enough steelhead and game and berries for everyone, Chief Seattle never concerned himself overmuch about the future of his people.

But he should have.

Inevitable progress forced the area tribes to give up their canoes, their villages, sign treaties that would take away their rights, and break up families. Distraught parents learned their children would be packed off thousands of miles away to boarding schools in other parts of the country. Many were never reunited. Missionaries were determined to indoctrinate what was left of them into a new world they neither understood nor wanted.

A short twenty years later in the 1870s, expansion of the land became the primary goal. Railroads, electricity, and settlements popped up, even an amusement park. A steady stream of people from back east took advantage of a circus-like atmosphere in a new frontier and the new technology to get them there. Advertisements enticed the adventurous to leave home and seek out new horizons. Given the idea of owning the land that had once belonged to the Natives, easterners invaded the area in droves. Ultimately development caused the generous beach to shrink in size to what it looked like today, a smidgen of pebbly shore.

The area resembled any other small, bustling community that sat near the water. Traffic bogged down stretches of the roadway. During good weather, tourists flocked to the seashore. A string of businesses—cafes, coffee shops, trendy boutiques, art studios—did their best to attract new customers.

Giant cedar and spruce grew next to cottonwood and towered over the grassy slopes where older bungalows lined the winding neighborhood streets alongside larger, newly built, modern houses. 

Today when they arrived on the scene the place looked deserted.

Yellow police tape marred the beauty and the view across the bay and its surrounding wetlands. Crime scene techs milled about the roped-off area with cameras while Roger Bayliss knelt on the ground, feet from the lapping water.

As soon as Harry pulled his SUV to a stop, three car doors flew open, each person taking in the scene before them. It seemed death had touched this serene, peaceful setting where families like to picnic in the summer.

Even from twenty feet away, Skye could see the scattering of bones littering the sand. She’d never seen the medical examiner quite as pale as he was today. She didn’t blame his bark when he warned everyone to stay back.

“Before you come any closer, I should tell you we have at least seven vertebrae and five pieces of various jawbones. Small ones.”

Everyone there knew what that meant.

“Those bones belong to kids,” Skye said in grim realization. “Five jawbones is a lot of children to go missing at the same time.”

“How long do you think they’ve been here?” Josh shouted to Bayliss.

“I can’t answer that,” the coroner snarled. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a little busy here.”

Josh spun back to Skye in solemn understanding. “Bayliss may not be willing to discuss it but… Those bones are from a long time ago.”

“How… How are you able to tell that from here?” But even as she asked the question there was acceptance. It had been almost two years since Josh had acquired the uncanny ability to pick up on certain details about a crime scene, not unlike that of a seasoned member of law enforcement routinely used investigating the worst of the worst. Pros referred to it as a gut instinct. Never mind that Josh had been a gamer for most of his life rather than a veteran cop. “How far do they go back?”