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CHAPTER 11
KIMBERLY
THINGS WENT A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY than expected,” Kimberly Quincy said into the phone.
It was nine P.M. She was finally back in her motel room after one of the longest days of her career. She’d spent the past few hours in conversation with her supervisor, plus the taskforce team. Now, she needed fifteen minutes of sanity before the next round of logistical planning. Through the phone, she could hear her girls chattering away in the background. Nine P.M. was bedtime. No doubt they were taking advantage of Mac’s distraction to launch one last misadventure.
The sounds of real life. Kimberly could never decide if such normalcy was the most beautiful or most disconcerting noise after a day such as this one.
“You find more bones?” Mac asked from their home in Atlanta.
“Bodies. We found more bodies.”
A pause. “Girls,” he said to their daughters. “Go pick out something to read. I’ll be back in a sec.”
“Last time you tried that, they beat each other with the books instead.”
“But it did wear them out,” Mac countered.
She heard a click. A door closing. Mac retreating from the girls’ adjoining rooms in order to head to the master for a moment of privacy. She closed her eyes. Let herself picture it. Their modest ranch-style home with its open family room, overstuffed sofa, jumbled floor. One bedroom awash in purple (Eliza’s). A second room adorned in shades of blue (Macey’s). Both filled with an assortment of sports trophies, stuffed animals, and well-thumbed reads. Then there was her and Mac’s space, where the bed was never made and family photos lined most surfaces and the treadmill sat in the corner where it was genuinely used during the hot, humid days of summer but served as a substitute clothes hanger the rest of the year.
She kept meaning to paint an accent wall in the bedroom. And to organize the closet and tidy up the master bath. But the truth was, she never had that kind of time, and probably wasn’t even that kind of person. She and Mac lived for their family and their jobs. Which she liked to think made them perfect for each other.
“From the beginning,” Mac said.
“The cadaver dogs found three more bodies.”
“Three more?”
“At least. We dug down enough to unearth three skulls, but withdrew to wait for the forensic anthropologist, Dr. Jackson. Maybe there’s more underneath? I don’t know. Best we could see was a tangled mess of bones.” Kimberly’s hand shook slightly holding her cell phone. “A mass grave, Mac. When was the last time you heard of a serial killer burying three victims at once?”
Mac didn’t answer right away. She didn’t expect him to. She still didn’t know what to make of the day’s discovery and she’d had hours to ponder it.
“How old is the grave?”
“The remains appear fully skeletal. We’ll need to wait for Dr. Jackson and her team for additional details. I’m wondering about the shallow burial. Most things people want to keep secret, they bury deep. But all four of these bodies were barely interred. Meaning our perpetrator is someone who knows the area well and was confident the graves wouldn’t be discovered? Or didn’t have the time or strength to dig a full grave? Flora says Jacob Ness wasn’t the fittest guy around. I don’t know.”
“Are the new bodies also female?”
“We have to wait for Dr. Jackson for proper exhumation. She was adamant her team and only her team handle the grave site. At this stage, soil, bug exoskeletons, flora, and fauna, all of it will matter. We’re not the right people for the job.”
“But you’re betting female,” Mac guessed.
“The skulls appear small, which would be consistent with female. Also, I have to believe this grave is related to Lilah Abenito’s, and she was a teenage girl. I don’t know. Are we seeing what we want to see? Have I approached this case all wrong from the start? Honestly, I’ve never felt so stupid, and I’m supposed to be leading this taskforce.”
Kimberly sighed again. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she rubbed her temples, where she could feel a budding headache.
“You called for reinforcements?” Mac checked.
“Marshall agreed to activate ERT.” Marshall was her boss, and the Evidence Response Team was the FBI’s elite group of specialists who assisted with particularly involved evidence collection. Kimberly herself was a member. Sometimes ERTs assisted in jurisdictions that couldn’t afford to have evidence techs of their own, or lacked the FBI’s lineup of sophisticated toys. Other situations, such as plane crashes or mass casualty events, simply demanded greater resources. Kimberly’s Atlanta team had been called to work the Pentagon site after 9/11. One of her instructors had talked about raking the debris for days to recover a single gold wedding band. The look on the widow’s face, she said, when they were able to give at least that much of her husband back to her...
Kimberly’s instructor had passed away five years later. Cancer. Most likely from exposure to hazardous chemicals at the site. FBI agents often talked about having a call to serve. Very few civilians understood just what that meant.
“You doing okay?” Mac asked softly now.
“I’m struggling,” Kimberly admitted. “With how to manage this mess—the amount of people to supervise, the pressure for immediate answers to horrific questions...”
“You think the graves are Jacob Ness’s handiwork?”
