Middle Of
The Night
With the morgue locked down, Chris, Chrissy, Tony, and Jaxon were left to their own devices. They all had work to do, and truthfully, MATE was doing all the heavy lifting.
For them, it was a waiting game.
What went down over the last two hours had been mostly digging through files for dentals, and any kind of matches to cases they’d worked.
When Chris had heard that the man had bought FBI intel from Elizabeth’s old cases, they began trying to match the bones to someone they’d seen in the morgue before.
Only, Tony hadn’t been convinced that was going to pan out, and he was right.
He’d seen something in those scans, and he was chasing ghosts.
Yes, they were ghosts of their past.
And it had him worried.
Now, though, in the silence of the room, as Jaxon had her head down on the counter, taking a nap, and Chris was cleaning up from the body repairs from Hell, he was watching the screen.
MATE was meticulously doing the reconstruction, as that dread sat in the pit of his stomach.
Over the last twenty-five years, he’d seen a lot of bones, and he had the uncanny ability as an anthropologist to see markers and get a baseline of the victim.
For the male one on his table, he didn’t like what he saw. Now, he was waiting for confirmation.
He’d not told Chris, simply because he wanted to make sure he wasn’t losing his mind—or just tired.
But truth be told, he was scared.
As the system chimed, he knew the analysis was complete, and his suspicions would either be right, or he hoped, wrong.
Printing out the results, he saw the name, and it was a sucker punch to his solar plexus.
He’d been right.
Oh, this hurt, and stole his breath.
A part of his brain was screaming one thing.
This couldn’t be happening.
There was no fucking way what he was seeing was accurate.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “NO, no, no,” he muttered, staring between the paper and the skull in horror.
From where he was cleaning up, that had Chris’ attention.
“What?” he asked, heading his way. “What did you just find?” he asked. “Is that the ID?”
Tony stared at him.
And said nothing.
Even though he’d suspected this, he still hoped he’d been wrong. Now, he wasn’t so much shocked, but horrified. Because of what he saw, he wanted to hide the results, and for one reason, and one reason alone.
“Chris, this is bad. We can’t…”
