AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Somehow Reggie had fallen through the cracks.
Reed made a couple of quick notes and headed out to grab some lunch. He’d just stepped outside and was crossing the parking lot when the phone rang again. “Detective Reed?” a sharp female voice inquired.
“Yeah.” Using his remote, he unlocked the driver’s door.
“This is Deputy Tina Rounds.” He remembered her. Tall, by-the-book, with mocha-colored skin, near-black eyes and a no-nonsense attitude. “Hey, I got a call from emergency. A fisherman found a body. He came up here to Black Bear Lake and found the remains. Freaked, called 911, and I caught the call. I’m here now and all I can tell you is that it’s definitely human cuz the skull is still there, though other body parts are missing, and it’s small. A kid.”
“Rose Duval,” he whispered under his breath, his heart sinking. Damn. He’d hoped she had somehow survived.
“Don’t know yet.”
Jesus. He started jogging to his vehicle. “I’m on the way. Tex
t me the address.”
She did and he typed it into his GPS, then drove out of the lot, the Jeep’s interior already warm, the windshield dusty. He hit the wipers and wash, then hit speed dial on his phone.
Delacroix picked up before the phone rang twice. “Yeah.”
“Looks like we may have found Rose Duval.”
A pause. “Really?” Disbelief.
He filled her in.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. “That’s about what . . . less than a mile upriver from the Beaumont place?”
“Yeah.” He checked the map as he drove away from the heart of the city, centuries-old buildings giving way to strip malls. “Closer to the old Marianne Inn.”
“Don’t know the place.”
He pushed the speed limit, cutting around an old diesel truck pulling a dirty, time-worn boat filled with crab pots and fishing nets.
“The Marianne’s been closed for years but used to be kind of a resort or fishing lodge.”
“You really think it’s Rose Duval?” Again, he heard the skepticism in her voice.
“No idea,” he admitted. “Only one way to find out.”
Delacroix said, “I can be there in fifteen.”
“I’ll meet you there.” His pulse kicked up and he pushed the speed limit, driving out of town, through suburbia to the road that wound along the river.
The thought of finding the third Duval girl bothered him, and he was surprised at his disappointment. At a gut level he’d hoped to find her alive, living under an alias, perhaps not even knowing she was the missing Rose Duval, that the memory of her youngest years had been erased or blurred with the passage of time. But why would she be located away from the crypt, where it seemed the killer had created a space for her.
His fingers clenched more tightly over the wheel as he turned off the main road to a lane where the asphalt had buckled and finally turned to gravel. Dry weeds scraped the undercarriage while the Jeep’s tires bumped through potholes. Around a scraggly pine he found the deputy’s cruiser and a dirty white pickup with a canopy, fishing poles propped against its side.
Tina Rounds was as daunting and by-the-book as ever. The man beside her, Frank Mentos, was no more than five-six, a little round in the middle, his eyes huge in their sockets. His hair was gray beneath a baseball cap, and he was wearing hip waders and a fisherman’s vest.
The story was simple: Mentos had been fishing around the lake, started back to his truck, when he noticed something half covered in brush and dirt. Upon closer examination, he’d realized he was looking at a denim jacket, beneath which he thought he saw bones. He’d freaked, called 911, and Rounds was the first on the scene. She’d phoned Reed.
“Damnedest thing I ever seen,” Mentos said, swallowing hard as he stared at the partial skeleton.
Reed bent down on one knee, careful not to disturb anything, but looking at the bones and tattered clothing: the raggedy jacket and once-red shirt. If there had been pants, they had either disintegrated or been dragged off by animals, along with several obviously missing bones.
His heart nose-dived. The skeleton was, indeed, small.
“Hey!” A shout behind him caught his attention and he turned, still kneeling, to find Delacroix, her expression serious, sunglasses over her eyes as she hurried down the path. “What’ve we got? Oh, geez.” She nodded at Rounds and Mentos, and Reed filled her in as she, too, crouched for a better look at the body. “This all there is?” she said. “Missing leg bones and an arm?”
