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“What are you gonna do now?”
Mac moved away from the curious technician. “Not really my case,” he said with a shrug.
“Bull-fucking-shit. Been your case from the beginning, man.”
Yeah, well… Mac headed back to his black department-issue sedan, switched out of his boots to shoes that weren’t quite so caked with mud, then climbed in behind the wheel and backed away from the crime scene. In the distance, the prehistoric outlines of heavy construction equipment were black against a faintly lighter sky. St. Elizabeth’s was being torn down. Even without the kids who’d stumbled upon Jessie’s grave, her skeletal remains would have inevitably been discovered.
He shoved the car into Drive and rolled out of the pockmarked parking lot that separated the convent from the school. A few lights still shone in the windows of the nuns’ quarters, which were to be saved from the developer’s bulldozers. The convent was still owned by the church and was to remain that way, at least until a better offer from a developer landed on the archdiocese’s table.
Driving past what remained of the gymnasium while the police radio crackled and the rain peppered his windshield, Mac did a quick mental inventory of himself, an exercise he performed automatically, something he’d learned from the ridicule and exposure he’d received after he’d insisted that the group of boys who made up Jessie Brentwood’s friends were involved. He decided he was okay. He wasn’t nuts and never had been, and that group of boys-the Preppy Pricks, as he’d dubbed them-were the real ones with problems.
They’d all known Jessie. They’d all insisted they were innocent in her disappearance.
He remembered them with surprising clarity. Christopher Delacroix III, a filthy-rich kid who had hidden behind Daddy’s money. The Third, as the others called him, seemed to be a ringleader. Now he, like his namesakes, was a Portland attorney and a son of a bitch. Mitch Bellotti, the heavyset football player, had been a smart-ass. He was still around and rumored to be a helluva mechanic. Scott Pascal was a weasel if there ever had been one. He and a buddy-Glenn Stafford-had opened a fancy restaurant together. Most of the others were around as well, and their names and faces ran through his head: Jarrett Erikson, Zeke St. John, and Hudson Walker.
He liked to check his own emotional temperature. He’d learned restraint. He’d learned how to keep things to himself.
But he’d never stopped believing one of the Preppy Pricks, or several working together, were responsible for Jessie Brentwood’s disappearance and death. Maybe there were some guys involved outside of their core group, too; Mac had certainly harassed others who were also friends or acquaintances of Jessie. But the Preppy Pricks were at the top of his list. He’d made their lives hellish twenty years ago; he could admit it now. He’d been twenty-five, full of his own self-importance; brash, cocky, and a real pain in the ass. But he couldn’t break them. Hadn’t been able to poke holes in their stories. And he’d ended up being the laughingstock of the police department. He’d damned near been demoted from missing persons to some nondescript desk job. It had taken years to become a respected homicide detective, and even to this day some of his superiors regarded him with a baleful eye and most of his partners left him as soon as they could. The Jezebel Brentwood case-his obsession with it-had put its stamp on him.
And now…her bones had been discovered.
If they were Jessie’s. And he believed with all his heart that they were. His headlights reflected on the wet, crumbling pavement and reflected off the eyes of a lumbering racoon that scuttled into the surrounding shrubbery skirting the abandoned school’s main entrance.
Checking his feelings, Mac expected to experience some kind of satisfied “I told you so” building up inside. Maybe there was a little of that, but mostly he sensed his curiosity about the case, a long-slumbering beast, stir from its resting place and lift a nose to the wind.
He pulled onto the highway running through the canyons that carved the west hills of Portland where tall firs flanked the road and elegant homes from the early 1900s were cut into the steep hillsides.
What had happened to Jessie? he wondered. A prank gone bad? A lovers’ quarrel that had escalated out of control? An accident? Or was it murder? The cold, calculated snuffing out of a pretty girl’s life.
Bile rose in his throat, the way it always did when he was dealing with the abuse or death of the young. Of the innocent. Though, from what he knew about Jessie Brentwood, she was older than her years and far from innocent…an intriguing underage woman who was as manipulating as she’d been alluring. One of those females who knew intrinsically all of her attributes, how to use those wide hazel eyes and turned-up smile to get what she wanted, even if it meant playing with fire.
And he asked himself the question that everyone else seemed consumed with: Why was he so fascinated with this case? A simple missing persons case, they’d all said. Why did Mac care about this one so much?
He still had no answer. Maybe he’d been a little in love, a little in lust, with the beautiful, mysterious girl he’d never met. He’d handled dozens of cases where kids disappeared, but this one was different. She was different. He’d followed all the leads he could, dreamed about her, even. Fantasized about her, for God’s sake, and he’d taken a lot of heat for it. At the time his friends on the force thought he’d gone around the bend. She was a sixteen-year-old runaway. He was an up-and-coming hotshot detective who was obsessed by a ghost.
In retrospect, maybe they hadn’t been that far off the mark.
Now, twenty years later, a single father working homicide, Mac knew he’d definitely mellowed. He didn’t really want this case now. Old wounds. And problems.
But those Preppy Pricks were still out there. He wondered how they felt, knowing Jessie’s body had been discovered. One, or several of them, must be sweating bullets now.
Mac smiled thinly. Well, maybe this was the way it should be after all. Him, heading up a homicide case, a cold case that put all the smug bastards on the hot seat.
It was sounding better by the minute.
Becca set the newspaper on the coffee table and sank back on the couch, still staring at the folded pages as if they were Satan’s diary. She felt cold inside and out. What was this? What did it mean?
Ringo circled her feet, tail down, a soft, nearly inaudible growl emanating from his throat.
“Stop it, there’s nothing out there,” she said softly, as much to soothe her own jangled nerves as to calm the dog.
Jessie Brentwood had disappeared twenty years earlier when she’d been sixteen and a student at St. Elizabeth’s, the private Catholic school that had gone co-ed only a few years before. Becca had attended St. Elizabeth’s, too, though she was a year behind Jessie, a freshman. But she’d been friends with Jessie’s crowd, and she remembered all too well how she’d secretly yearned for Jessie’s boyfriend, Hudson Walker, with his dark, longish hair, slow, easy smile, and cowboy drawl. He’d been different from the others, a boy who seemed a tad older somehow, one with a cynical sense of humor and a distance to him that had made him all the more interesting. It was as if he’d known everyone for what they were, had seen through their teenaged façades, and had been amused by all their foolish antics.
Or maybe she’d just fantasized that he’d been more mature and intelligent and innately sexy than his peers. All she knew now was that she’d been crazy in love with him and had hidden it for years.
But that changed, didn’t it? Once Jessie was gone…then you made your move. You, Becca, were as calculating as she was.
Oh, God…
