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That cheeky grin made her suddenly imagine herself sitting on the tiny booster seat with her arms wrapped around his middle, leaning into his strong body as they flew around yet another sharp corner, her thighs gripping his lean hips. Lacey enjoyed riding behind him, liked the speed and the rush of adrenaline.
“Yes, please,” she replied on a gush of outward breath. As long as he could spare the time this weekend. With a new homicide to solve, Nico was going to be busy. But she kept the thought to herself.
As she watched Nico rumble down the driveway, her mind turned to the dead girl they’d found yesterday. That poor girl deserved Nico’s full attention, she decided. She needed her killer to be found so she could finally rest in peace. Lacey had always been cognizant of Nico’s dedication to his job. It was one of the many things she loved about him. His drive and determination; his need to solve the case, sometimes putting it above all other things. He was a damn good detective, and she’d known going into this relationship that she’d have to share him with his job, perhaps even give him up completely at times, because what he did was important.
But she also loved being back in the police force. She was slowly regaining the strength of character she’d thought she’d lost forever after witnessing Cindi’s death. She’d never lost her independence; that wasn’t her problem. It was one of the reasons she’d enjoyed her travels around Tasmania in Dotti 1.0, because she had always loved her own company, was strong enough to endure being alone. But her mental health had suffered in other ways, and she’d been afflicted with nightmares and a severe lack of faith in her abilities. It wasn’t until she’d found Nico and been forced to stop traveling, forced to take a good hard look at herself and receive some much-needed counseling, that she put a name to her problem. PTSD. But she was getting on top of her inner demons slowly, bit by bit every day. And being a cop was helping her win back her old sense of purpose. Whenever she found the lost dementia patient who’d wandered away from their care facility, caught the thief who’d robbed the liquor store, took the drunk teenager home to their worried parents late at night, and generally helped the community function for the greater good, she felt better. Like she was growing, healing.
In some ways, being part of the force made her and Nico’s relationship even stronger. He was now free to discuss most things with her about cases he was working on. Because Burnie was a rural station with a small team compared to larger metropolitan stations, she was sometimes assigned to work with him directly. She loved how they seemed to think in parallel. Like their minds were in perfect sync. But also, being a rural station, the rates of true homicides were also less. Nico was sometimes seconded to other smaller precincts to help with a case if they had no detective in residence. There’d been a death in custody and two domestic disputes that ended in the husband being charged with manslaughter in Burnie over the past six months. But they’d all been cut-and-dried cases, with solid witnesses and no doubt who the killer was. There hadn’t been a murder case without a clear POI before or since Rania’s murder.
But she also found that Nico had become a little overprotective. Well, notbecomeoverprotective, because he’d always been solicitous when it came to her safety right from the start. They’d had a long talk about it right before Lacey had started back on the beat, and she reiterated that she could take care of herself and he couldn’t always be looking out for her. She had a strong partner who she trusted implicitly; she had her police training—including a weapon—and it was part of her job to put herself in harm’s way if the situation called for it. Nico had agreed in principle, but she knew he still kept tabs on her through Linc and other officers in the team. If she was ever late home from a shift, he would worry. And if she was ever assigned to a case where the felon had become violent, he would be on the phone making sure she was all right. She got the fact that he fretted about her, her job was dangerous, but he needed to let her do her job without freaking out, and without interfering. Because if he was freaked out, his worry wormed its way into her psyche, and then it ate away at her confidence. Which wouldn’t do. She needed to be one hundred percent sure she was capable of doing this job.
Lacey leaned down and patted Smudge’s black-and-white head. He turned warm, brown eyes up to hers and she smiled. Smudge never judged. Just gave out unconditional love. She sighed. Perhaps it was time to have another heart-to-heart with Nico. Let him know he had to back off a little with his need to safeguard her. This was the only real point of contention they had as a couple, and she didn’t want to fight with him.
Now wasn’t the best time to be bringing her grievance up, anyway. Not with Nico’s undead father on his mind. Poor Nico. She tried to imagine how she would feel if her own father had died while she was young and then found out he’d faked his own death. It was a mystery that needed solving. But she wondered exactly what Nico might discover about his father and about himself if he did indeed solve it.
Dotti was calling to her, and her time with the van was limited before she was due at work, so she needed to put disagreements out of her head and get her hands dirty. “Come on, Smudge. You can give me a hand.” She led the way to the back of the shed where a small workbench was set up with an array of tools on display. Smudge gave a short bark as if to say,Yes, I would love to help.
* * *
It was the sound of swarming flies that first attracted Lacey’s attention. A low electrical buzz that got louder as she got closer to the water’s edge. There were plenty of the annoying insects around this afternoon, she could attest to that as she constantly waved them away from her sweaty face. For a single disloyal second, she wanted to curse Nico for his harebrained idea that the rest of the river and the larger natural pools near where the woman’s body had been found yesterday needed to be searched. What she was looking for exactly, she didn’t know, but her brief when she’d arrived at work this afternoon had been simple. Go back to the crime scene and search upstream from where the body was found. Search the surrounding trails and waterways, looking for…something, anything that might be suspicious.
Linc thought perhaps Nico was sending them all out on one of his famous hunches and they would find nothing because it was all a wild goose chase. But Lacey knew better. Nico was just being thorough. She would probably have done the same thing. The reserve had been closed to the public since yesterday, so if there were any clues to be found, hopefully they hadn’t been disturbed further by many feet tracking the trails. Hickey and Gorman had already searched the section of the trail from the parking lot to Ferndale Lookout this morning, and now she and Linc were searching from the lookout a few miles farther up the river. There were numerous trails winding through the reserve, the longest was nearly six miles and made a loop back to the parking lot via a forest road. Nico and a constable he’d managed to acquire from another case were searching the section along the road themselves, as Shadbolt had no other manpower to spare for a search that he declared was based on no clear evidence.
Lacey was ahead of Linc, he’d stopped a little way back where the trail forked to kneel down and poke at something in the base of a large tree, while she’d continued on down toward a big expanse of open water she’d glimpsed through the trees.
The buzzing sound urged her on, and she suddenly got a sick feeling in her stomach.
It was only early summer, so there was still plenty of water in the river. By next March, the river banks would be much lower, the water only flowing sluggishly. The trail led her to a small clearing, with a sloping earthen bank covered in leaf litter where people could enter the water if they wanted to swim. Ferns and sedge grasses lined the edge of the water, and to the left of the clearing, a dead log, felled long ago, protruded a few feet out into the river, making a superb jumping-off spot to dive into the deep pool of water.
The swarm of flies were massing near the giant dead tree trunk. But Lacey didn’t need the insects to tell her what she was about to find. The smell got worse with every step she took toward the log. She desperately hoped she was going to find some dead native animal. A poor little pademelon that’d slipped into the river while taking a drink and drowned, perhaps. The alternative was too grizzly to contemplate.
But as she stepped up onto the log and peered over the edge, her hope was destroyed by the sight before her.
The woman was half buried in the sticky mud at the lake’s edge. The rest of her body floated like a clump of dead leaves, her arm caught in a clump of sedges at the water’s edge. Her face was gnawed in places, as if some hungry creature had snacked on it. Shifting position to get a better look at the woman’s face, Lacey saw that one eye was missing. She shied away from the sight, but knew she’d be haunted by nightmares for a long time to come about rotting faces and fathomless holes for eyes regardless.
“Oh, shit,” she said, standing up and backing away from the body. “Linc,” she called out to her partner. “Get down here. I’ve found something.” Lacey grimaced and resisted the urge to block her nose. Oh, God, the smell. This body was much further along in decomposition than the first one. Had this woman been murdered too?
What were the odds of finding two bodies so close together in the space of two days?
Surely, this had to be related to the first body they’d found.
Why wasn’t Linc coming? She turned to look back up the slope of the bank, tilting her head to listen for his footsteps. “Linc?” she called again, louder this time. “Whatever you’re doing, you have to get down here. I found another body.” Where was he? Had he found something and gone back down the track and was now out of earshot? No. Linc wouldn’t do that. Not without telling her. They had a good partnership, and excellent communication was a big part of that.
It was then she realized how deathly quiet the forest had become. The birds had stopped singing, and the leaves hung on the trees in complete stillness, as if holding their breath. Listening. Waiting for something.
Lacey’s hand went instinctively to her gun. Something was wrong.
“Linc,” she called again, but this time she scanned the area with increased awareness, suddenly alert to any small noise or movement. Nothing. She tried to raise Linc on her two-way radio. There was no reply.
Shit. She was going to have to backtrack and see if she could find him. Which meant leaving the body here, unguarded. Climbing warily up the slope, Lacey peered through the trees, trying to make out where he might’ve got to. Even as she walked, she pushed the button on her police radio again. It was time to request backup. Nico was the first to answer.
“I’ve found another body,” she reported. “About a mile on from the lookout up the trail. I’m at a bend in the river, there’s a large swimming hole here.”
“Shit, really?” Nico sounded flabbergasted, but she didn’t have time for him to catch up.
“Can you please hurry,” she said, sounding a lot calmer than she felt, using her judo training to breathe in deep through her belly, out slowly through her nose. She needed to stay composed; she wouldn’t be able to think clearly if she didn’t. “Linc is also…missing.”
“What do you mean missing?” Nico demanded.
