I closed my eyes and pictured my mother’s face.
“Mom,” I said. “I can’t do this alone.”
I opened my eyes and stared at two files. The women’s bodies had been buried two feet down and three feet away from each other, but there were no other personal items.
No. That wasn’t exactly true.
All the victims had one thing in common: the material surrounding their buried bodies. Strips of bamboo were wrapped around the skeletons, the pieces cut in irregular patterns, some with squared-off edges at the ends of the strips. Others with curved ends to the fabric, as if stitched by machine.
Detective Johnson opened the door, and his eyes swept across the items I’d relocated from the desk to the floor so I had a clean workspace.
“I’ll put those back,” I said.
He held out a file. “Odette Nell, twenty-four. Caucasian. Missing eight months. No witnesses.”
“From where?” I asked.
“Local from about a mile away,” he said, staring at the open file. “Roommate said she had a dentist appointment last August. The office said she never showed up.”
Johnson waited for some response, but I just grabbed the file and placed it on the desk. The detective closed the door, sighing, and I heard my phone pulse. A text from Cassie:
Tell me you got something.
I wrote back, telling her I didn’t. Then moved to a photo of the bamboo strips, laid out under one of the skeletons.
In religious cultures, shrouds of bamboo are used for burial, but the material is typically cut to suit the size of the body. In this case, the pieces looked like leftovers.
My cell phone rang.
“Remember Dog?” Frank said.
I looked at the time. Ninety minutes had passed. Frank was back in Shilo.
“Melanie Nelson’s boyfriend,” I said. “The pimp?”
“I tried a shot in the dark,” Frank said. “Asked Quinones if I could speak to one of his vice guys.”
Shilo wasn’t a big place. “Hehasvice guys?”
“There’s a pair of them,” Frank said. “I met with one. He said he never busted Dog as a pimp, like the girlfriend’s mom said. According to him, Dog was a dealer.”
“Details?” I asked.
“Before he disappeared,” Frank said, “Dog got popped for something with the street name Sleep Cut. He walked on a technicality.”
I wasn’t familiar with this name. “What is that, Frank?”
“It’s fentanyl,” Frank said, “cut with this other drug. Xylazine.”
Xylazine was a veterinary medicine created in the 1970s to sedate animals for diagnostic testing. I had read reports of it becoming recreational over the past two years.
“This vice cop was trying to make a deal with Dog,” Frank continued, “find out where he was getting the xylazine from, so they could get it off the street. At some point, the vice guy didn’t hear back. He’s been looking for Dog ever since.”
“Dog was dealing animal tranquilizer,” I repeated.
“Yeah,” Frank said. “And there’s something else. One of the tip line messages we flagged was a guy named Tony Harris. Turns out he’s Dog’s cousin, the one who originally reported him missing.”
“Do we know if Richie phoned this cousin back?”
