“Some sappy Luis Miguel song probably,” she said. Which cracked Camila up.
“I have to go.”
“Te amo, Daddy,” Camila said, telling me she loved me.
“Te amomore.”
I walked inside the station. Not seeing my team on the floor where Detective Quinones’s office sat, I texted Richie. His response came back fast.
Come to the basement.
I took the elevator down to B. As I entered the medical examiner’s suite, I slowed, seeing the room was crowded with tables. Amongthem was the stainless-steel type every ME uses to evaluate victims. But those had been run through quickly, and four bodies had been laid atop folding card tables, the kind sold at every home improvement store.
On each table was a skeleton, covered in dirt and debris. Six in all.
I threaded my way through the maze, and Quinones turned as he saw me.
“You said to keep things quiet,” he said, his voice low.
My eyes moved from body to body. The pelvic bones were wide, the rib cages broad and curved. Each of the skulls was delicate.
“Shit,” I said softly.
The bodies were in various states of decay, some indicating a death months ago, with fatty tissue turned to wax still clinging to the cheekbones of one skull. Others appeared to have been in the ground for years. One looked like it had been buried less than three weeks ago.
I scanned the length of the bones, my eyes stopping at the epiphysis on the sternal end of each body’s clavicle, which usually fused around the age of thirty or thirty-one. In all the victims, they were unconnected.
Six bodies. All women around the age of thirty or younger.
Slain and hidden in the dirt.
When I’d left Florida twenty-nine hours ago, there was one new victim on this case. Now the room was crowded. Which meant our potential suspect in the death of Freddie Pecos hadn’t just killed our C.I. and the three women that were discovered years ago.
He was a serial murderer, with at least ten kills to his name.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Tell me what you know so far,” I said, staring at my team.
We had assembled on the roof of the police station, and Richie was smoking. I wondered if the stress of the case had pushed him to this, or if he’d always been a smoker and I had simply not been aware.
“We’ve only ID’d two of the bodies,” Richie said.
“So far,” Cassie added.
“So far,” Richie corrected himself.
The wind whipped around the roof, and Shooter spoke up. “You remember Ingrid Santos from Jacksonville, right? We called her Santos Santos?”
This was the ME from our old office, a woman who had a habit of repeating words at the end of every sentence.
Cassie shook her head at Shooter. “Youcalled her Santos Santos. No one else did.”
Shooter continued, undeterred. “Shilo lost their coroner six months ago, Gardner. They’ve been using a mortuary employee to fill the role.”
A fairly common practice in small communities, but we couldn’trely on a skill set like this for a complex case. “You called Santos?” I asked.
Shooter nodded. “She’ll be here at eight a.m.”
