Page 81 of Our Daughter's Bones
She looked over at her husband, sound asleep. His naked back faced her. It had been a long time since Sterling had slept without draping his arm over her waist. No matter the fights they had gotten into, he would always seek her out in the dark.
She waited for sleep to catch her. She felt the slumber in her bones. It was her mind that betrayed her.
Daphne. Chloe. Erica. Abby.
She felt spray on her face. What was that? She looked over her shoulder. Sterling hadn’t moved.
She closed her eyes.
It happened again. Her eyes flew open. She touched her face. She felt something there. She rubbed it into a paste between her fingers.
Smelly and icky, like manure.
More mud flung into her face. She tried to move but her muscles wouldn’t so much as twitch. Her heart galloped. She urged her legs to move. But they were bound to the bed. Tight. Unyielding. Unforgiving.
Adrenaline surged through her. It filled her and replaced the blood in her veins. Tears welled in her eyes. Mud covered her face. It kept showering down on her, suffocating her. She opened her mouth to scream.
Big mistake.
No sound came out. Her vocal cords worked tirelessly, scratching against each other brutally.
Mud poured into her open mouth. It scraped the back of her throat and got lodged in the crevices of her tonsils. She couldn’t close her mouth. It was too late. Her lungs cried for scraps of air. But they were scarce. She felt the weight of mud pushing her and gravity pulling her. This was it.
Death was close.
Mackenzie’s eyes flew open, and she wheezed for air like someone half-drowned emerging from the water.
She was in bed. Alive. There was no mud. It took her a few minutes to get her bearings. Sweat clung to her skin. She registered Sterling’s arm, now over her waist. She wondered what the dream was about—Erica, or Robert?
Forty-Three
September 21
There was something curious about Daniel St. Clair. He was gentle on the eyes. He spoke in the kind of voice that could swiftly lull a crying baby to sleep. He brought with him an aura of stillness and prestige.
Samuel Perez was content that his daughter’s murder was being treated as it should—with the best resources. But there had also been something fishy about Daniel. Why was the golden boy at the FBI interested in a murder in Lakemore?
Everything about Daniel made sense now. He was in Lakemore because of Chloe St. Clair. She was still missing. She was seventeen years old when she disappeared, would be nineteen now. Daniel was too young to have a child that age, so Mackenzie deciphered that Chloe was his sister.
Mackenzie looked up the Washington State Patrol website, which listed all the missing persons in the state. They showed Abby on their website, but not Daphne or Chloe. She logged into the Homicide Investigation Tracking System. Her stomach dropped when she found the case file for Daphne Cho.
“Chloe’s not there?” Nick sat next to her with his coffee. They’d booked out the conference room, so they could dig deeper without distractions.
“Nope.”
“Maybe she turned up, but outside Washington and Oregon?”
“Then why ishehere?” Mackenzie watched Daniel standing by the cooler, talking to Justin. Her eyes narrowed at his smacking jaw.
Gum. Always with the gum.
“Why hasn’t the state patrol listed her as a missing person then?”
“No clue.” She downloaded Daphne’s case files from HITS. “Daphne Cho was a foster kid and had a history of running away. She never returned from a party at Riverwood Rocks on September fourth, 2015. One month later, her body was found in Tacoma, which is why we didn’t have her in our database.”
“2015? Who was assigned the case?”
“Aaron Lane.”
