The skeleton is wrapped in a royal blue shawl.
I sat in front of the computer with Dean beside me, scrolling from one
picture to the next, my finger feeling heavier with each click.
There’s a long-dead flower pressed into the bones of her left hand. The necklace is around her neck, the chain tangled in her rib cage.
Empty sockets stared back at me from a skull devoid of human flesh. I stared at the contours, waiting for a spark of recognition, but all I felt was bile rising in the back of my throat.
You removed the flesh from her bones. Forensic analysis suggested the removal had been done post mortem, but that was cold comfort. You destroyed her. You eradicated her.
Dean brought his hand to rest on the back of my neck. I’m here.
I swallowed back the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm me. Once. Twice. Three times—and then I scrolled on to the next picture. There were dozens of them: pictures of the dirt road on which she’d been buried. Pictures of the construction equipment that had uncovered a plain wooden casket.
You wrapped her bones in a blanket. You buried her with flowers. You gave her a coffin….
I forced myself to breathe and switched from the pictures to reading the official report.
According to the medical examiner, there was a notch on the outside of one of her arm bones, a defensive wound where a knife had literally cut her to the bone. Laboratory results indicated that the bones had been treated with some kind of chemical prior to burial. That made the remains hard to date, but crime scene analysis put the time of burial within days of my mother’s disappearance.
You killed her, then you erased her. No skin on the bones. No hair on her head. Nothing.
Dean’s fingers kneaded gently at the muscles at the back of my neck. I turned my gaze from the computer screen to him. “What do you see?”
“Care.” Dean paused. “Honor. Remorse.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I didn’t want to know if the killer had felt remorse. I didn’t care that she’d mattered enough to him that he hadn’t just flung her body down in some hole.
You don’t get to bury her. You don’t get to honor her, you sick son of a bitch.
“Do you think she knew him?” My voice sounded distant to my own ears. “That’s one explanation for what we’re seeing, isn’t it? He killed her in a frenzy and regretted it after the fact.”
The blood-splattered dressing room in my memory spoke of domination and anger, the burial site, as Dean had said, of honor and care. Two sides of the same coin—and taken together, the suggestion was that this wasn’t a random act of violence.
You took her with you. I’d always known that my mother’s killer had removed her from the room. Whether she was alive or dead when he’d done so, the police hadn’t been able to say, though they’d known from day one that she’d lost enough blood that her chances of survival were next to nonexistent. You took her because you needed her with you. You couldn’t leave her behind for someone else to bury.
“He might have known her.” Dean’s voice brought me back to the present. I noticed that this once, with this case, he didn’t use the word I. “Or he might have watched her from afar and convinced himself that the interaction went both ways. That she knew he was watching. That he knew her the way no one else ever would.”
My mom had made her living as a “psychic.” Like me, she’d been good at reading people—good enough to convince them that she had a line to “the other side.”
Did she do a reading for you? Did you go to one of her shows?
I racked my memory, but it was a blur of faces in the crowd. My mother had done a lot of readings. She’d done a lot of shows. We’d moved around often enough that there was no point in forming connections. No friends.
No family.
No men in her life.
“Cassie, look at this.” Dean drew my attention back to the screen. He zoomed in on one of the pictures of the coffin. There was a design etched into the surface of the wood: seven small circles, forming a heptagon around what appeared to be a plus sign.
Or, I thought, thinking about remorse and burial rituals and the monster who’d carved that symbol, a cross.
