Twisted (42 page)

“Nothing yet. I—”

“Dr. Quinn? Need your eyes over here.”

Kelsey glanced across the campground to the doctor standing beside the radiography tent. It was a welcome interruption. She could tell Aaron was about to launch into one of his lectures about backing off the hours, and she was too tired to argue with him.

“Get me an update on those lights,” Kelsey ordered, then remembered to smile. “Please.” She jogged across the camp and ducked into the largest tent, which was blessedly cool because of the giant fan they used to keep the expensive equipment from overheating. Dr. Manny Villarreal, a short man who happened to be a giant in his field, was now seated at a computer with his usual bandanna tied over his bald head. Today’s selection was army green, to match his scrubs.

Kelsey zipped the tent door shut. She tilted her head back and stood for a few moments, letting the decadent eighty-degree air swirl around her.

“When you’re done slacking off . . . ?”

“Sorry. What’s up?” Kelsey joined him at a computer, where the X-ray of a skull appeared on the screen.

“Victim thirty-two,” Manny said. “She came out of intake this morning.”

“She?”

He gave her a dark look. “Irene recovered a pink headband.”

Kelsey glanced across the tent at Irene, whose unenviable job it was to painstakingly disentangle every
set of bones from the clothing and personal items that came in with it. After being separated from the bones, each item had to be meticulously photographed and catalogued before being examined by investigators.

“You’re the expert,” Manny continued, “but I’m guessing the profile comes back as a four- to five-year-old female, about thirty-eight inches tall, based on the femur. In addition to the headband, Irene catalogued a pair of white sandals. What we didn’t find were any bullets or signs of bone trauma.”

“What about lead wipe?” Kelsey asked, referring to the opaque specks that typically showed up on an X-ray after a bullet crashed through a human skull.

“None,” Manny replied. “And as I said, no broken bones. So no obvious cause of death.” He leaned back in his chair and gazed up at Kelsey, and a bleak understanding passed between them.

If this child hadn’t been marched to the edge of a pit and shot to death, like the rest of the people in the grave with her, then she’d died by other means. Most likely, she’d been buried alive and suffocated.

Kelsey’s chest tightened and she looked away.

“I—Excuse me. I have to get some water.”

With that completely see-through excuse she ducked out of the tent and stood in the blazing tropical sun. She felt light-headed suddenly. Her stomach churned, and she knew Aaron was right. She needed a break—a Coke, at least, or a PowerBar to get her energy up before she did something embarrassing like faint in the middle of camp.

Lead from the front,
her uncle always said, and Kelsey knew he was right. Joe commanded Navy SEALs for
a living, and he knew a thing or two about leadership. Kelsey needed to work hard, yes, but she also needed to set a good example for the six members of her task force, who had been toiling in the heat for weeks in the name of human rights. Kelsey was spearheading this mission on behalf of an international human rights group with backing from her home research lab—the prestigious Delphi Center in central Texas. She was young to be in charge of such a big job, and she knew more than a few people were expecting her to fail—maybe even hoping for it. She needed to prove them wrong. She needed to be sharp and in charge, not passed out from exhaustion.

Kelsey wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her grimy arm. She traipsed across the camp and rummaged through a plastic food bin until she found a granola bar.

“Ma’am Kelsey?”

She turned to see one of her team members, Juan Ocampo, emerging from the jungle with his metal detector and his shaggy brown dog. Milo aspired to be a cadaver dog, but in reality he was simply a well-trained mutt who went everywhere with Juan. Kelsey didn’t mind the pup. She liked him, in fact, and knew he was good for morale.

Juan stopped beside her. His blue
International Forensic Anthropology Foundation
T-shirt was soaked through with sweat and his face was dripping.

“You need to come with me,” he said, and the low tone of his voice told her he didn’t want the others to know about whatever he’d found.

Kelsey shoved the rest of her granola bar in her back pocket and followed him into the jungle. A route had
been cut through the dense tangle of trees and vines, but the terrain was steep and uneven. Kelsey was glad for her sturdy hiking boots as she made her way down the path she and so many workers had traversed for weeks now. That’s how long it had taken her team to recover the remains of a busload of civilians who had been hijacked by a death squad working for a local politician. Aboard the bus had been a rival politician’s family on their way to file nominating papers for the upcoming election. Each member of the family had been bound, tortured, and shot. The other bus passengers had been mowed down with machine guns and left in a shallow grave.

Kelsey swatted at mosquitoes as she neared the first burial site, where a pair of local police officers stood guard over the workers. Like most policemen in the Philippines, they carried assault rifles rather than handguns—yet another cultural difference she’d found unnerving when she’d first arrived in this country.

To Kelsey’s surprise, Juan walked right past the gravesite. He veered onto a barely visible path through the thicket of trees. Milo trotted out in front of him.

Kelsey’s nerves fluttered as she tromped down the hill. He couldn’t have found another pit. They’d recovered fifty-three victims already, the exact number of passengers that local townspeople believed had been on the bus that went missing during last year’s election season. If there was another group of victims, surely her team would have heard something during their interviews with local families.

“You find gold in them thar hills?” Kelsey used her best John Wayne voice in a lame attempt to lighten the mood. Juan glanced back at her. He’d once told her he’d
been named after the American actor and loved all his movies.

“I was out here this morning, ma’am, walking Milo.” Juan’s formal tone said this was no time for jokes.

Please not another death pit.

“I had the metal detector on, and it started beeping.”

Kelsey glanced at the device in Juan’s hand, which was one of their most useful pieces of equipment. It detected not only bullets and shell casings—which were valuable evidence—but also belt buckles, jewelry, and other personal objects.

“Look what I found.” He stopped beside a ravine, and Milo stood beside him, wagging his tail. Juan shifted a branch and nodded at the ground.

Human remains, fully skeletonized. Kelsey crouched beside them, feeling a familiar mix of dread and curiosity.

“Male,” she conjectured aloud. “Five-eleven, maybe six feet.”

The height was unusual for a native Filipino. She studied the rotting clothing. Denim and synthetic fabrics withstood the elements better than soft tissue, and it looked as though this man had died wearing only a pair of jeans. She glanced around for shoes, but didn’t see any.

“What’d you hit on?” She nodded at the metal detector.

“Something under his head. I think there is a bullet, but I did not want to move anything.”

“Good call.” She frowned down at the remains.

“Do you think he tried to run?”

“Different postmortem interval from the others, I’m almost sure of it.” She glanced up at him. “He’s been here longer.”

Kelsey dug a latex glove from one of her pockets and pulled it on. She took out her digital camera and snapped a photograph before carefully moving a leafy branch away from the cranium. She stared down at the skull, and it took her a moment to realize what she was seeing.

“I’ll be damned,” she muttered, leaning closer.

On the road above them, the hum of a motorcycle. The noise grew louder, then halted, and she and Juan traded looks. Kelsey surveyed the trees lining the highway—the same highway the bus had been on when it was hijacked. Branches rustled. Kelsey stood and Juan reached for the pistol at his hip.

“Ma’am Kelsey!”

A boy stepped into view. Roberto. Kelsey breathed a sigh of relief and shoved her KA-BAR knife back in its sheath.

“Phone call, ma’am.” He scrambled down the steep hillside and emerged, grinning, from a wall of leaves. Roberto had appointed himself the camp errand boy and spent his days zipping back and forth to town, fetching supplies for the workers in exchange for tips. He reached into his backpack and produced the satellite phone that usually lived in Manny’s tent. The boy looked proud to be entrusted with such an important piece of equipment, and Kelsey handed him some pesos.

“Sir Manny said it’s important,” Roberto told her. “The call is from San Diego.”

Kelsey’s stomach dropped.
Oh, God, no.
She jerked the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

For an eternity, only static.

“Kelsey?”

Just the one syllable, and Kelsey knew.
Gage
. She’d been expecting this call for years. Her heart felt as if it was being squeezed by a fist, but she managed to make her voice work.

“Mom, what is it?”

Don’t miss any of the sensational Tracers series from
New York Times
bestselling romantic suspense author
LAURA GRIFFIN

SNAPPED
Sophie Barrett thinks she’s lucky to be alive. She may be dead wrong.

UNFORGIVABLE
Tracing killers is Mia Voss’s business. And her work just got personal.

UNSPEAKABLE
Elaina McCord wants to find a killer. But he’s already found her.

UNTRACEABLE
Alex Lovell makes people disappear. Turns out, she’s not the only one.

And be sure to catch “Unstoppable,” a Tracers novella, in the
New York Times
bestselling anthology
Deadly Promises

Available from Pocket Star Books

LAURA GRIFFIN
started her career in journalism before venturing into the world of romantic suspense. Her acclaimed novels have won various awards, including both a RITA Award for
Whisper of Warning
and a Daphne du Maurier Award for
Untraceable
in 2010. Her debut novel,
One Last Breath
, won the Booksellers’ Best Award in the Romantic Suspense category, and her novels
Untraceable
and
Unspeakable
were both
Romantic Times
Reviewers’ Choice Award nominees. Recently, her Tracers novella, “Unstoppable,” appeared in the
New York Times
bestselling anthology
Deadly Promises
. Laura currently lives in Austin. Visit her website at
www.lauragriffin.com
.