Will could’ve offered to take her, but not only was she exhausted by grief, it’d be better for her if she arrived after the autopsy was complete; she could sit in a room near Miriama without being confronted by the ugly reality of what had been done to the young woman she’d raised. More, she shouldn’t be making the heartbreaking journey without a support system. “You have friends, family who can come with you?”

Matilda nodded jerkily. “You make sure your people treat my baby well until I reach her.”

“They will.” Ankita was a woman who respected her patients, for all that they’d already taken their last breath. “And I’ll get justice for Miriama. I promise you that, Matilda. No one will forget your girl.” It was the first time he’d made a promise since the day of the fire that had ended Alfie Hart’s short life. And it tore the scars inside him wide open.

51

The next notification was even harder.

Dr. Dominic de Souza refused to believe Will.

“No. It’s not her.”

“-Dominic—-”

“No!” The other man came at Will, punching and shoving while Will tried to keep him contained without doing harm.

“It’s not her! It’s not my Miriama!” His glasses flew off in the struggle, to land on the beige carpet without a sound. “It’s not!”

Eventually his words began to tremble, began to turn into questions that pleaded for Will to give the right answer. “It’s not her? It’s not Miriama?”

“I’m sorry, Dominic.”

The young doctor collapsed into his arms. “She was so beautiful. So lovely. I thought she’d be mine forever.”

Nikau responded quickly to Will’s call asking him to stay with Dominic.

“Thanks, Nik. I appreciate this.”

The other man shook his head. “No need. This is fucked up. You mind if I get the doc drunk?”

Looking at where Dominic sat -blank--faced in his clinic chair, mindlessly straightening the bent arm of his glasses, Will said, “He could probably use a drink or five.” Then maybe he’d sleep, forget for a minute.

Tomorrow was soon enough to face the truth.

Dominic wasn’t the only one who slowed him down. The team dealing with the skeletal remains needed to talk to him about any missing person cases in the region. Will could’ve brushed them off, but he knew Miriama’s autopsy would take time. There was no point in him riding Ankita’s tail.

He met Robert and the others at the dump. The forensic and police teams were only partially into their painstaking search of the area. Will would bet his badge that there was nothing to find, that the skeleton had been left in this location because it was a way to further dehumanize the victim and cause exactly the kind of pain he’d seen in Matilda when she’d thought someone had thrown Miriama’s body in the dump.

“Thanks for this, Will.” Robert took out his notebook, his lanky partner beside him. “Look, to be blunt, we need your help. We don’t understand the area or the politics of this -town—-and I don’t want to waste time running down information you probably have in your head.”

Will could tell the other man was uneasy about asking, when Will had been pulled off the case, but Will had no desire to play games. “Here’s what I know.”

The older cop tapped his pen against his notebook when Will finished telling him about the missing hikers. “Residents really believe they might’ve had a serial killer running around?”

“It’s not too big of a stretch,” Will said. “Not when you take into account the physical similarities between the three women.” He’d brought his laptop and now opened it up, pulling up the file on the three women who’d gone missing over the course of a single hot summer.

Their ethnicities were different, but all of them had skin of light brown, their hair dark, their bones fine, and their height on the shorter side of average. But it was their smiles that tied them -together—-there was a primal vitality about the women.

All three were vividly alive.

Robert’s younger partner whistled. “Jesus, I see what you mean. Why wasn’t this picked up on before?”

“I don’t know that it wasn’-t—-it’s just not in the official files,” Will said. “I tried to get in touch with the detective in charge, but he died of a heart attack a few years ago, and the team that worked with him -could—-or -would—-only give me what’s already on record.” Wherever Matilda’s junior detective had picked up his intel, no one was willing to discuss it now.

“How extensive was the search?” Robert frowned. “I’m remembering the cases now, but I’m fuzzy on the details.”

“It went for -weeks—-and began after the second missing hiker.”

“Not the first?”

“She didn’t file her route anywhere.” Never knowing how easy it was to walk into the bush and never return. “No one knew she was heading to Golden Cove.” A number of the editorials that had come out in the aftermath of that summer had been -flat--out cruel, blaming the women for a lack of preparation.

“And the third?”

“Reported as missing by her family, but again, with no filed route, there was no reason to connect her to the Cove.” It was a small place in a country full of wilderness. “Then the media began a series on women who’d gone missing and never been found.”