“You called them murders. You don’t think there’s even a possibility they’re suicides?”

She shook her head. “Callahan told me they can’t find anything in the girls’ history for the past weeks that indicates they were thinking of suicide. No good-bye notes, no depression, no giving away of items, no weird statements on Facebook about life or love. All the friends and family the police have interviewed swear up and down that their friends had things in their lives they were looking forward to. Usually someone will say they’d been down or talking about weird topics. Callahan said he’d strongly suspected murder in the first place, considering how that scene was staged. No shoes, remember?”

Seth nodded, remembering the clean bare feet.

“Someone walked away,” she said grimly.

Victoria felt stifled. Lacey had a lovely large home, but stress flowed from the group who’d escaped the shooting an hour earlier. Lacey opened a third bottle of wine for the adults and the tensions slowly dropped along with the wine level. Trinity sipped sparingly at a Sprite; she still looked rattled. Victoria was on her first glass of wine, letting the others use the alcohol to unwind. She preferred to stay on her toes in a group. This crew was just the five who’d attended the service plus herself and Seth. Even though they were relatively close acquaintances, she still wouldn’t risk lowering her guard.

She’d dealt with Michael Brody a few times. Enough to know he was freakishly smart and deceptively casual. She glanced at Seth beside her on Lacey’s couch. He’d taken to Michael right away and vice versa. There were a lot of similarities in the men. Height, stature, intelligence. But Seth’s calm didn’t give her the annoying friction that Michael’s pushy sharpness did.

Right now, some of that pushy sharpness was needed to investigate the history of the dead Forest Park women. Both sets of them. Michael had the nose to do it, and Victoria was all about using him for her own purposes to find some answers. Trinity was under his scrutiny at the moment. Surprisingly, he’d taken a soft tactic with the teen, who gazed at him with a bit of hero worship that made Michael’s fiancée, Jamie, hide a smile.

“I didn’t know Glory,” Trinity repeated. “And I didn’t see anyone at the service I knew except for Dr. Campbell and Jason.”

Michael’s gaze narrowed. “Who is Jason?”

Trinity gave a half-hearted jerk of her shoulder. “I met him through Brooke. He goes to Harrison High School. He was there with some other guys I didn’t recognize.”

“Were they standing toward the back?” asked Michael. “Back where the noise started coming from?”

Trinity wrinkled her nose. “Kind of near the entry doors. It was so squished in there. I only saw him for a moment before we moved over to where you guys stood. He could have been anywhere by the time the fight started.”

“What’s his last name?” asked Seth.

“I have no idea. I do have his phone number. We text sometimes. Well, he’s texted me to ask how Brooke is doing.”

Victoria’s heart softened at the crack in Trinity’s voice as she said Brooke’s name. Victoria knew the doctors were guarded about the teen’s prognosis. Her brain had been oxygen starved; there was no way to assess the damage yet.

Trinity passed her phone to Seth, who thumbed through her contacts.

“You don’t think he’s involved in the shooting, do you?” she asked Michael.

“I don’t know. Police haven’t released the name of the shooter, but rumors say they arrested a teenager. I have someone looking into it,” he said.

Victoria glanced at Lacey, who gave a small eye roll. Michael had a tendency to break the rules and push the boundaries of the law where he saw fit. No doubt his “someone” was a cop buddy or a person who shouldn’t be passing information to a reporter.

Trinity looked tired. Her foster mom sat beside her, occasionally patting her back or holding her hand. Katy knew how to manage teen girls. Victoria gave a small prayer of thanks for her own adoptive parents. Birth was a gamble. You never knew what kind of parents you’d end up with. She’d been lucky, and it appeared Trinity was in good hands after her rotten first decade.

Michael’s hawk-like gaze turned to Victoria. “Tell me again what happened at your break-in.”

“All three skulls were taken. I was in the middle of inventorying everything when this occurred, and now I’ll have to go through it again and make certain nothing else is missing.”

“Lacey mentioned the remains had been mixed together. How can you tell what belongs to who?”

“Skeletal remains are immediately printed with their case number. Every piece. Sadly they used pencil back then, so some of the numbers are nearly illegible or completely missing. I’d touched up several but not all. I’m making an educated guess at the rest.”

“So they may not be completely right,” he stated.

“I’m getting it as close as I can.” The question didn’t bother her. No one else would be able to solve the puzzle of the missing pieces better than her. She had faith in her abilities. She may not be perfectly accurate, but show her someone who could do better.

“If anyone can figure it out, Tori can,” Seth added. He reached out and squeezed her hand. He’d tensed slightly during Michael’s questioning, a defensive tone now in his voice.

Michael turned his probing gaze Seth’s way. He met it with utter calm. “You’ve worked with her for less than a week.”