Cold Case Witness. Sarah Varland

Jim called out.

      She turned to face them one last time. She stared. Waited. They stared back.

      “It’s your choice,” Jim said. “You can walk out of here with no job, walk away from this town again, even...but if you genuinely care about the museum, the way I believe you do, then you’ll take the two-week trial period option.”

      One heartbeat. Then two. She let the silence stretch out, pretended to consider it. As though she had a logical choice. She was caught. And they knew it. She waited anyway, too prideful to seem too eager.

      One more heartbeat.

      “All ri—”

      Her answer was cut off by screams.

      In a man’s voice they were even more terrible to Gemma’s ears, especially because they echoed the screams she still believed she’d heard on this property ten years before—the screams the police told her she must have imagined, when she’d thought two of the men involved in the smuggling had started to fight.

      One of them she hadn’t been able to identify, though his voice had sounded familiar. One of them—Harris Walker, who had been somewhat of a drifter but had spent time in Treasure Point regularly—had been gone by the time the police arrived. No one had ever seen him again.

      These screams were like his had been, and they took her back to those terrifying moments ten years earlier, when she’d been running through the woods as fast as she could, trying not to be the next victim...

      Harris had disappeared and Gemma was almost certain he had been murdered, but no one had believed her when she’d told them. Not the police, not anyone.

      After the screams came a silence. The kind that chilled a person to her core.

      And Gemma knew her nightmare had come back to life.

      * * *

      In an instant, Matt O’Dell’s patrol had gone from predictable to intense enough that he felt as if he was on the opening segment of a crime show on TV. He’d run from where he’d been patrolling in the woods when he’d heard the construction worker’s yell. He’d found a group of them clustered at the outside edge of the construction site.

      “What happened?” Matt directed the question to Ryan Townsend, the foreman.

      The man looked up at Matt, looked back down at something on the ground and his face paled, contrasting starkly to his sunburned neck and shoulders. He shook his head. Not really an answer.

      At that moment Jim Howard ran across the gravel parking lot toward the construction area. “What’s going on?”

      Matt saw several more of the historical society members clustered in the doorway of the portable office building. “Stop.” He put one hand up and said the word firmly, shaking his head. “I need everyone back inside while I deal with this.”

      “But—” Jim started to argue.

      “Inside, now.”

      The man turned around and went back, and he and the others went inside.

      Matt approached the scene cautiously, trying to be ready for anything since no one seemed able to speak. The silence was startling after the constant noise of construction. “Move.” The men stepped aside quickly. Not the way he had expected them to respond. Matt braced himself, wondering how bad it had to be to get a group of men like this to be quiet and compliant. They were nice enough guys, but they didn’t typically like being told what to do.

      He looked down at the ground, wet from last night’s rain, and saw bones.

      Hand and finger bones, reaching out from the dirt.

      Matt felt goose bumps rise on his arms despite the eighty-degree heat. The bones seemed to be reaching up. Asking for help.

      Treasure Point wasn’t a perfect town—Matt had dealt with crime before as a police officer. But nothing like this. He took a step backward, needing the distance, and looked up to meet Ryan’s eyes.

      Matt took a deep breath and centered himself. “Tell me about how you found this.”

      Ryan’s eyes swung to another man. “Bruce was working on leveling the site and doing some grading work. When he went on his break, I walked around a little, just to get a feel for the site. I do that with almost everything I build. I saw something sticking out of the ground over here, assumed it was a root and reached down to pull it up.” Here he started to look green. “I looked closer at it and...” His gaze dropped down to the remains.

      Matt looked down, too, then glanced up at the construction worker. Ryan’s story made sense and it was hard to fake the level of uneasiness he was showing.

      Someone had put that body in the ground, but Ryan was one person Matt was pretty comfortable ruling out, although he’d have to keep him on the official suspect list until he could investigate further. That was policy. Now he had an entire town full of people to consider. A whole state.

      The bones looked old—old enough for the flesh to be gone—which made his chances of solving this case go down substantially. This was going to be like looking for a needle somewhere much bigger than a haystack.

      The Treasure Point Police Department hadn’t had an official crime scene investigator until a year or so ago when Shiloh Evans—now Shiloh Evans Cole—had gotten certified and stopped working patrol to pursue her interest in forensics and crime scenes. A couple of the other officers could do the basic forensics work, and Matt could do it in a pinch, but Shiloh was the best. Assuming this was a crime scene, and not the accidental digging up of an Native burial ground, her opinion would be invaluable. And even if it did turn out to be an old burial ground with no crime to worry about, it was better to have been safe and called in Shiloh than to have compromised a possible crime scene and risked her wrath.

      “I need everyone to move away from the scene.”

      Everyone complied quickly. Almost too quickly. Matt shrugged off the suspicion. The construction workers were spooked because they had discovered the body, nothing more. Their actions weren’t indicative of any guilt. He placed the call to Shiloh, and then waited, standing guard over the body.

      A police car pulled up only minutes later and Shiloh stepped out. She started surveying the scene even as she walked toward it; he could practically see the wheels in her mind turning, working at sorting out potential puzzle pieces. “What happened?”

      “Ryan Townsend thought he saw a root and bent to pull it. Turned out to be a skeleton’s finger.”

      Shiloh shook her head. “That’ll give you nightmares.”

      “What are your thoughts?”

      “You were right to call me. I think we’re dealing with something more recent than anything Native American. This was really close to the original site of the Hamilton house, before it burned down last year. That place had been around forever. They would have known better than to build on any kind of graveyard or burial ground.” She bent down, examined the bones a little more closely. “Besides, bone structure looks too big. We need to get an ME in here.” Shiloh stood and shook her head. “I don’t like how this feels.”

      Ryan walked back over before Matt could respond to Shiloh. “Do you need to talk to any of us anymore? Our shift’s over, but we can stick around to give statements or anything you need.”

      Cooperative. That made his job easier. “It would help to talk to a couple people, but then you’ll be free to go.” As he gave his answer, movement near the portable office building caught his eye. A woman hurried down the stairs, and straight to the cleanest, most expensive-looking car in the small dirt clearing that had become a sort of parking lot when the Treasure Point Historical Society was meeting in their office. Matt frowned. Why was she running? He hadn’t seen her at all today, so he knew she had nothing to do with the discovery of the body. In fact he didn’t think he’d even seen her around town, although something about her looked familiar, reminded him of... He squinted as he thought.