Cold Case Witness. Sarah Varland

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      He was a Treasure Point police officer, but he looked too young to have been on the force during the case in which Gemma had testified. Her shoulders relaxed some at that realization—she didn’t have to hold against him the way some of the officers in that case had treated her.

      The man came closer to the building, looked up at the window. Had he caught her staring?

      Something about him was so familiar...

      Then it hit her. Matt O’Dell, son of one of the men her testimony had sent to prison.

      Their eyes met, just for a second. Gemma looked away.

      If the Treasure Point Historical Society members hadn’t forgotten her past, Matt surely wouldn’t have. A shame, because he’d always intrigued her in high school. She’d always sort of wished...

      “—trial period.”

      “Wait, what?” Gemma snapped her attention back to the committee members. She surveyed them one at a time, studied their faces. And didn’t like what she saw.

      This wasn’t going to turn out the way she’d hoped.

      “We think a trial period might be wise in this case.”

      Gemma shot a glare at Cindy Anne. The older woman lifted her nose and shook her head. “Don’t look at me. I think hiring you at all is a mistake.”

      Gemma swallowed hard. A mistake? She pushed her chair back and stood. There was only so much she could take. If they weren’t happy with her, fine, but she wasn’t going to accept this kind of humiliation.

      “Never mind,” Gemma muttered.

      “Wait,” 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 СКАЧАТЬ