Victoria opened the back of her vehicle to unpack her gear, feeling clear of the stress of yesterday. Last evening, all the girls had been identified. It’d been a dreadful day, but when the last girl was confirmed, she’d wanted to weep from the relief. Trinity’s friend, Brooke, was the girl fighting for her life in a hospital bed. Brooke’s parents had returned from a night at the beach to find their daughter near death. But they were the lucky parents.
Dr. Campbell had slowly gone through the questionnaires, eliminating the obvious and setting aside the possibles. It’d narrowed down to nine missing girls who fit the general descriptions. Victoria had heard the other three missing girls had eventually made their way home. All three had spent the night and day with friends, either deliberately avoiding communicating with their parents or blaming dead cell phones.
The five dead girls were beautiful. Victoria and Lacey had looked at their school photos, tears streaming down their faces at the sight of the life and energy that leaped from the pictures. What a waste. Each attended a different local high school, but they all were cut from the same cloth. Vibrant, healthy, cheerful young women, whose parents all swore their daughters had no desire to kill themselves.
It matched what Trinity had said about Brooke. These were girls looking forward to dates next week and college next year.
Someone poisoned them.
Someone deliberately destroyed that beauty and vivaciousness and put it on display for the world.
Victoria was determined to help find out who.
Today she’d woken up with excess energy to burn. She’d been lucky this morning. The sky had been clear for rowing practice, and she hadn’t felt a drop of moisture. Well, except from the paddles of the other rowers. Late fall was a crazy time for dragon boat drills, but she loved it. The rowing workout was exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. When the days were clear, like it had been this morning, there was no better place to be than on the Willamette River.
It helped clear her head of sorrow. And anger.
For the past two years, she’d been a part of various dragon boat teams. Occasionally she went out of town for a competition if someone begged her, but she didn’t do it to compete; she did it to get out of the house and morgue and be on the water. This morning’s two-hour practice had flown by. The air was crisp and cold, and the river was high with the heavy rains from the last two weeks. Lots of rain meant debris on the river, and it stirred up the water into a muddy brown no matter how blue the sky was. When ample rain worked its way from streams and tiny rivers into the Willamette River on its way to the Columbia River and then the Pacific Ocean, it made for treacherous rowing.
Victoria loved the challenge. There was something about being at the water’s level and seeing the city and riverbanks from a turtle’s-eye view. Mount Hood seemed taller, city skyscrapers seemed mightier, and she simply felt vulnerable and alive. When you spend every day studying the remains of death, getting out into the living elements of the world was essential.
Her next-door neighbor had introduced her to the dragon boats. She and Jeremy had bonded over local wines and his golden retriever when she’d moved into the neighborhood after her split with Rory. Victoria wasn’t one to get to know her neighbors, but Jeremy had inserted himself in her life and she’d meekly acquiesced. The seventy-year-old was a force to be reckoned with. Gray-haired, marathoner-lean, and proudly flaming gay. She’d never met anyone like him and had instantly adored him.
He’d dragged her to the dragon boat practices one year when she’d been running herself ragged at work. She’d weakly protested, not wanting to hurt the kind man’s feelings, but he’d overruled her. It’d been exactly what she needed. She’d always been a work-out-at-home type of exerciser. She had an elliptical and a treadmill and ran outside when weather permitted. But getting her out on the river in a boat with nineteen other excited rowers had created an addiction.
“Hey, how was the water today?” Jeremy’s voice sounded behind her.
Victoria hit the automatic close button on her X5 and faced the man, studying him for signs of worsening health. Jeremy hadn’t rowed at all this season. He’d struggled with bronchitis and pneumonia, and she hated to see him as a shell of the vigorous man he’d been six months before. His face was thinner, his movements slower, but his eyes sparkled with life. It was that life that had drawn her to him. He shared it with everyone.
He looks a little better.
Jeremy was usually so spirited; it killed her to see him struggle. She’d never known a grandfather, but she wished she’d had one like Jeremy. He shared his positive energy; he didn’t suck it out of others. Victoria had spent too much time with people who left her drained. Jeremy did the opposite.
“Clear and cold,” she answered.
His eyes lit up. “In other words, perfect.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fabulous. I’m going to try to get out there next week.”
Victoria shook her head. “No. That’s too soon. I don’t want to see you relapse.”
Gray eyebrows narrowed in a playful glare. “You’re not my doctor. And I really am feeling better. Was out running errands all day yesterday and even took in a concert the evening before.”
Victoria smiled. “Good! I’m glad to see you’re coming around. Everyone misses you on the water.”
“Ah, they just want someone who does all the work for them. You’ve been busy, I see. Those girls were all over the television yesterday, and you’re all over the paper today.”
“What?” Victoria froze.
“Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration.” He held up the newspaper. “You’re on the front page of the metro section.”
Victoria tried not to snatch the paper from his hand. She hated publicity. And the thought of herself in the paper was making her stomach spin. She unfolded the paper and stared at an old photo of herself. It was from a lecture she’d given a few years back at Portland State University. She breathed a small sigh of relief. The Oregonian had used the photo before. That meant they didn’t have anything fresh from the current investigation. The headline read BONE LADY TACKLES OLD MYSTERY.
Not the Bone Lady moniker again.
Surely the papers could come up with a better name. She skimmed the article. It stated that she was taking a fresh look at the old bones from the original circle of women and briefly rehashed the story. She glanced at the byline. Not Michael Brody. Brody wrote better articles than this; this article said nothing. Brody wrote in-depth investigative articles. She wondered if he was examining the case for the paper. He was a close friend of Lacey Campbell’s, and had crossed paths with Victoria a few times. He knew how to push her buttons in a highly irritating way and seemed to enjoy it.
“So you’re looking into that old case, eh?”
She looked up. Jeremy studied her closely, and she wondered what her face had revealed. Irritation? Annoyance?
“Yes. I’m hoping to find something that will indicate who those unidentified three women were.”
“I remember when that happened. I always thought it was odd that no one stepped forward.”
She looked at him with new interest. “You lived in the city back then?”
“Sure. Lived right downtown. It was a different era, you know. Men like me did our best to stay out of the limelight, but we knew where to go to socialize with others like us.”
Victoria studied his face. They’d had a few conversations about what it was like to be a gay man in today’s society, but Jeremy rarely talked about the old days. Her heart winced in sympathy for the hidden life he’d led.
“We used to talk about that case a lot. Who would murder a bunch of women? Rumors swirled about white slaves and prostitution rings. I always thought it seemed like it had a personal touch. Like someone had arranged them in that circle, you know, put them on display for others to see.”
“But why weren’t all of them claimed?”
“Maybe folks were too scared to do so. It had that cult-like feeling about it, you know? Something about them being found in a pattern and dressed the same.”
Victoria shook her head. Could a cult have hid underground for that many decades in the city?
“I see all the recent girls have been identified.” Jeremy nodded at the paper still in Victoria’s hands. She handed it back to him, gladly closing the paper on her own photo. “All local girls, but different schools, eh?”
Victoria nodded. “You know Trinity, right? The girl who ended up in the hospital is a close friend of hers.”
“Ah, she’s a good one, that girl. How’s Trinity holding up?”
“She was relieved Brooke lived, but now is terrified she’ll die. She spent most of yesterday believing she’d already died.”
“It says they didn’t figure out who was who until late last night. Were you down there?”
“For a while. It was a nightmare. Lots of parents searching for their kids. Dr. Campbell narrowed it down pretty fast.”
“All this new technology, but teenagers still learn the quickest way to hide crap from their parents.” Jeremy snorted. “Some things never change. And they’re always willing to follow the person who seizes control of their crowd, applying the peer pressure. Usually to their detriment.”
“No word on a cult yet,” she added with a small smile.
“We’ll see,” Jeremy said with all seriousness. “There’s something that tied all these girls together. And something that ties them to those deaths decades ago. Convincing people to kill themselves takes some sort of brainwashing. Cults know how to do that.”
Victoria stiffened. “Who says they killed themselves?”
Jeremy shrugged, rolling his paper into a tight spiral. He tapped his palm with it. “Just speculating. Like they did in the article here.” He didn’t meet her gaze, his eyes focused down their street. “They’ll uncover this mystery. This one and the old one. You’ll help them get to the bottom of it.”
She hated speculation. She understood its use to form theories to help search for motive and answers, but she didn’t care for it being spread around until there was proof. And there was no proof that these girls had taken their own lives. Trinity’s tear-streaked face filled her mind.
She was going to figure out who killed these women. All of them.