Free Alone (A Bone Secrets Novel) by Kendra Elliot Page A

Lusco, making a notation on his notepad. “Anything else you can remember Brooke said about this guy?”
    “She was really excited that he was interested in her. I mean, interested in taking her picture. I didn’t like that he told her to darken her hair, but it made the pictures look really good. I remember he’d told her she had the exact look he wanted.”
    “Look? What did she mean?” asked Callahan.
    “I asked that, too. She said he was looking for her age, build, and hair color for a certain photo shoot he was creating for someone.”
    “So the pictures weren’t for him?
    Trinity shrugged. “I had the impression there was a client.”
    “Did he pay her?”
    “Not that I know of. I think she would have done it for no money. She was excited that someone thought she was beautiful enough to model.” Trinity’s eyes moistened and her shoulders sagged. “She was so pretty. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
    Victoria’s heart broke, and she wrapped an arm around Trinity’s shoulders, wishing her foster mom was there to comfort the girl. Trinity didn’t seem to mind and buried her face in Victoria’s shoulder.
    Ray Lusco kneeled beside Trinity’s chair, patting her back. “Hey. We don’t know that. But you need to be ready in case that’s how it turns out. If it helps at all, it would have been like falling asleep. We don’t know what exactly killed them, but I can tell you it wasn’t violent.”
    Trinity nodded, wiping at her eyes. She sniffed, and Callahan nudged the tissue box closer to her. To Victoria, he looked completely out of his element. Plenty of men froze at the sight of a woman’s tears. She knew Lusco had a daughter and a wife. He knew how to handle this type of situation.
    “We’ll find out what happened to these girls. And we’ll find out who was responsible.” Callahan promised.
    Trinity looked up and held his gaze, searching for truth in his eyes. She nodded.
    Victoria met Callahan’s brown gaze. He was on a mission.
    She believed him, too.

Ray hung up the phone on his desk. “That was an odd one. We’ve got a guy who just came in claiming to know one of the original women who was found in the circle decades ago.”
    “Seriously? Where the hell’s he been all these years?” Mason was irritable after the long morning at the medical examiner’s office and glad to be back in the familiarity of his office. Watching beautiful girls get sliced up did that to him. He’d left with an overwhelming sense of urgency to solve their senseless deaths. And figure out what’d happened in the same spot decades before.
    Digging into the old case, Mason was amazed at how little information there was on the original women. Like the recentscene, the old photos showed women with long dark hair, wearing white dresses. The bodies were arranged in the same circle. The main difference was the women hadn’t been discovered for nearly a week. Back then, Forest Park hadn’t been the mecca of popular hiking trails it was now.
    The three girls who had been claimed all had similar sketchy histories. They hadn’t gotten along with their parents and had run off, or they’d simply wanted a fresh start and left town for a new life. One had been arrested for prostitution in Seattle and Portland in the months before her death. Her arrest photos were in his growing file. Susan Wilbanks had been an attractive young woman from Idaho. Her dark brown eyes had stared blankly at him from the photo, her mouth downturned. She looked like a woman with a lot of regrets.
    What had driven her to prostitution?
    It bugged the hell out of Mason that no one had stepped forward, looking for the other three women. The detectives from the old case had been unable to draw any connections between the three women who were identified. Besides Susan from Idaho, one had been from Montana and the other from Pendleton in eastern Oregon. The women back then had been slightly older than last night’s teens. The original women had been in