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Wind whistled through the broken windows above, adding to the dread inching up my spine. I stepped through the open door onto black and white checkered tiles covered in decades of dirt and dead leaves. A reception desk was on one side and a set of stairs was on the other. Silence filled the room like a thick cloud.
Where is everyone?
“Hello. Where are you guys?” My voice bounced around bare walls.
I strode across the checkered tiles toward a faint glow at an open doorway and stepped into an immense hall with rows of tables that were covered in dust. High on the rafters above, pigeons cooed and swooped between the massive beams that stretched across the room.
A low drone carved through the silence, and I tried to peer through one of the four large arched windows that lined the back wall, but a thick film made visibility impossible. As I strode between a row of tables, I pictured young orphans sitting here with their backs straight and their knees knocking together.
The air seemed to be weighted with lingering fear.
The poor kids must have spent every day scared out of their minds. It was no wonder some of the adults who spent their childhood here were mentally affected. But it didn’t excuse the dreadful crimes some of them committed either.
I had been lucky to have loving parents who made a conscious decision to have just one child. They worked in stable jobs, came home every night, and barely ever fought. I had a great childhood. Mom and Dad were like my best friends, and I used to call home at least twice a week.
Until my fuck-up drove them into hiding and forced me to stop communicating with them.
At the rear exit, I stepped back into the sunshine. In the distance, a small digger was turning the soil at the edge of a dense forest. I marched through the long grass toward the tree line that formed a perimeter around the buildings.
A white van was parked near the trees with its back doors open, and the large flatbed truck parked beside it was how the digger had been transported here.
Eight people were nearby, but I only recognized two of them: Aria, from Wolf Security, and Captain Watts, my boss.
One man operated the digging machine. A man and a woman each pushed ground-penetrating sonar like they were lawnmowers as they scanned ten feet into the earth beneath them. Another man was the official photographer, and he was focused on the building I’d just come from. Two more men leaned on shovels, waiting for their turn to dig.
Being a cop was like that; sometimes you needed patience and had to stand back and observe until the moment to strike presented itself. I didn’t like waiting, not when it opened an unfettered mental highway to my mistake that put a permanent bullseye on my back.
My dad had warned me about the dangers of my career choice, but I would never have believed just how deadly it could be.
Dad had served forty years as a cop. The last thirty were as a detective, and the final five as police captain. Once I had declared that I wanted to follow in his footsteps, he started sharing some of the worst crime scenes he’d attended. He hoped his insight would scare me off joining the force, but it had the opposite effect. I wanted to put bastards behind bars. I’d done a damn good job until one stupid decision tarnished my career forever.
Aria turned to me as I approached, and her expression told me all I needed to know. They’d found human remains.
“Sorry I didn’t get here earlier,” I said as I neared. I hated being late, but I hated having unfinished business even more. Before I’d left home this morning, I’d written up my report on the dipshit I’d arrested yesterday who had been two times over the limit when he’d driven his car down the boat ramp and nearly drowned himself.
My report had taken longer than I’d penciled in when my investigation revealed that the car the idiot had written off had been stolen from his ex-wife, adding more charges to his rap sheet. He was in for one hell of a hangover when he woke in his cell this morning.
My shift doesn’t start for four more hours, but my attendance here was much more important than the gym session and five-mile run I’d planned to do for the rest of my morning.
“You timed it well,” Watts said. “The damn digger only arrived ten minutes ago.”
“Does that mean you found something?” Nodding toward the digger which had started to scrape away the top layer of dirt, I used my phone to take a couple of photos.
Aria nodded. “It looks like a child. The ground penetrating equipment?—”
“I have another one.” The woman pushing the sonar called from twenty feet away and then pierced the ground at her feet with a small red flag. Pacing three paces the other way, she pushed a second flag into the dirt. She wrapped yellow crime scene tape around the gum tree next to her, which had a trunk large enough that if it was hollow, she could step inside it.
“Goddammit.” Aria groaned. “Sometimes I hate it when I’m right.”
Watts shook his head, grumbling under his breath as he marched toward the forensics officer.
A small boy appeared in the distance, between two giant trees.
I clenched my jaw. You are not real. Not real.
I repeated the mantra until the vision absorbed into the foliage.
For two years, I’d been trying to eradicate Wesley from my mind.
