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He was there to stay forever.
And I deserved it.
“You okay?” Aria asked. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“Yes, I’m just surprised you found a body so quickly,” I said, improvising.
“Yeah, makes me worry about how many we’ll find.”
“Do you have any idea how many kids didn’t make it out of the orphanage?”
“I’ve had Cobra trying to work that out for weeks.”
“Cobra?” I asked.
“Sorry, I still use their callsigns sometimes. Cole Tanner. He’s my research specialist.”
I nodded. Watts had told me that Aria was ex-army, and she’d previously held a position high up in the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. Aria had some serious credentials behind her, and she ran her own agency. Wolf Security. I made a mental note to ask her about the interesting name she’d chosen for her agency sometime.
“Cole’s trying to match the names that were documented as being admitted to the orphanage with the names of those who were farmed out to foster families when it was shut down. However, there were no computer records four decades ago, and most documents were only kept for the standard seven years. So the minuscule paper trail that remains is dodgy, to say the least.”
I tried to imagine tracing records without computers but couldn’t. My father would have some ideas that could help . . . if it was safe to contact him.
“From what little I already know about this place, the minimal records could also be deliberate,” I said.
“Yeah. We’ve only just scraped the surface of what went on here. It’s going to be a minefield. I can feel it.” She turned toward the building.
On the third level, movement shifted behind one of the windows. I was a beat off mentioning it when I stopped myself. Nobody was inside. Never before had I seen two visions of Wesley in one day. Maybe this place was crawling with ghosts, making him feel at home.
I hated that I was justifying his appearance. Even though I knew the visions were a toxic combination of my imagination and my guilt, I couldn’t get rid of him.
I had never believed in ghosts until I’d created one.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Aria said.
“Same.” During my years as an undercover cop, I’d been to places that made my skin crawl, and I’d seen some things that made me try to vomit out the images.
Angelsong Orphanage wasn’t a patch on any of them.
“I have another one,” the technician called as he speared a small red flag into the ground.
Captain Watts groaned so loud I heard it from thirty feet away.
“Was anyone ever arrested for tattooing the orphans?” I asked.
“Yes. Two men and two women. One man killed himself before he went to jail. The remaining three were murdered in jail.”
Scowling, I shook my head.
She cocked her eyebrow in a silent question.
“They were probably murdered because of what they did to those kids, but those bastards should have lived in hell, and fear, for the rest of their lives.”
She drilled her dark eyes into me, probably trying to read my mind.
I hoped not. My guilt would be a massive black stain on my thoughts.
“Found another one.” The male ground sonar operator raised his arm.
