Page 24 of Scarred By Sin

Arden had wired funds to the estate the previous evening, covering not only the team’s stay but also the cost of groceries and any additional supplies Porter might need while they were in residence. It was the kind of detail Arden handled without being asked, and Brook had long since stopped being surprised by it.

Theo was running background checks on every name connected to the estate. Dale, Porter, Owen Pruitt, Cal Brennan, and the staff at Seldon’s Nursery. Sylvie was compiling her notes from the Porter interview into a formal report, and Bit was cross-referencing county property records with Dale’s financial filings.

They had all settled into the kind of productive quiet that Brook associated with the early stages of a case, when the team was still gathering threads rather than pulling on them. The only sounds had been the soft clatter of keyboards and the occasional murmur of Bit talking to his screen, which happened often when he found something interesting and forgot that other people were in the room.

Brook closed the door behind her, and it didn’t take long to start making her way down the gravel path alone. The morning air was already thick, and the humidity would only worsen as the day progressed. Fortunately, the sun had slipped behind a bank of clouds, and a breeze moved across the property. It was most welcoming, even going so far as bending the tall grass along the path and carrying with it the sweet, heavy scent of lavender from the overgrown bushes that lined the hedgerow.

Brook inhaled deeply and gave herself time to enjoy the fleeting serenity. She let her gaze drift across the landscape as she walked, her mind wandering to the list of baby names she and Graham had been going back and forth on for weeks. Nothing had stuck yet, of course. Graham favored traditional names, while she kept gravitating toward ones that held meaning.

“I think I’ll wait to meet you in person,” Brook murmured, resting a hand on her stomach. “How does that sound?”

The baby responded with a subtle shift followed by a light kick. Brook’s chest tightened at the concerns that never quite left her alone, but she did her best to push them aside.

“Good thoughts, little one. Good thoughts.”

The directive was kind of ironic, given she was about to enter a greenhouse containing several murder victims. She hoped by the end of this trip, their families would have closure.

The gravel crunched beneath her flats as the path curved past the shrubbery. The greenhouse finally came into view. The morning cloud cover had softened the light, and without the harsh midday sun pressing through the algae-clouded panes, the structure came across less like a crime scene and more like what it had once been—a place where things were meant to grow. The illusion lasted only until she came upon the crime scene tape. The evidence flags were also visible through the open doorway.

The portable generator was running, its low, steady rumble carrying across the grounds, and the work lights were back on inside. Two members of Kessler’s team were already crouched over one of the partially exposed burial sites with brushes and small picks.

Dr. Kessler was standing near the center of the greenhouse with a tablet in one hand and a travel mug in the other. She glanced up, gave Brook a brief nod of acknowledgment, and then set her morning beverage on a nearby ledge.

“Ms. Sloane. I was going to reach out to your team this morning.”

“Then I saved you the trouble.” Brook stepped inside and crossed to where Kessler stood. The humidity coated everything inside the greenhouse with a thin film of moisture. “I take it you have something?”

Kessler handed off the tablet so Brook could view the screen.

“We received a preliminary dental match overnight on one of the two fully excavated female remains. A woman named Helen Uche.”

“May I send this to my team now?” Brook asked, gesturing toward the tablet. When Dr. Kessler gave her approval, Brook shared it in a way that Bit would be able to access the file immediately. “Thank you.”

“The match came through a national missing persons dental database. She was reported missing out of Terre Haute in August of 1994 by a roommate who said she’d left for a round of chemotherapy at the hospital. The same hospital where she was employed, mind you. She was twenty-six at the time of her disappearance.”

“Twenty-six,” Brook repeated, turning the age over in her mind against the emerging profile of the unsub. “Helen Uche was a nurse?”

“According to the limited information I was able to pull, I believe she was in administration.” Dr. Kessler reclaimed the tablet and swiped to a new screen. “Yesterday, you inquired about age estimates. Based on the skeletal analysis of the fully excavated remains, epiphyseal fusion, pubic symphysis morphology, and cranial suture closure, I can give you preliminary age ranges for some. The identified female, Helen Uche, is consistent with mid-twenties at the time of death, which aligns with her missing persons report. The second excavated female is older. I’d estimate early to mid-forties. Nestor Ellingham was in his fifties, which matches the family’s timeline.”

“And the remains that are still being excavated?”

“Present as older. Early sixties, potentially.”

Brook turned the emerging pattern over in her mind. The victims didn't share a demographic. Their ages spanned at least three decades, far wider than most serial offenders targeted. Killers who hunted a specific type tended to narrow their selection over time, growing more precise with each victim. A spread this broad hinted that the selection criteria had nothing to do with age. Whatever connected these women was rooted in something else entirely, a shared characteristic, a circumstance, or a vulnerability that cut across every other variable.

Given that Helen Uche had been receiving chemotherapy treatments, Brook was already leaning toward what that shared circumstance might be. The question might very well not be whether cancer connected these women, but how they'd found their way to a botanist's greenhouse in rural Indiana.

“Has there been any progress on the cause of death for the women?” Brook asked, doing her best not to focus on Dr. Kessler’s coffee. The aroma of it was drifting toward Brook in the warm, humid air, and her body’s response was immediate and entirely unhelpful. “That would really assist me with a profile for the unsub.”

“Nothing beyond what I shared yesterday. No skeletal trauma, no hyoid damage. The toxicology samples are at the lab, but realistically, we’re looking at six to eight weeks for results. Soil toxicology is complex work. They’ll need to isolate any chemical residue from the natural compounds in the surrounding earth and differentiate between plant-derived substances and anything introduced externally. If these women were sedated before death, the compounds may have degraded significantly over three decades, which means the lab will need to run expanded panels.”

“So, we won’t know for some time whether they were poisoned or sedated.”

“Not with certainty, no. But I can tell you what the positioning continues to suggest.” Kessler led Brook to the fourth excavation site, where her team had exposed enough of the remains to observe the body’s orientation. “Same pattern. Supine. Arms placed. Same directional alignment as the first two. Whatever happened to these women, the consistency is remarkable. This isn’t someone who was experimenting or evolving his method. This is someone who had a process from the very beginning and never deviated from it.”

Brook crouched at the edge of the excavation, lowering herself carefully with one hand on the rim of the raised bed for balance. The amber staining on the partially exposed bones was identical to the others, and the plant's root system above had woven through the ribcage over the decades, threading between the bones like organic sutures. Life and death intertwined so completely that separating them would take Kessler’s team days of painstaking work with tools no larger than a dental pick.

Brook managed to stand without any assistance and let her gaze move across the greenhouse. The morning light filtered through the clouded panes in a greenish, underwater pallor that gave everything a submerged quality, as though the entire structure existed at the bottom of a place rather than on the surface. She then turned her attention to something she hadn’t focused on during her first visit.