Fear Collector Read Free

body. A seagull screamed overhead. A little more rain fell. The detectives took a few steps back to let the others do their work.
    “Autopsy will determine what happened,” Grace said. “Nothing to suggest anything other than an accident, at least nothing I’ve read in the missing persons report. Boyfriend said she was drinking a little and went toward the water to swim. Never saw her again.”
    “Not going to see her now,” Paul said, pulling away from the putrid odor that rose up from Samantha’s remains as the coroner’s team cocooned the body in a bright blue neoprene bag. It zipped silently with the kind of closure found on a sandwich bag.
    “Beachcomber over there found her,” Grace said, indicating the woman who was sitting on a log clutching her plastic bag of shells and glass. “Officers are getting her information.”
    Paul walked a few yards down the beach toward the base of a cliff.
    Grace called over to him. “You coming?” She repeated her question, but Detective Bateman didn’t say anything.
    She let out a sigh and followed him.
    He was on one knee, looking at something.
    “What is it?” she asked.
    Paul looked up. “Not sure,” he said, his eyes staying locked on hers. “Looks like a femur.”
    She shook her head. “Driftwood,” she said. “Not a bone.”
    “Really,” he said. “I think so.”
    “Human?” she asked, now joining him on her knees to get a closer view. Neither touched the bone. If it was human, it was evidence of a possible crime. It was likely that it had been dragged there by an animal, far from where it had been hidden. That is, if it had been hidden at all.
    And if it was human.
    “Not sure,” Paul said. “But I think so. Been out here a while.”
    Grace got up and went a couple more yards west of the femur and, almost immediately, found another bone, a rib.
    “It is human, isn’t it?” she asked, feeling that mix of excitement and horror that comes every time discoveries like bones on a beach were made.
    “A woman? A child, maybe.”
    Grace stepped back and studied the outcropping above the breach. A cedar and a fir had sloughed off the top of the cliff and lodged themselves in a ledge about fifty feet above where Paul had seen the first bone. If the bones had once been concealed in a grave, it was a good bet they had literally come from above.
    Samantha Maxwell had been the victim of a tragic accident. There was no doubt about that. She was a dead girl. A teenager. A daughter. But she was something else in that moment.
    Samantha had been a messenger.
    “It was like she led us here,” Grace said.
    Paul didn’t care for that kind of woo-woo sentimentality, but he let Grace go on about her “feelings” and intuition. She’d been more right than wrong when it came to moving a possibility into something real, turning a “what-if ” into a scenario that made sense—and helped solve crimes.
    “I guess so,” he said.
    “We’re going to need some techs over here,” Grace said, calling across the windy rocky beach to the investigators who’d come to collect Samantha’s remains. Samantha Maxwell wasn’t going home alone.
    She had company.
     
     
    Grace wouldn’t have told anyone—not her partner, her husband, even her mother—that it passed through her mind, as the bones were recovered amid the seaweed and silver-colored driftwood that had also cradled the remains of Samantha Maxwell. The it was like the grandfather clock in her parent’s Tacoma home, always ticking, always there. The it was like a kind of leech that had planted itself on her skin and just never let go. She drew a deep breath as she tried to put it out of her mind. While Samantha Maxwell’s case was never considered foul play, only a terrible accident, the scene had to be processed with the skill and decorum befitting the tragedy that had stolen the pretty young teenager’s life.
    The clouds had darkened and rain began to fall through a tear in the sky. The techs were dressed in