Sea of Bones Read online

The outer office door popped open and broke her thoughts. She peeked around the corner to see two middle-aged women walking up to the reception counter.

  When one of them spotted Skye, she stopped in her tracks to stare with her mouth agape, then poked the other one in the ribs with a sharp elbow. “That’s her. That’s Skye Cree. We’re definitely in the right place.”

  Now the other woman gawked, too. “I’ve seen you on TV doing interviews. You and your husband, you catch serial killers.” She stepped closer to the counter to get a better look.

  “Close your mouth, Melba,” the first woman declared, as she held out a hand to Skye. “I’m Wanetta Mathison. This is Melba Collins…catching flies. We need your help. We came all the way into downtown this morning…hoping to talk to you…because my daughter, Lindsey, went missing…”

  “Same day as my son David,” Melba added, reaching out another hand. “Ten years ago this November we both lost our kids. Trouble is, we don’t know what happened to them.”

  After shaking hands, Skye waved them toward one of the comfy chairs in the waiting area. “Sit down for a second. Let me get my husband down here to take our daughter upstairs. She’s in the other room. Then we can sit down and have a long talk and go over everything in detail. That sound okay?”

  “That’s fine,” Wanetta said, looking around. “You go ahead and do what you have to do. We’re just glad we finally decided to do this.”

  “It’ll just take him a few minutes to get down here.” Skye reached across the counter to pick up the receiver and punched in Josh’s extension upstairs at Ander All Games.

  When he picked up, Skye went into the reason for the call. “Could you come down and get Sierra? She’s probably ready for a break from Mommy right about now.”

  Sitting in his office on the top floor, Josh knew that code well. “Sure thing. I’ll be right there.”

  “Thanks.” After ending the call, she turned back to the women. “Would you ladies like something to drink while we wait? I have coffee…”

  “Just some water,” Melba said.

  “Water will be fine,” Wanetta added.

  Sierra abandoned her blocks to check out the visitors. She ran into the reception area and immediately went into her shy act when her eyes landed on the women. She dashed behind the counter and crawled into her mother’s lap. “Atka’s tired. She wants to go see Daddy.”

  Even with visitors on deck, the lilting voice of her daughter never failed to make her smile. “That’s great, baby. Because Daddy’s coming to get you. Instead of heading to daycare today, what if he calls Pop-pop and you go spend the afternoon with him and Lena. Or maybe you’ll go spend time with Mimi and Paw-paw? You and Atka would get to play in the backyard on the swings.”

  “Swings.”

  “Your daughter’s adorable,” Wanetta piped up, her eyes glossing over with tears. “I remember my Lindsey at that age. She was always so full of questions about everything. I swear I couldn’t take that child anywhere in the car that she didn’t talk my ear off.”

  Skye hugged Sierra a little tighter. “I know what you mean. Once Sierra learned to talk, we discovered she’s very aware of what’s going on around her. No pulling the wool over this kid’s eyes. Sometimes I think she knows more than I do.”

  “Kids are not stupid,” Melba said in agreement. “My boys were smart as whips, always kept me on my toes.”

  Josh entered the room to squeals of delight from his daughter. He swooped her up into his arms. “Come on, munchkin, Daddy’s gonna take you over to Mimi’s house. Want to go see Mimi?”

  Clapping her hands, Sierra nodded and shrieked into his ear, “Paw-paw, too!”

  “Yep. Paw-paw’s gonna be there, too.” After wrangling with the dog and gathering up Sierra’s things, Josh turned to study the faces of the women. He noted they had sad eyes. He’d seen that anguished look before from others who’d spent years worrying over a lost loved one. “I don’t know what your story is, but you’ve come to the right person. Skye here is the proverbial genius behind the Artemis Foundation. She’s the hunter.”

  “We’ve been hearing that for years. We should’ve come sooner,” Melba admitted. “But we had hope that the police would get a break one of these days and solve the case for us. They never did.”

  “And they aren’t even working the case anymore,” Wanetta groused. “We’re sick and tired of waiting.”

  Josh flashed a smile before leaning down to Skye, placing a peck on her cheek. “Give Mama a kiss and we’ll get out of everyone’s hair.”

  After Sierra obliged, Skye took hold of the little girl’s face. “I’ll see you this afternoon. Be good for Mimi. Okay, Squirt?”

  After Josh and Sierra left, Skye noticed the ladies had gone quiet. She got up to get the water from the break area, snagging three bottles out of the fridge. She decided small talk might take the edge off and put them more at ease. “A year ago, Josh and I realized there’s not enough daycare in the area for working parents. We contacted several and they all told us the same thing—there’s a waiting list to get your child in the program. Ridiculously long meant having to wait eighteen months for a spot. That’s when we decided to open a center of our own upstairs. It’s been a grand success because of the location. Parents don’t have to wait to see their kids until they get home. Now, they can pop in to visit them in the middle of the day on breaks and at lunchtime.”

  It was just the right topic to draw both women out of their silence.

  Wanetta brushed a hand through the crop of spiky brown hair that had already begun turning a platinum silver. Her big blue eyes looked like large sapphires because they glistened with tears. “Daycare’s come a long way. I remember taking Lindsey to a woman down the street who opened her home to the kids of working parents. Back then there were no child care centers on every corner like there are today.”

  Melba nodded in agreement. “Babysitters were hard to find, even harder to find the good ones. You often had to rely on friends and family. No family meant friends, sometimes friends of friends. It was another world back then. Working moms didn’t have all these fancy options. So, if you don’t mind me getting nosy, if there’s daycare available upstairs, then why is your daughter going to her grandparents for the afternoon?”

  Skye handed off the bottles of water. “Hmm…how do I say this and not sound like any other doting mother? Sierra is…somewhat special, especially these days. She’s going through a phase and we’re…working on the situation…trying to get her to stop doing what she’s doing.”

  “When he was three, my David had a habit of biting people,” Melba offered. “Whenever he got into a scuffle at the babysitter’s, he would take a chunk out of their arms or anywhere else he could reach. It was embarrassing.”

  Wanetta chuckled and shook her head. “Lindsey would lash out and take off for the corner and then deny she did anything wrong. Most kids grow out of those kinds of phases. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

  If only that were the problem, Skye thought to herself. Before they could ask any more questions, she ushered them into the conference room.

  “Have a seat and tell me what happened that day in November ten years ago. Might as well start at the very beginning.”

  Wanetta sat back and unscrewed the cap on the bottle of water and took a slug before clearing her throat. “Our kids met at the University of Washington back in the fall of 2008. My Lindsey was a junior, a fun-loving and carefree little thing who wanted to be a nurse. That’s all she ever talked about until she met David. A couple of weeks before she went missing, Lindsey dropped by the house on one of her rare days off and went on and on about this guy she’d met. That guy was Dave Collins, who she described as a hunk.” The woman smiled at the memory and elbowed Melba. “He’s all she talked about that weekend. Dave this, Dave that. Come to find out, she’d gone head over heels for him. That was early September right after the semester started.”

  “From what Dave told us, the feeling he had for Li
ndsey was just as deep.” Melba looked older, the lines on her face more defined. But her raven black hair hadn’t yet turned gray. She took the lid off her water, gulping down a third of the bottle, giving her time to gather her thoughts. “In fact, Wanetta and I used to joke that if the kids had…lived…we probably would’ve been in-laws one day.”

  Wanetta cut her eyes over to Melba. “I think when she said start at the beginning, she meant the day they went missing, not our life story. Why don’t you take it from here? You tell it better than I do anyway. You know I’ll start to cry.”

  Melba bit her lip and looked straight at Skye. “It was a Saturday, November the eighth. They’d gone to Husky Stadium to see the Huskies take on UCLA. That day, it was a four o’clock kickoff on a beautiful, normal fall afternoon. I know because my other son, Brian, was at the game. Even though he’d graduated three years earlier, he was a rabid fan of the team, just like David. Both my boys had season tickets.”

  “Did Brian see his brother at the game?” Skye asked, jotting down notes on a legal pad.

  “No. He was there with fifty-seven thousand other fans. No big deal, or so we thought. Dave and Lindsey were probably sitting in the student section. Brian had tickets closer to the fifty-yard line. They probably didn’t even interact.”

  Wanetta chewed her lip to fight back the tears. “Lindsey hadn’t wanted to go…to the game…that day. You see, that year the team was just awful. The Huskies went oh and eleven, without a single win all season long. But because she adored Dave, she went anyway and watched them lose again. Dave had talked about taking her to an after-game party at his fraternity house. She told me that the day before when we talked. But Melba and I checked, and the kids never showed up there. The last time anyone saw them was at that football game.”

  Melba dropped her head. “When I hadn’t heard anything from David by the middle of the week, I filed a missing person report for him. Wanetta did the same thing for Lindsey. The authorities issued what’s known as a ‘be on the lookout’ for Dave’s Jeep, a forest green 1994 Cherokee. But that’s about all they did. They didn’t find the car for another two weeks when a couple of hikers found the SUV parked above Copalis Beach, sitting there on the bluffs in a clearing that overlooked Griffiths-Priday State Park. Many weeks later—when Wanetta and I finally met—we figured they’d gone there to make out. But after all these years, we’ve decided that didn’t make much sense. Copalis Beach is two and a half hours from campus.”

  “And that’s if there’s no traffic,” Wanetta injected. “Which we all know on a Saturday heading south is bumper to bumper. Even ten years ago it was bad. So why would two kids leave a football game and drive to the beach to make out when they had other options.”

  Melba nodded. “Exactly. If they’d wanted to be alone, Dave could’ve just as easily taken Lindsey to a lake house we owned and sometimes rented out near Duwamish Waterway, which was a lot closer and unoccupied that weekend.”

  “Or a much simpler solution would’ve been to go back to Lindsey’s apartment,” Wanetta supplied. “She didn’t have a roommate at the time. They could’ve slept there that night.”

  Skye narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute. You’re saying there were other places they could’ve gone to if they’d wanted to be together that night?”

  Wanetta nodded. “Absolutely. We even listed them all down on a piece of paper. It’s all in the file we brought with us, a collection of our thoughts and ideas, observations we made, a few known facts, stuff that we’ve put together over the years.”

  “That’s helpful. Thank you. So, the area where the car was found, they didn’t find any…anything unusual…?” Skye let her voice trail off.

  “You can say it,” Melba prompted. “It’s been so long ago. There was no sign of bodies found within a mile of that bluff. The park rangers did a search with dogs and everything. For ten years, Wanetta and I have been looking for any trace of them, hoping someone would come forward with information.”

  “At one point, we even offered a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward on the website we keep up. Melba’s boy Brian takes care of that for us. But there’s never been a word about where they could’ve gone. No tips left on the website has ever panned out,” Wanetta murmured. “Not a sign of them anywhere in the Washington state area. It’s as if they vanished into thin air from right there on the cliffs overlooking the ocean.”

  “The doors were left open,” Melba added, taking out the file folder from her oversized handbag and pushing it across the conference table. “The doors on the vehicle, that is. Dave would never have done that willingly. His car keys were still in the ignition. Lindsey’s cell phone and purse were left on the passenger seat. The police found Dave’s cell phone in the left side door pocket. According to the police, there was no blood, no bodies, no tracks, and no footprints—no nothing. It’s as if they just vanished into thin air,” she said, repeating Wanetta’s assessment. “How can two people just disappear like that?”

  Skye opened the file folder and scanned the copy of the police report along with several updates from five years back. She read out loud from the pages. “It obviously wasn’t a robbery, or a carjacking gone bad. And it says here the Coast Guard even searched the water below the cliffs.”

  “I remember that,” Melba proclaimed. “The park rangers performed an initial hunt for bodies near the car, even called in experts, thinking they’d gotten lost. They brought in two of the best local search and rescue teams in the state. They found nothing.”

  Skye continued skimming the documents. “Despite doing a grid search on land and sea, nothing was ever found, no clothing, no shoes, not a single piece of evidence outside the car. Even the tracking dogs couldn’t pick up a scent.”

  “Now you see why we need your help,” Wanetta explained. “The years passed. The headlines of their disappearances faded. The website gets less and less traffic every year. But we still don’t have any answers as to what happened to our kids. We refuse to forget about them or give up.”

  “I don’t blame you for that,” Skye declared.

  “You should know,” Melba stated. “For ten years now, we’ve kept Dave’s Jeep. Ever since the cops released it back to us, we’ve had it in storage. You need to run DNA on it or something, we’ll get it to you.”

  Skye flipped the folder closed and leaned back. “I can’t promise you anything. But you already knew that before you got here. What I will promise is that I’ll start from the beginning and look at the case with fresh eyes.”

  “What does that entail exactly?” Melba wanted to know.

  “It means I’ll have my team go over the different scenarios of what might have happened that day after they left the game. We use a program written for that purpose, one similar to what the FBI uses, to key in various plausible alternatives. For example, we’d want to key in why they didn’t make it to the party that night. What circumstances could’ve happened to cause them to forego their plans? Were they in the wrong place at the wrong time depending on that date and criminal activity in the area? What took place in Seattle that day that might’ve contributed to their disappearances? What’s the most probable location that they could have crossed paths with their killer? What could’ve happened between the UDub campus and Copalis Beach? How did their car get to that spot and why?”

  “I see. All good questions,” Melba stated, impressed with what she’d heard so far.

  “There’s always the possibility that the police missed something, somewhere. Because, hey, the police never found them, now did they?”

  “No. That’s all we ask, a fresh look. We’ve run out of options,” Wanetta admitted, dabbing at her eyes. “And after ten years, we have nothing left to lose.”

  ****

  After the mothers took off, Skye scanned the file into her database, but she didn’t like the measly details it provided. Like so many missing person cases before, the manila folder consisted of a few pieces of paper, not even an inch thick. Probably because the police had
chalked up the disappearances of two twenty-year-old adults as a couple who vanished on their own. It wasn’t illegal to want to leave college and take off on an adventure without telling your parents. Law enforcement often made that assessment. In this case, someone decided the couple had merely chucked their lives in favor of escaping to their own version of Shangri-La. The file didn’t explicitly spell it out in those terms, but Skye had seen enough case files on the missing to know the authorities had brushed it off quickly. When they couldn’t initially locate Dave’s vehicle during those first two weeks or get their hands on any substantial piece of evidence, they put the case aside. Then, by the time those two hikers found the Jeep, they were on to other, more pressing cases they deemed needed their attention more. It happened all the time. Too frequently, cases or rather people got lost in the shuffle.

  But for Skye, there was plenty of evidence to suspect foul play. Who goes off on an adventure to Utopia without taking cold hard cash with them? Or their credit cards? Or their all-important IDs and passports? Hell, these days, no one could even cross the border into Canada for a day trip without showing the necessary documentation.

  Skye did an online search using Dave’s social security number and then did the same with Lindsey’s. The numbers hadn’t been used after November 2008 anywhere in the US for contributions or to acquire employment.

  She went through the usual task of trying to locate people on social media with similar names until that didn’t pan out either. She perused the Doe network, NamUs, and then finally their own in-house website they’d created for just this purpose. She looked for anyone fitting Dave’s and Lindsey’s general description but came up empty.

  Convinced that Lindsey Mathison and David Collins had been victims of a crime, she emailed the file in its entirety and the results of her online searches to each member of her team, filling them in on the interview with the mothers. She made notes and sent out her recommendations for follow up before glancing down at the time on her laptop.