Forty

Sabrina sat in the back pew, watching people file in for confession while she waited for Ellie to show up. Nothing Father Francisco had told her made any sense—and none of it connected to Paul Vega or what’d happened to Rachel Meeks.

Pulling her phone from her pocket, she checked it for what felt like the hundredth time. No messages, which meant either Church and Croft hadn’t turned up anything or her new partner had decided to let her sweat. Checking the time, she noted that Ellie was nearly twenty minutes late. Dropping her phone into her lap, she settled in to wait.

She’d managed to get one more question in before Father Francisco cut her off completely. “Who was his uncle?” she’d said, blocking the door with her hand so he couldn’t open it. “What was his name?”

The priest’s grip tightened around the handle of the door she was barring him from using. “What does it matter?” he said, stubbornly yanking on the handle. “He is dead and Nulo is gone.”

“You do know why I’m here, don’t you?” She slammed the door shut and glared at him. “That people are being murdered, violently tortured. Raped and—”

“Enough.” He barked the word at her, no longer the soft-­spoken priest. “And you think that Nulo did it?” he said, shaking his head at her. “Did you not hear me when I told you that he left? That he hasn’t been back?”

“Why? Because you haven’t seen him?” she said, eyes locked on his face. Instinct told her he was telling her the truth—that he hadn’t seen Nulo since the night he’d dropped him off at the bus station—but she’d been fooled before. “Yuma holds over one hundred thousand people, Father. Do you know every single one of them?”

His hand fell away from the handle, his arm suddenly slack at his side. He opened his mouth but nothing came out so he closed it again, averting his gaze to stare at her shoulder. “I don’t remember.” He shifted his gaze again, looking her in the eye. “I’m an old man and it was a long time ago” he said, reaching for the handle again. This time when he pulled the door open, she let him go.

“Sorry I’m late.”

Sabrina looked up to see Ellie standing in the row in front of her. She sat, turning on the bench to drape her arm over the back of it so that they were face to face. She looked nervous. Like she didn’t want to be there. “It’s okay,” Sabrina said, offering her a small smile, trying to put her at ease. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s okay,” Ellie said, wincing a bit. “I wanted to apologize and thank you for being such a good sport last night.”

“There’s no need to do either,” she said. “Your mother is a lovely woman.”

Ellie nodded, looking at her lap for a moment before raising her gaze again. “I don’t think you wanted me to meet you here to ask about my mom, Agent Vance,” she said quietly, worrying something flat and silver between her fingers. “Mark called me. He told me you asked him about the corrupted sample I took off Stephanie Adams.”

Sabrina didn’t know which surprised her more—that Alvarez would call Ellie to warn her that the big, bad FBI agent was sniffing around her mistake or that he and Ellie were on a first-name basis. “I’m not here to drag you through the mud,” she said, shaking her head. “I just want to know what happened, Ellie.”

Ellie sighed. “I noticed particulates under Stephanie Adams’s fingernails so I bagged her hands at the scene, according to department procedure. Back at the lab, I processed the sample and ran it through CODIS against possible matches … and I got two hits.”

“Stephanie Adams and Melissa Walker,” Sabrina said, carefully gauging Ellie’s reaction to the name. She flinched slightly, like the name carried a current of electricity that shocked and stung every time it was uttered.

“Yes. I thought it must’ve been some sort of mistake so I … I ran it again.” Ellie nodded, finally looking up at her, fingers still working and worrying. “The whole procedure—from start to finish—with a new sample. I even changed my gloves … and I got the same results,” she said firmly.

Separate samples meant that the department’s official story of contamination was unlikely but, for a small department with limited resources, not impossible. “Then what’s your explanation for your results?”

“I don’t know.” Ellie dropped her gaze again. “All I know is I didn’t mess up.”

“I believe you.”

Her words jerked Ellie’s head up on her neck, and she pinned her with a look that was half hopeful, half wary. “You believe me,” she said, shaking her head. “Just like that, you believe me.”

“Yes, just like that,” she said, giving the woman in front of her a small smile.

Ellie let out the breath she’d been holding in a relieved gust. “Now what?”

The smile on her face went sharp, stinging the corners of her mouth. “Now we figure out what DNA from a twenty-year-old murder case was doing under Stephanie Adams’s fingernails.”

“I think I might already know,” Ellie said quietly. “I tried to explain it, to tell them it wasn’t a mistake, but no one would listen to me.”

“Explain what?” she said, leaning forward to close the gap between them.

“After the second round of tests came back with the same results, I ran a full composite analysis on the scraping I took from Stephanie Adams.” Ellie lowered her voice even more, looking around the chapel before continuing. “The particulates were comprised of dirt, calcium, aluminum, and limestone.”

Sabrina thought about it for a moment. “What is that? Concrete?”

Ellie nodded. “Melissa Walker’s blood was adhered to what turned out to be pieces of cement block,” she said, her tone carrying the words carefully, like they meant something. “The kind used in buildings.”

Sabrina could feel them. The stinging scrape of them against her shoulder as she walked. Pushing herself forward, propped against the wall, moving as fast as her drug-tangled legs would carry her.

She thought of Nulo again. Wade’s student. His progeny. The one he passed it all down to. The sickness. The rage. Wade would tell him where he’d kept her. A safe place that would never be found. A place where a person could scream and never be heard.

You got it, darlin’. Our boy’s been keepin’ the home fires burnin’.

“The same place,” she said slowly, like she was trying to shake herself from the nightmare she was suddenly convinced she’d been plunged into. “He’s keeping them in the same place.”