The Blessed Bones
A pulse-pounding crime thriller packed full of suspense
Kathryn Casey
Books by Kathryn Casey
Detective Clara Jefferies Series
The Fallen Girls
Her Final Prayer
The Blessed Bones
The Sarah Armstrong Mystery Series
Singularity
Blood Lines
The Killing Storm
The Buried
True Crime
Evil Beside Her
She Wanted It All
A Warrant to Kill
Die, My Love
Shattered
A Descent Into Hell
Deadly Little Secrets
Murder, I Write
Possessed
Deliver Us
In Plain Sight
AVAILABLE IN AUDIO
The Fallen Girls (Available in the UK and the US)
Her Final Prayer (Available in the UK and the US)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Hear More from Kathryn
Books by Kathryn Casey
A Letter from Kathryn
The Fallen Girls
Her Final Prayer
Acknowledgements
*
For my brothers and sisters-in-law: Mike, Jan, John, Linda, Jim and Kate. For all the good memories; hoping for many more to come.
One
The bindings on her arms and legs cut into her skin and prevented her from rolling over. Tied as she was to the bed’s metal railings, she had no choice but to lie flat, but to do so made the small of her back ache and the muscles in her sides complain. Periodically, the pains came, rippling through her. Hard. When they did, she prayed they would end. They left her spent and covered in sweat.
How long had she lain like this, helpless and frightened? She thought hours, but it felt like days. Why had this happened to her? Looking back, she’d made mistakes, but at the time…
It had started when she’d trusted the boy. That one night with him had set everything in motion, the turn of events that led to the evening she’d made a tragic decision. I never should have left with the stranger, she thought, not for the first time. I should have known better.
The drug coursed through her, again sending her body into throbbing spasms, each moment feeling like an eternity. When blessed relief finally came, the agony left her weak and delirious, struggling to focus. In a haze, her memory drifted back to the last time she’d seen her father, that afternoon at the bus depot.
As they stood at the counter, she’d protested: “But I don’t want to go. Why do I have to?”
“Be quiet,” her father had whispered. “I’ll talk to you when I’m done here.”
“Why are you doing this?” she’d asked, her voice timid. “Can’t I just—”
“No. You can’t.” A lean, sallow man, he had a mop of brown hair that fell crooked over his forehead. Quickly, he’d returned his attention to the old man behind the counter. “I need a one-way ticket to Denver.”
“That’ll be sixty-two dollars,” the clerk had said.
Petite, small for her age, the teenager’s most striking feature was her eyes, a remarkable shade of violet. Her long prairie dress hung limply on her slender body with the exception of around her belly, where a careful observer might have noticed a round bulge. Nervous, her hands were shaking and her stomach had roiled with a bad case of indigestion. At least she’d stopped throwing up. For weeks, she hadn’t been able to figure out what was wrong with her. Although frightened, she’d kept her worry to herself, telling no one. Then her father had cornered her, telling her he’d heard about her and the boy from someone who’d seen them together—unchaperoned in the woods. A few hours later, he’d told her that she was taking a trip.
After he purchased the bus ticket, her father shuffled to the side to get out of the way of the others in line. The girl tracked behind, asking, “Aren’t you going with me?”
“No, of course not. Why would I do that?”
Her pulse drummed in her ears. “But I don’t know anyone in Denver. What will I do there?”
Furrowing his brow, her father shook his head. “I explained this to you.”
“Do my mothers know what you’re doing?”
She’d asked that question before, and he hadn’t answered. He didn’t again. Instead, he glared at her. “You know what you did. We can’t—”
“But I—” Tears began to flow, and the stomachache she’d been fighting crawled up her throat, making her feel as if she would gag. “What am I supposed to do?”
At that, her father pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Here, look. There’s a shelter in Denver for girls like you, ones who have strayed.”
She gulped back sour phlegm. “Father, I—”
“This is not a discussion. This is my wish. Remember what the prophet teaches: A father is to be obeyed.”
At that, she wiped her nose with her dress sleeve, but her tears flowed so hard and fast she gave up trying to stop them. “I’ll obey you, Father. I promise. Let me come home, and I’ll be a good girl. You’ll see.”
It sent a knife of pain through her when he muttered, “You can never come home. Never.”
“Father, I…”
“You made a grave mistake, one that would disgrace our family if others knew. Your mothers and I would become the subject of gossip and ridicule.”
“But…”
Her father stared down at her and she recognized the same look he’d had on his face a year earlier when she’d watched him slaughter a pig for Sunday dinner. The girl had raised it from a piglet, poured her love into it, sleeping on a mound of hay beside it when it was sick. She’d pleaded with her father to spare it, but he’d raised the rifle to the pig’s head and pulled the trigger. She’d heard the boom and saw the blood and brain tissue spatter across the ground.
“Your bus leaves for Denver in two hours,” her father said, with as little emotion as if he’d been dropping her off at school. She began to object, when he hissed, “Do you think I don’t have eyes? That I cannot see what has happened to you?”
“No. I—”
“In Denver, hire a taxi to take you to the shelter. Ask the people there for help.” Her father had a slight smirk on his face, one she interpreted as contempt for what she’d become. “Tell them that you are with child.”
“Father, please,” she pleaded, but ignoring the pain in his young daughter’s cry, he turned and walked away. The gi
rl waited, hoping he’d return, but eventually shuffled over to a gray plastic chair near the front, one where she could hear the speaker announcing departures. She leaned back in the chair. Eventually, she nodded off.
When she awoke, a man was sitting beside her, in jeans and a black sportscoat. He had the newspaper open. She assessed the clock on the wall, then looked at her ticket. She’d missed her bus. Panicked, unsure what to do, she couldn’t stop the tears from again streaming down her cheeks. The man with the newspaper glanced over at her.
“Are you okay?”
Her parents had told her to never talk to strangers, but they weren’t there, and she needed someone to confide in. “My father bought me a ticket to Denver. I missed my bus.”
“Ah. That is bad luck,” the man said. “Why Denver?”
She pulled out the sheet of paper with the name and address of the youth shelter printed on it and showed it to him.
“Why is your father sending you there?”
“I-I was bad, and now I’m having a baby.”
The man nodded, as if he understood. “You don’t have to go all the way to Denver. I know of a place that’s closer, one where they help girls in trouble.”
The girl thought about that. The bus was gone, and she didn’t know when another would come. The ticket counter had closed for the night, and outside the sky had turned black. She thought of her mothers, her brothers and sisters. Her stomach empty and bitter, she considered how the house smelled with dinner and pictured her mothers clucking in the kitchen as they cleared the plates. She wondered if they’d be upset. If they would miss her.
The man watched her, but when she remained silent, he stood, as if ready to leave. “Good luck.”
The girl’s gaze traveled across the nearly deserted bus station. Once he left, she’d be alone, except for a scruffy man in a stained raincoat who sat in the corner mumbling to himself. She looked up at the man, wondering what she should do.
Choking back the little voice in her head that whispered not to, she asked, “Mister, would the people at that place you know about, the shelter that’s closer, help me?”
The girl had second thoughts when the man smiled at her. Something about the way his lips curled up ever so slightly at the corners made her shiver. “Yes, I’m sure they would,” he said. She saw a spark of excitement in his eyes when he asked, “Do you want me to take you there?”
Later, tied to the bed, in the fog of a dream, the girl shook her head and muttered: “No! No! Don’t go with him. No!”
That realization came only in hindsight and far too late to save her.
Two
The day had slipped away. I’d been holed up in the musty room at the back of the station since early morning, seated at a long, library-style table. Above me the yellowed ceiling tiles were stained a sickly brown from a long-forgotten leak. Over the years, water had dripped and eaten away a patch of varnish, leaving a jagged scar on the tabletop’s dark wood. Despite the roof’s repair, the space felt dank, and it smelled of the aging paperwork it held. Kept under lock and key, the cell-like room had walls lined with metal cabinets. Inside were files, many of which went back decades. After long hours cloistered in this forgotten slice of the Alber police station, I’d come to call it “the Tombs.”
On top of the battered table, I’d positioned a dozen stacks of files categorized by types of crimes, all cold cases.
Maybe that wasn’t the right way to describe them.
A cold case suggested that these were crimes that had been investigated but remained unsolved. In truth, the matters chronicled in these reports had never been pursued. They were deposited there like corpses buried in unmarked graves. The file cabinets were akin to caskets, never intended to be reopened, their contents destined to molder away.
To comprehend why these cases were abandoned, one had to appreciate the strange milieu of my hometown. Founded more than a hundred years ago in a high valley tucked into the mountains, Alber, Utah, was the home of Elijah’s People, a fundamentalist Mormon sect that practiced polygamy. An insular society, our religion ruled our world. As true believers, we adhered to the strict edicts of our prophets, most recently an octogenarian named Emil Barstow. In town it had always been an open secret that rather than fairly enforcing laws, Alber’s police department did the bidding of Barstow and others in the faith’s hierarchy. Those in good standing with the prophet could count on not being held accountable for their actions. The police ignored injustices, the suffering of innocent men, women and—all too often—children, at the behest of the men in power.
In the past few years, Alber had changed. Since his conviction for marrying off underage girls to older men, our illustrious prophet resided in a federal prison cell. Foreclosures had lured outsiders in search of bargains, and the wall of secrecy that isolated the town from the secular world had begun to crumble.
Sadly, those changes came too late for nearly all the cases chronicled in the reports on the table before me.
In law enforcement, we are bound by strict rules. Among the most important are statutes of limitations, the finite periods after crimes are committed in which they are eligible for prosecution. In Utah, those statutes limited the prosecutions of nearly all crimes—with only a few exceptions, like murder—to four years. So although the files held accounts of not only run-of-the-mill robberies and vandalism but domestic violence, child abuse, and assaults, if they occurred one day more than four years ago, I couldn’t do a thing about them.
That had made my examination of the files maddening. While my heart broke for the victims, my hands were tied.
The unfairness was hard for me to stomach. Especially in this case, the one I held in my hand.
The manila folder had a name written in blue ink on the tab: Danny Benson. I couldn’t place Danny, but I knew his family. I may have only taken over as chief of police nine months earlier, but I’d spent the first twenty-four years of my life in Alber. Danny’s dad, Clyde, ran a service station on the highway outside town. A big, beefy, roughhouse-looking guy in his fifties, Clyde always had someone’s old clunker up on the lift and habitually wore smears of black grease on his uniforms. These days, when I’d had no time for lunch, I popped in and filled my Suburban with gas, then grabbed a Baby Ruth or a Mars Bar out of a bin Clyde kept stocked next to the register.
Not being able to place Danny bothered me.
It was true that with more than four thousand residents, I couldn’t know everyone in town, but I thought I should have heard of Danny at some point. I’d not only been born and raised in Alber; I’d taught elementary school here for four years.
Despite my deep roots, my return had been a hard transition.
Alber wasn’t the kind of town that welcomed outsiders with open arms, and most of the locals saw me as infinitely worse than a mere interloper. Although I’d grown up as one of Elijah’s People, I was an apostate who’d abandoned their beloved beliefs. In the eyes of the faithful, that made me a traitor. I was so mistrusted, so unwanted, that last fall there’d been a series of protests on the streets surrounding the police station. Although the demonstrations eventually ended, the bad feelings never waned. I had a stack of anonymous notes in my desk that warned me against staying. All through the winter they’d arrived, one or two a month. In the beginning they’d been slipped through a crack in the station’s front door. Once we installed a surveillance camera, the letters arrived via the mail. All were in pink envelopes and scented with vanilla, marked personal and addressed to me: Chief of Police Clara Jefferies. Whoever she was, the writer didn’t mince her words.
LEAVE NOW BEFORE THINGS GET BAD FOR YOU.
Whether or not the majority of townsfolk wanted me around, I’d decided to stay. Maybe part of it was pride. All I knew was that when I left Alber—if I left—it would be on my terms. I had no intention of allowing anyone to chase me out, not like last time. And for however long I remained, I would do my best.
That meant I would do what I could for the forgot
ten victims whose complaints had been buried in the Tombs.
All the folder before me contained was Danny Benson’s picture and the one-page report that accompanied it. Nothing else. The photo was of an impish-looking four-year-old with a bowl cut the color of tarnished brass and eyes that pinched in close at the corners above his nose. At least, one of them did. The other eye was nearly swollen shut, black, blue, and had to be painful.
The sixteen-year-old statement was signed by one of Danny’s older sisters, Lynlee. At the time, she was twelve. “Dad doesn’t hit the rest of us but he goes after Danny,” the girl had told the reporting officer. “This time, he got Danny in the eye, but a while back his whole backside was bruised.”
I read that line a few more times. Looked at the photo of the kid. And I felt my pulse build from a stroll to a sprint, the anger birthing a hard, undigestible lump in my throat. Clyde hits Danny a lot, I mentally paraphrased. That’s what she’s saying.
I turned the sheet over, hoping something would be scrawled on the back, but as in all the other abandoned cases, the boxes that were to be checked as each step of an investigation was concluded and the sections for comments remained empty.
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