Wicked Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

toddler.
    He glanced around the overgrown maze where berry vines wound and grappled their way through the once-tended hedges. There had been talk years ago, rumors, that the maze had been planted by a rogue priest at war with the bishop and archdiocese, that there were secrets hidden in the verdant labyrinth, but they were largely disputed and laughed about. An urban legend that just wouldn’t die, held by conspiracy theorists. But then there was the very real murder of a student years before, a boy by the name of Jake Marcott who literally took one through the heart—at the Valentine’s Day dance, no less. A perfect irony. Killed in this very maze over twenty years earlier.
    And now these bones.
    A girl, in her mid-teens. The techs had found her pelvis, but some of the other bones had been scattered, the skeleton not intact, fragments missing or in the wrong place, as if animals had dug through the shallow grave and pulled her apart. One of her ulnae had been located six feet away, under the hedge, pulled from her right arm. There were other scattered bones as well, and what was left of her had been hauled away in bags to be reassembled in the morgue. A gruesome job, but one he thought he might have the stomach to observe.
    Who are you kidding? Just the thought of her beautiful body being torn apart churns your stomach.
    He scowled into the darkness. “Damn it all to hell,” he muttered and glanced at the excavation site, a shallow grave at the base of the statue of Mary. What kind of sick bastard killed and buried her with a private marker?
    Had he buried her here so he could return and relive the killing? Or pay penance? Leave flowers on her unmarked grave? It had happened time and time again; even now there were dried remnants of roses that had been placed at the base of the Madonna, roses now saturated with rain and mud and carted off to the lab.
    You son of a bitch, he thought, I’m gonna find you, and I know just where to look.
    “Hey, Mac!” One of the techs waved him over to the base of the statue. The Madonna was tilted, still serene, arms uplifted to the heavens, well, now…kind of skewed, but you got the idea.
    Rain slipped icy fingers down his neck, but he ignored it as he picked his way over the sticky clods of mud. His boots weighed double their usual amount, they were so caked with the gooey dirt.
    “Yeah?” No one called him Sam. No one ever had, or probably ever would, he guessed.
    “You think you found her, huh?”
    In the shadowy weird, eerie illumination cast by the klieg lights, Mac gazed at the man coolly. It had been a thing around the department for twenty years—his need to learn the truth about Jessie Brentwood’s disappearance. And though it generally didn’t bother him much, he found it incredibly annoying that his interest in the case even had the techs pausing in their work to theorize and jaw and wonder. Pissed him off no end.
    Not that he didn’t understand it. He didn’t like to admit it, but he had been obsessed about the girl. It had eaten at him in a way he’d never experienced before or since.
    “You got something for me?” Mac asked. “Or you just want to talk?”
    “You could be right, is all. Sure looks like it might be that girl. Jaime.”
    “Jessie.”
    “You said right from the start that she was murdered. Killed by that group of boys, then covered up. Twenty years…” He shook his head in wonder. “Twenty goddamn years.”
    Almost to the day, Mac thought, but didn’t add fuel to the fire.
    “What are you gonna do now?”
    Mac moved away from the curious technician. “Not really my case,” he said with a shrug.
    “Bull-fucking-shit. Been your case from the beginning, man.”
    Yeah, well… Mac headed back to his black department-issue sedan, switched out of his boots to shoes that weren’t quite so caked with mud, then climbed in behind the wheel and backed away from the crime scene. In the distance, the prehistoric outlines of heavy construction