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Chapters (45)
  1. I know you'll never forgive me...
  2. Part One - Your Father
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Part Two - Your Mother
  24. Chapter Twenty-One
  25. Chapter Twenty-Two
  26. Chapter Twenty-Three
  27. Chapter Twenty-Four
  28. Chapter Twenty-Five
  29. Chapter Twenty-Six
  30. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  31. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  32. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  33. Chapter Thirty
  34. Chapter Thirty-One
  35. Chapter Thirty-Two
  36. Chapter Thirty-Three
  37. Chapter Thirty-Four
  38. Chapter Thirty-Five
  39. Chapter Thirty-Six
  40. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  41. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  42. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  43. Chapter Forty
  44. Chapter Forty-One
  45. About the Author

“At least now we know why Ajax was buying Penny gifts. He wanted information from her.”

Darrell nodded. “Ajax is caught up in all of this somehow. I have to assume that’s why he’s dead.”

We reached the area in the basement where the boxes were kept for the months of July and August seven years earlier. Everything Darrell had gathered in his investigation into the murders of Kip and Racer was crammed into three heavy boxes, typically filed on the top shelf. I wasn’t able to reach the boxes myself, or to lift them, not in my condition. But I didn’t need to.

The boxes were gone. The other records from that time frame had been squeezed together to make the gap less noticeable, but the murder files were gone.

“Somebody took them,” I said.

Darrell grabbed the log sheet that we used to record who removed materials and when. As he reviewed the top sheet, I could see Darrell’s own name from the last time he’d pulled the files, shortly after Gordon Brink’s murder. He’d noted the date and time in and the date and time out.

That was the last time the records had been touched, according to the log. No one had checked them out. But they’d vanished anyway.

“We need to check Brink’s file, too,” he said urgently.

Quickly, we made our way to the shelf that held the records from last December and then January of the current year. It took me only one glance to see that the box of materials we’d gathered on Gordon Brink’s death had disappeared, too.

“It was here,” I told Darrell. “I put it here myself.”

Darrell shook his head. “It had to be one of us. A cop took it. Nobody else has keys to get in here.”

“Ajax?”

“That’s my guess.”

“But why? He was part of the investigations. He already knew what we’d found.”

“I don’t know,” Darrell replied, “but we’re back to square one. Everything we know about the Ursulina murders, all our evidence, is gone.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The next morning, we met Sandra Thoreau at the mine. She arrived in the work site trailer from deep down in the terraced layers of the copper mine, wearing a hard hat and yellow reflective suit. She was dirty over every inch of exposed skin, the kind of dirt from which you probably never felt completely clean. She didn’t look happy to see us, and I was conscious of the fact that the mine was going to dock her for every minute she wasn’t on the clock.