I had no idea where the feeling had come from. Was I jealous? No, that was too strong a word. It was longing. And it was damn inconvenient right now.
I’d had that with Kayden. Not the forehead kisses and the easy domesticity. We’d been too young and too combustible for any of that. But we’d been drawn to each other. A gravitational thing where he’d had my attention, whether he’d tried to or not.
Ten years without seeing him, and yet, I’m straight back into his orbit.
I clicked my pen and looked back at the box.
Get your shit together, Constable Delaney.
Keeping it professional, I turned to Kayden. “You want another note?”
“Yeah, I guess.” He held out his hand.
I reached into the box, pulled out another note, and gave it to him.
Bella returned with drinks and a passionfruit slice, cut into fingers, which she handed out to everyone. Refusing to look at Declan’s reaction to her return, I selected another note for myself and unfolded it. Title: The night our lies became truth. Date: Sometime in 1977.
The oldest one yet. Frank would’ve been a teenager. Did his crimes really stretch back nearly fifty years?
I started reading.
A sense of dread settled in as I deciphered Frank’s handwriting. This note described wayward kids sent out to Koolaroo for thirty days at a time. Some kind of rehabilitation program. Hard work. No phones. No parents.
A line stopped me.
That’s how I met Bob and Donny.
Jeez. They’d known each other for nearly fifty years.
I kept reading. Bob had been seventeen—loud, confident, already practicing authority. And there was a boy named Donny, quiet and eager, who’d followed Bob because he’d wanted to be like him. And then a girl. Katherine. Known as Kat. Chronic runaway. Thick file. Sent to Koolaroo because she couldn’t be contained anywhere else.
She never walked away from Koolaroo. Oh shit!
My breaths shot in and out.
Bob never called it murder. He called it a problem that needed managin.
My heart pounded.
That night bound the 3 of us together for good.
Me, because I knew where to hide the body. Turns out that lesson served me well over the years.
Over the years?
Fucking hell.
Was Frank a mass murderer?
My hands shook as I set the note down. “Hey, umm …” I looked around at all of them. “I have a note you all need to hear.”
The serious tone in my voice must have caught their attention because nobody reached for their drink, shifted in their chair, or cracked a joke. They just looked at me and waited.
I started reading.
Frank’s handwriting was rough, and the spelling was patchy, but the meaning was crystal clear, and it got worse with every paragraph. I kept my voice level, reading the note word for word. Frank’s confession was brutal enough before I even reached the part where they’d killed a young girl named Kat.
“Oh, my god.” Bella put her hand over her mouth.