Sam McNally stood hatless in the rain, examining the taped-off areas the crime scene technicians had painstakingly combed over the last twenty hours. The crowd had thinned, the press long gone, most of the officers either home or on duty elsewhere. Tonight the area was a dark, soggy, muddy mess. The bones had been removed and the techs were doing what they could with them. Preliminary findings said the bones were from a girl, around fifteen or sixteen years old. If these remains weren’t Jezebel Brentwood, he would eat a kangaroo, something his son had said too often to count back when Levi was 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.