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 equipment were black against a faintly lighter sky. St. Elizabeth’s was being torn down. Even without the kids who’d stumbled upon Jessie’s grave, her skeletal remains would have inevitably been discovered.

He shoved the car into Drive and rolled out of the pockmarked parking lot that separated the convent from the school. A few lights still shone in the windows of the nuns’ quarters, which were to be saved from the developer’s bulldozers. The convent was still owned by the church and was to remain that way, at least until a better offer from a developer landed on the archdiocese’s table.