A Merciful Silence Read online

  PRAISE FOR KENDRA ELLIOT

  “Readers coming in cold to this thriller won’t have to worry about missing the series’ previous books: It reads just fine as a standalone plot, its wintry twists and turns paced adroitly and warmed up with a touch of romance.”

  —The Oregonian on A Merciful Secret

  “Elliot delivers a fast-paced, tense thriller that plays up the small-town atmosphere and survivalist mentality, contrasting it against an increasingly connected world. The romantic angle is subtle, with the established relationship between Mercy and Truman slowly and satisfyingly maturing as they solve the mystery.”

  —Publishers Weekly on A Merciful Secret

  “Each Mercy Kilpatrick mystery improves on the last . . . In this third installment, the whodunit, a tale that blends a hint of the paranormal with some all-too-human ghastliness, is engaging, but the real power comes from watching Mercy evolve as an individual.”

  —RT Book Reviews on A Merciful Secret

  “In the debut of her new Mercy Kilpatrick series, Elliot crafts an eerily fascinating small town. An air of menace is palpable throughout the story, and the characters hide a wealth of secrets and twisted loyalties.”

  —Romantic Times Book Reviews on A Merciful Death

  “In Elliot’s latest gripping novel the mystery and suspense are top-notch, and the romance embedded within will quench love story junkies’ thirst, too. The author’s eye for detail makes this one play out more like a movie rather than a book. It can easily be read as a standalone but is obviously much better if the prior three are digested first.”

  —Romantic Times Book Reviews on Targeted

  “Elliot’s latest addition to her thrilling, edge-of-your-seat series Bone Secrets will scare the crap out of you, yet allow you to swoon over the building romantic setting, which provides quite the picturesque backdrop. Her novel contains thrills, chills, snow, and . . . hey, you never know! The surprises and cliffhangers are satisfying, yet edgy enough to keep you feverishly flipping the pages.”

  —Romantic Times Book Reviews on Known

  “Elliot’s best work to date. The author’s talent is evident in the characters’ wit and smart dialogue . . . One wouldn’t necessarily think a psychological thriller and romance would mesh together well, but Elliot knows what she’s doing when she turns readers’ minds inside out and then softens the blow with an unforgettable love story.”

  —Romantic Times Book Reviews on Vanished (Top Pick)

  “Kendra Elliot does it again! Filled with twists, turns, and spine-tingling details, Alone is an impressive addition to the Bone Secrets series.”

  —Laura Griffin, New York Times bestselling author

  “Elliot once again proves to be a genius in the genre with her third heart-pounding novel in the Bone Secrets collection. The author knows romance and suspense, reeling readers in instantaneously and wowing them with an extremely surprising finish . . . Elliot’s best by a mile!”

  —Romantic Times Book Reviews on Buried (Top Pick)

  “Make room on your keeper shelf! Hidden has it all: intricate plotting, engaging characters, a truly twisted villain. I can’t wait to see what Kendra Elliot dishes up next!”

  —Karen Rose, New York Times bestselling author

  ALSO BY KENDRA ELLIOT

  MERCY KILPATRICK NOVELS

  A Merciful Death

  A Merciful Truth

  A Merciful Secret

  BONE SECRETS NOVELS

  Hidden

  Chilled

  Buried

  Alone

  Known

  BONE SECRETS NOVELLAS

  Veiled

  CALLAHAN & MCLANE NOVELS

  PART OF THE BONE SECRETS WORLD

  Vanished

  Bridged

  Spiraled

  Targeted

  ROGUE RIVER NOVELLAS

  On Her Father’s Grave (Rogue River)

  Her Grave Secrets (Rogue River)

  Dead in Her Tracks (Rogue Winter)

  Death and Her Devotion (Rogue Vows)

  Truth Be Told (Rogue Justice)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Oceanfront Press Company.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503901315

  ISBN-10: 1503901319

  Cover design by Eileen Carey

  For my girls

  My biggest fans

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EXCERPT: HIDDEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  There it is.

  Eagle’s Nest police officer Ben Cooley hit his brakes, thankful he’d been driving a cautious thirty miles an hour. He squinted, trying to see through the smears created by his windshield wipers. Ahead of his car, one-third of the road was gone, washed down the steep side of the hill. It looked as if a monster had bitten a ten-foot-wide chunk out of the asphalt. The last three days had dropped several inches of rain in Central Oregon, and he could swear the cities were about to float away. This sort of continuous downpour happened all the time in the Willamette Valley on the other side of the Cascade mountain range, but not in his beloved—and usually dry—high desert.

  To the left of the road was a gut-turning drop-off that vanished into a forest of pines. On his right the rocky hillside sloped upward, and several impromptu waterfalls cascaded down, flowing across the road. The water was supposed to feed into the ditch and funnel beneath the road to flow safely out the other side, but the quantity of water had overpowered the culvert.

  “Don’t know how the other side of the state puts up with months of this rain.” No one was around to hear Ben mutter to himself. He made a conscious effort not to do it within listening distance of the other guys in his department. The last thing the police chief needed to hear was that his seventy-something officer was losing his mind.

  Ben hit his flashers, called in his location, and popped his trunk.

  The highway department tried to keep up with the weather, installing nets and cul
verts and natural drains to keep the streets safe, but every year something happened to this poor road. And since its vehicle traffic was quite low, it ranked near the bottom of the state’s priority list.

  Ben set out cones and flares, wondering if anyone would even use the road before the flares burned out. He went back to his car and got Lucas on the radio.

  “We need the highway department out here to assess the safety,” Ben told the Eagle’s Nest dispatcher and office manager.

  “That bad?” asked Lucas.

  “Definitely. The guardrail along the south edge is gone. A car is going to come by, not see the hole in time, and end up forty feet down the hill, stuck in the pines. They need to close the road.”

  “I’ll call it in.”

  “Send Royce or Samuel out here with some roadblocks right away because the highway department will take hours to get here. I’ve blocked the road in one direction with my car, but we need something else.”

  “Will do.”

  Ben carefully walked to the edge of the wide gap, always curious about the engineering of roads. He saw the dirt-and-rock support under the asphalt had simply washed away, defeated by the continuous power of the water. The thick border of the black asphalt looked like a broken Oreo cookie wafer.

  He moved as close as he dared, aware he didn’t know what supported the asphalt under his feet . . . if anything.

  Peering into the giant washed-out section, he spotted the edge of a huge concrete culvert six feet below the road. A slow rivulet flowed out of it while a hundred times the amount of water surged outside the culvert.

  The culvert is probably jammed with rocks and dirt.

  He bent over, resting his hands on his thighs, and craned his head to get a look inside the culvert.

  His gaze locked on one round, pale rock.

  With eye sockets. And teeth.

  TWO

  Twenty-four hours later, FBI Special Agent Mercy Kilpatrick watched as bones were removed from the culvert. The Eagle’s Nest Police Department had reached out to the state police for help with the removal and investigation of the remains. The team from the state police had gotten a good look inside the large pipe and immediately requested a medical examiner, who had asked for a forensic anthropologist, who had then suggested the FBI be brought in.

  A long chain of requests for assistance had landed Mercy on the site.

  Beside her, Eagle’s Nest police chief Truman Daly stood with his arms folded across his chest, his sharp gaze watching every move of the forensic anthropologist’s team. What had started as his case had ended up being Mercy’s. The chance of that happening had been small, and she was slightly amused, considering they’d been dating for about six months. Mercy had heard about the situation the moment Ben Cooley reported the skull to Truman and had been aware of every step of the investigation after that. A perk of sleeping with the police chief.

  “That’s the fifth skull,” she whispered to Truman, knowing he could count just fine.

  He nodded, his stance stiff.

  It looks a lot smaller than the others. A shudder rippled through her.

  The entire group of observing professionals was quiet and respectful. Two state police troopers were there to handle any traffic—which meant they stood around a lot. A forensics team from the state carefully removed the remains under the watchful eye of a tall, elegant black-haired woman Mercy knew was the forensic anthropologist, Dr. Victoria Peres.

  The anthropologist ran the scene, giving orders and being in three places at once. Mercy watched her gently accept the fifth skull and study it for ten seconds longer than she had the others. Dr. Peres’s jaw tightened, and she passed it off to one of her assistants.

  The rain had stopped overnight, and the water rushing under the road had slowed to a trickle. Mercy knew their respite wouldn’t last long. More rainstorms were expected, blowing in from the Pacific and down from Canada. A double whammy of weather.

  At least it was better than ice.

  Or feet and feet of snow.

  Her thigh twinged, a reminder that she’d been standing in the same position for an hour and that less than two months ago, she’d been shot in that leg as she pursued a killer. She still couldn’t move as comfortably as she’d like and had learned the hard way not to ignore her body’s warning signs. “I need to sit down,” she whispered to Truman, hating her weakness.

  Truman jerked as if she’d shocked him. “Your leg?” Concern filled his brown eyes.

  She grimaced and nodded, looking around for a perch. The bumper of the medical examiner’s vehicle was the closest, and she took a seat. She lost her good view, but she wanted to be able to walk tomorrow. She’d be no help to anyone if she couldn’t move.

  Was that last skull a child’s?

  “Well look at that, the FBI sitting down on the job again.”

  Mercy closed her eyes. She didn’t need to see Chuck Winslow to recognize his voice. The internet reporter had become a thorn in her side over the last two months. Truman claimed Winslow had developed an obsession with writing about Mercy. The reporter had published how she’d been shot in the leg and had strongly implied that it’d been her own fault for being friends with the shooter’s brother. He wove the facts to suit the story he wanted, even dropping hints in his story that Mercy had refused to arrest the killer for his first two murders because she knew him. Her integrity had been stung by that story, and Mercy knew she’d screwed up when she’d cursed at the reporter over the phone when he asked personal questions about Kaylie, her seventeen-year-old niece. Winslow had gloated about it for weeks.

  He reminded her of a grade school boy who would punch a girl because he wanted her attention.

  She hadn’t read anything about her and Truman’s relationship in his articles. Anyone could find out that Truman spent a few nights a week at her apartment. Maybe Chuck was a bit lazy. It was a good thing she’d talked Truman out of confronting the reporter about his coverage of her, but Mercy knew that if Chuck included her relationship with the police chief in his stories—or personal details about Kaylie—she wouldn’t be able to stop Truman from losing his temper.

  She didn’t look in Winslow’s direction, keeping her gaze toward the recovery scene. Truman started to turn toward Chuck, but Mercy tugged on his sleeve. “Don’t give him the satisfaction,” she ordered. She knew the reporter was at least twenty feet away, behind the yellow tape, his view of the crime scene strategically blocked by tarps and tents.

  “Asshole,” Truman muttered. “One of these days . . .”

  “Careful!” the forensic anthropologist snapped at one of her assistants. The assistant didn’t flinch, but everyone nearby did. The two women had climbed up from the culvert to the blacktop, their hands full with buckets of dirt and bones. The state’s structural engineers had shored up one side of the washed-out hole and deemed the site safe enough for the bone removal, but one engineer had stayed at the scene, noting the dwindling runoff and keeping a sharp eye on the movement of the mud.

  Dr. Peres watched her assistant add the skull to the growing collection of bones and debris. The evidence would be taken to the medical examiner’s office, where the bones would be studied and hopefully reveal a lead for the investigators. Mercy had already pulled up a list of missing people from the immediate area. Since she didn’t yet know the sex or age of the remains, it might turn out to have been a waste of time, but Mercy had felt the need to do something to get the case moving.

  “Dr. Peres.” Mercy pushed to her feet after her fifteen-second relaxation period. “I’m Special Agent Kilpatrick.” She held out her hand to the tall woman. An intelligent but impatient brown gaze met hers, and even though the doctor had been digging in mud for hours, there wasn’t a hair out of place from the large bun at the back of her neck.

  “No, I don’t know who these people are yet,” the doctor immediately stated. Extreme patience filled her tone as she shook Mercy’s hand, but Mercy saw her annoyance flash. Dr. Peres seemed to be the type of per
son who just wanted to do her job and not be bugged by the police until she was ready.

  Mercy raised a brow. “You’re not a miracle worker?”

  “Not today. Try me next Tuesday.”

  Mercy leaned closer. “Was that last skull from a child?” she asked in the softest possible tone.

  Dr. Peres gave an imperceptible nod.

  “How many more are in there?”

  The doctor glanced from side to side, checking for listening ears. Truman had stepped away a polite distance. “I believe we’ve found them all, but I won’t guarantee that until the culvert is completely empty.”

  “Just this end was blocked, right?”

  “Correct. It appears that three-quarters of it was empty. We’ll need to check the surrounding area too.” She sighed. “There’s no telling how much of the remains have washed away.”

  How can the doctor put together this puzzle when several pieces might be missing?

  “Do you have an age and sex on the last skull?”

  The doctor’s large brown eyes narrowed, her lips thinning.

  Mercy pushed on. “I’m not asking for perfect answers, but I know you have a rough idea. I’m simply looking for a place to focus my efforts while I’m waiting for your report. I’m trying to save some time.”

  Dr. Peres’s face softened, and she looked over at the vehicle holding the bins of recovered bones. “That last skull belonged to a child between the ages of five and eight. I’m leaning toward female, but I’m not positive yet.” She met Mercy’s gaze. “Sexing a skull is hard at a young age. Clothes and hair help, but we’ve found neither. One of the other skulls belongs to a young person too. I estimated in their teens.”

  “Five skulls.”

  “So far.” Dr. Peres gestured toward the downward slope of tall pines. “Who knows what we’ll find down there?”

  The scope of the search suddenly hit Mercy. Acres and acres of dense sloped woods and rushing water. “It could take days,” she gasped, overwhelmed by the task.

  The anthropologist simply nodded. Her eyes looked tired, but Mercy believed she wouldn’t give up until she was completely satisfied. She’d heard rumors about the state’s Bone Lady. Tough. Brass balls. Ice princess. Damn good at her job.