Read Alone (A Bone Secrets Novel) for Free Online

unlocked the door to her tiny office and flipped on the lightswitch with a sigh, appreciating the peace. It wasn’t going to last. Soon the place would be buzzing.
    She wouldn’t want to be in Dr. Campbell’s shoes today. It would be a triple P day. Press, police, and parents. He was already hard at work with the victims.
    She estimated she’d had four hours of sleep. She, Lacey, and Dr. Campbell had left the eerie scene close to midnight, but she hadn’t crawled into bed until 2 A.M. And then she’d spent the next hour thinking about Seth Rutledge and those girls. It’d been a difficult night. Anyone who’d seen the circle of girls would never forget that image.
    The crime scene tech had been right. It’d looked like a fairy tale.
    The beautiful girls waiting to be awakened by a prince. But these girls were never going to wake up.
    Six sets of parents would endure the worst day of their lives. Hopefully one pair would have a happy ending if their daughter survived. Victoria knew the sixth girl had virtually no blood pressure or respirations when she’d been discovered in the woods. Something chemical had depressed their systems, slowing them down. Victoria suspected phenobarbital overdose. The heart slows, the breathing slows, everything crawls to a stop. It’d take some fast action to overcome. Possibly the surviving girl had been the last to ingest the drug or not taken as much.
    Victoria said a silent prayer for the girl and her family.
    Last night she’d Googled mass suicide, wondering what other drugs had been used in suicides. Surprisingly, the episodes with the Heaven’s Gate cult, Waco, and the women long ago in Portland were the only mass suicides on American soil, but she wondered how many deaths it involved to be classified as “mass.” The well-known Jonestown suicides took place in South America, although they involved many Americans.
    “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” she mumbled. She’d learned it hadn’t been Kool-Aid used in Jonestown, but its less popular cousin, Flavor Aid.
How had Kool-Aid become embedded in American memory?
    She wasn’t surprised to find that phenobarbital had been used in Heaven’s Gate, but cyanide had been used in Jonestown. Phenobarbital was a little easier to find. It was still widely used worldwide for treating seizures in humans and dogs. And it was low in cost. Unsurprisingly, the main complaint about taking phenobarbital was that it caused sleepiness.
    The articles about the long-ago deaths of women in Portland’s Forest Park were scarce. She found some old references in
The Oregonian
’s archives, but it’d never been a national story. Maybe there were other mass suicides that hadn’t become part of the national memory? Her curiosity was piqued. The detectives had mentioned the old suicide case would be looked at again, and Victoria planned to be one of the lookers. She wanted to be hands-on with this case. Looking for clues to identities in deaths this old fell under her umbrella of expertise.
    The anticipation of working on the old puzzle gave her brain an electrical surge. Her fingers ached to examine their bones and uncover their stories. And then find out the relationship to the crime of last night. Who would duplicate the old crime?
    The first step was to find out what had been done with the remains of the women. Last night Lacey mentioned three had never been identified or claimed, so that implied the remains could be in a few places. They could be skeletal and in storage, cremated and in storage, or buried. As long ago as this event had occurred, Victoria suspected they’d been buried. She crossed her fingers against cremation.
    She sent a message to the office manager asking for help to find the remains. If anyone could hunt down the records, Anita could.
    She turned away from her computer with a sigh and shuffled through the files on her desk. She had five new requests to examine bones found by the public. Usually these were bones found in