Once they were on the road, Palmer said, “Don’t let them push you around.”
“Who?”
“David . . . Cindy . . . they’re testing you. Every time you throw out a story idea, someone takes it as their own, and you allow it to happen.”
“I’m the rookie on the team,” she said. “It seems disrespectful to question their authority.”
He shook his head. “They have no power. I’m the boss.”
“You didn’t jump in and say anything, so I assumed I was the low guy on the totem pole and that was how things worked in the editorial meetings.”
“Never assume.”
During the editorial meeting, she’d thought she was being polite by stepping aside, but all she was doing was teaching her coworkers that she could be pushed around.
As silence settled around them, she attempted to keep her gaze straight ahead, but a one-by-one-inch picture of a little girl taped to the console caught her attention.
Palmer glanced her way. “My granddaughter. She’ll be turning thirteen soon.”
“Do you see her often?”
Gaze on the road ahead, he said, “No.”
“She looks nine or ten in the photo.”
“Nine. I haven’t seen her since that picture was taken.”
“How come?” The question was out of her mouth before she realized she might be overstepping.
“My son and I don’t get along.” The chuckle that followed was low and throaty. “Actually, that’s an understatement. When I saw him, he made it clear that it would be the last time.”
Sawyer said nothing.
“My son said most of the problems he wrestles with are because I never opened up to him about my own struggles in life. He said I’ve always expected too much from him and that I’m a judgmental son of a bitch.”
She smirked. “I can’t imagine why he would think that about you.”
“Touché,” he said with a chuckle. “Enough about me. How are you doing, Sawyer? That’s what I want to know.”
“I’m fine.”
“You lost both your parents in one fell swoop. That can’t be easy.”
“One fell swoop” was putting it mildly, Sawyer thought. Against both her older sisters’ better judgment, one month ago, Sawyer had returned to her hometown of River Rock for her grandmother’s funeral, only to discover that her father was a pedophile and her mom was his protector, willing to do anything, including kill, to keep their secret safe. When Sawyer had confronted her dad, he’d admitted to his wrongdoings and even offered to turn himself over to authorities. But blind rage at the notion of giving up all they had worked so hard for prompted Sawyer’s mom to swing a fireplace poker at her father’s head, killing him.
She would have killed Sawyer too, if her sisters hadn’t shown up. It was Sawyer’s sister Aria who had been forced to shoot their mother in self-defense.
In the end, her parents’ deaths had given Sawyer a sense of relief, but she kept that little tidbit to herself. “I imagine most people who lose a loving parent grieve for all the happy memories they shared,” she told Palmer. “But I grieve for what my sisters and I never had.”
He nodded. “Makes sense. My mom died when I was five. Cancer. I also spent more than a few years grieving for what I never had.”
Although Palmer was known for being gruff and blunt, he seemed unusually melancholy this morning. Being that she was a curious cat, she couldn’t help but wonder about his personal life. Was he happily married? Did he have more than the one son? Did he like to cook? Random questions rolled through her mind.
“What is it you want to know?” he asked.
“Me?”
“Is there anyone else in the car?”
His question had caught her off guard, but it shouldn’t have. One of the things she’d always known about Palmer was that he was abnormally intuitive. “I like to know about the people I work with,” she said. “That’s all.”
He made a left on Twelfth Street. “We’re here.” He found a parking spot, shut off the engine, climbed out, then stuck his head back in the car and said, “I’m divorced. Boy and a girl. Daughter lives in Los Angeles. In my spare time I like to crochet.”
“Really?”
He was looking right at her, his eyes like lasers. “I don’t crochet,” he said with a shake of his head. “I’m just fucking with you. Are you coming or not?”
Sawyer felt a pang of sympathy for his son. Again, she was left to grab her things and chase after him.
She jogged across the pavement, slid between two cars parked close together, then hopped over a cement curb, following Palmer off the well-traveled sidewalk and up a grassy hill. At the top of the hill, past picnic benches and barbecue pits, she could see yellow crime tape encircling an area beneath a grove of trees. Walking at a good clip, she and Palmer approached Detective Perez.
Judging by the look Perez shot her way, he hadn’t forgotten her. A month ago she had taken advantage of a security guard who’d left his post, and she’d walked into a crime scene, where she took pictures. Never mind that she’d helped solve a young woman’s murder. Perez was like a crow. He remembered a face and held a grudge.
Palmer turned his back to Perez and said, “Why don’t you check out the area, see what you can find out?”
Fine. She headed off to the opposite side where yellow crime scene tape had been strategically tied around the trunk of three trees, making a triangular area for investigators to work. Two technicians were kneeling and gathering evidence from within a three-foot-wide hole. Mounds of dirt, a shovel, and work gloves lay near a mostly dead tree, five feet in length, with odd-shaped leaves dangling from thin, gangly branches.
The tree was out of place among the oaks, redwoods, and even a few palm trees that dotted the neatly mowed green grass throughout the park.
With gloved hands, a technician photographed and then bagged a piece of fabric weathered by tragedy and time. The plastic bag was sealed and put inside a storage bin.
“It was a little girl,” a young man standing outside the perimeter told her.
Sawyer looked at him. His long, molasses-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She guessed him to be in his forties. Tall and lanky with bony arms and pointy elbows, he wore a T-shirt and jeans streaked with mud and grass.
“How do you know?” Sawyer asked.
“I was the one who found her.”
“That hole looks pretty deep. How did you find her?”
“I’m a groundskeeper. One of my jobs is to replace trees hit hard by drought and winter storms. I’ve been meaning to replace this particular tree for a while now.” He looked around. “There’s a lot to do around here, so I didn’t get to it until today.”
She nodded. “Makes sense. How do you know the bones belong to a girl, though?”
He shrugged. “The clothes mostly. Looked to me like the shirt had little red hearts on it, and there were pink shoes. Leather must take a while to decay.”
“I wonder how old she was?”
“Hard to tell since she was in a fetal position and there wasn’t much left except for bones. If I had to guess, judging by the size of the skull, I’d say she was somewhere between seven and ten years of age.”