Ava James and the Forgotten Bones (Ava James FBI Mystery Book 2) Read online

  Ava James and the Forgotten Bones

  Copyright © 2021 by A.J. Rivers

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Also by A.J. Rivers

  5 Years Ago…

  “911, what’s your emergency?”

  “Someone’s broken into my house. Oh, my gosh! I just heard a shot!”

  “What’s your address?”

  “509 Pleasant Hill Drive, Hidden Cove, Kentucky.”

  “Okay, ma’am, the police are on their way. Stay calm and lock the door to the room you’re in, and please stay on the line with me until they arrive.”

  Two cruisers fired up the forest-bordered road into Hidden Cove. The red and blue lights painted the surroundings in great bold strokes as the sirens warbled and split the normal calm of the backcountry community.

  Officers Tate and Milhorn were first on the scene. Weapons drawn, they moved toward the house. Dusk had fallen. The cruiser lights were the only source of illumination outside. Shadows jigged and danced in the strobe of the bar lights, making everything seem suspect.

  Officers Upton and Gouge came to a skidding stop in the gravel just shy of the other cruiser. They joined the other two officers on the wraparound porch.

  Adrenaline pumped, nerves twanged, and senses were heightened as Milhorn shoved the partially opened door inward.

  Tate announced, “Police!” and the others swung in behind them.

  Amber lamplight glowed from the corners of the living room to their left. A man lay face-down in front of the fireplace. Blood pooled darkly around his shoulders and head.

  Making quick work of it, they cleared the first floor, establishing that no one was there but them. At the top of the stairs, Tate and Milhorn turned right toward the master suite and another bedroom, both lit by overhead lights. Upton and Gouge turned left toward the bathroom and the adjacent room, the small nightlights at their entries giving them a haunted glow.

  But there was nothing there.

  Tate motioned to Milhorn as they approached the master bedroom doorway. A cordless phone lay on the floor just beyond the threshold.

  Two minutes later, the entirety of the second floor had been cleared.

  Tate spoke to emergency dispatch, confirming that the phone had dropped the call minutes before they arrived.

  The four officers cordoned off the outside perimeter and waited for forensics to show up. Detective Rogers was already there.

  “What happened?” he asked Tate.

  “Homeowner’s dead in front of the fireplace in the living room. ID’d as Dustin Johnson. His wife, Katherine, is missing. There was no sign of her or the perpetrator.”

  “You searched attic to basement and everything in between?”

  Annoyed, Tate nodded. “Yes. Twice. There’s nobody alive in there.”

  “Signs of forced entry?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  Detective Rogers nodded, looking over Tate’s shoulder toward the house. “Scene has been secure since you all came out, right?”

  “Not a rookie here, detective. Everything by the book.” Tate gritted his teeth and stared beyond the strobing cruiser lights toward the complete blackness of the woods.

  “Good man, Tate. Why don’t you and Milhorn run along and start on the paperwork now? I think I can handle this until forensics gets here.”

  Four months later…

  With a feeling of failure and emptiness, Detective Rogers watched as the last of the evidence bags was sealed and placed in the box with the rest of the items from the Johnson file. With no leads, barely anything in the evidence department, and Mrs. Johnson still missing, they had no choice but to label it as a cold case and move on.

  Detective Rogers was kicking himself for it. He wanted more than anything to find Mrs. Johnson, but with the leads cold, there was simply nowhere else for him to go. He’d had no other choice but to ship it off to the FBI. No progress had been made in months of searching.

  Detective Rogers wasn’t consoled by the fact the case was still open and just considered cold, but he knew there were other cases on his desk that could be solved and closed. How long the Johnson file would languish in storage gathering dust, he did not know.

  It was in the hands of the FBI, and he knew if any law enforcement entity could solve it, it would be them. That gave him some hope as he hung his head and walked away.

  Now…

  Ava James dialed her father’s number, looked at the screen, and back to the pile of cold cases she had been assigned to go through. Her father was expecting a call from her within the day, but she didn’t know what to tell him.

  “Hi, Dad. I know Mom’s missing and all, but the Bureau refuses to let me go to Africa to help look for her. Sorry. I know you hoped for better from your daughter, the useless FBI agent.”

  Yeah, she thought angrily. Not happening. Not right now, anyway.

  She closed the app and shoved the phone back into her pocket. “Well, backlogs, what do you say we get good and acquainted? I might even let you spend the night if you’re nice. Maybe we’ll go out for coffee later. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even celebrate New Year’s Day together if we’re both still here, which I highly suspect we will be.”

  With a groan, she picked up a stack of files and moved to her seat behind the desk. Her task was to narrow down the cases to a handful she thought she could successfully close out in a timely manner.
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  She had asked Supervisor Fullerton what exactly he’d meant by a ‘timely manner’. He had shrugged and said, “Just so you can close them is the main part.”

  “I thought the Cold Case Initiative was only for cases that were thirty and forty years old, or older. Some of the ones I’ve looked at in these,” she had motioned toward the pile on top of the filing cabinet, “are only a few years old. Like five and ten years.”

  Supervisor Fullerton, Max to his friends outside of work, and always Fullerton to Ava because she didn’t think they would ever be on first name terms, had raised a hand and put his thumb on one temple, his middle finger on the other. She was annoying him.

  Probably not a good idea since she had been yanked out of the field, reassigned out from Supervisor Martinez, and put on cold cases, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She was angry. Her mother was missing, and she was plenty upset.

  “Agent James, you have been given an assignment. Is there a reason, a good reason that you cannot fulfill your assignment? Are you in the hospital, knocking on death’s door?”

  Ava had looked to the floor. “No, sir.”

  Maybe annoying Fullerton hadn’t been such a good idea.

  “Are you currently active in the field on some mission of which I was unaware when I gave you this assignment?”

  “No, sir.” Way to rub salt in the wound, thank you, sir, she’d thought, but knew better than to say.

  “No, sir is right. You were put in the Cold Case Initiative Unit to do a job. I would suggest that you do that job. Does it really matter if the cases are decades old or just a few years old? Justice needs to be served, families need closure, and you need to clear out as many of these as you can.”

  That had been several weeks ago.

  The ‘maybe solvable’ pile had grown slowly to fifteen files. That meant fifteen or more boxes of evidence and other items she would have to go through.

  Lifting from the cold stack again, she moved toward the desk. Sitting there, she stared at the coffee-stained manila folder on top without opening it.

  Her coffee had gone cold, her stomach rumbled, and a small headache had come to life at the base of her skull.

  The clock said it was still shy of lunchtime, much to her chagrin. At least lunch would be an excuse to get out of her tiny, windowless office for a while. So what if the December weather was miserably cold? So what if the ground, where not covered in snow, was mushy, muddy, and treacherous? Even that beat sitting in the office all day. The day had already seemed a year long.

  Just one more, and then lunch, she told herself silently.

  The words on the first page just wouldn’t compute. Her attention was shot. Her mother was still missing, and that ate up all her mental faculties for such tasks as concentrating on anything else for more than a few minutes at a time. It had been that way ever since she learned her mother had disappeared on her UN trip to Africa.

  She pulled out her phone for the second time, looked at the clock on the wall, and then dialed her father’s number.

  This time, she actually punched the little green button and put the phone to her ear.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said when he answered.

  “Hello, sweetheart. I was waiting for you to call. I figured it would be later, though. Everything all right?”

  Hank sounded strained. Her heart hurt, she wanted to erase that sound from his voice.

  “Yeah, yeah, Dad. Everything’s fine. Just finished up some work and had a few minutes before lunch. Thought I’d call and check in.” Which wasn’t all she had in mind. She just had to figure out how to start the barrage of questions without ramping up that terrible strained sound from him. “How are you feeling today? Did you eat breakfast? Did you sleep last night?”

  “Whoa! Slow down with the interrogation, Agent James.” He chuckled, but it sounded hollow and humorless, as if he were faking the amused sound for her benefit alone.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “There were so many. Which one, Aviva?”

  She rolled her eyes at her father’s counter. The prominent prosecutor was an expert at avoiding subjects he didn’t want to discuss.

  “Your choice.”

  “Okay, then. Um. Yes.”

  She laughed. He could be obstinate. And everyone wondered where she got that particular trait from. In her opinion, her family was chock full of it. “Yes, to which one?”

  “Oh, I forgot you didn’t take clairvoyance class at the Academy. Yes, I slept.”

  The banter continued for another eight minutes or so, and her father’s mood seemed to have improved a bit. Ava decided to just jump in with the questions about her mother.

  “So, Dad, can I ask you a few questions about Mom?”

  There was a long sigh from his end. “Shoot. Just take it one at a time, though.”

  “Did you know ahead of time that Mom was going to Africa?”

  “Ah, she gave me a two-day warning. You know this. We’ve been over all this, Aviva.”

  “I know. I’m just doing what I do, Dad. Bear with me, please.”

  “All right. I know you’re as worried about her as I am. I just have to know something, though.”

  “Anything.”

  “Are you doing anything you’ve been told not to do? Are you planning on doing something crazy? You’re a federal agent, Aviva. Your mother wouldn’t want you to jeopardize your career, and maybe get into some serious trouble to boot.”

  “I’m not doing anything of the sort. I just…” she let her voice trail off. She just what? Had to drag her dad and herself through the same questions yet again? Had to wallow in the pain and frustration of nothing new ever coming up in these sessions?

  “Honey, I know. Me, too. It’s all I think about day in and day out. I’ve been over the weeks and days and hours leading up to her leaving the house. I’ve replayed the last conversation we had after she landed. She didn’t give a hint of anything suspicious going on. If she had, you’d be the first person I would have told.”

  “I just want to go look for her. I know I could find something if they’d just send me in. Who knows her better than me? Who could get into her headspace and trace her likeliest steps if certain scenarios happened? Me. I understand why they won’t send me, but then again, I don’t understand when I could be so much of a help.”

  Tears stung the backs of her eyes. She squeezed them shut and leaned back in her chair. No time for crying. Not now.

  In his usual calm manner, her father said, “Aviva, honey, you know exactly why they can’t have you working on this case. You’re too close. There’s too much of a risk that you could jeopardize your safety, the safety of others, and the case. It happens. The rules are in place for a reason.”

  “I know, but that doesn’t make it any easier to sit here and do nothing but read cold case files all day every day. They stuck me here to keep me out of the field. They think I can’t handle being out there because Mom’s missing. If they’re not going to let me look for her officially, then I need to be in the field. I feel like I’ve already been in this cracker-box-sized office for a year this morning. A week is nearly unbearable to think about. I need to do something.”

  “Then do your job, Aviva.”

  It was the same thing Fullerton had said. But when her father said it, it made sense to her. She understood instead of becoming angered. He was right, of course. She just needed to do her job. Lose herself in her work.

  “Thanks, Dad. You’re right. That’s what I need to do, and God knows I’ve got enough here to keep me busy for a while.”

  “That’s my girl. I love you.”

  “Love you, too, Dad. Talk later.”

  They hung up, and Ava forgot about lunch. She forgot about getting out of the office and about Fullerton’s attitude toward her. She forgot about everything for a while and read the case file in front of her.

  Something niggled at her memory as she read
over the documents. The names of the victims? She didn’t think so. She picked up the paper and read it again, paying extra attention to the details.

  “That’s it! This house was in the news recently,” she announced to the empty room. She pulled out her phone and did a quick search of the address, calling up a local news story.

  “509 Pleasant Hill Drive,” she murmured to herself, hoping that at least her own voice could fill the silence and make things pass a little easier.

  The article itself was of little substance, mostly consisting of a direct transcript of what had been on the 30-second local news spot. But it was enough to jog her memory.

  Recently, a young couple had been murdered in the house. Their three-year-old daughter had been found hidden under a stack of blankets in the master bathroom closet, crying. Her mother lay shot dead in the master bedroom, her father downstairs in the living room.

  But that was not the case she was reading about. The cold case file in her hands had happened five years ago, when Dustin Johnson, and his wife, Katherine Johnson, lived in the house. They were roughly the same age as the recent couple, in their mid-twenties. Dustin had been found shot dead in front of the fireplace in the living room, and his wife had never been found. Neither had the murder weapon. Nor was there ever a good suspect. There wasn’t a child involved in that case.

  “Why would two young couples fall victim to murder in the same house five years apart?” She read the rest of the file, scribbling names and pertinent details in a small notepad.

  With renewed interest in her current assignment, Ava put the file on top of the ones she would take on. She would run it by Fullerton. If he gave her the all-clear, she would pull up stakes and go to Kentucky for a while.

  Ava lugged the boxes from the Johnson investigation into her bedroom. She’d been told over and over again that it was a bad idea to work on cases in the same room she was supposed to use for sleeping, but she’d never listened. She was comfortable in there, and she could spread everything out on the bed around her where everything was within arm’s reach. Files and evidence made for uncomfortable bedmates, but she didn’t mind as much as she probably should.