White Space Season 2

daughter.
    Jackson pulled the blanket aside, revealing the nude girl’s grayish remains. Her hair was dark, like Christina’s, but the face was dusky, bruised, and cut in several places — signs of mutilation, not from sea life — which caused his heart to ache even more, no matter who the child was. The wounds, along with the slight bloating in the girl’s flesh, made it too hard to tell for certain if it was Christina.
    Brady bent for a closer look as Jackson stood up and moved to the side.
    It looked, on first appearances, as if the girl had been dead anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks. If it was Christina, someone had probably kept her prisoner all this time and only recently killed her. Another kid could have gone missing, but Brady tried thinking back on all the missing children and couldn’t recall any so young. At least not recently, or who couldn’t be attributed to a parent maybe running off with their child.
    Brady would have to wait for the medical examiner on the mainland to check against Christina’s dental records. He reached down and pulled the girl’s rubbery blue lips aside, to make sure her teeth were there, and to see if they looked like Christina’s.
    When his daughter disappeared, she had yet to lose any of her baby teeth. It seemed the bloated body was filled with baby teeth, too. About the same age.
    Brady looked at Jackson. “Can you bring me to the mainland? I need to get her body to the ME, and don’t want to attract any attention.”
    “Sure thing,” Jackson said.
    Brady got on his radio and called the medical examiner’s cell. “I’m bringing you a body, and I need this quiet until I get there, OK?”
    The coroner said of course, then “Can you meet me at the docks? I’d rather not call the local police.”
    Dirk Holstrum agreed, thankfully without a battery questions. Holstrum was familiar enough with Brady to know he wouldn’t request a favor like that without a damned good reason.
    Brady killed the call, looked at the dead child, feeling his life’s void stretching wider, growing darker, and getting deeper.
    The tugboat held no closure. There were no answers yet.
    Nothing but more fucking hope.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 6 — Milo Anderson

    Milo’s heart was thunder as he pulled the black strip from the pouch, ready to press it to the box on the back door of Alex Heller’s house. His body’s every fiber said the strip wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t get in the door, but would get busted. His dad would be so pissed, driving down to the boat slips and pulling him from jail. He swallowed, dug his nails into his arm for several furious scratches in each direction, then pressed the strip to the box.
    To Milo’s shock, the green light lit, the lock clicked, and the knob twisted. The door flew open from behind Milo’s weight, snapping the yellow police tape tightly strung across the threshold, proving that someone had breached the house. Milo wished he’d thought to bring gloves, but then again he could always say that of course his prints were all over the place — he had practically grown up at the Hellers’.
    Milo figured the key wouldn’t work, and he’d have to break a window or something. And if he had to do that, Milo couldn’t imagine going through with it, despite his promise to Don. There was something weird about breaking his best friend’s window, even if his best friend was in the ground.
    Milo stepped inside the house, and gasped. The dozens of brown boxes piled in tiny mountains and peppered through the living room and kitchen, packed and ready to go, were now spilled into disarray, contents strewn across the house as if thieves had pillaged the place.
    “What the hell?” Milo said to himself as he sifted through their belongings.
    Was someone else here looking for the flash drive, too?
    Milo didn’t want Don to be right, but what if he was? A chill ran through him as he looked through the Heller’s belongings in search of the flash drive. Finding something so small in a mountain of stuff seemed like it could take all day, and night. But there was no way in hell he could stay that long. Even if there was a flash drive, couldn’t it have been found already?
    Milo couldn’t shake the thought that every second spent in the house was borrowed, and that somehow, the police or Paladin Security would grow that much closer to knowing he was inside. His heart pounded, expecting the front door to explode open at any moment.
    He had to be quick,