The Botanist by L. K. Hill Read Free Book Online Page A

no evidence that anyone had been here recently.
    His eyes went to the boarded-up shaft. No one could be living in there, could they? A damp, slithering sensation crept into his middle.
    He moved over to the nearest flower to examine it more closely. Now that he was looking, each tulip sprouted out of a small mound of dirt. All of them were a pale blue color that had looked white from a distance. Each had two perfectly shaped leaves that connected to an eighteen inch shaft where stem met soil.
    Spinning on his toe to take in a full view of the place, Cody frowned. Painted in black on the inward-sloping wall below the boarded-up shaft were the words, “ Shakespeare’s Girls .”
    A soft, deep foreboding filled Cody’s stomach, but he pushed it away. Bizarre, yes, but that was all.
    Wondering why the flowers were planted in mounds, rather than flat earth, he stood. Cody was no gardening expert—far from it—but weren’t tulips bulbs? Putting his foot down on top of the mound, next to the flower but not close enough to disturb it, he put his weight on it, stepping on top of the dirt mound.
    The soil was soft and his foot sunk two inches. A sickening sensation radiated through him when he both felt and heard crunching beneath his boots. Whatever the mounds concealed, he was sure it wasn’t rocks.
    He hadn’t brought any gloves—he hadn’t thought to. Taking off his backpack, he scrounged around for something to cover his hand with. He only found the sandwich bag his food had been in. Deciding that would have to do, he stretched it over his hand and began digging at the mound of dirt. He only dug a little at a time, trying not to disturb the tulip.
    Finally he reached something solid. It felt like sticks—thick twigs embedded in the ground. Soon he’d moved most of the dirt away, but still couldn’t see it clearly. He leaned down and blew the excess soil off with one huffing breath. Then he sat back on his haunches and sighed, letting his head hang for a moment.
    The white, carpal remains of a human hand glared up at him from its bed of dark soil, its fingers spread out as far as they could go. A skeleton was waving at him from the basement of a manmade oasis.
    Cody looked at the other mounds: twelve of them, in two rows of six. He’d stumbled onto a mass grave in the middle of the desert.

Chapter 6
    Alex had been holding her cell phone to her ear for so long that her arm was beginning to ache. She wanted to strangle the lady that kept telling her that her call was important and to please stay on the line.
    She’d been watching the news for hours, long enough that everything they had on the mass grave found in Southern Utah had repeated several times. Though the police had released no statements yet, the reporters were musing that so many victims going missing in one place would have been noticed, so they must have been snatched from various places and brought from afar.
    Snatched off the highway, perhaps? Alex thought.
    The instant Alex saw it, she knew. She hadn’t stopped thinking about that night since it happened four years ago—not completely. She’d always been certain something strange was going on. Now, four years later this news report stated that twelve bodies had been found not far from where she’d been pulled over.
    The local community was banding together to try and catch the killer. The police were insisting that the hills be searched by professionals—both because they were worried the killer might be hiding under some rock out there, and because they didn’t want civilians who didn’t know any better trampling potential crime scenes. None of the victims had been killed where they were buried.
    Instead, the local volunteers made signs, got the media involved, brought in meals for the local police—which were more numerous than normal, as reinforcements from other jurisdictions had been brought in to pick up the grunge work—and they set up a tip line.
    Alex had been on hold with the tip line