by Elle Keaton
Dedication and Acknowledgements:
Thank you everyone.
To my children, Zoë and Harper who have been incredibly patient, and encouraging, through this endeavor, as well as being my most enthusiastic cheerleaders. Zoë designed the cover without too much complaint about naked men.
To those who read this first and weren’t afraid to speak up and say what needed to be said. I appreciate that you read a complete stranger’s manuscript and urged me to continue.
To my editor who edited the heck out of this manuscript, over and above the call of duty. Any errors are mine alone. Alicia probably tried to talk me out of them, yet I insisted.
The town of Skagit exists only in my imagination as well as the wonderful people who inhabit it, any similarity to real people or places is coincidence.
This book is a work of fiction and should be treated as such.
*This publication is intended for adults, aged eighteen and over due to; sexual content, language and other matters adults are supposed to know about but most of us don’t.
Pontiac, Camaro, GTO, Dodge Charger, Ziplock, Grand Theft Auto, CIS, The Shining are all copy written names which do not belong to me and I thank the companies in advance for letting my characters use them.
Anyone I have neglected to acknowledge is my fault alone.
Thank you
Elle
Dedication and Acknowledgements:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
One
Adam Klay pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He was cold. He was irritable. He was incredibly tired. Of bureaucratic excuses, cold coffee, and things that made his heart hurt.
Crime scenes like this often started with some variation of “Woman Walking Dog.” A little-discussed, yet widely experienced phenomena, that a perfectly good walk be ruined by a gruesome discovery. Today, “Woman Walking Dog” featured a dead body just off the painter’s canvas, but viewers would sense its macabre presence nonetheless.
Staring down at what remained of the tiny body (birds, small animals, and insects had all arrived more quickly than he had), Adam visually cataloged everything he could without further disturbing the scene or the photographer who had arrived only five minutes earlier. Anger, sadness, and weighty futility threatened his normally calm demeanor. Young children weren’t supposed to end up dead in deserted fields.
As he turned his back to the photographer in an attempt to block out the dispassionate snicking sound of the camera lens logging evidence, a flash of color caught his eye. Crouching in the viscous mud and dense bramble, he spotted a single grubby pink athletic shoe peeking from a viciously tangled blackberry thicket threatening to overgrow the crime scene. Adam wished he smoked so he would have an excuse to step further away, he was having a difficult time with this scene.
The dog-walker had trudged into this blackberry jungle in pursuit of Rufus or Spot, only to discover the rotting corpse of what had once been a human child. She had known this because the tattered remains of clothing were still attached to the victim.
The body was most likely that of eight-year-old Rochelle Heid. Rochelle had last been seen three months earlier, playing outside her home in Muncie, Indiana, 1600 miles to the east. Her identity hadn’t officially been confirmed yet, but Adam had made travel plans for Ringling, Montana, immediately. Ringling, 80 miles or so from Montana’s capital, Helena, had never been on his bucket list. Hell, he had never even heard of the place before. Most of the places he traveled to were not on his bucket list.
Rochelle’s case made prime time news because a neighbor boy witnessed her being dragged into a car and gave chase on his bicycle for several miles before he was knocked down at an intersection by another car, losing the trail. By the time the police got his story and verified it via a panicked call from Rochelle’s mother, the snatcher had been long gone.
Adam hated this kind of case, and not only because of the nausea establishing a stronghold in his gut. Monsters who killed children reserved themselves a one-way ticket to a special circle of hell. Adam’s reputation as a hard-ass, unemotional investigator and exacting partner was hard-won. He would see this case through regardless of the deep sense of discontent he’d been experiencing recently; would still hate every minute of it. Closure for victims’ families was satisfying, but he could do without the bodies of children haunting his dreams.
When Adam arrived in Ringling that morning, rampant rumor and wild speculation had a trucker serial killer who trafficked in women and children using Ringling as his dumping ground. Adam disagreed. In his experience, traffickers held onto their inventory; they were in it for profit. Time spent getting rid of bodies was time and money lost. Besides, Ringling was not on a major highway. He’d looked up its history, and the town’s last claim to fame was when it had been a station stop on the transcontinental main line of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad in the 1800s. He seriously doubted they had a long-distance trucker using a fly-speck on I-89 for a human dumping ground and not one of the nosey citizens had noticed him coming and going. Cadaver dogs had been brought in; Rochelle’s remains were the only human ones in that meadow.
The file he’d flipped through on the plane was pathetically small, but Adam felt that Ringling had been merely convenient. He’d learned a long time ago to pay attention to his gut feelings. Details on the initial disappearance were vague; not unusual. Rochelle’s mother had been ambiguous about why the child was outside so late at night; follow-up revealed Rochelle also had spotty school attendance. When the boy on the bicycle had finally been interviewed by police they had all but accused him of the crime, and the kid had clammed up. Adam didn’t blame him.
The Muncie police had had a chance to catch this guy and blew it, then blew it more by trying to deflect blame onto the mother and the kid who’d tried to save Rochelle. Who the fuck cared if Rochelle didn’t always get to school? Her mother had a hard time making ends meet and worked a lot of nights. As a janitor, the American dream.
The dog-walker, Jeannette Graves (the irony), had recognized Rochelle’s clothing from the media coverage after the kidnapping. Rochelle disappeared after the news coverage of a huge plane crash but before the big push to de-fund Planned Parenthood. The media had grabbed her story and run with it for a few days, saturating viewers with clip after clip of her with a sweet, gap-toothed smile and pink tennis shoes that lit up when she walked.
His slight heada
che erupted into a full frontal-lobe throb.
Less than a day in Ringling and Adam officially loathed the town. To be fair, he hated small towns on general principle; in his experience, they lived down to their reputation. Small-minded people living in a small world thinking small thoughts. Reactions were ludicrously predictable: They prejudged victims, failed to keep privacy protocol, and inevitably someone would complain about the investigation’s cost to the taxpayers. Jesus, his headache was causing him to be a little over dramatic,
“Ya think you got anything?” The sheriff’s voice pulled Adam away from his pessimistic thoughts.
“Sheriff Woods, no, not really a lot to go on. I can’t comment anyway.” Woods was glad Adam had flown in. That was nice. Usually there was a big pissing contest about who was top dog. They should understand, Adam was always top dog.
They’d been at the damp crime scene for hours before retreating to the sheriff’s office. Between the dog rooting around, the dog-walker tossing her cookies, and the deputies tromping over everything before he’d arrived (didn’t they watch CSI out in the boonies?), there had been nothing to be found other than the small corpse and pink shoe.
The rain had not ceased while they were processing the scene, and Adam had stood around in his dress shoes and third-best suit waiting for Weir to show up. For some reason, Mohammad thought fit to assign the both of them to this case. Adam was not pleased; Weir wasn’t such a bad partner, but he was practically a kid. As Weir liked to point out, he was so young they’d had to bend the rules to bring him aboard.
Carroll Weir was young, cocky, and very intelligent, a terrible combination. On their last case together, Weir had made some rookie assumptions—the kid was too smart for mistakes. Adam had called him out in front of their team it hadn’t gone over well. Ace had never been called on the carpet before. Adam felt a little remorseful but not enough to take back his comments.
Adam shouldn’t hold it against him, but Weir fit a certain stereotype. Didn’t help that he’d grown up in SoCal and had mannerisms that ticked Adam off. Adam could never tell whether the kid was taking him seriously or not. Weir needed to decide if he was going to be a serious investigator. “Dude” was not a word Adam associated with a fed.
Adam’s phone buzzed against his thigh. Again. When he fished it out of his pocket, the screen showed the same unknown number it had the last three times. A call from his mother, no message, a call and voice mail from Mohammad. Adam needed more coffee before he dealt with any phone calls.
Leaning tiredly against the huge metal desk in Sheriff Woods’s rumpled office while Woods went to grab them coffee, Adam was ready to put Ringling behind him. He’d be leaving tomorrow or the next day, unless Weir did some data magic and discovered a link between semi-trucks and pink tennis shoes. There was nothing in Ringling, only Rochelle’s body.
The cute retro (but the real thing) ice-cream parlor and new golf course for retiring boomers held no undiscovered clues related to Rochelle Heid. The ladies’ knitting circle was not a hive of septuagenarian killers.
His phone buzzed again. Fucking relentless. Woods came back into the small office with a mug of steaming coffee in each hand.
“You gonna get that? Mr. Azaya called my phone and said to, and I quote, ‘encourage’ you to answer your phone.”
It had been a long time since Mohammad had circumvented Adam’s phone to get in touch with him.
“Yeah, I’m going to step outside for this,” Adam grumbled.
Late-afternoon gloom pressed against Adam’s shoulders while he huddled under the peeling eaves of the Meagher County Sheriff’s Department building. Pulling his phone back out, he called a number he knew by heart.
Later, on the tiny tin-can plane carrying him to Skagit, Washington, he worried about who was going to take care of Rochelle.
Two
Micah was feeling a little more lost than usual, or wherever his personal bell curve averaged. He’d been working all morning on a file for one of his oldest customers without making much progress; he couldn’t get his head in the game. When he felt this way, the best thing was a change of scenery. He packed his laptop and notes into his messenger bag. hoping a brisk walk to his favorite coffee-shop-slash-office would clear his head enough so he could get some work done.
This time of year was always difficult for him. It always would be. He’d never been able to decide which was worse, the fog he drifted into at the beginning of November or the mix of guilt and relief he felt when the holidays were finally over. He’d feel okay for two or three months before the creep of time would begin reminding him that the holidays would roll around again, sooner rather than later. His anxiety rose as more and more shops and public spaces began to decorate for the holidays, each individual decoration a reminder of what he had lost.
The Booking Room was his favorite place in Skagit other than the Tudor-style house he had inherited from his parents. Today, however, he regretted coming the instant he pushed through the entryway. The café was packed, his favorite table, the one he thought of as his own, was taken, and there was a new employee behind the counter. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people; it was meeting them for the first time. The dreaded introduction, the hesitation coming when Micah knew something unspoken was communicated: This is the guy I was telling you about.
Micah turned to leave. Today wasn’t going to be a day of work at the coffee shop after all. As he turned, the woman in front of him moved and Micah’s messenger bag collided with her elbow. Due to a curse laid upon him when he was born, the new barista had just handed the woman her coffee. Without a lid. The hot drink slid out of her hand and hit the counter with a thunk and, like any well-planned disaster, it didn’t stop there. A chain reaction sparked. The full cup hit the counter perfectly, the hot liquid inside it exploding upward much like Mount Vesuvius had erupted almost two thousand years ago, destroying the city of Pompeii, dousing both the woman in front of him as well as the new barista.
Silence. Dead silence.
Micah stood there like a complete idiot, wondering if he was having some kind of seizure or fever dream. Except he knew he wasn’t; this kind of thing happened to him with some regularity. He tried not to zone out so much. He was working on it. His therapist used to tell him it would get better. Since he’d stopped seeing the therapist about four years ago, he hadn’t had a chance to tell her it hadn’t.
If anything, he felt worse this year than he had in previous years.
Incredibly, both the woman who’d been doused and the newly baptized barista were good-natured about what had happened. Most of the mess was easily cleaned with damp towels. Micah shook himself far enough out of his daze to buy the woman’s drink and pastry.
“Oh, it’s okay, nothing that won’t come out in the wash. I backed up into you or something. Too busy thinking about my to-do list for the day. Thanks for my coffee.” She patted him on the shoulder before leaving.
He wanted to flee but forced himself to stay. If he went home now, he would probably crawl into bed for the rest of the day. He’d promised Brandon he wouldn’t do that anymore.
There was a new customer in the café, too. Not that Micah was paranoid or anything, but he just noticed new faces. Skagit wasn’t a big city, but it wasn’t quite a small town anymore, either. A lot of people had moved north in the past few years trying to escape Seattle’s high prices. The population growth accounted for the cleanup of the old downtown and the new boutique-shop fronts in the area locals affectionately called NOT: North of Old Town.
Micah figured the new guy was a cop. After all, SkPD headquarters were right across the street. And he had that look: hard, grim, displaying little emotion. His fingers flew over the keyboard of a laptop while he scowled at the screen. His phone must have buzzed, because he left his table to stand outside and take a call. Micah appreciated someone who chose to take his conversation somewhere besides the middle of a crowded coffee shop.
The guy paced back and forth under the red-striped awnin
g, managing to gracefully avoid incoming and exiting customers. A skill Micah would never master. He was shorter than Micah and stocky where Micah was lean. Broad-shouldered, he filled out his navy-blue Henley quite nicely. Micah shook his head at himself. He knew better than to scope out random strangers. Regardless, his attention kept flickering out the window where the brown-haired guy was done with his call, hands on his hips, his expression not just grim now, but frustrated, too.
Three
The small town of Skagit, Washington, sucked. The drive north from L.A. had sucked. Generally, everything sucked. As he expected, nothing had changed about the town he’d spent his first eighteen years in. The only thing that hadn’t sucked was finding a new and nice local coffee shop around the corner from his motel.
It had been madness to drive, really, but he was tired of airports and airplanes. After driving from Ringling to Helena, flying to Seattle then to Bellingham, then driving to Skagit for the funeral, add another two flights to get to L.A., Adam couldn’t face another airplane for a while. He also had no idea how long it was going to take him to wrap up everything in Skagit. From what the lawyers had indicated, the house wasn’t going to be easy to clean up. If he wanted to sell, he had his work cut out for him. The county had already sent a certified letter giving ninety days before they would begin the process of condemning the property. Bastards.
In a moment of irrational sentimentality Adam had booked himself a room at the Wagon Wheel, a relic from the heyday of old Highway 99. The contents of the room were relics, too. The furniture had lots of history evidenced by a multitude of nicks and dents. He was reasonably certain this exact bedroom set had been featured on The Brady Bunch. The paint on the walls was beige. As were the carpet and bedspread. Beige. Adam didn’t care. He’d sleep there and spend the next few days at the cleverly named Booking Room Café, directly across from the Skagit police headquarters.
Was he task avoiding? Absolutely. His intention had been to come to Skagit, rent a bulldozer and a Dumpster, salvage what he deemed worthy. Unfortunately, driving down the pitted driveway toward the wreckage of his dad’s life had thrown Adam into a state of panic.
