All That Remains (Lancaster Falls Book 3)

by RJ Scott

  “Of course.”

  “Right now, I need coffee and to get up to speed. Nice to meet you. Now, Josh, if you could.” She gestured for me to continue walking, and in a daze, I carried on. Avery had somehow shut down Nicky Farmer, and that was a feat I’d never seen anyone manage before. Nicky hadn’t gotten one single word in.

  “I’m impressed,” I faux-whispered.

  Avery shot me a look of amusement. “I actually do need to talk to her and others about the case so far, but on my timeline. It’s all in the words. Value a person’s contribution, give a time frame to when you’ll talk to them, make yourself look human.”

  “FBI handbook?”

  “Life handbook,” she said as we reached Calabresi’s.

  I opened the door for her. Nonna wasn’t there, but Luca was leaning on the counter, scribbling in a book, Marco sitting with him, their dark-haired heads close together.

  “Extra pepperoni,” Marco said and took the pencil from his dad, adding to a list, as Luca straightened to deal with us.

  “Josh, hey.” His gaze slid to Avery, and he waited for the introductions.

  “This is my brother-in-law, Luca, good guy, best coffee maker in town, and his son, my nephew, Marco.” Not sure how much of that she needed to know, but her reaction to them was so different than after my warning about Nicky.

  I decided she had to be a chameleon as she slipped easily into chatting in Italian with a bemused Luca, all sunshine and smiles. Even asking Marco about the pizza and listening to him explain how it was for him and Harry, who was his best friend, and how Harry was my son, and that once, he and Harry ate a bug each. I guessed that was what the FBI was about, pulling out information you weren’t aware you knew, and faking it until you made it. Maybe Lucas wasn’t the nice guy he seemed. Maybe he was acting the kind of man he thought I needed to see. I should be careful about what went on in my office with federal agents in my house, particularly with the visceral reaction I had to Lucas and the urge to bend him over the nearest surface.

  I couldn’t let my guard down.

  Nine

  Lucas

  Assistance arrived in the form of a team of FBI scene officers I had on call, eight in total, whose sole purpose was to help with the legwork after a scene was established. A few of them might stay here, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. They were local officers and all lived within fifty miles of Lancaster Falls, but had no connections to the town itself. They were answering to me for now, but Avery would take over as it was her area of expertise. Animal control had attended to track down the remaining dogs, but all they found were the corpses of more than one dog. Sawyer and I were in charge of carefully picking our way through the detritus of Adam Gray’s life inside his place, and it was painstaking and disgusting all at the same time.

  “Do you think we’ll actually find anything?” Sawyer asked from my side, as he carefully removed the remains of a dead animal wedged between boxes.

  He’d stayed with me when Logan and a reluctant Drew had returned to the office. I knew why Drew wanted to stay. He had the air of a desperate man, and if I had lost my brother as he had, then I would’ve been the same.

  “Anything, something.” I kept my words deliberately vague and moved the next cardboard box that was one of a whole mess of containers in the corner of an otherwise empty bedroom. It would seem that Adam Gray had slept in his living room. Blankets in a worn leather recliner were ready for colder nights, and his weapon was next to it and part of the discovery and evidence was being cataloged and shipped to the lab. Of course it would take weeks to get results back, but it was a start. I eased back the folds and sighed at the sight of yet more paperwork. There was no rhyme or reason to what we found: old utility bills that weren’t even for this address, dated thirty or more years ago, receipts that were so old they’d been hand-typed. And mixed in were photos, cuttings from magazines, some recipes, flowers. Looking at this place, in particular the derelict kitchen, I wondered why he would have receipts, and a sadness gripped me that maybe this old man, imprisoned by PTSD, wanted normal but was overwhelmed by his fears and experiences.

  “Do you think we’re dealing with the same serial killer as the one who put the women in the sinkhole?”

  Sawyer’s voice startled me from my thoughts, but I’d been asked similar questions before, although never out in the field. The first time—the only time—I’d been in the field had been to wrap up a case that had had a lucky break, with the murderer, the uncle of the family of victims, admitting what he’d done and then taking himself out with suicide by cop, rushing the police brandishing a gun. Interviewing witnesses in the sterile building I worked out of had made their perceptions easier to manage. It wasn’t as if I was out hunting down clues. To them, I was simply the mouthpiece for the people who did the real work.

  “It’s dangerous to jump to conclusions. There is no indication on the bones in the sinkhole of limbs being sliced off. In fact, the evidence to date speaks of a murderer who used a knife and probably cut the carotid artery, then tossed the intact remains into the space.”

  “A quick death, deep and certain cuts,” Sawyer agreed.

  “And Adam Gray was something else. The manner of murder for a start and the possible ritualistic manner of corpse disposal postmortem.”

  “Or they wanted the pieces small enough for the dogs to…” Sawyer visibly swallowed and then coughed. “Some of the things I’ve seen, but I never knew the people involved so intimately, not until Casey and now Adam Gray.”

  “It’s harder when it’s personal,” I admitted and thought about my grandpa and his endless search for the woman he’d loved. How my gran had lived with his obsession, I’ll never know, but she had. We had never questioned her loyalty or whatever had happened to keep them together after Grandpa had had his affair. Maybe it was their generation. Maybe it was something else, but I’d never doubted their love for each other as a child. It was only when she’d died, that Grandpa’s obsession with finding Carmen Kreuger had ramped up, and I’d become part of the puzzle. It was me he’d turned to, shared his thoughts with, and I’d loved that I had something in common with the man who’d taught me how to play chess.

  The same man whose mind was failing.

  We worked on in silence, Sawyer shifting boxes, cursing at any and all spiders that darted out from under the piles, and me taking the boxes from him and placing them in stacks according to what I thought was relevant. Some of the containers fell apart in our hands, and a lot of them held more old magazines, newspapers, and flyers, nothing that struck either of us as any use to finding out who had killed Adam Gray and why. You never know what was in here.

  “Did you manage to get through what was on the memory stick?” He spoke so quietly I had to ask him to repeat the question, and I got the sense he didn’t want this talked about and overheard.

  “Enough to know that we need more information on all parties involved.”

  We exchanged pointed glances, and then we went back to our searching.

  “Could this be something?” Sawyer broke the silence.

  I glanced over to see him holding up a tied bundle of photos. The top one was in black and white, a wedding by the look of it, and old, curled at the corners and watermarked. Everything in this place smelled of damp, and these boxes were no exception.

  “Are they all wedding photos?”

  Sawyer carefully untied the ribbon and eased off the top photo, but it was sticky, and he frowned, just peering under one corner. “Adam and Lily and a date that’s half faded.” He picked another photo, this one of a woman on her own, Lily. “Crime lab pile?”

  I’d given up justifying what should go and what meant nothing at all. In this mess, there could have been information relating to the bodies in the sinkhole or to Casey or the church fire. I was already linking Sandoval with the mayor and the bank owner plus Pastor Kirkland, and there was too much garbage in this town to make anything jump out at me as obvious.

  Or the
re could be nothing in any of it at all.

  “Bag them up and leave it for us to look through.” We were so deep into what I assumed was supposed to be a spare room in the corner where things had been left to rot that I doubted we’d find clinical evidence in Adam Gray’s murder, but to get a better picture of the man was half the battle.

  I eased out a small envelope, stuck to the bottom of the final box in pile six, and turned it over.

  “Specialist Four Adam Gray,” I murmured and eased the envelope open. An official statement lay inside. “He was awarded the Medal of Honor.” He’d served, I knew that, but to have served with such recognition made the rest of his life so much sadder.

  “Medal of Honor?” Sawyer was surprised, so this was clearly something that had escaped small-town gossip.

  “I’ll bag this in case we find family that might want it.”

  “Part of me hopes he had someone, but I don’t think he does,” Sawyer said, his voice tinged with regret. “His mom and dad passed on a long time ago. If I remember right, he had a brother, who left town as a kid and died ten years back. Of course losing his wife and son, he has no one. Had no one.” I caught Sawyer reframing how he was looking at Adam, and I felt the strangeness of it myself.

  My job was to find out how people died, but for someone who had known the victim, then coming to terms with the death wasn’t instant.

  “This is the final box.” I picked it up, but even though it was sturdy, wood instead of cardboard, it was light, and when I opened it, all that was inside was a bunch of white fabric, speckled with mold, and tattered and torn in one corner where some animal had chewed through. I didn’t have to take it out to know what it was; the lace and tiny hooks told me this was a wedding dress.

  His wife’s dress?

  I gently picked it out, but apart from the overwhelming scent of mold, there was nothing else in the box. I exchanged glances with Sawyer, but neither of us said a thing.

  “We’re done with the first sweep, sir,” Scene Officer Eddie Leary, reported from the door.

  I turned just in time to see him stare down at the bags at our feet, his eyes wide. I didn’t have to ask him to report. He just went ahead and summarized.

  “No sign of a specific blade capable of removing the deceased’s limbs, but we found a gun, which has been bagged, tagged, and sent to the lab with the first tranche of paperwork. There could be a match to the weapon used to kill.” He cleared his throat and seemed a little nervous.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s something I think you should see.”

  He turned and left the room, and I followed, with Sawyer on my heels, heading across the weeds of the yard, dodging piles of tires and concrete blocks and going into a small shed that was less shed and more wood hinged to a tree, barely hanging by a thread.

  “It’s not easy to make out, but I wanted you to view it in situ before we removed it.” He gestured with a pin-head flashlight, and what appeared to be a lattice of decaying wood was actually some kind of scratchboard. There were measurements, bear kills, deer—a neat, ordered list of what Adam had hunted. That and the neat vegetable patch, his only remembrance of how he’d managed to live here. “Down here,” Leary said and went to a crouch, pointing the flashlight at something that was more like words than random hunting counts.

  “Connor, Damien, Mitchell,” he read out, then glanced up at Sawyer. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  Sawyer considered the question, but then he shook his head. “We have a Connor in town and a Mitch, although he could be Mitchell. I’d have to check. Damian? Not that I know of.”

  “The bottom of the siding is worn away, decayed, maybe eaten, who knows, but two-thirds of the letters S and E are next to each other. Down there.”

  I went to a crouch where he pointed, desperately hoping that Leary was wrong and that the decay wasn’t so bad that we would be able to see the name there.

  “Does it say Casey?” Sawyer asked.

  “We can’t know that the S and E are part of the name Casey here,” I argued because now wasn’t the time for wild speculation. “Leary, photos, dismantle what you can, more photos, and get whatever you retrieve to the lab.” I pulled my notebook out, took a careful note of the names and any marks around them, although they were more scuff marks than anything else. Then I composed myself before standing. These weren’t names of women; these were males, and yes, the last name could’ve been Casey. What did this mean? Was it relevant to what we were doing here? Were they the names of his dogs? Who the hell knew?

  I was tired and desperate to go through some of the more pertinent stuff we’d found, but right now, it was back to the boxes, and Sawyer trudged alongside me, his hands clenched into fists. He was fighting some inner anger or despair, and given his link to Casey, I assumed it was that.

  “Tell me about Josh,” I offered, a little desperate to break the emotions he was struggling to contain.

  “Huh? Josh?”

  “Owns the hotel.”

  “The fuck? He’s one of my best friends. He has nothing to do with this.” There was accusation in his tone, the implication that he thought I considered Josh to be something to do with Adam’s death.

  “Of course he doesn’t,” I said with great confidence. Of course, in my head, I was telling myself that I didn’t actually know that for the truth, but I got a sense of Josh, and he was a dad, a steady man, worked hard, honest… the list of his good points was long.

  “Oh.” Sawyer stood aside to let me go back into the cabin first, and I nodded my thanks. “What do you want to know about him?”

  Everything. I wanted to know it all. He intrigued me, made me hot, and I wanted to know from when he was a kid, right up to what side of the bed he slept on.

  “Just making conversation,” I offered lightly as if it made no difference if Sawyer told me anything or not.

  “He was a very young dad. He loves his son. Wait, look at this!”

  The change in direction confused me, and then I focused on what Sawyer had picked up, holding it carefully in his gloved hands, rubbing at the silver disc, then slipping it into the clear evidence bag, sealing it. It was the remains of what looked like a dog collar, and he held it up to the light, his eyes widening, and then he cursed and sagged back against the wall, and I reached out to hold him upright. The collar was small, the leather degraded but red in color, and the silver disc had a name etched into it. He handed me the bag, and I checked the wording.

  “Taffy McG?” I read out loud, wondering what was so awful about this small disc that it had caused Sawyer to go white.

  “Taffy McGuire, the dog that disappeared just after Casey vanished. They never found Casey or Taffy. Had Casey been here at Adam’s place? Or had Taffy just got lost, maybe out looking for Casey, and casually added himself to the pack of Adam’s dogs?” Sawyer stared at me as if I would have all the answers.

  I wish I did.

  Ten

  Lucas

  We headed back to the office just after six. The heat of the day was manageable after a particularly theatrical thunderstorm mid-afternoon, and I was hungry, but I was also covered in fuck knew what, and my priority was a shower. Sawyer was quiet for the rest of the afternoon, lost in thoughts he wasn’t ready to share with me and the fact that we’d found possible evidence that the McGuire’s dog had ended up on Adam Gray’s land. Add that to the sinkholes that were right there at the edge of Adam’s land, and it pulled up a shit pile of questions.

  Could Adam have known what happened to Casey in the week between his disappearance and his death after being hit by the car the pastor’s wife had been driving?

  “Joe Dwyer called you about his land issue again,” Tate announced as soon as we walked into the door. “Says it’s urgent, but then he’s an asshole. No offense, Special Agent Beaumont.”

  “None taken.”

  “Anyway, he seems to think that Adam being dead means the land should revert to him and his brother, and Mayor Stokes wants
to buy it as part of a consortium, and it gets all kinds of complicated, so I logged it for you.”

  “Thanks, Tate,” Sawyer said on a yawn.

  Tate wrinkled his nose as the stink of what we’d been rummaging through hit him. “I’m not going to ask.” He made a theatrical shudder. “Bad day, huh? I’ll get coffee.”

  “Not for me, thanks.” I lifted my shirt away from my chest, wishing again that I hadn’t worn it under the white forensic suit, because it had been hot and uncomfortable, and yet again I’d wrecked a perfectly good set of suit pants. I was down to one pair of slacks and my last remaining shirt, and as I headed back to the hotel, I kept my eye open for a laundromat, but there was nothing obvious. Google would have to be my friend later.

  I was halfway up the stairs when Josh called me, and I turned with difficulty on the narrow stairs. He was grinning up at me, but the smile dropped when he got a good look.

  “Avery will be back at nine, something about forensics. Also, yesterday’s suit is hanging on the back of your door. I took it and got it dry-cleaned. There’s food here in the kitchen. Take a shower and come down.” He didn’t even wait for me to explain that I’d planned to take a shower, then grab a snack from my supply and go to bed because after the last couple of days, the lack of sleep was creeping up on me.

  I bet if I’d said all that, he would have given me one of his cute-as-hell smiles and explained how I was wrong and that I needed feeding.

  “Don’t argue with Dad,” Harry said from the top of the stairs, holding his nose as I passed. “Jeez. I’m not asking.”

  “And I’m not telling,” I replied, and he sidestepped me, smiling, still holding his nose, and headed downstairs.