Her Final Words

by Brianna Labuskes

  They stood by the truck in silence, both lost in their thoughts, Lucy’s eyes locked on the mountains in the distance, her mind somewhere else, somewhere she couldn’t quite identify. Hicks tossed his keys from hand to hand, and a part of her registered the depth of his stare.

  “You keep getting thrown by the timeline,” he finally said, his voice raspy. The sentence tipped up in the end, an almost question.

  She didn’t know how much she wanted to share with him, didn’t particularly enjoy how he seemed to be able to read her so easily. Didn’t like that there was clearly something unsaid between Darcy and Hicks.

  At the same time, it was like she couldn’t stop the way the itch crawled up her spine to be formed into words.

  “If Eliza killed Noah on Monday,” she said, “what did she do with the two extra days?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LUCY THORNE

  Friday, 5:30 p.m.

  “Say you just murdered someone,” Lucy said to Hicks as they sat in his truck parked outside the sheriff’s office, after their drive back from the Dawsons’.

  “All right,” Hicks drawled, a hint of a dimple twitched into being and then out just as quickly. “I murdered someone.”

  “You said that a little too easy,” she joked. Sort of.

  He huffed out a breath and slanted her a look. “You were going somewhere with that?”

  “Right.” Lucy snapped her fingers. “Say you’re Eliza and you just took and then killed Noah Dawson.”

  Hicks nodded and she studied him carefully. He hadn’t flinched at Eliza’s name this time, and she was beginning to wonder if she’d been imagining it before.

  “She was clearly prepared—somehow managed to get her hands on a vehicle, brought a rain jacket and ammonia-soaked rags with her,” Lucy ticked off. “Decided driving out there in the middle of the evening instead of taking him at some easier time was the way to go.”

  “The Cooks said she was accounted for all evening?”

  Lucy thought of the long hallway, the secluded bedroom. The killing and disposing of the body must have taken at minimum two hours, and that was if Eliza’d had everything ready. “Yeah, they said she wasn’t feeling well.”

  He stared out the windshield with an intensity that could have nothing to do with the bland brick building in front of them. “You believe them?”

  “Should I not?” she tossed back at him, because she wasn’t about to show all her cards.

  “Why would they lie?” Hicks asked in that way of his that sounded like he was answering a question when he really wasn’t. The Cooks seemed to make a habit of that, too.

  She shook her head as if she didn’t have an answer. But once again her mind crept back to the idea of power. Of having it, of safeguarding it.

  The Cooks had a reputation at stake here, Josiah especially. What must it be like for him to have his ward confess to murdering a boy under his protection as the leader of the Church?

  Is that why they’d been so seemingly helpful instead of lawyering up? Is that why they were acting as if Eliza weren’t alive and well and sitting in custody a day’s drive away?

  If they’d suspected that she hadn’t been in the house Monday night, would they really tell Lucy, a member of the government they were so suspicious of? Would it not be more likely for them to hide their doubts, shield their own images, and try to emerge as unscathed as possible?

  Lucy would guess that had this happened in another congregation, the pastor might have stepped aside while it was being worked out so that he didn’t disrupt the community further. But from what Lucy could tell, everyone was operating as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened with him.

  And if she’d had these thoughts, surely Hicks would have, too.

  “So say I murdered someone,” Hicks said, steering her away from Josiah. She wondered how purposeful that was.

  She almost nudged him again. Is this a confession, Sheriff? But instead she stretched her arms out, cracking her fingers as she did, trying to get rid of the feeling that there were too many things that didn’t add up. “Okay, Eliza just killed Noah, moved and positioned his body, because there’s no way there wouldn’t have been more blood if he’d been killed there, and then . . . what? Went back to her room? Lived out two days at the ranch while her aunt and uncle and the rest of the Church searched for him?”

  Hicks nodded, but it was slow and thoughtful. “I asked around on Thursday. After Noah was found.”

  “And you’re just telling me this now?”

  “No one can remember seeing her.” Hicks shrugged, like it was an afterthought.

  Swallowing her annoyance at his easy dismissal, Lucy got snagged on a possibility. It was tantalizing and made at least a few more things fit. “The Cooks say they have an underground shelter . . . bunker-type thing? Is that normal?”

  The finger that had been tapping against the steering wheel stilled, but the rest of him remained easy as he lounged back in the driver’s seat. “Yeah, around here it is. Between the weather and the Armageddon preppers, I think there’s enough ammunition and tinned food buried beneath the ground to last a few apocalypses.”

  “That would be an easy place to hide a kid for a few days.” Lucy tried out the theory. “Even one who was alive.”

  That got Hicks to look at her. “Jackson said the TOD was Monday night, Tuesday at the latest.”

  Lucy bobbed her head in acknowledgment of what the coroner had said, but not in agreement that it was gospel. Those two missing days were messing with her timeline.

  It was like the rest of this case. She knew everything important yet still felt like she knew nothing at all. The sensation was at best uncomfortable. Unfamiliar, too.

  Eliza’s decision to confess, to only confess and say nothing more, to shut down in the face of aggressive, expert interrogation, was too deliberate to be anything other than a well-thought-out strategy. Just like the careful staging of the victim. Damning, but just off enough to raise an alarm.

  Between the body drop and Eliza’s confession, Lucy couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a play being put on for an audience of one. And for some reason that audience was Lucy.

  “What’s up with him? Jackson,” Lucy asked, her fingers drumming a random tattoo against her leg. “He seemed pretty shifty during the examination. Do you trust him to be honest about the results?”

  “He has a . . . relationship . . . with the Church,” Hicks finally said.

  “What do you mean? He’s a member?”

  Hicks rubbed his thumb along the grooves of the wheel. “No. But he’s worked hard with Josiah and the other elders. To gain their trust.”

  “Okay?” She let it be a question. Did that mean Hicks doubted Jackson’s timeline? Had the coroner fudged it? But why? To protect Josiah was the obvious answer if he really was close to the pastor. But what would changing the TOD accomplish?

  “It’s caused some . . . issues between Jackson and myself,” Hicks said. “He thinks this is the way to get the Church to cooperate with him.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  Hicks licked his lips, his gaze locked on the building in front of them. “Look, before Jackson got here, those people didn’t even report their dead. They wouldn’t call me, they wouldn’t call the coroner or the town doc. They just buried them.”

  “What?” A thread of morality spun into her very core trembled at the idea of any departed soul who went uncounted. She’d had one too many cases go ice-cold not to feel jittery about bodies that went so quietly into the ground.

  “When Jackson came, he reached out to them,” Hicks continued as if she hadn’t said anything. “To get them to consistently call him when someone dies, especially when it’s not just of old age.”

  Lucy thought of the cheery smile, the friendly, welcoming face. Jackson had seemed harmless, almost eager to help them out. She understood the tough position he was in. She understood the power of small victories and the importance of winning over a skeptical communit
y with compromises. The ethics here were gray, the waters murky, and she wasn’t sure she could judge him for it. It sounded like he was doing the best he could.

  But it made her want a second opinion for Noah’s autopsy.

  “I’m guessing he’s not fighting to get those shield laws overturned, huh?”

  “No.” Hicks’s mouth compressed into a straight, unpleasant line. “They actually trot him out in defense of them at hearings.”

  “What does he say?”

  “That he’s never seen any evidence of abuse in any of the autopsies he’s done,” Hicks said. Paused. “And that I was trying to start up a witch hunt, one in which he had no interest in participating.”

  “Well, abuse isn’t always so clear-cut,” Lucy commented, ignoring the second part for now. But not forgetting it. It wasn’t the first hint that Hicks was in this war deeper than he wanted to appear.

  Hicks hummed in agreement. “I don’t really want to mess with the community, you know,” he said, his head lolling forward a bit as he shifted to look at her. “It’s not . . . Some people think I’m just being a jackass or I have something to prove. But someone should pay when a kid dies from deliberate neglect. And that’s what we’re seeing here.”

  Lucy studied his face, the slump of his body, the resignation, the hopelessness that seemed to have sunk into his very bones. “Noah’s bruises. You think . . . ?”

  He tossed her words back at her. “Abuse isn’t always clear-cut.” Then he shook his head. “God. I don’t know, I don’t know.” A pause. “All of this . . . It probably doesn’t have anything to do with the case.”

  Maybe it didn’t—maybe he was as opportunistic as anyone else and was using this death to make his point somehow. Maybe he was blinded by his own convictions, a confirmation bias that would be oh so easy to believe. Everyone had an agenda; this might be his.

  But from what she could tell, they were dealing with a cultlike group here that used religious protections to suit their purposes. A group that had circumvented local law enforcement when a kid had gone missing.

  Yeah, maybe Hicks had his own ulterior motives, but Lucy wasn’t ready to dismiss the importance of this information as unnecessary to her case quite yet.

  Hicks laughed, but almost under his breath, as if to himself. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  She smiled faintly, but didn’t have a guess at that, either. Hicks was a web of contradictions, a mess of carefully hidden secrets and straightforward candor, of calm watchfulness and a thrumming tension that was so constant that it was most noticeable when it was absent, of a cop’s cool detachment and the heated interest of someone who had skin in the game.

  “It’s good to know anyway,” Lucy finally said, for lack of better reassurance.

  Part of her wanted in on this crusade, but the larger part wanted her to focus, to be professional, to not get distracted. This wasn’t her fight. It would never be her fight.

  Noah Dawson was her fight. Figuring out why seventeen-year-old Eliza Cook took him into the woods and drove a knife into his skull—that was her fight.

  She had to—had to—leave the rest of it to Hicks.

  Hicks nodded, just one quick jerk of his head like he’d heard the words she hadn’t just said.

  Maybe she was grasping at straws here, but Lucy made a decision. The doubt would gnaw at her otherwise. “I want to talk to him again. Jackson.”

  The engine turned over almost before the words left her mouth, like he’d known she was going to demand it.

  The coroner’s office was only a few blocks away, and Hicks assured her the man would still be there despite the late hour.

  It was a promise that held true. They found Jackson holed up in a broom closet–size office right off the medical lab. He looked up from his paperwork when Hicks knocked on the open door. “Back so soon?”

  Lucy dropped into the chair across from him.

  “Did you know Noah Dawson?”

  Jackson shot an uncertain look toward Hicks, but unlike the two men’s previous silent communication earlier in the day, this seemed more confusion than anything else. “Sure. Most people know each other around here.”

  “And the Cooks, right?” Lucy asked. “You knew them well?”

  “I don’t know about . . .” Jackson shook his head, sat back, some of the color gone from his cheeks. “I don’t know about ‘well’ per se.”

  “You worked with Josiah Cook—”

  Jackson interrupted. “On getting him to call me when someone died.” It came in a burst, a hint of panic at the edges. “I was just getting them to follow the law.”

  His eyes were big, pleading—a kicked puppy. “I was just trying to help.”

  Little did he know that those tactics only served to grate on Lucy’s nerves. “Would you be able to get a list of all the children who have died since you’ve been coroner?”

  She didn’t know what that would accomplish, but if nothing else, it would give Hicks something to work from once Lucy left. If he was still on his crusade after this.

  “Sure, I’ll . . .” Jackson stumbled. “I’ll see what I can do. It might take—”

  “So there have been a lot?” Lucy posed the question as innocently as possible, letting her eyes go a little wide.

  “I mean . . . not more . . . than . . .”

  “How long have you lived here?” Lucy interrupted. His back was flat up against his chair as his body leaned as far away from them as possible.

  “A couple, a couple years,” Jackson said slowly like he knew he was falling into a trap.

  Lucy turned to Hicks. “Would you say this town was very big?”

  Hicks’s mouth twitched before he answered. “No, ma’am.”

  “About how many deaths would you expect to see in a town this size, then?”

  “A handful a year, maybe.” Hicks played his part. “At most.”

  “A handful a year,” Lucy repeated, shifting her attention back to Jackson. “Do you really expect me to believe it will take you a long time to compile such a list?”

  Jackson’s desperate eyes clung to Hicks’s face, but he must have realized he would receive no help from that quarter. He deflated. “No.”

  “Wonderful.” Lucy clapped her hands once and then pulled out a card with her email, placing it on the far edge of his desk. “You can send it here.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer before standing and moving toward the door, and everything in Jackson exhaled at the obvious sign that they were leaving.

  Lucy paused. “Oh, before I forget, I’m going to have a team from Spokane take the body to their ME in the morning. Please be here to let them in.”

  And just like that, the strain was back. “The Dawsons only wanted me to look at the body. No one else.”

  “I don’t care,” Lucy said. Despite the irritation she’d deliberately telegraphed to him only a second earlier, she wasn’t actually interested in starting a war. All she wanted was a thorough, unbiased report. The FBI agents who had overseen the extraction had deferred to the local coroner because this was the closest lab. That no longer mattered anymore now that they couldn’t trust Jackson with the body. “Eliza crossed state lines”—as she said it, Lucy wondered just how deliberate that had been—“and the case is mine. I’m happy to work with you, but this is my decision. Not his family’s.”

  And not yours. That part went unsaid, but she might as well have tacked it on for how blatant it hung in the air between them, neon and flashing.

  There was no jaunty salute from him this time when she and Hicks left.

  “That was quite the grenade,” Hicks murmured as they headed back into the night, but she thought there might be amusement there. Maybe.

  “Was it?” Normally she really didn’t like pissing contests. The rivalry between FBI agents and little police stations was a cliché best saved for TV and movies. It was so much easier to work with local cops when no one felt the need to whip it out and measure it. Sometimes, though,
sometimes it was inevitable.

  Hicks didn’t say anything, but when she glanced at him, there was the smallest smile hiding in the corners of his lips. A second later shadows fell along his face, obscuring it completely, making her wonder if she’d imagined the softness. “And thanks. For the list.”

  She shrugged it off, unwilling to admit she was getting sucked into this fight. “We’ll see if he actually delivers.”

  He lifted his brows in cynical agreement. “What’s next?” he asked, nodding toward his pickup.

  It was late and Lucy wanted to regroup. And she still had to talk to Dr. Syed Ali about his analysis of Eliza’s interrogation, anyway. Maybe after hearing his take about the girl’s guilt, that itch along her spine would be scratched. Maybe he would confirm that Lucy was overthinking everything.

  A confession, a body, a murder weapon.

  “I’m going to call it a day,” Lucy said, and looked past him toward the end of the block. The B and B was right there. “I’m good to walk the two minutes.”

  “You sure? I could give you a lift.” It was said in a teasing tone, one that she wouldn’t have attributed to him nine or so hours ago when she’d first met him on a rain-drenched ridge. Hicks had depths, apparently.

  She laughed and waved him off, already starting down the street. “It might be touch and go, but I think I’ll make it okay.”

  He watched her for a second, his cowboy hat still low over his eyes. “Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll call you in the morning,” she promised, walking backward. “When I’ve figured out what the hell comes next.”

  A low laugh, and then he was climbing into his pickup.

  It had been a joke, mostly. But Lucy had to admit to herself that there was some truth buried beneath. She wasn’t quite sure what came next, and she had only until Monday to untangle it before Vaughn yanked her to work on the dozens of cases they had that weren’t already solved.

  Except this one still felt like it fell into that category.

  Right now, if Lucy had to put money on it, she’d say that Eliza had help at some point in the process, that she hadn’t been acting alone.