Her Final Words

by Brianna Labuskes

  The local coroner would certainly be a good option, if she was looking for the accomplice.

  Jackson had clear ties to the Church and could get rid of evidence as needed.

  He also had the body type that could have carried Noah into the woods and the knowledge on how to make it a quick, clean kill.

  A lot of people in the area would, though.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose. Exhaustion was clearly setting in. There was no reason to suspect the ME of any foul play.

  Her fingers toyed with her phone, though, while she wondered if she shouldn’t get Noah’s body out of Jackson’s lab tonight rather than tomorrow. Perhaps giving him warning had been a sloppy mistake.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  LUCY THORNE

  Friday, 6:15 p.m.

  Lucy had just waved off Annie Tate’s overeager invitation to tea when she stopped, one foot on the narrow stairs.

  “Annie,” she called out before the woman could disappear into the sitting room.

  “Change your mind?” Annie was beside her in an instant, smile wide and happy.

  “No, sorry,” Lucy said, unable to blunt that particular rejection. “You mentioned a man earlier. The one who was going to come out to fix the step.”

  “Oh.” Annie’s eyes slid past her to the wobbly board. “I’m sorry, but he didn’t have the chance to make it by today. Do be careful going up.”

  “No.” Lucy shrugged away that concern. “Please don’t worry about that. But, what was his name again?”

  “Frank Thomas,” Annie supplied dutifully.

  Frank. Frank Thomas. That’s Frank’s place. That’s what had niggled at her when she’d been at the Cooks’ house, standing in Eliza’s room. It had thrown both Josiah and Rachel to be asked about him and his property.

  It had been his daughter who had supposedly run away, just three weeks before all this unfolded.

  “He lives out by the Cooks?” Lucy confirmed, and Annie nodded quickly. “You had mentioned his daughter, right?”

  The light behind Annie’s eyes dimmed a bit, and she glanced down, to the side. “Yes. Molly.”

  “You had said she was”—how had Annie worded it?—“troubled?”

  Annie’s fingers worried the bottom button of her peach cardigan as she chewed on her lower lip. After some deliberation, she seemed to make a decision, leaning forward after she did. “Hannah—that’s my sister, I should introduce you, if you wanted tea . . . no, right, of course. Well, Hannah says she used to see Molly out late at night with that Brandon Shaw fellow. Let’s just say there was no room for the Holy Spirit between them.”

  It was the kind of gossip Lucy loved to gather on cases like this, but the glee with which it was divulged still left an unpleasant taste in her mouth.

  “This Molly, Molly Thomas, she was neighbors with Eliza Cook?” Lucy asked despite already knowing the answer—an effort to get Annie chatting freely.

  “Mmm, yes,” Annie said slowly. “They were thick as thieves, those girls.”

  Yet Rachel and Josiah had made it seem like Eliza had no close friends. “You sure about that?”

  “Oh yes.” Annie nodded, warming to the topic. “You wouldn’t see one without the other. And then that other girl, too. Brandon’s sister.”

  “Other girl?”

  “Alessandra.” Annie’s eyes went a little distant, and when they snapped back, her mouth was pursed. “That was a while back that they all ran together, though. The Shaws moved away some time ago.”

  “All right,” Lucy said, easily, though her mind was turning over the information, greedy for connections.

  Annie smiled and turned to leave, but Lucy stopped her when a thought struck. “Annie, did the sheriff look into Molly’s disappearance?”

  “Oh, Agent Thorne, you must have misunderstood me. It wasn’t a disappearance.” Annie shook her head. “There was a note and everything. I’m sure Sheriff Hicks wanted to use it as an excuse to get in those nice people’s business, but not even he could justify it.”

  Again, Lucy played dumb. “An excuse?”

  Annie sighed. “Hicks,” she said sadly, and then just watched Lucy with big, unblinking eyes until Lucy nodded like she understood. Maybe she did. A bee in your bonnet.

  “Does he often find excuses to investigate the Church?” Lucy asked, curious for another perspective on Hicks’s crusade.

  “Seems like he’s always up there pestering them,” Annie said. “Rachel Cook’s been through enough. She doesn’t need the sheriff hovering over her shoulder all the time.”

  “He checks in on Rachel?”

  “Well, of course.” Annie looked at her over the rims of her glasses. “But he’s been bugging Darcy Dawson these days, too.”

  That distracted Lucy from Rachel. “What? Why?”

  “Poor woman,” Annie murmured. But there was a hint of glee in her voice. She was enjoying being asked so many questions about her neighbors. “She’s been having . . . episodes.”

  “Episodes? What do you mean?”

  “I heard it from several people that she nearly passed out at the grocery store a few weeks ago, and then again at the coffee shop,” Annie said, her voice lowered, conspiratorial. “And Mary Jane Wright told me she came upon the poor woman just staring at a blank wall at the gas station the other day.”

  “Before Noah disappeared?” Lucy asked.

  Annie tapped her chin in an exaggerated gesture. “Yes, I believe so. Mary Jane said when she asked if Darcy was all right, she didn’t even respond for a while. And when she came to . . .”

  “Yes?” Lucy prompted.

  “Didn’t even know where she was,” Annie said. “Flat out didn’t know she was at the gas station with Rosie in the car.”

  Lucy ran through the names she’d been collecting. Rosie. Darcy’s daughter.

  Annie continued without prompting. “Little Rosie, she’s a tough one.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, no one thought she’d make it this long,” Annie said. “Doc Green guessed if they didn’t take her in for care, she wouldn’t survive another six months. That was five years ago.”

  “What does she have?”

  “Not sure of the particulars, what with the Dawsons being Church and all,” Annie said. “A degenerative disorder is my guess. But their oldest daughter died of something similar when she was just a baby.”

  “I didn’t realize they’d lost a child,” Lucy said. Two kids both buried so young.

  “Tragic,” Annie whispered. “I don’t blame her for staring at walls, if I’m honest with you.”

  To be fair, Lucy didn’t, either. “It seems like they end up burying a lot of children up there.”

  Annie wagged her finger at Lucy, actually wagged it in her face. Lucy had never seen such a gesture in real life. “That’s the sheriff talking.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “They’re a bit old-fashioned when it comes to some things,” Annie hedged. “But that doesn’t make them killers or any such nonsense.”

  “And Hicks has been checking in on Darcy lately?” Lucy asked, reining in the conversation before it went down that road. It wasn’t necessarily strange that Hicks hadn’t mentioned that, but it might be the reason for the tension between them that had been so obvious at Darcy Dawson’s place.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Annie said, and she seemed to exhale, to soften. “The sheriff means well. He can just be heavy-handed. I’m sure he’s heard the same talk about Darcy as everyone else had, and wanted to make sure she was all right.”

  So Noah’s mother had a recent track record of unstable behavior just before Noah had been murdered. That was certainly a piece of the puzzle she wasn’t quite sure what to do with.

  “All right, thank you, Annie,” Lucy said. “Good night.” This time it was a real dismissal. She started up the stairs, once again thinking about Frank and Molly Thomas as she jumped the loose board.

  When she got to her room, Lucy locked th
e door and pulled out her phone. Vaughn had texted her earlier that Dr. Syed Ali would be available to chat with Lucy whenever she got in that night, no matter how late. It might have read like a suggestion, but Lucy didn’t mistake it for anything but the order that it was.

  She’d worked with Dr. Ali before so she had his number in her contact list, and he answered on the second ring.

  “Agent Thorne,” Dr. Ali said, his greeting respectfully formal but affectionate.

  The sentiment was mutual. She always addressed him as Dr. Ali, as if she were back in college and he was one of her professors. But not one of the intimidating, boring ones. Instead he was the type everyone universally adored and looked up to, who would offer you tea and stay way past office hours to debate with you about philosophy and literature and religion. His vast knowledge covered an array of subjects.

  “I’m sorry to call you so late,” Lucy said. “Thank you for speaking with me. Vaughn said you watched the tapes of Eliza’s interview.”

  “Of course, of course.” His voice was a low rumble. A door closed, and then there was a faint squeak of leather, like he was settling into a well-used chair. “It was quite a challenge. I enjoyed it.”

  Lucy sank down into her mattress, one arm coming up to cover her tired, dry eyes. Floral potpourri itched at her nose, and the scratchy bedcover irritated the skin on the back of her neck. “What are your impressions?”

  There was a smile in his voice when he answered, reading her easily even over the phone no matter how neutral she’d attempted to keep the question. “Possibly different from yours, my dear.”

  “You think she killed Noah Dawson.” Most people looking at this case would think Lucy was on some kind of wild-goose chase. She couldn’t blame him if that was his takeaway.

  He laughed at her a bit, but it was affectionate, indulgent. “Don’t be mad at me, Agent Thorne,” he said, and she realized some of the defensive edge must have trickled in anyway. “And no. That’s too broad of a stroke.”

  If there was nothing else she knew about him, Lucy knew Dr. Ali did not like absolutes. That was something they agreed on. “Tell me what you think.”

  “Well, it is too easy to say, ‘This one killed him, this one didn’t,’” Dr. Ali said gently. It was his lecture voice and Lucy settled in to listen, toeing off her boots as she did so she could curl her legs up onto the bed. Her muscles pulsed with exhaustion from the long day. “There is guilt in that girl—shame, too.”

  One of Dr. Ali’s methods was slowing down the videos, dissecting microexpressions. He could read a split second of emotion that would be blind to the naked eye as easily as reading a book. When Lucy had the luxury of time, she would often do the same thing with her interrogation tapes, but that hadn’t been an option here. “What else was there?”

  A hesitation. “Well, apart from the guilt and shame, there were no indicators to suggest she was lying at any point in the interview.”

  The verdict came like a missed step, the drop in her belly, the jolting of bones and tendons that came from landing too hard. Everything about Eliza’s confession had read true to Lucy in that interrogation room, so Dr. Ali’s impression shouldn’t come as a surprise. It still didn’t sit right.

  “So she seems to be telling the truth and is guilty about something,” Lucy summarized.

  “Yes,” Dr. Ali agreed. “I won’t draw a conclusion, but those are the facts.”

  “Why won’t you draw a conclusion?” Although he could be evasive, couching his words sometimes to avoid those absolutes he wasn’t fond of, Dr. Ali didn’t shy away from voicing his opinions when he knew he was right.

  There was silence from the other end, then the rustle of fabric against leather as he shifted. “There are a few moments that strike me as odd.”

  Lucy almost laughed. That one sentence could describe her thought process on this entire investigation. “Tell me.” She winced at the demand, having fallen so quickly into the brusqueness of this place. “Please.”

  “When you walked into the room, she relaxed for a beat.”

  At the time, Lucy had been tired, only half-sure the girl would prove to be legit. She hadn’t noticed any change in Eliza’s expression. Which is why they brought in Dr. Ali.

  “That’s unusual?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Ali said. “Even for someone who had turned themselves in, the experience of being interrogated is stressful. They expect it to be unpleasant.”

  “But she was relieved to see me.” She asked for me? That thought again, on a loop.

  “Agent Vaughn says she mentioned you by name,” Dr. Ali prodded gently. “When she first asked to speak to someone.”

  “I’ve had that happen before,” Lucy said, shrugging despite the fact that he couldn’t see her, a defensive gesture she recognized as her own guilt at not pursuing this line of thinking deeper. “People see a name in the newspaper, things like that.”

  The pause that followed was almost long enough that she was about to check if the call had dropped. “Perhaps.”

  Lucy scratched at a scab on her thumb. A cut from the training session she’d been leading when Vaughn had called her in to talk to Eliza. “Is there any other reason she would have relaxed?”

  “Well, you were clearly there to ask her questions, not escort her out of the building,” Dr. Ali said, his voice going thoughtful.

  That could make sense. Eliza had feared she’d be led out of the building before she could tell them of the murder, that she’d be dismissed perhaps because of her age. She’d had a plan. Confess and then shut up. Again, these actions, this worry, didn’t seem to be driven by the guilt of a killer.

  “You said a few moments,” Lucy prompted. “What were the others?”

  “The verse,” Dr. Ali said, and that itch at the base of her spine prickled. “It was strange the way she acted. She was desperate in a way she wasn’t in any other part of the interview.”

  White knuckles, shallow breathing. A pale face flushing pink. It had been the most emotion Eliza had displayed. “She made me repeat it.”

  “And when you did, again she relaxed,” Dr. Ali pointed out. “The rest of the interview she was almost absolutely controlled.”

  “What else?” Lucy pressed.

  He sighed. “When you were trying to get her to break . . .”

  Those two hours, those long two hours. The time itself hadn’t been noteworthy. Lucy had spent double, triple that teasing out confessions as the normal course of business. Usually, if people were willing to talk, deep down they wanted to be broken. They just didn’t want to want it. Which was fine—it was Lucy’s job to make sure they didn’t realize that all she was doing was giving them space to let the words spill out.

  But Eliza hadn’t wanted to talk. Not beyond her confession.

  Dr. Ali continued when Lucy didn’t say anything. “She came into that FBI office with a mission. And that was to tell you, and you in particular, three things: where Noah Dawson’s body was, that he had a Bible verse cut into his chest, and that she killed him.”

  Setting the stage for an audience of one. “So what are you thinking?” She stopped, clarified. “Not your professional analysis, just you. What are you thinking?”

  There was a pause. “My expertise involves picking apart body language, words, microexpressions, and gestures, all to figure out if someone is lying. But there’s a false dichotomy there, one that leads people to make assumptions they shouldn’t.”

  Usually she knew where he was going with something. Not this time. “Okay.”

  “Just because someone isn’t lying,” Dr. Ali said, each word slow and weighted, “doesn’t mean that they’re telling the truth.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ELIZA COOK

  Two weeks earlier

  It had been five days since Molly had disappeared when Eliza was finally able to sneak out of the house without her aunt or uncle noticing. They were both on high alert following Hicks’s visit regarding Molly. The only reason Eliza had been ab
le to swing an escape was because it was Friday and the Church was having one of its socials.

  Rachel and Josiah opened their barn up to the community for a party once a month, and the congregation took care of the rest—the tables, the food, the music. Even now, Eliza could hear the twang of the banjo strings as she carefully palmed the keys to the truck Josiah parked around the front of the house. With so many vehicles stacked up, there was a good chance he wouldn’t realize that it—along with his niece—had gone missing for an hour or two. At least, that’s what she was counting on.

  The barn glowed, the light, the laughter, the noise curling like golden tendrils into the night. From the outside where Eliza crept through the falling darkness, the warmth of it beckoned. She resisted the pull.

  She had a plan.

  It wasn’t a perfect plan, borne as it had been from desperation rather than careful thought. But it was better than sitting around and doing nothing.

  Eliza climbed into the truck and then started it up without flicking on the headlights. Last year she’d pestered Hicks into teaching her how to drive. She wasn’t anywhere near perfect, but she could get where she needed to go, and, better yet, neither Josiah nor Rachel knew she was able to.

  If they’d known, they would have been watching her even closer than they already were.

  Sometimes it felt like she was living in those days a few years ago right after Josiah and Rachel had realized she’d been sneaking out to meet Molly by the post some nights. They’d padlocked the back door, made her write lines for hours and hours and hours on end. No food, no water, no sleep. Just that one line, that verse that was now all but burned into her skin.

  For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

  It was a favorite in the Cook household. Eliza realized now why that was.

  When she’d been younger, she’d loved it. Eliza still remembered climbing up into the lap of her grandmother, who’d always smelled of ginger and mint. When her grandmother recited the words, they’d sounded like reassurance, and Eliza had needed that in those confusing years after her mother’s death.

  Now she realized how twisted they were.