CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
MOLLY THOMAS
Three days earlier
Believing in God had never been a choice for Molly. It simply was, in the same way her heart beat and her lungs drew in air. The world turned, and God existed, and so did his wrath and his glory. Sundays were for Church, as were most of the rest of the days. Living and believing were synonymous.
And then she’d met Alessandra.
Molly had been worried at first that Alessandra and Eliza were destined to be adversaries, like fire and ice. Alessandra was dramatic gestures and loud laughs and lips that were too big for her bone structure and ideas that were too big for small-town life. Eliza crept like the frost, tidy and contained and nearly translucent, but reaching, reaching, reaching ever forward. They shouldn’t have gotten along. But they did.
Sometimes Molly had wished they hadn’t, jealousy a pungent thing that had crept into Molly’s soft spaces more often than not in those early days. But Alessandra wouldn’t allow it. We have to stick together, she’d whisper to them at one of those awful socials the Cooks threw every month. No matter what.
It was addicting, being around Alessandra. She had a way of talking that made Molly believe like she never had before. Not in God, but in life.
That was why it had taken Eliza and Molly months to realize something was wrong. The idea that Alessandra could be anything but brilliant and glowing was almost blasphemy itself.
They’d finally caught on, though, and Alessandra had shrugged off their concerns. Then she’d disappeared without warning.
People knew it wasn’t normal. Molly had started grasping that only when she’d noticed no one would look at the empty pew where the Shaws had sat, avoiding it in a way that could be nothing but deliberate. Molly had started watching more closely after that. The rigid shoulders, the unsettled eyes, the white-knuckle grips on children’s arms. People knew it wasn’t normal.
“It’s one of us, isn’t it?” Eliza had whispered one night at the post a week after Alessandra had disappeared. “Who’s doing it. It’s one of us.”
Oh, if Molly could go back, if she could stop herself, if she could lie and pretend she didn’t know what Eliza was talking about, if she could stop that train before it was put in motion. She would, she would, she would. In an instant. But Molly wasn’t there at the post; she was in a hole in the ground that smelled of her urine and vomit and fear. She couldn’t stop the inevitable.
“Yes.”
CHAPTER FORTY
LUCY THORNE
Saturday, 10:30 p.m.
Lucy tracked down Hicks at the Laundromat.
He was easy to spot through the row of half windows that lined the entire storefront. Tucked into a corner, his boots on the table, he stared at the far wall as the dryers tumbled behind him.
It was 10:30 at night and there wasn’t anyone else in the place.
Lucy pushed through the doors.
Hicks’s eyes tracked her progress as she made her way down the aisle of washers, but he didn’t acknowledge her arrival in any other way.
The light was the cheap, yellow kind, and threw shadows onto his face. He was sans cowboy hat for once, but even without its presence, he was still somehow able to hide.
Lucy grabbed one of the extra chairs at the wobbly table and swung it around so she was straddling it backward, her forearms leaning against the top of it. “I met Peggy.”
A flash of surprise came and went so quickly Lucy wouldn’t have even registered it had she not been looking for it. She wondered if the reaction was because of her talking to Peggy or to the fact that Lucy was telling him anything at all.
“You’ve known her awhile,” Lucy prompted. She already knew the answer, but she wanted to see what he would say about the woman now that Lucy had actually met her.
“Grew up here,” Hicks said as if that answered it. Probably it did.
“She’s older than you, though.” At least Lucy thought she was.
One side of Hicks’s lips quirked up. “Not by much. She was friends with Rachel and Josiah when they were growing up. I was a kid at the time, but I knew her.”
“Does she know Eliza?”
Hicks’s attention sharpened. “Most people do.”
“How well?” Lucy asked, not bothering to keep the irritation out of her voice. He was a cop; he knew what she was asking.
He swallowed, looked away. “Peggy’s friends with Josiah. But she doesn’t see much of the whole family.”
“You know that for certain?”
“It’s not hard to track the town’s comings and goings, and Peggy lives far enough away that when she’s in Knox Hollow, it’s of note.” Hicks shrugged. “She and Josiah meet up about once a month. I think she sees Rachel occasionally. Peggy still has connections to the Church.”
Connections. So many connections. Which ones were important?
Eliza certainly would have trusted Peggy if she was a longtime friend of her uncle’s, wouldn’t she?
Hicks’s expression hardened. “Peggy didn’t kill Noah.”
“I didn’t say she did,” Lucy murmured. That didn’t mean Peggy didn’t kill the rest of the victims they’d found in the woods. The victims she’d kept such careful files on. But that brought up a good point. “Do you think Eliza did?”
There was a pause where Lucy thought she might have crossed some kind of line she couldn’t come back from. Hicks’s nostrils flared as his fingers curled into fists. Then he exhaled, loud but controlled, his eyes on the floor like he was taking hold of his raging temper with both hands and yanking it back.
Finally, he met her eyes. “No.”
“That’s why you wanted in on the investigation.” Or because he was involved somehow and trying to hide his own evidence. She didn’t mention that part.
“I thought I’d be helpful.”
Lucy snorted. “Yeah, okay, Deputy Do-Gooder. I’m sure your motives were nothing but pure.”
“Sheriff Do-Gooder, ma’am,” Hicks said, dry and almost smiling. He held out his pinkie. “I swear.”
She swatted his hand away and let the easy humor between them die. “Who did it then?”
He huffed out a breath. “You think if I knew that I would have had to hitch on to your case?”
“You said the DA laughs you out of the office,” she pointed out. “Me being here is the only reason someone is ever going to get charged.”
Which seemed important now that she’d said it out loud.
“If I had a solid suspicion . . .” He trailed off, looked away.
“A serial killer operating under your nose? You can’t tell me you don’t even have a guess.” If he tried that route, she’d know he was still lying to her. Or protecting someone.
Or protecting himself.
But he just shook his head. “Maybe I don’t want to see.”
It was so profoundly honest Lucy was left with nothing to say. Part of her wanted to point out that a bias like that was the reason cops weren’t allowed on cases where they knew the people involved. But the scolding felt wrong on her tongue, a sour note during a surprisingly raw moment.
So they simply sat with the sound of clothes beating against the walls of the dryer until she nudged his foot with hers.
“Did you see Eliza a lot?”
He shook his head as if the stretch of vulnerability had never happened. “Josiah and Rachel cut off most contact when I left the Church after Cora’s death.”
“But you must have seen her some.”
“Only when I ran into her in town.”
Lucy studied him. Despite his outward stoicism, there were strong emotions that ran beneath the quiet waters, and a loyalty to the town he served that she’d noticed within hours of meeting him. She found it hard to believe he would abandon his sister’s kid because of Josiah Cook’s say-so.
“So you weren’t close?”
He looked over. “No.” His voice was flat, too flat. Unemotional for the purpose of hiding emotion. A common tactic
of his.
“You haven’t talked to her recently?”
Hicks didn’t seem annoyed by this continued line of questioning. He simply sat back and shook his head.
“You ever see her with Noah?”
“No,” Hicks said. The anger that had been so precariously leashed was now nowhere in sight. He was back in full control. “But I didn’t see her much, like I said.”
“She never hinted at anything?” Asking slightly different questions to find a discrepancy was an oldie but a goodie. He’d recognize the pattern for what it was, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t fall into a trap anyway.
“No.”
“Did you ever have concerns that she could be harmful to herself or others?” Lucy asked, switching the topic. Despite the stories about neighbors and friends being surprised that the quiet man who lived next to them was a serial killer, it rarely worked like that. There were signs, there were leaks even in the most careful facade. Especially in children.
His nostrils flared a little as he exhaled, but the rest of his expression remained steady. “Like I said, I didn’t have much contact with her.”
Was that a yes wrapped in a nonanswer? Or was it something else?
Lucy stood up, recognizing a brick wall when she ran smack into one. Hicks watched her, those guarded eyes revealing nothing.
“I’m going to figure out what you’re not telling me,” Lucy said quietly. A promise, a threat. Whatever it was, it was the truth. “I’m going to figure out what else you’re hiding.”
Hicks flashed her a smile that was more baring of teeth than anything. “I’m counting on it.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
SHERIFF WYATT HICKS
Three days earlier
The knock when it came wasn’t a pounding of fists. It was civilized, as if the clock didn’t read 3:17 a.m. after a long day of searching for a missing twelve-year-old boy.
When Hicks opened the door, he didn’t know why he wasn’t surprised, but he wasn’t.
“Rachel,” he said. His voice wasn’t rough with sleep. He hadn’t been sleeping.
She didn’t say anything, but rather held up her phone. It was an old model, the kind that flipped open. He didn’t want to take it but did anyway.
On the screen was a message from a random string of numbers.
The text itself was an address. And then: Hicks’s truck is there.
He kept his face angled down, away from his sister’s eyes, the ones that saw too much. “Eliza.”
“Let’s go.”
Hicks didn’t even bother with a jacket, just slipped his feet into the shoes by the door and grabbed the extra set of keys he kept on the side table.
He pulled up his GPS as they both climbed into Josiah’s truck. “Take 95 to 290,” he said.
“I know how to get to Spokane,” Rachel snapped back, and he pressed his lips together to avoid getting dragged into a verbal brawl. It wouldn’t take much to nudge either of them into something that would have them bleeding out where they sat.
The highways were deserted, but Rachel didn’t speed. They drove steadily, the delicate silence inside the car broken only by the slap of tires against road.
“Does Josiah know?” Hicks finally asked. “That you’re out here.”
Hicks didn’t need any light to see the way her jaw clenched. “It’s better that he doesn’t.”
He studied her, the harsh lines of her profile, her strong nose, her thin lips, the shape of her chin, all so similar to his. He tried not to think about it too much, how they looked alike, how they shared a past, an origin story.
They’d been through hell together, yet here they were, no more than strangers now. How had the years and the differences and the distance come between them when they still saw each other most weeks? At one point, he would have said he knew her as well as he knew himself. Now, he wondered if he ever had.
“You have to stop protecting him,” Hicks said quietly. He had no doubt that was what was happening now.
“Josiah doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Rachel said, her voice calm as if she were talking about the weather. He sensed the anger beneath her skin, though. “I don’t know what you got Eliza mixed up in . . .”
“Me?”
“Well, it wasn’t us,” Rachel countered. “She’s taking your truck, in the middle of the night to God knows where—”
He couldn’t help himself. “Spokane.”
“Don’t be smart.” Rachel no longer sounded composed. She sounded like his older sister. They were quiet for a while. And then Rachel glanced at him. “You think Josiah had something to do with the missing boy?”
Of course. For once he didn’t poke at her, though. There had been a quiver in the question, one that made her sound like someone else. Like Cora, maybe. Not Rachel. Rachel, who’d been the only one who’d ever stood up to their mother, who’d faced down the beatings with a lifted chin, who carried the weight of the Church on her shoulders while Josiah basked in the spotlight. Rachel was tough. She didn’t break. Not like Cora. Not like him.
“Do you know where he was when Noah went missing?” Hicks asked instead of answering the question. Or maybe that was answer enough, because her shoulders drew back, the walls coming up.
“With me.” She was back to snapping. “You’ve always hated him. You and Peggy with your little vendetta against us.”
The accusation was laced with bitterness, disdain. The same venom directed at him as Rachel assumed he carried toward her, toward Josiah, toward the Church.
He’d been wrong. They were worse than strangers. They were adversaries. Adversaries who knew how to make each other bleed, which was the very worst kind. He shut his mouth.
Even if he suspected Josiah was playing some kind of sick game here that Hicks didn’t quite understand, he’d never convince Rachel of it. She didn’t want to see, so she wouldn’t. There was a lot someone could miss because they couldn’t bear the truth.
They drove the rest of the way in the heavy silence that had fallen between them.
When the headlights finally cut over a sign that cheerily informed them that Spokane was only fifteen miles away, Hicks checked the GPS address.
“Get off here,” he said.
There was a blue bus sign with an arrow at the end of the exit ramp. “Left.”
Brightly lit but deserted gas stations and twenty-four-hour convenience stores stood in stark contrast to the vast darkness that stretched out behind them. The outskirts of a small Idaho border town. They drove past it all until Hicks saw it—a large parking lot attached to the bus depot. He pointed, and Rachel pulled in.
His truck sat in the back corner, far away from the closest streetlamp.
“Why did she take it?” Rachel asked as they got out of the car. “Hicks, why did she take your truck?”
He shook his head once, terse.
A ghost of a girl in the night. I’m sorry.
“Where is she now?” There was panic creeping in, and it took him too long to realize she hadn’t known they were coming to a bus station. She stepped toward him, eyes wide, almost feral in the dim parking lot lights. “Where is she now?”
“I don’t . . .” Hicks shook his head. He didn’t know.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Why had he given her the truck? What had he thought she was going to do?
Almost mindlessly he crossed to it.
Rachel had pulled to a stop so that Josiah’s truck was blocking anyone else’s view of the pickup. There were two other cars in the lot, but they were parked near the front of the bus station.
He unlatched the back, staring at his hand as he did. It felt like it didn’t belong to him, a numbness in the very joints of his fingers. Rachel was still talking behind him, but he ignored her and pulled the back panel down so that he could see into the bed.
A shovel. A tarp. Dirt. Nothing out of the ordinary for a truck in Idaho.
Nothing that had been there when he’d tossed Eliza the keys all those hou
rs ago.
“Wyatt.” Her voice like a slap. Rachel was standing next to him, for once looking as pale as Eliza always did. She turned to meet his eyes. “What . . .”
“It wasn’t her,” Hicks said, the only words his mouth seemed willing to form. He knew it to be true. Whatever the hell was going on here, Eliza wasn’t a killer.
Rachel looked from his face to the damning evidence. The story it told sat in between them, a palpable thing that was squeezing his chest. Her chin up, just like it had when they were kids, just like it did when they faced each other down in shield law hearings these days.
“We burn it all,” she said.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
LUCY THORNE
Sunday, 2:00 a.m.
Lucy had an iron stomach when she was working cases. Torn flesh, mutilated victims, faces in every stage of decomp possible. She could handle it without flinching. She could concentrate on the details, on the evidence, all with the goal of building a case.
But there was only so much a person could take when sifting through old crimes. Stacked up together, the atrocities that lived inside those seemingly innocent manila files wore on the soul, sliced into it like a thousand paper cuts until a person was left bleeding, unable to soothe the pain.
She would be the last to admit it to someone, but she hated this part.
Lucy had been going through the murders that Vaughn had sent her through special delivery, both the ones she had worked on earlier in her career and ones that had similarities to Noah’s. Religious symbols, clean kills, care of the body. Things like that. Those ones were unsolved, which made it worse. She couldn’t even tell herself that the victims had been avenged properly.
The B and B creaked, settling with the night’s wind. The floor beneath Lucy was hard and cold, yet she couldn’t manage the effort of crawling up into the bed. If she did, she was tired enough that she’d probably drop immediately into sleep anyway, and there was too much to get through for that.
Coffee. She needed coffee.
There were no other guests staying at the inn, so she wouldn’t have to worry about running into anyone in the kitchen. Decision made, she grabbed several of the files and crept out of her room.
Her Final Words Page 20
