Her Final Words

by Brianna Labuskes

  When Lucy skipped the loose stair, she thought of Molly. Was she alive? Was she actually missing? How was she tied up in this?

  There had been no sign of her yet in the woods with the other three victims they’d found. That was something—though the land out here was vast, so many places to hide a body, so many places to hide a girl. If she wasn’t dead yet, she could be anywhere.

  Moonlight drenched the kitchen in silver, pouring in through the wide back windows. Shadows clung to the walls, but they were kept mostly at bay, a relief for Lucy. She’d been sunk into a nightmare for the past several hours, her defenses battered and her adrenaline depleted. Everything looked like a threat right now.

  She went through the motions of making the coffee, only distantly registering the time that passed as she stared blankly, the dripping water soothing like little pebbles tossed into a calm lake.

  Lucy poured herself a mug once it was ready, and then crossed to the kitchen table. It was wood—old, thick, and scarred with history.

  When she was settled, she opened the first file. On its face, it was the closest to Noah’s killing, and it was one she hadn’t worked. It was a boy, nine years old, which would fall into the right age range. There were initials carved into his skin—not quite a verse, but similar mutilation, all the same. He’d been dropped in a patch of woods not far from Knox Hollow, closer to the Canadian border, but not by much.

  But he’d been tied, the ropes crossing over his chest in a complicated pattern that spoke of some proficiency with bondage. While some killers switched up their methods enough to go undetected, when there was something that specific involved, it usually showed up again with subsequent victims.

  She opened the second file she’d brought down with her.

  It was one of the first cases she’d been assigned when she’d been working in the Montana office—a young girl, earlier twenties. The only thing about her case that rang familiar to Noah’s was that she’d been left deep in the woods, unburied. When she’d been found, her body had been mostly picked apart by predators. No ammonia-soaked rags for her.

  Lucy almost shut the file again, but something on one of the pictures . . . Was that . . . ? She shifted the glossy photograph so that it caught more of the moonlight. And . . .

  Yes.

  Scrambling a bit, Lucy shoved the rest of the files out of the way so that she could lay out the photos of the young woman across the table. Her thumb brushed over the cut that had drawn her attention.

  It was at the very edge of a bite mark from some large animal, and so they’d probably overlooked it before. But now that Lucy knew what she was looking for, she could see the deliberate slash of a knife against skin.

  Lucy drew in a sharp breath. It looked like the bottom of an R.

  It could be. Maybe. Or she was tired and looking for things that weren’t actually there. But the mark next to it looked like part of a 2 if she squinted.

  She sighed, rubbed her eyes.

  Just as she was about to dig into the file, there was a scuff of feet on floorboards in the hallway. There was only a second for her fingers to fly to the gun she had holstered beneath her arm before Annie Tate appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a tatty pink robe and fluffy purple slippers, looking like she’d been woken up despite Lucy knowing she hadn’t made any noise.

  As Annie shuffled over to the coffeepot and poured herself a cup, Lucy tried to gather up the photographs of the half-eaten body of a murdered girl. But Annie barely blinked when she saw them, sliding onto the bench across from Lucy, looking as if she was preparing for a good gossip session.

  “This is for the Dawson case?” Annie asked, voice still rough, but clearly shaking off her grogginess.

  Lucy shot her a weak, conciliatory smile. “I’m not able to discuss an ongoing case. I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

  “Don’t you worry any,” Annie said. “Lightest sleeper this side of the Mississippi. My sister despairs of it.”

  The darkness shifted around them, throwing light on a particularly grisly photograph.

  “I hope for Rachel and Josiah’s sake it all goes fast,” Annie continued blithely as if used to gore and guts spread out across her table.

  Lucy ran a finger around the lip of her mug. “What does?”

  “The trial and everything.” Annie waved a casual hand as if they weren’t talking about the fate of a seventeen-year-old girl. “It should, shouldn’t it? What with her confession.”

  There was no need to ask how Annie knew about that. Lucy was sure she’d been one of the first to find out even more details than Lucy probably had. “I’m not able to discuss an ongoing case.”

  Annie nodded with exaggerated understanding as Lucy delivered the well-used line. And Lucy wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth if Annie was feeling in a talkative mood. She just needed to redirect the conversation so it wasn’t she who would be doling out the information.

  “Alessandra Shaw was a part of the Church, too, right?”

  “Oh, Alessandra,” Annie breathed out, the name holding the weight of a thousand untold secrets. “Yes. She was.”

  “Then she must have been close with Eliza, too? And Molly Thomas?”

  “Mmmm, yes,” Annie said. “She was their ringleader.”

  That surprised Lucy. She would have pegged Eliza for that role. “Alessandra was?”

  “That girl had a wild soul,” Annie said, but she sounded almost . . . fond. “Guess that’s why she ran off like she did. No one was surprised. Except maybe Eliza and Molly, that is.”

  That meant Annie didn’t know about the bodies in the woods. Eliza and Molly had been right about Alessandra.

  Three girls. Three friends. Two of them were missing, with one all but confirmed to have been murdered. The third was in custody for a separate homicide.

  Why confess to a crime you didn’t commit?

  Two of Eliza’s best friends had disappeared. It wouldn’t be a great leap of logic to think Eliza had been frightened she might be next. Had she been seeking protection?

  And where did Noah Dawson fit into this? Where did the other victims—the two more they’d found in the woods near Alessandra’s body and the files from Peggy Anderson?

  When looking at serial killers, there was usually a type of preferred victim. Sometimes there would be an aberration, a girl with light brown hair instead of blonde. But all told, they rarely strayed. Certainly not like this.

  A psychopath who targeted teenage girls usually stuck to teenage girls. One who went after prepubescent boys did the same.

  But if the escalating victim toll traced back to the same killer? That meant it wasn’t age or gender or normal demographics tying them all together.

  It was something else.

  A motive would be nice.

  The Church was the obvious answer. So far all the victims involved had a connection. But it could just be a killer had been taking advantage of an insular community, one that was wary of law enforcement and tended to try to cover up missing children.

  What would have happened if Eliza had confessed in Knox Hollow instead of in Seattle? It probably would have been Zoey who would have arrested her, to avoid any potential conflicts with Hicks. The DA would have rushed through the charges, eager to close a case on a murdered twelve-year-old boy.

  With Lucy brought in, the entire game had changed.

  Was that why Eliza had traveled all the way to Seattle? But if she only wanted the FBI brought in to investigate, there were closer offices.

  Lucy’s gaze drifted back down to the picture of the victim. That really did look like an R.

  When Lucy glanced up again, thinking of escaping back to her room to study the file more closely, it was to find Annie staring at the photos, her head cocked, a slight frown dragging on the corners of her mouth.

  “Is that . . . ?” Annie murmured, her eyes locked on the picture of the young woman’s face, then shook her head.

  Lucy’s breath caught. “Is that what?”

&
nbsp; “Hmm?”

  All of a sudden Lucy was far more awake than she’d been for the rest of this conversation. “You said, ‘Is that?’ but stopped yourself. What were you about to ask?”

  “Oh.” Annie sat back, seeming a little flustered with Lucy’s new intensity. “For a second, it looked like someone who used to live here, is all.”

  Lucy’s eyes dropped to the picture. The victim had been identified through dental records, so there was a pretty decent shot of her clipped to the inside of the folder.

  “Who?”

  “It looks like . . .” Annie paused, shifted. “Kate Martinez.”

  Everything sharpened. It wasn’t exactly a rare name, but it wasn’t common, either. And it was the one written on the tab of the file. “Tell me about her.”

  “Her and her family lived in town for a little, maybe about five years ago or so. Moved on to . . . Montana?” Annie’s hesitation started to fade as she picked up on Lucy’s new interest. “They weren’t here long, passed through for harvest and stayed a bit. A couple months . . . through the winter. By spring they were gone.”

  “Five years.” Lucy skimmed the notes again to make sure. That time frame didn’t fit. “You’re certain?”

  Annie’s eyes slipped over Lucy’s shoulder, going distant. Then they snapped back to Lucy’s face. “Maybe a little further back than that. The years start to blur, you realize?”

  Lucy blessed whatever fates had sent her to the woman who remembered an itinerant family from nearly a decade ago. “One more question.”

  “Of course,” Annie said, her poorly concealed excitement apparent in her voice. This was more excitement than she probably got all year.

  “Did she have any connection to the Church?”

  Everything about Annie went shifty, body language closing up, gaze dropping to the floor.

  Lucy didn’t push, didn’t think she would have to.

  In the end, she was right. Annie squared up her shoulders and met Lucy’s eyes.

  “Her family worked for Josiah Cook.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  LUCY THORNE

  Sunday, 5:00 a.m.

  Lucy pulled her legs up onto the rocker on the back porch of the B and B. Annie had gone back to sleep an hour ago, but Lucy hadn’t been able to.

  Anticipation, confusion, frustration—they were knotted together and sitting heavy in her chest. She didn’t know what the hell was going on, but she did know that whatever it was had never been as simple as a body, a murder weapon, and a confession.

  A motive. That’s what had been missing all along; that’s what she was trying to chase. If it was as simple as they’d stumbled onto a serial killer, why was Eliza involved at all? Why had she asked for Lucy in particular?

  Lucy flipped her phone in her hand, and then made the decision. It was early, but she was fairly certain that wouldn’t matter.

  Dr. Ali answered on the second ring. “Good morning, Agent Thorne.”

  “Do you know anything about Romans 3:23?”

  “The verse on the boy’s body,” Dr. Ali said, sounding more like he was gathering his thoughts than actually asking for clarification. Lucy didn’t bother filling him in about Kate Martinez. “Yes, I’ve been reading about it ever since I watched Eliza’s interview.”

  “Anything notable?” Lucy asked.

  “The verse itself, of course . . .”

  Lucy had at least gotten that far. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

  “Very good,” Dr. Ali murmured. “There are, of course, different translations, but that is an accepted one.”

  “For all have sinned,” Lucy repeated again, more to herself. “It sounds like a judgment.”

  “You would think that if you look at it out of context,” Dr. Ali said, in that gently correcting, professorial way of his. “And people do. It’s common to cherry-pick phrases from holy books to serve a personal purpose.”

  “Of course.”

  “The passage is in the middle of a larger section, though,” Ali continued. “In layman’s terms—”

  “Appreciate that,” she cut in, earning a fond laugh.

  “Taken alone the words might sound damning, but all together, the message is about everyone being equal under the eyes of God—Jews and Gentile alike, in this specific context,” Dr. Ali said. “We all sin, we all fall short. God is God for a reason.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly, letting that sink in.

  “The very next line is the message that all those who fell short of God are, in fact, all redeemed,” Dr. Ali said, crisp and certain. “Taken together, listen. ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.’”

  Something clicked at that. The care taken with the body. The clean kill. The verse. The ammonia protecting the body from the coyotes.

  “It’s a prayer,” Lucy said softly, almost a whisper.

  Dr. Ali made a pleased sound in agreement. “It could be looked at in that way, yes.”

  “Everyone’s equal under the eyes of God, and everyone is redeemed in the end,” Lucy said, trying to reconcile the vicious cuts with a message that was at its core hopeful.

  “Correct.”

  Lucy stared off into the darkness. “Why would someone slice that into their victim?”

  There was a long pause, and Lucy’s attention snapped back from the road it had started to wander down.

  “If it was a single killing, I would say it was a burial prayer,” Dr. Ali mused. “Maybe not an elegant one, but an attempt to send his soul off with some respect.”

  “But it’s probably not a single killing,” Lucy pointed out.

  “Right. And I . . . I hesitate to bring this up,” Dr. Ali finally said, the spaces between each word long and thoughtful.

  Lucy pinched the bridge of her nose. “Anything could help.”

  He breathed in deep, noisy and obvious, clearly struggling with the decision.

  “I’ll take it with a grain of salt, I swear,” she assured him.

  Dr. Ali laughed a little at that promise, and the previous reluctance in his voice was gone when he spoke. “All right, but please do take this as informational only. It may not be meaningful in the slightest.”

  “I’m practically not even listening,” Lucy said lightly.

  “All right, well, I was reading through the entire passage, and one of the earlier verses reads, ‘Why not say—as some slanderously claim that we say—“Let us do evil that good may result.”’”

  She needed more coffee for this. “Okay, help me out here. They’re saying . . .”

  “Let us do evil that good may result,” Dr. Ali repeated with deliberate emphasis. “While the entirety of the message is condemning that belief, the idea that it is mentioned at all is what I find interesting.”

  It took a second to pick up what he was saying. But when Lucy did, she exhaled on a curse.

  The care with the body, the clean kill, the prayer, the ammonia. “So essentially they’re talking about the ends justifying the means.”

  “Take it with a grain of salt,” Dr. Ali reiterated.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” he asked.

  “Why did you think it was interesting?”

  There was another lengthy pause and then a sigh. “I was looking at it within the facts of the case. The confession and the guilt, as well. Think about what the verse is saying. ‘Let us do evil that good may result.’”

  “But you said that the overall message conveys that the good results don’t justify the evil deeds, correct?”

  “Right, the verse itself is condemning the idea,” Dr. Ali agreed. “The verse says that even claiming that good people do evil for any reason is slander.”

  “So why . . . ?” Lucy knew what he was getting at, but she needed to hear him say it, to put the innuendos into fully formed ideas.

  “There are many things the killer could have chosen to
put on the body,” Dr. Ali said, more controlled than he’d been so far. She knew he was picking through a field of land mines in his own head. One wrong move . . . “And they chose a verse that was included in a passage talking about the ends justifying the means. If they thought that verse explained the killing of the boy, if the murder was an evil act done for some greater good, the killer’s mind would probably latch on to it.”

  “Like how Eliza made me repeat it in the interrogation room.”

  “Exactly in that way, yes,” Dr. Ali said. “The older victims suggest Eliza is at the very least not working alone, if she is involved. But she seems equally invested as the killer is with the verse.”

  “Could it be that it’s someone who grew up in an ultrareligious, cultlike community?” Lucy asked. “And phrases like that simply became part of their everyday vocabulary?”

  Dr. Ali hummed low in his throat. “Well, I’m sure you’re aware of this, but most serial killers who employ religious symbols are not actually killing in the name of God. They grab on to that as a justification for their compulsion, but it is the compulsion itself that makes them kill, not the religious impulse.”

  “Right, yes,” Lucy said slowly, trying to make it all slot into place in her mind.

  Serial killers had rituals they were compelled to follow to satisfy the itch. Some bound their victims in certain ways, some cut off their hair, put makeup on them. Oftentimes, if they killed a victim without following through with their rituals, the murder didn’t even “count” in their minds.

  It was no different for those who added religious symbols into the mix. They might have convinced themselves they were killing for or because of a higher power of some sort, but the rituals of carving crosses into victims’ skin were no different at a psychological level than putting the bodies in certain clothes or using a specific killing method.

  Bottom line was that, like Dr. Ali had been saying since the start, messages like a verse, even sliced into a victim’s body, needed to be taken with a grain of salt.

  It might not mean anything more than that was the killer’s favorite Bible passage. Or they liked the number twenty-three.