Her Final Words

by Brianna Labuskes

  Lucy squinted out toward the trees at the back of the property, seeing other ones in her mind. The forest, the bodies. “So what you’re telling me is it’s either crucially important or not important at all? Thanks a lot.”

  There was no bite in her voice, and Dr. Ali laughed. “I am not envious of your job, Agent Thorne.”

  Lucy nodded even though he couldn’t see her. “Hey, Dr. Ali.”

  “Hmm?”

  “What do you think?” Lucy rested her head back against the rocking chair, tipping it into motion. Could she honestly say she was above doing evil if it had made the difference in one of her unsolved cases? “Do the ends ever justify the means?”

  “Philosophers and religious texts much wiser than I have yet to answer that question, my dear,” Dr. Ali said.

  “I’m not asking what philosophers and religious texts say,” Lucy corrected.

  He huffed out a small breath, and then there was more of that silence, the kind that had punctuated their whole conversation, the kind that was so much a part of his careful cadence that it made Lucy smile in spite of the headache brewing at the spot the knife had sunk into Noah Dawson’s skull.

  “I suppose I would have to say yes,” he finally said. “There are times when an evil act may lead to the greater good. And what is one soul’s destruction if a million more may be saved?”

  Despite the fact that it echoed the thought she’d just had, Lucy shook her head. “But who gets to decide whose soul is destroyed?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  ELIZA COOK

  Three days earlier

  The bus smelled of fried chicken and something simultaneously sour and smoky—marijuana, some distant part of her had noted.

  Eliza had wrinkled her nose at the combination when she’d taken a seat by the window. She hadn’t picked the back of the bus, nor the front. Both would be too obvious. Her point was to blend in.

  When an older gentleman in a paperboy hat and bow tie had settled in beside her with a friendly but distant smile, she’d finally relaxed, letting her head drop to rest on the cool glass of the window.

  Now, as they neared Seattle, Eliza stared at the dirt beneath her fingernails, a thin, dark line that hadn’t gone away even when she’d scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed in the nasty bus station bathroom.

  She sat on her hands so that she wouldn’t rake her nails across her eyes to dig out the images of Noah Dawson’s bloated face, swollen in death, the flies greedy for the blood that had gone cold days earlier.

  When she’d first seen it, her stomach had heaved, a violent spasm that had sent her stumbling away, bent over, bile burning against her throat, the acidic remnants of it lingering on her tongue.

  Her brain had taken mercy on her and had checked out for the rest of it. There was a white space where the memory of moving his body should be. She could still smell it, though, beneath the marijuana and greasy meat, the stench of death clinging to each molecule of her being. She thought it always would.

  In wars, it’s not the people that matter but the beliefs, she’d told herself over and over again on a manic loop as she’d wrapped the body in a tarp, as she’d dragged it through the woods, the muscles in her arms straining against the weight.

  She didn’t want to go too far. If she did, the other victims may never be found. And that’s what was important—that they be found.

  Eliza wanted them to be found.

  Molly most of all, some part of her had whispered, making a lie of her mantra. Eliza had tried desperately not to think of her as she placed the ammonia-soaked rags in a triangle pattern around Noah to keep the predators at bay for as long as possible. Tried not to think about what Molly’s face would look like after being in the ground. Tried not to think of the judgment that would be there anyway.

  An announcement cut in over her thoughts. Ten minutes. They’d arrive in ten minutes.

  She leaned forward to dig in the backpack she’d brought with her. She’d ditch it before she went to the FBI, but it provided a comforting weight against her feet for now.

  Eliza pulled out the burner phone she’d bought at Walmart. That purchase, more than anything, had sent spikes of fear through her body. She wasn’t this person, this person who needed a phone she could easily throw away so as not to be traceable.

  Except she was that person.

  She powered it on now. She had to move quickly.

  Eliza sent messages to two separate numbers, both of which she had memorized.

  The first text was an address. That bus station that now felt like it was from a past life.

  The second was directions to her safety-deposit box, the one that held all her secrets. No one knew it was hers. But she’d spent the past few weeks getting it ready. Perfect.

  Everything had to be perfect.

  Her stomach ached, hollow and still heaving, but she ignored it as best she could. Once the second message was sent, Eliza powered off the cell, popped the battery out of the thing, and retrieved the SIM card, stuffing it down into the crack of the seat cushion.

  It wouldn’t accomplish much; they probably wouldn’t even bother taking the time to figure out how she’d gotten to Seattle. But it made her feel like she was doing something.

  Eliza’s body went through the rest of the motions. Slinging the backpack onto her shoulders, disembarking the bus, keeping her chin down, angled away from the station building and any potential security cameras. She walked a few blocks and ignored the catcalls, ignored the one man who had tried to follow her. Had followed her until a cop car swooped a siren warning at him and he’d melted into the night. At the sight of the flashing blue-and-red lights, she’d been a second away from sinking to her knees, hands in the air. But the police officers hadn’t even bothered to stop, just kept on their patrol, probably already forgetting the incident.

  She thought about trying to eat the protein bar in one of her backpack’s pockets, but the already-unappetizing cardboard-like chocolate would taste like sand in her mouth, and she was pretty sure her stomach would protest anything right now. So Eliza tossed it along with the bag in a dumpster behind a shady bar with a neon sign buzzing in its window.

  Back on the street, she hailed a cab with the last twenty she’d folded neatly into the pocket of her skirt, the city’s lights blurring as they sped down the highway.

  The city lights were nothing like the stars back home, but they reminded her of them anyway. She and Molly, their backs against the post, staring up at the sky, dreaming of big things and small trivialities.

  And now the stench of death clung to Eliza, and Molly was missing. Probably dead. Just like Alessandra.

  No.

  There was no reason for Molly to be dead, no reason.

  Except . . . except . . .

  There was a reason. You, the nasty little voice whispered. You got her killed.

  But if Molly was dead, Eliza wouldn’t be here, in the back of a taxi that had chewed gum stuck to the door handle and a wet stain on one of the seats.

  The driver cleared his throat in a way that spoke of multiple, annoyed attempts of getting her attention.

  “Sorry,” she said quietly, climbing out of the cab and waving off his offer of change. His eyes went from her pale face to the plaque that hung on the side of the building, and the money disappeared in a flash. Tires squealed on pavement, and she was left alone.

  Eliza had thought there would be dread, fear, something coursing through her, but there wasn’t. There wasn’t anything. Only a calm determination rooted in the blind, perhaps naive, confidence that Molly was not dead.

  A fluorescent light shimmied on the verge of death above her as she stepped into the lobby, the boy at the front desk looking up from his computer at the sound of the door closing. She crossed to him.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, bored, like a visitor in the middle of the night wasn’t anything out of the normal. Maybe it wasn’t.

  “I need to speak to Agent Lucy Thorne.” Eliza took her last brea
th of free air. “I’d like to report a murder, please.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  LUCY THORNE

  Sunday, 6:00 a.m.

  “There aren’t any cuts on the other victims,” Vaughn said as soon as the call connected, not bothering with a greeting.

  Lucy paused on the sidewalk outside the B and B. She’d been heading out, in the direction of the sheriff’s office. Zoey was going to meet her there, but Lucy had said she’d be fine walking.

  “What?”

  “No wounds, no notches on the bone to signal that the marks had been there,” Vaughn reported.

  “But Kate Martinez . . . ,” Lucy said, slow and confused, moving forward but not paying attention to where she was going.

  “I know.”

  “So they’re not connected?” Lucy tried it out, though she knew it was unlikely. The three victims in the woods had been found too close to where Noah had been left to be a coincidence. The world didn’t work that way.

  “I looked at the photos of the Martinez girl, and I think you’re right about the Bible verse,” Vaughn said, clipped and precise. She was as confused as Lucy was, and annoyed about it. “So that means Martinez and Noah are linked. And the fact that she may have worked in the same house as our self-confessed killer lived . . .”

  “But Eliza was a kid then. She must have been nine or ten years old.”

  Vaughn grunted in a very un-Vaughn-like manner. “Right.”

  “So whoever it was chased Kate Martinez to Montana,” Lucy said. She closed her eyes, running the timeline through her head. “The oldest victim in the woods—do we have a TOD window for that body?”

  “Hold on.” There was shuffling, then the sounds of a keyboard.

  “Looked like about eight to twelve years old based on decomp,” Lucy thought out loud.

  “No,” Vaughn said. “Just confirmed it’s fresher than that. The weather accelerated the process.”

  And right then, Lucy knew. “Let me guess, it’s from about seven years ago.”

  “Right when Kate Martinez would have been in Knox Hollow,” Vaughn agreed grimly.

  “Her family working at the Cooks’ ranch,” Lucy said, trying to fit the pieces together. “But she was in her early twenties.”

  “Are the notes from the conversations with her parents in the file?”

  They were, but calling them spotty would be generous. They had been as wary about cops as most people were out here.

  “Can you get me their current number?” Lucy asked in lieu of answering.

  “Working on it.”

  It was a tough request, and Lucy swallowed her frustration before she ended up taking it out on the wrong person.

  “Martinez was shot, correct?” Vaughn asked.

  “Yeah, it was a clean kill like Noah,” Lucy said, without needing to recheck the file. All the details had seared themselves into her memory. “But they used a gun instead of a knife.”

  Neither murder had been about torture. That was important. Because if the murders hadn’t been about the kill itself, if it hadn’t been about inflicting pain on the victims, or fulfilling some kind of psychological need for the killer, what was the point of them?

  A motive would be nice.

  “The oldest body in the woods,” Lucy breathed out. “Have they been able to determine COD?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What if . . . ?” Lucy squinted up at the sun, some of the puzzle pieces so tantalizingly close yet so far away at the same time. “What if the oldest body was the serial killer’s first victim? Or one of their first. Kate Martinez witnessed something she wasn’t supposed to. Ran with her family, but the killer found her.”

  “That would explain the weapon choice. Guns are easier for less experienced people,” Vaughn said, easily following Lucy’s logic. “They create distance.”

  Most people didn’t understand that. They didn’t grasp the fact that a knife required intimacy, dedication. A gun, you could just pull the trigger. A knife, you had to sink into a victim’s body.

  “Or,” Vaughn continued when Lucy didn’t say anything further, “Eliza is a copycat killer. And we’re dealing with two murderers here instead of one.”

  “But how would she have even known about Kate’s murder? The verse?” Lucy asked. “Those weren’t in the newspaper articles about the death. Hell, they weren’t even noted in the police file.”

  “If you knew what to look for, you could see it in the photographs,” Vaughn pointed out.

  “But how would Eliza even have access to the file?”

  Hicks. The obvious answer hung in the silence between them.

  “Okay, okay,” Lucy said slowly. “What’s going on here? Eliza somehow stumbles upon information about a girl who worked at her ranch while Eliza was a kid? Then she thought, Hey that sounds like a fun idea?”

  They both knew that theory was absurd and Vaughn didn’t even validate it with a response.

  “Okay, more likely the killer is someone in the Knox Hollow community,” Lucy said. “And Eliza knows who it is but is scared to go to . . .”

  Hicks. Again with Hicks.

  “The local law enforcement,” Vaughn finished dryly, knowing exactly what Lucy was hesitating to say out loud. “Even if she didn’t have access to the file, which she still might have, you’re mentioned in the articles about Martinez’s death.”

  “She wanted me to connect the killings.” She asked for me? “But how did she even know what happened to Noah? How did she know where the knife was buried?”

  Vaughn didn’t have the answers, of course. But asking the questions helped Lucy collect her thoughts.

  “Noah is the wrong piece,” she finally said, quietly, to herself more than to Vaughn. “The rest makes sense. It lines up with how a serial killer operates. Refining their methods. Maybe even narrowing down on victim type. If Molly Thomas turns out to be the last victim, then we are seeing a pattern of young women start to emerge.”

  “But Noah blows it all up,” Vaughn said. “Not only is the victim completely different from the emerging pattern, the killer has fallen back on old methods, like using the verse.”

  “Are there any cases that have presented like that before?” Lucy asked. She knew her history, the famous cases, the nonfamous ones. She had a solid grasp of the psychology involved in serial murders, understood theories on escalation and methodology. But she was far from an expert.

  “Nothing comes to mind,” Vaughn said, sounding reluctant to admit she might not have an encyclopedic knowledge of the topic.

  In the end, it didn’t matter what the norm was. This particular serial killer had reverted. What Lucy needed to do was figure out why.

  Lucy blew out a breath. “I need coffee.”

  Vaughn hummed sympathetically. “I’ll work on getting you more information on the Martinez case.”

  “Thanks,” Lucy said as she hung up and continued toward the sheriff’s office, her thoughts disorganized. She could already see Zoey waiting outside for her, just her silhouette at this distance. The woman lifted her hand in greeting when Lucy neared.

  Part of her wanted to tell Zoey about the Martinez case, but something held her back.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Zoey. Despite her protestations to the contrary, Zoey actually seemed like a decent cop. Maybe not a standout, but certainly smart enough to keep up.

  Still, Lucy hesitated, thinking of their conversation on the way back from Peggy’s. She’d walked away from that with the distinct impression that Deputy Zoey Grant had secrets. Lucy had already seen how that turned out with the sheriff.

  “No new developments, then?” Zoey asked as she unlocked the building, casual, like she had been this entire case. Lucy was probably being paranoid.

  “Nothing.” Lucy let her real exhaustion show, scrubbing a hand over her face. “Feels like I’m spinning my wheels here.”

  They crossed through the small bullpen to Zoey’s office. There was no one else in the building, not that L
ucy was surprised. It was far too early on a Sunday for most people to be up and about.

  Lucy’s phone vibrated once in her pocket—a message, not a call—and she unlocked the screen, thumbing open her inbox as they settled into Zoey’s office.

  When a surprised “Huh” slipped out at the sender’s name, Zoey looked over from where she’d been studying the whiteboard.

  “What?”

  Lucy tapped into the email itself. “The coroner actually sent me something I asked for.”

  Zoey’s nose wrinkled. “Jackson? What did you want?”

  “A list,” Lucy said absently. “Of all the kids from Knox Hollow who have died when he’s been coroner.”

  The message itself was curt, but there was a spreadsheet attached. Lucy opened that to find too many names listed in harsh black and white. The scone Annie Tate had shoved into her hands as she’d passed the kitchen that morning turned to lead in her stomach.

  “I’m shocked,” Zoey commented. “Jackson usually fights tooth and nail against us. I would have put money on him conveniently ‘forgetting’ you had wanted something from him.”

  “That was my guess, too.” She would have gotten a warrant if he’d stalled long enough, but she was thankful she didn’t have to.

  Lucy pushed to her feet, crossing to the whiteboard and creating a new column next to Eliza’s and Noah’s names.

  “There’s a lot of them,” she told Zoey, who had come to stand at her shoulder. She handed over the phone. “Can you tell me the ones who aren’t connected to the Church first?”

  Because whatever this was, Lucy was fairly certain it was tied up in that group.

  “I’ll try.” Zoey took the phone gingerly, cradling it as if the names needed her to be careful.

  Eliminating the non-Church kids turned out to be the easy part. There were only a handful on there, much like what would have been expected in a town the size of Knox Hollow. There had been two drownings, a kid who had broken his neck falling from his horse, a hunting accident, and then four who had died of cancer. That last category was perhaps a little higher than Lucy would have guessed, but in rural areas without easy access to specialists or high-tech equipment, it wasn’t that shocking.