She paused in the hallway, when she heard the squeak of a chair from Hicks’s office. He appeared a minute later, loose arms folded over his chest, his shoulder propped up against the doorway, very obviously positioned to look as nonthreatening as possible.
“You know you could just ask for the Martinez file.” Hicks’s voice was easy, casual, almost friendly.
Lucy studied him for a minute, the theory that he was involved clinging like smoke to the inside of her skull. Had he been the one to chase Kate to Montana all those years ago? Had he carried on with Noah and the rest, letting Eliza take the fall? He knew how to make a clean kill. He could easily bear the weight of a body. And at the coroner the verse had been achingly familiar on his lips.
“I have the file,” she finally said. “I do work at the FBI, in case you’ve forgotten.”
His brows rose in a silent question.
Would there be any harm in saying it? “I wanted to see if you did, too,” she admitted.
“Does the fact that I did tell you anything?”
Other than that he was a good cop? Not really. She didn’t answer, but before she moved away, she considered something, then took a chance. “Who do you think killed her? Kate.”
He inhaled, visibly surprised, the reaction lasting only a split second before he was neutral again. “How do you know it wasn’t me?”
Lucy studied him for a long beat, and then turned and walked toward the exit.
“Hey.” Because even Hicks was human, curious.
She stopped but didn’t turn around. “If it had been you, no one ever would have found the body.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
SHERIFF WYATT HICKS
Now
The door to the sheriff’s office clicked shut behind Lucy Thorne as she headed toward the trucks they kept parked out back.
He’d never tried to give her the keys to the spare vehicles before. There had been little he’d been able to control in the past few days, but that at least had been one thing.
Frustration, helplessness, anger, they clawed in his gut as he turned back toward his desk. Reaching into the drawer that he’d caught Lucy snooping around in, he then pulled out the Kate Martinez file.
She was a ghost that had haunted him for seven years.
If he didn’t know the file so well, he would have had a hard time remembering what she looked like. She’d stayed out at Josiah and Rachel’s for only six months, a handful of weeks more maybe. That was it.
But he did know the file well, and he met her deep brown eyes, a sad smile on his face. “You’re important, huh?”
Because she must be. If Lucy was looking to see if he had the woman’s file.
He couldn’t explain to himself why he’d even kept an eye on her cold case.
I don’t want to see. That’s what he’d told Lucy, and it had been as honest as he could be. No matter what, this wasn’t going to end well for any of them. Not for Eliza, not for him, not for his family.
Maybe he had the file memorized, but he hadn’t looked at it since long before Noah’s body had turned up. And so he read it with fresh eyes.
When he got through it, he sat back in his chair.
It was just one detail, one small detail.
But for the first time in a long while, he could finally see the whole picture.
CHAPTER FIFTY
LUCY THORNE
Sunday, 10:45 a.m.
The Cooks’ place was empty, and Lucy checked the date on her phone. Sunday. They’d be at church, in all likelihood.
She should have realized, but she was losing track of time, the days stretching on forever and then snapping into the next like a rubber band.
There wasn’t much she could do but wait for them to return. She didn’t have a warrant, and there wasn’t probable cause she could justify.
For now, she glanced around on the off chance there was a helpful sign that pointed to the location of Molly’s body, or at least something that would give her an excuse to go poking about. But the yard was as tidy as it had been before.
There were storm clouds rolling in from the distance, but now it was just cool, crisp. Fall in Idaho, edging toward winter. She remembered dashing out of her car only two days ago to meet Wyatt Hicks, who’d been standing on the ridge like some middle-aged accountant’s dream of a cowboy.
Where did he fit into this? Where did Eliza?
She started pacing as she stared at the little house in front of her, trying to force the strange parts of the case into something that made sense.
Molly Thomas had gone to Zoey Grant weeks ago, trying to warn her about something. Then she’d disappeared.
Three weeks after that was when Eliza said she killed Noah Dawson, before then waiting two full days to go all the way to Seattle to confess to the murder. Asking for Lucy when she did.
Hicks was Eliza’s uncle, and he’d kept that from her.
Meanwhile, they had three bodies in the woods where Noah had been found, one of whom was good friends with Molly Thomas and Eliza Cook.
Noah had bruises on his body that were old. And there had been a lot of them.
That last one stopped her. Surprised her.
She’d mostly forgotten it after meeting Darcy Dawson, who’d painted a realistic portrait of a grieving mother.
Noah also had a Bible verse—a prayer by some interpretations—carved into his skin. A verse that was in a passage about the ends justifying the means.
If the killings weren’t about torture, they were about . . .
Her eyes stayed locked on the house as she struggled to finish the thought.
The bruises.
Her brain had snagged on that, presenting the fact on a nice silver platter as if it meant something.
The bruises. The shield laws.
Lucy dipped back into the truck for a card she’d slotted into her wallet yesterday.
Her cell’s battery was low, but not dead yet, and Lucy carefully punched in the number on the little card she’d pulled from her bag.
“Why didn’t you win?” Lucy asked when Peggy answered.
Peggy didn’t hesitate, didn’t ask who it was, didn’t go for a greeting. “Senator Hodge convinced the rest of the committee that the shield laws were about freedom from the government. Once that happened, we didn’t stand a chance.”
Lucy closed her eyes. She was so close, but not quite there yet. “But did you point out that kids were dying?”
“Of course.” Peggy sighed. “But it’s not abuse, you know? It’s actual illnesses that may or may not have been fixed by doctors and hospitals and whatnot.”
“If it had been abuse, like a parent hit a kid so badly they bled to death, what would happen then?”
“Then Hicks could charge them,” Peggy said slowly. “The shield laws only exist to protect medical-care decisions. Not active abuse. So prayer is a valid form of treatment, whereas beating your kid gets you charged.”
“But they made it about freedom of religion,” Lucy said, leaning back against the truck. That answer, the one that she could see only out of the corner of her eye, started taking solid shape.
“And freedom from government.” A sore spot with folks who lived on modern frontiers—Lucy knew that intimately. It would be easy to manipulate those fears out here.
But not everywhere.
“Other places. Do they have these shield laws?”
“No, only a handful of states left now,” Peggy said. “A few recently knocked them down. We were hoping for that momentum to kind of help us along. Though we knew it was a long shot.”
Lucy straightened. “What made them do it?”
“What?”
“The other states,” Lucy clarified. “What made those states change them? The laws.”
“Oregon and Tennessee,” Peggy said, slow and thoughtful. “Both had two high-profile cases with teenagers who had cancer. The parents actually took them to the doctors, which was their mistake because then the diagnoses were on record.”<
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“They died?”
“Yeah, but months later,” Peggy said. “The parents got cold feet, and even when the doctors tried to follow up, all they got was radio silence.”
Cold feet. Or someone in their Church had gotten to them.
Peggy continued. “Nothing unusual about that if you follow these kinds of communities, though.”
“Then why . . . ?”
“Did they have an impact?” Peggy guessed. “They both got some press. Coming one right after the other? It looked bad. Real bad.”
“Enough attention to change lawmakers’ votes.”
“Exactly,” Peggy said. “In Tennessee, it wasn’t four months after they’d knocked down an attempt to overturn the law that a new bill was introduced. It didn’t mention the girl specifically, but everyone knew what was going on. That was the only thing that had really changed in those four months. It’s not hard to draw the lines between the dots. The new legislation passed unanimously.”
Lucy’s pulse kicked up. The bruises. “Would that be enough? To convince Senator Hodge?”
“Don’t know about her—don’t think anything would make that stubborn cow budge,” Peggy said. “But the others? There were a few on the fence. Yeah, if we had something like that happen here, it might help us actually have a chance. It’s hard to get any actual records, though. They don’t go to doctors.”
Everything slowed, tilted, and then crystallized.
There had been no older children who had died of something like cancer in the Church despite there being four cases in Knox Hollow in recent years. Statistically, that was almost impossible.
So what if . . . those bruises Noah had weren’t just a little kid being clumsy? There’d been too many of them, the damage lasting and deep—she’d had that thought from the first time she’d seen them. They were the kind that showed up on kids who were sick.
What if . . . What if he’d had cancer? What if he’d been like one of those cases in Oregon or Tennessee? Darcy had already lost a child and had another one who seemed sick. If she would have noticed Noah’s condition, there was a good chance she would have actually taken him to a doctor.
Or she would have tried to. Maybe like those other cases, she would have had one appointment before someone found out, before someone tried to stop her.
Momentum, Peggy had said. Would Noah’s case have been enough to get the shield laws finally overturned? If he’d died, and there had been a record of his diagnosis out there somewhere, would an impossible war actually be won?
This was what had been missing the whole time. The motive. The why.
Why kill someone who’s already dying?
Because Noah’s file needed to say missing and not dead.
It was the last thought Lucy had before something struck the back of her head, and she went down hard, sliding into the abyss as she fell.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
MOLLY THOMAS
Now
Molly had nothing to lose. Or so she reasoned.
She’d been moved, which probably meant that there was no need to keep her hidden and alive anymore.
What did that mean for Eliza?
Molly pushed the thought away. It wasn’t constructive and would do nothing to help her right now.
The drugs that had knocked her out enough to get her to the little shack where she was currently being held were still in her blood, her mind slow and easily distracted.
Her position didn’t help anything, either. She was on the bed, both arms above her head, tied to the metal frame, her hands enough of a distance apart that she couldn’t reach the other wrist. So she used friction to try to get the knots loose, rotating her arms back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
The skin rubbed raw at her wrists, and still she kept going, her eyes on the sun as it worked its way across the floor.
There was nothing in the one-room shedlike cabin to hint at its owner. The bed was the only furniture, the walls were bare, the windows small and higher than normal.
Molly thought there should be pain now—the wetness of her own blood trickled down her arms in an excruciatingly slow slide—yet it felt like there was cotton in her body, dulling anything other than the knowledge that it was happening at all.
When the rope finally relented, just an inch, endorphins surged in, taking her higher. She kept up with it, back and forth, adding a twist now that she had the taste of freedom. It took a long time—so long that she could tell the sun had risen in the sky—but she had enough of a gap to bend her fingers to the edge of the rope and pull.
She didn’t realize at first when the rope gave even farther, enough to slip her narrow hand out of its restraint. Molly just kept working at it, until the signals from nerves in her hands finally crawled through the molasses of her thoughts to get her to stop.
Once one hand was out, the other was simple. Her fingers were all but numb, but she stared at them until they cooperated enough to get the knot to loosen. Then it was her ankles, and then she was free.
Free. Her legs were wobbly, a colt testing its ability to stand for the first time. She stumbled, just like it would have, toward the door.
Her brain whited out when she went to turn the knob and the wood rattled against the gold dead bolts that held the door shut.
You knew it would be locked. You knew. Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic.
There was no glass on the door that she could break through, but there were windows, high up on the walls. She eyed them and for once in her life was grateful that she was tall and skinny.
She dragged the metal frame of the bed to the closest one. The windows were all glass, no wood frames separating the panes. That would make it easier.
On the small chance that it had been left unlocked, Molly first attempted to open it. As expected it didn’t budge. Painted shut.
She pulled off her shirt and wrapped it around her fist, pain flaring up along her arm when the fabric brushed against the tender wounds on her wrists.
Molly ignored it, breathed deep, and then punched the glass. Her fist bounced back, and for a heartbeat she didn’t feel anything. Then the agony of vulnerable bones meeting an unmovable object took her to her knees.
The mattress squeaked, metal coils digging into her flesh, but they only distantly registered. Molly used all her concentration to fight off the blackness that threatened, drawing in oxygen through clenched teeth as she cradled her arm close to her chest.
Time passed. Maybe. Or maybe she was dead and this was hell and time didn’t actually exist anymore. Her parents had always told her she wasn’t pure of faith. Told her she was too easily wooed by temptation and the devil—and Eliza, even. She’d always pictured hell with more fire, but maybe it was just a cabin in the woods with just enough freedom to try to escape and not enough to actually accomplish it.
You’re losing it.
She squeezed her eyes shut, tight, tight, tight, the reverse image of the metal bed frame a slash of light against dark lids.
And that was it.
She shifted to stumble off the mattress, onto the floor. Metal, there was metal. Metal could break glass.
Molly scooted far enough under that she could see the workings of the frame. It was simple, just three pieces interlocking together. She pushed herself back out and then dragged the mattress off with her good hand. Then she yanked at the frame until the smallest piece of it came off. It was still heavy and unwieldy. It was meant to hold up one side of the bed, after all.
Breathing deep, she slowly uncurled her shattered fist. The knuckles were already purple and swollen, brutally ugly but fascinating at the same time.
The drugs had burned off, and so had most of her adrenaline, and she could actually feel her heartbeat in all the aching places. Still, she gripped the end of the metal piece and swung at the small crack she’d already made in the glass.
The impact nearly sent her down again, but she wouldn’t let it. She wouldn’t let it.
She swun
g again, and again, and again, until the crack became a spiderweb that covered the entire window. At the bottom left was its underbelly, the weakest spot that she’d been aiming for with each blow.
Sweat had turned her palms slippery, was stinging against her eyes. Pain had become a constant, just like the darkness had been in the bunker. She sank into it, just like she had then, using it, letting it power her swings.
One more, one more. That’s all she needed. She lost track of the times she told herself this. And then it became true.
One more.
The glass all at once surrendered, falling apart into glittery shards that cascaded onto her shoulders and arms. The euphoria kissed the little cuts, though, made them better, and carried her through reassembling the bed frame, positioning it beneath the window so that she was at chest level with it once again. She used her shirt to clear away most of the glass but didn’t waste time with the pieces still sticking up. As long as she didn’t catch an artery, she would be okay.
Using a strength she hadn’t known she possessed, Molly boosted herself up and through the window. The sharp edges caught on her exposed torso, but the thick skirt she was wearing protected the vulnerable skin at the top of her thighs. She didn’t even try to stop the fall once she made it mostly through, her weight and gravity doing the work.
Molly hit the ground hard, rolling enough that she landed on a shoulder and not flat on her face. Every bruised part of her sang out, but she breathed through it. When she thought she was capable of standing, she pushed to her feet, gave her shirt one shake to get the glass out, and then slipped it on as she took off running.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
LUCY THORNE
Now
The throbbing in the back of Lucy’s head pulled her out of the darkness.
There was light. She blinked, saw the patterns of it on the backs of her eyelids.
Her tongue sat heavy in her sand-dry mouth. A hacking cough wrenched through her body, sending the pain at the base of her skull crashing through her ribs, down into her pelvis and thigh bones.
Her Final Words Page 24
