Back off, Detective. We’d hate to see your brother leave Valley View in a body bag.
He flinched when his phone rang, his heart pounding in his ears. He knew he had to reach for it, had to look, had to answer. But he couldn’t stop his mind from imagining the worst. The number would belong to Valley View State Prison. The voice, to some apathetic administrator who’d pretend to care Ben had been shanked in the shower, or thrown from the tier, or choked with a bedsheet. Will would have to live with it.
“Will Decker, Homicide.”
“Hey, Will. It’s JB.” He knew then it was the next worst thing. Because JB never called him Will. “I just heard from dispatch. Looks like the lightkeeper found a body down at Little Gull.”
Will retrieved the lid, covered the shoebox. Tucked the whole awful thing under his arm. “I’ll meet you there. I’ve gotta make a stop first. Are you sure it’s—”
“It’s her. Shauna.”
The sun still hadn’t come up, and Will sat in his truck, reeling. Wishing he could call it a day. The shoebox watched him from the floorboard, guarding its dark secret. He had to admit he had no clue what to do.
Once upon a time, he would’ve called his dad. When it came to bad news, Captain Henry Decker always had a plan. He knew a guy; he could call in a favor. He could make problems disappear. Even after he’d retired, he kept his finger on the pulse of the city, and his boys—the two he could depend on, anyway—on a tight leash.
It had been nearly two years since Will had dialed the number he knew by heart. His father would be up by now, shaving his face like he did every morning. Preparing the same breakfast he’d been making since the day Mom walked out. Two eggs, sunny side up. Two strips of crispy bacon. One glass of OJ with a nip of vodka that had become more substantial with every passing year. After all the shit they’d put him through—Petey, the black sheep; Ben, the crooked cop; and Will, a full-on Judas—that glass was probably all vodka by now.
Will punched in the area code, then the first three numbers. He thought of what he’d say and what his dad would say back. How his father would blame him like he always did. How he’d hear the booze in his hello from three hundred miles away. How he’d hang up first, like a scared little boy hiding from Daddy’s belt.
He mashed the button, deleting the numbers in one fell swoop, and composed a text to Olivia instead.
His finger hovered for a moment, the reality of the morning still sinking in. Again, he glanced at the box, confirming its existence. Real.
He took a breath. Pressed send.
Chapter Forty-Three
Are you awake?
Olivia almost laughed when the text bubble appeared on her screen at 4:45 a.m. The wine had done the trick, put her right to sleep. But that dream—that nightmare—had dragged her to the surface way too fast, leaving her sick and gasping. Like a diver with the bends, she still hadn’t recovered.
Yep. I’m awake.
If you could call it that.
Deck’s reply came back in an instant.
Is Emily?
Two words, innocent in their own right. Together, they made her skin cold. She sat up and put on her sweatshirt. It didn’t help.
I doubt it.
Meet outside in ten minutes.
Olivia’s hands trembled as she opened the search browser and typed Shauna Ambrose. She couldn’t wait ten minutes. Couldn’t stomach the thought of Em curled in bed, oblivious.
The results told her nothing she didn’t already know. She felt reassured but her dream-self lingered in the dark, mute with panic.
Shoving her worry into a cobwebbed corner of her mind, Olivia tugged on a pair of blue jeans, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and splashed cold water on her face until she felt halfway human again.
She padded down the dark hallway, somehow much darker than her bedroom, and stopped outside Emily’s door, waiting for her eyes to adjust. When she took the knob in her hand, she almost cried out. It reminded her of the one on the dream door, cold but yielding to her touch.
It opened effortlessly. Emily’s bed unmade, and empty.
For one horrified second, Olivia stood there like always, frozen. Taking in the shard of moonlight on Em’s comforter. Her painting of Little Gull, finished now and resting against the wall, another blank canvas on the easel. On her dresser, displayed adjacent to the snow globe, the smooth red rock she’d taken from the river.
She hurried out and down the hallway, searching. The guest bath, empty. Kitchen light, off. Mom’s old room, cold and musty.
Tears welled in her eyes, but she fought them off like she always did, wondering if this was how it felt to be a parent. This roller coaster of panic and relief. It certainly explained her mother’s perpetual need to be a little bit tipsy. Ever since Olivia had come back here, she couldn’t shake the fear that clung to her like a shadow. No wonder she’d had that dream.
“Thank God,” she heard herself whisper.
Emily lay on the sofa, still in last night’s clothes, her head propped on a sofa cushion.
Olivia covered her with the throw and took one last look, before she put on her coat and boots and went outside to wait for Deck. The thought gnawing like it always did.
Em is all I have left.
Deck’s headlights approached down the long, straight road. As he neared the house, a deer bounded across the highway and disappeared into the forest, heading for parts unknown. Olivia envied that. The ease of escape. Because when he turned into the driveway, and she finally met his eyes, she saw a heaviness there that threatened to drop the ground out from under her.
He cut the engine and climbed out. Already dressed for work, she noticed, in a white button-down and gray slacks. His gun, holstered on his belt and that badge—the talisman her father had feared and loathed in equal parts—glinting in her porch light. He stepped closer to her.
“Olivia…”
She couldn’t remember ever hearing him say her name aloud. She liked it, but not like this. It clunked out, hollow. A bell with no ringer.
“I didn’t want you or Emily to hear it on the news. Someone found a body at the beach.”
Olivia’s knees felt wobbly. She didn’t trust them. “Is it Shauna?”
“I haven’t been out there yet. JB called me at the station. He seemed convinced it’s her.”
“Does her grandma know? Her parents?”
“Not yet.”
Olivia nodded. She bore it like she always did. Like a soldier. But inside, she felt her heart break again, a jagged little fissure that branched out from the big one, the crack that had been there for twenty-seven years. Her heart had been broken before she’d even learned to ride a bicycle. Before she’d lost all her baby teeth.
Deck didn’t ask permission when he wiped a tear from her cheek. His touch, a salve, though his fingers felt cold against her skin. She stuttered forward, then back, unsure what to do next. But he seemed certain, pulling her into his arms.
She’d imagined it, him holding her. Still, it shocked her how good it felt. To lean into the solid wall of his chest. To feel the steady push and pull of his breathing. To let someone else bear the weight of her burden even for a moment.
When he released her, she heard him sigh. A tremulous breath that made her wonder if that embrace had been just as much for him as for her. A salve for his burden, too.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “I mean, is there something else?”
He looked at her for a long time before he answered. Even as his eyes welled, she recognized the hesitation, that need to soldier on, no different than her own.
“No. And yes.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Will drove to Little Gull on autopilot, his mind traveling elsewhere. To the shoebox on the floorboard. To Valley View. To Olivia’s porch and her arms around his waist. He’d wanted her touch, needed it even, but not like that. Not with her tears wetting his shirt and the hurt in her eyes when he’d told her about Shauna. Then he’d felt guilty as hell when she’d
proven what he’d already suspected. She could see right through his bullshit, could tell he’d been about to lose it himself.
Will parked in the lot on the bluff, between JB’s blue Camaro—a wedding present from his second ex—and Chet’s old pickup. A couple of patrol cars had already arrived. Will felt certain the media vans weren’t far behind. Those vultures could smell death for miles.
The lighthouse beacon pricked the still-dark sky. No trace of fog this morning. Even so, he couldn’t spot the horizon from here. As he walked to the wooden staircase, he tried to preserve the moment. Before. The ocean air, the waves kissing the rocks, the salt grass swaying in the light wind. After, he knew this beach would be ruined for him forever. Just another hazard of the job.
JB waited on the bottom step, holding a large flashlight, while Chet moved carefully above him. Will quietly groaned when he spotted the rest of their so-called team, Graham and Jessie, further down the beach.
“’Bout time you showed up,” JB grumbled, as Will ducked under the crime scene tape strung from one side of the railing to the other. “You stuck me out here with Tweedledum and Dumber.”
Chet paused before snapping a photograph to cast a disapproving glance at JB over his shoulder.
“Not you, Doc. Those two nincompoops.”
“Milner’s not so bad.” Will watched Jessie work, scanning the sand with her flashlight. Meanwhile, Graham worked on his pouty face. “Anyway, I’m sorry. There was something I had to do.”
He ignored JB’s quizzical expression and finally forced himself to look at the blonde hair strewn on the step like seaweed. The head lolling forward. The hands, already bagged. “Catch me up.”
“Well, it’s definitely our girl, Shauna Ambrose. She’s got that triple piercing in her ears her mom told us about and the butterfly ankle tattoo. Doc, you want to tell him the rest?”
“She’s been dead about twenty-four hours. Probably killed shortly after she abandoned her car. Same as the others. Manual strangulation. Minimal sea lice activity, no other insects. She’s probably been out here a couple hours at most.”
Chet didn’t even look up, just rattled off the facts with the kind of stoicism Will didn’t envy but recognized. By the time he’d retired, his father had been that way too. Practiced in the dirty business of death. Barely blinking as he uttered phrases like circling the drain to describe the condition of a victim to his buddies.
“The garrote?” Will asked.
“Identical. And her pants were pulled down to her knees. Underwear, too. But we did—”
JB cleared his throat, the obnoxious rattle stopping Chet mid-sentence, as Graham and Jessie headed back up the beach within earshot. Jessie carried a few items in her gloved hands. Graham carried nothing but a single used beer can and a chip on his shoulder, visible even from here.
“Found a couple of beer cans and a few cigarette butts.” His face half in shadow, Will couldn’t read Graham’s expression, but he sounded like a man who’d just traipsed a cold beachfront picking up trash. “No footprints. The garbage cans were empty.”
“Bag them up for the lab,” JB said. “Then head on back to the station. Keep working on that UBO. We’ll finish up here.”
Jessie started up the hill, alongside the stairs. But Graham stayed put, fixed like an anchor in the sand.
“That’s it?” he asked. “Chief Flack said—”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what Chief Flack said. Out here, Decker and I are in charge. You’re both way too green to be working a case like this anyway. Your best bet is to stay out of our way.”
“Whatever you say, Grandpa.” Graham dropped the beer can he’d collected onto the beach and kicked it, sending it skittering up into the salt grass. He followed Jessie up the hill, huffing and muttering under his breath.
Will stifled a grin, relishing the distraction as much as JB’s putting that punk in his place. “What’s gotten into you, Gramps?”
“Shoddy police work, that’s what. Bauer and Milner heard the call over the radio. Thank God Chet and I got here when we did. Bauer almost lost our smoking gun messing around with the body. Trying to look at her hands.”
“Her hands?”
Chet stopped working, nodded. “With her being dead over twenty-four hours, she’s in full rigor mortis. Officer Bauer spotted something clenched between her fingers, and he thought he’d just reach right in there and grab it. Break the case and be the hero. Milner tried to stop him. We walked up just in time.”
Will shook his head, though it didn’t surprise him. He’d worked with plenty of cowboy cops. Guys ready to write their own rules just to break them. “So, what’s with her hands then?” he asked.
JB pointed the flashlight back at the body. Shauna’s slender arms dead-ended into plastic bags, tightly rubber-banded at her wrists. Beneath the bags, he imagined her fingers, delicate as a bird’s bones. Just as cold and stiff as the gull in that shoebox.
“This one fought back. She took something from that asshole that’s gonna lead us right to him.”
“Are you going to make me guess?”
JB offered a smirk, nothing more.
“Hair,” Chet said, finally. “She got a handful of hair.”
Will paused at the bottom of the stairs—bare since they’d carted the body away—and looked toward the beach, desolate and gray now even with the sun strong-arming its way over the horizon. He’d been right. Ruined.
“How do you think she got down there?” JB asked.
As Will had watched Chet’s crew struggle to lug the stretcher up the steps and to the van, he’d wondered the same.
“Let’s walk,” he told JB, pointing the hundred or so yards to the drainpipe. His cop clairvoyance pushed him forward like an unseen hand. Past four sets of Graham and Jessie’s footprints and the jellyfish left stranded at low tide.
Will stopped and pointed to the stone path that ran from the steps to near the pipe’s entrance, leaving only five or so feet of uncharted sand. “What if our perp used the wheelchair, same as we suspected with Bonnie, to transport the victim here via the pipe? Then, he wheeled her along the path to the steps. Dropped her there and headed back the same way.”
“Only one way to test that theory. Since the dynamic duo didn’t walk out that far.”
“That’s assuming the wind didn’t blow it all away.” But already, he could see the tracks. Two deep indentations, the width of a wheelchair, that spanned the length of soft sand between the pipe’s entrance and the path. Footprints too, though they were hardly discernible. Just holes, sunk deep.
Will jogged ahead and snapped several photos on his cell. When JB caught up to him, he slapped Will’s back as he caught his breath. “Hot damn, City Boy. You’re finally starting to pull your weight around here.”
Inside, Will’s own weight felt too much to bear. Only Olivia had been able to budge the stone that laid upon his chest. As soon as he’d driven away, leaving her waving half-heartedly in the rearview, it had sunk back into place, pinching his lungs shut. But, he played along, sighing and rolling his eyes. “Better mine than yours.”
JB laughed, then coughed, hacking up a glob of spit he deposited on the shoreline. He rested against one of the larger rocks, rubbing his right knee. “Careful what you wish for. I might need you to carry me back.”
“Shit’s gonna really hit the fan now,” JB said, as they neared the top of the stairs. “Once the media gets wind we’ve got a third victim, the s word will be plastered everywhere.”
Already, Will spotted several media vans parked outside the roped-off periphery of the parking lot. The reporters called out to them—“Hey, Detective! What’s going on? Can I get a statement?”—as they walked. He recognized one of them from the crime beat in San Francisco and quickly looked away.
“I’ll give ’em a statement.” JB surreptitiously extended his middle finger.
Will batted his hand down. “Careful. Or you’ll turn into the story. Rogue cop makes obscene gesture toward female re
porter. Trust me on this one. It’s not just Fog Harbor media out there. You’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“Well, wherever the hell I am, I hope they serve breakfast, because some of us didn’t take our time lollygagging out to the crime scene. Some of us didn’t even get a damn drop of caffeine.”
JB peered into the cab of Will’s truck, eyeing the paper cup in the center console, the coffee long gone cold.
“Are those doughnuts?” he asked, pointing to the shoebox on the floorboard.
Will said a silent prayer of thanks he’d remembered to lock his door, imagining JB’s horrified gasp at finding a strangled seagull, not a glazed dozen. He’d planned to toss it in the nearest dumpster as soon as he left there—he couldn’t wait to be rid of it. “I’ll get you doughnuts on the way. We need to head over to the Ambrose house. Then get back to the station, put a rush on the DNA.”
“I’ve got a plan for that.” JB headed toward his Camaro, a new bounce in his step. “Did I ever tell you my fourth ex-wife works in the crime lab?”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“She owes me big-time. I let her keep the dog.” He lowered his head, his own eyes drooping like an old hound. “Damn, if Princess wasn’t the best friend I ever had.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Olivia knew it wouldn’t help, that Em wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of food after she heard the news, but she made her sister’s favorite breakfast anyway. French toast with cinnamon and two eggs scrambled. It gave her something to do, somewhere to put her mind other than the dark places. The cobwebbed corners and shadowy nooks where her worst fears multiplied. Where Deck said things like, Someone found a body at the beach and The Oaktown Boys threatened me. Showed her things, too. A dead seagull, its filmy yellow eye fixed on her in judgment. But worst, he’d asked things of her, things she’d agreed to but regretted now in the petal-pink light of the morning.
Watch Her Vanish: An absolutely gripping mystery thriller (Rockwell and Decker Book 1) Page 24
