The Drowned Woman: An absolutely unputdownable mystery and suspense thriller (Jericho and Wright Thrillers Book 2)

by CJ Lyons

  “Talk about your forces of nature.” The memory of Nellie brought a smile.

  “I’m just saying—maybe Ruby has changed, is changing. After everything, with Ian, with you and Emily moving in here, maybe it’s good for her, for all of you.”

  “You’re telling me to trust her. I am, I’m trying. The way Emily loves her… It’s torture, watching her open her heart to Ruby and all I can do is hold my breath, thinking of all the ways Ruby could break it.”

  “Maybe it’s not about trust at all. Maybe it’s about having a little faith. I know she’s disappointed you before, broke your heart when you were a kid, but I think she’s trying. And after this morning, I’m realizing that that whole ‘takes a village’ stuff about raising a kid—there’s something to it. You can’t do it alone, and neither can I.”

  She glanced at her face reflected in Ian’s computer. It bore little resemblance to the face of the smiling mother cuddling her daughter from his desktop photo. “Honestly? I’m terrified. Maybe it’s not Ruby I can’t trust, but myself.”

  “Why?” He leaned forward, abandoning his tea, his expression earnest.

  “Ruby blamed how she acted when I was a kid on depression triggered by my father’s death. Depression that took her decades to get over, to the point where she abandoned me time and again when I was too much to handle. And now, after Ian, I finally understand what she felt.” She sagged in her seat, didn’t have the energy to sit up straight. “I’m exhausted, it’s like the world is surrounded by a fog so thick I can’t find a path through it. I’m lost without Ian.” She glanced away, blinking hard. “What if this feeling never goes away? What if I’m just like Ruby? I don’t want that for Emily, can’t let her lose me as well as Ian.”

  “She won’t.” His tone was firm, not allowing for any argument. “Because you’re not Ruby. First, you’re already dealing with Ian’s death—you’re seeing a therapist, you’re focusing on what’s best for your daughter, you’re trying to heal, not clinging to the pain. And second, you’re not alone. You’ve got Ruby and me and Pops and Maggie and your friends at the ER. We’re all here for you. All of us.”

  As reassuring as his words were, they couldn’t ease the constant knot of fear that held her heart in a vice. She took a sip of tea but its soothing magic was gone. “I need to know: when will it get better?”

  His gaze focused on the depths of his tea mug, as if he could read the future. “Know where I was this morning? Before we got called to the Falconer? I drove over the mountain to Lewisburg. Sun wasn’t even up yet, rain was pouring down, fog so thick you could walk across the river on it. But I do it every year. For seventeen years now. I go to where she died, and I bring her favorite flowers.” He looked up, met her gaze. “Guess I’m not the right person to ask how long before the pain goes away.”

  They sat in silence for a long moment. “How are you doing?” she asked. “I mean after that letter, knowing Cherise was killed—does that make it better or worse?”

  “Both, I guess. Worse because I fought and argued with the police when it happened, even tried to get her folks to pay for a second autopsy—which didn’t help their pain. Eventually I gave in, I let them convince me. Only that meant if she did kill herself, then it was my fault. That I missed the signs or I somehow drove her to it. God, how I beat myself up. But now, knowing the truth—”

  “It means it wasn’t your fault.”

  He nodded. “More than that. It means I can actually do something. All these years, wondering where I’d gone wrong, asking myself what I missed. Now I have something—someone—to fight. I can bring her justice.”

  “All we have to do is find him.” She pulled Ian’s laptop close. “Let’s get to work.”

  Twenty-Eight

  While they waited for more information on Cliff Vogel—which Luka hoped Krichek would be supplying soon—he and Leah spent the next several hours dissecting everything they knew about Risa’s stalker and the people he claimed to have killed. Hoping to organize the wealth of information Risa had collected and translate it into actionable lines of investigation, they moved to the dining table which they covered with craft paper taken from the kids’ art supplies, making lists in neon-colored markers. Despite the informal office supplies, it wasn’t much different from how he led his team when approaching a new case. The main difference was that officially Luka wasn’t involved—he’d need to feed any ideas they generated to his team via Krichek. Frustrating, but necessary.

  “Somehow I thought police work would be more action, less talking,” Leah joked as she stood back to appraise their work. “Where are the car chases and shootouts?”

  They shared a grimace at that—they both knew Luka had never had to use his duty weapon until last month when he shot and killed Ian’s killer.

  “It’s not like TV,” he assured her. “Real detective work is all about the walk and talk.”

  “But everyone lies.”

  “Exactly why we talk to them more than once,” Luka said, rifling through their notes. “Sooner or later they trip up. Or we keep talking to other people, widen our focus. Sooner or later someone sees something that leads us back to our actor.”

  “Why do you call them actors? I thought they were suspects or perps or persons of interest?”

  He chuckled. “Never perp. Suspect has a negative connotation that defense attorneys can use against us, say we have tunnel vision or targeted someone, built a case to fit. Persons of interest, or subject, sometimes, but usually in reports. Actor, I guess because it’s a legal term. Someone who took action.”

  “Another thing TV gets wrong.”

  “I’m sure all the medical stuff is just as bad.”

  “Oh yeah. Don’t get me started.” But she sounded distracted. “Everyone lies,” she repeated. Then she snapped to attention. “Everybody lies. Especially Risa’s stalker. We’ve been looking at this backwards.”

  Luka nodded for her to continue. Leah tore off a fresh sheet of paper and began making a list. “He says he only kills victims that he finds by random chance, but he killed James Santiago because he wanted to prove himself to Risa, duplicated his death to look like the Jimmy Santiago she wrote about in a story. James wasn’t merely chosen by the toss of a coin; his death was staged, manipulated.”

  “It’s on the to-do list I left for Krichek and Harper—to follow up with the South Carolina authorities. But I see where you’re going. He’s claiming to work at random. But these so-called gifts of his…” He gestured to the names from the list of possible victims Risa had included in her database. “They were all people with similarities to people in stories or obituaries Risa worked on. They weren’t random. He targeted them because of Risa.”

  Leah tapped the marker against her teeth, the neon purple cap bobbing in the air. “Except, I think he lied. I mean, look at them. They’re scattered all over the country and the only ones that the police were involved in was the drunk driver who died in the car crash and the old lady in the house fire. The rest died of natural causes.”

  “But the stalker still claimed them as his, said he made their deaths appear as if they weren’t murders.” Luka turned to her. “You think he lied about that as well. That he didn’t actually murder them, and make their deaths appear accidental?”

  “Not all of them. I mean, if it’s Cliff, he’s worked at the Falconer for over a decade. But somehow over the past year since he met Risa, he found time to travel all over the country, to find victims who correlated with Risa’s work, and committed not one or two but a dozen perfect murders?”

  “You think the killer found random people who correlated with Risa’s work and used their deaths to what, pad his résumé?”

  “If Cliff is Chaos, I don’t see any other way. I’ll bet if you check his work records, he’ll have alibis for all the deaths over the past year.”

  “But if it is all lies and no one mentioned in Risa’s letters was actually killed, are we even sure that Risa’s not involved?” he asked. “Either Cliff
Vogel is Chaos and is as brilliant at deception and misdirection as he said in his letters, or he’s actually who he appears to be: a guy obsessed with a woman he can never have, not in his wildest dreams. Guys like that, they’re easily manipulated. She could be building him up as a fictional Chaos to resurrect her career and then when she’s ready, he takes the fall.” One of the items on the to-do list he’d left Krichek was to verify that Risa had actually reported her stalker to the FBI’s cybercrimes unit. Although simply filing a report wasn’t enough to prove her stalker was real.

  But Cherise’s ring… Now, that was proof. How could anyone not involved with Cherise’s death have gotten it?

  “But if we’re not trusting what anyone has told us—certainly not what Chaos put in his letters—than where do we start?” Leah asked. They stood side-by-side, taking in the maelstrom of data Risa’s hunt for her stalker had created.

  “First we eliminate the ‘doppelgänger’ victims, the ones whose names or details have been used by Chaos, but who we have no proof of having been murdered. Then we narrow in on the ones who he probably did kill.” Luka began crossing names off the list.

  “Santiago, for sure he killed,” Leah said. “And landscape guy—he’s a definite.”

  “We don’t have confirmation,” Luka reminded her, but still starred both names. “Indiana PD is going to search the manure and mulch hills tomorrow.”

  “You keep letting facts get in the way of my theory.” She gave him a mock grimace and rolled her eyes, reminding Luka of Harper. Not that he’d ever tell Leah that. “Let’s focus on what we know for sure, then. We know he’s obsessed with Risa.”

  “And we know whoever killed Trudy didn’t want anyone to see those photos from her phone.” Luka made a mental note to follow up with Sanchez, the cyber squad tech. Then he remembered—he was meant to be off the case, so he couldn’t ask directly. He’d have Harper get him the info; she and Sanchez were buddies. Though it was already bad enough he had Krichek and Harper feeding him information, risking censure from the brass. Damn, this was becoming a nuisance already.

  “Which brings us to the one person we know he killed. He had her ring after all. You said there’s no way he could have gotten hold of it unless he killed her,” Leah said. “Cherise.”

  Luka looked away. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for this, but he’d already come to the same conclusion. All roads led to Cherise.

  “Why do you think he killed her?” Leah asked. “If it really was his first killing, she had to have meant something to him.”

  “You think he knew her?”

  “Were there any signs of her being stalked at the time? Maybe she was involved with someone before you came along?”

  A kaleidoscope of ancient memories swirled through Luka’s vision—Cherise at the heart of each of them. Throwing one of her campus-famous “soirees” where they’d open their house to everyone; Cherise sitting at a table surrounded by their friends, beaming at each in turn. He remembered them cheering him on the first time he ever dared to get up and perform one of his poems in public. So many times and places, where she was not only the sun Luka’s world revolved around, but she burned so bright, the rest of the world couldn’t help stare and admire her brilliance.

  He sank into one of the dining chairs, rested his head in his palms, elbows on the table. He was so tired. This case… Every time it spun in one direction, it ricocheted back to blindside him from another.

  After a moment, he looked back up, the colorful notes in front of him swimming in his vision. “I can’t remember anyone in particular. Cherise went out with a lot of guys before me, but she’d said none of them were ever serious. She stayed friends with a few of them, but I never suspected they could have wanted her dead. I’ll forward the ones I know about to Krichek, just to cover all bases.”

  “If it was Cliff, he’d have been older than you guys. By—”

  “Eight years,” he supplied. “I definitely would have remembered someone that much older hanging around Cherise. But I’ll see if he was enrolled or working on campus or nearby.” He shook his head, irritated. “I mean, I’ll ask Krichek. Damn it.”

  “The killer said he was just a kid when he killed Cherise—but if it was Cliff, then that’s another lie. Which makes sense, since he manipulated everyone into believing Cherise killed herself. That’s a fairly sophisticated level of thinking. Hard to imagine a kid doing that.” Leah took the seat beside him, her gaze on their handiwork. “Did the autopsy find any evidence that she wasn’t alone in the car that night?”

  “No. The river took care of that, erased everything.” He didn’t bother to hide his bitterness. “Forensics came up empty.”

  “Why were you so certain it wasn’t a suicide? You said she’d had problems, was off her meds?”

  He considered that. He could’ve given her all the arguments he’d offered to the police back then: that Cherise was too proud to give up, not with her dreams in sight; that if she had, she’d never have been so mean, focusing the blame on him by leaving his book with the Langston Hughes poem; that she’d been acting fine, was excited, making wedding plans, plans for her future—for their future…

  Except none of those were the real reason. “Honestly, I just couldn’t accept that I’d been living with her, had seen her every day and I had no idea. I couldn’t handle the idea that I’d missed every sign. For months after, I’d lie in bed every night dissecting those past few days and I couldn’t for the life of me see what I’d missed. It tormented me, the not knowing why.” His breath was ragged as he sucked it in. “I imagine her in the water, in the dark, alone, the water tugging at her, holding her down. I imagine her changing her mind. But it’s too late.”

  “But now you know that it wasn’t her fault. And not yours, either. The killer wanted you to feel guilty, to shoulder his blame.” She took the seat across from him. “Because despite what he says about allowing chance to control his actions, he loves manipulating other people. For him, it’s all about power and control. I mean, he’s practically run Risa’s life for her for a year now. He’s manipulated you right off the case.”

  “But that means he was there back then, watching us, stalking Cherise. And I missed him. I never saw him, never noticed him.” Luka cursed, caught in the bitter shadows of memory. “If so, then it was my fault that he got to her. And I never even knew that he was right there.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Luka ended up sleeping on Leah’s couch—by the time they had finished dissecting the case, it was late, and they were both exhausted.

  They’d gone over everyone from college that Luka could remember, and even a few he didn’t whom they’d found via an alumni message board. Cherise’s friend who’d hosted their study group that last night had created a memorial website for her. It pained Luka to see all the hearts and prayer hand emojis filling the screen. He didn’t know most of these people—and was certain Cherise hadn’t either. But he diligently checked all their names, finding no one who seemed suspicious, and forwarded them all to Krichek for full background checks.

  He woke early as sunlight was beginning to crawl through the windows, showered and dressed in the mudroom. Leah’s great-aunt Nellie had installed a washer, dryer, toilet, laundry sink, and a small shower in a location convenient to both the back porch and the kitchen since her work had meant she was always out in the flower fields or making chocolate and candles.

  Luka had visited Nellie’s home a few times as a kid when he spent summers with his grandparents, but he remembered her more from her trips out to Jericho Fields. She’d come during the harvest, the orchard dripping with apples, and she and his gran would create the most marvelous concoctions using Jericho apples, Nellie’s lavender and roses, and, of course, chocolate. They sold them at all the nearby fall carnivals, Amish auctions, and county fairs.

  When he was a kid, he’d be on the lookout for Nellie’s rickety old green truck and would run to greet her, knowing his efforts would be rewarded with a piece of chocolat
e. No matter the weather, she always looked the same—red hair escaping her sun hat, flannel shirt, jeans, work boots. He hadn’t seen her in over a decade before her death, but somehow in his mind she lived on, kept alive by his childhood memories.

  Now, he wished he’d spent more time at his grandparents’ farm when he was a kid. Since he was several years older than Leah, he had never met her during the time Leah lived with Nellie after Ruby left for good. Leah was eleven then and Luka would have been fourteen, much too old to leave Pittsburgh and his friends to come hang out with his grandparents. He’d been such an arrogant brat back then—like most teenaged boys.

  As he tied his tie, he couldn’t help but think of Nate sleeping upstairs. How would he remember this time after being torn from everything and everyone he knew? It was already clear he saw Luka more as a cop than a surrogate father. No matter. Luka was determined to give Nate a childhood that one day he could look back on and smile at. Just like what Luka had.

  Luka finished dressing, folded the quilt and sheets Leah had given him, then grabbed his bag and keys. He hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, his gaze climbing to where Nate slept. Should he talk to him, warn him about what he might hear about the case?

  With a sigh, Luka turned away. Better to let the boy sleep while he could. There were no TVs in Nellie’s house—neither Ruby nor Leah had brought any in after they moved here, honoring the dead woman’s wishes—so maybe Nate wouldn’t even hear about it. Why not protect the kid for as long as possible?

  Luka left, the kitchen door latching behind him with a quiet click.

  Nellie’s farm was only a quarter mile beyond the city limits, but because of the winding topography of the river and the hills, it took over twelve minutes for him to drive the four miles to the police department downtown. Even with no traffic on a Saturday morning, it was almost eight by the time Luka arrived for his meeting with Ahearn. He parked and walked to the staff entrance, pausing to regard the latest efforts of the mystery gardener. The rain had stopped and the clouds were clearing, leaving blue sky in their wake, so he’d expected the small corner of color to be even more brilliant this morning.