Tumbledown

by Cari Hunter

  Emerson nodded, his eyes fixed straight ahead. Curving away from Avery and little used, the road they were traveling on was in a poor state of repair; on more than one occasion he had had to slow to a crawl to negotiate sections almost reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Despite its feeling of remoteness, they were only an hour from town, and Alex couldn’t help but wonder at the gall of Caleb Deakin, if he really had been the one who rented this cottage. That he would do anything so brazen only emphasized how hell-bent he must be on getting his revenge. It also made her dread to think what he might do next.

  “Here! Shit, sorry.”

  Emerson braked and then skidded into the turn, cursing, and she slapped both hands on the dash to stop herself from flying forward. As soon as the car was under control, he looked askance at her.

  “Some copilot you are,” he muttered, though there was no sting in his tone.

  “Hey, it was right where I said it would be.” She leaned back in her seat, rubbing at the burn where the seatbelt had caught her shoulder. The access road was narrow and the forest pressed in on the car. It reminded her of the woods around her own cabin, but there was something untamed about it, as if the place wasn’t meant to be easily found.

  “Hell of a place to hide,” she said, nervous excitement making her foot tap against the floor. The cottage was marketed as a retreat: no phone, no Wi-Fi, no neighbors, nothing but acres of wilderness and water.

  Emerson didn’t answer, but she could see the white of his knuckles on the wheel, and his speed was increasing incrementally as he picked up on her agitation. He stopped the car the instant they caught their first glimpse of the cottage.

  “Tire treads.” It was the only explanation he needed to give. Although the cottage’s owner had driven up here recently, there might still be other treads, which could be compared to those Alex had preserved beneath her pup tent.

  Standing by the trunk, they pulled on the CSI coveralls, booties, and gloves that Emerson had “borrowed” from the station. To the casual observer it might have seemed like overkill, but Alex didn’t care how ridiculous it appeared. She would do exactly the same at every property on her list, if it might help get Sarah safely back home.

  “Set?” Emerson asked.

  “Yep.” She waited patiently, already soaked with sweat, as he adjusted her hood. Then she led him to the porch. The key was beneath the first step, just as the owner had promised. Alex took two attempts to fit it into the lock, her jittery hands belying her semblance of composure. The kitchen she walked into was immaculate, the fixtures and fittings gleaming in the sunlight that came through the slatted blind.

  “You smell that?” She stepped farther into the room, allowing Emerson to shut the door. Without the breeze, the chemical odor was even more apparent.

  “Bleach,” he said, turning full circle on the spot. The tiles shone beneath his covered boots. “And lots of it.”

  “They never get everything up, though, do they?” Crouching on the floor, she ran her fingers over the grout between the tiles. “They watch CSI and think they know enough to get away with murder, but there’s always something they fuck up on.”

  Emerson went into the next room. “Bed’s been slept in,” he called. “The bathroom’s clean, but you can see which towels have been used. I shook one out into the bath, found more hair than my pop has on his head.” He came back to stand in the kitchen doorway, frustration written all over his face. “What exactly are we doing here, Alex? Quinn’s not going to authorize forensics on the basis of a hunch about a couple who skipped out on their honeymoon.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I fucking know that?” She didn’t know what she’d expected to find: a smoking gun waiting for her in the first room, with a sign saying “Caleb Deakin was here”?

  “Bag the hairs,” she told him. She wasn’t just going to roll over and concede defeat. “Maybe Castillo can get them through his lab under a dummy case number. We’ll top-to-bottom every room, and then…” She looked at Emerson as she faltered, willing him to support her, not to advise her simply to give up and let him take her home.

  “Then we check outside.” He spoke slowly, as if thinking the logic through. “If Deakin came here after killing Lyssa, there’d be things he’d need to destroy: bloodstained clothing, gear—”

  “The knife handle.”

  “Definitely that. So, bury or burn?”

  She followed his gaze out the window. They had driven through at least a mile of forest to get to the cottage. “Jesus, be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He shrugged and plucked a pack of evidence bags from his bag. “Better get started, then.”

  *

  Alex took the can of soda Emerson offered her and held the cool metal to her forehead. A fingertip search of the cottage had kept her on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor for the past hour, and had yielded nothing. One thing Emerson hadn’t been able to procure in time was the luminol necessary to detect microscopic traces of blood. In any case, it wasn’t something they were trained to use, and she suspected the owner of the cottage might take issue with their spraying chemicals all over its interior without a search warrant.

  “Here, take a look at this and tell me if I’m going crazy.” Alex didn’t have the energy to get up; she just leaned over and opened the cabinet beneath the sink.

  Emerson came to sit beside her, looking as exhausted as she felt. “You tell me what you think you’ve found and I’ll tell you if I think you’re crazy.”

  “Right.” Alex winced. “There are four newspapers missing.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “No, no, hear me out. This stack is in date order, one local newspaper per week. The owner must collect her own; she’s apparently quite OCD about it. I bet she brings them when she cleans after each rental. This particular rental started two weeks back, but the dates don’t add up. There are four missing.”

  “Alex—”

  She cut off his protest, though she knew that what she was suggesting was pretty farfetched. “No sign of a fire in the living room hearth.”

  He was still shaking his head. “Maybe the owner wasn’t done reading the latest issues. If she did bring them, they could’ve been used for anything: barbecue, protecting gifts to take home…”

  “You think Caleb Deakin got the grill out while he was here and then went shopping for souvenirs?”

  “If he was here.”

  She took a long drink of soda, in the hope that its caffeine and sugar would mask the aching in her joints. “I think he was here,” she said, unable to face the alternative. “I think he was here after he killed Lyssa, and he burned whatever he needed to get rid of.”

  *

  Common sense told Alex she should stop. She hadn’t eaten all day, she hadn’t drunk enough to combat the searing heat, and they were beginning to lose the light. Using a compass, starting with the land to the front of the cottage and measuring it in paces, they had worked out a rough grid for each of them to cover. Four hours later, she was only about a third of the way through her patch. Much of the undergrowth was too thick to walk through, snaring her feet and forcing her to retrace her steps, or blocking her route completely. She had found no signs of a recent fire, or any disturbed earth indicative of a burial site; it was doubtful that anyone would have been stupid enough to venture into this terrain, no matter what they needed to hide.

  The last time she had fallen, a branch had gouged an ugly rent across the center of her palm, and something in the streak of muck and blood had started to itch. She stopped walking to find and pull out the offending fragment of pine needle. The superficial wound hurt far more than it should have, and she realized just how beaten down she was, her euphoria and hope replaced by an all too familiar despair in just a few hours. Sarah had never voiced any real expectations to her, had never pushed or cajoled or pestered to hear what Alex was doing to help her. Every ounce of pressure was coming from Alex herself, and she could feel hers
elf buckling beneath it.

  “Alex!”

  Her head shot up.

  “Alex!”

  Emerson’s yell was faint, coming from somewhere ahead of her and off to the left. It was followed shortly afterward by a triumphant whoop.

  She set off at a run, hurdling obstacles she had just dragged herself around and somehow managing to stay on her feet. He shouted again when he heard her crashing toward him, warning her to slow down, to give whatever he had found a wide berth. She stumbled to the edge of a clearing, only just preventing her momentum from carrying her any farther.

  “I think we might have gotten the little bastard,” Emerson said, from where he knelt peering into the remnants of a fire pit. “Whoever started this did a decent job, but they didn’t stick around to see it through.” He looked up at her. “Remember the rain the night Lyssa died?”

  She nodded mutely, staring at the prematurely extinguished fire. She could pick out different elements in it now: khaki-green material, another cloth incongruously patterned with pale blue flowers, and something Emerson was indicating with a long stick.

  “Jesus Christ,” she whispered, and a rush of relief promptly forced her onto the ground. She cradled her torn hand to her breast, too stunned to feel embarrassed by her reaction. Emerson’s stick was pointing at a carved piece of wood. Although it was blackened with soot at one end, the fire barely seemed to have touched it and its shape was unmistakable: it was the snapped-off handle of a Bowie knife.

  *

  After waiting over a week for something to happen, and then waiting several more hours for Buchanan to sign off on a search warrant, Alex found things suddenly moving too fast for her. She sat on the trunk of a fallen tree, an uneaten sandwich in her hand, and watched the CSI techs photograph, catalogue, bag, and label evidence from the fire. White light blazed down on them as they worked, the generator for the lamps rumbling in the background. Casts were being taken of the two sets of tire treads directly outside the cottage, and the specialist technician was set to go over to Alex’s cabin to cast the ones under the pup tent.

  A second team was processing the cottage, trying to find hair, fibers, or other DNA samples to link the debris from the fire with whomever had stayed there. Until this link was proven, it would be simple for Quinn to accuse Alex of planting evidence, even if Emerson acted as a witness to refute such a claim. Quinn hadn’t yet dared even to intimate this, but neither was he rushing to get the charges against Sarah dismissed. It was small wonder Alex had no appetite; the one bite she had taken from her sandwich had almost come right back up on her boots.

  Quinn, subtly shadowed by Emerson, was supervising up at the cottage. He had arrived in convoy with the CSI techs and, barely even making eye contact with Alex, had demanded she provide a full account of her unauthorized investigation. She had drawn a breath to speak and been cut off by his raised hand and a curt: “Not here, back at the station.” Then he had stalked away, forcing her to wait for his summons.

  A CSI walked past with bulging evidence bags in her arms. Alex gave up on her sandwich and leaned forward to try to gain a better view. Several items of clothing had already been salvaged from the fire pit, one of which—the flowered material—was the remains of a woman’s shirt, and all of which bore stains that a Kastle-Meyer test had identified as blood. For the last hour, ever since a sympathetic tech shared the preliminary findings, Alex had been torturing herself trying to think of a local woman who might have collaborated with Deakin. When Emerson had collected Alex to bring her out here, he had given her the list of names she had asked for. Twelve people had helped to search her and Sarah’s land the day after Lyssa had died, and three of them were women. That Alex hadn’t even considered the possibility of a female accomplice made her feel like handing in her badge and gun before Quinn got around to demanding them from her.

  “So fucking stupid,” she muttered, not for the first time, her fingers picking furiously at the bark on which she was sitting. She knew she was overreacting; it wasn’t as if she had questioned every man in town, ruling out all the women as suspects, but still she felt like an idiot. Her phone rang, earning a reprieve for the shredded remains of her fingernails. Castillo had promised to call back within the hour for another update.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, Sherlock.” Castillo’s droll response was enough to make her smile. “Caleb Deakin’s married.”

  And just like that, everything turned on its head again. She was conscious of her mouth flapping soundlessly. “Why wasn’t that mentioned on the bulletin?” she eventually managed to ask.

  “Administrative SNAFU by the boys in North Carolina. It’s real hot down there this time of year, so they figure they’re allowed to let things slide a little. They apologized, if that helps any.”

  “Not really.”

  “No, I guess not. I’m looking at a picture of her now. Leah Deakin, twenty-four years old, which puts ten years between them. Needless to say, she’s not at home. Been a regular patient at the local ER for the past three years or so. Seems to have gotten real clumsy since she married into the Deakin family.”

  “Poor kid.” Alex’s response was instinctive.

  “A poor kid who may have been complicit in Lyssa’s murder,” Castillo reminded her.

  “Yeah.” She scrubbed at her grimy face. “When are you coming up here to straighten all this crap out?” The Deakins, their Church, and the events in the Cascades were all originally Castillo’s case. If a direct connection could be established between Caleb Deakin and Lyssa’s murder, no one would be able to prevent Castillo’s involvement in the investigation.

  “Just waiting on clearance. Bosses are dragging their heels a little. They’d prefer to wait for the forensics to come back, but they’re also worried they’ll be associated with what looks like a cataclysmic fuckup on the part of the Avery PD, so I don’t think they’ll leave it that long.”

  “Gotta love that as a motivating factor.” She stood and paced away from the glare of the lights, too tense to sit still any longer. “No mention of finding Lyssa’s killer or clearing Sarah, just a bunch of suits trying to avoid being left with egg on their faces.”

  “You know how this shit works, Alex.”

  “I hate it.” Above her, the sky was paler, hues of blue and lilac bleeding into the edges of the black. She had no idea how long it had been since she last slept. “I fucking hate how this shit works.”

  “Looking on the bright side, I did get the go-ahead to request that Quinn split the forensics. We’re getting a batch of samples couriered down here, and the lab’s agreed to put a rush on them.”

  “Oh, thank fuck for that.” She put her hand out, feeling the abrasion on her palm catch against a tree. The pain helped to keep her upright.

  “You okay over there?” Castillo had raised his voice, making the concern in it more apparent.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Figured that might reduce the risk of Quinn ‘losing’ any of the samples.”

  “That possibility had crossed my mind,” she admitted. “And the labs here have been known to take weeks.”

  “Ours will be four days, max.”

  “That’s great, Mike. Really, I don’t…Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, honey.”

  She raised her head as the first hint of sunlight caught the tops of the trees. “What do I tell Sarah?”

  He answered without hesitation. “Tell her we’ll have her home soon.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The trailer rocked if its occupants walked from room to room too quickly, and its walls were paper-thin. Sitting as still as she could on the bathroom floor, Leah pressed her ear to the partition and strained to hear the conversation between Caleb and his contact.

  She hadn’t seen the man arrive. His abrupt knock had sounded on the door as she was trying to scrub out the stains on the shower stall. She had smiled, lowering her head to her hands in thankfulness, but only one man had crossed the threshold, a
nd he had made no attempt to arrest Caleb. Instead, the kitchen door had slammed hard enough to make her cling to the stall, and seconds later, Caleb had yelled something unintelligible. The other man was talking now, his tone a tremulous mixture of placation and tension. She knew what it was like, standing in front of Caleb as he raged, but she felt no sympathy for his victim; she only hoped he would bear the brunt of Caleb’s temper so that she wouldn’t have to.

  The police had found the cottage. That in itself was bad enough, but they had also found the fire she had started and then left unattended. Bloodstained clothing and the knife handle had been pulled from the ashes. She understood little about forensics, but she supposed that if the handle was intact then Caleb’s fingerprints would probably be on it. He had worn gloves to stab the woman, but Leah remembered that when he had given her the handle to destroy he had done so with his bare hands. He must have remembered that, too, because he was pacing, the floor reverberating beneath his tread.

  “How long before she’s out?” he asked.

  “If it was up to our labs, two to three weeks, but the feds have gotten involved.” The man hesitated as if wary of Caleb’s reaction. “I heard Quinn say four days.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then the charges will be dismissed and the feds’ll probably take her and Alex into protective custody while they look for you.”

  A flicker of movement caught Leah’s attention, and she leaned her head against the wall to watch a roach scurry into the damp corner behind the sink. She hated this trailer. They had been here for five days, after moving at a moment’s notice in the middle of the night. She didn’t know exactly where they were, only that they hadn’t traveled far enough to have crossed the state line. Like the apartment by the river, the trailer belonged to a relative of Caleb’s contact, except that this relative had lived here until she died and she hadn’t been house-proud.