Pretty Little Wife

by Darby Kane

  “Ginny.” Coming out of the cabin, the chief jogged toward her. “You need to come in the cabin.”

  “Why?” She glanced up and saw the chief’s pale face and the stress pulling at the corners of his mouth. An alarm flashed in her head. “What is it?”

  “You need to see for yourself.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  SHERIFF DEPUTIES USHERED LILA AND JARED BACK INTO THE office through a gauntlet of reporters. No one seemed to know what had happened, but they guessed something had. Clearly the word had gone out that the story was here in the sheriff’s office and not at Lila’s house.

  Samantha. The podcast. Ryan’s involvement. Aaron’s phone. Lila had a million questions. They slammed into her head, and she fought to categorize them. To sort them out so she could handle them. And that was before half the office went rushing out of there in search of . . . something.

  Hours later they were all back in the same place—Ginny’s turf. Lila and Jared sat in a small conference room. Not the place where they’d been questioned. This one had comfortable chairs and a round table. Coffee and water on one side of the room and a wall of windows across the back. The glass walls gave them a view of the main room where the investigators and others sat. Rows of desks and computers. Personal photos and a wall that looked like a call sheet of some sort. Aaron’s name was right there, under Ginny’s.

  Tobias stepped out for his usual round of recon. He could sweet-talk most people into getting the information he needed. This trip took longer, but she finally saw him around a corner, coming out of the big office at the end of the hall that belonged to the sheriff.

  She sat on her hands, forcing her body to still and not jump on him when he walked into the room. “What did you find out?”

  He closed the door behind him and took a seat at the table next to Lila. “Ginny is on the way back.”

  The flat tone of his voice put her on edge. “Tobias?”

  “They found Aaron’s car.”

  Jared had been sitting with his eyes closed. At that answer, he jackknifed to attention and leaned in. “Where?”

  Geography didn’t matter to her. She had bigger questions. Ones that might end in answers that kept her in this building far longer than she wanted. “Like abandoned or was he in it?”

  “I don’t have a lot of details. It sounds—”

  His voice cut off, and Lila knew why. The sight of Ginny stalking down the main room with her raincoat open and flapping with each determined step proved impossible to ignore. She frowned as she dropped an envelope on a desk and kept marching. Right for their room.

  “This is bad.” Lila hadn’t meant to say the words out loud. She thought she’d whispered until Ginny’s gaze locked with hers coming through the doorway. “Your poker face needs work.”

  “I’m not trying to hide anything.”

  Ginny’s voice carried a mix of exhaustion and an emotion Lila couldn’t identify. Her shoulders slumped, and cloak of sadness seemed to be draped over her.

  “So, what are we looking at?” Tobias asked, jumping them all to the deep end of the conversation.

  “We used the GPS to locate Aaron’s car.” Ginny sat down. She had a thin file in her hands and placed it on the table in front of her but didn’t open it. “It was parked in a barn at a cabin outside a small town called Logan’s Gorge.”

  Jared snorted. “What?”

  “Where’s that?” Lila asked at the same time.

  “North and remote. It’s near the Canadian border but not too close to it to be on a well-traveled road. The closest thing you might know is the camping area, Moose River Plains.”

  Jared shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  A wince came and went on Ginny’s face before she started talking again. “The SUV was on a wooded lot, and Aaron was in it. In the back, Jared.” She laid her palms flat against the file. “It looks like he was stabbed, rolled up in a blanket, and left there until we found the body.”

  Stabbed. The word punched into Lila.

  Not alive. Killed, and not by her.

  Jared’s mouth opened as he fell against the back of his chair, almost boneless. “He’s dead?”

  Ginny nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  “Stabbed?” That meant . . . Lila didn’t know what the hell that meant.

  With her original plan, she’d anticipated feeling nothing when Aaron’s body was found. The videos would show why. There would be corroboration. She had a plan for that, too, but it turned to dust when Aaron’s body went missing.

  Every day since, her thoughts had ping-ponged between believing he was alive and tormenting her with the idea of an accomplice who’d stepped in to make her pay. She feared being found out and not having her carefully constructed story stick. She worried the girls at school wouldn’t get justice.

  Knowing he was gone but in some violent way she hadn’t expected left her reeling. Shock churned inside her. Someone had killed or stabbed him at some point, and it wasn’t her, which left a wide-open field of terrifying possibilities. The sensation of being hunted and watched, dissected and terrorized, hit her full force.

  “Are you familiar with a cabin in Logan’s Gorge?” Ginny wrapped her fingers around the top edge of the file. “I know he likes hiking and tough trails. He might have rented it or—”

  “Not there. We went to one about thirty miles from my house. Nowhere near Canada or whatever this moose thing is.”

  Jared shifted around in his chair and drew out his cell. His fingers shook as he pressed the buttons. When he turned the screen around for Ginny to see, it showed a map and pinpoints around the lake indicating her house, and Jared’s, and the rental cabin.

  Tobias cleared his throat. “Where is Logan’s Gorge exactly?”

  “Almost three hours away. The GPS on his phone suggests he’d been there recently. We’re trying to access older records.” Ginny lifted the edge of the file but didn’t open it.

  Lila tried to get a peek at what Ginny found so important that she kept it close. Held on to it. The movements could be nervous fidgeting, but that sort of uncontrolled response didn’t fit with the Ginny she’d been verbally battling in the case so far.

  “Why would he go there?” Jared’s voice faded in and out as if he was having trouble breathing. “When?”

  Ginny smoothed her hands over the file again and dragged them to her lap. “I was hoping one of you would know about the property.”

  “No.” Lila could pass a lie detector on that answer.

  Tobias watched Jared for a few extra seconds before turning back to Ginny. “Can you track the ownership?”

  “We will.” Ginny glanced into the open room behind her before continuing. “The information is pretty fluid. All of this is unfolding as we speak.”

  “Stabbed.” Lila blurted the word out again. It rumbled around in her head, begging to get out, as the others talked.

  Ginny let out a small sigh. “Yeah, it looks like the weapon came from the knife block in the cabin’s kitchen.”

  “So someone who lives in or rents the cabin attacked Aaron?” That made less sense to Lila than Brent or another accomplice. “This is insane. Why would that happen?”

  “When?” Jared delivered the word in a louder voice, as if his brain cells had jump-started and he’d come out swinging.

  Ginny frowned at the question. “Excuse me?”

  “Aaron disappeared nine days ago. Has he been in the SUV all this time?” Jared’s voice rose with each word. By the time he got to the end, he sat up straight, demanding answers. Then his body fell. It looked like all the air rushed out of him, and he doubled over in his chair. “Shit. I can’t take this.”

  Ginny stood up and reached for the door handle and called for help.

  On instinct, Lila rushed to Jared. She dropped into the chair beside him and rubbed his back. Seeing him broken and struggling hit her as if she’d slammed full speed into a brick wall.

  “Okay, breathe.” She whispered the plea dire
ctly into his ear. After a few minutes, his breathing seemed to settle. “You okay?”

  A harsh laugh without any amusement erupted from deep inside of Jared. “No.”

  Lila glanced up in time to see Ginny and Tobias exchange a look of concern.

  “I’m fine.” Jared waved off the concern. “No need to call an ambulance.”

  Ginny waited until Jared sat up again to answer. “There’s a possibility his body was moved to the SUV recently.”

  Just when Lila thought her thoughts couldn’t be any more scrambled, her brain proved her wrong. She couldn’t decipher Ginny’s cryptic response. “He was alive and hanging out at some random cabin while we were all looking for him?”

  Tobias shrugged. “Maybe the person who stabbed him held him captive there.”

  “We’re not sure.” The more Ginny talked, the more drained she sounded.

  “This is . . . I don’t know what this is.” Lila’s mind took off on another race.

  Who other than her would want him dead? An accomplice. A victim? A parent who knew what he’d done? All sounded reasonable, but she couldn’t make the jump from there to the notes left at her house and office. Those were personal. Threatening. They suggested surveillance and a specific knowledge of her plans.

  And they’d stopped.

  It had been days since she’d gotten one, which might mean Aaron had been alive and leaving them and then something had happened to him. She couldn’t exactly ask, since no one knew about the notes. Just her and the person who’d left them.

  “There’s something else you both need to know, and I’d prefer if you heard it from me.” Ginny shifted to serious investigator mode. Some of the haze cleared from her eyes as she stood there, ready to drop the next piece of information that would blow their lives apart.

  Lila had run out of tolerance for surprises. “What is it?”

  “There was another body on the property.”

  Tobias’s eyes narrowed. “When you say ‘body,’ you mean—”

  “Aaron wasn’t alone.”

  Not possible. Not possible. Not possible. “In the car?”

  “Again, we’re collecting information and trying to wade through the evidence, but no. The woman was in the cabin and . . .” Ginny didn’t try to hide the calming breath she took. “She’s dead.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  LILA SAT SLOUCHED DOWN ON HER FAMILY ROOM COUCH WITH her head balanced against the back cushions. She thought about opening a bottle of wine, but in her current mood she might chug it, and she needed to stay rational and in control.

  She and Tobias had spent the last few hours babysitting Jared. He moved sluggishly and kept mumbling to himself. They dragged him out of the sheriff’s office and back to her house but it took effort. He demanded more answers and wanted to talk to Samantha and know about the cabin. He’d yell one minute then look near collapse the next.

  He sat in the oversize chair next to her fireplace and didn’t say a word. She and Tobias engaged in mindless chitchat, trying to give Jared time to find a mental equilibrium. He’d wanted to go home, but she didn’t want him to be alone. Brent had called. Work people had called. A few others she didn’t know had called. All were checking in on him. Cassie had called for her, and she’d said they’d talk later.

  This time the call was for Tobias. He listened but didn’t say much. She heard him mention Ginny and then saw all the color drain from his face.

  He got off the call, and his cell dangled from his lifeless fingers.

  “What’s going on?” She didn’t know how the news could get worse, but it looked like it had.

  “They identified the woman in the cabin.” Tobias finally seemed to focus. “It’s Karen Blue.”

  GINNY HUNG UP the phone and turned back to the medical examiner. Her case had now run right into the task force’s jurisdiction, which meant her time on this might be winding down. Never mind that she had all the intel on Aaron and Lila and everyone they knew in town. The task force was too visible and had support from the FBI, and that trumped her.

  That was the only reason she stood in the morgue, running out of patience and wanting to be anywhere else. Despite years of wading into violence and death, this part always unsettled her. People became faceless bodies and a source of information at this point in the process.

  Dr. Lori Timmons moved around the room like she owned it. As the medical examiner, she basically did. This was her domain.

  As the doctor finished typing in notes, Ginny stood by a tray of personal belongings and picked up a small plastic bag. The thin silver bracelet in it had a charm with the number seventeen engraved on it. “Was Karen wearing this?”

  Lori glanced over. “Yes.”

  “Maybe it was a birthday gift. I’ll have to ask her parents about it when they come back.” After the initial identification, Karen’s parents had been numb and exhausted. Ginny had sent them for coffee and a short break before the rest of the investigative team descended and started asking about Aaron.

  “Do we have an official time of death? . . . Unofficial would be fine.” She just needed to know when Karen was killed in comparison to when Aaron went missing.

  “Well, that’s going to take a bit longer.” Lori stood between the two tables now, one with Aaron’s body on it and the other with Karen’s. “The decomposition seemed off, and there wasn’t a blood pool for him, which would be consistent with a stabbing death.”

  “Maybe someone moved the body.”

  Lori nodded. “Definitely. After they thawed it.”

  Wait . . . no. “Excuse me?”

  The doctor pointed at Aaron’s lifeless form. “My working theory is that he was killed then frozen then thawed then stabbed and put in the vehicle. Stabbing is not the cause of death. He was long dead before someone picked up the knife.”

  This case kept taking odd turns. But Ginny had not seen this one coming. “Thawed . . .”

  “It’s not going to sound any better if you repeat it.” The doctor picked up a file and flipped through a few pages. “I had an accidental drowning case about a year ago, right when I took over the department. The body had been frozen, so I did quite a bit of research on this. To confirm these bodies had been frozen and thawed, I measured the activity of short-chain—”

  “Whoa.” Ginny held up a hand to stop what sounded like gibberish but was really quite important. “Adding a lot of science talk isn’t going to clear this up. Your point is, you know someone killed these two and froze their bodies?”

  “Yes.” Lori lowered the file. “I collected samples from inside the standing freezer on the cabin’s back patio, and they confirmed my theory. Both had been in there. Her under him.”

  “Any chance you found anything else in the freezer?”

  “Sorry, no. No fingerprints or stray hairs or anything.” Lori looked at Karen’s body. “I’ll check her stomach contents to try to backtrack and see if we can match that up and get an approximate time of death for Karen. We don’t have clothes, but her body did give us some clues.”

  “Such as?”

  The doctor held up a bag. “She had scrapes all over her torso and arms, and her feet were pretty ripped up. Scabbed over in places and new cuts in others. All of which suggests she ran through the woods naked, probably more than once. These needles support the running recently. They were on the bottom of one of her feet.” Before Ginny could ask a question, the doctor took off with more information. “She has ligature marks on her neck that match the rope found in the cabin.”

  “Are there fibers, DNA—anything that points us toward a killer? The cabin was clean except for one set of prints on the rocking chair.” Ginny pointed to Aaron. “His.”

  “For someone who ran through the woods and got punched and hit with something—maybe a piece of wood, though I’m not sure yet—her body is debris-free. She has broken fingernails and defensive wounds, so she clearly fought back.”

  Good for you, Karen. “Did you get anything from those?”


  “A speck of human tissue under one nail, which I hope will lead us somewhere. I’ll put a rush on it.”

  “Any sign of sexual assault?”

  “I can’t rule it out or say it happened, but no bodily fluids.”

  In any other case, a defense attorney would be all over the lack of blood and DNA evidence, claiming contamination or some other thing that explained the trace levels pointing to Aaron here. That was the least of her worries right now.

  “So you’re saying the evidence suggests someone—and the only ‘someone’ evidence might be from Aaron—stripped her, fought her, chased her through the woods, maybe more than once, beat her, strangled her, killed her, froze her, and then at some point thawed her and placed her on the bed, tied up with the same rope he used to kill her.”

  “It’s a lot, I know.”

  “But is the series of events right?”

  Lori shrugged. “Strange, but I can only tell you what the evidence says. I’m working on the timing for you, but I can’t promise, and I certainly can’t answer the biggest question.”

  Ginny was impressed the doctor could narrow it down to only one question. “Which is?”

  This time Lori sighed. “If Aaron killed her, then who killed him?”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “YOU WANT ME TO BELIEVE THAT MY BROTHER WENT TO A cabin in the middle of nowhere, where a missing woman happened to be, and he got stabbed while someone killed her.” Jared sat up higher in the chair, no longer sprawling and looking half-asleep.

  It sounded ridiculous when Jared spelled it out. The connections also stuck out as obvious. “You have the right pieces but maybe not the right order,” Lila said.

  “Did he walk in on some horrible scene at the wrong time?” The shock never left Jared’s voice. “And GPS. If Aaron knew about the place, he wouldn’t need that. He had a great memory for directions.”

  If the cabin had been down the block or next door or a cabin that belonged to someone he knew, maybe. The distance and the way he set off with that destination in mind after Lila tried to kill him suggested something bigger to her. “If he’d never been to the cabin, how would he have known to go there? And why?”