by A J Rivers
Copyright © 2020 by A.J. Rivers
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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The Girl And The Hunt
A.J. Rivers
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
More Emma Griffin FBI Mysteries
Staying In Touch With A.J.
Also by A.J. Rivers
Chapter One
The flash of the cameras is blinding.
Around me, the world moves in slow motion. Voices drift past like they're coming through water. Only the sound of the cameras, the impossibly, unnaturally loud snap of each second being captured, pierces through the fog. Each click of the shutter slices through time, creating moments like slivers of glass.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm aware of someone talking to me. I'm not sure who it is. The voice is muffled by the pressure closing in around me and the sound of the blood rushing in my ears. A touch on my shoulder turns me around, and I stretch my hands out in front of me. The flashes glisten off the blood smeared on my palms and dotted on my fingertips. I turn them over to show the wet streaks of brilliant red across the backs of my hands and up onto my wrists.
They shouldn't be there. I know that as well as any of the people around me. If I'd done what I was supposed to do, reacted the way I was supposed to react, there would be no blood on my skin. But that's like looking over your shoulder in a photograph. No matter what's there, you can't change what's behind you.
I walked into the house before Sam. He was right behind me, close enough to hear me breathe, but not enough to stop me when I ran for the family room. I knew the layout of the house. It was familiar beneath my feet, even though I'd never been in the house. The only time I was here during the last time I was in Feathered Nest was when I stood in the front yard and talked to Marren Purcell while she showed me pictures of her roses. She grew beautiful roses. They crawled on vines up trellises and reach toward the porch, casting shadows on the front of the house and standing out against the white siding in pops of pink and peach. Not now, though. The vines are cold and dry; the early February sunlight not yet warm enough to coax out the leaves and unfurl the buds.
It's just as well. Pink roses look out of place at a grave.
That's what Marren's house will always be now. Even when her tattered body is brought out of the family room and the darkened carpet is replaced. Even when the splatters of blood are washed away, and the words scrawled on the wall are covered with a coat of fresh white paint meant to keep all the house's secrets. After everything is done and time has passed, it will still be a grave.
When I’d visited Marren the first time I was in Feathered Nest, she was so proud to show me the pictures of her roses. Later I saw pictures of the roses in full bloom in a newspaper clipping from years before. She’d won a now-defunct garden contest. I didn't go into the house then, but I know it now. It was easy to navigate when I opened the front door and stepped inside because it was like stepping inside Jake Logan's house. Though his stood several streets away, they were built from the same plans, laid out in the same way. I imagine there are many houses throughout the tiny town just like it.
Sam didn't stop me when I ran through the formal living room at the front of the house. He might have called out to me when I got into the family room set in the center of the house or tried to stop me from reaching down toward Marren's body stretched out across the carpet. If he did, I didn't hear it. My mind wasn't on him. It was on her eyes staring up at the ceiling and the blood pooling beneath her. It was on the note pinned to her chest with my name written across it.
My hands were already on her when he came into the room and told me to stop so they could take pictures. Everything needed to be photographed exactly the way it was when we found her. I didn't plan on moving her. I just wanted the note. It's in an evidence bag now, ready to be brought to the police station and processed along with all the rest of the evidence. That's all the room has been reduced to now. Evidence.
Pictures, swabs, segments of carpet and fabric, objects splattered with blood. The room dismantled and relegated to plastic bags and cardboard boxes as the investigation team compartmentalizes each element of the crime. It feels somehow safer that way. Precise and controlled. But also cold. A life has been reduced to a puzzle.
It doesn't matter that the note was taken from my hands by the first officer to respond. I don't need the paper or the gold safety pin that held it to her chest. Even if the words weren't burned into my mind, I had Sam take a picture of the note when the officers were still on their way. It started in the flowing script of the second half of the note we found with the flowers on the car and on the letter sent with the train ticket that shoved me headlong into horror almost a week ago. Halfway down the note, the handwriting changed, shifting back to the heavy black block letters all too familiar to me.
You missed the tea party, Emma.
It was lovely.
Spice tea and cake.
The last, but not the first.
It's a shame it's still cold.
No flowers for the party.
But not too much of a loss.
I've always thought roses should be read.
These remind me of her funeral.
Such a simple casket.
Is that why it seemed so light?
I know.
Come find out.
Catch me
The officer stops taking pictures of my hands and steps further into the family room. They've already draped a white sheet over Marren. She's just a piece of the puzzle now. Evidence. They'll slip her into a plastic bag and bring her to a box. Examine her. Pick her over. Try to piece her back together again and hope she can still tell her secrets.
Sam steps up beside me and puts his arm around my waist, pulling me close. I don't know if he's trying to comfort me or make sure I stay on my feet. But it’s not really necessary. I'm steady now. I have to be. I watch the officer take more pictures and another start setting down the markers of what they'll take with them when they leave. I know I can't just walk away from this. I can't hand it over to them and let them figure it out. Because they won't. It's not about them.
My mind starts to settle as awareness comes back and everything sharpens again. What felt slow and washed out returns to crystal focus, and I can hear the stomp of heavy footsteps come up the front steps toward the door. My eyes lock on the pool
of sunlight stretching across the living room floor just before a foreboding form swallows it.
"Chief, we're processing the scene," says an officer who looks like tired and worn are his perpetual states. "Right now, there doesn't appear to be any sign of forced entry. No murder weapon has been located."
Police Chief LaRoche ignores the officer and takes long strides across the room to me. His eyes hook into me, all signs of the reluctant respect that was there during our brief conversation outside the courthouse the last time I saw him gone.
"Emma Griffin," he says with a slight growl in his voice.
Sam steps up to put himself protectively between LaRoche and me. His face stays calm and steady. It's an expression I recognize from being on investigations with him when he has to contend with those involved while trying to keep tensions under control.
"Sheriff Sam Johnson, Sherwood County," he says, offering his hand.
LaRoche looks at it but doesn't reach for it.
"I know who you are." His stare shifts back to me. "What are you doing here?"
In that second, the emotion locked tight inside me bubbles over. I step past Sam to confront the chief.
"I'm doing what you were supposed to do," I shout. "You said you would check on her."
"You called me three hours ago, Griffin," he snaps back.
"And you said you would make sure she was alright. I told you to come here and make sure she was alright, to talk to her, and warn her to stay inside until I got here."
"I came," he tells me.
"When?" I ask. "Did you come as soon as I called you?"
"I'm not at your beck and call. There were other things I was in the middle of handling, and I needed to finish those first before I could come out here. I drove by and noticed her car wasn't here, and her shades were down. It took me some time to get back, but when I did, I knocked on the door, and she didn't answer. She's been out of town, so I figured she hadn't gotten back yet," he says.
"She didn't answer because she was dead!" I shout.
Sam grabs my shoulders and pulls me back away from the police chief.
"Emma," he says. "Calm down."
"I'm not going to calm down. If he did what he was supposed to do, she might still be alive."
"Don't blame me for this," LaRoche warns. "She might have been dead by the time you called me."
I recoil at the cold note in his voice. He draws in a breath as I pull closer to him, my jaw set.
"That woman was lying there in a pool of her own blood, alone."
"Until you found her."
"What's that supposed to mean?" I ask angrily.
"Who did you bring to my town?" he growls.
My heart squeezes tightly in my chest, painfully constricting my breath. The coroner comes into the house, and I step out of the way, turning to look over my shoulder at Marren a final time. Only hours ago, her kind blue eyes looked into the face of evil. A sick feeling rolls through me as I wonder if she watched the words written across the wall in her own blood.
Where's your mother, Emma?
Chapter Two
Ian
Seventeen years ago…
He said goodbye. Ian knew he did. Before Mariya left the house, suitcase in hand, he held her close and said goodbye. But that wasn't supposed to be the last time. Those weren't the last of the words he had to say to her. There were so many more.
They were owed so many more years. He could feel them when he walked back into the house. Sweat sticking the thin fabric of his shirt to his skin, the spring night outside still humid, he walked into a silent world of unfulfilled promises. With every step, he encountered something that should have happened but never had the opportunity to. The rooms around him echoed with breaths never taken, laughs that never happened. Whispers that would never be heard. Out of the corners of his eyes he almost caught movement, like he was watching the ghosts of moments meant to unfold that were stolen from reality.
He felt those words in his mouth. They rolled on his tongue and swelled in his throat. They ached in his chest and churned in his stomach. All those words were things he was meant to say, but he would never be able to now. Even if he did, he would only be saying them into the void. There was no one there to hear them now. No one to scoop them up out of the air and replace them with her own. That goodbye he said when she walked out of the house and to the waiting car wasn't meant to be the final one. It fulfilled a role it could never live up to. That goodbye was only meant as a bridge, only meant to last a few days. Now it had to stretch, to hang on for the rest of his life.
How many more goodbyes were meant to be spoken between them? How many I love you's existed in the corners of his mind and waiting in his mouth? What else was there? What other words did he not even know he was going to say to her?
He felt the phantom words there in the silence. They pressed in around him now that the teams that swarmed the house were gone. It had all happened so fast he barely even had a chance to process what was going on, and now it was over, and reality crashed in around him.
Ian didn't remember making any phone calls. Obviously, he had, or the people wouldn't have come. But he couldn't remember picking up the phone or dialing. He didn't know who he called first or what he said. All he knew was that, in what seemed like an instant, the house went from calm and full of promise to bursting with voices and people. He tried to keep up with them, to listen to what they were saying to him, and tell them the things they needed to know. But he didn't know. They were asking questions he had no answers to. Questions he wanted to ask them.
He thought he’d held her. He wanted to hold her in his arms as soon as he saw her lying there on the floor, but now, hours later, he looked down at himself and realized there was no blood. He didn't understand. As soon as he heard the unmistakable slicing sound of the silenced bullet and the impact of a body against the floor, his memories stopped. He couldn’t remember anything until the stretcher slid by with the white sheet covering her. He couldn't see her face. He didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed, or where the bullet went in. As soon as that realization sunk in, he clawed through his mind, ripping it apart in search of even a flicker from when he found her.
But there was nothing. Those moments weren't there. They'd been wiped from his mind, blocked from his memory. His brain did it to protect him, but it was torture. Why didn't he touch her?
Seeing them bring her out of the house was the last thing he could concretely remember for the next several hours. There were pieces of memories, shards, and fragments he could start to piece together. He knew he was brought in to answer questions. But he couldn't remember any of the faces or the names of the people who asked them. He didn't know what today was, or when asked, how he responded. Their words sank into him and dragged out responses. There was nothing voluntary. Not that he was trying to hide anything. There was nothing to hide. He would tell them anything, offer whatever was in him to give. He would willingly carve his heart out, peel away every layer of his mind, anything that would give them what they wanted to know.
There was only one face he clearly remembered. One face staring at him through the roiling sea of people that flooded the house and spilled out in the lawn, dripping into the road blocked with chasing lights. There was no sound. No sirens. But there was that face. Ian met his eyes for half a second, only long enough to know he was there. The man should have been there before. It was only minutes, but they slipped away and took Mariya with them. Those minutes turned her from what was into what used to be. Reduced her to sand at the bottom of an hourglass.
Ian didn't think again for a long time. Not until after the questions. After the long ride home. After walking back through the door. That's when it brought him to the floor. He sat against the door, trying to breathe, but there was no air. He was existing outside of reality; in borrowed space that overlapped the world, he'd lived in only hours before. It wasn't until he felt her sit down beside him that he started to inhabit the world again. His daughter sitting
there beside him pulled him back and made him feel real again.
He didn't say anything to her. He couldn't. Emma didn't ask. She sat there, close enough to lean her head against his shoulder, and breathed. Those were his breaths now. They would fill his lungs and push back out into the empty, hollow rooms. They would force his heart to keep beating, stop the blood from drying in his veins. Eyes just like his, but a face like her mother's. She would keep him there.
They sat there as the last of the night faded, and the darkness cast through the windows above the door became less saturated. Ian didn't want the sun to rise. He willed the horizon to hold on, to cling to the night just a little longer. Once it broke open and allowed the light to come, he knew it would really be over. The time ticking by on the grandfather clock in the corner of the foyer didn't matter. It was the night that kept him close to Mariya. As long as it was dark, they were still together in that night. He could still share that space with her.
When the light came, it would all be gone. With the first sliver of rose gold glowed against the dark edge of the sky, they would be irreparably separated. He would move forward into the first day without her on this planet with him, and she would stay forever in that last night.
But the sun came, as he knew it would. It broke through the windows above the door and filtered onto the foyer floor in front of them. Ian couldn't resist it any longer. He got up and scooped Emma into his arms to carry her into the living room. He laid her onto the couch and pulled a blanket down over her. It came down from the back of the couch carrying the scent of her mother, the one who last used it.
