The Killer You Know

by Kimberly Van Meter

  “I can’t sit.”

  “Trust me, you’re going to want to sit for what I have to tell you.”

  Quinn faltered, caught between her natural curiosity and her competitive spirit. She had pretty big news but Silas didn’t cry wolf, which meant he must have something equally juicy.

  “Fine,” she capitulated with a groan and climbed into the passenger side. “What do you got?”

  Silas produced five pages and handed them to her.

  “What’s this?” Quinn asked before reading. Then her eyes widened and she gasped. “Are you freaking kidding me? Are you a magician or something? How the hell did you get these?”

  “You are never going to believe this but...from my mother of all people.”

  “Come again?”

  He explained how he came to have the blog pages in his possession and all Quinn could do was wish she had that kind of luck on her side. “You were born under a lucky star,” she said. “Have you read them?”

  “I skimmed but I wanted to get them to you as soon as possible.”

  Quinn was torn between devouring the pages and sharing her own news. Silas sensed her indecision and helped her decide which to do first. “What were you going to tell me?”

  Her hands lowered, papers momentarily forgotten, and said, “Mick was indeed having an affair with Sara but he swears he didn’t kill her. He allowed her to take advances on her paycheck but he paid it back so no one would notice. However, I think he knows more than he’s telling. He was freaked out, and not just because he was afraid of his wife finding out about his indiscretion all those years ago. He’s protecting someone.”

  “He just came out and told you this?” Silas asked, dubious. “Why would he do that?”

  “I may or may not have mildly threatened him,” she admitted in a sheepish tone. “But I figured I had to do something wild to get him to admit to anything and he cracked like an egg. Much easier than I would’ve suspected.”

  “That was very dangerous,” he said, surprising her with his disapproval. “I wish you would’ve talked with me before doing it.”

  Affronted, she said stiffly, “And why would I do that? I don’t need your permission to chase down my own leads.”

  “You don’t need my permission but you don’t know enough not to get yourself killed by poking at the wrong people.”

  “Mick is harmless,” Quinn disagreed, irritated that Silas was raining on her parade. “This was a big deal. Why are you brushing off my discovery?”

  “It is big,” he agreed in a patronizing tone that instantly set her nerves on fire. “But there are better, safer ways to get information rather than just rushing in, making a bunch of racket to see what crawls out from beneath the rock.”

  “I didn’t do that,” she said, stung. “I can’t believe this. I thought you’d be happy that I cracked the case open a little wider.”

  “I am.”

  “You have a funny way of showing it.”

  “Look, if the corruption in this town is bigger than we realized, we could be dealing with more than one person, which makes this even more dangerous. I think you should let me take it from here.”

  “Screw you,” Quinn said, seeing red. “No. Absolutely not. I can’t believe you even suggested it.”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he said, trying to caress her cheek but she leaned away from him. He frowned. “C’mon, Quinn. Don’t be a baby. I’m not playing around.”

  “What makes you think I am? You think I’m just doing this to pass the time? This case is my ticket and nothing is going to stop me from chasing after it. Not even you, Silas Kelly.”

  She spat his name and climbed from the car, still clutching the papers. Her previous euphoria was long gone. Now she felt ready to cry and she wanted to be far from Silas when that happened.

  She’d thought Silas was different than everyone else, patronizing her big dreams and patting her on the head like she was a cute puppy.

  Damn him.

  Quinn managed to make it home before the tears really started falling.

  She exited her car, papers still clutched to her chest, when she nearly dropped everything as she screamed.

  Something bloody was lying on her doorstep.

  Her scream brought Uncle Leo. He gasped. “What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, swallowing as Leo bent down to take a closer look. “What is it?”

  “Looks like it used to be a cat,” he answered grimly. “Hold on, I’ll get a bag and a shovel.”

  Quinn stepped closer, peering at the mangled mess. Someone had done this to scare her. Someone was sending her a message.

  Uncle Leo went to scoop the carcass but the head rolled off its body to land in a juicy heap at her feet and she nearly threw up.

  “Go in through the back door. I’ll handle this,” Leo said gruffly and Quinn didn’t hesitate.

  She ran around the back of the house and entered through the mudroom.

  Good God, someone had tortured a poor cat to get to her.

  What the hell was wrong with people?

  Uncle Leo returned, shaking his head. “Who the hell would dump a dead cat on our doorstep?” he asked. “I better call Lester and let him know someone’s playing games.”

  “No,” she said quickly, not wanting Lester to know about this. “It’s fine. Probably just a couple of kids with really questionable morals. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  But even as she tried to assure her uncle, her voice trembled and her entire body felt numb.

  Never in her life had anyone threatened her.

  She wanted to tell Silas but she couldn’t.

  Silas was an asshole.

  “What’s that in your hands?” Uncle Leo asked, drawing attention to the papers.

  “Uh...research,” she answered, clutching the pages more tightly. “Copies of an old blog that used to run in town.”

  “What blog?” Lester asked, his gaze narrowing with suspicion. “Not that fruit loop Sara Westfall’s blog, right? There’s no need to contaminate your brain with her nonsense. The woman was a menace. All she did was stir up fear and anger with her baseless accusations. Do yourself a favor and toss those in the trash.”

  She wanted to protest that it wasn’t nonsense but her heart was still hammering and she just wanted to escape to her room to breathe.

  “I need to shower,” Quinn said, moving past Uncle Leo and ignoring his questioning glance. She didn’t have the energy to fight with him when she was still in shock.

  Once safe in her room, she smoothed out the papers, wiping her eyes as she tried to focus, but her brain wasn’t cooperating. Her thoughts kept ping-ponging between Silas and the dead cat.

  She’d mistakenly thought that Silas had believed in her. But he still saw her as a kid, bungling around, more apt to hurt herself than do anything of value, and he’d proven it by reprimanding her for her actions with Mick.

  Her vision blurred as more tears fell and she dropped back on her pillows, throwing her hand over her eyes as she sobbed.

  Why was she so torn up?

  So what? Silas didn’t think she could handle the big league. Maybe she’d just been a diversion.

  A fun bed partner while he searched out the leads, intending to leave her behind all along.

  Ouch, that really hurt.

  Quinn liked Silas—really liked him. But if he didn’t have any faith in her...he was no different than anyone else in this town and she didn’t need him.

  And now someone was delivering dead cats to her door? What was next?

  “Quinnie?” Uncle Leo’s worried tone was muffled from the other side of the door. “Is everything okay? Want to talk about it?”

  Talk about what? Her bad day or the dead cat? Sh
e didn’t want to talk about either with Leo.

  “I’m fine,” she lied, sniffing back more tears. “I’ll be okay in the morning.”

  “How about pancakes? Pancakes always seem to make everything better.”

  Screw the pancakes. I just saw a dead cat’s head roll to my feet. Not exactly hungry.

  But if she declined, her uncle would surely continue to pester her because Uncle Leo thought food solved everything, which was probably why Uncle Leo’s doctor was constantly harping on him about his cholesterol.

  “Sure,” she relented, staring up at the ceiling. “Give me a few minutes, okay?”

  “You got it.”

  And then Uncle Leo left her door, presumably to fix everything that was wrong with the power of flour, eggs, butter and syrup.

  Would anyone ever take her seriously?

  Or would she always be Cute Little Quinnie?

  Quinn groaned into her pillow but she really wanted to scream.

  Well, maybe she was looking at it all wrong...maybe someone didn’t see her as Little Quinnie any longer because who delivered dead cats to people who weren’t a threat?

  If anything, the dead cat told her the opposite and in the state she was in, as disgusting as it was, she’d take that validation.

  And that was the only way she’d manage to choke down pancakes tonight.

  * * *

  He blew it.

  Man, he blew it hard.

  He shouldn’t have been so heavy-handed. Quinn didn’t take very well to being given orders.

  And he’d essentially crapped on her big news—and it was an interesting lead—but he was scared for her.

  A growing knot in his gut told him things were about to get bad.

  It was that sixth sense that Oppenshaw said he had that never steered the team wrong.

  Of course, she was joking—the FBI didn’t traffic with New Age bullshit—but he was rarely wrong when his gut started to twist.

  And it was rocking and rolling right now.

  If he was being brutally honest, he wanted to hog-tie Quinn, throw her into his hotel room and keep her there just so he knew she was safe.

  Real caveman style.

  Maybe he ought to be ashamed of how sexist he was being but the thought of Quinn getting caught in the crossfire of a war she hadn’t realized she was stepping into...it made his stomach ache.

  So if Mick was sleeping with Sara and Sara wound up dead with a potentially doctored BAC on her accident report, that meant that someone in authority—or someone with ties to someone in authority—had managed to pull strings to keep things quiet.

  But why?

  And how did all that relate to Spencer?

  Or Rhia, for that matter?

  That was where things got muddy.

  He wished he’d done more than skim those blog pages. Now he felt like an idiot for letting Quinn take them before he’d had a chance to really study them.

  He realized, sheepishly, he’d imagined that they would read them together.

  Yeah, that didn’t happen.

  He was letting his feelings for Quinn get in the way of the investigation—something he never imagined doing.

  Quinn did something to him, turned him upside down and warped his thinking.

  But there was no changing that fact now. As much as he wanted to deny it, he had feelings for Quinn that he couldn’t ignore.

  He wanted to protect her, wanted to keep her safe.

  And her propensity for walking straight into the mouth of danger sent his anxiety skyrocketing.

  If he didn’t make amends, Quinn would just continue to ignore anything he said because she was pissed off and it might get her killed.

  Sara might’ve been right—there had to be more than one person involved with Spencer’s murder, if not the actual act but definitely the covering up of key details.

  Who had the most to lose if they were caught?

  He kept circling the obvious answer—Lester.

  But it felt wrong.

  Or maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to admit that the man he admired wasn’t a good guy at all.

  Even the suggestion left a bad taste in his mouth.

  So who else?

  The deeper he got into Rhia’s case, the more certain he was that Spencer must’ve stumbled onto something he shouldn’t.

  Spencer had always been a curious kid—precocious, even.

  He’d had a smart mouth and a sharp wit, courtesy of three wise-ass older brothers.

  Maybe he’d popped off to the wrong person? Maybe he’d seen something he shouldn’t have.

  He could’ve been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  And what about Rhia?

  They’d already established that Rhia had secrets. She was sleeping with some mystery guy that not even her best friend knew of and she’d been stringing along her boyfriend as a front so no one asked questions.

  Whoever Rhia was really sleeping with wanted to ensure that no one knew of their secret.

  Was the need for secrecy enough to compel someone to kill?

  Had they known about the baby?

  What had Rhia planned to do about the pregnancy?

  Keep it? Get an abortion?

  Or had she just been a kid, in over her head, unsure of what she was going to do?

  Chapter 23

  X thinks he’s safe but I’m just biding my time. I have to make sure all my ducks are in a row before I take down this monster. When I get scared I just try to remember how poor little S had felt—alone and afraid—and I soldier on.

  Acid churned in Quinn’s stomach as she read the blog pages, highlighting certain passages that seemed important. X could be a lot of people. Please don’t be Lester.

  It makes me sick to think that I live in a town that would protect X when he clearly has a perverse appetite. Did X do something to S before killing him? I shudder to think of what S must’ve gone through in his final moments.

  I wish I could tell S’s family that there’s more than meets the eye going on in Port Orion but I can’t...not yet.

  I’m not very popular with too many people but screw them. They’ll be singing a different tune when I expose the rotten underbelly of this godforsaken town.

  Quinn tried to distract herself by studying the blog passages, which seemed more like diary entries than news stories. She didn’t want to think about Silas and what he’d said.

  But it was there, crowding her thoughts and pushing everything else aside.

  Maybe she had been reckless with Mick. Silas’s point was not lost on her but he could’ve handled it better.

  Or maybe she would’ve reacted the same either way because she was embarrassed at seeming a rookie.

  She wanted to be an investigative reporter—risks were part of the job.

  So why did she feel like crap?

  Probably all those pancakes; she rubbed at her belly with a wince. Her uncle Leo had tried to feed her problems away and she felt ready to burst.

  Yes, she’d taken a chance that Mick could’ve called her bluff, and if by some chance Mick had been the dangerous one, she would’ve shown her hand but it hadn’t worked out that way.

  Sheer dumb luck, Silas would say.

  The fact remained that Mick knew more than he was saying.

  He was protecting someone—but who?

  Mick knew someone had killed Sara and he’d helped cover it up by burying the story and perpetuating the idea that Sara was simply an alcoholic and her brain was likely soaked in gin.

  That was despicable.

  Terrible boyfriend.

  Terrible husband, too.

  Mick was pretty much terrible all the way around.

 
But was he a killer?

  No, she couldn’t see that. Mick was too soft and squishy around the edges to do something as brutal as take a life.

  She returned to her notes, trying to see if anything else clicked.

  Did she feel guilty for stomping off with the blog pages? Yeah, a bit. Silas had done a fantastic job of finding the pages and she’d taken off with them.

  A sigh escaped as Quinn rekindled her focus, determined to find something of value in this gibberish.

  What did she know at this point?

  Sara had stumbled on something, putting her life in danger. Mick likely helped make the story go away when Sara was killed.

  Rhia was sleeping with someone other than her boyfriend. Boyfriend was likely a front. Father of secret baby: unknown.

  Rhia seemed a sweetheart but anyone who was willing to lie to that extreme was capable of more deception.

  Quinn dropped the pages and let them scatter on her bed as she fell back onto her pillows. She was running in circles.

  Nothing seemed any clearer—if anything she had more loose ends than ever before.

  Sure, some of those ends were tantalizing but what did they all add up to?

  She groaned and closed her eyes, fatigue beginning to pull at her. Nothing was jumping out at her except the driving need to apologize to Silas for overreacting.

  And she was not doing that tonight.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  Maybe.

  * * *

  Seeing as Quinn had already stirred the hornet’s nest, Silas figured it was time to visit Mick Creech with all the authority of the FBI behind him.

  He walked into the newspaper front office as soon as it opened and flashed his credentials. “I’m here to speak to Mick Creech,” he said, causing a flurry of baffled expressions by the office staff. He glanced at the attendant board and saw that Quinn wasn’t in yet and he was glad. He didn’t want her to think he was squashing her investigation again, but this had to be done.

  A short, pudgy man with a balding pate appeared after he was given the message and after one look at Silas, he blanched but otherwise motioned for Silas to follow him to his office.

  The man was already sweating as he dropped into his worn leather chair. “What can I do for you?”