Erin Solomon Mysteries, Books 1 - 5

by Jen Blood

  “Relax, Sol. I won’t let Sasquatch get you.”

  I thought of what Red Grivois had described of Erin Lincoln’s final week on the planet. I shivered despite the warm night air.

  “I’m not worried about Sasquatch.”

  Diggs walked me to my room, though the fact that he was right next door made it seem a little silly. It didn’t matter, though—I was grateful for the company. I hadn’t said much since our meeting with Luke and Sarah, and even less since talking to Red Grivois. Diggs tipped his head sideways and studied me while I tried to make my key card work. Half of me wanted him to just go and leave me to stew. The other half had never wanted to be alone less in my life.

  The light turned green and the door buzzed. I pushed it open. Einstein just about knocked me over to get inside, while I stayed in the doorway with Diggs.

  “You’ll be okay?” he asked.

  “I think I can handle a motel room, Diggs. Compared to the rest of the day, this should be a cake walk.”

  He still made no move to go. “We got some good information today.”

  I laughed. “Did we? I guess if what we were shooting for was confirmation that my father was a monster.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. A baby cried in a room down the hall. Next door, someone was watching baseball with the volume too high. The Sox were up by two.

  “We should get some rest,” I said. “I’m just gonna hit the showers. And I imagine Andie’s waiting for an update.”

  He nodded guiltily. Stepped back. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll see you in the morning, I guess.”

  “I hope so—otherwise it’s gonna be a hell of a long walk back to civilization.”

  He turned and started to walk away. I stood there debating for a second before I went after him and grabbed his arm. It was warm and strong and when he turned to look at me, there was something dark in his eyes—like a war was waging in that pretty blond head of his. I let go, wishing I hadn’t stopped him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I just wanted to thank you.”

  “Stop doing that,” he said irritably. “You don’t have to thank me for this. For being here. This is what we do. If it were me, you’d be here. Why would you think it would be any different for you?”

  “Well, I still appreciate it. I just don’t want you to think it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I know that.”

  Then we stood there for another six or seven days, staring into each other’s eyes. I raised my eyebrows. This was when being half in the bag would really come in handy.

  “Should we hug it out now?” I asked.

  He kicked up a little smile, blue eyes sparkling. “I’m good. You?”

  “I think I’m okay.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m just gonna go scrub some of this road dust off. Give a shout if you need anything, though.”

  I told him I would, and went inside my room alone. A few minutes later, I heard his TV come on next door. The shower followed. For a few seconds I just stood there, my hand on the wall separating us. I’d been sleeping alone a lot lately; it turned out it didn’t come as easily as I would have liked. I looked at Einstein, who had already settled himself on the bed.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s not gonna happen.”

  He looked fleetingly concerned, but that vanished as soon as I opened my pack and started rooting around for treats. I gave him one and found a half-melted Hershey bar for myself, and went into the bathroom to drown my sorrows in the tub.

  I went through the case files while I was soaking in tepid bath water. The bathroom fan was broken—it sounded like a DC-10 was landing in the next room, which proved to be too much for Einstein to handle. Between his whining and the content I was going through, I finally gave up on the idea of a relaxing bath and got out.

  I turned the TV on, forgoing the local news in favor of a Firefly marathon on Syfy. I was half-dressed and just starting to lose myself on Serenity with the rest of the crew when Einstein bolted up from a seemingly dead sleep and started barking like a banshee, all his fury directed at a picture window on the other side of the room.

  The drapes were drawn and the air conditioner was going, but that didn’t stop him. I glanced at my phone. A call to Diggs would be not only cowardly but also too easily misconstrued as something else; I dismissed the idea outright. Instead, I opened the drapes. The glass was thick and both windows were locked securely.

  “We’ve talked about this before, Stein.” He looked at me guiltily. “I can’t bring you if you’re gonna freak out over every little bump in the night.”

  I stared through the glass into the night outside, waiting for the face of some deranged killer to appear in front of me. The only deranged face I saw was mine, however, so I closed the curtains and silently directed my heart to get a hold of itself.

  I spent the next hour trying to convince Einstein that he didn’t really need to go out for the final pee of the night, but that was a wasted effort. Eventually, after Stein had been dancing at the door shooting reproachful glances my way for half an hour, I surrendered. At eleven that night, I grabbed the dog’s leash, my jacket, room key, and phone, and headed out.

  Despite whatever scary-movie vibe the night may have had, it was still undeniably gorgeous. The moon was nearly full, an expanse of stars and the pale blur of the Milky Way overhead. The air had that summer smell to it: pine and earth, the cool, fragrant clean of a world in bloom. It wasn’t like the stories I’d been hearing all day hadn’t made an impression, though—I could have been in heaven itself and I don’t think I would have strayed too far from a cell tower and a helping hand. I stuck as close to the motel as possible without actually encouraging Einstein to relieve himself on someone’s doorstep. Even then, most of the windows in the place were dark, and between the trees and the stars and the silence, the whole scene had a very end-of-the-world quality to it.

  When Einstein started getting more insistent about heading toward the woods, I drew the line and redirected our course toward the single-lane stretch of highway running past. An eighteen wheeler sped by, kicking up dust in its wake. Across the road at another cheap hotel, a couple got out of an SUV with two bikes strapped to the back and a canoe on top. The woman hauled a car seat from the passenger’s side; I heard a baby start to cry. Einstein and I kept walking.

  We continued for a while—long enough for the knots in my shoulders to loosen and that tight ache in my chest to ease, anyway. I kept returning to everything I’d heard about my father over the past few days: the abuse and the anger, the loss and the depravity. Yet again, I tried to connect all everyone had been telling me with the man I’d known on Payson Isle.

  I named you after my sister, I remembered my father saying to me once. Because she was from heaven. She changed everything. God took her, but he gave me you.

  The day he told me that, we’d found an orphaned fawn out behind the greenhouse on the island. We’d been debating about names. We settled on Ruby for reasons I couldn’t even remember anymore, and for the next month he tended to that deer like she was his own child. She lived in the boarding house with us, trailing baby deer turds in her wake until Isaac—the head of the Payson Church—had had enough and insisted she at least be relegated to the barn. When Ruby took sick that fall, Dad lived in the barn with her for a week before she finally passed one night with both my father and me by her side.

  I couldn’t explain the horror stories people were telling me now, but at the end of the day it didn’t matter. The man I’d known may have been a bastard as a kid, but something huge had changed him by the time I came along. I’d stake my life on the fact that he’d never been a murderer, and he sure as hell hadn’t grown up to be a serial killer. There had to be another explanation, unless every memory I had of my childhood was false.

  I got Stein turned around and started back toward the hotel, feeling better than I had since Diggs had given me the news about Jeff Lincoln the night before. There were no cars on the road,
Route 1 stretching as far as the eye could see in the deep blue of the moonlit night. Einstein growled just as we went round a bend that brought the motel back in sight, his attention suddenly on the night behind us. I instinctively reached for my cell phone. Stein started back despite my clear intent on the road ahead, whining softly, his body tensed. I turned, prepared to confront a behemoth madman with red eyes and an axe.

  Instead, across the road and well back from us, I spotted yellow eyes. No axe. A coyote, thin and mangy, loped into the road with its head down. It held something in its mouth—a rabbit, judging by the size. I ordered Einstein to settle his ass down; he whined one more time, then sat. The coyote got halfway across the road then paused, head up now, sniffing the wind. She must have caught our scent, because she froze. Her yellow eyes found mine. I tightened my hold on Stein’s leash and held my breath.

  A tenth of a second might have passed while she stayed there, trying to make her decision: go back, or continue. Then, suddenly, a truck engine roared to life. The coyote perked her ears in the direction of the noise, then quickly turned and adjusted her course—back into the woods, her body moving with that grace and assurance wild things have when left to their own devices.

  The owner of the monster truck, meanwhile, revved his engine in the distance. I gave Einstein a perfunctory head pat for being more alert than I was when it came to up-close-and-personal wildlife experiences, and we got back on track to the motel. We were still maybe fifty yards from the Budget Inn parking lot when what I could now see was a very jacked-up pickup, revved its engine one more time, spun its wheels in the gravel, and shot out of the lot with no headlights on.

  I spent more Saturdays than I can count back in Littlehope as a teenager watching the locals do donuts on every habitable surface in their 4x4’s, so I know a little about the peculiar driving habits of Men With Trucks. Rule number one? Stay the hell out of the way. I was preparing to do exactly that when the truck picked up speed and the headlights came on suddenly, blinding me. For one endless moment, I was frozen in a dream-state, watching the truck barrel toward me. The lights got brighter, the engine louder. I kept waiting for the driver to swerve.

  When it dawned on me that the lunatic wasn’t planning on changing course before he mowed me down, I yanked Einstein’s leash and dove off the road. I took a digger in the gravel on my already-skinned knee, but managed to get both Stein and me out of the truck’s path just as the horn blared. The driver jerked the wheel to the right and sped away.

  Afterward, I sat on the side of the road beside Einstein for a good five minutes, trying to pry my heart out of my throat. I was just getting my knees back under me when my phone rang. My hands were shaking as I pulled it out of my pocket.

  “Where the hell are you?” Diggs demanded before I had the chance to say a word.

  “I had to walk Einstein.”

  He breathed an audible sigh of relief. Whatever de-stressing I might have managed in the past half hour was officially undone.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Where are you right now?”

  I started back toward the motel, now just a stone’s throw away. “I’m outside. I’ll be right in—why, where are you?”

  “Just get back here. Please.”

  When I got back to the room, Diggs was sitting on my bed surrounded by my files.

  “How’d you get in here?” I asked.

  “Door was open,” he said. “When I came in, that was here.” He nodded toward an old Polaroid snapshot on the dresser. I took a closer look, and regretted it immediately. I pushed it away and took a step back.

  “What the hell is that?”

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. In the picture, a red-haired girl lay nude on a dirt path, her eyes wide, her mouth open in a scream frozen in time.

  “That’s not the only picture there,” he said grimly.

  I pushed the Polaroid aside with my index finger, reluctant to touch it. There was a digital shot beneath it that had obviously come from a laser printer—and a lousy one at that. It didn’t make the content any less disturbing, though. In the photo, Diggs and I sat at a pine picnic table with Red Grivois. Someone had drawn a heart around my face with red marker.

  I wet my lips, trying to find my voice. “The girl in the first picture—that’s Erin Lincoln. And that’s not a shot from the crime scene. She’s still alive there.”

  “I know,” Diggs said.

  “I know everyone else is saying my father did this,” I said. I kept my eyes on the ground. My stomach felt like I’d been on rough seas for days. “But they’re wrong. He wouldn’t do this, Diggs. I don’t care what anyone else says—whatever he did or didn’t do, he wouldn’t hurt me.”

  He didn’t say anything. He hadn’t moved from his seat at the edge of the bed. For the first time, I noticed how pale he was. His hair was still wet, and he was wearing only boxers and a t-shirt.

  “I’m okay, Diggs,” I said.

  He shook his head. Diggs is usually a cool customer, but the way he looked at me just then, it was like he’d been stripped bare and run through.

  “I thought he got you,” he said. “I heard something next door—I think he dropped something while he was here. So I came over to check. I just had this feeling. And then your door was open, and I found those pictures.” He wouldn’t look at me. I sat down beside him and put my hand over his.

  “Hey—I’m serious. I’m right here, Diggs. Nothing happened.”

  He squeezed my fingers so tight the blood stopped flowing. A second passed, then another, before he took a deep breath and let it out nice and slow. He let go of my hand and shook his head again, running his fingers through his hair.

  “Jesus Christ, Sol,” he said. He managed a strangled laugh. “Seriously—just call me before you walk the damn dog, huh? At least until we’re done with this thing.”

  I would have made fun of him normally, but the Polaroid on the dresser had effectively killed my rapier wit. Diggs gave me a thorough once-over for the first time since I’d come in, just noticing my torn jeans and bloody knees.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  The short version of the story seemed like a good bet at the moment. “I fell.”

  “I’m getting you a helmet and kneepads for your next birthday,” he said. “Get into something more comfortable—I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I changed into pajama bottoms and a t-shirt while he was gone, and returned from the bathroom to find Diggs, now in jeans and a jersey, sitting on the floor with the first aid kit he’d been carrying with him for as long as I could remember. He nodded toward the edge of the bed. I sat. He knelt at my feet and used a damp washcloth to clean the gravel out of my knee for the second time in as many days. I’d had worse, but it still stung like hell. I flinched when he dabbed at it with peroxide.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  He curled one hand around my calf, holding me in place. I felt his touch on a cellular level, stoking something I was doing my damnedest to keep un-stoked. His thumb grazed the sensitive skin behind my knee. He was close enough that I could feel his breath, the tension still obvious in his shoulders. When he was finished, he moved back to give us both some much-needed space.

  “That was a pretty good tumble you took out there. What happened?” he asked.

  When I didn’t answer right away, he looked up. His eyes narrowed. “Sol?”

  I’d promised after the last story that I wouldn’t keep things from him anymore—a reasonable request given that a slew of people hadn’t made it off Payson Isle alive. A more transparent research process seemed advisable. I took a long, slow breath, and scooted backward on the bed. Diggs got up and took a seat next to me.

  “I think I saw the guy who broke into my room.”

  His Adam’s apple moved when he swallowed hard, the fear I’d seen before back in his eyes.

  “Say something,” I said.

  “What? I don’t know what to say to you anymore. Or what to
do. We’re chasing a serial killer—do you get that? A lunatic who gets his rocks off torturing and killing little girls.”

  “Well, see—there you go. I’m not his type. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a little girl anymore, Diggs.”

  “Don’t,” he said shortly. I raised my eyebrows innocently, but he didn’t crack a smile. “Don’t turn this into a joke. Have you actually looked at these pictures?” He got up and took the one of Erin Lincoln off the dresser, then came over and held it in front of me. My stomach turned, but I didn’t look away.

  “Trust me, I’ve seen them, Diggs,” I said.

  “Then why the fuck aren’t you terrified? He was in this room. He tried to run you down. This woman—this Bonnie Saucier. What did she tell you?”

  I pushed the picture away. “What, you suddenly believe in psychics? It’s a bunch of bullshit—you know that.”

  “Sarah Saucier obviously doesn’t think so. How do you know Hank Gendreau didn’t set you up when he got in touch with you in the first place? Maybe he worked with an accomplice all those years ago, and this is…I don’t know, some grand scheme to lure you out here.”

  “So this is a conspiracy? To do what, exactly? No offense, Diggs, but I think you’re overestimating my appeal here.”

  He walked away and paced the room, his shoulders so tense that I figured it was only a matter of time before he burst something critical. I went to him and touched his arm, forcing him to stop and look at me.

  “I feel like a goddamn broken record,” he said, his voice still tight with anger. “Do you really not see that you’re putting yourself in danger here? Or is it that you honestly don’t give a shit?”

  “Of course I give a shit,” I said, my own anger on the rise. “But this is my father. Everything I thought I knew about my life got flushed down the toilet last spring, and apparently that was just the beginning. I need to know where he is. Who he was.” My voice rose. “And don’t talk to me about not giving a shit whether I live or die. Do you know how many times I scraped you off the bathroom floor of sleazy dives from Portland to LA and back? How many bar fights and eight balls and bimbos I watched you burn through before you finally pulled your head out of your ass?”