The Girl in Dangerous Waters (Emma Griffin FBI Mystery Book 8)

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 in Dangerous Waters

  A.J. Rivers

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  Staying In Touch With A.J.

  Also by A.J. Rivers

  Prologue

  One year ago…

  "A single bullet wound to the base of the skull."

  "Sounds like an execution. Were there any other injuries?" I ask.

  “Nothing separate from what he was already recovering from in the hospital,” the medical examiner tells me. “The abrasions on his face are from the sand.”

  I nod.

  “Thank you,” I tell her.

  Tightly coiled dark hair bound up in a ponytail at the back of her head bounces slightly as she pulls the sheet back up over Greg's face. The sight of it catches my breath in my throat. I've seen it before, but this time there's no question. I know it's him.

  I take a step back, waiting for her to slide the slab back into the morgue drawer and close the heavy metal door over it. Our eyes meet. She gives me a look that's something close to pity. It's a look I've been getting a lot recently, but I've more than had my fill. Without another word, I turn and leave.

  Stepping out into the hallway is a relief. The last time I was in a morgue was in the hospital. I was stretched out on one of those slabs, drugged, and hidden behind the heavy metal door. Dean rescued me from the drawer before I froze to death, but there is no rescuing Greg. No getting him out. He will lie there alone in the dark and cold while we try to unravel what happened to him.

  "He wasn't supposed to leave alone," I say, storming down the hallway past Eric, who waits for me against the wall. "He was supposed to wait at the hospital until he could be discharged with a guard. What was he thinking, walking out of that hospital without one of us? Or at least another agent?"

  "Did Dr. Galvan find out anything else?" he asks.

  "Same as the initial findings. Single bullet hole to the back of the head. She said there were no other signs of injury. I guess you don't really need any other injuries when you get a point-blank hole to the skull,” I explain.

  He follows me through the building and out into the thin, bright sunlight of the afternoon. The towering mirrored building is stark and sterile. The trees planted along the sidewalk in front of it don’t do much to soften its appearance. Somehow the rays of light bouncing off the sharp corners and expanses of metal and glass make them feel colder.

  “Sounds like an execution,” Eric muses.

  “That's exactly what I said,” I tell him, yanking gloves onto my hands. But there's something about it that doesn't sit well with me.

  “What?” he asks.

  “He was standing.” We make our way down the sidewalk. “I got a chance to look at the crime scene photos. The sand isn't disrupted in a way that would indicate he was kneeling when he was shot. The trajectory also shows the gun wasn't pointed downwards when it was shot but held straight ahead at very close range. Greg also has a few scratches on the side of his face where he hit the sand as he fell. After the gunshot. That means he was just standing there when someone walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head.”

  "Not all hits have the victim kneeling," Eric points out. "It could have just as easily been an execution with him standing."

  "I know that. But think about where he was. It's not like he was in the woods at night or inside a building where he could be trapped. He was found dead on the beach at the edge of the water. There was no indication he was killed somewhere else and dumped, and the time of death puts him being shot before sunset. After what he went through, Greg wouldn't just let someone march him out across the sand and then stand there while they shot him."

  I shake my head, still staring straight ahead as we walk. "I need to look at the crime scene images again."

  “Creagan is already pretty jumpy about this. He's not going to like you getting involved," Eric says.

  I stop in the middle of the sidewalk and turn to him, stepping up close so I can stare directly into his eyes.

  "Creagan can shove a flute up his ass and play ‘Dixie’ with a straw. After the shit he pulled with my mother's death and dangling me like a piece of raw meat in front of a serial killer, he knows better than to get in my way right now."

  Eric gives a slightly shaky nod, and I continue down the sidewalk. A few seconds later, he takes several jogging steps to catch up with me.

  “When all this has settled down a bit, remind me to have you explain the physiology of what you just said,” he says.

  “Do you want a demonstration?” I ask.

  “Not necessary. Especially if it includes visual aids.”

  “Then you'll just have to use your imagination,” I offer.

  Just as I expected, Creagan doesn't show his face as we enter the war room that has been set up to manage the investigation into Greg's murder. In the days since his body was found, a frustratingly minuscule amount of progress has been made into finding out what happened. This room contains everything investigators have uncovered, but the shreds are still scattered around, like pieces of a puzzle yet to be put together. Well, at this point, it’s almost as if not just one, but several puzzles have been upended and tossed around. We have to sift through them all to even find the pieces that matter.

  Some of those pieces are the crime scene photos. These photos are a sliver of time. I've always felt that crimes burn into a place, permanently altering the atmosphere. These pictures record the moment that brand is made. Even tiny details can give insight into the crime that might otherwise be lost. That’s what makes them so invaluable and influential in an early investigation.

  My hands pressed flat on the large oval table; I sweep my eyes over the photos spread out across it. They land on one, and I pull it toward me.

  "Look," I say to Eric, running my fingertip down the trail of footprints behind Greg's body. "There are footprints all over the beach, but there wasn't much rain in the days before the murder, so the sand was dry. The footprints are shallow. They just pressed down into the very surface of the sand. But look at the ones behind Greg."

  "Like the mud under Martin Phillips," Eric notes.

  I nod. The deep impressions of boot marks sunk into the wet ground at the train yard, just beneath where the orderly was tied to a
fence and tortured, are clear in my mind. They almost superimpose the footsteps in the picture I look at now.

  “Exactly,” I tell him. “Those were made when Anson picked Martin up to hang him. Some of those marks were shallower because only he was standing in that place, but then they got deeper when he lifted him up. He had to press his weight down to get leverage. This is the same idea, but not because somebody picked Greg up. Instead, Greg made footprints going across the sand up to the edge of the water. Then another person followed behind, following in his exact footprints. It made them much deeper than any other footsteps nearby.”

  “So, whoever shot him followed directly behind him rather than walking beside him,” Eric says.

  I nod.

  “So, again, I don't see somebody marching Greg out across the beach in the daylight and shooting him. Greg wouldn't comply like that. There would be a fight; he would try to make a scene and get away. But if you look at the sand, there isn't any sign that he reacted at all. He walked to the edge of that water and dropped dead where he stood. No struggle. No movement like he was turning around in response to anyone," I say.

  “So, why was he out there? Greg doesn't exactly strike me as the beach-going type,” Eric says.

  “Definitely not,” I agree. “The one time I convinced him to go to the river with me, he slathered on sun factor two thousand and still sat under an umbrella the entire time with a shirt on. He was never a water person. He would hike and was a really skilled boxer. When he was a kid, he built go-karts."

  "Seriously?" Eric asks.

  I nod, an unexpected laugh bubbling up.

  “That was his fun fact.”

  “His what?”

  “His fun fact. We didn't have a cute or romantic story about how we started dating. It just kind of happened. But at the very beginning, when we first met, he did try to flirt with me a little. He just wasn't very good at it. He was too analytical and precise for that. We already talked a lot about work and our current lives and everything, but once he decided he was attracted to me, he just stopped being able to communicate. So, one day when he was struggling with having a conversation with me, I asked him for a fun fact about himself. It was supposed to just throw him off his game and force him to think outside the structured conversation he seemed to have planned,” I explain.

  “And his was about go-karts,” Eric acknowledges.

  I nod, looking back at the table and a picture of Greg before he ended up on that beach.

  “Yes. He didn't even really have to think about it, which was pretty funny. It was almost like that was the only fun fact about him, so it was easy for him to think of. But he told me that when he was younger, he lived in a pretty rural area, and it was just a normal thing for boys to build their own go-karts. As you can imagine, he didn't have a lot in common with most of the guys in his area. But he was smart and mechanical, so that in particular really resonated with him. He was able to build impressive karts; he even entered into races with them." I glance over at Eric with a tense smile. "I bet you didn't see that coming."

  "I'm just envisioning a miniature Greg in a little child-sized suit, racing go-karts," he smiles with a tinge of sadness to his voice.

  The image is pretty funny; I have to admit. But I’ve slipped off track, letting my mind go into nostalgia and memory rather than focusing on what's in front of me. Even though Greg and I had been over for a long time before all this, it still hurts that he’s gone. Shaking away the emotion, I look back at the pictures in front of me and focus again on the footsteps.

  “I think he went on to the beach himself.”

  “What about the blonde woman on the security camera?” Eric asks.

  “I don't know. It definitely looked like she at least left with him. But I don't think anybody was with him when he first walked out onto the beach. It looks like he did that on his own, and then someone came up behind him.”

  “Maybe getting through his captivity with Jonah and surviving being brutalized gave him a new lease on life,” Eric suggests. “He could have decided he didn't want to follow the same patterns and routines he did before and was going to try new things.”

  I look up at him, any tiny fiber of humor that might have existed in me now gone.

  "Yeah. So, he left the hospital without telling us, went to watch the sunset over the ocean, and got a bullet in the brain for it."

  Six months later …

  The fall night is sticky and oppressive. Too hot to be October, even in Sherwood. I wake up unable to breathe. Instinct stretches my hand to the side, but I find nothingness. Sam is on duty tonight, leaving my sweaty sheets empty and still. The stifling air around me is too quiet. It swells in my lungs rather than giving me a fresh breath. I can't force the air in.

  My body feels impossibly heavy. Like I'm being pulled down into the mattress. At the same time, something aches at the very center of my being. A blast of force in my gut propels me up. Barely realizing what I'm doing, I run up into the attic.

  I haven't climbed these stairs in months. My bare feet take them two at a time, nearly slipping from the edges. Fine dust on the bare wood floor feels soft on my skin. A fleeting thought goes through my mind, wondering if I'm leaving footprints. Wondering if anyone would notice.

  Each second burns in my lungs. The air isn't any easier to breathe up here. There are no windows I can open. This attic was used once. Many years ago. Many people ago. In the recesses of my mind, corners I rarely venture into anymore, there are memories of that time. Of the little table that used to sit against one of the walls, adorned with a tiny lamp. It looked like an urn. Rounded white porcelain with pink Rosas painted on it. The shade had deep pleats, like the ones in my grandmother's skirts when she went to church on Wednesday nights. They were her casual skirts, the ones that brushed her calves and hung in heavy cornflower wool from the wide band at her waist.

  The table isn’t there anymore. Neither is the hulking armoire that used to stand against the other wall. Swallowing up the empty space as if to declare there was nothing else for this room to be. It stood in front of a part of the wall with textured wallpaper lined up perfectly. Like it had been there as long as the wall itself. But there was more to the wall behind where it once stood.

  Bits of the wallpaper still speckle the floor, fallen from the long, torn pieces hanging like ripped flesh from the gaping gash in the wall. There's darkness beyond it. The door still stands open, just as I left it that day months ago. When I took an axe and smashed the facade away and uncovered all the secrets of this house.

  Much of what I took out of the secret room that day and in the ones that followed is sitting in an evidence locker somewhere, waiting to be used in the ongoing trial. But there are still remnants. The shelves are still nailed into the walls. Tables still sit in corners. Some crates are scattered across the floor, with papers threatening to spill off the edges. I can't see them in the darkness, but they're there.

  The floodlight Sam brought over is still sitting in the middle of the attic floor. I turn it on. White light explodes, so intense it could cut through stone, sending shadows back behind their objects. Everything is illuminated.

  I step inside and look around, then reach for the nearest shelf.

  Sam finds me the next morning asleep on the floor of the attic, my hands bloodied and raw, the space around me cluttered with broken shelves and crates dragged across the floor.

  The room is empty.

  Chapter One

  Now

  "Babe?"

  Sam's voice drifts up the stairs into the attic, and I stand up from where I've been hunched over painting the new baseboards in the tiny room.

  "I'm up here, Sam," I call down to him and step back to look at the coat of paint.

  For years I forgot this room was even here. It was one of many parts of my childhood that got so twisted and blended with questions and false memories; it stopped existing in my mind. It wasn't until I saw a similar room in the house across the street that I started ques
tioning my memories of my grandparents’ home. Pam, the representative from the property management company, mentioned the feature exists in almost every house on the street. But that only served to deepen that wedge in my memory. What was the difference between what I remembered and what was the truth?

  A series of events last year brought those memories crashing down on me, and a few precise blows with an axe literally thrust them in front of my eyes. Along with long-buried secrets about my family that still linger with me.

  It's taken months for me to be ready to face it like this. For a long time, I just kept pretending it wasn't there. The information sealed up behind the wall shattered my understanding of my life. Forced me to come face-to-face with horrible realities I thought might destroy me, even as they filled gaps in my understanding and answered questions I'd carried with me my whole life. After Greg's murder and the crushing investigation that followed, I simply pushed the room back out of my mind.

  But even that couldn’t last long. I went from not ever going into my attic and ignoring that I'd ever seen the room to tearing it apart in a split second.

  I had been back in therapy for a few weeks at that point, but it wasn't doing much for me. The block against it wasn't new. From the first time Creagan funneled me into the therapist’s office as a condition of continuing to work for the Bureau, I resisted. No one could possibly understand what I went through when I was younger or how it continues to impact my life even as an adult. Even I didn't fully understand it. It seemed futile to try to unpack it for someone else just so they could repeat it back to me under the guise of helping me sort through it. But I sat there. I let the therapists try to crack me open and crawl around inside to find the bits I hid.