by RJ Scott
My steps took me a few paces up the road, and I stopped. I shouldn’t have been doing this. Sawyer had called and checked, but that didn’t mean that Stokes wasn’t up there, avoiding calls, refusing to speak to anyone. Anger took me the mile out of town, and as soon as the clubhouse came into view, I hastened my steps, almost jogging to the front path, and then I stood at the door that had a discreet sign announcing the place was closed until Monday. I knocked with a closed fist, rang the bell, then stepped back a little and attempted to pull my emotions into a cohesive calm where I could handle this. There was no answer. I stepped back again to leave, catching movement inside the old place—nothing more than a flicker of something. I went to the window, but there was no one I could see inside. It could have just been the reflection of a beam of light on the mullioned glass.
Or it could be Stokes. Is he fucking hiding in there?
I pulled out my cell to call Sawyer, but something in me, that dad-core of me, made me pocket it again and, following my instincts, I checked the front door again, which remained shut tight, and then set off for the back of the house, clambering over the gates, and landing awkwardly on a path that took me around the side. Every window I reached I peered in and thought I saw movement again along dark wooden panels, some kind of reflection.
“I know you’re in there!” I shouted. Every part of what little sense I had when it came to protecting my son vanished, and I banged on each window, my patience thin. My last stop was at the wide patio doors at the back with the view of the golf course, one of them with a narrow gap where it was open on a latch. It wouldn’t move, and I looked around for something to pry it open, found the near-empty woodpile, and rummaged for a stick that wasn’t brittle. I managed to lever the latch from splintered wood, and I stepped inside.
“Stokes! We need to talk!”
There was the creak of floorboards above my head, and I was at the stairs in an instant, taking them three at a time, avoiding crashing into the wall at the top by a few inches.
“Mayor Stokes!”
Nothing. Complete silence, and it didn’t even occur to me at first that Stokes might be in there with a gun, I just knew I had to confront him. I checked each room, shoving open doors, hearing a sharp yelp and a weapon or something coming for my head. My reflexes kicked in. I ducked and swiveled and shoved my attacker back against the wall. But it wasn’t a man I’d been expecting, but a girl scratching at my face, sobbing hysterically. Megan Leary. I knew her family well.
“Leave me alone!”
I released my hold, and she jumped at me, waving a golf club, but I caught it easily.
“Megan! It’s me, Josh, from the hotel.” She struggled, her eyes wide, but I held her firmly, and it seemed like my soft words, which I repeated again and again, were getting through to her. “What happened?”
“Mayor Stokes told me to hide.” She stopped talking, and I shook her a little to get her back to the here and now.
“What happened?”
Huge tears swelled and tracked down her face. “He shut the door and told me to stay quiet. I didn’t have my phone. I thought you were him coming to…” She stepped back against the wall and wrapped her arms over her chest. “What’s wrong with him?”
I didn’t have an answer.
I could tell her the same thing, that she needed to stay there while I checked around the place, but what if Mayor Stokes was having some kind of breakdown. What the fuck? I couldn’t leave her alone.
“Stay behind me,” I snapped, and she immediately moved as I left the room, right on my heels, so close that if I’d stopped she’d have barreled into my back. I checked every door, moving to the last in the wide corridor lined with paintings, and shoved at the door hard, expecting it to be locked. Only it flew open and smacked into the wall.
All I saw was scarlet, and at my back, gripping my T-shirt, Megan screamed.
So much blood, sprays of it on walls, the cream rug, crimson, and in the middle of it all, Mayor Stokes. Half-naked, his throat cut, and then down to his groin, and the stench and horror of it had me gagging and bending at the waist, I closed my eyes. When I opened them, it would all be gone, and this wouldn’t be real.
But, the body was still there, and I noticed every small part of the horrors inflicted on this man, and black-and-white photos sprawled on and over him, some stained red with the blood.
And then I saw the words scrawled on the wall behind him. Stark and simple.
He hurt Casey.
I backed out of the room until I had a solid wall behind me, reached out for Megan, and pulled her in close, giving her somewhere to hide in my neck. Then I shakily pulled out my cell phone. Sawyer didn’t answer until the fourth ring, and he sounded pissed.
“Jeez, Josh. I’m on it—”
“Sawyer, fuck. Sawyer.”
“Josh? What’s happened? Is it the boys?”
“I’m at the golf club. You need to come here. Fuck, fuck.”
“Josh!”
“Stokes is dead.”
“Jesus Christ, Josh. Fuck. What did you do?”
“I… you have to… Megan is here… Casey… shit.”
I slid down the wall, taking Megan with me, and we crumpled in a heap, her face still buried against me, my phone falling to the floor.
And I could do nothing but wait.
Twelve
Lucas
“Beaumont, with me,” Sawyer snapped and stalked from the building, stopping only long enough to bark an order that there’d been a potential incident at the golf club and that Tate should track down Logan and Heather and get them both out there. I left the questions until we were in the SUV.
“Get me up to speed.”
“Mayor Stokes is dead.”
“How?”
“Josh is up there. He didn’t say.”
We were walking into god knows what, and all I could focus on was that Josh was at the scene. What was he seeing? Was he okay? The kiss was front and center in my thoughts and the connection of what we could have. Worry gripped me that a man I knew, a friend, was in the middle of danger, anger mixed in that he could have hurt someone. I sent a quick text as we barreled out of town in the SUV, advised Avery to join me, and as soon as the SUV stopped at the front entrance, both Sawyer and I drew our weapons. The door was locked, and Sawyer indicated he go left and I go right. Cautiously, the grip on my weapon relaxed, my focus at one hundred and ten percent, I tracked around the side of the huge clubhouse, an old place with leaded windows and the air of superiority in every line of it. Small chain link fences stopped people from walking on the grass around the house. Signs warned them of the same, even if the grass was parched and brown. When I reached the back, I saw that Sawyer had found ingress and, with a nod, he slipped inside. It was my job to have the rear, maybe even stay outside, covering his six, but there was no way I was doing that as the sound of car doors and then the running steps of someone had me tensing and pointing my weapon in the direction of the noise, only dropping it when I saw Logan had arrived, his own weapon drawn.
“Stay here,” I ordered, and even though I might have a loose kind of jurisdiction, I couldn’t really order Logan around. “No one comes in or out.”
Logan nodded and fell back to the tree that was maybe ten feet from the open patio door. Cautiously I stepped inside, following the sound of talking and a stench that was very familiar.
The stench of death.
I rounded a corner and saw figures at the end of the hall up the stairs, but what I could make out didn’t sit right with me, and I didn’t holster my weapon. Sawyer was cuffing Josh, and there was a girl there sobbing hysterically and attempting to pull Sawyer off Josh.
Why was Josh being arrested? I hurried to catch up with what was happening, taking in a completely shell-shocked Josh, a horrified Sawyer, and the girl who was clinging to Josh. I came to a stop outside the room, the stench of blood and bodily fluids overpowering, and so much scarlet over the rug.
“I found him that way,�
�� Josh said in a dead tone.
Had Sawyer read Josh his rights? If there was this much blood in the room, why was Josh completely clean of it? Who was the girl?
“I told you not to come up here!” Sawyer snapped and turned Josh so they faced each other fully. “What did you do in Harry’s name?”
“Nothing. Shit, Sawyer…”
I sidestepped the three of them and stood outside the door, peering in and taking in everything.
“Captain Wiseman, uncuff Mr. Baker, take him and the young lady outside, secure the scene, send Logan in, call the coroner, and take statements.”
Sawyer stared at me, and I could see the horror in his eyes before realization snapped into place, and he cursed loudly, unlocking the cuffs and shaking Josh, making him look up at him.
“Josh, we need to leave.”
Josh locked gazes with mine. He’d gone into shock and would need someone to watch him, but I couldn’t leave the scene. I had to ignore the tremendous pull in me to go to him and tell him it was all going to be okay.
The three of them went to the end of the corridor, and Josh was helping the girl. Logan appeared within seconds, coming to stand by me and exhaling noisily.
“Fuck.” He leaned into the room without touching the frame and peered left and right, and I knew the moment he saw it. “He hurt Casey,” he read out loud, and it was as if the fight left him in an instant. “Shit, Drew.” The horror of what we were being shown there, the message on the wall, the specific mutilation to the mayor’s genitalia, and the photos, which from what I could see of the nearest, were the kind of photos only a pedophile would own.
This was a message. Either it was someone signposting why this man had been killed.
Or it had been staged to lead us in that direction.
By the time I made it back to the hotel, it was past midnight, and Josh had long since left the PD. Sawyer, Logan, Heather, and the coroner had worked the scene. Avery had helped me interview Megan, but all she could tell us was that the mayor had shoved her into a room and told her to hide.
From whom, she couldn’t tell us. She did what she’d been told, armed herself from the lost and found, and stayed where she’d been put. She heard shouting, but none of it was coherent that she could tell us. I believed because the walls of the house were thick and stone, faced with wood, that she heard volume but not actual words. I paused for a moment outside the hotel, standing in the shadows and steeling myself for what I might find. There were now two suspicious deaths, we had nothing yet from the coroner, and making sense of everything was causing my thoughts to spin. I still couldn’t get over the fact that the murder of the mayor, grisly, intentional, was intentionally staged. We had the mayor’s office computer with links to child porn right there on his desktop in plain sight, and Sawyer was getting a warrant for his home in the hope that they’d find something, but I wasn’t sure what we would find. I was convinced everything had been handed to us on a plate, the links, the photos—this was cold calculation, and a murder so violent it made me nauseous.
But why would someone want to show us what the mayor was? Or imply that he was hurting young boys. Why link it to the Casey McGuire case? Was the mayor connected to that? I’d watched when Logan had told Drew. I hadn’t meant to, but I’d been in the room when Drew had arrived, and the way the blood had left his face and he’d reached out to hold on to Logan was a visceral tug to my heart.
And now I had to face Josh. He’d given a statement and then said he was going to be with his sister if we needed him. I assumed at some point Josh had come back to the hotel with Harry. So what did I say to him when I went inside to make things better? Was there anything that could make what he’d seen less horrific?
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary? Do you think they can get DNA from the body or tell anything from the blood spatter?” As soon as I unlocked the door and let myself in, Josh was on me as if he’d been waiting for me. He was pale and rubbing his wrists, where they’d been cuffed. I’d seen him do that a lot as he’d sat in the PD, even as Sawyer apologized. It was an absent gesture, and I didn’t think he even knew what he was doing. I couldn’t think of a way to reassure him. All I’d seen at the scene was a bloody murder, with the message on the wall written in black marker, not with blood.
“I doubt we’ll get much quickly. If anything, it was a…” Messy, horrific, savage scene.
He nodded as if he’d already come to that conclusion and then spun on his heel and stalked into the kitchen. I followed him, watching him pull out chocolate, coffee, and then deciding on lemonade.
“Avery has just gone up. You want some?”
He poured two glasses before I’d even said yes, but I welcomed the coldness of it on this sticky hot night where storms threatened, lightning on the horizon, and the scent of ozone in the air.
“I can’t believe… this is a quiet town… I thought staying here with Harry would be a good thing. Safe. I did my best but…”
I could see he was struggling, and I took the chair next to him, leaning a little so that just a few inches separated us. If he needed human contact, then I was right there for him, and it only took a few moments before he moved as well, so our elbows knocked. He seemed startled at first, but he didn’t move away.
“The coroner will have something for us soon.”
“It’s taken so long even to get identities on the bones in Hell’s Gate. Do you think we will ever…” He lost his track of thought again and concentrated on the lemonade, sipping it and then staring at the ceiling. I wondered if he was thinking about what Harry had told him, and it had already occurred to me that it was one hell of a coincidence that Harry had spoken to his dad today, the very same day that Stokes had been murdered.
Josh wasn’t part of what had happened to Stokes. I knew that, and not only from the evidence I’d seen but from instinct.
“Fuck,” Josh said, and the word was pulled from right inside him as he hunched over his lemonade. “How long had he been lying there? Who do you think did it?”
At last, a question I could answer. “Megan explained that she’d been shoved into that room maybe an hour before we arrived, that she heard shouting for as long as half of that time. Rigor mortis takes about three to four hours, when the calcium in a body makes muscles contract. It peaks at twelve hours and dissipates after forty-eight, so given the freshness of the blood, I would say that it hadn’t been more than an hour and that we can trust Megan. Incidentally, like yourself, there was no blood on her. We checked the various places she could have cleaned up—the coroner was thorough. She didn’t do it.”
He blinked at me, and I was ready to answer more questions.
“How in god’s name do you sleep at night, knowing all this?”
“It’s my job. Knowing how the body works, the muscles, the bones is just one part of how we catch the people who have murdered others.”
“So the results on Mayor Stokes will be quick then if it was fresh?” He shuddered on that last word, and I didn’t blame him. “Did you see anything that gave you, I don’t know, some clue as to who killed him? Is it the same person who killed Adam Gray?”
That nebulous thought poked at me and took root in my brain again. It was the insistent twist of an idea about the murder being premeditated and staged, contradicting the facts that the murder had been vicious, passionate. I couldn’t help thinking that the death had been carried out in such a way as to lead us in a direction we didn’t want to go. That made the killer far too clever, and that was the last thing we wanted. I couldn’t verbalize my thoughts yet, so there was no point in waking Avery to discuss these random shots in the dark, but I made a mental note to work on it in the morning.
“Forensic science isn’t a magic bullet that solves all crimes, however fresh the corpse,” I murmured. “Nor can the FBI walk into a crime scene and spot a stray clue that only they are trained to see. I wish it were that easy.”
“I don’t understand how this can be happening here in my town.
”
I wanted to reach for him and reassure him that everything was going to be okay. I’d have been lying, but underneath it all, I had this pull to touch him. Instead, I talked.
“No one expects murder to happen on their doorstep, but it ends up spreading an indelible stain.” I cupped the cold glass and thought carefully about how to explain what I meant.
“Do you think that…?” He swallowed and sat back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest. “I mean, was Stokes responsible for Casey’s death?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stokes spent time with Harry.” He uncrossed his arms, and this time he leaned over and seemed to shrink in on himself. “I didn’t like him, but he liked Harry at that fucking youth club. Hell, he hugged my boy, and I let it happen.”
“You can’t do that to yourself,” I murmured. This time I gave in to the need to connect, and I laced my fingers with his, holding tight and hoping it might give him something to focus on. “You didn’t know, and he was a community leader that you assumed was doing his best for the town.”
“But the whole town knew that Stokes was an asshole, that he was working with Sandoval, digging into funds, making deals, letting his son get away with spousal abuse, not protecting his grandson. How did it come to this that we all let him do that? Who do we trust?”
I wasn’t the kind of person who spoke foolishly or gave hope where it wasn’t warranted, but I knew I could give him one small thing. “The old boys club were part of the fabric of this town, characters that make sense in everyone’s minds. Then there’s the cops, you the hotel owner, the guy at the deli, even Nicky Farmer, or that old lady who always has cake. We’re here to see if we can pull back the veil, and you can trust me and the team to find out what happened. I don’t know how long it will take, but I can guarantee you we won’t leave. I won’t leave until we’ve solved this mess.”
I must have gotten through to him because he relaxed a little, but he closed his eyes, and I wondered if he was going to cry. I wouldn’t have blamed him after what he’d seen and the emotions he’d run the gamut of today. So I did what I did best. I rambled to fill the silence.