The Girl and the Deadly End (Emma Griffin FBI Mystery Book 7)

by A J Rivers

  He scoffs.

  “Don’t you think I know what kind of household it was? I lived there, too. And I was left behind. But that didn’t matter. Not to anybody in Feathered Nest. Not to Chief LaRoche Sr. And not to your mother. She came in and listened to every sob story my mother gave, then whisked her away without even a second thought to me.”

  “Nobody in town knew about your mother,” I point out. “Her life was lived in other towns among other people.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

  “She worked at Rolling View Hospital as a nurse. You never told me that. You never said she worked at all, much less that she helped people,” I tell him.

  “I never knew if she helped anybody at all,” he says. “She never spoke to me long enough for me to know anything about her. I knew she was a nurse, but I didn’t particularly envy the patients who had to deal with her.”

  “One of those patients was my mother,” I say. “For years, apparently. She delivered me when I was born.”

  Jake lets out a short, mirthless laugh.

  “Isn’t that so appropriate? She helps your mother bring a child into this world, only for her to come back and pull her away from her child,” he says.

  “My mother didn’t pull your mother from anything. Alice asked for help. She said that she and her daughter were in serious danger, and she couldn’t survive in the household any longer. They’d known each other for years but hadn’t spoken in a long time before your mother reached out to mine. There isn’t a single word in this file about you. My mother would never have left you behind if she knew what was going on.”

  “You’re going to tell me that your mother and mine knew each other, but your mother didn’t know I existed?” Jake asks.

  “All of Feathered Nest didn’t know about your family. Your mother is fairly exceptional at creating her own version of her life to the people around her. The blonde women you killed but didn’t… preserve. Were they supposed to be my mother?”

  He gives a slow, single nod.

  “Is that why you targeted me?” I ask.

  The question just falls out. It’s what I want to know, but I didn’t expect it to come out quite that way. But once it’s done, I’m glad I asked it.

  Jake looks me up and down slowly. His eyes scour over the skin he can see, and I wonder if he’s envisioning me the way he used to know me. As the persona I maintained while undercover in Feathered Nest. I wonder if he can still see the fire dancing around me when he looks at me. I know I see it around him.

  “Yes,” he admits. “At first. You came to town with a different name and story, but I knew who you were. I didn’t find out until several years later what had happened to my mother and sister. But once I found out, I, let’s say, took a very strong interest in you and your father. I was interested to know more about a woman who made her living breaking up families and aiding a mother in abandoning her child.”

  “That’s not what she did, and you know it.”

  “Perhaps,” he shrugs. “But it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? I knew the FBI would be getting involved as the bodies piled up, and our valiant chief of police would never be able to figure it out. I wasn’t expecting an undercover investigation. But as soon as you got to town, I knew who you were. I wanted to hate you. But you were different from what I thought you were going to be. I found myself attracted to you. Of course, I couldn’t let myself do that. I knew who you really were. What you really were. I wanted to keep you so much.”

  I stand up and gather the papers.

  “Thank you, Jake. I appreciate it,” I say.

  I turn and start for the door.

  “You did a good job with the Sarah Mueller case.”

  I slowly turn back around to look at him.

  “Excuse me?”

  He smiles at me. I’m struck by just how normal he looks. There’s nothing about his crooked grin or vibrant blue eyes that betray the truth about him. It seems like an odd sentiment, considering how many killers I’ve come across in my career, but I try not to think about them as people. It’s easier to consider them targets and nothing more. But I knew Jake as just a person first, separate from his crimes. Sometimes it’s still difficult to reconcile them. His hold on me is gone, but my sympathy is still there. I still look at him and see a broken, wasted person.

  “Crime news is very popular around here,” Jake grins. “I particularly enjoy hearing about the cases you’re working on. You held your own during everything that went on with Sarah. I was proud of you.”

  “It wasn’t a game of tennis, Jake. She tormented me and killed people because she was mad about the very first murder case I investigated. She made my life a living hell, made everyone around me question my sanity, and threatened my career,” I snap.

  “I know,” he nods. “It was fascinating to watch it unfold. I was impressed by how she manipulated your former cases. Though I’ll admit, I was a bit offended to have been left out.”

  Surprised by the comment, I tilt my head to the side and take a step toward him again.

  “What do you mean? Your case was in there,” I tell him.

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Yes,” I frown, not believing I’m having this conversation. “She lured me to that old house and chased me around for a while and tried to trap me in it.”

  “That wasn’t a house, Emma. That was a hotel. But of all the ways she could have referenced my case, why would she choose that? It doesn’t make sense.”

  It doesn’t.

  “She knew,” I murmur. “How the hell would she know that?”

  “Someone out there knows you, Emma.”

  My eyes lift to Jake’s one more time before I walk out of the interview room.

  I’m on my phone before I leave the parking lot.

  “Did you get a chance to talk to him?” Eric asks.

  “Yes. Thank you for setting that up for me.”

  “I still don’t like that you did it, but I’m glad you’re done. Did he give you the information you wanted?”

  “Not exactly. But he might have given me something else. I need you to set something else up for me. It might be a little more challenging.”

  “What do you need?”

  “To talk with Travis Burke.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  There’s no way I’m getting on another plane and going to Maine, so I’m thankful when Eric is able to arrange for a video call between the Bureau headquarters and the prison where Travis is serving his sentence. I’m sure it took some creative talking to arrange the call, but at this point, I don’t care. Whatever it takes to be face-to-face with him.

  He looks old. That’s the first thought that goes through my head when the screen blinks, and Travis’s face appears. It’s only been a few years, yet it looks like he’s been worn thin by the years in prison. He doesn’t look at me with nearly the amusement Jake did. In fact, I have the distinct impression he’s doing the call under a certain degree of duress.

  “What do you want?” he demands. “Don’t you think you’ve already done enough to mess up my life?”

  “I didn’t do anything to you or to your life,” I point out. “You’re the one who decided it would be a good idea to murder your wife and hide the body. That’s on you. I’m just the one who called you on it. But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m actually here to ask for your help.”

  That brings amusement to his face. He leans back in his chair and crosses one ankle over his knee.

  “Oh, really?” he asks. “The great Agent Emma Griffin is asking for the help of a lowly convict. How ever will you maintain your reputation?”

  “Right now, I don’t care about my reputation, Travis. And I don’t even know if I’m going to be an agent anymore after this. But I need your help. I need to know more about Sarah Mueller,” I say.

  He looks at me strangely.

  “Sarah is dead,” he says. “Your boyfriend shot her.”

 
Apparently, watching the news is popular in this prison as well. Good to know the memory of me stays strong in the hearts and minds of those I helped put away. I wouldn’t want them to go to sleep at night, having forgotten my face.

  “I know. But I need to know more about her before that happened. You know what she did,” I say.

  He shakes his head.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” he replies. He holds up his hands to show his innocence. “That was all on her. I didn’t tell her what to do or how to do it. I didn’t even know she was planning something like that. She and I had been cooling off, and I had a new girl.”

  “I don’t think you helped her,” I tell him. “If nothing else, you simply don’t know that much about me. But somebody does. I just learned she knew far more about me than I thought. And figuring out how she knew that could be critical in solving several other cases. So, I need to know about her. Her friends. Family. Anyone who might have had influence over her.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Don’t push it, Burke. You’ve got a long sentence left. Tell me first, and then we’ll talk.”

  He sighs. “It wasn’t hard to have influence over Sarah. She didn’t exactly grow up with the most loving of family lives and got put through the wringer in high school. That’s why it was so easy for me to get her to fall in love with me.”

  “So, if someone were to tell her she could make it so you were released from prison and the two of you could be together again, she would jump on that opportunity,” I muse.

  “Absolutely.”

  I nod.

  “You know, I came up to Maine a little more than a year ago to follow a tip about a friend of mine who was missing. I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t know where he could possibly be going. But all along, it was right here under my nose. Travis, how many men in that prison have tattoos of sea monsters on their back?” I ask.

  “A few,” he notes. “Some are here for the long haul, but others come for shorter times.”

  “Let me guess. They’re pretty popular. They always have money on their books; visitors come frequently?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he says. “They are well taken care of.”

  “Are you particularly close to any of the men with those tattoos?”

  “No,” he says. “But there is a guy who came to visit one of them pretty often who I struck up a friendship with. Then he and Sarah got pretty close.”

  I nod, trying not to express any of the emotions I’m feeling. I don’t want him to feel like he’s doing too much for me like he can start to manipulate me with the information he’s offering.

  “What can you tell me about him? What did he do for a living?”

  “He’s a construction engineer,” Travis says. “According to the guy he used to visit, he’s some sort of genius. He can design and create just about anything.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Before I tell you. What’s in it for me?”

  I let out a deep sigh. “I’ll make some calls.”

  “You promise?”

  “What’s his name?”

  “It might not be his actual name. He would tell everyone to call him something else. They would announce the names during visitation, but I don’t recall what that was.”

  “What did you call him?”

  “Fisher.”

  “Thank you, Travis. That’s all I need from you,” I say.

  “That’s it?” he asks, obviously waiting for some benefit to come from the conversation.

  “Yes. Have a nice day.”

  I end the call and call Eric into the room.

  “I need the security footage from the prison. Can you convince them to give you a peek at that?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Any particular day?”

  “Go back to a couple months before Sarah showed up in Sherwood. I just need to see the visitations.”

  I put a call into Detective Mayfield to check a few things about Martin’s murder while Eric works on getting the surveillance footage from the visitation room at the prison. It takes some time, and eventually, I tip-off to sleep, somehow more comfortable in Eric’s office than the hotel. He wakes me up to tell me he has the footage.

  “What are you looking for?” he asks.

  “Someone talking to Sarah more than the usual visitors talk to each other,” I say.

  I watch the people streaming into the visitation room and quickly pinpoint Sarah. Soon, the inmates come into the room and distribute among the tables where the visitors sit. Her bubbly, bouncing reaction to Travis isn’t returned, but she still sits with him and listens to him with rapt attention. His attention wanes, and she starts looking around.

  We watch video after video, watching her start drifting away from Travis more often. She sits at a table with a man and listens to him, leaning into him, but occasionally looking over at Travis. It takes a couple of hours, but we finally get to footage of the days leading up to Sarah showing up in Sherwood to masquerade as my neighbor. I can clearly recognize Sarah, but the man is harder to pinpoint. He stays at a back-corner table and keeps his head down. But on one of the last videos, just days before her arrival, Sarah and the man linger after the inmates return to their cells.

  I’m watching them stand close together, then walk out of the visitation room together. Just as they step up close enough to the camera for me to finally see his face beneath his hood, my phone alerts in my lap. I pick it up and see a text from Mayfield.

  “That train station is currently being renovated, and new structures are being constructed across the street.”

  A smile twitches at my lips. I set the phone down and look at the surveillance image again, zeroing in closer on the man’s face and a dark wave of hair curling down his cheek.

  “Caught you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “The visitor's list for the prison lists his name as Anson Combs, but according to Travis Burke, he was known as Fisher. We know from information we got from Greg that Fisher is the title of one of Jonah’s highest-ranking associates in Leviathan. I can only assume it’s the same person. Surveillance footage has him spending a considerable amount of time talking with Sarah Mueller in the months leading up to her coming to Sherwood. If you’ll remember, Sarah used details of important previous cases of mine to damage my reputation. At one point, she used technology to operate my phone remotely and lure me to an old farmhouse where I was chased and fell down an elevator shaft. My assumption was this related to Jake and our final confrontation in his house. But after speaking with him, I realized that detail didn’t exactly add up,” I explain.

  “It wasn’t a house,” Sam tells those gathered in the room with us. “It used to be, but it had been converted into a hotel and then abandoned.”

  “There was some work being done on it, but the construction had stalled,” I continue. “I realized this was not in reference to Jake, but rather to the two men found murdered in the hotel that was undergoing renovation. The same hotel would later be the site of Doc Murray’s body being dumped. The way Sarah orchestrated each of her stunts was based on the timing of those cases. She chose that particular order based on Doc Murray’s death, which occurred just before I arrived in Feathered Nest to do my undercover assignment.

  “The only way she could have known about that was through a trusted member of Leviathan. Those murders were not done as an event of chaos. They were a personal vendetta by Jonah, something he would have only shared with the people closest to him. That means the only way she would have known of that is through Fisher. Through Anson Combs. He has been contracted to work on projects in the Richmond bus station, as well as the train station, where the initial murders on the train occurred. There is surveillance footage of him at the train station. Not getting into any of the trains but showing familiarity with the area.”

  “So, what’s the plan?” Bellamy asks.

  “He wants attention, so I’m going to give it to him. All along, he’s been playing this game
with me. So, what if I lose?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Greg asks.

  “What if I lose the game? Throw it completely. It would mean I’m not going to be playing anymore, but it would also give him the satisfaction of knowing he won. He won’t be able to resist either of them. He’ll have to come to me. To encounter me directly for the first time. Up until now, he’s done everything at a distance or through other people. But this will be his last chance to confront me.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Dean asks.

  “Eric, Sam, and I are going to have a press briefing. We’re going to release a statement that I have solved the string of murders previously attributed to the serial killer known as Catch Me. Through personal evidence and his highly telling suicide, we’ve come to the conclusion that the murderer was Martin Phillips, who used his position as an orderly at the hospital to dangerous advantage. Including my abduction and attempted murder.”

  “That should do it,” he notes.

  I nod. “We will end the briefing with a quick comment about how I look forward to taking some time off and managing some family business in Florida. He won’t be able to help himself. It’ll be just too much for him to resist. Then we go down to Florida, and I go home for the first time in a long time.”

  “I called Christina Ebbots,” Bellamy explains. “She’s finally back in town and was able to give me the exact street address of the house. She says Emma is more than welcome to use it.”

  “It turns out Christina’s father Charles Ebbots, aka Grayson, was the head of Spice Enya when he was alive. She found some more of his records. It looks like he was the one who handled planning my mother’s memorial service.”

  “Are you ready to do this?” Eric asks.

  “Absolutely,” I say. “This ends here.”

  It takes a couple of days to get everything put into place, but the preparation is well worth it. The press briefing goes off without a hitch, and the almost rabid reaction of the reporters in attendance tells me it won’t be long before Anson hears about it. As soon as the announcement has been made, we all head to the airport. The only one to stay behind is Greg. He wants to come along, but the doctors are still concerned about his condition. They’re optimistic he’ll be able to leave within the next couple of weeks. The agents who’ve been watching over him are excited to have him back. I have a feeling life is going to look very different for Greg when he steps out of the hospital and returns to the real world.