If Eliza didn’t sing, would the music press into her next? Her lungs, her belly, her womb. Filling every empty space.
Her fingers trembled around the Bible that she hugged close to her chest, but she dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come. God wouldn’t notice if she wasn’t singing, just like he didn’t notice anything else around here.
It had taken a long time for Eliza to realize that there was something wrong about the way their Church practiced faith, had taken a while to realize it was extremism and not religion that thrived beneath this particular roof. Holy words were twisted by corrupt mortal men into steel bars that caged their community.
Eliza let her eyes sweep the small room, trail over the achingly familiar faces of the parishioners whom she saw every single day, her attention lingering on Molly and her parents for a beat before continuing on to the rest of the pews. So many people Eliza loved, so many people who were kind and generous and everything good in a world they were told to hate.
She wondered how many of them had doubts about their Church like she did.
Most of the men didn’t seem to, their voices booming when they sang, their heads nodding along to the sermon no matter how incendiary it was. No matter how they themselves might hesitate to say those words in daily life, they would go along with them for the sake of protecting the Church.
Liam Dawson sat across the aisle from Eliza, and she’d catch him sometimes watching Uncle Josiah with the reverence of a man who’d been kicked and beaten down his whole life and was finally being told that he was right, that he mattered, that he was home.
Liam’s wife, Darcy, sat on the other side of two of their children, her arm always wrapped around the daughter as if she could pull her tightly back into her body. She was a quiet woman who often made an effort to become one with the wallpaper at any Church gathering. Darcy didn’t sing anymore unless there were eyes on her, and if the sermon veered toward particularly fiery rhetoric, her expression would pinch in.
Eliza liked watching Darcy sometimes when she could, drinking in the reactions in a way that was the closest Eliza would ever get to showing her own.
But Darcy Dawson was the outlier even when it came to the women. Most of them had simply been shifted from their fathers’ household to their husbands’ and had started producing their own children to fill the pews.
Even most of the teenagers bought into everything Josiah preached. Molly, of course, had doubts. Eliza’s attention drifted once more to her closest friend. Sometimes Eliza wondered if Molly would have those thoughts if she hadn’t moved to Knox Hollow. If her family had never bought the ranch next to Eliza’s, would the idea of escape have ever even crossed her mind? Or would she simply have fallen in line with what was expected of her?
Eliza had learned to tune out the actual words of the sermons, and often did as she dreamed of the day she could leave this lifestyle behind. Not God or worship, no not that. But this Church for which the elders only played at religion when it suited their purposes.
Those had been fruitless dreams, she realized now. But at the time they’d been the only thing that had kept her moving from one day to the next.
The pianist struck three wrong notes in a row as the voices faded into the quiet reverence that always followed a hymn. No one tittered at the mistake, though. They were all too well trained, even the little ones, and besides it was Noah Dawson’s first time playing at a Saturday evening mass. Everyone knew those drew the biggest crowd, were the most nerve-racking for the kids involved in the sermon.
Darcy Dawson watched him, her hand gripping her daughter’s arm still, her lips pressed tight and worried. She always looked so worried these days.
Eliza could relate.
Uncle Josiah leaned down to whisper in Noah’s ear on his way to the pulpit. Josiah slapped the boy’s shoulder a few times before moving on, and Noah all but crawled beneath the secondhand piano, wearing his mortification in the pink that bloomed against his neck and spread into his cheeks. Josiah liked to tease, thought it was good-natured. But during the exchange, Darcy had gone quite still over in her pew. Josiah threw a wink in her direction, but the woman didn’t relax an inch.
Then without any warning, Darcy turned to meet Eliza’s eyes across the small space that separated them. Eliza’s pulse tripped and then sped up as Darcy stared at her without blinking, without smiling, without any acknowledgment, for one, two, three seconds, before turning back to where Josiah was speaking.
Eliza exhaled, shaken but not sure why. There had been nothing malicious in Darcy’s eyes. Maybe she’d simply felt the weight of Eliza’s gaze. That heavy stare lingered in Eliza’s memory, though, as she shifted her own attention back to Josiah.
It wasn’t a fancy church—never had been, never would be. The podium where Josiah stood was cheap, the nails twisting loose at its joints, which sagged beneath the pastor’s weight. The walls of the church, although always freshly painted, were unadorned. The pews were old and scarred. Although Eliza doubted anyone would dare carve anything into them, the normal friction of everyday use wore on the wood.
Luxuries, ornaments, anything that wasn’t stripped down to its barest parts—none of that was allowed. It was sin; it was temptation.
That line of thinking was so closely echoed in Uncle Josiah’s sermon that Eliza wondered for a strange moment if the words had been written on her skin for him to read. Eliza prayed her thoughts were not as apparent as ink, though. She prayed they could not be deciphered as easily.
Because Eliza had a secret. And if anyone found out, it would get her killed.
CHAPTER THREE
LUCY THORNE
Thursday, 7:00 a.m.
“It’s a closed case,” Vaughn said for the third time since they’d set up in her office an hour ago. “A confession, a body, and a murder weapon.”
“Easiest investigation of my career,” Lucy murmured, too tired and too frayed to hide the anxious twist in her voice.
Lucy’s muscles ached with fatigue, but she fought the desire to sink into the chair in front of Vaughn’s desk. Instead, she kept her post by the window, watching the city wake up as she struggled to make sense of the night.
Eliza had stopped talking once she’d given her confession, had simply shut down, her chin tilted up as if heading into battle, those dark blue eyes of hers determined. Lucy had spent another two hours trying to pry anything else loose, but her efforts had been for naught.
Soon after Lucy and Vaughn had finally given up on Eliza, they’d received confirmation from the Spokane team that Noah’s body had indeed been where Eliza had said it would be.
“You’re upset,” Vaughn said.
“Wrong word.”
Vaughn sat back in her chair. “Disturbed.”
Lucy ran a hand through her messy hair and finally crossed the room to sit as she thought of that pale, bloodless face and the stark interrogation room. “Better.”
“Because she asked for you?”
The more Lucy thought about it, the less importance that detail took on. It wouldn’t have been hard for Eliza to look up agents online. Maybe she’d even seen Lucy in the news—sure, it was rare for one of her cases to get national media attention, but it did happen. “No.”
“Then why?”
There was no real surprise in the question, and Lucy knew this was Vaughn poking at her to see just how she would twitch. So she poked back. “Are you not?”
Vaughn tapped her nail on the desk, mouth pursed. “A young boy was murdered by a teenager. I’m not so unfeeling as to be unaffected.”
The way she said it was perfectly detached, stripped of any curiosity, any doubt.
Maybe that would have worked on Lucy when she’d been a fresh-faced recruit, intimidated into deferential silence at the mere idea of Special Agent-in-Charge Grace Vaughn. But they’d worked together for too long now for Lucy to buy the act. At least entirely. There were still days Lucy wondered if she knew Vaughn at all. This wasn’t one of them. “Don’t
pretend otherwise. You don’t think it’s as open and shut as it seems.”
“You’re projecting,” Vaughn chided softly. “The girl confessed.”
Lucy rolled her eyes, now convinced more than ever that Vaughn was playing devil’s advocate. “Right, because there’s never been a false confession before.”
Vaughn lifted her brows at the tone but didn’t verbally slap Lucy on the wrists like she probably deserved for the sarcasm. “There was no coercion here.”
“From us,” Lucy corrected, then looked away out the window, toward the sky that was splashed with the lingering pinks and golds of dawn. She didn’t know why she felt so raw, why she couldn’t meet Vaughn’s eyes for a second longer.
“You’re reading a lot into a closed case,” Vaughn commented idly. But here they were, still talking about it.
“Why did she stop talking?” Because Eliza Cook confessing and then going completely mute was strange, and Vaughn knew that as well as Lucy did.
Lucy was one of the office’s better interrogators, and the only thing she’d been met with after two hours of throwing all that she had at the girl had been silence and the relaxed body language of someone who knew they weren’t going to break.
“There was no reason to say anything further,” Vaughn countered.
Lucy finally slid her eyes back over to her boss, whose expression remained calm and even. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Because murders so often do?” Vaughn held up her hand before Lucy could volley back a retort. “Walk me through what you’re thinking.”
Coming from her, that was significant. Vaughn must have her own doubts about Eliza’s behavior—she wasn’t the type of boss to indulge in an agent’s special pet projects without cause. There was enough of a field agent left in her that she could appreciate a good gut feeling, but there was enough of a bureaucrat in her that she had a constant tally in her head of just how many cases they all had sitting on their desks.
Their budget was only getting tighter, their resources sparser. There was no way Vaughn would let Lucy investigate this further if it really was a closed case.
This, though . . . this wasn’t a no. This wasn’t a firm Drop it, Thorne. This was Convince me.
The hard part was culling logic from where it was tangled up with instinct, emotion, and exhaustion.
“To be able to hold off a professional interrogator for two hours, Eliza had to have come here with the plan to confess and then shut up,” Lucy said slowly, making sure her mouth didn’t outpace her thoughts. If she wanted this case—and she did—this was her one shot. “But why would that be her plan? If she’d simply wanted to turn herself in for murder, why not answer the questions I asked? It would have been far easier for her to do so.”
Vaughn didn’t explicitly agree with the point, but she didn’t interrupt, either, her eyes narrow, her attention completely focused.
“She came to us in the middle of the night, yet there was no evidence she was in the midst of a psychotic break,” Lucy continued, this argument not as strong as the first but still salient in her opinion. Panic-induced confessions didn’t look like what they’d just witnessed in that interrogation room. “What prompted her to come here now? Why at three a.m.? She must have just killed him and then . . . gotten on a bus? Why not just go to her local law enforcement?”
“Psychosis presents differently in different people,” Vaughn pointed out.
Lucy swallowed the snark that wouldn’t have won her any favors. “The weekend. Give me the weekend.”
What Lucy could figure out in a weekend probably wasn’t much. Maybe it would give her only enough time to drive out to Idaho, realize everything was as it should be and nothing was suspicious, and then turn back around. Maybe she’d return empty-handed to Vaughn’s unsaid I told you so.
But Lucy knew if she went home now, if she tried to put this case behind her, she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She’d stare at the walls, her thoughts caught in an endless loop, her body paralyzed by the memory of those eyes, the whisper of that soft, sure voice. The confession that had sounded far more like a plea than a guilty conscience.
Vaughn studied Lucy as if she could see her at her most pitiful, stuck in her dark, nearly empty house, thinking about a murder that didn’t even need to be solved. “All right. You’ll have until Monday. Not a day later.”
The relief was short-lived. Before Lucy could even release the breath she’d been holding, Vaughn lifted a hand.
“But only if you promise me one thing.” Vaughn watched her steadily. “You have to promise—don’t get sucked in, Lucy. I mean it. Obsessions get people killed.”
Lucy shook her head as if the warning itself was absurd when they both knew it wasn’t. She had a habit of getting sucked in, of caring too much. “Just a few days. I’ll check out the body drop location. Talk to the families. The sheriff out there, too. Hicks, you said?”
Vaughn glanced at the short report from the Spokane team that Lucy knew was pulled up on her screen. “Yes. Knox Hollow Sheriff Wyatt Hicks and his deputy, Zoey Grant.”
“Hicks and Grant.” Lucy nodded and wondered once again why Eliza hadn’t just gone to them to confess.
“She knew about the knife,” Vaughn said quietly, an almost non sequitur. “Lucy, she knew about the wounds on the body.”
Lucy ignored the warning beneath the words. Don’t get sucked in. Obsessions get people killed.
“We’ll get a timeline going,” Lucy said, forcing an easiness she didn’t feel. “It can’t hurt the case, right? I’m sure the prosecutor will be sending me flowers when I get back.”
Sighing, Vaughn pointed a finger at Lucy. “You need to get a life.”
Knowing she’d won, Lucy let her muscles unclench as she leaned back in her chair. “Look who’s talking. You were here when Eliza came in.”
In years past, Vaughn’s commitment to the job would have inspired Lucy, would have nurtured a nugget of guilt and dedication that somehow came packaged together to spur her into staying later, working harder. Now it just made her sad for Vaughn. And a little bit for herself when she realized it was early morning and she’d been at the office the entire night, too.
“I have to sleep and shower and become a human again,” Lucy said, glancing down at her pitiful outfit, the dried sweat on her skin sending cascading waves of shivers along her arms every few minutes. “I’ll leave first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Monday,” Vaughn repeated. “If you don’t have anything by then, I’ll come out there and drag you home myself.”
“Grace Vaughn hauling herself into the wilds of Idaho just for me?” Lucy batted her eyelashes as she stood, ignoring Vaughn’s feigned exasperation. She sobered as she paused with her hand on the doorknob. “It’s off, Vaughn. There’s something off about it all.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” Vaughn said, the words bare and honest in the soft golden silence that pulsed in the room.
“You know what?” Lucy said, thinking about how much easier her life would be if she could just get her brain to shut up. “I hope I am, too.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LUCY THORNE
Friday, 9:30 a.m.
The lone figure on the hill was just a silhouette in the early-morning light. A cowboy’s hat, a cowboy’s stance.
He stood unflinching despite the downpour.
Lucy watched the man from where she sat in the safe, still-warm confines of her sedan—the frantic wipers revealing him only in quick glimpses before the pounding rain turned the world blurry once more.
She assumed he was Knox Hollow Sheriff Wyatt Hicks—when she’d asked if she should meet him at his office, he’d sent her this address instead.
Resigning herself to the inevitability of getting drenched, Lucy shrugged into the green slicker she’d brought and then pulled her stubby ponytail through the back hole of her baseball cap, yanking it low over her face.
She left most of her gear in the car as she stepped into the elements. It was nort
hern Idaho, and it was well into fall, so when the water hit the exposed skin at her neck, it sliced like tiny razor blades. There was nothing for it, though, so she huddled deeper into her jacket and crossed the small distance to the man.
“Sheriff?” Lucy called when she got close enough that her voice wouldn’t be swallowed by the slap of rain against oversaturated earth.
He heard her, he did. There was a new tension in his body that hadn’t been there before. But he didn’t turn when he answered. “Yes, ma’am.”
Lucy stepped up beside him, let herself follow his sight line. They were on a slight rise, a hill that sloped down, gently at first, until it dropped off into a wide valley. Mountains rose up on either side, jagged thrusts of gray, weathered rock against an oatmeal-colored sky. A thick, black river wound its way through the center.
“I’m Special Agent—”
“Know who you are,” Hicks cut her off, finally glancing in her direction, his face still shadowed by his cowboy hat. Only the strong line of his clenched jaw was visible.
The brusqueness didn’t come with any sharp edges, just the familiar practicality Lucy was used to with people who lived on modern frontiers. She wasn’t so removed from her own childhood as to forget it.
No need for small talk or further introductions, clearly.
“That’s where Noah Dawson was found?” she asked, jerking her chin toward the tree line not far from where they stood. Found, because the body had been moved. There hadn’t been enough blood for the location to be where he’d died, the team had reported.
Nodding once, Hicks shifted, his shoulder brushing hers enough to get her to turn with him as he did. They started toward the forest, keeping to the slight ridgeline by unspoken agreement. The mud along the graveled parking lot had loosened up beneath the unrelenting rain, making it nearly unpassable. Where they walked was only marginally better, both catching the other once or twice as their boots, despite their tough treads, lost their traction against the slickness.
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