The evergreen trees huddled together, their branches overlapping enough to provide the first little bit of relief since Lucy had stepped out of the car. She wasn’t completely protected, but she could actually breathe, could actually think beyond cold and wet.
Once they entered the woods, the pounding sheets of rain were muted as if coming from a distance—and neither she nor Hicks broke the silence as they trekked deeper. Lucy followed close behind the sheriff as he led the way along a trail that could only generously be called “maintained.”
An itch started at her shoulder blades, getting more persistent the farther she and Hicks went, and Lucy called up an image of Eliza. The girl was five foot nothing, if that, her frame delicate, her bones almost fragile beneath that pale skin. She seemed more like an idea, a wisp that could dissolve into air, than a solid person.
How had she carried a twelve-year-old boy this far?
There was no way. She couldn’t have.
But then if Noah Dawson hadn’t been dead at the time Eliza had brought him here, how had she controlled him? With the knife that Eliza said was the murder weapon?
Even a small twelve-year-old boy could probably have overwhelmed Eliza if that had been her only weapon. Or at the very least he could have run off into the night to get away from his captor. Had she had a gun? If so, why not use it to kill Noah? Had he been drugged? If so, why go through the trouble of taking him so deep into the forest?
The FBI team Vaughn had deployed the minute Eliza had turned over the directions to the body had deferred to the local medical examiner instead of transporting the body all the way back to the Spokane lab. Lucy almost wished they hadn’t.
The report from the field team had been brief to a fault, the bare facts doing nothing to add to the picture Lucy was trying to get of the murder.
There were too many questions here, and rushed by Vaughn’s deadline, Lucy hadn’t had time to start the deep background research she usually did on cases. Beyond some basic Google and database searches about the town, and a few crime scene photos from the Spokane team, Lucy didn’t have much to go on.
Except . . . she did.
She had the confession, the location of the body, and the murder weapon. Did it really matter if she knew exactly how Eliza had gotten Noah out this deep in the woods? Did it really matter that walking all this way had made Lucy start to wonder about a possible accomplice?
It wasn’t her job to tell a story about what happened; that was up to the prosecutor when the time came. And Lucy was sure, even without whatever she found here, he would have a nice narrative to spin for the jury.
But she’d bought herself a few days to scratch this itch beneath her skin, and so she would use them wisely.
She’d been glad the sheriff had wanted to meet here, because getting a sense of the body drop location had been second only to touching base with him anyway. She usually took for granted that it would be one of the first things she’d do on a case—walking the same paths the killer walked gave her a much better sense of all the practical pitfalls Eliza would have had to deal with.
Next would be seeing the body and then talking to the families. To see if Noah and Eliza had ever interacted, to see where their lives had crossed and for how long. To figure out if Noah had been just a random victim, or if he’d been chosen by Eliza for a particular reason.
When she was done with all that, she might just have more than a gut reaction to report back to Vaughn. Or maybe Lucy would have exactly what she’d started with—a closed case.
Lucy stuttered to a halt on the path behind Hicks when he stopped without warning. There didn’t seem to be much around, so she just waited.
“The creek,” Hicks said, and once he did, Lucy could hear it, the babble blending in with the rain so that it was almost indistinguishable.
Hicks stepped off the path, and Lucy followed once more, brambles catching against the denim that was plastered to her thighs. After a few steps the trees thinned out, opening onto a narrow stream swollen from the storm.
About ten feet to their right was the unmistakable yellow of crime scene tape, cordoning off several large boulders.
“Tell me,” Lucy murmured, adopting the clipped, efficient speech pattern with the ease of returning to a long-lost but well-practiced skill.
“The body was wedged between those rocks,” Hicks said. “Mostly covered with a rain jacket.”
“His own?”
“No. Adult-sized.” Hicks spared her a glance and a slight nod. As if he approved of the question. “Male.”
So not Eliza’s then, either. “All right.”
“The body was in fairly good condition,” Hicks continued, and that gave her pause. It was a near miracle that the boy hadn’t been picked apart to scraps—the predators this far north were plentiful and hungry. Hicks must have read the thought on her face. “We found rags soaked with ammonia nearby.”
“Ammonia?” That was an old-school coyote deterrent, only somewhat effective but better than nothing. So maybe not so much a miracle, but planned. “She was trying to protect him.”
“At least until he was found,” Hicks agreed. “It wouldn’t hold them off for very long.”
But it had been an attempt. Eliza had wanted the body to be safe, yet she hadn’t buried it. The itch crept back again. If she was so concerned with making sure that it would be preserved, that it would be found, why bring it into the woods in the first place?
The rocks, the stream—they weren’t unusual as a body drop location. It was off the trail, deep in the woods, and from what Lucy could tell, didn’t seem to be built up into a popular hiking area. This would be the perfect place to dispose of a murder victim and have the body go years without being discovered.
Except then Eliza had told Lucy exactly where to find Noah.
“Were there any signs of a struggle?” Lucy had read the coroner’s short report, seen the photos, but she wanted Hicks’s impression. He’d been there when the techs had processed the scene.
Hicks shook his head but didn’t elaborate.
“COD was knife wound?” she prompted, not because she needed the confirmation but, again, because hearing someone’s take on it was better than reading the blunt, unemotional print against plain white paper.
“Yes, ma’am.” The brim of Hicks’s hat still shielded any expression. Lucy wished they were having this conversation elsewhere, out of the rain, where she could see the twitch and pull of his lips, his eyes. Even his inflection was flat, just the facts. “To the lower base of the skull, and then up.”
“Wait.” Lucy held up her hands, shook her head. The notes she’d seen had specified only neck. “What?”
Her surprise finally got Hicks to turn fully, and for the first time Lucy got a good look at him. If she had to guess, she’d say he was midforties—his skin weathered but more in a way that spoke of a life lived outdoors than from the ravages of age. His face was long and narrow, matching the rest of his lanky frame, his cheeks a bit sunken, his lips thin. In normal light, his eyes were probably blue, but in the storm-induced shadows they edged toward gray.
“To the lower base of the skull,” he repeated, slowly so that she knew his estimation of her had just dropped a notch. “And then up. It severed his brain stem immediately. It would have been nearly painless as far as deaths go.”
“A clean kill.” The words escaped without real intent to be heard. But Hicks’s brows inched up. It was his turn to study her. She wondered if he was taking in her sturdy boots, her jeans, the slicker she knew was the brand preferred more by ranch hands than by weekend hikers. Maybe he was putting it all together with the fact that she’d known the significance of ammonia-soaked rags. Yeah, not your average city slicker cop, my friend.
“You from here, then?” he asked, and she took “here” to mean frontier country more than Idaho specifically.
“Wyoming,” she said, unsure if she should really claim it as home given the fact that she hadn’t been back in more than a dec
ade. It hadn’t been quite that long since she’d worked a case out in these parts, though Lucy wouldn’t be telling him that.
Hicks nodded once and let the subject drop as he shifted his attention again to the scene.
“You thought it was across the neck.” He said it like a statement rather than a question.
Lucy didn’t bother with the easy excuse of incomplete—or, rather, misleading—autopsy notes. “Yes, it would make more sense.”
“It would,” he agreed, and she was starting to like him. His hesitations, the way he weighed his words—if she had to guess, she’d say he didn’t think this was an open-and-shut case, either.
“Or to the chest even.” She floated the suggestion like a test balloon to check if that theory on his doubt held water.
He rocked back on his heels. “That’s certainly what you would expect from someone inexperienced with a knife. Going for the brain stem requires absolute precision.”
“Was Eliza skilled enough to make that kill?” Lucy asked. He hadn’t outright shut down the implication that this was all a bit off, but he hadn’t jumped at it, either.
“Most kids from here know their way around a knife.”
That wasn’t surprising. People who had grown up in places like this had often been hunting since they were just out of diapers. Still, there was a big difference between taking down a deer and taking down a person.
The efficiency of the kill, though—the pure bloodlessness of it—certainly matched Eliza’s strangely calm demeanor throughout her confession.
There had been only a few moments that had revealed any emotion beneath, and those had been fleeting, perhaps projections from Lucy’s own expectations rather than reality. They could very well be dealing with a budding sociopath here. A clean kill, an effort to preserve her work so that it could be admired by the police. That at least fit behavior Lucy had dealt with before.
“And you found it? The knife,” she asked.
“Where she said it would be.” Hicks paused, and there was something lurking there, something he wasn’t saying.
She didn’t pretend she couldn’t tell. “What is it?”
Hicks sighed, but he didn’t try to pretend, either. “It had been cleaned.”
“Before it was buried?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “There was dirt on it, sure, but beneath that layer . . . no fingerprints, no smudges, nothing.”
That persistent itch, it spread. Lucy could imagine wiping the blade down with a rag, maybe one of the ones Eliza had soaked in ammonia. But to be thorough enough so that there weren’t any fingerprints?
“Why?” she asked, before she could stop herself and despite the fact that she knew Hicks wouldn’t have an answer. Why take the time, why make the effort? Eliza had given the FBI the location of the weapon; there would be no reason to get rid of her own fingerprints.
Why would she make sure the knife didn’t reveal any secrets, if the ones it could tell were already spilled?
CHAPTER FIVE
MOLLY THOMAS
Four weeks earlier
The first time Molly Thomas had met Eliza Cook, Molly had wondered for one brief, terrifying heartbeat if the girl was a ghost.
It had been nighttime, was the thing. And Eliza was just so pale.
Service had just ended, and no one ever cleared out right away. Instead the congregation gathered in the parking lot, every single one of them—including, embarrassingly enough, her own parents—jockeying for a sliver of attention from Pastor Cook.
Even though Molly and her family had been new to the Knox Hollow Church at the time, the scene had been so familiar it almost felt like they were back in Oregon.
Molly had wandered over to the group of kids who’d looked about her age, but she’d hovered at a safe distance, her shyness flaring hot, edging toward mortification for no reason other than that she existed.
That was when she’d first seen Eliza. The girl stood apart from the rest of the crowd, beyond the reach of the parking lot’s bright gleam, her hair threaded with silver from the moon, her eyes sunken and cradling shadows, her limbs gossamer and porcelain white against the darkness.
In the space between Molly’s stuttered heartbeats, Eliza had shifted into the light and become a girl instead of a ghost, yet the fear that had washed through Molly when she’d first caught sight of the haunting figure remained—clinging hot and sticky to her throat, to her mouth, to the back of her teeth.
That had been when they were twelve and thirteen, and four years later the remnants of that fear were still there, dull and muted with time and experience, but there nonetheless. Sometimes Molly still looked at Eliza and thought she was a ghost.
Like now.
It was night again, but colder than that humid summer evening they’d first met. They snuck out like this sometimes, if they could get away with it. Their families’ properties butted up right next to each other, a rusty, tangled fence dividing the land. They met at one of the posts, each leaning her back against the wood so that if asked, they could say they hadn’t left and not actually be lying.
Molly’s fingers traced the carved initials at the bottom of the post, the gashes almost smoothed over by the way she always worried at the marks, petting and stroking them for comfort. A reminder that some terrifying things were worth it. “Saw Hicks at the rodeo.”
Silence greeted the confession. Eliza was like that sometimes, drifting off, untethered to their conversation. Molly couldn’t see her, but she knew Eliza’s pupils would be dilated, her eyes unfocused, her skin maybe even cold to the touch.
“Was th-th-th . . .” Molly grunted in frustration, swallowed hard. “Was wondering if we tell him, maybe?”
Eliza’s shoulder nudged hers, probably because Molly’s stutter had made an appearance. It was a tell between them. When she was with Eliza, it showed up with frequency only if Molly was actually distressed. And tonight she was distressed.
Molly had tried being brave, so brave, just like Eliza always was. But sometimes she worried; sometimes she stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep because fear had turned her breathing so shallow it was loud in the quiet house. Surely someone would hear the wheezing, the slight whine of protest as oxygen tried to force its way into her lungs. Surely they’d hear the screaming in Molly’s head, the panicked wails of a girl in too deep. Far too deep.
Eliza never seemed to worry like that. Even though she had more reason to.
Molly traced over the initials again. And then again and again.
“Sorry,” Eliza finally said, the apology catching against the wind before wrapping around Molly, and once again Eliza was a girl and not a ghost. “I got lost.”
“It’s okay.” Molly laid her head back against the fence post and breathed in the night—the smoky campfire in the distance, the rich earth devouring dying leaves, the sugar-sweet perfume Eliza sometimes wore. “You can be lost with me.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Eliza said, an affectionate smile evident in the curve of her words.
“Doesn’t have to.” And Molly meant it. Sometimes Eliza scared her when she’d get that far-off look, or that stubborn set to her mouth where she couldn’t be convinced about anything, but she was still Molly’s favorite person in the world. The panic that had been threatening to devour Molly dissolved just at that reminder.
Eliza had a plan, and Molly would stick to it. She would.
The silence that unspooled between them was a different kind then, velvety and present and warm despite the chill slithering ever closer, frost trailing behind it. She’d miss these in-between days of crisp air and pleasantly pink cheeks, but fall was certainly nipping at summer’s heels.
“Molly,” Eliza finally said, warning in her tone. Molly’s fingernails all but dug into the wood of the post, right by those initials. “You know why you can’t tell anyone, right? We talked about this.”
They had. Time and again, as they pored over old articles of vicious crimes they’d found on the ancient computer
s in the back corner of the library.
Molly nodded but didn’t say anything, tasting copper from where her teeth bit into the inside of her cheek.
Eliza being Eliza grabbed Molly’s hand, squeezed it too hard. “I couldn’t live with myself if you . . .”
Got hurt. This conversation was familiar enough that Eliza didn’t need to finish the thought. Like Alessandra Shaw. Like Kate Martinez. Like . . .
But who’s going to protect you? Molly always wanted to ask.
She never did.
CHAPTER SIX
LUCY THORNE
Friday 10:45 a.m.
The walk back to the cars was as quiet as the one into the belly of the forest.
It was still on the earlier side—Lucy had woken up at 4:00 a.m. to make the five-hour drive from Seattle to Idaho—and the sky had lightened by the time they cleared the tree line.
While they’d been protected by the forest, the deluge had eased, but the wind howled in the rain’s wake. She and Hicks shouldered their way toward their cars, bodies bent forward, hands on their hats. They got to his white pickup first.
“The coroner?” Lucy prompted, needing to look over the body now that she’d seen where he’d been left. Now that she realized how much care Eliza had taken with Noah despite dumping him in the middle of the woods.
“Yeah. Follow me into town,” he directed and then wasted no time climbing inside the safe warmth of the cab.
Lucy ran the last few feet to her battered sedan.
The body drop where Noah had been found was about a fifteen-minute drive outside Knox Hollow, a straight shot on Highway 41. Both the town and the hiking area were remote, isolated, and Lucy passed only two other cars on the way to the coroner’s.
Every dull, stripped-down thing about the squat building that the sheriff parked in front of screamed government-owned property. Even if she hadn’t known what it was, she could have easily guessed it was the coroner’s.
Hicks held the door of the building open for her as she dashed from her car, the drizzle back but not quite in full force. The cowboy hat finally came off, revealing a surprising sandy mop that softened Hicks’s angular features into something almost boyish. After yanking off her baseball cap, Lucy ran a hand over her own frizzy ponytail, knowing any attempt to tame her hair into respectability was futile.
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