Hicks gestured toward the long hallway, and once again she was left staring at his back, and then the muddy footprints he left on the clean white linoleum.
They passed a few open office doors, but there wasn’t anyone else inside.
“Lots of budget cuts,” Hicks said quietly, as if he could hear the question she hadn’t voiced. It spooked her a little. “Just the coroner and one assistant these days. They’ll probably sell the building off eventually.”
The coroner, it turned out, was a young man named Jackson. It was unclear if that was his first or last name—“Just call me Jackson”—and it didn’t seem necessary to clarify. He was short, only an inch or so above her own vertically challenged five feet two, with the broad shoulders of a linebacker. His bright red hair came with the stereotypical pale skin and freckles of the Irish, and his smile was big and easy. Welcoming.
They shrugged into smocks and then pulled on gloves before Jackson held out a tub of menthol. Lucy dabbed the gel beneath her nostrils, the burn of it surging into her nasal cavities, obliterating her receptors.
The familiar coroner’s trick was to protect from the stench of death, the rotting flesh, the sour blood, any festering wounds turned black at ripped edges. Sometimes Lucy thought she could still smell the maggots writhing inside the bodies, anyway. But she knew that was impossible.
Jackson just smiled at her as she breathed in, holding on to the mint, letting it wipe the memory of anything else away.
“Over here,” he prompted, before crossing the lab to the cold chambers that lined one of the walls. He pulled out a slab that was about waist height.
This part never got any easier. It was even worse when it was a kid.
Noah Dawson was on the smaller side, but he looked like all little boys seemed to look. His brown hair was floppy, baby fat still rounding out his cheeks, and his arms were a little too long for the rest of a body clearly on the cusp of a growth spurt.
“Do you have a time of death?” Lucy asked, her voice gentling with the instinctive reverence that came in the presence of destroyed innocence.
“About a twelve-hour window,” Jackson said. “Monday night into Tuesday early morning.”
With that simple answer the world tilted, rearranged itself, and then settled once more. Assumptions were dangerous, but Lucy had formed them anyway. She’d thought Eliza had come straight to Seattle after the murder. But this put it at four days ago, not two as Lucy had expected.
Which meant . . . Which meant the killing itself hadn’t been the catalyst for Eliza turning herself into the FBI.
At three in the morning. Five hours away from where the body was.
“How sure are you that the TOD is accurate?” Lucy asked, because it made no sense.
Jackson lifted one thick shoulder. “Like I said, it’s a window. But I wouldn’t put it much outside that time. Especially since we know when he disappeared. That helps.”
“Can you confidently say it wasn’t Wednesday? His death,” Lucy pressed. She had to be sure, because this blew her timeline straight to hell. This blew a lot of assumptions she’d been working from straight to hell actually.
Criminal behavior, while abnormal in relation to the rest of society, was predictable to an extent. There was a psychology involved, a logic and conformity to it that was never too deep beneath a thin veneer of chaos. This didn’t fit the admittedly spotty narrative Lucy had been building around the case, which included a possible accomplice that lingered in the shadows and offered itself as a solution to a lot of Lucy’s unanswered questions.
Like maybe the person had helped get Noah’s body out to the drop. And then once Eliza had been faced with the realities of killing a child, she’d balked and turned herself in. But she still wanted to protect her accomplice, which was why she hadn’t let herself say more than that initial confession.
Lucy hadn’t even realized it, but that little scenario had been starting to seep into all the holes in the case, filling them in nicely.
This, though? This changed the game before that theory could really take on shape.
Jackson shook his head. “TOD was at the very latest Tuesday night. But even that’s a stretch. Wednesday’s completely out of the question due to the decomp we’re seeing. Especially since it wasn’t a hot day.”
If the killing itself hadn’t been enough to get Eliza to break and turn herself in, what had? A fight with the potential accomplice? Was Lucy getting ahead of herself if she moved forward assuming there was one? Maybe Eliza had been able to persuade Noah to go out into the woods with her and the distance to the body drop was irrelevant to the case.
Lucy needed to talk to the families.
“All right,” she said with an easiness she didn’t feel to get this moving along. “Continue.”
With careful hands, Jackson lifted Noah’s shoulders, cradling his head when it dropped forward. “Here’s the wound.”
It was neat and precise at the base of his skull, no practice marks, no cuts that would signal a defensive struggle. A clean kill.
After studying it, Lucy nodded, and Jackson laid the body flat once more.
Jackson then shifted the sheet so that the boy’s chest was exposed, the ribs straining against tight skin. At the base of his throat were the jagged knife marks that were all the more savage in contrast to the sheer carefulness of the thrust that had killed him.
Here was the brutality that Lucy was used to in cases like this.
She blinked until she could see beyond the violence, beyond the obscenity of ripped flesh. She blinked until the knife marks started to make sense.
A letter. Then numbers.
“Say it,” Eliza had said. “There’s a verse cut into the skin. Say it.”
“R. 3:23,” Lucy murmured now, as if in response to the lingering echo of Eliza’s command.
Lucy desperately tried calling up long-forgotten Bible study classes. She’d spent more time sneaking off for cheap cigarettes in the parking lot before her mother picked her up than actually listening to any of those teachers.
“Romans,” Hicks said in that gruff voice of his. He paused, looked away from them. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Lucy stifled the instinctive Jesus that sat in her mouth ready to spill out in all its blasphemy. She wouldn’t have pegged Hicks for the religious type, but he’d recited the Bible verse with the familiarity of a loved one’s name, the words warm.
Jackson nodded along as if it was expected for the sheriff to whip out Bible knowledge on a whim. Perhaps it was.
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
It sounded dire. It sounded threatening. It sounded like a promise for more. Lucy thought about the woods, the silence, the isolation. Were there other bodies to be found? Others who had—what was it?—fallen short of the glory of God?
“There’s not much else I can tell you guys.” Jackson’s smile had dimmed somewhat. “There wasn’t any skin beneath his fingernails, no fresh bruising, either.”
The wording of that caught Lucy’s attention. “Were there old bruises?”
“Actually, yeah,” Jackson said, lifting the sheet once again, this time to uncover the boy’s legs. “But it seems the type you’d get from being an active kid.”
Jackson pointed to a smudge that she almost would have missed, right where a low coffee table would hit against a shin. “There.” He shifted the sheet to show a green-and-purple splotch just above the boy’s knee. “There.”
A few more littered his arms, a particularly deep one wrapped around his hip. Jackson pointed to each without inflection.
But he’d lost the rest of his smile.
“Seems like a lot,” Lucy commented when Jackson was finally done. “Even for a careless kid.”
Lucy had a friend who worked child-abuse cases. She came over sometimes, drank too much wine, and railed against the injustice of the world. The signs are always there, she’d say. Always.
Even without
that in her head, Lucy would have known what this hinted at. And quite honestly so did both the men in the room, the men who remained silent, eyes downcast, staring at the body. Jackson’s lips had pursed into an unpleasant twist, and Hicks had crossed his arms over his chest.
Neither of them said anything in response to her observation.
“Is there a history here I should know about?” Lucy finally asked, in the most diplomatic manner she could manage. If they were protecting the kid’s parents, it wouldn’t do to tip her hand too much.
Jackson’s eyes flitted from Hicks to her and then back again as he shook his head. The shutters had come down completely, the welcoming body language closing off. “No, not even a suggestion. I swear it. The Dawsons are good folk. They were devastated about Noah.”
Hicks didn’t contradict any of it, but some instinct had her watching his face across the slab. When Jackson had mentioned the Dawsons, Hicks’s shoulders had twitched a little before he’d gone absolutely still, as if he could feel her eyes on him.
“No suspiciously high number of hospital visits, nothing like that?” Lucy pushed.
Jackson shifted beside her. “Uh, no.”
The stress level in the room at large said otherwise. She couldn’t tell, though, whether the hesitation came from Hicks or Jackson, couldn’t tell who was following whose lead when it came to whatever they weren’t saying. But Lucy was good enough that she recognized when the straightforward route wasn’t going to work.
“All right, no fresh bruising, no defensive wounds,” Lucy said trying to get this report back on track. “No marks besides the verse on his chest.”
The air still crackled around them, the new social awkwardness of an almost confrontation turning Jackson’s words slow and guarded. “I found some fibers on his clothes but nothing unusual. I’ll have them checked, but I’m not expecting anything.”
Even if Noah had gone to the forest willingly with Eliza, Lucy found it hard to believe she’d been able to surprise him to the extent that there would be no defensive wounds. Had he been half-drugged in that case? Enough to make him pliant, but awake enough for him to be able to walk by himself?
If that were so, where had Eliza gotten the drugs?
Another accomplice? Or the original one Lucy already suspected existed? Who had easy access to sedatives in this town?
“You’ve ordered a toxicology report?” Lucy checked. The question itself would be insulting to any other ME she worked with, but there was something evasive in the way Jackson held his body away from her that had her making sure he’d followed proper procedure.
“Of course,” he said. “But it’s going to take a few days, even a week or two.”
Grudgingly she admitted to herself that the long wait was expected in these parts. It was one of her biggest frustrations whenever she was called out beyond Seattle to help with cases. Even on major investigations, it could take anywhere up to six months. “Keep us posted.”
Jackson pushed the slab back into the cold chamber, and Lucy fought the wild urge to reach out, stop the smooth slide, to keep the slight body from being swallowed by the frigid darkness.
As they left, Jackson saluted them, some of the warmth returning to his face now that Noah was tucked away once more.
Lucy didn’t say anything until she and Hicks were in the parking lot. Then without any warning she turned on him, got into his space, trapped him between herself and his pickup. “What aren’t you telling me?”
It was a risk, it was rushing the gun in hopes that the element of surprise would pay off, and a part of her worried she’d miscalculated so badly he’d shut down completely. His gaze was locked on the mountains in the distance, his shoulders taut in an unforgiving line, a deep frown dragging down the lines of his face.
Then he looked at her, looked at the building they’d just left, and sighed.
“Not here.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUCY THORNE
Friday, just past noon
Despite the fact that it had only been lunchtime when Lucy and Hicks had left the coroner’s, their next stop was a bar.
The man working the taps had more beard than face, the silver nest tangling down to midchest. He nodded at Hicks. “Sheriff.”
“Boone,” Hicks called back, leading Lucy toward one of the more secluded booths. “All right?”
“All right.”
When an older lady with deep brown skin and ink-black hair stopped by their table, Hicks ordered. “Just coffees, Brenda, thanks.”
“Heard about Noah,” Brenda said, leaning on the back of the booth, her eyes on Lucy.
“You know I can’t talk about that.” Hicks’s voice was gentle but left no room for argument.
Brenda poked him in the shoulder. “Don’t you go bothering poor Darcy, now. She’s been through enough.”
“Brenda.”
“I mean it, Wyatt Hicks. You’ve got that damn bee in your bonnet about those folks, I know you do,” Brenda said, but she was backing away. “I mean it.”
“Darcy Dawson,” Hicks said once Brenda had disappeared into the kitchen. “Noah Dawson’s mother.”
The bruises. A bee in your bonnet. “Tell me about her. Them?”
Hicks didn’t say anything, just sat back and scanned the room. It was dark, the windows at the front mostly covered by flyers and stickers and neon lights. An old man sat at the far end of the beat-up bar that looked like it had been there since the gold rush—with the bullet holes to prove it. A glass with a single finger of amber liquor sat ignored at his elbow as he read the newspaper. Other than him, Boone, and Brenda, the place was empty.
Still, Hicks remained silent until Brenda had dropped off their coffee, black, in mismatched mugs, like they were from a personal kitchen instead of a restaurant.
“It might not have anything to do with anything,” Hicks finally said without really saying anything.
“Seems like whatever it is, I should probably at least know about it.”
Hicks ran a hand through his hair, then pushed his coffee out of the way so he could lean forward, dropping his voice as he did. Not quite to a whisper but just above. “Have you heard of the True Believers of Christ Church?”
Despite the Bible verse, the question surprised her. “No.”
He nodded as if that had been expected. “They call themselves a Christian sect, but it’s less of a Church and more of a . . .”
Lucy took a not-so-wild swing. “Cult?”
Hicks held out his hand, tipped it back and forth. Like she’d gotten close to the right idea but hadn’t quite hit it on the head. “At least the community in Knox Hollow . . . well. It bends toward that.”
There was an edge to his tone. A bee in your bonnet. “Tell me about them.”
“There’s only a handful of these so-called Churches across the country,” Hicks said, voice low despite the fact that no one was around to overhear. This was precarious ground, clearly. “They’re extremely religious, very strict. They don’t appreciate regulations or government in their business.”
Well that, at least, sounded familiar to Lucy’s experience of people who chose to live in places like Knox Hollow—places that existed essentially as modern frontiers. Her own parents would probably fit that description, to be fair. Considering the way that verse had poured off Hicks’s tongue, she would guess his family did as well. She jerked her chin down, part in acknowledgment, part in question.
“Right, not that unusual around here,” Hicks agreed, seeming to read her expression with ease. Something fond flickered in his voice. “Usually with people, you know, they stay out of our way, we stay out of theirs. Live and let live.”
An unofficial motto Lucy knew very well.
There was a but riding in the wake of those words, though. She waited for it.
“But Idaho . . . It’s kinda tricky here,” Hicks continued. “There are these things called shield laws. It’s one of the few states left that has them.”
This was new
territory. “Shield laws?”
Hicks tapped his fingers against the table, agitated energy narrowed down into a controlled tic. “The Church doesn’t believe in modern medicine or intervention of any kind.”
“So . . . like the Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
“Sort of,” Hicks said. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t as strict about it. They don’t take blood transfusions, things like that.”
“This group goes further than that?” Lucy asked.
“No medical care whatsoever.” Hicks swept out a hand. “Across the board.”
“What do they do?” The question, once uttered, sounded silly even to her own ears. But that’s all she could come up with.
“Nothing,” Hicks all but spat out. Then he looked away, his jaw swiveled and then clenched. “Pray.”
“You mean,” Lucy drawled out, her mind finally booting back up again, “it’s like . . .”
When she trailed off, he filled it in for her. “Faith healing.”
The term brought up images of gel-slicked hair and brightly colored robes; loud, purposely distracting gestures as “holy men” tossed away crutches or pulled the injured from wheelchairs; actors stationed in the audience, and cheap tricks to make it look like the sick were healed. Con men feasting on the fragile hope of the desperately ill.
But what Hicks was describing . . .
It seemed like a different kind of faith healing, the kind where everyone involved and not just the audience actually believed it worked. “But what if they get seriously sick? Kids can die from pneumonia, things like that.”
“Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Lucy thought of her own childhood, the acrid fear in her parents’ voices when that one dry cough had made her wheeze in the middle of the night, the doctor forty miles away. Her eyes found Hicks’s, his earlier words locking into place. “And the shield laws?”
Her Final Words Page 4