But feeling queasy? The implications of that? That was another twist of the knife.
She flung open the door to Reilly’s car and got out his evidence kit. Gloves and baggies. She brought it inside.
“Why’d he put it in the same place that you found it before?” said Reilly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess force of habit. Serial killers ritualize things. If they don’t do it the same way, it doesn’t feel the same.” She pulled on a pair of gloves. She picked up the box. She opened it.
It was empty.
She let out a little cry and let it fall.
Reilly had gloves on now. He picked it up. “Huh. Maybe it’s just a box.”
“Maybe he took the trophies when he ran,” said Wren.
They looked through the rest of the house. They didn’t find anything incriminating, but then that might have been a good thing, since they hadn’t gotten a warrant for Hawk’s house. They’d only come in to look for him, or to look for signs that he’d left.
After they’d looked through everything, they went back out to Reilly’s car and drove around the compound, asking if anyone had seen him.
No one had.
Then, out on the northern edge of the compound, near the meeting house, they found Hawk’s car, but Hawk wasn’t in it.
Isaac Scott was trimming some hedges outside the meeting house. He waved at them. “Hi there!”
Wren and Reilly trudged over to him.
“Isaac, did you see Hawk park this car?” called Wren.
“Wren, did you ever talk to the Daramonds?” said Isaac.
“Did he get out? Is he in the meeting house?” said Wren. “Did you talk to him?”
“Did the Daramonds confirm my alibi?” said Isaac.
Wren sighed. “Yes, okay, the Daramonds said you were there. You’re not a suspect. You happy?”
“I’m relieved,” said Isaac.
“Hawk?” said Wren.
“Don’t know anything about that car,” said Isaac. “I went inside the meeting house earlier, and it wasn’t there. When I came back out, it was. Didn’t see Hawk anywhere.”
“Huh,” said Wren, mostly to herself.
“Where could he have gone?” said Reilly.
“Maybe out in the woods?” spoke up Isaac.
The woods?
Great. There were acres and acres of woods out there. And Hawk had shown himself adept at doing things amongst the trees, since that had been his kill site for the girls.
“Who would know where Hawk goes in the woods?” said Reilly.
“Major,” said Wren. “Major went with him everywhere.”
* * *
“So, if this is true, then Major is innocent,” said Reilly.
They were back at jail for the second time that day, only a different jail. Major was being held in Martinsburg, because he was awaiting his trial. Vivian Delacroix, on the other hand, had been sentenced and was held in a maximum security prison elsewhere. Seeing Major was less of a hassle than seeing Vivian, but they were here without any advanced notice, so they had to wait until the prison could arrange for them to talk to Major.
“Yeah,” said Wren. “I guess they’d let him go, then?”
“Right,” said Reilly. “But I got to tell you, Wren, we don’t have the evidence we need for Hawk.”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s him. Major’s telling the truth, and Hawk did all of this. We’ll find the evidence.”
“You’re sure of that now? We were going to talk to him to try to find some reason to prove that he didn’t do it.”
“That was before he ran.”
“Right,” said Reilly. He sighed.
She sighed.
He tapped his fingers against the chair where he was sitting.
She sat up straight. “Is there a bathroom in here?”
Reilly pointed. “I remember this from Janessa. She was peeing constantly. It’s got something to do with blood flow—”
“What are you talking about?” said Wren.
Reilly hesitated. “Nothing.”
“I don’t even need to go,” Wren muttered. “I was just… I was going to go and… I’ve been carrying that stupid pregnancy test around with me all day, and…”
“Oh,” said Reilly. “Well, you should probably do that. It’s actually a good idea. Knowing for certain would be good for you.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” she said.
Reilly nodded. “Okay, then.”
Wren leaned back against the wall and shut her eyes. “I’d be a really terrible mother, Reilly.”
“What?” He turned to her. “That’s crazy. You’d be great.”
She opened one eye.
“I mean…” He shrugged. “There’s not a lot to it.”
She shut her eyes again and snorted. “You met my mother today.”
“Right,” said Reilly.
“That’s not what she’s like.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was all an act,” said Wren. “I used to watch her do that. She’d turn it on for people, for whoever she needed to manipulate. But she never bothered using it on me. I wasn’t important. It wasn’t until today that she tried it on me.”
Reilly wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so he didn’t.
“It kind of made me feel a little special. It means she cares, in some way. It means she deemed me important enough of a person to try to get something from me.”
“What do you think she wanted?”
“Whatever she could get. Money maybe. The way I understand it, it’s very expensive to be in jail. There’s a whole crazy economy going on in there. Maybe she wanted access to things on the outside. I don’t think anyone visits her.” She opened her eyes. “Maybe she was just lonely. Even psychopaths get lonely.”
“That what you think Vivian is?”
“I know it,” said Wren. “It was so easy to recognize the type when I was in the Academy because I saw my mother do that sort of thing my whole life. I know she’s nothing but cold.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you’d be that sort of a mother.”
“I don’t know,” said Wren. “Sometimes, I wonder if I’m just like her.”
“You’re not,” said Reilly. “Don’t say things like that.”
“What about me distinguishes me so much from Vivian Delacroix?”
“You have nothing in common with her. You’re not a cult leader.”
“No,” she said. “But I do seem to spend all of my free time thinking about murder.”
“Not the same, Wren, come on.”
She studied her fingernails. “Maybe not the same. Maybe slightly better, but—”
“Look at me,” he said.
She raised her gaze slowly.
“We are the good guys, okay? We stop the bad guys. There’s nothing about what we do that’s remotely similar to what murderers do.”
“But we have to understand them,” said Wren. “I like to understand them. I’m fascinated by all of it. Besides, have you seen me? I can’t even take care of myself. I wear the same jeans every day. I don’t know how to cook. I’m not… I can’t do it, okay? There’s no freaking way.”
“If you have to, you’ll step up. You’re extremely capable,” he said. “It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t think anything is going to be okay, ever again.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“There’s a place out in the woods that we built together,” Major said. He was happy to see them both, eager for them to believe what he’d said before, that Hawk was guilty, not him. He took the fact that they were asking questions about Hawk as a good sign.
It was, but Wren didn’t want him to get his hopes up. She wasn’t sure how to feel about Major. It was pretty likely that he was collateral damage, manipulated and twisted by Hawk for his own ends. But it was also possible that he’d been very involved. Maybe the two of them had done the girls together. Or maybe she was wrong about Hawk.
She still wanted to be wrong about Hawk, but she couldn’t make herself believe it was true.
“A place,” she repeated. “Like a house?”
“Not a nice house,” said Major. “No glass in the windows. No electricity or anything like that. We built it ourselves. We dragged things out from the compound. We took wood and nails and tools. We had to make a path between the trees. We did that first. We went through and hacked out a path, and then we had to keep it clear so that we could go back and forth.”
“Is this near where the bones were?” Wren said. “Where the girls were killed?”
Major shook his head. “No. I didn’t like that place. That was Hawk’s place.”
“But you knew all about it,” said Wren.
“I knew it because Hawk wanted me to know it. Because he was trying to set me up,” said Major. “He had planned for me to be his scapegoat all along, you know? It makes me so mad when I think about it. I thought we were friends. But he just used me. He saw me as weak and impressionable. He didn’t care about me at all.”
“But you confessed,” Wren said. “How does someone get another person to confess to murder of all things? How could Hawk ever have been able to convince you of that?”
“You’ve met him,” said Major. “He can do that. I think it’s because he’s still in touch with the Crimson Ram. He says that the Crimson Ram gets in through the cracks—the ones between sleep and awake? The Horned Lord crawls through those cracks and he takes over. He’s powerful too. He’s a god.”
“There’s no such thing as the Crimson Ram,” said Wren. “He’s made up. What Hawk does, it isn’t magic.”
Major leaned forward. “But you agree that Hawk can do something, don’t you?”
Reilly cleared his throat. “I think we’re getting off track here. This house in the woods you built?”
“Right,” said Major. “We worked on it for a long time. It took us months and months to make it. First we made the foundation. We dragged in concrete blocks on that litter we made. We dragged them over the path in the woods. It took a lot of trips. Then we set them up and then we built around it with wood. We framed it out and then we made the floor—”
“Where is it?” said Reilly. “Where’s this house?”
“Is this where the two of you went before?” said Wren. “Right before you were arrested?”
“Yes, yes,” Major said, nodding. “Hawk said no one would look for us there and that we could sneak out in the night and run away and I could start another life. But I didn’t want that. He was making up lies about me.”
“Except you didn’t know that at the time, you believed the lies,” said Wren.
“Some part of me always knew the truth,” said Major. “I always knew that I could never have killed little girls like that. I’m not a monster like he is. I’m not crazy and evil. I don’t talk to the Horned Lord. No, no, no. That’s Hawk. That was always Hawk. He made me think that I was him, but I was never him.”
“Major, where’s the house in the woods?” said Reilly.
“You follow the path,” said Major.
“The path that we followed to get to where the stone circle was?” said Wren. “That path?”
“No, a different path.”
“How do we get to that path?”
“You go out towards where the crazies live,” said Major. “But you don’t go too close, because they’ll get you if you get too close. You go past them, and then, the path is there.”
“I don’t know where that is,” said Wren.
“Who are the crazies?” said Reilly.
“You don’t know about the crazies?” said Major. “Really? Well, you don’t want to know. They’re worse than Hawk. They’re real bad. They’ll kill you and cut you up.”
“And they live in the woods?” said Wren.
Major nodded urgently. “If you don’t know where they live, you better not go out there, not by yourselves. You’ll need me to come with you. I can show you where the crazies live, and help you stay away from them. And then I can show you the path to the house that Hawk and I made. But you’ll have to get me out of here.”
Wren sighed. “Major, we really can’t do that.”
“Why not? You know that it was Hawk, not me.”
“We don’t know that,” said Wren. “All the evidence points to you, and you confessed. The fact that you’re changing your story now—”
“You do know it was him,” said Major. “I can tell. I can see it all over you. You know what it was that you were kissing, Wren. You were kissing the monster in the burning forest, and he’s going to chew you up and spit you out now.”
“Just tell us,” said Wren. “Tell us how to get to the path and the house.”
“No,” said Major, putting his arms over his chest. “No, you get me out of here. Get me out and I’ll show you. You know I’m innocent. Get me out of here now.”
* * *
“I feel even more confused now than I did before I went in there,” Wren muttered, scrunched down in the passenger’s seat of Reilly’s car. She was staring out the window.
“That’s because you let yourself get out in the weeds with him. We were trying to get one little piece of information, and he wanted to talk. If you would have gone for it, instead of leading him down those little side paths that he wanted to go down, maybe we’d be further along than we are.”
“What? Seriously? I was trying to make this all make sense. One of them did it, you know. And if it really was Hawk, I need to know how.”
“No, you can’t trust Major. He’s not all there,” said Reilly.
“No, I know,” she said. “He’s… off. And I don’t know if that’s because he’s a murderer or because he was systematically broken down by Hawk so that he would be impressionable enough to use.”
“You think Hawk could do that?”
“I think he was trying to do it to me,” she said. “The thing with Oliver, getting into my head and making me think I could be capable…” She grimaced. “Maybe he’s already been working on breaking me down, too. Maybe I don’t even know all the things that—”
“You’re giving him too much power. Stop thinking of him like that, like some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing entity. He’s just a guy, and he’s nothing special.”
“Oh, whatever,” she muttered.
“Wren, I’m serious. You—”
“Could we get Major out of jail?”
“What? Of course not. How could you possibly ask that?”
“Well, if we had evidence that Hawk did it, like irrefutable evidence?”
“Maybe,” said Reilly. “Maybe then. But what we’d need would be DNA and a confession at this point. The case against Major is strong.”
“But none of the evidence really ties to Major. They found the clothes and the bags and everything out in the woods, but they never found Major’s DNA. They found the victims’ DNA, but not his.”
“Look, I’m not the person to argue this with.”
“We need to find Hawk.”
“Yes,” said Reilly. “We do. And he’s probably out there in that house, but we’ll have to find it ourselves.”
“There’s no way we’ll find it. Covering every inch of those woods would take too long. We need Major to guide us. What if we could get him out of jail to help out? Like a day outing.”
“A day outing?”
“People get released from jail for special events sometimes. For a wedding or for a funeral or that sort of thing. Major isn’t convicted of anything. He’s being held without bail because of the seriousness of the charge. He’s still awaiting trial. If we tell them it’s possible he’s even innocent, wouldn’t someone loan him to us for a day?”
“I don’t think so, Delacroix.”
“Well, can’t you ask?” Her voice was steadily rising.
“Ask who?”
“I don’t know. Whoever it is you would ask in this situation. Lopez, maybe. He’s your direct superior, right? Ask him.” She ges
ticulated as her voice got even louder.
“It’s a crazy request, and there’s no way it’s going to happen.” As if in response, he got quieter, more still. His voice was a soft rumble in the car.
“Well, okay,” she said. “But if you don’t ask, you don’t know!”
“Wren—”
“We have to find Hawk.” And her voice was shrill now.
“Listen, why don’t you calm down, okay?” His voice was softer still.
“Stop the car,” she said.
“What?”
“Stop the car!” She pounded both fists on the dashboard.
Reilly, confused, pulled the car over to the side of the road.
Wren threw open the door and leaped out.
“Hey, Wren, what the fuck are you doing?” he called after her.
She took off running. They were on a country road, but there were houses on either side of the road. She ran through the yard of one house and then into a nearby field.
“Wren!” he called.
She didn’t even look back.
Reilly muttered swear words under his breath and then pulled the car even further over, so that it was completely off the shoulder. He got out of the car and went after her.
She disappeared behind a clump of trees.
“Wren!” he yelled again.
“Go away!” she shrieked back.
“Come on, Wren, what the hell are you doing?”
“I’m taking a motherfucking piss, okay?” she yelled. “Is that okay?”
He stopped moving.
“Go back to the damned car, Reilly,” she yelled.
He did. He went back to the car, and he climbed inside, and he shut his eyes, and he thought that he was not going to be able to deal with pregnancy hormones and Wren Delacroix. It was a combination that would be a holy terror unleashed on the world.
He remembered what Janessa had been like, and Janessa was usually fairly mild tempered. But when pregnant, she would sometimes get so angry that she’d break things and yell. Meek little Janessa had been that way. It had gotten worse the more pregnant she’d gotten. He couldn’t imagine what Wren would be like.
And this was probably the worst way to be pregnant that he could even think of. It was just… obscene.
Wren Delacroix Series Box Set Page 48