The Girl and the Hunt (Emma Griffin FBI Mystery Book 6)

by A J Rivers

  “So, who actually rented it to you?" Sam asks.

  “I never actually found out. The landlord was supposed to be waiting for me when I got here. I had been traveling for more than a day. Creagan had me going all over hell and back on the trains to create confusion and make it harder to trace a direct line between my arrival in Feathered Nest and where I came from. He had a car waiting for me at the train station, and it took me another forty-five minutes just to get here.”

  “How far is the train station?” Sam asks. “There wasn't a parking lot there that I saw.”

  “Not that one,” I say. “I wasn't coming on a train from the direction of Quantico or Sherwood, so I ended up at a different train station than the one we did. Anyway, when I got here, there was nobody to be seen. A key was hanging on the front door, and that was my welcome. At least until someone knocked on the door, and when I opened it, a man fell dead at my feet.”

  “Ron Murdock,” Sam nods.

  “Only I didn't find his name out until later. He had no identification or anything with him. All he had was a piece of paper with my name written on it in his hand. And a gunshot wound to his back. So, dealing with that was LaRoche's first encounter with me. Even though I had just gotten here that night, it was obvious he was suspicious. I can only imagine how much more suspicious he would have been if he saw the paper.”

  "You never even told him about it?"

  I shake my head and open my bag to start pulling things out so we can put them away. Creating some sense of normalcy in the cabin might smooth out the sharp edges of just how twisted it was for LaRoche to send me back here to stay during the investigation into Marren Purcell's death. He wanted it to get to me, but I wasn't going to let it.

  "No. It had my real name on it. Emma Griffin, not Emma Monroe. The undercover assignment before this one didn't go well for me. Showing the local cop my real name on a piece of paper in the hand of a man murdered within minutes of me getting to town would have blown that cover fully to shit. Besides, it felt too personal to share with them. Remember, I wasn't in the right state of mind at the time. Now, if I found something like that, I would obviously get some backup on it.”

  "Like now?" Sam asks.

  "Exactly. The paper, the notes on the train, the messages with Marren. They're all about me. And I told the police. It's still on me to finish this, to figure it out, and bring this guy down. But as much as it is about me, I can't pretend it doesn't have to do with the rest of the world, too. They aren't game pieces; they're people.”

  "You're right. And they deserve justice for their deaths," he adds.

  Carrying an armful of clothes, I cross to the dresser and pull open a middle drawer. A gasp forms and dies in my throat when I look inside. The old, worn fabric is just as soft beneath my fingertips as when I was here a year ago. Sam's words sink in, and I pull the quilt from the drawer to make space.

  "That's bullshit," I say.

  "How can you say that as a law enforcement agent?" he asks. "The point of your job is to find justice for the victims of crimes."

  I stuff my clothes into the drawer and bring my toiletries into the bathroom.

  "There is no justice when someone is murdered," I reply, walking back into the bedroom. "Justice means making something fair and balanced. Justice is when a bullied little boy grows up to be the powerful head of a company that employs everyone who tormented him. Justice is when a girl musters up the courage to ask a gorgeous guy out and is mocked and turned down, only for years later to be beautiful and see him miserable, ugly, and alone. Justice is when someone steals from a store, and they have to work there to pay the debt. Where is that for someone who is stabbed through the heart, or dismembered and shoved in a box? How do you make it fair and balanced for a child suffocated in a hammock or a woman with her throat slashed in her living room? The idea of getting justice for a murder victim is bullshit. As a law enforcement agent, it's my job to make people like that pay for as long as possible while they wait for the day they die and face real justice."

  "And involving the police from the start will help you do that," Sam says reassuringly. He knows I'm struggling with being kept at a distance, with not being able to control the investigation and carry it where I need to.

  "It will also help keep the bodies from stacking up with a sticky note that says 'Emma did it'. I've had my taste of being accused of murder, and I don't need any more of it. I will happily leave that to Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote."

  "Jessica Fletcher?" Sam asks with a laugh. “You’ve been watching too many of those old shows.”

  "You know everybody thought she did it," I tell him. "She lived in the country's tiniest town, and yet every other day somebody wound up murdered. And who was always there? Jessica, the retired teacher, trying to look all innocent with her sweaters and her glasses hanging from a necklace."

  I stop. Mentioning the character was meant to lighten the heaviness, to keep Sam and me from cracking. But the image I painted reminded me of something else. I rush out of the bedroom and back out onto the porch. Sam follows me, nearly tumbling from the open front door like he's unsure what I'll do if I'm out of his sight.

  "What are you doing?" he asks.

  "The necklace," I say.

  "Jessica Fletcher's necklace?"

  "No. Mine. Mine and my mother's. You saw the picture of us wearing them when I was little. One was left in my house in Quantico on my birthday before I went back to Sherwood. Clancy mailed the other one to me after he found it under the porch."

  "Right. That one must have been in Ron Murdock's pocket and slipped through the cracks in the wood when he fell," Sam says.

  "Yes. Only… " I reach into my shirt and pull out the necklace I've taken to wearing since seeing the picture. Taking it off, I hold it down close to the porch. "It won't fit."

  Sam crouches down and looks at where I'm holding the necklace. The pendant is clearly too large to fit through the gaps between the slats of the porch, and there are no holes or other gaps nearby.

  "And you're sure they didn't replace the porch or anything? Maybe they repaired it and brought the slats closer together?" he asks.

  I shake my head. "No. Look at the color of the wood. It's weathered and aged. It's exactly like the rest of the porch and the pillars. And if you look closely enough, you can still see traces of his blood where it soaked in before they could clean it. This is the porch where he died. But unless he took the necklace out of his pocket and threw it under the porch before knocking, Ron Murdock isn't the one who put it there."

  Chapter Ten

  "Somehow, I doubt a man dying of a gunshot wound would think about taking a necklace out of his pocket just to toss it under a porch,” Sam says.

  “So do I,” I nod. “Not that I haven't seen people do some pretty extraordinary things in the moments right before death, but this doesn't strike me as something he did. He would have no way of knowing anybody was going to look under the porch. If he wanted me to find it or to see it, he could have just left it in his pocket. Or taken it out and had it in his hand. It doesn't make any sense for him to put it under the porch, and there's no way it fell down between the slats.”

  “And the other necklace isn't smaller?” he asks.

  “Smaller?” I ask.

  “One of them is yours, and one is your mother's. You wore them together when you were a little girl. Is yours the same scale as hers, or smaller?”

  “The same,” I tell him.” I don't even know which one of these I wore and which my mother wore. But the thing is, Clancy mentioned they had just cleaned out under that porch a little bit before I was here the first time. It was unusual to go to the effort of cleaning out under it frequently, but after the murder, they wanted to make sure there wasn’t any blood under the porch to attract animals. And that's how they found the necklace. So, it couldn't have been there for long.”

  “So, Ron Murdock probably didn't have anything to do with the necklaces at all,” Sam notes.

&nbs
p; “It doesn't seem that way,” I say, a disquieting blend of shock and disappointment filling me.

  Ever since finding out about the necklaces, they've been a connection between Ron Murdock and this whole situation. It’s upsetting that I still have no idea who he was and why he was in Feathered Nest the night I got there. Even the tiniest clue, the smallest link could help me feel less like I’m completely missing something. But I obviously am.

  Sam reaches over to run his hand along my back.

  "You knew he couldn't have had anything to do with the first necklace. You got it, what, five months after he died? He couldn't have been the one to put that one in your house. That has always meant there was more than one person involved. Now you can consider if it might have been just one," he says.

  "Which is better, trying to will myself into believing Murdock stole a couple of celestial ponies and pulled a ghostly express to bring me the first necklace after he did drop the one found later? Or wrapping my head around a nameless, faceless person knowing where I lived, was able to get in without being noticed, and also came to Feathered Nest where they knew where I stayed?" I ask.

  "Knowing it was likely only one person helps to narrow it," he points out. "Rather than two people trying to give you a message with the necklaces, or one trying to tell you about the other, it's just one."

  "This man, whoever he actually was, is the only new link I've had to my parents in a long time," I explain. "I should know him. I should know why he would be here, but now I feel even further from that.”

  “He is still a link to your parents,” Sam says. “You know he knew them. You’ve seen the picture.”

  “It's more than that,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  "It's not just the picture of him with my parents. It's not even the link to Iowa. That's tangible proof, but I know there's more. I have memories of him. At least, I think it's him. It being him is the only thing that makes sense, but at the same time, it doesn't because I still don't know who he is or why he would be there."

  "What kind of memories?" Sam asks. "Did you meet him or talk to him?"

  "Nothing that concrete. It's just… flashes. It's like I have memories of these little moments in my life, and when I just think about them, all I can see is that memory. Like I'm focused in on it and see only that moment. But if I look around the edges, I find him. And it keeps happening. I keep discovering him in memories I've gone over so many times in my mind. It's like he's always there, I just never realized it. He was at the waterpark on a day I was there with Dad. I remember sitting on one of those lounge chairs eating French fries and a sno-cone. Mom was there somewhere. I know she was. But all I can remember is Dad. He was sitting on the chair beside mine, and he stole some of my fries. That's usually where the memory stopped. I didn't think about anything past that. But then I thought about it further and remembered him looking up. Not anything big, not a really noticeable gesture like he was surprised or looking for something. Just a really slight movement. So, I looked up and saw a man a few yards away. He wasn't in a bathing suit like everybody else. He looked at us like he knew us.”

  “Did you know him?” Sam asks.

  “That's the thing. I can't really tell. It's like I do, but I don't. Like I recognized him as someone I've seen before, but not as a specific person. There are a few memories like that. Where that man just kind of exists on the periphery of what's happening, and nobody acknowledges he's there. Not in a negative way, like they're trying to ignore him or don't want him to be there. They just don't say anything about him or go over and talk to him. It's like he's there and he's not at the same time. But that's what kind of makes me worry about it.”

  “What do you mean worry about it?”

  “What if I'm not actually remembering him? What if I saw that picture and have just started superimposing him into various moments in my life, but he wasn't actually there?”

  “Are all the memories the same?” Sam asks. “Is he wearing the same thing? Have the same mannerisms?”

  “No. It's different for each of the memories.”

  "Then I don't think that's what's happening. If you were just layering him in there, you wouldn't have that much variety. It's possible, I guess. You're the most imaginative person I've ever known, so if there was going to be someone whose brain would do that, it would be you. But I think it's much more likely you have real memories of him. He was obviously fairly close with your parents. That picture looks pretty chummy. And you were around during that time. That wasn't taken before you were born. It makes sense you might have seen him around," Sam tells me.

  "Then why wouldn't I remember meeting him? Or spending any time with him? There are no memories of interacting with him. Any of us. He's just there," I say.

  "Is there anything else consistent about the memories? Anything else you can think of that links those specific moments?"

  I think about this for a few seconds, letting my brain bounce from moment to moment. Just like I told Sam, these are moments I have thought about so many times over the years without ever noticing that man in them. Now that he's surfacing in them, it makes me wonder how many other memories have him in them and I just haven't yet discovered him. Something occurs to me, the longer I think about it. It's tenuous, but at this point, everything is.

  “Every time I think of a memory with Ron Murdock, whoever he is, in it, it's right before one of Dad's trips. Like the one I was just telling you about where I was at the waterpark. He left the next day and was gone for a few weeks.”

  “Did you know where he was?” Sam asks.

  "No, I never did. But Mom wasn't concerned about it and just told me he would be back, like always. And he was. It wasn’t always long stretches like that. There were times when he was only gone for a couple of days. But whenever a memory pops up that has Murdock in it, my father left soon after."

  "Emma, could he have been your father's handler?"

  The concept of my father having a handler was always abstract to me. I grew up knowing he was in the CIA and that his job meant doing difficult and often dangerous things he couldn't talk about. Just as I had to be accustomed to moving around all the time and never being completely sure what was happening at any moment of my childhood, I had to accept that I would never know many of the details about my father's career. The older I got and the more I understood about his agency as well as the Bureau, the more I learned about the intricacies that existed within the organizations. One being the existence of handlers.

  These specialized officers are assigned to agents to act as a buffer between the agents and the organization itself. Rather than an agent engaging directly with the organization to receive instructions or transfer intelligence, the handler acts as a go-between. They are often referred to as cut-outs because their interaction with the agents cuts out the need for them to engage with other agents or with the larger organization.

  "I don't know,” I tell Sam. “Dad never mentioned having a handler, and that picture made it look like Murdock was very friendly with my parents. Friendlier than I would expect that type of professional relationship to be.”

  “How long was he around?” Sam asks. “When is your last memory of him?”

  I let out a long breath and look at the wood porch in front of me again. Resting my hand where his body lay, I try to connect with the man I knew only as Ron Murdock. I try to let it trace back to create a thread that will draw me back through each moment of my life when he was there. But those moments are jumbled, out of order, and I don't know how to arrange them into place.

  Chapter Eleven

  Murdock

  Seventeen years ago…

  He should have been there. As soon as he had a feeling something was wrong, he should have acted. He would never forgive himself for that. He would never again be able to look in a mirror and accept what he saw because there would always be blood on his hands, and the image in his eyes would never go away. Whenever he looked at himself, he would see her.
Even more, he would see Ian. Reflected in his eyes, he would see Ian's face staring back at him through the splash of the lights that dissolved away the midnight darkness along that hidden road.

  Ian gave absolutely no indication that Murdock was even there. He made no move, no gesture. Nothing to communicate through the crowd. Murdock waited to hear something. He was still waiting. The trucks were gone, the cars that clogged the road disentangled from their self-created jam so they could slide away to the next scene, the next moment of chaos. Ian was already gone. Packed up in his blue-striped pajamas into the back of the ambulances so he could sit alongside Mariya one last time. There would be no sirens. There would be no CPR or life support. They weren't here to rescue. They were here only to collect.

  The men in dark suits were also gone. They had lingered in the house long after the stretcher was pulled through the entryway and brought out into the night air. They stayed after Ian left, and after the responding officers swept the area. Murdock stayed out of sight. He remained on the edge, not bringing any attention to himself until they were gone.

  Emma was still there. Lost in the turmoil and upheaval of the night, she was left behind in a house that now felt so much quieter than it had before. No one went upstairs to wake her or to find out if she saw or heard anything. Many of them probably didn't even realize she was there. But she couldn't remain alone. There was no way of knowing how long Ian would be gone or what may happen between the time the hidden road in front of the house emptied, and he returned.

  When they were all gone, Murdock walked into the house through the side door and surveyed what was left. Very little had changed about the space. Most people who saw it wouldn't think very much was different. But he could see the tatters of life that once existed. He could feel the shift, the oppressive weight now hovering in each of the rooms. For a second, he considered climbing the stairs and looking in on Emma. Just a quick glance to make sure she was alright. Something told him she hadn't actually slept through the entire event. She was young, but not a baby or toddler who would be able to block out anything happening in the world around them to get sleep. It seemed unlikely an almost twelve-year-old girl would make it peacefully through her mother being murdered on the floor of the house just beneath her.