by Kyla Stone
Jackson drove the rutted forest road that came out onto a paved road several miles west back into town. Lena, Shiloh, and Ruby rode with him.
With satellites and ground stations damaged, even satellite phones were inoperable. And with the repeater network offline, their two-way radios were reduced to a shortened range of only a few miles.
Once he was within radio range, he’d flagged down Devon. Devon had taken Lena and the girls to the hospital. She promised to contact Michelle Carpenter as well. Ruby was traumatized, but she was alive.
Both girls were alive. It was a win by any measure.
Devon had located the sheriff and several deputies, plus the Munising Police Chief and three police officers. Jackson and the other law enforcement officers had traveled back to the cabin in trucks and ATVs.
The indigo sky lightened to shades of gray. Dawn hid behind the trees.
Eli had been sequestered on scene by two deputies. Though he’d been deputized, he’d shot and killed a suspect. It was a homicide. It would be up to the D.A. to determine if it was a justifiable homicide. Such investigations could last a long time, up to a year. He wasn’t sure what would happen.
In the morning, reporters would descend upon them in a frenzy. The State Police would come up from Detroit, probably the FBI. The case would be taken from them; they’d be treated like country-bumpkin cops who spent more time eating donuts than solving cases.
Or maybe not. That was the way things used to be.
The world was changing so rapidly that it made him dizzy.
Behind the cabin, the medical examiner crouched over a mound of freshly upturned dirt. A black body bag lay unzipped on the ground beside her. Moreno and Hasting stood nearby, watching.
She looked up as Jackson approached. “The six remains that we’ve uncovered so far have been here for several months to several years. Their clothes are disintegrated from the acidic body fluids, but for the nylon in seams and waistbands. Due to the shorter sacrum and wider pelvic bones, I can tell you that the skeletal remains are female. Since bones continue to grow and fuse until the age of twenty-five, I can also estimate that the victims are between the late teens and early twenties. I’ll be able to compare the bones growth charts and narrow it down in the morgue.”
Jackson wanted to curse, to scream at the sky. How could they have missed this? These poor lost girls, buried beneath the earth for so long. They had called out and no one had heard them. No one had saved them.
Moreno covered his mouth and nose with one gloved hand. The stench of human decomposition was distinct and like nothing else Jackson had ever smelled. “What about this one?”
The ME bent closer to the grave site and pointed. “This corpse is fresh, comparatively speaking. Judging by the maggots and insects stages of development and the level of soft-tissue breakdown, it’s in advance decay. I roughly estimate a month.”
Moreno and Jackson exchanged tense glances. This got worse and worse.
Dr. Virtanen pointed to an object in the dirt that she had brushed away from the corpse. “You should see this.”
Hasting squatted and picked it up with a pair of tweezers, his hands gloved. The dirt-clotted object glinted beneath the spotlight. Jackson could make out the gold chain, the half- heart locket.
A locket just like the one that had been found on Lily Easton’s body.
A hole opened in Jackson’s chest. It was hard to breathe. The whir of insects filled his ears. The cool morning air kissed the back of his neck like the breath of a ghost.
His words felt like glass in his throat. “Check the victim’s hair.”
Dr. Virtanen showed them a section of hacked off black hair. “Is this what you were looking for?”
“And the locket? What’s inside?”
With great care, Hasting opened the locket and revealed a matching swatch of hair curled inside. The exact appearance of the locket had never been released. Neither had the detail of the victim’s hair inside the locket.
“The signature of the Broken Heart Killer,” Moreno said, shocked.
“Were these victims strangled?” Hasting asked.
“Preliminary findings? Yes. You can see the hyoid bone is broken here.”
“Were they beaten as well?”
“Too early to tell. I need to conduct the autopsies.”
For at least several of these homicides, Eli Pope had been locked away in prison. It didn’t make sense.
“A copycat?” Moreno asked.
Jackson shook his head. A copycat wouldn’t know such intimate details. “What about the other victims?”
The ME nodded. “We haven’t found the locket on every corpse, but we’ve just started. But yes. Three so far.”
Hasting slipped the locket into an evidence envelope. He stood and brushed off his pants. “You think Boone did this? That he was the Broken Heart Killer all along?”
Jackson didn’t answer. Neither did Moreno. Jackson fisted his hands on his hips and half-turned, gazing at the bleak clearing, the sad mounded graves, the flags a snap of color in the gray light.
A tsunami of doubt washed over Jackson. All these years, he’d been so certain. That certainty had defined him, had driven him, justified him. In doing one thing wrong, he’d righted the world.
That foundation moved beneath his feet, no longer solid but cracked and crumbling. Things shifting, altering, pieces falling into place.
He had the disorienting sensation of falling though he was standing upright.
He’d been wrong. So terribly wrong.
70
JACKSON CROSS
DAY EIGHT
Hours later, Jackson and Devon visited the Munising hospital. He hadn’t slept. He was weary to the bone, his eyes gritty. Adrenaline and sheer will power drove him on, kept him upright.
The hospital’s generator was still running, but medical supplies were running critically low. Wait times in the ER were over 24-hours. The doctors and nurses looked as exhausted as he did.
Shiloh sat up in the hospital bed, a crisp white sheet spread across her legs, machines monitoring her vitals beeping softly. An IV was hooked to her arm. The air smelled sterile.
Eli was present. He paced like a caged panther in the narrow confines of the hospital room. Though the shooting investigation was ongoing, Eli had been released on his own recognizance.
Lena sat next to the bed in a plastic chair, holding Shiloh’s hand. Bear lay on the floor at her feet. His tail thumped as Jackson and Devon entered.
“Hey,” Lena said tiredly.
Eli said nothing at all. Jackson could barely look at him. He could feel Eli’s dark eyes burning holes in his soul. He knew he would have to face Eli, that a reckoning was coming, but that time was not now.
Jackson managed a smile for Shiloh and pulled a plastic chair next to Lena. Devon stood behind him with her notebook and pen. “Can we talk about what happened? It’s better when it’s fresh, but only if you’re okay with it.”
Dressed in a hospital gown, Shiloh leaned forward, eyes alert and burning like two black coals. Her cuts had been bandaged. She was clean, her black hair washed and glossy.
Still, she looked like a girl who’d fought her way through the Underworld, dragged into hell by Hades like Persephone. Only she hadn’t demurely accepted her fate but had clawed and bit and scratched her way to freedom.
“Ask,” she said. “Ask the questions you need to ask.”
Seeming to sense Shiloh’s stress, Bear rose, sniffed the girl’s hand, then leapt on the hospital bed. The frame shuddered beneath his weight.
Chuffing in pleasure, Bear flopped onto Shiloh’s thighs like a giant overstuffed teddy bear. Shiloh hesitated for a moment, then buried her hands into the ruff of the big dog’s fur, letting him give her strength and comfort.
Lena leaned forward and rubbed Shiloh’s back. “We can do this later. You don’t have to—”
Shiloh looked at Eli. Eli stilled. They exchanged a wordless glance heavy with things Jackson didn’
t understand, wasn’t privy too. After a moment, Eli nodded at her.
Her narrow shoulders straightened. She lifted her chin. Her cheekbones were sharp as knife blades, her eyes dark wells. “I’m ready.”
Her words came stilted and jerky but they came. What had happened that day at the salvage yard. How Cody had told her to hide, how he’d sacrificed himself to save her. And how Easton had fought for his grandchildren, in the end.
In his last moments on this bleak earth, he’d chosen to be a hero. Jackson heard it in Shiloh’s voice—she knew it. A small gift. A spark of hope in the darkness.
“Can you tell us about last night?” Devon asked. “Start from the beginning. Take your time. What happened?”
In a halting voice, Shiloh told them how she’d seen the man in the black boots in town. How she’d figured out how to find the cabin. How she’d discovered Ruby Carpenter, freed her, and then found herself trapped with a predator.
Her gaze flicked to her backpack at Lena’s feet. “I have a picture that you need. It’s in there. I found it in Calvin Fitch’s trailer under his bed. It wasn’t his.”
“We know,” Jackson said gently. “We found the box.”
“Look,” she insisted.
Even though the chain of custody had been broken, Jackson donned a pair of latex gloves, opened her backpack, and retrieved the manilla envelope with the note she’d written, the words cut from magazines.
He withdrew the photo. The face of an Ojibwe teenage girl stared at him, both hostile and vulnerable. A face he recognized.
Heart in his throat, he slid the photo back into the envelope and handed it to Devon. They hadn’t yet identified the remains of the corpses, including the freshest one. He feared they had just found her. “This is Summer Tabasaw. She’s from Marquette.”
Jackson turned back to Shiloh. “Boone is dead now. He’s never going to hurt you or anyone else again. It’s over, honey. It’s over.”
Shiloh’s hand shot out and seized his. Her skin was cold as ice, but her fingers were strong, firm. Her eyes burned with dark fire. “There’s another one. Walter Boone was not alone.”
71
JACKSON CROSS
DAY NINE
Jackson stared at the crime scene photos tacked to the bulletin board against the wall. The power was off in the building. No generator hummed. Battery-operated lanterns provided light.
Sheriff Underwood came to stand beside him. He clasped his hands behind his back. “Hell of a thing.”
“That girl is lucky as hell you and Pope found her.” His granite face hardened. “What the hell were you doing with him at that cabin?”
“It’s a long story. I’ve written up the report.”
“It’s a cluster of epic proportions. You realize that, right? You deputize a convicted felon who then shoots our perp. What the living hell happened?”
“The investigation will clear him. It was a good shoot. He’s a better shot than I am. He was special forces. It was the right play. We only had one chance to save the hostage.”
Sheriff Underwood shook his head. “I don’t even know where to start. It’s not even the most bizarre part of the case. We’re riding the crazy train and no one will let us off.”
“Eli Pope is innocent.” The words were glass in his throat. “He didn’t kill Lily Easton.”
Guilt ate at Jackson. A darkness he could not yet face, but he knew he would have to. The reckoning that Eli Pope had promised him was coming—and he would deserve it.
Sheriff Underwood ran a hand over his bald head and frowned. “Even if Pope is innocent, the town won’t like it. They won’t accept it. They’ve hated him for too long.”
“Maybe,” Jackson said. “They’ll have to. They won’t have a choice.”
“Another problem for tomorrow. We ready to close this case?”
“Shiloh said Walter Boone had an accomplice,” Jackson said.
“Did she see someone else? Does she have a name? An ID?”
“No.”
“He could have been lying to her. It wouldn’t be the first time a perp minimized his crimes to his victims. Or she was mistaken in her fear and panic.”
“It’s possible,” Jackson allowed.
“Stop chasing ghosts, son. We got him.” The sheriff’s gaze went distant. Jackson didn’t like the look in his eyes. There was fear there. And weakness.
Sheriff Underwood wanted to believe that Boone had killed Lily, that he was the same monster who’d killed and buried seven girls like so much refuse in the deep woods of the Hiawatha National Forest.
He wanted to believe because it was the easy choice, and Sheriff Underwood always took the easy way.
Jackson was not convinced. He had no evidence to go on other than Shiloh’s testimony. And it was true, Boone could have lied to her, but he didn’t think so.
Lily’s ghost had never let him go because he had not caught the right killer. It had not been Eli. And it was not Boone. Jackson felt that truth deep in his bones, though he could not prove it. Not yet.
Boone had chased Cody over the cliff. He’d dumped a body somewhere on Lake Superior. He’d kidnapped Ruby Carpenter and locked her in an abandoned, derelict cabin, as he’d done to a numberless group of vulnerable girls before her. For years, maybe for decades.
And then when he’d tired of them, he had offered them to someone else.
An unsub who remained at large, hunting the shores of Lake Superior, who prowled the rural towns of the Upper Peninsula, whose playground was the isolated wilderness that Jackson called home.
Were there more girls? More secret gravesites? Were they all dead, or were some of them trafficked somewhere else in the UP? There was so much more that he needed to uncover.
Jackson said, “If there’s a second unsub, I’m going to find him.”
The sheriff rubbed his eyes and turned away from the crime scene photos. “Get some shut eye, Cross. I haven’t slept in a week, you know that?”
Jackson didn’t doubt it. Deep shadows ringed his eyes. His brown skin was ashen. Deep brackets lined his mouth.
“None of us have, sir.”
The sheriff stared at nothing, his eyes bloodshot, impotent and overwhelmed.
“I need a team,” Jackson said. “We bring in the FBI. They’ll trample all over this case but they have resources we don’t, especially now.”
“The feds have their hands full. Hell, so do we.”
“We’ll get it done. We have to.”
“You know there’s rioting in Marquette and the Soo?”
“I heard.”
“It’s spreading. The grocery stores in every city in the entire state are empty. Empty. You expect this in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo. But here? The governor declared a state of emergency. The National Guard has been called in. The Coast Guard and Army Corp of Engineers are trying to maintain order at the Locks. We’re hearing reports of whole hordes of people trying to cross the Big Mac,” he said, referring to the Mackinac Bridge. “In cars, on bikes, a few ran out of gas and they’re pushing damn shopping carts. Can you imagine? They think they’ll be safer up here. Ten days into this thing, Cross. It’s like everyone lost their minds when those transformers blew. What the hell is happening?”
Jackson recalled Lena’s words, the chill that had crawled up his spine at his first glimpse of the aurora. The millions of lights blinking out, one by one. “The beginning of the end.”
“That’s the same thing all those conspiracy videos on YouTube said. You scare the hell out of me when you talk like that.”
“I only say what I see right in front of me.”
Sheriff Underwood rubbed his grizzled face. “Well, stop it.”
“I need a team,” Jackson said, quieter, firmer.
“You never listen, you know that?”
“There’s a killer out there and I’m going to find him.”
“We have to protect this town!”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
For a long moment
, Sheriff Underwood didn’t speak. “I don’t have the manpower, Jackson. You understand? I need you. If you’re right…” He shook his head again. “Damn it! I need every hand I have available. We need supplies. We need to maintain order. Put up roadblocks. Figure out how we make this work going forward, and make damn sure the masses downstate don’t reach us and wreck what we have.”
“I know.” He’d said this before and had been ignored. At least the sheriff was listening now. It wasn’t too late. He hoped it wasn’t. “I know.”
The sheriff heard him, but he couldn’t help. He was drowning and knew it. The man headed for the door, leaving Jackson alone with the case, with his ghosts.
Sheriff Underwood hesitated in the doorway. “Don’t let this case eat you up, Jackson.”
Jackson didn’t speak. He couldn’t. His mind whirred, sifting through facts and clues and possibilities. He could feel the killer out there, slinking through the shadows, just out of his reach. One who would see the coming chaos as an opportunity.
Shiloh’s words echoed in his mind. There’s another one.
And as the world lost its light, Jackson did not know if he had what it took to bring him down.
72
JACKSON CROSS
DAY TEN
The aurora was gone.
Not that it mattered. The sun had already done its damage. In the blink of an eye, half of the planet had been thrust back one hundred and fifty years. Hundreds of millions of people in shock, with no idea how bad things would get, or how quickly.
The world was reeling; the aftershocks were just beginning.
Jackson moved through the darkened house, past the candles on the mantle with the photos of his missing brother like a shrine, past the shadowed dining room with the empty chairs and the dust gathering on the counters, the leather sofas and glossy coffee table to the French doors leading to the expansive deck.