The empty lot brought a wave of relief, which vanished almost immediately when he parked. There was a single dark sedan on the far side of the lot. As he got out, a patrol officer emerged from the car and retrieved a small toolbox from his backseat. “Hey, Iver.”
Carl Gilbert. Iver recognized him now, a swagger in his step that the skinny, pimple-faced kid had never had in high school. “Hey, Carl. Thought you guys were all done here.”
“I need to collect from your truck.”
“My truck?”
“DA issued a warrant for it.” Carl shifted the toolbox and pulled a folded paper from his inside pocket.
“That’s okay,” Iver said, waving it off as he helped Cal down from the cab. “Go ahead and take a look. I was just heading into the bar.”
“I won’t take too long,” Carl said, and Iver didn’t respond. Carl approached the truck. “Looks clean.”
“Yeah. Took it to the car wash this morning.”
Carl studied Iver with one brow raised. “You usually wash your car in the dead of winter?”
Iver stared back. “I wash it when it’s dirty.”
“Can’t wash away everything, Iver.”
Go to hell, Iver thought as he called out to Cal and entered the bar. He had no desire to be there, but he had enough to do for an hour while Gilbert poked around his truck. He had to reconcile the books and sign off on the payroll so that everyone got paid.
He turned his key in the lock, stepped in, and was surprised to find Mike standing behind the bar, breaking down a cardboard box. Iver looked back at the lot. “Where’s your truck?”
Mike looked momentarily startled, as though he’d forgotten about his truck. “Oh,” he said, turning his attention back to the box. “It’s been acting up.”
“Bummer,” Iver said and nodded toward the parking lot. “Carl Gilbert’s out there searching mine.”
Mike’s eyes went wide. “Really? How come?”
Iver paused. Actually, he didn’t know why they were searching his truck. And if they were, why not Mike’s, too? Why not everyone’s? He forced a shrug. “No big deal,” he said and hoped Mike couldn’t hear the tremor in his voice.
“Sure,” Mike said. “Just a reminder that I’m off for three days,” he added as Iver started to walk away. “Leaving town this afternoon.”
Iver looked at him. “Sure.”
“I told you a few weeks ago. Just taking a few days off, driving down to Denver.”
“Thought your truck was acting up.”
Mike’s face grew flushed. “It’s getting fixed,” he said a moment later.
Had Mike told him that he was going away? Iver couldn’t remember. “What’s in Denver?”
“Just going to check it out,” he said.
Iver used to go to Denver once or twice a year. His ex-wife’s brother lived there. “Okay,” Iver said. “Anything we need to catch up on before you go?” As soon as the words were out, he regretted them. He didn’t want to catch up.
There was an awkward pause. “You mean about the other night?” Mike asked.
That wasn’t what Iver had meant. He’d been referring to running the bar while Mike was gone.
When Iver didn’t respond, Mike went on. “We can talk about it, if you want.”
“Sure,” Iver said. But he was anything but sure.
“You were pretty pissed,” Mike said.
His father had used that word talking about customers who were drunk. Was that what Mike meant? That Iver had been drunk? Or did he mean that Iver had been angry? “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Mike repeated.
“We don’t need to talk about it now, do we?” Iver’s voice caught on the last word. You should ask. Find out what you did. It’s better to know. But maybe it wasn’t better to know. At least now he could honestly say he didn’t know what he had done. He had no memory of it. If he’d done something. The image of the dead girl on Davis’s phone flashed in his mind.
Mike frowned. “I guess not.”
A wave of fear rose like a tsunami inside Iver’s chest. “I mean, it’s not life or death, right?” The words shook as they came from his lips.
“Sure,” Mike said slowly, eyeing him.
Iver pressed his fingers against his temple, though he had no headache. “I’m going to take care of that paperwork and get out of here.” He started for the office.
Inside, his office was a mess. The drawers stood open; the desk and floor were littered with papers. Smudges of black dust coated the windowsill and the edge of the desk. The police had done a number in there. He looked around for a blank space or a missing piece of furniture, some obvious clue that suggested they’d found the evidence they needed to convict him of murder. But there was no break in the chaos. That fact did nothing to make him feel better.
Wouldn’t they have come for him already?
Again came the rush of fear.
He scooped up the scattered papers and tossed them into an empty Stoli box, then added the cash register tapes from the last few nights and the calendar on his desk. He had no plan to come back to this place today or even tomorrow. Kevin could run the bar while Mike was gone.
Or he’d close it down for a few nights. He no longer cared. It was time to sell the damn thing. It had been time for years.
There was the roar of a diesel truck in the parking lot. Out the small office window, he could see the passenger side of the cab. Mike’s truck was idling in the parking lot. The horn honked, and a moment later, Mike jogged up to the truck, opened the door, and climbed into the passenger seat. In the driver’s seat was a silhouette—a woman, from the narrow shoulders. Mike never let anyone drive his truck.
As Mike turned for the seat belt, Iver caught sight of the huge grin on his friend’s face. Something about it made Iver feel a little sick.
CHAPTER 25
LILY
To gain access to her own home, Lily Baker had crawled through a window in the kitchen. Iver had helped wedge the old window open, using a box cutter to carve through the thick layers of paint that had made it stick. Once in the kitchen, she had unlocked the back door for him. But Iver hadn’t entered. Instead, he’d looked around the room and said, “I should let you have some time alone.”
The words had filled her with terror. Alone.
“Sure,” she’d said, following his gaze back into the kitchen—her kitchen. A trash can overflowed. Plates were scattered across the table and in the sink. An empty bottle of Smirnoff lay on its side on the floor, and a pizza box sat half-open on the stove. It was a mess.
She’d said goodbye and started to close the back door, as though shutting it quickly enough could block out what he had already seen.
“I’ll check in later,” he had promised.
And then she was alone. She turned slowly in the room, wishing she could be anywhere else. How was this her house? How did she live like this?
In the center of the table was a small Ziploc bag, empty except for a thin film of white powder. She put a finger in the residue and brought it toward her mouth, only realizing what she was doing as her lips parted. She crossed to the sink and washed her hands, rinsed out the bag.
She paced the dirty kitchen, repeating the words my house in her head. Her clothes and pictures would be in other rooms, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the kitchen. She looked around for a radio, something that might fill the room with noise. But there was nothing. Other than the trash and dirty dishes, the only thing on the counter was a filthy coffee maker, an inch of dark sludge in the glass pot.
This was her life.
She fought the desire to sink onto the ground and bury her head in her hands. To walk out and never come back. Instead, she tossed the bottle and the pizza box in the trash and tied the bag closed before putting it outside the back door.
She filled the sink with soapy water and left the dishes and the coffeepot to soak, then wiped down the counters with soapy water and a dish towel. Then she faced the rest of the house, fighting
off the desire to simply leave and return to Iver’s.
She missed Cal. A momentary fear hit her that maybe she’d had a pet. She made a round of the house, barely looking at the spaces except to search for some living creature. But there was nothing living here.
Not even a plant.
The front bedroom was large, with a closet. Her room, she guessed from its lived-in appearance. The covers were dingy, the bed unmade, its sheets shoved to the center as though there had been occupants on both sides. Water glasses on the two bedside tables. Someone had slept beside her, but who? Surely not Tim. How would he have gotten away from his family for a whole night? Was it Abby? Like some sort of sleepover?
There were no images on the walls, no pictures. Shivering, she pulled open a dresser drawer and found underwear and bras, ugly things, utilitarian and dingy. In one corner of the drawer was a small plastic bag with two white pills in it. Nearby was an empty prescription bottle, the label pulled off. Similar bags littered the nightstand.
Moving through the rooms, she surveyed the house as though she were a guest. It was small—one story with a tight living room. What must have once been the dining room had been walled off to form a second bedroom. From the crown molding and the cracked walls, it had been done decades ago. A bed occupied the middle of the room, still made. An inexpensive-looking melamine bureau stood in one corner, its door cracked open. A small duffel sat on the floor, contents spilling onto the floor.
She sank beside it. The thin nylon bag was cheap and ripped along the zipper. Slowly, she unpacked the clothes, fighting off the sensation that she was invading someone’s privacy. Did a dead woman have privacy? This is your house, she thought. But these weren’t her things.
At the bottom of the bag was an orange prescription bottle in the name of Tammy Jensen. Abby’s mother. She stared at the name. How did she remember that Tammy was Abby’s mother? But she did remember. Hydrocodone, the side of the bottle read. It, too, was empty. She wondered if the pills in her bedroom were hydrocodone, knew as she had known how to perform CPR on Brent Nolan that hydrocodone was a painkiller and a strong one. The kind people got addicted to.
Abby’s things. Abby had been staying here. And now she was dead.
Exhaustion settled over Lily as she returned to her own bedroom.
She needed a shower and sleep. Scanning the bright room, she wondered if it was safe to sleep here. Would the man from Iver’s house come for her in the middle of the day? Surely it was too risky. She wished she had Cal with her, someone to alert her to trouble.
But she was alone.
She scanned the filthy surfaces, the piles of laundry, the shoes strewn everywhere. Now she noticed dirty tissues on the floor beside her bed. Who lived like this?
You do.
Lily stripped the bed and remade it with clean sheets she found in a hall closet. She started a load of laundry and forced herself into the shower, scrubbing quickly while keeping one ear out for trouble. Her fingers grazed the thin raised scars on the back of her right shoulder, and her stomach clenched as though she might be sick. She worked faster with the sensation that a threat was approaching and she had to rush before she was caught.
Emerging from the hot water, though, she felt calmer, almost sedate. She put on fresh clothes from her drawer—loose-fitting sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt—and checked every door and window in the house before climbing into bed.
She wouldn’t sleep. She just needed to spend some time off her ankle, rest her eyes. Her body was heavy, the bed soft and, perhaps in some recesses of her mind, also familiar.
The music had the raspy beat of a bad speaker. It came from a cell phone on the center of the kitchen table. Abby danced around the room, her head swaying and her hips cocking and her eyes already glazed and half-lidded. But it was okay because the smile on her face was real. And Lily should know. How many times had she seen the fake twist of lips that Abby had worn to appease him?
Between songs, Abby poured shots, and Lily swallowed the vodka and tried to relax into Abby’s energy. Then it was time to go. Lily still felt afraid. It followed her, that fear. Abby popped two pills in her mouth as they were leaving the house, swallowed them with the last swig of vodka from the bottle. “I’ll drive,” Abby said, pocketing Lily’s car keys. She pressed two pills into Lily’s hand, and Lily swallowed them dry. Abby always laughed when Lily did that, like it was a magic trick that she could pool enough saliva in her mouth to get the pills down.
They were going to the bar, a place Lily never went, but Abby had pushed, said it would be fun. But it wasn’t Abby’s town. These weren’t the people Abby had grown up with, who had seen her disappear, then return, changed.
Even as the bar came into sight, she knew it was a bad idea. But Abby didn’t pull into the lot, parking the car on the street instead. The air was cold on Lily’s face as Abby got out of the car. Lily grabbed her bag and followed.
“Hurry up,” Abby shouted.
“Coming,” she called back. Didn’t she always follow Abby? Wasn’t that how they had gotten free? There was comfort in following Abby. Only a year older, Abby was wiser, calmer, smarter. As though she heard Lily’s thoughts, she spun around and grinned at her friend, reached a hand back for her. “I’m so glad we’re together.”
Lily took hold of Abby’s hand, the long, cold fingers. Her blouse was much too thin for the temperature, but Lily didn’t feel cold. The drug pressed its soft warmth into her skin, embracing her like a blanket. They were together. They should always be together, Abby always said. Abby understood like no one else. They wanted to fix Lily, to rid her of the memories of that time. But not Abby. Abby knew that to remember it was to breathe more, to breathe bigger. Because they had survived.
Abby was running now, laughing and spinning, her arms stretched out to the sides. Excited, like something good was coming. Maybe it was the idea of the high. The cold became a light touch on her skin, like someone trailing fingertips along her neck and scalp. It was sexy.
Abby led her into the woods. “Right here. Just a few more steps.”
Lily followed. They were so close to the bar. The fear was gone, and now she just wanted a drink.
But then something was wrong. The dark came on fast. Around her but also inside her. Abby was begging, then shouting. The cold air burned, a pain like someone tearing out her lungs. But she had to run. Just run. Where was Abby? Lily thought to look back, but she couldn’t. There was no time. Branches slapped and sliced her as she ran, stumbled, and fell, then rose and ran again.
Through the dark woods and out the other side. At the edge of the trees, she froze and listened to the silence. She scanned the darkness. Abby was gone. There was no going back now.
“Lily!” A heavy pounding sounded at a distance, then closer. Glass rattled. “Lily!”
But it wasn’t Abby’s voice now. It was his.
Shocked awake, Lily scanned the unfamiliar bedroom and tried to pull the fragments of the dream into her waking mind.
“Lily!” a man’s voice shouted. Followed by pounding at the door. At her door.
He was there.
CHAPTER 26
KYLIE
Kylie Milliard stared up at Steve Cannon, still perched on the edge of her desk, now working that penny across his knuckles.
“You’re sure the prints match Lily Baker?” she asked.
Cannon gave her that half grin. “It’s not like I matched them by hand, Milliard. I pulled them off the dash of Brent Nolan’s Lexus and entered them into the database. I got a hit. There’s not a lot of room for error. Unless you’re thinking someone entered prints into the system that aren’t Baker’s.”
Cannon stood, pocketing his coin, and started to walk away.
“Thanks for the help,” she called after him.
“Anytime,” he said, and she watched him go. “Stay safe,” he called over one shoulder.
Kylie returned her attention to her computer, where the crime scene photos from the original Hudson scen
e were still downloading. Forty-seven percent now. Brent Nolan was married. Did the presence of Baker’s prints and a woman’s hair in the car suggest that Brent Nolan had been having an affair with Lily Baker? Was that why she and Larson had been acting so strangely? But Baker had said she’d spent the night with Larson on Wednesday night, which would imply that Larson and Baker were together.
Kylie sat back in her desk chair. Why would Baker lie to protect Larson? Even if they were close, would she really protect a killer? After everything she’d been through?
Kylie scanned her emails for something from the highway patrol’s accident investigator. She located an email from Will Merkel, selected it, and read the contents. An engineer had inspected the site and confirmed that the guardrail was compromised. The scene had been ruled an accident, and highway patrol was closing the case. The guardrails were outdated, just like Gary Ross had said. She had to give him a point for that. It never would have occurred to her that there might be a structural issue with the guardrail. It had been an accident. Ice and a weak guardrail.
Now, the question was whether Vogel and Davis knew about the matching prints. Would they want her to pursue Lily Baker as Nolan’s potential mistress? To what end? The wreck had been ruled an accident—end of story.
But it was a strange coincidence that Baker was a victim of Derek Hudson and also the lover of a dead man. Not to mention the victim of an attack in Iver Larson’s home, most likely by Iver himself.
A box popped up in the center of her screen. File download complete. One hundred and ninety-seven images. A hell of a lot fewer than they took at crime scenes these days. She double-clicked the first image: Derek Hudson lying in a pool of blood. She expanded the image to full screen and studied the scene. Hudson lay on a dirty floor in a room with no furniture. The walls were hewn logs, the windows spray-painted black.
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