Will left his clothes on the floor and got into the shower.
The hot water was the first relief his body had felt in hours. He let the spray dig into his muscles, tried to keep it away from the staple in his scalp. His hair still had pieces of grass in it. The foam from the shampoo was gray from his sweat. He looked down at the drain. Sticks and twigs from Bella’s yard danced on top of the holes, trying to wash down.
Will thought about the two men picking Sara up and carrying her to the car. One had a knife in his leg. The other had a hole in his side.
He got out of the shower. He wiped the fog off the mirror. He carefully combed his hair. He brushed his teeth. He rubbed the rough stubble on his face. Will usually shaved in the morning, then again when he got home from work. Sara liked his face smooth.
He left the razor on the counter and went into the closet. Will dressed in the gray suit and blue shirt that Sara had picked out for him. He took his Sig Sauer P365 out of the gun safe. The pistol was a Christmas gift from Sara. His service Glock would either be found by the arson investigators who processed Sara’s BMW or by a cop who took it off a bad guy.
Or maybe Will would get it back and find whoever was holding Sara and shoot him in the head.
He braced himself before making his way up the hallway. Sara’s parents had moved to the couch. The same couch where Sara and Will watched TV.
Eddie said, “We’ll keep an eye on your dog.”
“Thank you.” Will grabbed his phone off the counter.
4:56 p.m.
Amanda would be waiting downstairs. Will thought about packing some clothes. He couldn’t sleep here tonight. But that would mean returning to the bedroom, then going up the hall again, which meant he’d have to say goodbye to Sara’s parents again. Which meant he would be tempted again to ask Cathy why she was lying.
He told Sara’s parents, “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
Will didn’t wait for their answer. He carefully closed the door behind him. In the hall, he pressed the button for the elevator.
His phone vibrated with a message.
He cursed, assuming it was Amanda, but the number was one he didn’t recognize. Will opened the text. A sound file had been sent at 4:54 p.m. The length of the recording was 0.01, less than a second.
Will stopped breathing.
Sara was the only person who texted him sound files.
He swallowed so hard his throat hurt. His hand was shaking. He had to tap the arrow twice to get the recording to play. The sound was faint, like someone clearing their throat.
He maxed out the volume.
He pressed the speaker to his ear.
“Wi—”
Sara.
The Lexus was sweating heat by the time Amanda exited off the split-lane state highway. Sara’s voice text had served as a beacon. All they knew back in Atlanta was that the cell tower that had pinged her text was located in North Georgia. Amanda had started driving toward the downtown connector while the phone company worked on triangulating the signal. Ten minutes later, they were told to go northeast, so Amanda had jumped onto I-85. There was a long, unbearable stretch of silence, then suddenly, the cell phone’s last known location was pinpointed to a radius of less than twenty feet. Amanda had forked onto Lanier Parkway by the time the Rabun County sheriff’s department had raided the King Fisher Camping Lodge.
Two deceased males. No witnesses. No suspects.
“There it is,” Amanda said, steering a hard turn into the motel parking lot.
Gravel spit up from her tires. She had trimmed the nearly two-hour journey by half an hour. Every minute had felt like a year off Will’s life. No Sara. No Michelle. No license plates to follow up on. No witnesses. No suspects. No one to talk to who could tell them a damn thing.
Amanda slotted the Lexus into a space between the motel office and the GBI’s Crime Scene Unit bus.
Will reached for the door handle.
Amanda put a hand on his arm. “Careful what you say.”
She nodded toward the cops milling on the wide porch that skirted the front of the motel. Rabun County sheriff’s deputies. The Georgia Highway Patrol. The City of Clayton Police Department.
Will asked, “You don’t trust them?”
“This is a small town. I don’t trust the people they’ll talk to at church or over fried chicken at the diner.” She let go of his arm. “There’s Zevon.”
Zevon Lowell, the GBI agent from the Appalachian Regional Drug Enforcement Office, approached the car with two cups of coffee in his hands.
Amanda took one of the cups as she got out of the car. “Run it down for me.”
“Nothing new to report, boss. Charlie’s processing the room as fast as he can. He’s got a crew coming up from Atlanta.”
Will stared at the motel room in the center of the building. The door was open. A sheet of plastic kept the air conditioning inside. Bright work lights beamed onto the porch, leaked around the curtain in the window. Charlie Reed would be on his hands and knees combing the carpet for evidence. He was the best crime scene investigator in the state. He worked closely with Sara. He would do everything in his power to help find her.
“Motel’s been vacant for over a year.” Zevon took his notepad out of his pocket and flipped it open. “Owner was a guy named Hugo Hunt Hopkins. Real estate attorney from Atlanta. He died without a will. It’s been caught up in probate while his two kids battle it out.”
“Are they local?”
“One lives in Michigan, the other is in California. There’s a caretaker in and out, makes sure the roof’s not leaking, pipes aren’t freezing.” He shifted around so that Amanda’s eyes were out of the sun. “Look over my shoulder.”
Across the street from the motel, Will saw a metal building clapboarded in wood to give it the appearance of a hunting lodge. The parking lot was empty. The sign showed a rabbit holding a mug of beer.
“Peter Cottontail’s,” Amanda said. “This isn’t a dry county. Why is it closed?”
“It’s a social club. Keeps its own hours. The building’s held by a shell corporation. Been that way for eight years. The guy we believe runs the place is Beau Ragnersen. He’s also the motel caretaker. He makes his money down in Macon.”
“Ah.” Amanda pursed her lips. Something had rung a bell, but she didn’t stop to explain. “Go direct that choir practice for me.” Choir practice was slang for a bunch of gossiping police officers. She told Will, “Let’s go.”
He followed her toward the motel room. Part of the parking lot was taped off. The gravel showed tracks where a box truck had backed into the space. The wheels had stopped six feet from the porch. The tires had lost traction in the gravel, but Charlie had already set plaster casts in the best impressions.
Will stared at the spot where the truck would’ve parked. The gravel looked disturbed where someone’s feet might have been, but maybe that was wishful thinking. He wanted to believe that Sara had jumped down under her own steam. That she wasn’t carried in kicking and screaming. That she wasn’t knocked out, tied up, drugged into oblivion.
“Here.” Amanda found two pairs of shoe protectors in Charlie’s duffel bag outside the door. She pulled aside the plastic sheet. She took a moment to collect herself before going in.
Will instinctively ducked his head down as he followed her. The ceiling was low. The room felt claustrophobic. Brown shag carpet. Beige walls. Looking around, he understood Amanda’s need to steel herself. Will had been to hundreds of crime scenes. He had seen worse, but he had never felt worse.
Blood painted the room in dark, violent streaks—across the two beds, the mini-fridge, the nightstand, the television, the chest of drawers, the ceiling, the ugly carpet. The source seemed to be the dead man sitting up in the bed by the window. His head was bent down, but not in the guise of peacefulness. His torso was ripped open like an animal had torn its way out of his chest.
Will swallowed down acid. The man was naked from the waist down. His penis was blac
k with blood.
“This is the phone Sara used to text Will.”
Will pulled his gaze away from the dead man on the bed.
Charlie Reed was dressed in a white Tyvek suit. He was holding an evidence bag that contained the remnants of a shattered cell phone. He told Amanda, “The IMEI number matches what the wireless company has on file. We’re getting a warrant for the user’s name.”
“Good,” Amanda said. “Don’t waste your time telling me you’re not a medical expert. How did these men die?”
Charlie pointed to the bed by the wall. “This one received medical treatment prior to death. The bullet wound in his side was patched with a chest seal. An IV was run into his right arm. A needle was used to draw the tension out of what was probably a pneumothorax.”
“Sara,” Amanda guessed.
“I’m assuming,” Charlie said. “I’m praying, actually.”
Will didn’t care about prayers. “That’s the guy who called himself Vince. He was the passenger of the F-150. I shot him in Sara’s BMW.”
Amanda did not respond.
Charlie offered, “Someone shot him again, twice, in this room. One of the bullets penetrated the mattress. The other round is still in his chest. We’re going to rush ballistics and see if anything comes up on the gun.”
Amanda asked, “And the second man?”
“Without being a doctor—” Charlie caught her look. “I think we can assume he was stabbed to death. Look at the handprint on the headboard.”
Now that he was pointing at it, Will could make out the bloody outline of four slender fingers and a thumb wrapping around the wooden edge.
Charlie said, “My guess is that the attacker was either a woman or a very small man.”
Will looked at his own hand, as if holding Sara’s hand for so long had made him an expert on the bloody impression her fingers would leave. Could she kill a man like that? Straddle him, stab into his neck and chest so many times that the skin started to pulp?
He fucking hoped so.
Amanda snapped her fingers for Will’s attention. She was waiting.
He walked around the bed. He squatted down on the floor. He looked up. The taste of the man’s name filling his mouth was sickening. “Adam Humphrey Carter.”
Charlie said, “That tracks with the wound in his upper thigh. The femoral artery was nicked. His pants were cut off. I’m assuming a procedure was started to remove the knife. Then—”
“The then doesn’t matter.” Will drilled his words into Amanda. “There were five guys at the car accident. The one called Merle is already at the morgue. Vince is dead. Carter is dead. The fourth guy, Dwight, was knocked out the entire time. Hurley is the only man left who can identify my face, and he’s cuffed to a hospital bed under armed guard.”
She pressed her lips together. “Anything else, Charlie?”
Charlie looked uncomfortable to be caught between them. “I think someone was taken into the adjacent room. The bedspread shows blood transfer, not active bleeding. Also, you probably didn’t smell it when you walked in, but I caught a whiff of rubbing alcohol when I opened the door. Someone tried to remove any trace of their fingerprints from the scene. The table has been wiped down, so he or she must’ve been confined mostly to this area by the window. I’ll need to luminol the entire motel to make sure we’re not missing anything. But if we find a fingerprint in blood, that puts the person here when the murders took place.”
Amanda asked, “What about blood typing? Are we sure that no one else was bleeding?”
“I can’t say with absolute certainty, but it seems probable that the majority of the blood came from Carter. Latent fingerprints are going to give us the quickest snapshot. Sara’s are on file. So are Michelle Spivey’s. I need the laptop from the other bus to start running comparisons. Half of my equipment is being repaired. The only reason I started without the team is because of Sara. I wanted to see if something jumped out at me.”
“Nothing jumped out?”
He shook his head, but said, “There are some bloody shoeprints on the bathroom floor. Looks like a man’s size seven, maybe a woman’s nine, which would match Sara.” He motioned for them to follow him. He stood outside the cramped bathroom. “The toilet’s not flushed, but the seat is down. It’s weird. These guys don’t strike me as the type who sit down to take a piss.”
Weird.
Will ducked his head under the door frame and looked around. The first thing he smelled was urine. The first thing he saw was bloody footprints pacing out almost every part of the laminate floor. The walls were clad in the same laminate. The drop-ceiling hung half a foot lower than the ceiling in the room, probably to hide a roof leak. Plastic sink with a cabinet base. Blood in the basin where someone had washed their hands. Toilet crammed against the shower/tub combination. Grab bar bolted to the wall through a piece of plywood.
He felt Sara in here the same way he’d felt her outside in the parking lot.
Amanda asked, “Did you check above the ceiling?”
Charlie said, “All I found were spider webs and rat droppings. There’s no access to the room next door. It’s a decorating choice, I guess?”
Amanda said, “Will, finish up here and meet me outside. We need to regroup.”
Will did not immediately follow her. He couldn’t shake the sense that he was missing something. He took one last look around the tiny bathroom. He ducked his head under the door frame, but then—
Maybe it was the grab bar or maybe it was because he’d just said the word rape eighty times to Sara’s parents, but Will looked up at the ceiling.
Sara had been attacked in a public restroom. The rapist had crawled through the drop-ceiling in the adjacent men’s room and jumped down into her stall. Before Sara could manage more than a gasped no, the attacker had handcuffed her to the grab bars on either side of the toilet.
Will asked Charlie, “Where’s your black light?”
“It’s on the other bus. Why?”
“Did Sara show you that trick?”
Charlie grinned. He went to his duffel bag outside the door. He returned with two colored Sharpies and a roll of clear tape. Then he took out his cell phone.
Will said, “You have to layer it,” even though Charlie knew what he was doing. He knew because of Sara. Her nerdiness ran deep. The only thing she loved more than helping people was regaling them with the magic of science.
Charlie stuck a clear piece of tape over the light on his phone. He used the Sharpie to color a blue circle over the light. He fixed the ink with another piece of tape. Then he colored a purple circle over the blue one and fixed that with more tape.
Will turned off the lights. He closed the door. The curtains were already pulled. The room was dark.
Charlie tapped the flashlight app on his phone. The blood slashing around the room started to glow, because that was the point of a black light: the ultraviolet wave turned bodily fluids luminescent.
Fluids like urine.
Will said, “Point it up at the bathroom ceiling.”
Charlie stood outside the door. He shined the light upward.
Will blinked at the glowing greenish-yellow letters that Sara had written on the drop-ceiling. Four tiles across, three tiles deep, all but one had either a single word or a number.
Charlie read, “Beau. Bar. Dash. Thinks. Hurley’s. Dead. Spivey. Me. OK. 4. Now.”
Will heard the words, but at the moment, he didn’t care. All he could see was the crude little heart that Sara had drawn for him in the corner.
PART TWO
Monday, August 5, 2019
9
Monday, August 5, 5:45 a.m.
Sara was pulled awake by her own sweat dripping into her eyes. She squinted at her watch, but found only her bare wrist. She turned to see if Will was in bed, but there was no Will and there was no bed. Sara had fallen asleep with her back wedged into the corner.
The Camp.
At least Sara assumed she was in the Camp. Last night,
a black van had picked them up at the motel. Sara was loaded into the back, blindfolded and gagged, handcuffed to Michelle. The woman was unconscious through most of the journey. Even after she’d finally stirred from her drugged stupor, Michelle had not uttered a word. The only noise out of her mouth was a grief-filled cry when the door to the van had opened and she’d realized where they were.
But where was that, exactly?
Sara pushed herself up against the corner. Her legs were stiff. Sweat rolled off her body. Her clothes were so filthy they scratched her skin. She had only seen the rustic, one-room cabin by lamplight. Twelve paces wide. Twelve paces deep. Ceiling pitched higher than she could reach. No windows. A tin roof. Rough-hewn walls and floor. Surrounded by trees.
The bucket by the door served as a toilet. Another bucket in the opposite corner held water and a ladle. There was a straw mattress on a crude wooden frame. The makeshift box spring was a long length of rope tied into a series of knots, forming a net. Sara had chosen to sleep in the corner nearest the backswing of the door. She wanted as much time as possible to prepare if a stranger came in.
She tried the doorknob. The padlock bumped against the frame. She paced the room. The walls were unpainted wood. There was no insulation between the studs. No electricity, but sunlight streaked through the gaps in the boards. She peered between the slats. Green leaves, dark tree trunks. The sound of water burbling. A stream, maybe, or a river that she could follow downstream if she found the chance.
She walked to the other side of the room. Same view of dense forest. She pressed her hand against the board. The nails were rusting. If she pushed hard enough, she might be able to force off the bottom slats and crawl out.
A key slid into the padlock.
Sara stepped back, fists clenched.
Dash smiled at her. His arm was still in a sling, but he had changed into jeans and a button-down shirt. “Good morning, Dr. Earnshaw. I thought you might enjoy taking your breakfast with us after you meet your patients.”
The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author Page 18