Briggs grabbed Eddie’s elbows, pinning them behind him. “Do you have a weapon on you of any sort, Mr. Stevens?” Briggs cuffed his wrists.
“Brennen Briggs, you know me!” Eddie shouted, reeling.
Briggs shoved his hands into Eddie’s pocket and pulled out the gun. He smelled the barrel. “Is this what you shot her with, Eddie?” he pushed.
“It wasn’t supposed to be her!” Eddie shouted. “I told you, another man was here with her. He had her gagged and tied up. I was trying to stop him before he could run away. I couldn’t just let him go,” Eddie pleaded. “What if…”
What if he knew what happened to Hazel?
The train of thought didn’t leave his mouth. They wouldn’t believe him. Not now. They needed to get this woman to a hospital. She had to live so she could tell them Eddie didn’t do this. What if she didn’t remember?
Briggs searched his other pocket without answering. His hand went still, and then he slowly withdrew it. The little silver watch dangled from his fingers.
“What are you doing with a lady’s watch?” he asked.
“I found it in the old stone hutch,” Eddie said.
“Sure you did,” he answered. “Want to know a secret?” he continued in an angry whisper. “Chief told me our new big-city detective has Hazel’s file on his desk right now, Eddie, and the only person he wants to talk to is you.”
Fear, cold and wet, trickled from the base of Eddie’s throat, through his body, and down his limbs. This was his last chance to help Hazel. Her killer was in these woods right now; of that, Eddie was sure. And yet the likelihood of the police taking him seriously now, and being willing to comb this mountain range one last time, seemed impossible.
“Stanton, you tell the captain to get a chopper here no matter what it takes. We need Ms. Ama to wake up long enough to tell us Eddie shot her. Eddie”—Briggs turned his attention to him—“you’re coming with us.”
Briggs began to recite the Miranda warning. The sound of Eddie’s breathing decelerated in his ears. He stared at the woman, blinking slowly, his eyelids like lead. Her jaw was slack. Her eyes weren’t open or closed. Briggs was right. If she died without regaining consciousness first, he’d never be able to clear his name, and any hope of Hazel being found would be locked up with him.
MARTIN Chapter 25 | 1:55 AM, December 2, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
MARTIN STOOD IN FRONT OF the one-way glass, peering at Eddie Stevens. Eddie had been sitting alone in an interrogation room for the past couple of hours while Martin gathered as much evidence as possible and decided how he wanted to approach the interview. He preferred to let a suspect simmer. The truth spilled out easier and faster that way.
Eddie looked older than Martin had imagined, even noticeably older from the picture in Hazel’s file. A year of unrelenting stress did that to the body. His hair had silvered around his temples, and the lines around his eyes were deeper and had doubled. Plus it was nearly two in the morning. Stanton had told him it took almost two hours to walk Eddie out of the woods, and then another hour spent on travel to the station and processing. Every person still left in the precinct looked as though they’d aged a decade.
Martin wondered if he’d see the telltale hollowness in Eddie’s eyes he often noted when he’d finally caught a criminal long on the run, but Eddie hadn’t yet raised his head high enough for Martin to be able to tell. He hadn’t touched the cup of water they’d left for him, either.
Eddie lifted his arms and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. The chain connecting his handcuffs to the floor clanked against the side of the table. The cuffs slid down his wrist until the width of his forearms caught them. Eddie was a solid man. His knuckles were leathered and oversize, evidence of a life of labor. They hadn’t cleaned the blood off his skin, although they’d stripped him and put his bloodied clothes in evidence bags, then had him dress in a gray prison jumpsuit.
Martin opened the file. At the very top was Ama’s silver watch in a plastic bag. This was as open-and-shut as a case could get, whether Ama woke up or not. Yet while he’d waited for Eddie to be brought to the station, a thought had surfaced in his mind that he couldn’t shake. How could Eddie have been so careful about the murders of his wife and daughter yet been so messy with Ama? Raelynn Stevens hadn’t been shot, and what details he’d dug up in the disappearance of Hazel didn’t point toward a quick end by a bullet. What had gone wrong when Eddie tried to take Ama? He drew in a breath and held it while he organized his thoughts. Then he exhaled and shouldered open the door.
“Mr. Stevens, I’m Detective Martin Locklear. Thanks for your patience.” He slid into his seat and scooted himself closer to the table. Eddie showed no reaction. Martin tapped the file on the tabletop. “Mr. Stevens, do you know why you’re here?”
“Is she dead?” Eddie murmured without looking up.
“Ms. Chaplin is in surgery, last I heard.”
“Is she going to die?” Eddie’s brow lifted.
“I don’t know. Would it matter to you?”
“Of course it matters!”
“What’s she going to tell us if she wakes up, Eddie?” Martin asked as he propped his elbows on the table.
“I shot her, but I didn’t mean to. A man had her in a bad way. I aimed at him, and I pulled the trigger. But I swear on my life, she jumped in front of the gun, or she jumped thinking she was moving out of the way. I didn’t shoot her on purpose. I was aiming for him.”
“Why shoot either one?”
“I just wanted to stop him. I wanted to ask him…” Eddie trailed off and shook his head.
“Ask him what?”
“If he had Hazel,” Eddie answered in a whisper.
“Why would he have Hazel?” Martin pressed.
“Somebody does. You think it’s me. You think I did it.” Eddie looked up. Tears ran freely down both sides of his face. “You and everybody in this building think I killed my own little girl.” Eddie’s voice faded into a strangled rasp. “She was my light. She was my life.”
“She is your light. She is your life,” Martin replied carefully, and narrowed his eyes.
“What?”
“You seem to think she’s out there somewhere to be found, kidnapped by a man in the woods. Yet you referred to her in the past tense, like you know she’s dead.”
“She ain’t been home in a year. I don’t want to believe she’s dead, but I swear she talked to me today. She told me to go look for that lady. I’ve been sitting here for Lord knows how long, thinking about Hazel, about the woods, about that woman. I messed up.” His face twisted, and a sob of grief escaped his mouth.
“What do you mean, she told you to go look for that lady?” Martin asked, and his drumming fingers fell still.
“It’s been a year today since Hazel disappeared. I’d dropped her off at that trail. I didn’t go with her.” He squeezed his eyes shut, and fresh tears spilled out. “I went in to look for that lady, and I nearly turned back, but Hazel told me to keep looking. I swear she did. So I kept going because I would’ve wanted someone to keep looking for Hazel. She didn’t run away from me.”