“I’ve had that happen before,” Lucy said, shrugging despite the fact that he couldn’t see her, a defensive gesture she recognized as her own guilt at not pursuing this line of thinking deeper. “People see a name in the newspaper, things like that.”
The pause that followed was almost long enough that she was about to check if the call had dropped. “Perhaps.”
Lucy scratched at a scab on her thumb. A cut from the training session she’d been leading when Vaughn had called her in to talk to Eliza. “Is there any other reason she would have relaxed?”
“Well, you were clearly there to ask her questions, not escort her out of the building,” Dr. Ali said, his voice going thoughtful.
That could make sense. Eliza had feared she’d be led out of the building before she could tell them of the murder, that she’d be dismissed perhaps because of her age. She’d had a plan. Confess and then shut up. Again, these actions, this worry, didn’t seem to be driven by the guilt of a killer.
“You said a few moments,” Lucy prompted. “What were the others?”
“The verse,” Dr. Ali said, and that itch at the base of her spine prickled. “It was strange the way she acted. She was desperate in a way she wasn’t in any other part of the interview.”
White knuckles, shallow breathing. A pale face flushing pink. It had been the most emotion Eliza had displayed. “She made me repeat it.”
“And when you did, again she relaxed,” Dr. Ali pointed out. “The rest of the interview she was almost absolutely controlled.”
“What else?” Lucy pressed.
He sighed. “When you were trying to get her to break . . .”
Those two hours, those long two hours. The time itself hadn’t been noteworthy. Lucy had spent double, triple that teasing out confessions as the normal course of business. Usually, if people were willing to talk, deep down they wanted to be broken. They just didn’t want to want it. Which was fine—it was Lucy’s job to make sure they didn’t realize that all she was doing was giving them space to let the words spill out.
But Eliza hadn’t wanted to talk. Not beyond her confession.
Dr. Ali continued when Lucy didn’t say anything. “She came into that FBI office with a mission. And that was to tell you, and you in particular, three things: where Noah Dawson’s body was, that he had a Bible verse cut into his chest, and that she killed him.”
Setting the stage for an audience of one. “So what are you thinking?” She stopped, clarified. “Not your professional analysis, just you. What are you thinking?”
There was a pause. “My expertise involves picking apart body language, words, microexpressions, and gestures, all to figure out if someone is lying. But there’s a false dichotomy there, one that leads people to make assumptions they shouldn’t.”
Usually she knew where he was going with something. Not this time. “Okay.”
“Just because someone isn’t lying,” Dr. Ali said, each word slow and weighted, “doesn’t mean that they’re telling the truth.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ELIZA COOK
Two weeks earlier
It had been five days since Molly had disappeared when Eliza was finally able to sneak out of the house without her aunt or uncle noticing. They were both on high alert following Hicks’s visit regarding Molly. The only reason Eliza had been able to swing an escape was because it was Friday and the Church was having one of its socials.
Rachel and Josiah opened their barn up to the community for a party once a month, and the congregation took care of the rest—the tables, the food, the music. Even now, Eliza could hear the twang of the banjo strings as she carefully palmed the keys to the truck Josiah parked around the front of the house. With so many vehicles stacked up, there was a good chance he wouldn’t realize that it—along with his niece—had gone missing for an hour or two. At least, that’s what she was counting on.
The barn glowed, the light, the laughter, the noise curling like golden tendrils into the night. From the outside where Eliza crept through the falling darkness, the warmth of it beckoned. She resisted the pull.
She had a plan.
It wasn’t a perfect plan, borne as it had been from desperation rather than careful thought. But it was better than sitting around and doing nothing.
Eliza climbed into the truck and then started it up without flicking on the headlights. Last year she’d pestered Hicks into teaching her how to drive. She wasn’t anywhere near perfect, but she could get where she needed to go, and, better yet, neither Josiah nor Rachel knew she was able to.
If they’d known, they would have been watching her even closer than they already were.
Sometimes it felt like she was living in those days a few years ago right after Josiah and Rachel had realized she’d been sneaking out to meet Molly by the post some nights. They’d padlocked the back door, made her write lines for hours and hours and hours on end. No food, no water, no sleep. Just that one line, that verse that was now all but burned into her skin.
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
It was a favorite in the Cook household. Eliza realized now why that was.
When she’d been younger, she’d loved it. Eliza still remembered climbing up into the lap of her grandmother, who’d always smelled of ginger and mint. When her grandmother recited the words, they’d sounded like reassurance, and Eliza had needed that in those confusing years after her mother’s death.
Now she realized how twisted they were.
She shut out the past as she parked on a side street where she hoped the truck wouldn’t be noticed. The library was open until 9:00 p.m. on Fridays, a quirk that was left over from the fact that Mrs. Winslow didn’t like having to sit through the reruns of Knight Rider her husband had insisted on watching each week back when he’d been alive.
She was also blessed with the fact that Mrs. Winslow, unlike most people in town, knew how to mind her own business. The woman simply squinted up at Eliza when she walked into the library, harrumphed a little at the clock—it was 8:30, the place would be closing promptly at the top of the hour—and then went back to her novel.
The computers that seemed older than Mrs. Winslow herself ran along the back wall, mostly hidden by the three sparse stacks of books. The positioning offered a thin suggestion of privacy, or at least enough warning that Eliza would be able to close out of her searches if needed.
Eliza pulled out the file folder, the one that Deputy Zoey Grant had left so carelessly open on her desk just when Eliza had been visiting the other day. It was copied from the original, so Eliza guessed Hicks didn’t even realize Zoey had been looking at it.
He certainly wouldn’t realize that Eliza had been looking into the seven-year-old case that had never been closed.
Why did you keep this file, Hicks? She wanted to confront him, wanted to shove it in his face. But a bigger part of her wanted to keep him out of this. And that’s the part that won out.
She met the girl’s eyes in the picture paper-clipped to the inside of the folder. They were black and gray and pixilated, but Eliza knew them to be brown and warm.
A pretty girl, a kind laugh.
Sweat beaded beneath her turtleneck, and she tugged at the stifling collar as the computer chugged through checking her credentials. With careful deliberation, she laid her palms on her jean skirt–clad thighs, concentrating on the rough drag of the fabric. At times it felt like a panic attack had been hovering at the edges of her sanity for the past five days, just waiting for a sign of weakness before it would swoop in and take her down.