Hicks refrained from touching his nose once more. A point to Zoey’s cleverness. She’d always been able to wade through his thought process and emerge with the right answer. It wasn’t Darcy herself that he was worried about. More that she was the visible crack in a community that seemed on the brink of shattering.
Because of Josiah? Maybe. But really because of the missing children. Hicks couldn’t help but think about Rosie, and the fact that Darcy had already buried one kid.
“We’re back to ‘it’ not being an actual thing,” Hicks said instead of any of that, dragging his hands over his face, exhausted to the core.
Josiah was . . . frustrating. Stubborn as anyone Hicks had ever met, and he had to look in the mirror every day, so that was saying something. But Josiah genuinely thought of himself as a leader of his flock. He pushed back on the more radical of the elders, and preached sermons about taking care of the elderly, the vulnerable, the poor and downtrodden. The outcasts. He lived those truths as well. Hicks had seen it countless times over the past few decades.
But . . .
When you love something that much, it makes you forget.
Forget what?
What it means to be good.
Zoey was watching him, trying not to seem like she was.
He couldn’t believe she would answer, but he tried anyway. “Have you ever cared about anything enough that you just threw everything else out the window? Your beliefs, your ethics. Everything?”
The room went still as if holding its breath. Then Zoey smiled. The sad kind that twisted Hicks’s gut into knots, made him wish he’d never asked.
“Just once.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
LUCY THORNE
Saturday, 9:45 a.m.
Whatever Lucy had been expecting when she pictured Deputy Sheriff Zoey Grant, it was not the beauty pageant blonde in front of her in Hicks’s office.
As much as Lucy had tried to school her expression away from surprise while they were introduced, Zoey must have seen the flare of it or at least the aftermath.
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Zoey said, a stilted smile doing a deliberately poor job at hiding irritation.
“Sorry,” Lucy said sincerely, owning up to it with the hope that the sincerity would tell Zoey something about her.
Zoey shrugged it off, smiling and friendly, and sank into one of the chairs across from Hicks. Lucy took the second one.
“You’re looking grim, boss.” Zoey’s narrowed eyes were locked on Hicks.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, then sat back in his chair, body language relaxed, shoulders loose, hands gently clasped. But even after knowing him for only a day, Lucy could see the effort that lay beneath it all.
This obvious stress wasn’t about Noah’s missing body. Lucy had already seen him react to that news, and that controlled anger hadn’t looked like this.
No. Whatever the emotion he was working so hard to conceal, it had to do with something else. And if Lucy had to guess, she’d say Hicks was worried about questioning Zoey about Molly Thomas.
Did he know something that made him nervous? Or was he just bracing for a worst-case scenario?
“Noah’s body disappeared from the coroner’s overnight,” Hicks said, breaking the news to Zoey, who whistled low, her eyes ping-ponging between them.
“Jackson?” Just the name, the way Zoey said it, spoke multitudes. They hadn’t trusted the coroner before, these two, and Lucy wondered about that. Hicks had said Zoey didn’t like the shield laws, but he’d made it seem like she was on the outskirts, an onlooker who disapproved but didn’t get down and dirty in the fight.
“He says he wasn’t involved, but to be honest I wouldn’t put it past him to have left the door unlocked,” Hicks said, and that got Lucy’s attention. She’d been thinking it, but neither of them had said it out loud yet.
“We could get him for that,” she said. “If he actually left it open.”
Hicks raised his brows at her. “Yeah, and who’s going to prove it to a judge? You?”
The victory snatched away as soon as it had appeared on the horizon. Lucy took a shot in the dark. “I don’t suppose the building has security cameras.”
It was Zoey who laughed this time. “Honey, Jackson has to buy his own latex gloves the budget is so tight.”
Pettiness pouted and kicked and threw a general tantrum, but Lucy attempted to adopt a what’s done is done mentality. There weren’t resources—or time, either—to waste on this particular rabbit hole. That was if Vaughn, pissed about a missing body, didn’t yank her right away today instead of waiting until Monday. And she hadn’t exactly amassed enough evidence that something beyond Eliza’s confession was going on here. She couldn’t use that to convince Vaughn if the woman was truly fed up.
The details they had from Jackson’s preliminary report on the body would most likely be sufficient in any case being compiled against Eliza. When the tox report came back, they’d be able to tell if Noah had been drugged, too. Lucy was still having a hard time imagining what had happened that night, what had been the sequence of events. Usually she could map it out, sketchy though it might be. In this case, she didn’t even know where to start. But none of that really mattered. The facts of the case supported the killer’s confession, and that would be enough for most people.
Zoey was back to looking between them, her mouth mostly hidden behind her coffee cup. “So what’s next?”
In the awkward silence that followed, Hicks watched Zoey, his eyebrows drawn tight, his lips slightly parted as if he were trying to say something and trying not to say something at the same time.
“Do you remember Molly Thomas?” he finally asked.
Zoey tugged at her pursed lips, considering. “The runaway? From a few weeks ago?”
Hicks may have been braced for a reaction, but Zoey didn’t give him one. She hadn’t balked, hadn’t gone defensive in any way. Her hands remained loose around her mug, her face open and expressive, her legs splayed to take up most of the chair. She hadn’t closed off, hadn’t retreated. Maybe she was good, but there was no way she could have been prepared for that question out of nowhere.
It was Hicks who had been worried about it, not Zoey.
Had Hicks thought she would flinch? Had he thought she wouldn’t? Which was worse?
“Yeah,” he said.
Zoey looked a little confused, a little intrigued. Nothing else. If she really didn’t remember the girl, did that mean Molly hadn’t used the deputy’s phone number that she’d written so carefully in her journal?
Or was Zoey lying?
“That’s all I’ve got.” Zoey shrugged, still casual. “I know you were—” Zoey stopped. Looked at Lucy, blinked. Seemed to realize she was about to share thoughts that might have been better to have been filtered.
“Go ahead,” Hicks said, leaning back in his chair. He didn’t seem concerned by whatever Zoey had cut herself off from saying.
“Um. You were pretty displeased,” Zoey finally said, careful now. Speaking too freely was like missing a step, Lucy knew. There was that jolt and then the recovery. You were always more deliberate when you started down the stairs again.
Lucy looked to Hicks then. “Why?”