He pulled up his GPS as they both climbed into Josiah’s truck. “Take 95 to 290,” he said.
“I know how to get to Spokane,” Rachel snapped back, and he pressed his lips together to avoid getting dragged into a verbal brawl. It wouldn’t take much to nudge either of them into something that would have them bleeding out where they sat.
The highways were deserted, but Rachel didn’t speed. They drove steadily, the delicate silence inside the car broken only by the slap of tires against road.
“Does Josiah know?” Hicks finally asked. “That you’re out here.”
Hicks didn’t need any light to see the way her jaw clenched. “It’s better that he doesn’t.”
He studied her, the harsh lines of her profile, her strong nose, her thin lips, the shape of her chin, all so similar to his. He tried not to think about it too much, how they looked alike, how they shared a past, an origin story.
They’d been through hell together, yet here they were, no more than strangers now. How had the years and the differences and the distance come between them when they still saw each other most weeks? At one point, he would have said he knew her as well as he knew himself. Now, he wondered if he ever had.
“You have to stop protecting him,” Hicks said quietly. He had no doubt that was what was happening now.
“Josiah doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Rachel said, her voice calm as if she were talking about the weather. He sensed the anger beneath her skin, though. “I don’t know what you got Eliza mixed up in . . .”
“Me?”
“Well, it wasn’t us,” Rachel countered. “She’s taking your truck, in the middle of the night to God knows where—”
He couldn’t help himself. “Spokane.”
“Don’t be smart.” Rachel no longer sounded composed. She sounded like his older sister. They were quiet for a while. And then Rachel glanced at him. “You think Josiah had something to do with the missing boy?”
Of course. For once he didn’t poke at her, though. There had been a quiver in the question, one that made her sound like someone else. Like Cora, maybe. Not Rachel. Rachel, who’d been the only one who’d ever stood up to their mother, who’d faced down the beatings with a lifted chin, who carried the weight of the Church on her shoulders while Josiah basked in the spotlight. Rachel was tough. She didn’t break. Not like Cora. Not like him.
“Do you know where he was when Noah went missing?” Hicks asked instead of answering the question. Or maybe that was answer enough, because her shoulders drew back, the walls coming up.
“With me.” She was back to snapping. “You’ve always hated him. You and Peggy with your little vendetta against us.”
The accusation was laced with bitterness, disdain. The same venom directed at him as Rachel assumed he carried toward her, toward Josiah, toward the Church.
He’d been wrong. They were worse than strangers. They were adversaries. Adversaries who knew how to make each other bleed, which was the very worst kind. He shut his mouth.
Even if he suspected Josiah was playing some kind of sick game here that Hicks didn’t quite understand, he’d never convince Rachel of it. She didn’t want to see, so she wouldn’t. There was a lot someone could miss because they couldn’t bear the truth.
They drove the rest of the way in the heavy silence that had fallen between them.
When the headlights finally cut over a sign that cheerily informed them that Spokane was only fifteen miles away, Hicks checked the GPS address.
“Get off here,” he said.
There was a blue bus sign with an arrow at the end of the exit ramp. “Left.”
Brightly lit but deserted gas stations and twenty-four-hour convenience stores stood in stark contrast to the vast darkness that stretched out behind them. The outskirts of a small Idaho border town. They drove past it all until Hicks saw it—a large parking lot attached to the bus depot. He pointed, and Rachel pulled in.
His truck sat in the back corner, far away from the closest streetlamp.
“Why did she take it?” Rachel asked as they got out of the car. “Hicks, why did she take your truck?”
He shook his head once, terse.
A ghost of a girl in the night. I’m sorry.
“Where is she now?” There was panic creeping in, and it took him too long to realize she hadn’t known they were coming to a bus station. She stepped toward him, eyes wide, almost feral in the dim parking lot lights. “Where is she now?”
“I don’t . . .” Hicks shook his head. He didn’t know.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Why had he given her the truck? What had he thought she was going to do?
Almost mindlessly he crossed to it.
Rachel had pulled to a stop so that Josiah’s truck was blocking anyone else’s view of the pickup. There were two other cars in the lot, but they were parked near the front of the bus station.
He unlatched the back, staring at his hand as he did. It felt like it didn’t belong to him, a numbness in the very joints of his fingers. Rachel was still talking behind him, but he ignored her and pulled the back panel down so that he could see into the bed.
A shovel. A tarp. Dirt. Nothing out of the ordinary for a truck in Idaho.
Nothing that had been there when he’d tossed Eliza the keys all those hours ago.
“Wyatt.” Her voice like a slap. Rachel was standing next to him, for once looking as pale as Eliza always did. She turned to meet his eyes. “What . . .”
“It wasn’t her,” Hicks said, the only words his mouth seemed willing to form. He knew it to be true. Whatever the hell was going on here, Eliza wasn’t a killer.
Rachel looked from his face to the damning evidence. The story it told sat in between them, a palpable thing that was squeezing his chest. Her chin up, just like it had when they were kids, just like it did when they faced each other down in shield law hearings these days.
“We burn it all,” she said.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
LUCY THORNE
Sunday, 2:00 a.m.
Lucy had an iron stomach when she was working cases. Torn flesh, mutilated victims, faces in every stage of decomp possible. She could handle it without flinching. She could concentrate on the details, on the evidence, all with the goal of building a case.
But there was only so much a person could take when sifting through old crimes. Stacked up together, the atrocities that lived inside those seemingly innocent manila files wore on the soul, sliced into it like a thousand paper cuts until a person was left bleeding, unable to soothe the pain.
She would be the last to admit it to someone, but she hated this part.
Lucy had been going through the murders that Vaughn had sent her through special delivery, both the ones she had worked on earlier in her career and ones that had similarities to Noah’s. Religious symbols, clean kills, care of the body. Things like that. Those ones were unsolved, which made it worse. She couldn’t even tell herself that the victims had been avenged properly.
The B and B creaked, settling with the night’s wind. The floor beneath Lucy was hard and cold, yet she couldn’t manage the effort of crawling up into the bed. If she did, she was tired enough that she’d probably drop immediately into sleep anyway, and there was too much to get through for that.