Coffee. She needed coffee.
There were no other guests staying at the inn, so she wouldn’t have to worry about running into anyone in the kitchen. Decision made, she grabbed several of the files and crept out of her room.
When Lucy skipped the loose stair, she thought of Molly. Was she alive? Was she actually missing? How was she tied up in this?
There had been no sign of her yet in the woods with the other three victims they’d found. That was something—though the land out here was vast, so many places to hide a body, so many places to hide a girl. If she wasn’t dead yet, she could be anywhere.
Moonlight drenched the kitchen in silver, pouring in through the wide back windows. Shadows clung to the walls, but they were kept mostly at bay, a relief for Lucy. She’d been sunk into a nightmare for the past several hours, her defenses battered and her adrenaline depleted. Everything looked like a threat right now.
She went through the motions of making the coffee, only distantly registering the time that passed as she stared blankly, the dripping water soothing like little pebbles tossed into a calm lake.
Lucy poured herself a mug once it was ready, and then crossed to the kitchen table. It was wood—old, thick, and scarred with history.
When she was settled, she opened the first file. On its face, it was the closest to Noah’s killing, and it was one she hadn’t worked. It was a boy, nine years old, which would fall into the right age range. There were initials carved into his skin—not quite a verse, but similar mutilation, all the same. He’d been dropped in a patch of woods not far from Knox Hollow, closer to the Canadian border, but not by much.
But he’d been tied, the ropes crossing over his chest in a complicated pattern that spoke of some proficiency with bondage. While some killers switched up their methods enough to go undetected, when there was something that specific involved, it usually showed up again with subsequent victims.
She opened the second file she’d brought down with her.
It was one of the first cases she’d been assigned when she’d been working in the Montana office—a young girl, earlier twenties. The only thing about her case that rang familiar to Noah’s was that she’d been left deep in the woods, unburied. When she’d been found, her body had been mostly picked apart by predators. No ammonia-soaked rags for her.
Lucy almost shut the file again, but something on one of the pictures . . . Was that . . . ? She shifted the glossy photograph so that it caught more of the moonlight. And . . .
Yes.
Scrambling a bit, Lucy shoved the rest of the files out of the way so that she could lay out the photos of the young woman across the table. Her thumb brushed over the cut that had drawn her attention.
It was at the very edge of a bite mark from some large animal, and so they’d probably overlooked it before. But now that Lucy knew what she was looking for, she could see the deliberate slash of a knife against skin.
Lucy drew in a sharp breath. It looked like the bottom of an R.
It could be. Maybe. Or she was tired and looking for things that weren’t actually there. But the mark next to it looked like part of a 2 if she squinted.
She sighed, rubbed her eyes.
Just as she was about to dig into the file, there was a scuff of feet on floorboards in the hallway. There was only a second for her fingers to fly to the gun she had holstered beneath her arm before Annie Tate appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a tatty pink robe and fluffy purple slippers, looking like she’d been woken up despite Lucy knowing she hadn’t made any noise.
As Annie shuffled over to the coffeepot and poured herself a cup, Lucy tried to gather up the photographs of the half-eaten body of a murdered girl. But Annie barely blinked when she saw them, sliding onto the bench across from Lucy, looking as if she was preparing for a good gossip session.
“This is for the Dawson case?” Annie asked, voice still rough, but clearly shaking off her grogginess.
Lucy shot her a weak, conciliatory smile. “I’m not able to discuss an ongoing case. I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“Don’t you worry any,” Annie said. “Lightest sleeper this side of the Mississippi. My sister despairs of it.”
The darkness shifted around them, throwing light on a particularly grisly photograph.
“I hope for Rachel and Josiah’s sake it all goes fast,” Annie continued blithely as if used to gore and guts spread out across her table.
Lucy ran a finger around the lip of her mug. “What does?”
“The trial and everything.” Annie waved a casual hand as if they weren’t talking about the fate of a seventeen-year-old girl. “It should, shouldn’t it? What with her confession.”
There was no need to ask how Annie knew about that. Lucy was sure she’d been one of the first to find out even more details than Lucy probably had. “I’m not able to discuss an ongoing case.”
Annie nodded with exaggerated understanding as Lucy delivered the well-used line. And Lucy wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth if Annie was feeling in a talkative mood. She just needed to redirect the conversation so it wasn’t she who would be doling out the information.
“Alessandra Shaw was a part of the Church, too, right?”
“Oh, Alessandra,” Annie breathed out, the name holding the weight of a thousand untold secrets. “Yes. She was.”
“Then she must have been close with Eliza, too? And Molly Thomas?”
“Mmmm, yes,” Annie said. “She was their ringleader.”
That surprised Lucy. She would have pegged Eliza for that role. “Alessandra was?”
“That girl had a wild soul,” Annie said, but she sounded almost . . . fond. “Guess that’s why she ran off like she did. No one was surprised. Except maybe Eliza and Molly, that is.”
That meant Annie didn’t know about the bodies in the woods. Eliza and Molly had been right about Alessandra.
Three girls. Three friends. Two of them were missing, with one all but confirmed to have been murdered. The third was in custody for a separate homicide.
Why confess to a crime you didn’t commit?
Two of Eliza’s best friends had disappeared. It wouldn’t be a great leap of logic to think Eliza had been frightened she might be next. Had she been seeking protection?
And where did Noah Dawson fit into this? Where did the other victims—the two more they’d found in the woods near Alessandra’s body and the files from Peggy Anderson?
When looking at serial killers, there was usually a type of preferred victim. Sometimes there would be an aberration, a girl with light brown hair instead of blonde. But all told, they rarely strayed. Certainly not like this.
A psychopath who targeted teenage girls usually stuck to teenage girls. One who went after prepubescent boys did the same.
But if the escalating victim toll traced back to the same killer? That meant it wasn’t age or gender or normal demographics tying them all together.
It was something else.
A motive would be nice.
The Church was the obvious answer. So far all the victims involved had a connection. But it could just be a killer had been taking advantage of an insular community, one that was wary of law enforcement and tended to try to cover up missing children.
What would have happened if Eliza had confessed in Knox Hollow instead of in Seattle? It probably would have been Zoey who would have arrested her, to avoid any potential conflicts with Hicks. The DA would have rushed through the charges, eager to close a case on a murdered twelve-year-old boy.