On a sudden stroke of inspiration, Lucy turned to dig in her bag for the files for the “missing” kids Peggy had sent her, handing them over to Zoey as well so they could add the names to the board.
When they’d finished grouping them into sections, Lucy stepped back, not even sure of what she was trying to find.
She had listed the babies together, off to the side. As sad as that story was, she doubted those particular deaths had anything to do with her current case.
Removing them from the overarching picture left only a handful of older kids from Jackson’s list. The number was slightly higher than the non-Church folks, but not by much. Certainly nothing to suggest Jackson was actively covering up some kind of systematic abuse and murder.
And the deaths of the Church kids were strikingly similar to the Knox Hollow ones. Accidents, tragedies.
One of the few red flags was the girl Hicks had mentioned back in the bar that first day. A teenager who had vomited to the point of rupturing her esophagus. The COD details in the column next to her name simply mentioned food poisoning. Lucy wondered how many of the others were misleading because the context had been left out.
The other notable difference was the deaths from cancer and other such illnesses. There were none from the Church. Even if they hadn’t gotten a diagnosis while they were alive, that still should have shown up in a postmortem autopsy.
Lucy stepped up to the board and circled the four who were from Knox Hollow but not the Church, and then glanced down at her phone once more as if there were information she’d been missing. It was as bare as the first time she’d looked at it.
She turned to Zoey. “Do you know anything about these deaths?”
Zoey’s eyes slid over the names, and she tugged at her stubby ponytail. “Only the last one. Marsha Redburn.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Her father’s the principal of the public school, and her mother works at the diner in town,” Zoey said. “They have three kids. She was the middle one.”
“What happened?”
Zoey grimaced a little. “The details are vague. I had just gotten to town at that point. But I know they drove her into Spokane a few times, and even flew down to California to visit a special doctor.”
The information settled into the puzzle, all smooth edges, nudging right up against the names from the folders Peggy had given her.
A motive would be nice.
There was something here, but was that what it was? The motive? And for whom? Their serial killer or Eliza?
The thought slipped away, elusive, as if she could catch it from only the corner of her eye. When she tried to look at it dead on, it disintegrated.
Lucy felt Zoey’s attention on her, and she realized she’d missed a question. She shook her head, just slightly. “Sorry, my brain is slow this morning.”
Zoey groaned in sympathy. “Tell me about it.”
“You guys don’t happen to have coffee here, do you?” Lucy made a point to glance around. There had been a stained pot out by the reception desk, but it looked like it hadn’t been used in years. “I wasn’t able to grab any at the B and B.”
“Oh man, you poor thing.” Zoey was pushing to her feet with a sympathetic smile. “Our stuff is crap. We don’t even bother anymore, what with the coffeehouse only a block over, which”—she glanced at the clock on the wall—“is blessedly open now. Let me go grab us some.”
Lucy clasped her hands in front of her chest in exaggerated gratitude. “I will literally name my firstborn after you.”
Laughing, Zoey headed for the door. “Yes, that is my normal charge for a coffee run.”
Even after Lucy was sure Zoey was actually gone, she waited another minute, and then another one. When Zoey didn’t come rushing back in with an excuse of a forgotten wallet or something equally bland, Lucy felt safe enough. She glanced at the clock, running the calculations even as she crossed quickly around to Zoey’s side of the desk. If there wasn’t a line at the coffeehouse, Lucy might have six, seven minutes, depending on how fast Zoey walked.
Her intention in letting Zoey go get the coffee hadn’t been to snoop, but when the opportunity presented itself . . .
Zoey’s office proved easy. One drawer was filled with candy, the other with paperwork for traffic stops over the past three months. There was a picture of Zoey and another woman who looked startlingly like her on the desk, and that was the only obvious personal item Lucy could find.
Lucy hesitated, considering if she could risk it. Her feet were headed toward Hicks’s office almost before she’d even made the conscious decision. The door was open, the lights off.
His desk proved much messier than Zoey’s, but Lucy dismissed the clutter with a quick glance. None of it seemed relevant. She sat in his chair and began opening drawers. The top four were some combination of junk and keys and miscellaneous cell phones, none of which turned on.
The bottom two, though—that’s where it got interesting. Old files were neatly ordered alphabetically by name. Lucy had opened the P–Z side, and she immediately shut that, swiveling over to the A–O, her fingers flying over the tabs, searching, searching, searching . . .
Bingo.
MARTINEZ, KATE.
“Find what you’re looking for?” a rough voice asked from the doorway.
Lucy flushed hot as she looked up into Hicks’s eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
MOLLY THOMAS
One day earlier
Molly had thought the footsteps day would have been the worst.
Weeks, months, years, she didn’t know how long she’d been in the bunker, but that had been the worst day until now.
Because that was when the people had come. They’d walked over the hatch, a crowd of them, dozens maybe. Everyone in the Church? Everyone in Knox Hollow?
She couldn’t hear them, not really, the bunker and the soil doing their jobs. But the door at the top, the most vulnerable part of her prison, had shivered against its hinges, signaling the constant flow of footsteps above her head.
Molly had screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. She’d pounded on the walls until something had snapped in her hand, sending a sharp, white shock through her body. Holding her broken finger close to her chest, she’d used that agony to amplify her voice. Surely the pure pain in it would seep into the ground above her, its tendrils coiling around ankles, crawling up legs, a thick, insisting vine that refused to let them continue on until they looked down.
Look down. Look down. Look down.
The words had lost meaning, and still she’d screamed them, the plea sinking into concrete, dying there. It had gone on for so long, the torture worse than anything she could comprehend.
Her mind had unraveled into strings that tangled into knots that pulled tighter and tighter and tighter until everything went quiet. Dark, because that was her reality. Dark, always. Dark with footsteps above and people, people, people who walked and talked and lived as if she wasn’t below them screaming, Look down.
When her mind had rejoined her body, she’d been crumpled on the floor, her face wet with tears, her hand throbbing in time with her heartbeat, swollen and tender to the touch.
It had been quiet, but not the kind that had taken her away to another place in her head.
No, it had been quiet because the footsteps had been gone.