CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
LUCY THORNE
Sunday, 10:00 a.m.
The three girls. They were at the heart of this.
Eliza Cook. Molly Thomas. Alessandra Shaw.
Lucy tossed the folder about Molly onto Zoey’s desk. In the past few hours, they’d been going over their interviews from the case, the new notes that Vaughn had sent about the bodies, and doing a lot of staring at the whiteboard without actually getting anywhere.
“I think you should go out to the Shaws’ place,” Lucy said, breaking Zoey’s concentration. The woman looked up, blinked a couple of times like she was somewhere else, and then sat back in her chair.
“By myself?”
“Do you have an officer you can take?” Lucy asked.
“Maybe,” Zoey said, staring at the desks in the bullpen like they’d offer a solution despite the fact that they were still empty. An elderly woman had come in to man the reception a few hours back, but besides that, no one else had been in or out. Which meant Hicks was still there. “But you’re not coming?”
“Someone’s already called them to give them the news,” Lucy said. “You don’t need me.”
“You don’t think there’s anything to find.”
“I want to use our resources selectively,” Lucy corrected, though in truth she didn’t have high hopes the trip would turn up anything useful. The family had left town more than a year ago, and the address Vaughn had sent them was an hour away from Knox Hollow. They had clearly cut ties with the place, the people. “I want one of us to have talked to them. And I trust you to do it.”
That was an exaggeration at best, but it got Zoey’s shoulders to lower.
“What are you going to be doing?” Zoey asked, her voice having lost some of its defensiveness.
Lucy’s eyes slid over to the list of names. The kids, the missing ones, the dead ones.
A motive would be nice.
The killings weren’t about torture. The killings were about . . . the killings were about . . .
What?
An idea crept in, not quite the right one, she didn’t think, but an idea nonetheless. It was one that had been hovering ever since she’d heard about the Church.
It was the idea of power. Of having it, of safeguarding it.
“I’m going to talk to the Cooks,” she said, keeping it vague. The idea wasn’t fully formed yet, and she wanted to tread cautiously. Anyway, she could ask about Kate Martinez while she was there, too.
“You’ll need to be able to get there,” Zoey said, standing up to cross over to one of the walls. Three sets of keys hung in an even row on built-in hooks. She grabbed a pair and tossed it to Lucy. “The truck is out back.”
“Thanks,” Lucy said, the cool weight of the metal in her hands surprisingly reassuring. She’d been missing her car, feeling too vulnerable without it. She wondered why Hicks hadn’t offered these keys up. Wondered why Zoey so easily had.
Zoey shrugged into the jacket she’d slung over the back of her chair. “Well, might as well get going. I’ll keep you updated.” She sent Lucy a little salute and then headed for the door.
Lucy watched her go, but her mind was already swinging back to the Cooks, to Kate Martinez. To Hicks.
Standing, she shoved the Molly file into her bag, palmed the keys Zoey had thrown her, and then headed out of the office.
She paused in the hallway, when she heard the squeak of a chair from Hicks’s office. He appeared a minute later, loose arms folded over his chest, his shoulder propped up against the doorway, very obviously positioned to look as nonthreatening as possible.
“You know you could just ask for the Martinez file.” Hicks’s voice was easy, casual, almost friendly.
Lucy studied him for a minute, the theory that he was involved clinging like smoke to the inside of her skull. Had he been the one to chase Kate to Montana all those years ago? Had he carried on with Noah and the rest, letting Eliza take the fall? He knew how to make a clean kill. He could easily bear the weight of a body. And at the coroner the verse had been achingly familiar on his lips.
“I have the file,” she finally said. “I do work at the FBI, in case you’ve forgotten.”
His brows rose in a silent question.
Would there be any harm in saying it? “I wanted to see if you did, too,” she admitted.
“Does the fact that I did tell you anything?”
Other than that he was a good cop? Not really. She didn’t answer, but before she moved away, she considered something, then took a chance. “Who do you think killed her? Kate.”
He inhaled, visibly surprised, the reaction lasting only a split second before he was neutral again. “How do you know it wasn’t me?”
Lucy studied him for a long beat, and then turned and walked toward the exit.
“Hey.” Because even Hicks was human, curious.
She stopped but didn’t turn around. “If it had been you, no one ever would have found the body.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
SHERIFF WYATT HICKS
Now
The door to the sheriff’s office clicked shut behind Lucy Thorne as she headed toward the trucks they kept parked out back.
He’d never tried to give her the keys to the spare vehicles before. There had been little he’d been able to control in the past few days, but that at least had been one thing.
Frustration, helplessness, anger, they clawed in his gut as he turned back toward his desk. Reaching into the drawer that he’d caught Lucy snooping around in, he then pulled out the Kate Martinez file.
She was a ghost that had haunted him for seven years.
If he didn’t know the file so well, he would have had a hard time remembering what she looked like. She’d stayed out at Josiah and Rachel’s for only six months, a handful of weeks more maybe. That was it.
But he did know the file well, and he met her deep brown eyes, a sad smile on his face. “You’re important, huh?”
Because she must be. If Lucy was looking to see if he had the woman’s file.
He couldn’t explain to himself why he’d even kept an eye on her cold case.
I don’t want to see. That’s what he’d told Lucy, and it had been as honest as he could be. No matter what, this wasn’t going to end well for any of them. Not for Eliza, not for him, not for his family.
Maybe he had the file memorized, but he hadn’t looked at it since long before Noah’s body had turned up. And so he read it with fresh eyes.
When he got through it, he sat back in his chair.
It was just one detail, one small detail.
But for the first time in a long while, he could finally see the whole picture.
CHAPTER FIFTY
LUCY THORNE
Sunday, 10:45 a.m.
The Cooks’ place was empty, and Lucy checked the date on her phone. Sunday. They’d be at church, in all likelihood.
She should have realized, but she was losing track of time, the days stretching on forever and then snapping into the next like a rubber band.
There wasn’t much she could do but wait for them to return. She didn’t have a warrant, and there wasn’t probable cause she could justify.
For now, she glanced around on the off chance there was a helpful sign that pointed to the location of Molly’s body, or at least something that would give her an excuse to go poking about. But the yard was as tidy as it had been before.