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“What?” I said, putting both my hands atop the shovel handle and resting my chin on them. “If it’s not her, you’ve still got a problem.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. It doesn’t matter. The person I took from your house that night is the same person that’s in that grave. Whoever she is, she’s not picking me out of a lineup, not going to say, ‘That’s the guy.’ If your wife’s still out there somewhere, well, yeah, I should have got her, but it’s not like she’s got an ax to grind with me. You get what I’m saying?”
Sadly, I did.
I might have bought myself five minutes here, but this was turning into a no-win situation. Didn’t matter who was in this grave. What mattered was that someone was in it. Matt’s mind was put at ease.
Mine, not so much.
Matt, pointing his gun at me more directly, said, “Guess we’re done here. One thing all this has taught me is, be sure. Leave no room for doubt.” He cracked a smile that gave me a chill.
“Wait,” I said.
“What?”
“You’ve got a problem.”
“I think you’re the one with the problem. But it’ll be over soon.”
“My car.”
Matt blinked a couple of times. “Hmm,” he said once again.
I didn’t know whose land this was, or how Matt had come to choose this part of the woods to bury Brie, but if he drove out of here and left my car behind, it would eventually be found, and the police would eventually find Brie’s remains and, presumably, mine. That discovery might end up leading to Matt. Did he own this property? Did it belong to a friend of his?
“Let me go,” I said.
Flatly, Matt said, “No.”
“I’m serious. You … you’ve given me hope.” Stick with the charade. “I now know there’s a chance my wife’s alive, that the woman who showed up over the weekend, it’s really her. I know you didn’t kill her.” I pointed to the grave. “I don’t know who this is, and I can’t explain how you got the wrong person, but if there’s a chance my wife is out there, I have to find her.”
“No,” he said again.
“Come on,” I said. “Why?”
“Say you find her,” he said. “She tells you why she disappeared. Who would have wanted her dead. Cops find that person, it leads back to me.”
It was hard to argue with his logic. There was still the matter of my SUV, though.
“I’ll figure things out with your car,” he said. “Get a lift back.” Another smile. “Don’t trouble yourself.”
I had no arrows left in my quiver, unless you counted begging.
“Please,” I said.
“Start another hole.”
I moved my hands farther down the shovel handle, eyeing the ground, wishing Matt would take a few steps closer, get within shovel-swinging range. I was going to dig this hole like I was being paid by the fucking hour. I was about to ask him where he wanted me to start when we heard something.
“Hey!” someone called.
I looked beyond Matt, in the direction of where we’d come from, where our two vehicles were.
A man was coming our way.
“Hey!” he called out again. “What’s going on?”
It was Norman.
