“None. They managed to extract DNA, but all it told us is she was a white female. She wasn’t in any databases.”
Greta’s stomach turned. Another woman. Another family somewhere who’d buried an empty casket or kept a candle burning or stood at a window every night waiting for a headlight that never came. She knew that grief.
“How old are they?” she asked.
“Hard to tell, but best guess is she died right before or right after he grabbed Alice.”
Greta looked down at her coffee. The surface had gone still. She hadn’t taken a sip in five minutes. “So he’s been at this for a long time.”
“Longer than anyone wants to think about.” Naomi leaned against the porch rail beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. “They found things at the cabin. Older personal items that couldn’t belong to Alice. The property records show he bought that cabin in 1994. He was twenty-four.”
And Alice disappeared in 2011.
He bought the cabin seventeen years before that. Greta did the math without wanting to. Seventeen years of a cabin in the woods with a basement and a ring bolted into concrete.
“Jesus.” She swallowed down a surge of bile and faced her best friend. “What happens if he doesn’t talk?”
“He’ll go to trial, and he’ll probably get life. He won’t ever go free, but those other families out there will never know what happened to their daughters or sisters.”
Greta stared at her for a beat. After Alice disappeared, Naomi had been the closest thing she’d had to a sister. She knew when Naomi was holding back.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Naomi shook her head. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
“Nomi, tell me.”
She swore under her breath. “Greta?—”
“Tell. Me.”
“Fuck.” This time, the curse wasn’t under her breath. “He said he’d talk, but only to you.”
Everything in Greta went cold, and then flashed hot.
“You don’t have to,” Naomi added quickly. “I’m not asking you to. I’d never ask you to. Nobody expects this of you.”
“I’ll do it.”
The words came out before she’d fully processed them. Her coffee mug was still cold in her hands, the liquid untouched, but her mind was already moving ahead—past the porch, past the ranch, into a room with Cody Simms on the other side of a table.
“Greta.” Naomi’s voice went sharp. “No. That’s not?—”
“I’m not asking for permission.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying. He’s playing you. He wants to hurt you.”
“I know exactly what he wants.” She set her mug down on the railing too hard, and the coffee sloshed over the edge. “He wants to look at me. He wants to see my face when he tells me things that will keep me up at night. He wants to feel powerful one more time.”
“Then why give him that?”
“Because I’m not the only one who lost someone. Those other women. Their families. They deserve answers, too. I got Alice back, but they won’t get their sisters back. The least I can do is get them answers.”
Naomi’s jaw worked. Her dark eyes searched Greta’s face, looking for the crack, the place where she might talk her out of this. “What about Alice?”
“Don’t use her as a shield.”
“I’m not. I’m asking you to think about what this will do to her. She just got you back, too.”
