“I’ll be there,” he said. “But I’m not happy about it.”
The interview room was small and harshly lit by a single fluorescent bar overhead, the light flickering slightly at the edges. The metal table was bolted to the floor, with two chairs—one on either side—and a mirrored window. Greta knew state investigators were behind it, watching everything.
But it still didn’t stop the full-body chill that raced through her when she sat down across from Cody Simms.
He looked smaller than she remembered. His jail uniform hung loose on his frame, the orange faded at the seams. His arm was in a sling under the jumpsuit—King’s work, still healing—and the cuffs on his other wrist ran a short chain to the metal ring set into the table.
“You came,” he said softly, almost as if he were talking to himself. “I knew you would.”
“I’ve come for names.” Her voice came out steady, which was its own small victory. “Who did you bury in Alice’s clothes?”
He smiled. It wasn’t the smile he’d worn at town meetings, at the hardware store, at vigils where he’d stood beside her with his hand on her shoulder.
This was… ugly.
This was the monster hiding under the mask of civility.
“You look so much like Alice,” he said in a reverent tone. “How is she? I miss her.”
Greta’s stomach churned. She wanted to lunge across the table, wanted to wrap her hands around his throat and squeeze until his face went purple and his eyes bulged, and he understood what it felt like to be helpless.
Instead, she folded her hands on the table and kept her expression neutral.
“You don’t get to ask about her. You don’t get to know anything about her ever again.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping to just above a whisper. “You lost that privilege when you chained her to a wall for fifteen years.”
That ugly thing inside him flashed across his face again. “I saved her.”
“You tortured her.”
“I protected her.” His voice rose, and a guard shifted position near the door. “She was going to run away with Daniel Goodwin. He would have destroyed her. He would have?—”
“That was her mistake to make.” Greta’s fingernails dug into her palms. She could feel the heat rising in her chest, the anger that had been simmering since she woke up in that basement. But she needed to stay calm. Needed to get what she came for.
She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Tell me about the bones we found.”
Cody’s expression smoothed into something almost pleasant. “Tasha,” he said. “Her name was Tasha McLaughlin.”
Greta’s breath caught. A name. A real name, with a family somewhere, with people who had been searching. “Who was she?”
“She was a mistake.” His voice grew distant, as if he were remembering something from a long time ago. “I thought she looked like Alice. From a distance, in the right light, her hair was the same color. But up close...” He shook his head. “She wasn’t Alice. She was just... wrong.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“You killed her because she wasn’t my sister?”
“No.” Cody looked almost offended. “I never meant to hurt her. She was supposed to stay at the cabin with me. But she fought. She kept trying to escape. And then she got sick.”
“Sick?”
“Fever. I couldn’t get it down. I tried everything—medicine, cold compresses, even praying over her.” His voice cracked on the last word. “But she died. And I had to put her somewhere.”
“So you buried her in Alice’s clothes.”
“I needed people to think Alice was dead.” He leaned forward, the chain pulling taut. “I needed you to stop looking.”
Greta’s vision went white at the edges. She had to press her hands flat against the table to keep from reaching across it.
STOP LOOKING.
