Page 111 of Shhh…It’s A Killer Story

"This isn't on you, Elias."

"Feels like it."

"It isn't."

"Ten women."

"You didn't take them."

"I also haven't fucking found them."

"Yet."

The word hung there. Yet. I leaned my head back against the cold stone wall and closed my eyes. Ten women. One killer. One sheriff I didn't fucking trust. One deputy that made my skin crawl.

We sat against the rough river-stone wall, our shirts soaked through with grey circles of sweat, our chests rising and falling in the damp quiet of the basement. I held a plastic bottle of freezing water against the raw, scraped skin of my knuckles, the cold stinging the cuts until my fingers went numb.

The machine was finally winding down, the heavy, manic heat from the station leaving my blood.

"Something doesn’t make sense with this kidnapping and the way Walker is acting."

I said, my voice dropping into the quiet room, the heavy bag still swaying gently an inch from my boots. Nobody laughed. Nobody disagreed. Mason took a long swallow from his bottle, his eyes tracking the dark knots in the overhead timber.

"He shut down three separate leads on the flatbed tracks. He didn't even log the mileage for the secondary search grid before he called the state investigator in. That’s not a jurisdictional panic, Elias. That’s a burial."

"And Collins..."

Derek added, his voice losing every trace of its playful cadence as he leaned his head back against the stone, his brow furrowed. He paused, his fingers tracing the edge of his eagle tattoo.

"I don't like him. I don't like the way he stands in the back of the room. He’s too clean."

"Neither do I,"

I muttered, the image of his uniform shirt pressing down on Seraphina’s car door flashing behind my eyes.

"He watches people," Mason said, his gravelly monotone falling like an axe into the quiet.

"Not like a cop," I noted, looking at him.

"No," Mason whispered, his slate-grey eyes finally lifting to meet mine, cold and unblinking.

"Like prey. He looks at a room like he’s counting the exits before he takes the meat."

The line sat in the basement like a block of ice. It was a chilling thing to hear from a guy who had spent half his life tracking human target arrays, and it told me everything I'd been trying to avoid since Tuesday morning. The leak wasn't coming from the outside. The dark was already inside the building. Derek shifted his weight, his blue eyes turning serious as he looked across the canvas at me.

"Those women, Elias... the ten pins on that board. They're not gone because of you."

I didn't answer. I just kept my eyes fixed on the raw skin of my knuckles, the water from the bottle dripping onto my boots with a steady, maddening precision.

Drip.

Drip.

"You can't carry everybody that disappears in these mountains, man," Derek continued, his voice quieter now.

"You're a detective, not a saviour. You didn't build the woods."

I didn't say a word. Because the ledger didn't care about philosophy, and every time I closed my eyes, I could still see the ten empty spaces where those lives used to be, their names floating in the dark like unread case files. Mason quietly reached over, his rough, scarred hand settling heavily on my shoulder.