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I shouted, ”Clear,” and Matt did the same.
“Anything?” he asked as we met in the hall.
“Nothing besides a nasty-ass bed and a collection of soda cans. Two different kinds. Guess he doesn’t have much allegiance.”
“No, guess not.” Matt motioned down the hall. “Let’s keep going. My room was empty. Not even a bed in there.”
We continued down the hall, trying to move fast without leaving any room for error or any chance for us to overlook anything.
“This looks like it’s the last room in this place,” Matt said, his eyes piercing through the dark shadows that crept through the hall, projected from a couple of bare-branched trees swaying just outside of the one un-covered window. “Ready?”
I nod, again, feeling ready so long as Matt was by my side. Whatever was in this room, we’d handle it together.
He opened the door, and we stepped in, covering every corner of it and making sure no one leapt out at us. It was an easy task, considering the room was a circular space without any corners or closets to hide in. There was an old table sitting on top of a crusty-looking rug with some drug paraphernalia scattered around, but nowhere for a serial killer to hide.
There also wasn’t anything to prove a serial killer even lived here.
Were we wrong? Could we have chased our own tails down the wrong rabbit hole? I looked to Matt, who seemed as confident as ever, his eyes raking over every inch of the room. He still had hope.
I got back to scanning the room, enough light snaking in through the boarded windows that I could make out a difference in the flooring. A slight miscoloring, like the space around the rug was lighter than the dust-covered floor further away. As if it was moved regularly, maybe to access—
“Help me move this,” I said. Matt didn’t even ask why. He grabbed the other side of the table, and we pushed it off the rug. I bent down and grabbed a corner, lifting it and sending a cloud of dust into the air.
And there it was. Just like I’d guessed.
A trap-fucking-door.
Now we had to decide whether we went deeper down this rabbit hole?
22
MATTHEW HALE
I put a hand on Jason’s shoulder, stopping him from opening the latch. This could all be a huge mistake. Jason and I may have been walking headfirst into a trap.
“Jace, what if the Pegasus planned for this to happen? Maybe it would be better to wait for the police to search this themselves?”
I used to be the one who’d run directly into the line of fire if it meant solving a case. Jason had always been the more calculated one in the pair, thinking things through a hundred different ways before feeling it necessary to think about it in a hundred other ways. It’s likely what had ended up causing the rift between us: Jason overthinks to the point of hurting himself or the people around him.
Not this time, though. The tables were flipped. Jason shook his head and reached for the rusty clasp in the creaking floorboard. “This is our case—we’ve been working it since the beginning. Stonewall Investigations opened in Blue Creek mainly because the police department was a bunch of incompetent blue-shirts holding guns. I’m not going to let them come storming in, possibly shutting us out, and ruining whatever evidence they end up finding. That’s not even taking into account that the Pegasus could actually be someone in the department—a common serial killer tactic is to embed themselves in law enforcement. The Unicorn did it. This guy could be doing the same.” He clicked open the latch and pulled the trapdoor, a chilly draft sweeping up from the dark.
Damn. I guess he had thought this through.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m going down first.”
He cocked a brow at that. An argument was clearly forming on the tip of his tongue, which I silenced with a kiss. When we separated, the argument had gone, and in its place was a smile.
I took a deep breath and started down the thin wooden planks that served as stairs. There wasn’t any kind of light source except for whatever sunlight crept into the room above. I grabbed my phone and turned on the flashlight, holding the phone crossed underneath the hand that held the gun.
Bright white light flooded the narrow stairwell, illuminating the last five steps I had before entering what appeared to be a carpeted room. There weren’t any sounds except for the gentle but accelerated breathing directly behind me. Jason always had a hand touching the small of my back in a sign of assurance.
I went down the final steps and snapped my gaze down the sight of my gun, scanning the room, spinning around in a circle and using my phone as a torch. The light cast long and distorted shadows on the wall from the chairs and desk it went over, a lamp momentarily taking on the shape of a thin assailant waiting in the shadows.
