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Josie jumped to her feet, pistol pointed at Mathias. “Don’t move,” she said. “Put your hands up.”
For a fleeting second, he looked away from her and to Garrick. His face crumpled in pure anguish. Then he turned and ran. Josie yelled, “Get Mett and Noah.” Then she ran after him. For the first time since they’d arrived, she felt the slap of cold air and the stillness all around. The further she got from the house, the darker it became. Pausing momentarily, she took her phone out and pulled up the flashlight app, simultaneously trying to scan the area around her. Once she had it on, she turned the beam outward, holding the phone beneath her pistol so that the light and the barrel of her gun were pointed in the same direction. She strained to hear anything in the silence.
Then came the sound of rustling. A twig snapped.
Josie turned in the direction from which it had come and ran toward a wooded area near the side of the house. “Mathias!” she called out. “Mathias Tobin! My name is Josie Quinn. I’m a detective with the Denton Police Department. I just want to talk.”
She tried to move more quietly, listening intently for any sound. Each time she heard it, she turned her body in that direction and picked her way through trees and over rocks and brush. Every movement she made sounded impossibly loud. Even her breathing seemed cacophonous. Soon she had to stop altogether and listen, then begin again. A few times, she pressed the flashlight beam to her side so that it wouldn’t be visible. She tried to keep her body still until she heard him move again. He tried to match her movements, but she outwaited him every time.
“Mathias! Please stop running. I just want to talk!”
Footsteps rushed away from her. She followed. The trees gave way to a clearing. She panned the area with the flashlight, but the phone’s beam was weakening. She was going to lose the charge soon. “Mathias! Talk to me. I’m investigating the death of Keri Cryer. If you cared about her, you’ll help me.”
She froze in the middle of the clearing, turning in a slow circle, the beam dwindling as the moments passed. Then Mathias materialized from the darkness, inches from the barrel of the gun, squarely in the middle of the light. Josie suppressed a gasp, tightening her fingers around the pistol’s grip. “Put your hands where I can see them,” she said.
His shoulders made a small movement. In her periphery she saw his two hands, pale and empty. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
She studied his face. All she saw was devastation. His cheeks were sunken. He hadn’t looked quite this gaunt on the video Scarlett March had provided. The place where the bridge of his nose hooked was more pronounced in person. This close, she could see what she hadn’t been able to see in the pictures of him, even in his driver’s license photo. The eyelashes of his left eye were white-blond, whereas those of his right eye were dark. Staring so closely into his pupils, she saw that his irises were blue but in his left eye, there was a slight discoloration, as if a sliver of the pupil had turned brown. She wondered if someone had hit him. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot, his eyelids puffy.
He’d been crying.
“Keri’s really dead?”
“I’m sorry,” Josie said.
She watched him swallow down his emotion, the features of his face rippling as he tried to compose himself. “She hasn’t returned my calls or texts. I knew she was mad at me—we had a fight—but it’s not like her to make me worry. Someone killed her, didn’t they?”
Instead of answering his question, Josie said, “I’ve got handcuffs in my pocket. Since you ran away from a crime scene and did not respond to my commands, I’d like to put them on you for the walk back to the residence.”
Fear flitted across his face. He took a step back. “Please,” he said. “Don’t do that. I can’t—I can’t go back to prison.”
Calmly, Josie said, “No one said anything about prison, Mathias. I just want to go back to my stationhouse in Denton and talk to you.”
“I didn’t hurt Keri,” he blurted out. “I swear to you. I would never hurt her. Ever. I love her. Loved her.” A tear slid down his cheek and he used a hand to wipe it away.
“Hands up,” Josie reminded him.
He followed her instructions. It was automatic, she realized. A result of his foray into the criminal justice system. He said, “I told you, I’m not going to hurt you. I wouldn’t hurt anyone. Not Keri, not Garrick. Not anyone.”
“Then why are you running?” Josie asked.
“I can’t—I can’t tell you, and I can’t risk going back inside until I get all this figured out.”
“All of what figured out?”
He took another step backward, but Josie followed. The light was growing dimmer. Her forehead pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Some muted part of her mind realized she had no idea where she was or how to get back to the house. She had no idea if there were even other residences up on this mountain.
“Mathias,” Josie tried again. “If you did nothing wrong then you have nothing to worry about.”
He looked down, a noise coming from his throat that was half laugh and half sob. “You’re naïve if you believe that.”
In that moment, he looked utterly defeated. His body seemed to shrink down. Tears streamed down his cheeks now in earnest and he made no move to staunch them. His hands, aloft in the air, began to tremble. Josie tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. What if Hallie was right? What if he really wouldn’t hurt another person—ever? He’d grown up in foster care and in an eighteen-month period lost the only parents he’d ever known, all while fighting rape allegations. By the time those were resolved, at the tender age of eighteen, he’d taken his younger foster sister and raised her—something he didn’t have to do. It was a weighty responsibility that most eighteen-year-olds would run from. Then one night, he’d had an argument with Jana in the parking lot of a gas station. He’d clearly thought she was in danger—insane—for doing whatever it was she’d been planning. He’d asked her to stop. Two days later she was dead, and ten years later, he was still under a cloud of suspicion for her death. Back then, he’d managed to move on, marrying Piper Grey, and starting a life. Then one day, he came home to find her with a bullet in her head. He went to prison. When Garrick Wolfe stepped in and hired a firm to have him exonerated, he was finally free. Again, he found someone to love. They were trying to start a family. Now she was dead, too.
“Mathias,” Josie said softly. “Who’s doing this to you?”
He looked up, searching for her eyes. Josie lowered the flashlight a fraction so that he could see her. His entire face changed, agony giving way to soaring hope. He looked like someone had seen him for the first time in his life.
He swallowed. “It’s complicated.”
