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Once the scene at the farm had been processed, the brand they believed was used on Sharon and Keri had been discovered inside Vance’s truck. Its sudden appearance didn’t sit well with Josie, but the district attorney was thrilled about it. Between the brand found in his truck and the other circumstantial evidence against him, they felt there was enough to charge him with the Denton murders. They also felt the branding and the strength of Anya’s testimony about the abuse she’d suffered at his hands would be enough to sway a jury. The fact that Denton’s K-9 unit had alerted them to the scent of human remains in the back of the Hadlees’ white sedan was dubious, since it was possible that Vance had transported Susanna Hadlee’s partial remains in the sedan when he brought them to Garrick. The district attorney felt strongly that they wouldn’t even need the car to convince a jury that Vance had killed Sharon Eddy and Keri Cryer.
Josie and what was left of her team had discussed the matter several times. The initial search of Vance’s truck, performed by her and Gretchen, had been thorough. Josie was sure that they hadn’t missed the brand—it simply hadn’t been there. She floated the idea that someone else had put it there after the fact to properly frame him. The rest of the team disagreed. The consensus was that Vance must have been hiding the brand somewhere off the premises when committing the murders. Josie wasn’t sold on any of it, but as the district attorney had pointedly told her, it wasn’t her job to try cases, only to solve them. When Josie pointed out that the DNA found on Keri Cryer’s coat had not matched Vance—or anyone else in law enforcement’s databases—he had made excuses. The DNA was on her coat, not under her nails. It could have been unrelated to the crime. The bottom line was the DA was proceeding against Vance no matter what Josie thought.
“We have enough to proceed, so that’s what we’re going to do,” he had said.
But no one could stop her from coming to see Mathias and trying to tie up some loose ends. She’d lost a dear friend and colleague over this case. She wanted the truth—or as much of it as she could dig up with the people who were left alive. Her next stop would be the Hadlee farm, where Lark had agreed to speak with her. With Dermot gone, she was fully cooperating with both the Bly Police Department and Denton. She’d allowed a team from the state police, on loan to Bly, to begin digging up the north side of the farm in hopes of finding the rest of Susanna Hadlee’s remains. She wasn’t the only person coming forward with information after Dermot’s death. The three cheerleaders who’d accused Mathias of rape in high school gave statements to Bly PD that Dermot had paid them to publicly accuse Mathias, just as Josie and Mettner had suspected.
“Detective Quinn?” Hallie’s voice pulled Josie from her thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” Josie said. “Yes, it looks like Vance will be charged with Sharon and Keri’s murders.”
Mathias met her eyes for a brief second. Something flitted across his face. Josie couldn’t be certain of the emotion. Fear? Regret?
She said, “Mathias, I wanted to thank you.”
“For what?”
Josie smiled at him. “Saving my life.”
He returned her smile. “You’re welcome.”
Hallie looked back and forth between them, grinning widely. She squeezed Mathias’s shoulder. “I told you he’d never hurt anyone.”
Mathias reached up and covered her hand with his, giving it a squeeze. Then he slyly moved it back to her lap. Hallie didn’t seem to notice this veiled rejection, or if she did, gave no indication. Turning his attention back to Josie, Mathias said, “That’s not the only reason you’re here.”
“I had some questions,” Josie admitted. “I was hoping to talk to you about a couple of things that still puzzle me.”
“Sure,” he said.
Hallie patted his knee. “I’ll go get us some coffee.”
He didn’t respond, didn’t even look at her. Hallie seemed oblivious, humming a happy tune under her breath as she disappeared into the kitchen. Josie heard the jingle of Flynn’s tiny bell. Then a small thump. Hallie said, “Flynn, stop that!”
Josie said, “The night that you talked to Jana at the gas station, what did she say to you?”
“I don’t remember it exactly,” Mathias said. “It’s been a long time, but I’ll do my best. Basically, she said that she had found someone who could change our lives. She had arranged a meeting with him. She said everything was going to be different for all of us afterward. She was pretty vague. At first, I thought she was talking about a cult or some kind of pyramid scheme type of thing. I told her it sounds like a scam to me. Them wanting to meet after nine at night? Sounded suspicious.”
Josie remembered the video. “She didn’t listen to you.”
“Not even a little bit,” Mathias said. He glanced over at the fireplace where the last log was slowly giving way to ash. “I got scared. The way her eyes looked—it was like when she was little, and Hallie would make her favorite cake. We tried to ration it ’cause she’d eat the whole damn thing till she got sick from it. Then she’d miss school. We were always afraid the state would take her from us if anything even remotely bad happened, so we were careful about everything. Didn’t want her getting sick or hurt. We were already on shaky ground with the rape accusations in my past. We were shocked the caseworker even agreed to let us take her, but she said the charges being dropped were good enough for her. The foster care system was already overloaded. Anyway, sometimes, no matter what we told Jana—no TV for a whole day, or no going over to your friend’s house if you don’t follow the rules—she’d go and sneak the cake anyway. It got to the point where I could tell when she was going to break the rules no matter what the consequences. She’d get that look. Like she’d just found a pass for unlimited cake, and she didn’t care what she had to do to reach it. That’s the look I saw in her eyes that night at the gas station, and I’m ashamed to say I got physical with her.”
That tracked with what Josie and Noah had pulled from the video.
From the kitchen was another sound, something clinking and then rolling. Hallie’s voice was faint but audible. “Flynn! Honestly. You’re going to get the spray bottle!”
Mathias continued, “Jana said something like, what if I told you that you could finally know where you came from and who you really are—something like that. I said if she wanted to know those things, Hallie and I could help her do it. Not some random stranger asking her to come out at night. She said something like ‘Don’t you want to know the truth about where you came from?’ and we went back and forth. Me trying to tell her that Hallie and I could do that for her and her saying I wasn’t listening. Then she said something like, ‘What if I told you that you come from a family who was rich?’ I told her that sounded insane. She said something like, ‘Wouldn’t you want to know? What if your birth family had lots of money and it could be yours?’ I don’t remember her exact words now, but something along those lines.”
This was also consistent with the partial transcript they’d developed.
“Jana didn’t tell you that she was looking foryourbiological family?”
Mathias sighed. He rubbed his hands over his face again. “I mean, looking back, I guess that’s what she was doing. She kept saying, ‘Don’t you want to know?’ but I took that as a general thing. Like she was saying, as a fellow foster kid, didn’t I want to know? The same as she wanted to know. The same as probably every kid like us wants to know. I didn’t understand how badly I’d misread that situation until a couple of weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Josie said. She drew in a deep breath, trying to ignore the pain in her ribs. She’d need more ibuprofen soon. “Did you ever talk to Vance Hadlee after he came forward to exonerate you?”
Mathias shook his head. “No. I wanted to but after the way Dermot screwed me—refusing to confirm my alibi and sending me to prison for my own wife’s shooting—I wasn’t going near that farm. I wasn’t going near Bly. Garrick told me about our mom, though. He paid my legal fees, offered me a place when I got out. He showed me the stuff Vance had brought him. Vance had always had suspicions about his mom leaving. When he was younger, eight or nine, I guess, he caught Dermot burning up her things including her clothes, birth certificate, and driver’s license. But he was too young to put it together, I guess.”
“Garrick told you this,” Josie clarified.
