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Barbara’s stomach rumbled. “That’ll be mine, thank you.”
Colleen rose smoothly. “I’ll leave you to enjoy your dinner.” She paused. “You know you really should try the barbecue night here…if you’re stopping that long.”
She smiled again and wafted away from the table.
The implication was not lost on Barbara. She wouldn’t be here that long. Her job was to tick boxes so that the local law enforcement could get on with the cull.
The girl placed her plate of food on the table. “You want to watch that one,” she said casually.
“Who? Reverend Grey?”
The girl raised an eyebrow. “She’s no more a Reverend than I am.” Then she tucked her serving cloth into her apron and walked away.
Barbara doused her fries with ketchup and stuck one in her mouth thoughtfully. Part of her already wanted to get out of this town as soon as she could. It was starting to stir up too many memories. I thought I got a hint of Midwest in your accent. And the accent wasn’t the only thing hard to shake.
But there was still that niggle. She liked to do things right. If you’re going to do a job, do it properly. No short cuts. They’ll always come back to bite you (no pun intended).
Belt, braces and a full metal jacket, Barbara.
Another Susan-ism. Barbara lifted the burger to her mouth and paused.
There it was.
The niggle.
The jacket.
She put the burger down and wiped her fingers on her napkin. Then she opened her laptop. The grainy footage began again. Marcus lay on the ground. Sweatshirt, jeans, no jacket. Marcus wasn’t wearing his jacket when the attack took place.
The phone slips from his hand, offering a view of the dirty floor and the cabin wall. Barbara paused the video and enlarged it. There. A faint gray blur.
The image was fuzzy but now she knew what she was looking at; it was obvious.
A jacket. Hanging on the wall.
“Gray. North Face. Brand new.”
Marcus’s jacket. He must have taken it off and hung it up.
But why? Had he returned to the cabin for more than his phone? A sexual assignation, perhaps? But why remove his jacket? It would have been freezing.
Unless…Marcus knew he was going to lie down on the cabin floor. And he didn’t want to get his jacket dirty.
Because it was brand new.
“Dammit,” Barbara whispered.
The footage wasn’t proof. It was staged.
6
Tucker sat on the deck of his cabin, staring out into the forest.
It was dark and freezing cold, but neither bothered him. Never had. Even as a child, Tucker had never feared the dark. His stepdad worked nights. Once the door closed behind him at 8 p.m., both he and his mom breathed a sigh of relief. Even the house seemed to settle more easily. A peace that would last until the front door burst open at nine o’clock the next morning.
Heat. That bothered Tucker. He’d never enjoyed the sun. Mornings, when his stepdad would sit out on the deck, swigging beer, seemed full of hot foreboding. As the sun rose higher and his stepdad got drunker, Tucker would feel the heat rash prickle across his skin. That was when he would seek out a hiding spot in the woods or under the decking, in the crawl space beneath the house where no one could reach him.
Back when he was a cop, it wasn’t during the long months of winter, with daylight barely scraping in an appearance for three hours a day, that he dealt with the most trouble in town. People were generally calm; they slept more and went out less. Summer, when the hours stretched longer and the sun clung to the blue sky, that was when the drinking and bar brawls began. When husbands remembered how they liked to beat up their wives for wearing a dress that showed a bit too much cleavage and underage kids got themselves doped up and lost in the woods, necessitating search parties and helicopters to the hospital. Heat. Sun. Tucker didn’t miss it.
