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After he ended the call, feeling like a jerk, something niggled in his chest.
Carrie. The name sounded familiar. As if he’d seen it recently. He replaced the umbrella back in the metal can and retrieved the list of missing women from Blue Harbor and the surrounding areas, scanning the names.
His chest constricted. He had seen it and remembered because the spelling was unique. Not C-a-r-r-i-e but C-a-r-r-i.
Carri Evans.
Missing ten months ago from Kill Devil Hills. Her car had been found empty at a Food Lion, and there had been no video footage of the parking lot. She’d vanished.
Retrieving his cell phone from his pocket, he Googled the name in connection with a flower.
His search popped.
Carri could be short for carrion.
The corpse flower.
Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina
Friday, September 7
9:45 a.m.
Rain had mercilessly continued and slicked down the windows like tears, matching the ones on Mrs. Evans’s cheeks. After Ty conveyed the new information in the group text, Selah sent him an address for Mrs. Evans in Kill Devil Hills, where Carri grew up.
Mrs. Evans lived in a two-story cedar-planked house on the beach. Sand dunes rose like mountains on either side of the home, and her private boardwalk was only steps from the semi-private beach.
Could Carri leaving Garrick have triggered his plan? On his hunt for his wife who’d left with Dalen, did he discover Ahnah and Bexley? Did his revenge plot take shape then?
Mrs. Evans sipped tea from a tiny china cup with red blooms. Her haircut was more for comfort than style and was streaked with gray, matching her weary eyes. “I was suspicious of the Family of Glory. I know a cult and commune when I see it, but Carri had been obsessed with Garrick. She met him when she was a server at Jimmy Jo’s Bar and Grill.” She handed Ty a photo of the woman. Average height, slender. Long, dark hair and dark eyes. Pretty smile.
“She’s very lovely.” Presently, they had no way to know if she was deceased. No evidence she’d been tattooed in flowers that were known to smell like rotting flesh, though beautiful.
Mrs. Evans went on to share the best about her daughter. Kind and sweet to everyone. She lit up a room. If he had a dollar for how many times he heard that exact phrase... It might be somewhat true, but in his line of work, he discovered far more secrets about the “lights in rooms.” Dark secrets. But he let a grieving mother grieve and think of her baby girl as a perfect human being with no dark parts, no ill behavior.
“Did you mention that he belonged to a cult?”
“I tried. But he was a smooth talker. Even I got caught up in him for a moment with the way he discussed the Family, and even the uglier sides—I’d seen them in the news a couple of times. I wasn’t in love with him, though, and wasn’t as enamored as Carri.”
If anyone was a carrion flower, it was Garrick.
“After he had her in his grips, he isolated her from me and her friends and eventually took her to Asheville to his big fancy home. I had no contact with her for three years. Then she called me and said she was coming back to the Outer Banks. Never said much about her time there. I met her for lunch at the Blue Marlin in Blue Harbor. I tried to coax her into telling me about her time in the Family, but she said things weren’t as they seemed and that was it. We never talked about it again.”
Mrs. Evans shrugged. “Two weeks later she vanished again from the grocery store. That was over ten months ago now. I assumed she’d had a change of heart and gone back, but I reported her missing anyway about four days later.”
Had local law enforcement talked with Garrick? If Carri had left the Family with Dalen...had Dalen done something to her? Why didn’t he report her missing? Did she think she was in the arms of a lover only to discover she’d been trapped into the arms of a madman who wanted revenge on Garrick and the Family?
“You think that flower killer person has her, don’t you?” Mrs. Evans wiped her nose. “Because she’s named Carrion and we call her Carri for short. I know it’s a flower. But that’s not what I named her after. He has to know that. She has to have told him it was my maiden name. Sharla Carrion. My husband and I divorced, but I kept his last name. It was easier.”
“I’m not sure where Carri is, but we’re doing everything in our power to find the person who might have taken her.” A gust of wind knocked over something outside, and the clanging startled Mrs. Evans.
“I wonder if hunkering down and waiting out the hurricane is smart,” she said. “What will you be doing?”
That was the million-dollar question. “I have family here, so...” Family that didn’t even know about him. “If you think of anything, please call me.” He stood and dreaded heading out in the downpour. The wind alone was fierce. News said it could get up to seventy miles per hour before landfall and then...then it was going to be unbelievable. He hunched forward, pushing against the gales to the vehicle. He’d been pushing against dark gales since this case had begun. But he wasn’t giving in or backing down.
As he opened the car door, the wind assumed control, and it flew from his grip. He ducked inside, soaking, and put some grit into shutting the door. Once inside he called Owen.
He answered. “What’s up?”
