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I sat there, staring at my computer screen, feeling nothing but absolute shock and horror.
This couldn’t be real.
Never in a million years did I think my quest to find answers about what had been happening in Steel Ridge would lead me here. I would have laughed in the face of anyone who would have told me that I’d wind up looking at what I was looking at now.
A mug shot.
A mug shot of a teenage girl.
But it wasn’t just any teenage girl.
It was Hanna.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Desperately needing to find something to help with this case, I’d gone back years. Lots of years. And I started with the most recent victim, Archibald Hogan. As it turned out, Archibald went by the name Archie, and when Archie was just a teenager, so was Hanna.
Part of me was desperately hoping that this was merely a coincidence. She was a kid at the time, and we all did things that were stupid at that age. I certainly wasn’t an angel. But the other part of me had this awful, sneaking suspicion that there was more going on here. I didn’t want to do it, but as soon as my mind caught up with what my eyes were seeing, I knew I needed to do it.
I had to find out if Hanna was attached to these other people.
I’d have been lying if I said that for the first time in my career, I hoped I was wrong and wouldn’t find anything.
The first thing I did was start with Jimmy Moss. This one seemed the most unlikely, and that was probably the reason I started with it. From what I’d been able to gather, Hanna, Archie, and another kid named Garrett had all been picked up repeatedly for misdemeanor offenses. Since, on the surface, it seemed that they were all young kids making foolish mistakes that were the result of a lack of guidance in their lives, I had a feeling it’d be easy to make the connection between Hanna and Xavier. Maybe they’d both gotten into mischief somewhere along the way.
But Jimmy was different. I didn’t see how he could have any connection to Hanna. And it was the hope that I wouldn’t find anything there that led me to researching him first.
I wasn’t paying much attention to the time that passed, but it didn’t take me long to make a discovery. When I did, I wanted to kick myself.
Because I’d initially written the woman off based on the information I’d been given from the Steel Ridge PD. As it turned out, that was the wrong thing to do.
Now, I was looking at another mug shot. And this mug shot was of Suzanne Moss, Jimmy’s wife. But one look at her told me precisely who she was.
Her eyes bore a striking resemblance to Hanna’s, and there was no question in my mind that this woman was Hanna’s mother.
“Fuck,” I clipped.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I looked up to see Jax walking into my office. “Is everything alright?”
I shook my head. “No. Not at all.”
“What happened?”
I could feel the tension and anger bubbling up inside me, and I wasn’t sure I could even begin to understand where it was all coming from.
I’d just started getting to know Hanna, and nothing about any of my interactions with her would have led me to believe that she had led a life that was anything like what I was seeing.
Question after question ran through my mind. How? Why?
“You know that case I’m working on?” I replied.
“Yeah. I’m guessing you figured something out with it,” he returned.
Nodding, I confirmed, “Yeah. Hanna Briggs is the link.”
“Who?”
Wave after wave of frustration moved through me. I didn’t even have to research Xavier Pope, because I knew I was going to find that link there, too.
“Hanna Briggs,” I repeated. “She’s the owner of Short and Sweet.It’s the tiny home community that Ellery and, ultimately, Kane stayed in when Ellery was going through her whole situation.”
