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“Just you now?” Lifting her head, the chef she’d seen in the kitchen stood beside her table. He still wore his dirty apron, his long fingers clutching a notepad.
“What happened to the waitress?”
The man huffed, slapping the pad against his thigh. “Didn’t show and none of the other waitresses will answer their phones. I’m on my own. What can I get ya?”
Vera looked around the room. There were other people seated around the diner, each one of them a man. Elderly. Middle-aged. Dressed in hunting gear. Dressed casually. Scanning the town square outside she saw a handful of people but not a single person she recognized. Not Lily, Mrs. Maller, or Daisy. Not even Mrs. Malis and she seemed to be everywhere.
A flash of purple caught her eye. A long braid trailed behind the girl as she ran across the street. With the large pack on her shoulder, Sam was running back towards the same house she’d squatted at the first time they met. She was supposed to be gone already.
Vera burst out of the chair, running after her.
Chapter 35
Teddi
“Lily!” Teddi bellowed her name, banging on her front door for the third time. Peering into the windows, hands cupped around her eyes, she could see nothing. Every light was off and the TV she’d been watching the last time they came to see her was black. “Shit.”
Teddi took off on a jog. She meant what she said about leaving. She didn’t want to leave Vera in Sylen, but she couldn’t trust her. That new certainty was a bitter pill caught in her throat. Asking what happened in D.C., knowing what she knew from J’s report, it was the bare minimum. She would’ve listened to her side and trusted that there was more to the story. Vera was there when those men died. She knew what happened and Teddi would have heard her out, free and clear.
Slowing down from the fifteen-minute jog, she ran up the pathway leading to Mrs. Maller’s home. If she could interview them one more time, interview any one of the victim’s families, she might be able to get something that could help the people of Sylen before she left.
“Mrs. Maller? Daisy?” Knocking loudly, she lifted onto her tiptoes trying to see into the murky glass on the top of the large door. If Vera were here she could peer inside easily. Frustrated at the thought, she jumped. Nothing. Their house was just as dark as Lily’s. She hadn’t seen her mother, Nora, at the diner either.
Where the fuck was everyone? Some all-hands-on-deck PTA meeting after the men tried to start a mob against the Sheriff? Where would everyone gather in a town without a library or large building?
Heading towards their fence gate, she pushed it open. Whoever went through it last had forgotten to latch it shut. Taking the back steps two at a time, she rattled the door, slapping it hard.
“Daisy! Mrs. Maller!” She turned her ear to the wood, straining to hear a creak of a floor or a hushed whisper. Silence.
The sky split open on a booming crack as irate thunder rumbled overhead. Heart skipping, she watched as pillows of black clouds unfurled, spurts of fractured lightning bursting across the dark blanket. It shrank the world as the sky pressed down on the Earth.
Sniffing, she turned towards the wall of forest along the back property line. Someone was burning something. It wasn’t leaves, the sour stench of it making her eyes water. It was earthy but rotten, indistinct but wrong. Rubbing her stinging nose, she tried to find evidence of where it came from. The sky was too dark for a cloud of smoke to be evident from where she stood.
Growling in her fast-growing frustration, she looked once more at the home and took off down the road. It would be faster to cut through the forest but the throbbing split in her scalp from her last foray had her hitting the pavement.
The strange, inky black forest was too maze-like, too busy, and full of its own machinations. As if the clouds poured out poisonous gas instead of rain, the stench became stronger. Eyes watering, she ran faster, trying to escape it. The fetor reminded her of what they smelled the first time they visited the crime scene in the glade. It was all-consuming now.
She pumped her arms harder, legs burning as she willed herself to outrun the apprehension nipping at her heels. She made it two-thirds of the twenty-minute distance before her cell rang.
“I was going to call you in a few,” she panted, her raw nerves riding her harder than the cardio.
“What’s happened?” It was Mackey, the echoing sound of her voice telling Teddi she was on speakerphone. She texted them about Deputy Gunson immediately after they verified he was in the cellar, but it’d been radio silence since.
“Shit hit the fan. I need a ride outta here. Mackey, you need to come cover for me.” She couldn’t tell her why and she knew J hadn’t shared the intel on Vera yet. She’d made her promise to wait until they were done with the investigation. Mackey would lock Vera out so tight she would never let her in again. Trust lost by Mackey was never regained. By anyone.
For some reason Teddi couldn’t bring herself to do that to her, to cut a fresh relationship, even one so small. She could feel the desire to believe—even now—that it was all a big misunderstanding. Her divided hope was an illness for which there was no cure.
“What the hell are you talking about? You’ve just seen a fifth victim get dropped and you’re leaving?” J yelled, her voice pitching into a high screech. “I knew we should’ve called this in already.”
Frustration overrode pain as she slowed her pace. Days of half-truths piled up like shit in a pasture and she let it happen. She hadn’t pushed, hadn’t wanted to seem too desperate or needy or whatever to her ex-girlfriend. She listened as J went on, not giving her the green light yet to make the call, building up the courage to do so.
“We’ll get back to that. We got the lab results back. There were fingerprints on the note.”
Teddi’s steps faltered. “Whose?”
“Deputy Isaac Butler.” Before she could reconcile the information with what she knew about the young deputy, J went on, speaking quickly. “There’s DNA on all of the bodies but no matches came up in the system.” Teddi’s face went slack. Deputy Butler didn’t appear capable of committing murder but that didn’t mean anything. Who the hell— “The fibers collected from the strangulation marks show it was from cotton rope. It’s commonly used for clotheslines.”
Realization hit Teddi like a jab to the gut.
