My voice is loud enough for a couple of passing residents to glance over, which is the point. Yes, I’ve just convinced myself that it doesn’t matter, but in my gut, I still don’t want anyone accusing me of impropriety.
I ease inside. The first thing I notice is that the hall-closet door is open. Wide open. As if Gloria grabbed her shoes and left in a hurry? I file that aside and continue in. I do a quick sweep to be sure she isn’t unconscious on the kitchen floor or asleep wearing earplugs. She is not.
I slow for a second sweep. It’s easier here than in Jolene’s apartment. Gloria’s is immaculate. So when I see a folded piece of paper on the kitchenette table, it grabs my attention.
It’s a page torn from a standard town notebook. The writing is shaky and uneven. The quick-and-dirty way to disguise handwriting is to write with your nondominant hand. That’s what this looks like.
The note reads:
THEY’RE LYING ABOUT JOLENE. IT WAS NO ACCIDENT. WE CAN’T LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT. YOU’LL SEE WHAT I MEAN.
The note ends there. I frown, and then I see faint markings through the paper. I turn it over, and there’s a map. It’s crudely drawn but labeled in that same shaky hand, leading to an X.
Leading to the spot where we found Jolene’s body.
I stare at the map, my brain chugging through the implications. Why send Gloria there? It’s not as if we were hiding where we found the body. Enough people saw us guarding the area to have a rough idea of the location. Yes, this pinpoints it exactly, but what could Gloria find there that would prove Jolene was murdered?
Nothing.
Not a damn thing had been at the scene, even when we found her body. No weapon. No blood. No “proof” of murder.
There’s nothing to find because that’s not the point. The point is to get Gloria into the forest, alone. What would possibly lure her in? Not a note to a secret meeting, that’s for damned sure.
But this? Proof that her friend had been murdered? A map luring her to a spot that seems safely close to our borders?
I look at the open closet door, and there is no doubt that Gloria got this note and went running.
Went running straight into a trap set by whoever delivered this note.
A note sent by someone who knows exactly where Jolene’s body was found.
Because they put it there.
THIRTY-TWO
I round up Dalton and Storm. As we hurry along, I explain, keeping my voice low. Dalton’s reaction is the obvious one. “What the fuck was she thinking?” Everyone in town knows Conrad was lured into the forest. Yet we believe someone still managed to lure Jolene in to her death. And now someone has lured in Gloria. At some point, you really need to start questioning the IQ level of our residents. Yet while I understand Dalton’s frustration, I also see how this happened, and I can’t blame the victims for seeming to follow this lemming pattern.
Conrad was desperate for stories to share after he pretended he already had more. Easy lure there.
I have no idea how Jolene ended up in the forest, but she’s not alive to tell us, which could mean there was no note involved. Someone asked for a private forest meeting, and she agreed because Conrad’s attacker was in prison. Also, it suggests she knew whoever lured her in well enough not to think twice.
Now we have Gloria, who’d been very obviously upset over Jolene’s death. Who may have suspected it wasn’t misadventure, knowing how much Jolene hated the forest. Gloria, who’d wanted to speak to me. Gloria, whom I had been avoiding.
I have guilt here, but I need to set that aside. The point is that I don’t blame Gloria for investigating. It was close enough to town that she’d have felt safe.
We check the site first, on the off chance Gloria is there. Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe someone other than the killer and ourselves knew where Jolene’s body had been found. Someone got a glimpse of her corpse and knew “death by misadventure” didn’t cover a slit throat.
Gloria is not there, and there’s no sign of anyone around. I’d grabbed a scent marker from Gloria’s apartment. That hadn’t been easy. We shut down the laundry this morning, but she’d obviously taken a load in the day before, and her hamper had been empty. I’d grabbed the hand towel from her bathroom. If that’s not enough for Storm, then we’ll retreat to Gloria’s apartment and proceed from there. Storm sniffs the towel and then snuffles around, and in a moment, she’s hot on the trail.
We spend the next half hour following Gloria’s trail as darkness falls. Storm has it, and then she loses it, as whoever took Gloria does the one thing Brandon didn’t: walks through water, effectively hiding their trail. Storm picks it up again where they exited, but that takes a bit of time.
There are no other diversions. Whoever took Gloria ran through one stream and decided they’d hidden the trail well enough.
We get another fifty feet before a scream rings out. We run, twisting and dodging trees, flashlight beams swinging in front of us, cutting a swatch of jerky light. I’m behind Dalton, both of us running as fast as we dare in the shadowed forest.
The first shriek had been surprise. That dies down, and we hear garbled panic that sounds like “No! Go! Get away!” Then a growl. An animal growl.
Dalton pulls away, running faster. I struggle to keep up, but if he hears me fall behind, he’ll slow. My foot catches in the undergrowth, and I stumble. He starts to turn.
“Go!” I say. “I’m fine!”
The voice comes clearer now. Female. Gloria? It sounds like her. She’s telling someone—something?—to stay back, to go away.
Dalton stops short, hands going out to hold me back as a sharp wave orders Storm to stop. I move up beside him to see what he does. It is Gloria. She’s backed against a rocky hillside. In front of her is a snarling gray canine.
I think “wolf” but the coloring is wrong. Then the beast snaps, and I see freckles on its pale muzzle. Wolf-dog. An Australian-shepherd-and-wolf mix, like Raoul. A pup from an earlier litter? This dog is older, more wolf in size and shape, big and powerful.
It snaps at Gloria, who bats her hands as if to fend off attack. She’s streaked with dirt. Blood drips from one hand, and there’s more smeared on her shirt.
“Go!” she says. “Shoo!”
She kicks. She means it as a threat, and that’s exactly how the wolf-dog interprets it. But for a predator, threat can mean different things. When cornered by an animal, you want to show them they shouldn’t mess with you. From Gloria—an average-size human already smelling of blood—that kick doesn’t scare the wolf-dog. It pisses it off.