“Abby, trust me here,” he said softly. “You don’t want to see this. Do you really want to see the boy who you used to kiss and hold hands with with half of his head missing?”
She sucked in a sharp breath, her green eyes widening, a dark flush rising on her freckled cheeks. She opened her mouth to say something, but was interrupted by the sound of an engine rumbling toward them. Zooey came driving down the road in the truck and hopped out. She reached into the back, pulled out her messenger bag, and headed to the porch. Paul and Abby watched as she suited up, pulling booties over her shoes and tucking her hair back.
“Cyrus,” she called. “I’m gonna need you to get out of there. I don’t want any more contamination of my crime scene.”
“You’re pretty bossy for a nerd,” the mountain man commented as he ambled out of the cabin.
“Haven’t you heard? All nerds are bossy,” Zooey drawled sarcastically. “All of you, stay out here,” she directed. “I want to get a feel for the scene without all your reactions clogging up the science.”
Without another word, she disappeared into the cabin. The three of them stood on the porch, falling into an awkward silence as the adrenaline from the initial ambush began to fade.
Paul’s mind was working through it, what this meant. He kept his hand on the gun at his hip, aware that if someone had killed Ryan, he very well might be out there, somewhere, watching . . . waiting.
Who the hell were they dealing with here?
The cabin door opened and Zooey stepped out, a somber expression on her face. In her hand, was a small leather-bound bible, which she gave to Paul after he pulled on the pair of gloves she handed him.
“Last page,” she said.
Paul thumbed to the back of the bible, his heart thumping when he realized what he was reading.
This was the Clay family bible, an old one, where the births and deaths of each member of the family were recorded. And at the very bottom, there was an addition that made his stomach drop:
Baby 2002–2002 Lost with her mother
He took a deep breath, steeling himself and looked to Zooey. “What do we know?” he asked.
“Okay, first of all, there’s no way that guy shot himself,” Zooey said. “The blood splatter’s all wrong. Hell, even the shotgun on the floor’s at the wrong angle. Plus, there is bruising on his wrists that indicates he was tied. Few tests, and I bet I’ll find rope fibers in his skin.”
“So it’s a staged suicide,” Paul said.
“Not a very good one,” Cy muttered.
“He’s right,” Zooey said. “This is pretty damn messy.”
Abby frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. If Ryan was killed by Dr. X’s apprentice . . . our unsub is good enough to frame an infamous serial killer. But he can’t stage a suicide?”
“You’re also right,” Zooey said. “Which is why I say we get the hell out of here. Now. Because he’s probably out there, lurking in the woods, waiting to pick us off, like a creepy, murderous lumberjack.”
Abby looked over her shoulder nervously.
“Your geek’s right, Paul,” Cy said, shooting a sly glance at the annoyed way Zooey pursed her lips. “This is starting to feel like a setup.”
Paul peered at the tree line. Part of him wanted to shout into the darkness: Come and get me. But he couldn’t. He might have, if it had just been Cy and him. Cy was the kind of man who you wanted at your back with this sort of thing. But he wasn’t putting Abby or Zooey in that kind of danger.
Zooey had signed on for that when she joined the FBI. But Abby hadn’t.
“Let’s go,” Paul said, his mind made up. “Get in the truck with Cy,” he said. “I’m going to do one final search of the cabin.”
He waited until he was sure they were secure in the truck with Cy before going back inside.
The evidence box Ryan had taken was sitting on the kitchen table, and Paul went over and grabbed it. For a moment, he just stood in the middle of the cabin, acutely aware of the body out of the corner of his eye.
Ryan Clay had been a narcissistic, misogynistic asshole who loved power plays and apparently also loved taking advantage of teenage girls’ naiveté, if his “relationship” with Keira Rice was any indication, and he was likely the father of Cass’s baby, but he hadn’t killed Cass.
No, he’d been the unsub’s patsy. A failsafe that had been planned years in advance, just in case someone ever got far enough to connect Keira Rice’s disappearance with Cass’s murder.
But why stage the scene so badly? That was the question. Paul puzzled over it as he carried the box back to the truck, setting it in the bed before climbing inside.
As they drove away, Paul kept an eye on his phone, and as soon as they were back in cell phone range, he called Sheriff Alan and told him he’d need to send the deputies out.
There was a crime scene to take care of.
Chapter 25
Abby felt like she’d been through a war where no one was the victor. By the time Zooey had headed off to her motel, and Cyrus had disappeared, practically fading into the mist like some sort of cowboy of yore, it was late.
Roscoe was snoozing upstairs, drooling on her pillow like it was his own, so she went downstairs. She checked the corkboard in the mudroom, seeing that Jonah, her orchard manager, had left her a note that said: Fed Roscoe for you.
She needed to track Jonah down tomorrow and thank him. She hadn’t been checking in at all since Paul had arrived, and that wouldn’t do. Jonah had the orchard running like a well-oiled machine, but she liked to be in the know. She didn’t want him to feel like the burden of the place was all on him while she reaped the profit. One of the big changes she had made after her father died was to give each of her workers a share in the orchard. This land may have been in her family for generations, but she wasn’t going to be the removed owner in the farmhouse, watching like a queen over the serfs who worked her land. All her employees had a hand in the orchard’s success—and they deserved a piece of it. It was only fair, when there were entire families who’d worked for her father for decades.
Paul had left for his house, going back across the meadow, and as tired as she was, Abby felt restless and unable to sleep . . . like she’d drunk too much coffee and the jitters were just starting to set in.
She’d been wrong about Ryan. That was clear now. She would feel a flash of guilt for thinking he was a murderer, but apparently, the man preyed on Keira Rice, got into a predatory, illegal relationship with her, and then had never come clean when she disappeared. So she was saving all her sympathy for Keira—and the other girls missing along I-5.
What had happened to Keira? Abby racked her brain, trying to think of the most likely scenario. Their unsub had a type. That meant he sought the girls he took out. Probably stalked them for a while. And Keira had been taken later in the year than the other girls. Had it been harder to get to her? Taking her from a motel parking lot was risky. It was the first time she’d gone to a soccer meet without her parents. Had the unsub just been waiting for his chance to take her, and when she snuck out to meet Ryan, he took advantage of the opportunity presented?
That seemed the most reasonable explanation. If Ryan had showed up late—or Keira had snuck out early—then Ryan could have missed Keira’s abduction completely. She could’ve been gone before he even pulled into the motel parking lot.
Maybe she wasn’t cut out for this, she thought miserably.