The Deepest of Secrets, page 23
Definite dirt, suggesting recent wear. I pull a glove from my pocket and lift a boot to note the size. Eight. Men’s boots, too, which doesn’t mean they aren’t Marissa’s—the men’s are wider and some women find them more comfortable. As I’m setting the boot down, I notice a hair inside. I pluck it out. Dark brown. I have evidence bags in my pocket from earlier, and I tuck it into one.
I eyeball-measure the width of the boot’s toe and compare it to my notes. I haven’t gotten around to seeing exactly what size footprint I found, but this is a reasonable match. I rise and turn toward the general store. I should get the key from Dalton and measure sample boots.
No, I need to speak to Gloria first. Get that over with, and then I can measure boots.
Gloria lives in the next building. I rap on her door, and there’s a click before it swings open at my touch. It’d been closed, but not pulled completely shut.
I hold the knob so the door won’t open as I knock again, louder now. When she doesn’t answer, I push the door a few inches and call, “Gloria?”
No answer. I glance around, considering. My first reaction is to find someone who can confirm that I am only entering Gloria’s apartment for a welfare check. Then I remember our mantra. Does it matter? Nope.
Right now, no one cares what we do, short of hurting residents. Even if they did, what’s the council going to do? Fire me for violating a resident’s privacy? Yes, they’ve made their threat about exposing me, but they’ll save that in their hip pocket for a real emergency. A resident accusing me of breaking and entering hardly qualifies.
“Gloria?” I call. “I’m coming in. Your door was ajar and I’m concerned. We were supposed to talk tonight.”
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.
It’s not unlike when I’d been attacked in that alley all those years ago. I tried to disarm one of our attackers and that set them all off. Should I have not fought back? I can’t say for sure. It’s the second-guessing every survivor does. If I hadn’t tried to disarm them and I’d still been attacked, I’d have been forever cursing myself for not taking my shot when I saw it.
Gloria kicks at the wolf-dog, and her foot doesn’t land within a foot of it, but it’s all the canine needs. It lunges, and before we can act, Storm races out and slams into the wolf-dog’s side. A battering-ram strike. The wolf-dog goes flying into a roll. It scrambles up, but Storm has parked herself between the wild dog and Gloria. I have my gun trained on the wolf-dog, and Dalton has run forward, ready to intercede in case of a fight. The wolf-dog doesn’t notice us. It’s too busy staring at the mountain of black fur in front of it.
The wolf-dog’s nostrils dilate as it sniffs the air. I swear I see its brain processing.
Huh, it looks like a bear, but it smells like a dog.
Wolves are big, and this one isn’t much shorter than Storm. It’s all legs, though, with a muscular but slender body. Storm is pure mastiff bulk.
She lowers her head and growls. It’s a warning, one that says she has no interest in fighting—she’s just here protecting her people.
“Move along now,” Dalton says.
The wolf-dog’s head swings his way. It notices me in that sweep and then glances over at Gloria.
Not one terrified human woman, but three humans and a very big dog. I’ve seen movies where wolves don’t care about those odds. They still leap in, fangs flashing. Yet even with just Gloria versus the wolf-dog, the wild canine hadn’t been committed to attack until she lashed out. Now, it looks between us and back at Storm. Then it grunts, and its gaze moves to a tangle of brush.
Dalton follows its gaze and nods. “You’d like your dinner to-go, huh?”
I ease around and see what Dalton does. The reason the wolf-dog went after Gloria in the first place. Again, we might see movies where healthy wolves attack at random, but it’s rare enough to be almost unheard of. In that clump of brush I see fur and blood. Gloria stumbled on the wolf-dog with its prey, and it mistook her for a meal thief.
“Okay,” Dalton says. “We’re going to leave you to your dinner. Gloria? Can you carefully walk sideways until you’re behind Casey?”
Gloria nods, chin bobbing, eyes wide. She does as he says, and at the same time, Dalton moves to stand beside me.
“Storm?” I call.
She glances over out of the corner of one eye. She knows I want her to retreat, but it takes her a moment to figure out how to do that without exposing herself to attack. She sidles until she’s given the wolf-dog room to return to its meal.
The wolf-dog creeps back to the brush, grabs what looks like a mangled hare, and dashes into the forest.
“I—” Gloria begins.
“Hold that thought,” Dalton says. “He seemed to be alone, but we’re going to put a little distance between us first.”
We do that, moving until we reach a clearing. Then I turn to Gloria.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
Her mouth opens, and she bursts into tears, her eyes widening in horror before she rubs her hands over her face. I move closer and put an awkward arm around her waist in a quick hug of reassurance.
“Are you okay?” I repeat.
“I … I think so. I was so proud of myself for getting away, and then I realized I was in the middle of the forest, with no idea which way to go. I remembered walking through water, and I heard water running so I started that way, and then I saw the dog. I could see its face and those freckles, and it looked like Raoul, so I thought Sebastian must be taking him for a walk, and I ran over and…”
A sharp breath. “I got right up to it before I realized it wasn’t Raoul. I shrieked and that made the wolf—the dog—whatever it is—jump and snarl. I backed up, only I backed against the rock and…”
She swallows. “What was that? It looked like Raoul, but it looked like a wolf, too, and I remember someone saying Raoul is part wolf.”
“He is. We rescued him as a pup. There are feral dogs out here. Some escaped from Rockton, and some might have escaped from other people. They breed with the local wolves.”
She gives a strained half laugh. “I’ll have to tell Raoul I met his brother or uncle.” She wraps her arms around herself and shivers convulsively.
“Gloria?”
She looks up at me, her eyes not quite focusing.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Doing?” She stares at me. Then she makes a noise, half groan, half bitter laugh. Her face falls into her hands. “Oh God, I’m losing it. I’m really losing it. I’m babbling about wolves and dogs when … when…”
“How about you sit down?” I tap her arm and point to a fallen log.
She nods mutely and moves to sit. I take a spot beside her.
“I found the note on your table,” I say.
She looks up sharply and then nods. “I got it, and I took off. I didn’t think.” She glances over. “I’m sorry, but I felt as if I wasn’t getting the whole story about Jolene, and I needed to see for myself. I realized I shouldn’t go running into the forest, but then I saw that the place indicated on the map was barely past the town border. If anything went wrong, I could scream, right?”
Another bitter laugh. “I didn’t have a chance. I was kneeling, looking for whatever clue I was supposed to find when someone pressed a knife to the back of my neck.” She reaches back, and there’s dirt-coated blood there, with a tiny scrape. “She told me to walk and said if I screamed, she’d kill me.”
“She?”
Gloria nods. “I couldn’t recognize the voice. It was muffled, and she barely said ten words. Definitely a woman, though. She told me to walk and … Oh God, this is embarrassing. I did as she said. I didn’t fight. Didn’t scream. I let her lead me into the forest. I kept thinking I could talk her out of it. That’s what I did. Talked and talked when I should have been fighting back.”
Which is why she lashed out at that wolf-dog. Exactly as I said, a survivor of violence will question every move they did and did not make. Gloria failed to fight her human attacker, and so she’d fought the wolf-dog.
She continues, “We got to a spot and stopped, and I started to turn. I wanted to see her, to talk face-to-face. That’s when I noticed the hole. Before I could even react, she jabbed me with something.” Gloria rubs her upper arm, where there’s another blood-smeared spot. “Then she shoved me hard, and I was so surprised that I fell. I went to get up, and she kicked me, and then everything just went black.”
She shivers, and I let her have that, not pushing or prodding. She’ll continue when she’s ready.
I think I know what happened—I figured it out when I saw her dirt-smeared clothes—but I’m going to wait. Dalton does the same. He’s behind us, as if standing guard, but really getting out of her line of sight. Letting her feel as if it is just the two of us.
“I woke up in a hole,” she whispers. “I couldn’t breathe. I went wild. I’ve been thinking about what happened to Conrad and what that would be like to be buried alive. I remember when I was young, I read about how it used to really happen, and it terrified me. Then it happened to Conrad, and I could barely sleep. What would it be like to wake up like that? Buried and trapped? I’m surprised I didn’t think it was just a nightmare. Thank God, I didn’t.”
She rubs her throat, shaking convulsively, as if remembering that moment of waking up, gasping for air, realizing what had happened.
“I fought,” she says. “There was a rope on my hands, but I didn’t realize that, and I just pulled, and my hand came free. I could scrape and claw, and that’s what I did. Went wild clawing at the dirt. Then I could breathe.”
She takes a deep inhalation, as if reliving the moment. “Once I could breathe, I calmed down. I stayed under the dirt for a few moments, listening to be sure she was gone.” A dry chuckle. “By then I was calm enough to realize she might be there but not thinking straight enough to realize that if she was, she’d have seen or heard me digging.”
She shifts on the log. “After a few minutes, I started working my way out. She must have dug one end of the hole deeper, because I couldn’t get my legs out at first, and I panicked. But I eventually got free, only to realize I had no idea how to get back to Rockton. It was getting dark by then. I knew I had to get away from the hole—in case she came back to check on me. I remembered the water we walked through. My shoes were still soaked with it.” She lifts one foot. “I heard water and headed that way, and then stumbled on that dog-wolf.”
I take a few minutes to provide some victim support. There’s always part of me that wants to jump ahead and ask more questions and start investigating. That part feels cold. Yet on the few occasions when I’ve had to jump straight into an investigation, I’ve been equally champing at the bit to offer support instead. Two warring sides. Tend to the victim with quiet sympathy and tend to the victim by solving the case.
I give Gloria the first and then ease into the second. The obvious initial question would be “Can you tell me anything about your attacker?” I already know that she didn’t get a look, and pressing the point will only panic her. Instead, I ask if she can help us find the spot where she was buried.
“Of course,” she says. Then she freezes, panic flashing as she looks around. “If I can find it. I should have paid attention.” She straightens. “No, I can find it. I’m sure I can.”
She stands quickly, and then gasps, wincing in pain.
“Gloria?” I say.
“I’m fine. Just…” She touches her side and winces again. “That’s where she kicked me. When I took a deep breath, it hurt.”
