More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
A.J. Rivers
Read between
May 25 - May 29, 2022
I cross to the door and pull it open. The man outside stares at me with widened eyes, then collapses onto the porch with a heavy thud.
Her mother. Her mother didn't need help anymore.
If there's one thing this man isn't going to do, it's intimidate me.
“His body, Emma. It's gone. My father isn't in his grave. Whoever desecrated it took his body.”
Out of the corner of my eye, the woods look even and unbroken. Even as I walk up to the marker, I barely notice anything different about the trees. The only reason I can perceive the opening of the path as much as I do is because I know it's there. If I was coming on it for the first time, absorbed in the gruesome sight of a mangled body in front of me, there's no way I would know it was there.
it further, I realize it's a dog collar attached to a metal chain. Tugging it up, I find the end of the chain. It's wrapped around a nearby tree. A chill creeps along my spine again, and I bury the chain back where I found it. It's
“I need to speak with you. Please come to the station when you get this.”
“I don't think this is something we should call him about. He should know in person.”
“I tried, anyway. He's not answering. We should just go find him,” another voice answers.
“Is he up at the bar at this time of day?” the first voice asks.
“What's going on with Jake?”
“The police are here,”
“I'm not letting you back there. This is nothing you should be seeing.”
“You know damn well what you have back there. That's my father. All that's left of him. And if the man who did this to him is here, he needs to have a word with me.”
All I see are blue tarps hanging from trees with white nylon rope. It’s clunky and unwieldy, but it does the job. We can't see anything beyond a few steps away from the driveway and the cramped cinderblock patio built at the back of the house. Jake looks at each of the tarps like he hopes to see through them and find out what's going on beyond them. From my angle, I can see piercing yellow tape set up in a perimeter a few feet away from a small shed. What looks like the sum of the rest of the police force mills around snapping pictures, taking notes, and setting down markers. One officer walks
...more
“Get off me!” I turn to the sound of the shout and see Jake with his hands wrapped around the shirt of a man standing on the patio. His hands are already handcuffed behind him, but Jake tries to yank him away from the officer leading him down the steps. “What did you do?” he screams.
“You were his best friend,” Jake shouts at the man, completely ignoring me. “He trusted you. And this is how you repaid him? Don't you think you already did enough?”
“Small towns aren't always as sweet and innocent as people want to think they are. There are people in Feathered Nest who didn't have the same thoughts about business as my father. They thought only about themselves. They cut corners, did what they could to save money, and didn't care about the customers on the other end of their deals. Sometimes it was just unethical. Sometimes it was illegal. My father stood up for what he believed in, and it didn't matter who he had to cross to do it. A few people ended up in hot water because of it. Businesses closed or were forced to change their
...more
“Money laundering? Did the police get involved?”
“Cole Barnes was my father's best friend from way back. They were just kids together. When I was young, he was a fixture at our house and at family events. They did everything together, and if one needed something, anything, then the other was there to do anything he could,” Jake tells me. “But then that changed. Things started getting tense between them. Cole accused my father of betraying him.”
“He was always the healthiest person I knew. Never sick a day in his life.
One day he was perfectly fine like any other day, and the next, he was so sick he couldn't get out of bed. Stayed that way for three more days before we finally convinced him to go to the doctor. They couldn't help him, and he ended up in the hospital, where he died the next day.
“Apparently some of his symptoms lined up with poisoning, but when they tested him, nothing came up.
“He acted a little shady in the days after the death. Cleaned out his shed. Piled his truck high with stuff to throw away but didn't bring it to the convenience center.
My father's favorite cup went missing the day before he got sick.
“Jake, does Chief LaRoche have a dog?” I ask.
Just one choice, one move along a different path, and she could have been lying there right beside her mother, and it would have been her father to first walk through the blood.
Understanding who killed her mother and why.
“Not your handyman,” he says. “Just your man who happens to be handy.”
“So, it turns out the house isn't really owned by anybody,”
Something catches my eye in the corner of the screen, and I stop the video. I go back several seconds and watch again. Four times through later, I'm convinced I know what I'm seeing. I watch one more time for good measure, my stomach sinking. “Son of a bitch.”
“Yep. Round about six months ago, I'd say,” he muses.
I'm halfway across the lot to my car when the shot rings out.
It's the second shot that really sinks in and gets my mind spinning. My stomach scraping on the tiny bits of gravel scattered across the parking lot, I army crawl over to my car, so I have some cover.
“No, I don't. The last time I came out here, I found a dog collar attached to a tree. It was deep in the ground, like it had been there for a while, and someone had tried to cover it with leaves. The crime scene pictures of what was left of the girl showed damage to her neck, like something was wrapped around it.
The cameras are positioned badly,
I believe she was in the woods and managed to escape. She ran out of the trees in a panic and didn't realize the train was coming until it was too late. The train killed her when the corner of it hit her on the edge of the tracks. It dragged her for a while; then she tumbled to the side. That's where they found her.”
“I believe she was tortured. There were injuries on her body consistent with knife wounds and blunt force that happened prior to death. That tells me the police noticed those injuries and just went with their first assumption. It happens more often than people would like to think,” I tell her. “If I'm right, that means she might have survived and gotten to help. Her getting hit by that train might be the only reason the killer’s still out there.”
I get to the tree and touch my fingertips to the dig in the bark where the chain used to be. My heart sinks. Crouching down, I dig through the cold, wet leaves hoping the metal just gave way, and the collar would still be there. But it's not. I let out a sigh.
“I can't tell the police because the man responsible for the murders is the police chief,” I say.
A twig snaps in the distance.
The next stick snaps closer to me, and something rustles in the leaves.
As I unlock the front door to the cabin, something moves out of the corner of my eye. I look to the side just in time to see a shadow sink back toward the darkness of the woods.
Creagan was wrong. I haven't lost anything.
Cristela Jordan.
No one mentioned she checked into Mirna's hotel four days before she was found dead. And apparently never checked out.
Andrea Layne.
The date on the first card with her name on it is particularly interesting to me. It's from just two days before Ron Murdock showed up.
Once I have my hand wrapped, I turn around to look in the back seat. I haven't put anything glass back there since getting in the car. Is it possible one of the windows is broken, and I just didn't notice when coming out of the bar? Shards of glass in various sizes scattered across the seat look like they could have come from something shattering, but it's not vehicle window glass. All the windows are intact.
