Tumbledown (26 page)

“Hey, stay still for me, okay?” Avoiding a bruise, Sarah touched Dorea’s cheek. “The doc’s coming to help you.”

Dorea managed to roll her eyes at the prospect before the gesture developed a worrying authenticity and she lost consciousness again.

The next shoes to appear in Sarah’s line of vision belonged to the doctor and a nurse. She gave the doctor as comprehensive a handover as she could, which prompted him to raise an eyebrow at her.

“You a medic?” he asked as he secured a hard collar around Dorea’s neck.

“Not really.” Sarah shuffled over, and together they logrolled Dorea onto a long board. “I volunteered as a first responder. I was studying to be an EMT.” Unlike the doctor, she used the past tense; all of that seemed like several lifetimes ago.

The doctor’s expression subtly altered as he made some sort of connection. It was something she had seen countless people do in the past week, as they remembered why her face was so familiar. She looked away from him, closing her hands around the bottom of the board to help lift it onto a waiting gurney, and discouraging him from asking anything else. Something in her back pulled as she stood, preventing her from straightening fully. The doctor didn’t notice, but Kendall, standing close by to prevent any further violence against Dorea, touched Sarah’s arm.

“You need to join the line for treatment?”

“No.” Supporting her back with both hands, Sarah managed to get herself upright. “No, I’m okay, thanks.” She looked around but couldn’t see Barrett anywhere; he was probably escorting the instigators to the infirmary or to solitary. All she wanted to do was get back to her cell. Not for the first time, being locked away from vindictive guards seemed the safest option.

“Get a shower,” Kendall said. “Your clothing will have to be incinerated.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll find you a fresh set.” Kendall turned to leave but then hesitated, indicating the blood on Sarah’s clothing. “Why would you do that? I don’t…” She shook her head. “I don’t know that I understand you, Hayes.”

“I haven’t even had a fucking trial yet. You ever think I might be innocent?” Sarah had snapped out the retort before she could think through the consequences.

Kendall took a breath to reply but then shook her head as if unwilling or unable to be drawn in on the subject. “I need to finish up here. Let me know if you change your mind about seeing the doc,” she said and walked away, leaving Sarah alone.

Sarah peeled off her shirt and balled it up. There was nowhere she could dispose of it, and the rest of her clothing was equally contaminated. The sweet smell of the blood, reminiscent of that night with Lyssa, turned her stomach. She ached all over, and an unbearable surge of homesickness made her sway enough to need the wall for support. For a minute, she indulged herself in her misery. Then she carefully cleaned her face with the sleeve of her T-shirt, pushed herself from the wall, and made her way to the shower block.

*

The weather-beaten post marked a long-forgotten track down to Avery Lake. Alex tapped the piece of paper in her hand as Emerson drove past the turn.

“Okay, that’s the sign we were supposed to look out for.” She reread the directions and then paraphrased for him. “Another quarter-mile or so, there’s a bend, and the access road’s immediately after that on the right.”

Emerson nodded, his eyes fixed straight ahead. Curving away from Avery and little used, the road they were traveling on was in a poor state of repair; on more than one occasion he had had to slow to a crawl to negotiate sections almost reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Despite its feeling of remoteness, they were only an hour from town, and Alex couldn’t help but wonder at the gall of Caleb Deakin, if he really had been the one who rented this cottage. That he would do anything so brazen only emphasized how hell-bent he must be on getting his revenge. It also made her dread to think what he might do next.

“Here! Shit, sorry.”

Emerson braked and then skidded into the turn, cursing, and she slapped both hands on the dash to stop herself from flying forward. As soon as the car was under control, he looked askance at her.

“Some copilot you are,” he muttered, though there was no sting in his tone.

“Hey, it was right where I said it would be.” She leaned back in her seat, rubbing at the burn where the seatbelt had caught her shoulder. The access road was narrow and the forest pressed in on the car. It reminded her of the woods around her own cabin, but there was something untamed about it, as if the place wasn’t meant to be easily found.

“Hell of a place to hide,” she said, nervous excitement making her foot tap against the floor. The cottage was marketed as a retreat: no phone, no Wi-Fi, no neighbors, nothing but acres of wilderness and water.

Emerson didn’t answer, but she could see the white of his knuckles on the wheel, and his speed was increasing incrementally as he picked up on her agitation. He stopped the car the instant they caught their first glimpse of the cottage.

“Tire treads.” It was the only explanation he needed to give. Although the cottage’s owner had driven up here recently, there might still be other treads, which could be compared to those Alex had preserved beneath her pup tent.

Standing by the trunk, they pulled on the CSI coveralls, booties, and gloves that Emerson had “borrowed” from the station. To the casual observer it might have seemed like overkill, but Alex didn’t care how ridiculous it appeared. She would do exactly the same at every property on her list, if it might help get Sarah safely back home.

“Set?” Emerson asked.

“Yep.” She waited patiently, already soaked with sweat, as he adjusted her hood. Then she led him to the porch. The key was beneath the first step, just as the owner had promised. Alex took two attempts to fit it into the lock, her jittery hands belying her semblance of composure. The kitchen she walked into was immaculate, the fixtures and fittings gleaming in the sunlight that came through the slatted blind.

“You smell that?” She stepped farther into the room, allowing Emerson to shut the door. Without the breeze, the chemical odor was even more apparent.

“Bleach,” he said, turning full circle on the spot. The tiles shone beneath his covered boots. “And lots of it.”

“They never get everything up, though, do they?” Crouching on the floor, she ran her fingers over the grout between the tiles. “They watch
CSI
and think they know enough to get away with murder, but there’s always something they fuck up on.”

Emerson went into the next room. “Bed’s been slept in,” he called. “The bathroom’s clean, but you can see which towels have been used. I shook one out into the bath, found more hair than my pop has on his head.” He came back to stand in the kitchen doorway, frustration written all over his face. “What exactly are we doing here, Alex? Quinn’s not going to authorize forensics on the basis of a hunch about a couple who skipped out on their honeymoon.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I fucking know that?” She didn’t know what she’d expected to find: a smoking gun waiting for her in the first room, with a sign saying “Caleb Deakin was here”?

“Bag the hairs,” she told him. She wasn’t just going to roll over and concede defeat. “Maybe Castillo can get them through his lab under a dummy case number. We’ll top-to-bottom every room, and then…” She looked at Emerson as she faltered, willing him to support her, not to advise her simply to give up and let him take her home.

“Then we check outside.” He spoke slowly, as if thinking the logic through. “If Deakin came here after killing Lyssa, there’d be things he’d need to destroy: bloodstained clothing, gear—”

“The knife handle.”

“Definitely that. So, bury or burn?”

She followed his gaze out the window. They had driven through at least a mile of forest to get to the cottage. “Jesus, be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” she said.

“Yeah.” He shrugged and plucked a pack of evidence bags from his bag. “Better get started, then.”

*

Alex took the can of soda Emerson offered her and held the cool metal to her forehead. A fingertip search of the cottage had kept her on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor for the past hour, and had yielded nothing. One thing Emerson hadn’t been able to procure in time was the luminol necessary to detect microscopic traces of blood. In any case, it wasn’t something they were trained to use, and she suspected the owner of the cottage might take issue with their spraying chemicals all over its interior without a search warrant.

“Here, take a look at this and tell me if I’m going crazy.” Alex didn’t have the energy to get up; she just leaned over and opened the cabinet beneath the sink.

Emerson came to sit beside her, looking as exhausted as she felt. “You tell me what you think you’ve found and I’ll tell you if I think you’re crazy.”

“Right.” Alex winced. “There are four newspapers missing.”

“You’re crazy.”

“No, no, hear me out. This stack is in date order, one local newspaper per week. The owner must collect her own; she’s apparently quite OCD about it. I bet she brings them when she cleans after each rental. This particular rental started two weeks back, but the dates don’t add up. There are four missing.”

“Alex—”

She cut off his protest, though she knew that what she was suggesting was pretty farfetched. “No sign of a fire in the living room hearth.”

He was still shaking his head. “Maybe the owner wasn’t done reading the latest issues. If she did bring them, they could’ve been used for anything: barbecue, protecting gifts to take home…”

“You think Caleb Deakin got the grill out while he was here and then went shopping for souvenirs?”

“
If
he was here.”

She took a long drink of soda, in the hope that its caffeine and sugar would mask the aching in her joints. “I think he was here,” she said, unable to face the alternative. “I think he was here after he killed Lyssa, and he burned whatever he needed to get rid of.”

*

Common sense told Alex she should stop. She hadn’t eaten all day, she hadn’t drunk enough to combat the searing heat, and they were beginning to lose the light. Using a compass, starting with the land to the front of the cottage and measuring it in paces, they had worked out a rough grid for each of them to cover. Four hours later, she was only about a third of the way through her patch. Much of the undergrowth was too thick to walk through, snaring her feet and forcing her to retrace her steps, or blocking her route completely. She had found no signs of a recent fire, or any disturbed earth indicative of a burial site; it was doubtful that anyone would have been stupid enough to venture into this terrain, no matter what they needed to hide.

The last time she had fallen, a branch had gouged an ugly rent across the center of her palm, and something in the streak of muck and blood had started to itch. She stopped walking to find and pull out the offending fragment of pine needle. The superficial wound hurt far more than it should have, and she realized just how beaten down she was, her euphoria and hope replaced by an all too familiar despair in just a few hours. Sarah had never voiced any real expectations to her, had never pushed or cajoled or pestered to hear what Alex was doing to help her. Every ounce of pressure was coming from Alex herself, and she could feel herself buckling beneath it.

“Alex!”

Her head shot up.

“Alex!”

Emerson’s yell was faint, coming from somewhere ahead of her and off to the left. It was followed shortly afterward by a triumphant whoop.

She set off at a run, hurdling obstacles she had just dragged herself around and somehow managing to stay on her feet. He shouted again when he heard her crashing toward him, warning her to slow down, to give whatever he had found a wide berth. She stumbled to the edge of a clearing, only just preventing her momentum from carrying her any farther.

“I think we might have gotten the little bastard,” Emerson said, from where he knelt peering into the remnants of a fire pit. “Whoever started this did a decent job, but they didn’t stick around to see it through.” He looked up at her. “Remember the rain the night Lyssa died?”

She nodded mutely, staring at the prematurely extinguished fire. She could pick out different elements in it now: khaki-green material, another cloth incongruously patterned with pale blue flowers, and something Emerson was indicating with a long stick.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered, and a rush of relief promptly forced her onto the ground. She cradled her torn hand to her breast, too stunned to feel embarrassed by her reaction. Emerson’s stick was pointing at a carved piece of wood. Although it was blackened with soot at one end, the fire barely seemed to have touched it and its shape was unmistakable: it was the snapped-off handle of a Bowie knife.

*

After waiting over a week for something to happen, and then waiting several more hours for Buchanan to sign off on a search warrant, Alex found things suddenly moving too fast for her. She sat on the trunk of a fallen tree, an uneaten sandwich in her hand, and watched the CSI techs photograph, catalogue, bag, and label evidence from the fire. White light blazed down on them as they worked, the generator for the lamps rumbling in the background. Casts were being taken of the two sets of tire treads directly outside the cottage, and the specialist technician was set to go over to Alex’s cabin to cast the ones under the pup tent.

A second team was processing the cottage, trying to find hair, fibers, or other DNA samples to link the debris from the fire with whomever had stayed there. Until this link was proven, it would be simple for Quinn to accuse Alex of planting evidence, even if Emerson acted as a witness to refute such a claim. Quinn hadn’t yet dared even to intimate this, but neither was he rushing to get the charges against Sarah dismissed. It was small wonder Alex had no appetite; the one bite she had taken from her sandwich had almost come right back up on her boots.

Quinn, subtly shadowed by Emerson, was supervising up at the cottage. He had arrived in convoy with the CSI techs and, barely even making eye contact with Alex, had demanded she provide a full account of her unauthorized investigation. She had drawn a breath to speak and been cut off by his raised hand and a curt: “Not here, back at the station.” Then he had stalked away, forcing her to wait for his summons.