Page 48 of A Curse On Black Lake (Black Lake Gothic Cowboys #1)

Chapter thirty-eight

Killian

“Carla and the others are happy now. I might have given them a couple scoops of oats,” I tell Eliana as I come in the house.

“Oh, I’m sure they’re going to be your best friend now,” she says, stirring eggs in a skillet.

“I told you I would cook,” I mutter and grab a couple of mason jars she brought and pour the goat milk into them.

“Thank you,” she says.

“You’re welcome.” I kiss her temple and watch her stir the eggs.

“Move,” I command and reach around for the wooden spatula in her hand.

She hands me the utensil and checks the oven. “What did you make?” I ask her.

“Biscuits.”

“I wasn’t gone that long,” I mutter.

She stirs the sausage gravy in the other pan.

“There were days I had to be quick because Grams needed me and there was so much to do because she couldn’t help. So I got fast at it, no big deal.”

I flip the burner off, and pull her to my side. “Hey, it’s okay, I just want to take care of you.”

“Thank you, I’m not used to this,” she says.

“Your Grams helped you though. Didn’t she take care of you as a kid?”

She wipes her eye. “She did. I owe her everything. Towards the end, I was her caretaker.”

“I’m sure that was a really difficult adjustment. I get it though. I had to do that with my dad. It’s hard watching them … decline,” I say, rocks filling my throat.

“She was always larger than life to me. She was my whole world. I didn’t mind taking care of her, but I hated the reminder that she was about to leave me.”

The oven beeps, and she pulls out the biscuits, setting them on the stove.

I can tell she’s done with the conversation, so I don’t push her on it, and grab some plates. It doesn’t matter if we haven’t eaten all day, nor does it matter if it’s three in the afternoon. Breakfast is always good.

“Will you let me feed you next time?” I ask her as we sit down.

Her blue eyes feel heavy on my skin, and sadness fills her features. I reach across the table, pulling her hand into mine.

She smiles sadly and squeezes back. I want to walk around the round table and pull her into my arms, but hesitate.

I’m all in with Eliana, but I realize that might not be the case for her.

She told me yes, but is this temporary? Is this more?

I know I’m getting ahead of myself. But I can’t help it. I want to know.

At least she’s at a point she can acknowledge we are beyond friendship, and it’s from more than simple proximity. I can’t be friends with her. I’m too far gone.

“What was it like being a Sheriff?” Eliana asks, bringing me out of my thoughts that seem to only center around her.

I huff a laugh and take a bite, trying to ignore the way my stomach clenches with the question.

I loved my job for a long time. I felt like I was making a difference until I was promoted to Captain which took on more of a detective role.

Then, the bodies continued to pile up. Cases continued to stack up around my desk, and I was suddenly drowning under the blackness of unsolved murders and people who deserve justice.

“It was good for a while. I rose up the ranks quickly to a captain, but when I was put on murder investigations, it got dark very fast.”

“I’m sure you saw a lot,” she whispers.

“People are…”

“Terrible? Disgusting? Evil?” Eliana offers.

“Yeah,” I sigh.

“I think I got out in the nick of time, though. It started to jade me, I think. It was getting to the point where all the death made me feel guilty because I either didn’t have the resources to solve the case, or I struggled to figure out which one mattered more.

They all mattered obviously, still do, including like the woman I found here.

But I was buried, with no end in sight.”

“Did you solve some of them?” she asks.

I sigh and nod. “I solved quite a few, with Wyatt too. There was a killer, a long-haul trucker. He had a … style to what he did, and he was methodical. Every other month, a woman was put in roughly the same exact place up the road next to the lake. You know, where there’s no light, no one lives around there, it’s wide-open space.

Unless we had cops sitting there, anyone could get away with anything. ”

“It seems like bodies are always found on that stretch of road. Almost like it’s a magnet,” she says.

“It probably is. Logically, as a killer, it makes perfect sense. It doesn’t take long for the elements to ruin evidence, and there are no witnesses.”

I pause, pushing my plate away.

“Are you sure you want to hear any of this?” I ask her.

She rests her elbows on the table. “I do. I want to know what you did in your past life.”

“Suit yourself,” I grunt.

“Well, the women were always covered with brush. I couldn’t figure out if it was remorse or hiding evidence.

They would have the same stab wounds, bruises, all that.

So we tried to drop deputies along that stretch of road.

We knew a body would be dropped the same week every month. ” I brush a hand through my hair.

“I’ll spare you the details, but this guy was smart. I don’t know how he knew we were on to him, but he skipped the time when he usually would drop a body.

“We had no idea where he was finding these women. We sent notices to all the truck stops within a hundred-mile radius, and it still didn’t do anything.

Anyway, we couldn’t keep stashing a deputy along that side of the road.

We kept running into cases. Before we caught the killer, a young male was found floating in one of the swampier areas of the lake.

No identification. It was a weird one, though.

His face was painted like it was Halloween, but we found him in the spring if I remember correctly.

It seemed ritualistic in nature. So, that case was handed to me, and I was trying to balance that and catch this guy because I knew I was close.

You know how I said, if you can throw them off, they’ll make a mistake? ”

Eliana nods, listening with rapt attention.

“Because he didn’t drop a woman on that stretch of land, it threw him off. It messed with his … let’s call it a process.”

“He was pulled over for speeding about five miles west, outside county lines a couple weeks later from his normal drop day. The State Police pulled him over for a simple speeding ticket, but when the trucker opened the door to hand him his license and registration, he smelled it. Luckily, this officer had been around the block a few times. He knew the smell, and well the trucker never dropped her. He had been driving around with her in his back cab, waiting to put her on the few mile stretch next to the lake. When he was questioned, he knew he was dead to rights, so he told us why. He said he had to give Black Lake its blood.”

Eliana’s body visibly shudders, and I swallow thickly. “He was tied to killing fifteen other people.”

“Were there other cases as odd?” she asks.

I blink in shock that she still wants to hear anything about my time as an investigator.

“Yeah, the one that we’re trying to solve now.

Only that started before I was a deputy in Black Lake.

I think I was at school when the first woman showed up.

Whoever has been killing these women has been doing it since you and I were about twenty or twenty-one, or earlier. ”

“No wonder you’re struggling to find anything. He’s practiced at this.”

I nod, anger boiling through my veins. I want to catch this monster and bury him under the prison.

“Did you catch others?” she asks.

“Yeah, not all were murderers. We caught rapists, and kidnappers too. There was one killer who reminded me of the Zodiac. His type was random young couples driving through, or maybe living in the next town over. Those cases, to my knowledge, are still unsolved.” I puff out a breath.

“Another guy we caught killed people by the lake.

The area is pretty swampy out there, but he managed to find a dry patch of land to set up shop.

We got to the point where if we found a body we had the dogs sniff out the scene, to be extra cautious.

So when another body was found, unrelated, the dog found an old shirt near the body.

“At the time I thought it was related to the body we found. It was either evidence or trash. I felt like it was worth looking at regardless, no stone unturned and all that. When a dog finds a scent, we don’t know exactly whose it is.

That case took forever because we had to have the dog go through a mountain of other evidence to see if there were any links.

We finally found ripped pants from a woman in a separate cold case because of the scent off the shirt we found earlier.

When we found the connection, we looked at it from a purchasing perspective.

Where did the clothes come from? When in the season were they purchased?

Through that, we were able to identify the woman.

We found out she worked at a little boutique, over state lines in Louisiana.

Her name was Cassie. From there we found him and his murder shed, but it took almost three years.

And part of it was purely from the luck of finding that guy’s shirt near a body he had nothing to do with. ”

“Wow,” Eliana says.

“This town seems not only to attract it, but it’s as if it thrives from all the death. I guess we know why.”

Eliana rubs her chest in tight circles.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay, I asked. I want to know more about you.”

“I’m not that interesting, darlin’,” I mutter.

Eliana’s heavy stare weighs on me, like I’d imagine her body feels on mine.

“You’re definitely wrong about that.”