Page 18

EIGHTEEN

Liam

It’s morning by the time Liz’s daughter Rachel and her dog arrive. After a few hours of sleep, I show up prepared to feed Michaels to the pigs. Weirdly, Gabriel won’t let me. I think he’s concerned about the welfare of the pigs.

Michaels didn’t want to chance the killer still being out there where Rachel could get hurt, so he refused to let her arrive until morning. I told him I would throw Matthew’s body in front of her if it came to that, but strangely, he seemed even less willing to work with me. I think Michaels was also positive that he could find Liz with the team—likely wanting his own “I told you so” cake—but by daybreak, I think the majority of the people were beginning to think that Liz wasn’t out here at all.

So when dawn comes and Michaels has nothing to show for it, he turns up with Liz’s daughter who is holding Puppins’ leash—it’s honestly a surprise the dog hasn’t run off with a name like that. “This is a waste of time and resources,” Sgt. Michaels makes sure to announce as he walks up to me and Matthew, since Gabriel is in the house.

“As long as I’m getting paid overtime, I don’t care.”

“You’re not getting fucking overtime,” Michaels grumbles. I do notice I seem to be the main one he cusses at, and honestly… I think that’s an accomplishment if I’ve ever seen one.

“Liam?” Gabriel says as he comes trotting out of the house he’d disappeared into about twenty minutes ago.

“Look how cute he is when he jogs,” I observe.

Michaels is so enamored by how cute it is that he nearly chokes on his despair.

“Look at this,” Gabriel says as he holds out an old photo album. He’s the only one wearing gloves, so I let him flip to what he wants me to see.

“Oh… fascinating.”

“What? I’m not sure if Gabriel actually found something of use or merely blinked, which Liam would find to be the best thing ever,” Matthew says.

“You’re literally going to be fed to the pigs. No ifs, ands, or buts, the pigs are going to eat you,” I decide. “If you had eyeballs, you’d realize that this building in the photo is no longer on the farm. You can tell it’s part of the farm because of this silo here waaaay off in the distance.”

“It looks like it used to be a bank barn, so if someone didn’t fill in the lower part when it was torn down, they could have created an underground area,” Gabriel says. “If we can find the location… maybe there’s something there.”

“Have at it,” Michaels says as I pass him a Post-it Note. “What’s this?”

“The number for an ice cream cake place I like. You know… for my ‘I told you so again ’ cake.”

“I do like cake,” Matthew comments.

“Don’t encourage him,” Michaels says as he balls up the note and throws it at my head. I catch it midair and chuck it back at him before scurrying off.

Michaels annoyingly follows us, which makes it harder to talk about him but not impossible. I’m definitely not above talking about someone when they’re looking me in the eyes. Rachel trails along with her mother’s dog.

“Do you think she’s okay?” she asks quietly.

I leave this question to the people who have far more compassion than I do. I used up all my spare compassion—the little that’s not reserved for Gabriel—the day that I finally caved and told Michaels he had something black in his teeth about four hours after I noticed it. It’s not my fault absolutely no one else told him either.

“We’re doing everything we can to find your mother, Rachel,” Gabriel says as he reaches out and gives her a gentle squeeze. She leans into his touch… I mean, who can blame her? She looks like she’s probably still in college and has already been graced with meeting the best man she’ll ever meet.

I do notice she keeps looking at me, and I can’t tell if I haven’t been snarky enough to scare her off or if I’ve been so snarky she wants to make sure she knows where I am at all times.

“Is what they said about my dad true?” she asks me. “Did he really break into your home? I looked it up… I looked the incident up and I just don’t believe my dad was involved in that. I really think you have the wrong guy. He can’t go to prison for something he didn’t do.”

Ah… so that’s what this is. She actually wasn’t staring at me because of my handsome face. Her loss.

“Well, what’d your dad say?” Matthew asks, which I’m not sure is the correct answer, but sure better than me having to explain myself.

“He… didn’t say much. He said he’d talk to me about it later… that he couldn’t now. I just don’t believe you. You have the wrong person.”

I catch her still staring at me, clearly wanting something out of me. “I’m going to be real honest… I don’t actually care what you think.”

Gabriel seems torn on what to say or do. Maybe this pity thing can play in my favor. I sure as fuck don’t want anyone else pitying me, but if he wants to, I could get behind it.

“I understand that you’re distraught,” Gabriel says to her. “First your mother goes missing and then this. You suddenly feel very alone and like you have no one to talk to, right?”

“He’s a really good dad,” she responds, voice shaky. “He’s always been such a good dad. I just… he wouldn’t be involved in something like that. He wouldn’t join some plan to murder… to murder a family.”

“He wasn’t in it to kill my parents. He was in it for the money. But he was old enough to realize that when you get caught up in something like that, you never know what’s going to happen or who is going to die… or who is going to get caught,” I tell her.

“I can’t lose my dad. You could like… drop the charges, right?” she asks.

“Let’s stay focused,” Michaels orders. “All of this is for the police and the law to deal with. Good people sometimes do bad things, but we can’t look the other way just because they’re a good person. For now, let’s stay focused.”

Rachel seems even more upset now. I notice the tears are making an appearance, and tears make me feel icky. She’d somehow gotten closer to me during our conversation, so I put Gabriel between us, confident that he can shield me from having to see her blubbering and snotting. Really, she should just be happy that Gabriel kept me from dicing up her dear ol’ daddy.

The temptation is still there, but I tamp it down.

“This kind of looks like the spot,” Matthew announces, referring to the photo he’d taken a picture of with his phone. Something I probably should have done but chose not to because I was too distracted.

“Matthew, sometimes you do smart things that creep me out,” I say as I grab his phone to take a look for myself.

“Oh… glad I could please you,” he retorts sarcastically.

I turn to the young woman, pleased to see she’s wiped a bit of that stuff all over her face away. “You call your mother ‘Mom’?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell your dog to find ‘Mom.’”

“He’s not… like a trained dog.”

“Dogs are smart. If he smells her out here, he’s going to go looking for her. What do we have to lose?”

She shrugs and unhooks his leash. “Puppins, find Mom.”

Puppins starts sniffing around—probably looking for a new name—and I have absolutely no idea if he just smells a rabbit who shat here two days ago or something of interest. While we leave him to that, I wander around a bit trying to find any signs of something. This was a pretty far walk. He would have had to haul her quite a ways if he didn’t bring a vehicle, but the tire tracks in this area all seem to head toward the field beyond it.

“This could have been foundation,” Matthew says as he kicks something lost in the weeds.

“Good job. Look, Gabriel, Matthew is being ‘useful.’”

“Don’t get the fucking finger quotes out for that,” Matthew says. “Do you still want me to shoot you before Thanksgiving? I’m prepared.” He mutters that part quiet enough that Michaels can’t hear since he seems to think Michaels wouldn’t approve, though I’m confident he’d join in.

Puppins starts to whine, which he hasn’t done since this whole thing started. I glance over at the dog as he anxiously starts sniffing around, then I make sure to look Michaels in the eyes while grinning maniacally, in case he wants to tell me I’m right.

“Wipe that look off your face, Detective. We haven’t found her yet.”

“I can’t,” I say as the dog starts weaving back and forth, looking anxious and confused.

We move toward the dog, looking for whatever’s caught his attention. The dog seems absolutely fixated on the area, refusing to leave as he whines and sniffs.

Our group circles around the area where the dog is focused and starts searching the tall grass, which makes it hard to see anything on the ground.

“Here!” Gabriel says as he gives a light tug to something hidden in the grass.

“Hyde, can you stand with Rachel?” Michaels asks.

She looks panicked over the idea of stepping away. “W-Why? If she’s there?—”

Gabriel wraps a gentle arm around her to herd her back. “We have to give them room.”

“I want to?—”

“They can’t do their job if they don’t have space to work. Can you call the dog over here?”

“Puppins, come,” she calls, but the dog is too busy trying to help us slide open the door. The dirt that’s lying over it did a splendid job of hiding it, telling me that he clearly knew just how to keep a scene flawless. The search and rescue team had to have traveled over this area multiple times, yet it took Gabriel practically tripping over it to find it.

The door with the dirt on top of it is heavy, heavy enough that I’m not sure Cameron opened this on his own every time, or maybe he hooked it to something that would lift it. It’s dark down in the hole as Matthew flashes his light into it, revealing a body lying at the bottom. I honestly can’t tell whether she’s alive or not until Matthew calls out and she jerks back, making me think she was lying still out of fear that it was Cameron. She looks frantic before relief rushes across her face, but it doesn’t appear like she can move with her hands and legs tied and her mouth covered.

“She’s alright,” Matthew says to Rachel. “But let’s stay back for right now so we can get her out.”

Matthew calls for support while Michaels starts down the old wooden ladder leading down into it.

“If I slid it shut right now, I could become sergeant,” I tell Matthew.

“I would throw my body in front of the door to keep it from closing to make sure that would never happen. Dear god, imagine if you were in a position of power,” he whispers. It’s like the thought of it is too much for him to even speak it out loud.

“If I pushed you in as well…”

Matthew turns to look at me. “You would literally lose your only friend.”

“I never wanted to become friends with you. Becoming friends should be a two-way street, but my side of the street has a fucking sinkhole in it that you aren’t crossing.”

“I’ll repair it. I’m already halfway across,” he says as he creepily strokes my arm. I have to assume he’s trying to get me to lower my defenses to toss me in, but with Gabriel here, I have faith he won’t get away with it.

“Please, let me out, please, let me out,” Liz begs as soon as Michaels pulls the tape from her mouth.

“We’re going to get you out. The ladder is unsteady and you have a head wound, so we’re going to wait until the medical team is here,” Michaels says soothingly as he frees her. “We want no accidents.”

She’s not having it. She’s going to climb out of this pit even if it requires her brawling Michaels, which I kind of hope she does.

Liz smacks him off her and starts rushing up the ladder as Michaels does his best to keep her from falling and Matthew reaches down to help her out. I grab her other arm—feeling like Gabriel would approve of my heroic deed—and we haul her out. She falls to her knees with a gasp and Rachel comes hurrying over as Puppins decides to forgive his family for his awful name by licking her in the face.

“Good job,” Gabriel says as he gives me a smile.

“Wasn’t all me. You’re the one who narrowed down the area and found the door,” I say. “Matthew’s the only one who didn’t do anything.”

“Christ!” Matthew hisses as he looks over at me.

“And Donna and Chris? We might as well fire them.”

“This isn’t even their case, so of course they didn’t do anything,” Gabriel says with a grin.

Once the medical team is here, I slip down into the hole to look around with Gabriel. Matthew ends up down here as well, which means he’s uncomfortably close to me.

“Obviously, this isn’t the first person he kept down here,” Matthew says as he motions to what looks like a fake fingernail stuck in the wall near the top. Someone must have climbed up but couldn’t get the door open.

“Yeah,” I agree. “But why? If he was going to kill them, why did he toss Jane Doe off the bridge?”

“She wasn’t dirty and didn’t have any marks on her wrists, so I doubt she ever even saw this hole. So what was different about her?” Gabriel asks.

“Right… what if the women weren’t intended for Cameron? I mean… if they were, he’d know which ones he wanted. But maybe he’s finding them for someone else… and Jane Doe didn’t make the cut, so he had to dispose of her, and that’s when he saw Liz. So maybe the ones who fit, he holds here?”

“That’s a rather fucked-up idea,” Matthew says. “But… it would make sense.”

“I want to see Abby’s iPad.”

“Abby?” Matthew asks in surprise. “Why Abby? You think the two are connected? The motives are different. The types of people are different. The way Steven and Mitch were killed is different than the way Jane Doe was killed… but I guess you could be right.”

“Of course I’m right. I really feel like they’re connected and I’m going to prove it to you. I think the person who killed Steven and Mitch was also the one who killed Cameron and Jessica. Do I need to wear my ‘I told you so’ shirt again?”

Matthew rudely ignores that question. “The tech team got nothing off her iPad.”

“Then I’m going to go force her to wake up,” I grumble.

“I don’t think that’s how comas work,” Gabriel says.

“You’re so smart,” I tell him.

“I swear I could have cracked the fucking Enigma code and you wouldn’t be impressed, but Gabriel can say whatever and you act like it’s amazing,” Matthew mutters.

I pat Matthew, proud of him for understanding. “And Gabriel said you weren’t very smart.”

“I never said that,” Gabriel says. “You do realize you’re going to need proof that the cases are connected before anyone believes you.”

“You’d think after me proving everyone else wrong so many times they’d just believe me the moment I opened my mouth, but strangely… they don’t.”

“Do you ever think it’s your execution? That maybe if you were a bit more like Gabriel, they’d immediately believe you instead of getting defensive in the hope of proving you wrong?”

“I like it when they try to prove me wrong. I like the tears,” I assure him.

As we head out, Gabriel looks at his phone. “Oh no.”

“What’s wrong?”

“My parents had a major water line issue that’s going to take days to get repaired. They’re not going to be able to have Thanksgiving at their house. My mom asked if it’d be okay if we have it at mine.”

I hesitate. “Tell her I’ll host it at mine.”

Matthew does a double take. “You were literally prepared to get shot so you wouldn’t have to go, and now you’re going to host it at your house?”

Gabriel gives me such a sweet look. “Hon, your house is a mess right now with moving. Thanksgiving is in a few days.”

“Nah, movers moved everything and set up the house today,” I say.

“Didn’t you just close on it? How’d they already move everything in?”

“When you’re rich, anything is possible.”

“Why… do you want to have it… at your house?” he asks suspiciously.

“So I can prove to your mother that I’m a worthy spouse so she makes you move in with me.”

“That’s just fucking weird, man,” Matthew says.

It takes everything in my power not to push Matthew back in the hole. I bet I’d even find the strength to cover it all alone.

“Your house does have a ton of room… and it’s so open. Matthew, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? You mentioned your family lived on the West Coast… are you heading there?”

Matthew stuffs his hands in his pockets as he walks. “Nah. I’ll visit for Christmas, but it’s a bit much to travel when so much shit is going on here, and I’m planning to go in a couple of weeks.”

“You can come; I insist. Liam will love to have you there. I bet it’ll make him more comfortable to have a friend attend,” Gabriel says, and because he smiles, I have no choice but to agree.