Page 62 of Inside Silence

“Your assistant is fixing me one right now. And thanks for the warning, but caffeine currently sustains me and I’m desperate enough for my next fix to chug down engine oil if I must.”

Good, she has a sense of humor, and is not some stiff in a suit. Which the funky hair and glasses already kind of gave away.

“And please don’t let me stop you from enjoying the rest of that scrumptious-looking thing on your desk.” She points at the cinnamon bun.

“Can I at least offer you half?”

She shakes her head. “God no. Just looking at it is gonna put back the seventy-five pounds I’ve managed to shed since last year.” Then she quickly adds, “But please, don’t let that stop you. I have two sons who unapologetically stuff their faces like starved animals in front of me, so I’ve been desensitized.”

Just then Brenda walks in and hands the agent her coffee.

“I’ll hold your calls,” she informs me before she steps outside and closes the door behind her.

I watch as Tessa takes a gulp of hot coffee, makes a disgusted face, and still takes another one before she resolutely places the cup on my desk and pulls a thick file from the briefcase at her feet.

“I was able to track down Stanley Greer and his wife Olivia back at home in Clinton, Missouri. They were the guests in cabin five,” she clarifies when she catches my confused expression.

Right. We’d been in the process of trying to locate any and all guests whose stay would’ve overlapped with Franklin Wyatt’s time there. A few of them were hard to chase down.

“Five is the one right across from the victim’s cabin, correct?”

“It is,” she confirms. “The Greers were kind enough to speak with me on the phone. Between them they had pretty detailed recollection of their time at the cabin and were able to send me their signed statements.”

She pulls two sheets of paper from the file folder and places them on my desk, facing me.

“I’d like you to read them and tell me what you think.”

I grab them and start reading. Pretty standard observations, the comings and goings of our victim they remembered seeing during their time at the cabins, a brief conversation they had with him when they bumped into him on an evening walk, anything unusual they might have seen, including a visitor they observed going into cabin four on two separate occasions.

What stands out immediately is that both occurrences were at night, they saw them go in, but not come out, and both times the individual seemed to appear out of the surrounding woods. It was dark so—other than the fact this was a man, and his general height and build—his face was not visible so they couldn’t give us many more details on his possible identity.

What they were able to describe, however, is what he was wearing.

My breath catches in my throat as I read their description of light reflecting off shiny buttons, the appearance of a duty belt on the hips, complete with a weapon’s holster, and the ball cap the visitor appeared to be wearing. The final detail is a pair of handcuffs Mrs. Greer spotted hanging from his hand.

“A uniform,” I mumble under my breath, but Tessa hears it.

“That would be my guess.”

“Could be a security guard,” I suggest feebly.

“The ball cap doesn’t really fit,” she counters, pointing out what I’d already figured out.

“Role-play? A costume?”

She shrugs. “Could be, but we can’t ignore the possibility this was someone in law enforcement.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. Just what I need, with everything else going on, now I have to look at the dwindling members of my sheriff’s deputies with suspicion?

Unless…

Nate

* * *

Weird morning.

Well, not all of it was weird. The earlier part of it couldn’t exactly be described as weird, that was actually pretty mind-blowing, but after that it got weird. A bit surreal.