Page 20 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

Garrett, poor kid, was especially unlucky to have a dad who was a professional investigator.

In his one attempt at outright lying, I’d decimated his story about the events leading up to a broken window at his friend’s house and had both him and his friend in tears and confessing everything in under twenty minutes.

That was gold-medal parenting, a moment I pulled out and savored whenever I needed a pick-me-up.

“Silas is no different. We’ve got to weigh the evidence and decide what’s true and what’s bullshit. That’s where I need you.”

Charlie blinked and seemed to regain some focus. “What can I do?”

“First: do you think Kate actually went over there?”

He thought about it for a minute before nodding. “I don’t see why he would’ve made that up. And Kate brought up Silas a few times after I told her about him.”

“She wanted to know if he was still blackmailing you?”

He nodded again.

“Okay, so that tracks. And it tells us something important about Kate.”

“What’s that?” Charlie wiped his face again.

“She’s a fighter.”

He stared at me, wordless, before swallowing and looking at an empty chair on his right. “Thank you.”

We moved on to the other crucial point of the interview: Silas’s claim that he hadn’t seen or talked to Kate after that one encounter.

He seemed shifty and triggered by the whole conversation, and he clearly couldn’t wait to get us off his land.

Was he just an angry old man or did he have something to hide?

“You’ve known him for years at this point. Is he violent?”

Charlie was back up and pacing again—the guy couldn’t sit still—but it came off as less unhinged this time. Maybe Charlie Ashlock thought by the mile.

“Yes and no. He was always talking shit, but I never saw him do anything about it. He liked being angry; it was like he fed on it.”

I told Charlie about the assault charge on Hepworth’s record. “But a road rage brawl in a parking lot twenty years ago is a long way from premeditated kidnapping or murder.”

Charlie jerked at the word. I hadn’t spoken it aloud in front of him before now, but it was time.

Kate had been gone almost ten days, not by her own choice as far as we could tell, and the incident with Hepworth made it a virtual certainty.

She’d cared enough about Charlie to go out of her way to confront his blackmailer.

She’d put herself in danger for him. Someone who did that didn’t turn around and leave town without even a note. She’d been taken, or forced to leave.

Hepworth could have intercepted her while she was on her morning run and overpowered her, or convinced her to come to his place for another talk.

Once she was off the road, he would’ve been free to attack her.

She’d had her keys with the mace on her at the time, but maybe the mace hadn’t done its job.

After she was out of the way, either dead or still alive and trapped somewhere, Hepworth could’ve easily walked to Charlie’s house and driven her car to another location, even stowing it in one of the outbuildings on his property.

He’d known Charlie a while and probably knew he wasn’t an early riser.

The odds of Charlie waking up when he moved the car would’ve been low.

Hepworth couldn’t get inside the house—so no way of taking her things—but at least by making the car disappear he could give the impression that Kate was somewhere farther away than the neighboring farm.

The scenario added up on a few different levels.

Hepworth was the only suspect we had to date, at least now that I’d crossed Charlie himself off the list. He had opportunity and motive.

On the other hand, it was hard to draw a straight line from being told “back off my boyfriend” to cold-blooded murder.

“Do you think he did something to her?” Charlie asked, pulling me out of my mental case file.

He stood in the middle of his ugly kitchen wearing a stained T-shirt and shorts, arms hanging useless at his sides.

His hair was a mess and even his beard seemed weirdly matted.

Everything about him screamed lazy stoner, except for his eyes.

His eyes belonged to a man five times his age.

They were sunken and lined, teeming with a thousand emotions threatening to overpower him.

I faced him head on, which was the only way to deliver bad news.

“It’s possible. We’re going to need to keep digging.”

He nodded, looking down at the floor.

“It’s not too late to file a missing person case with the police. They have resources we don’t. With enough evidence, they might be able to get a warrant to search Hepworth’s property.”

“Would they have enough evidence?”

I sighed. “It’s mostly circumstantial right now. We’ll go back over the route again and see if we can find any physical traces she could’ve left behind. Maybe there’ll be something on or near his property. That could help with a warrant.”

Charlie heaved out a long breath. “It’s not about the grow operation. I know you think that.”

I held my hands up and lied. “I don’t think anything about it.”

“She didn’t want anything to do with the police. Ever.”

“And you never pressed her on that?”

“No. It’s not like I’m Blue Lives Matter.” He winced and shook his head. “Sorry if you are.”

“No. That’s partly why I left the force.”

“Cool.” Charlie pulled a crescent wrench out of one of the cupboards and started loosening the hardware on his sink.

It was such a random move all I could do was sit at the table and watch.

Maybe I’d overestimated his mental state?

As he made a pile out of the faucet and water handles, and just as I was starting to wish Jonah was here, he pulled the entire stainless-steel basin out of the countertop and flipped it upside down.

Taped to the underside of the sink were bricks of ziplocked cash, same as the ones he’d brought to the office at our first appointment.

The bricks covered the entire basin like barnacles on a boat.

Charlie opened the cupboard beneath the sink, showing me another, slightly larger basin that was still attached to the plumbing.

“Smart.” I nodded. “Do you have a false tub, too?”

“Too much work.” Charlie pulled a brick off the sink and handed it to me. “Here’s for this week and next. You said five thousand a week, right?”

Holding the cash pushed a dull weight against my gut, a nagging, gnawing feeling I tried to shrug off. “Plus expenses, but we haven’t had much besides mileage so don’t worry about that.”

“Bill me for them. I told you, the money’s not important. I just need to know what happened to her.”

It was a subtle and significant shift. When Charlie first walked into our office with a backpack full of kitchen sink cash, he wanted to find Kate and make sure she was okay.

Now, he wanted to know what happened to her.

The slip into past tense, the slow chokehold of resignation over hope, was a milestone in a lot of our cases. I hated it every time.

I stood up, holding the brick of cash. “I’ll send an invoice for expenses when I get back to the office.”

Charlie walked me to the door. “Even though you’re not a cop anymore, you probably still don’t approve of what I’m doing. How I make a living, I mean. There’s a lot of people like Silas out here, who lump me in with drug lords and the mafia.”

“I’ve met some of those people. You’re not them.”

“But I’m sure it’s still hard for you. Not reporting me. So, thanks,” he waffled, glancing at the upside-down sink, “for not doing that.”

Charlie shifted from foot to foot. His face had flushed and he avoided any eye contact. The weight in my gut got heavier.

I wanted to tell him his line of work didn’t have any bearing on the case, but if Silas was involved in Kate’s disappearance, that might not be entirely true. In the end, I settled on, “Yeah, no problem.”

He nodded and tried to smile. Even the attempt looked painful. “You’re still going to keep looking, right? Even if I’m . . .” He trailed off.

I clapped him on the shoulder and left my hand there until he looked up.

“We’re not giving up on her.”

Jonah was still at the office when I got back.

“Working late?” It was almost dinnertime. I’d texted Shelley from the car that I was close to wrapping up and asked if she needed anything at the store. She replied with a kissy face emoji that I took as a no.

Jonah made a half-awake noise, not stirring from his computer. He was hunched over, barely propped on one arm while clicking through grainy black-and-white footage.

“Pastries & Dreams security cameras?”

Another noise, this one sounding even less conscious.

The resolution wasn’t the worst I’d seen, but Blake clearly hadn’t sprung for the deluxe cameras. At least she’d paid for the thirty-day archive. From the date stamp on the screen, it looked like Jonah had worked through at least a week of footage already.

“Any sightings?”

He flipped to another window, backed the video up fifteen seconds, and clicked play.

There she was.

Kate/Darcy parked in the spot next to the garage behind the bakery.

She got out of the car with the overnight bag that was sitting in Charlie’s bedroom right now, and opened the gate to the backyard.

With the angle of the camera and the position of the gate, the car’s license plate would’ve been visible if Kate and her bag hadn’t blocked the entire front of the car.

She locked the gate behind her, cutting off the view, before crossing the yard to the back steps.

“Shit. They all like that?”

“So far. She didn’t use the car much. I’ve only found her going in and out six times. No luck on any of them.”