I glance over my shoulder at him. “You were there. You saw everything. The cabin. The mountain. The graves. The fact that they managed to operate in plain sight for years, one as a respected doctor, the other pouring drinks for half the town’s social circle. That’s not dumb luck.”
His jaw flexes. He doesn’t argue. Which is good, because I’ve argued this before—with detectives, with profilers, with one very stubborn chief of police who hates that a civilian consultant cracked parts of his case before his own people did.
I tab over to a police summary from the mountain search—the one that lists the locations of all five known graves. Victims we could name. Victims who still don’t have names. A neat little bullet point list of horror.
“Jason gave them enough to find these,” I say. “His ‘practice runs.’ Henry’s. We still don’t know how they divided the work exactly. But we know Jason liked to talk to them, fostercontact with them in some way, shape, or form. He built a fantasy around most of them, a fiction that they had an actual relationship. And Henry…” My cursor hovers over the line about the girlfriend who vanished a decade earlier, the necklace found with her body. “Jason has said that Henry did the hunting and the actual killing. The clean-up. The parts Jason wanted to outsource.”
I feel Bran move, see the shift of him at the edge of my vision as he steps closer to the monitors.
“Outsource,” he repeats, voice flat.
Cotton’s mouth pinches, the way it does when she hears one of Brodie’s old war stories. She doesn’t interrupt, but her fingers tighten around the mug, knuckles whitening.
“He literally used that word,” I say. “He thought it made him sound like a white-collar CEO instead of a monster. Henry was the one who liked getting his hands dirty, though. Jason called him ‘the finisher.’”
Bile burns the back of my throat. I swipe to the next tab, because if I linger on those graves too long, I’ll start seeing Shiloh in one of them instead of alive and safe in the little house she and Gunner share behind the big house at the vineyard.
“Okay,” Bran says slowly. “So you have the confession. The search results. The adoption records. Employment file. Anything else?”
“School records,” I say. “He was smart. Very above-average intelligence, but not flagged as gifted. Good attendance, no disciplinary action, average extracurriculars. Which is its own red flag, honestly. It’s very…bland. Like someone reverse-engineered what a ‘normal boy’ is supposed to look like and aimed for the middle of the bell curve.”
I pull up a yearbook photo. Henry at seventeen, standing stiffly in a row of other kids in matching blazers. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Forgettable face.
And yet.
“And then there’s this,” I continue, tapping the screen. “Everyone I’ve talked to who knew him after high school—the bartender who trained him at Kendrick’s, his manager, a couple of regulars—they all say the same thing: decent guy, good listener, easy to talk to. Not flashy. Not aggressive. Always remembered your drink order. Always remembered your bad day, too.”
“Everyone liked him,” Bran says, reading between the lines. “A good guy.”
“On the surface,” I agree. “But good guys don’t leave graves on mountains with their girlfriend in one of them.”
Bran is quiet. Too quiet. I can practically hear him thinking, some complicated, methodical calculus moving behind that frown.
“What about the adoption?” he asks. “You said you got some of those records.”
I click open another document, this one with Thurston letterhead. “Both boys were adopted by Samuel and Beatrice Thurston. Jason first, then Henry a few years later. Different birth families. Same house. Same mother. Same ‘high society’ expectations, which is ridiculous if you spend any time in Lucy Falls. We’re just not…high society.” I flick my fingers, irritated by the euphemism. “Shiloh always said there was something off about Dr. Adams, even before all this. Knowing what we know now about Beatrice…yeah. That tracks.”
Bran leans a hand on the back of my desk chair, bringing his center of gravity closer. The room feels smaller, the air thicker.
“And after the raid,” he says. “After Jason was arrested, after Henry ran. You said there’s been quiet.”
“Relatively.” I flip to a spreadsheet I’ve been building, lines of text that make more sense to me than most people do. “I cross-checked missing persons reports, unidentified bodies, and unsolved assaults in a three-hundred-mile radius from here, spanning the last year and change. I filtered for victims matching Henry and Jason’s previous pattern as much as I could extrapolate it—age range, physical type, last-seen circumstances, proximity to highways, rural drop sites, that kind of thing.”
“And?” he prompts, eyebrows lifted when I pause for a beat too long. I have to look away from his gaze, from the mixture of respect and…heat…that brushes over me like a tangible graze.
“And there are a few that ping my radar,” I admit, mentally giving myself a shake. “But nothing that screams him. Nothing that overlaps in enough specific ways to feel like a signature. If he’s been active, he’s either changed his hunting ground drastically…” My mouth twists. “…or he’s changed his pattern.”
“And you think the body at the Falls is him changing his pattern back,” Bran says. “Coming home. Picking up where they left off.”
I stare at the spreadsheet, at the empty column where I’ve been meaning to type something, anything, under “HENRY CONFIRMED?” and haven’t been able to.
“I think it’s pretty obvious,” I say finally. “Jason is locked up. Henry isn’t. Jason always felt like the one who needed Shiloh more. Henry could’ve walked away without attempting anything further with her. He didn’t. He stayed. He escalated. He took the risk at the cabin. You don’t just flip that switch off forever.”
Bran exhales slowly, like he’s trying to blow out a fuse before it burns.
“Tally,” he says. My name in his mouth is a low warning. “You’ve done good work. I’m not disputing that. But my job is to protect you. Your job is to stay out of his sightline.”
I swivel my chair to face him fully. We’re close enough that if I stuck out my hand, I’d brush his chest. Which I will not do. Obviously.
