46
DETECTIVE RODRIGUEZ
I tappedmy fingers on the desk and read my notes from the call with Ethan Todd.
What a dick.
Not that he’d been a dick on the phone. He was too smart for that, had played all the right cards: successful entrepreneur, concerned citizen, prodigal son of Blackwell Falls.
But I knew all about Ethan Todd, not because he had anything to do with my work at the Blackwell Police Department — all of the allegations against Todd had been investigated by the FBI — but because I was a woman and I didn’t live under a fucking rock.
Ethan Todd was one of many loud-mouthed little boys who fancied themselves men because they’d been armed with a microphones, keyboard, and some effective buzzwords.
Imagine my surprise when he’d called with a tip about the missing girls I’d been working for the better part of for years.
I scanned my notes, snippets of our conversation coming back to me with my handwritten words.
Caller claims knowledge of missing girls…
… heard “through the grapevine”…
Bram Montgomery, Remy Taft, Poe Killborn…
It didn’t sit right. Todd didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of the missing girls, hadn’t witnessed the other three men committing any crimes. But he’d been a local — something I hadn’t realized until he’d called — and he claimed to have reliable sources.
Friend of a friend kind of thing.
It wasn’t even close to enough to get a search warrant, but that didn’t mean it was nothing.
I pulled up the files on Montgomery, Taft, and Killborn. There wasn’t much: none of them had ever had so much as a traffic ticket.
That didn’t sit right either. The pictures in the police database showed three tattooed giants, one of whom — Montgomery — had a wicked scar on the left side of his face.
Of course that was probably from the car accident that had killed his parents when he’d been nineteen. He’d been in the car. Parents hadn’t made it. Bram had gotten guardianship over his younger sister, Cassandra, and had been model citizen — on paper anyway — ever since.
Killborn’s mom had gone missing when he was a kid, and he’d been raised with his brother Whit, now in lockup on a drug charge, by their grandparents.
And Remy Taft was a regular kid from a middle-class Blackwell Falls family.
Not so much as a bar fight between them. Not exactly prime suspects for sex trafficking.
Still, someone like Todd could raise a stink, make it seem like we were negligent in not investigating a tip. Thank you, fucking social media.
And the case had been cold ever since that weird fucking cult had burned to the ground. I’d brought in those dick-swinging Navy SEALs, along with Lilah Abbott, for questioning after we’dfound Sandoval’s car not three miles from their house on the mountain. But they’d acted innocent as lambs, and I hadn’t had any reason to hold them, unless you counted my gut, and unfortunately my gut wasn’t admissible in a court of law.
I sighed. I should pay Montgomery, Killborn, and Taft a visit.
Just to cover my ass.
47
MAEVE
The prison,a sprawling complex of squat concrete buildings, was five miles outside Blackwell Falls. Poe was quiet, his hand wrapped tightly around mine on the console of the Hummer as we passed the snow-covered fields that surrounded the prison. It was almost March, that point in winter when it seemed like it would never end, when spring and summer felt like a cruel dream.
We approached a gate manned with a guard, and Poe told him we were there to see Whit Killborn. Once we were waved though, we parked in a big lot outside the main building.
Poe turned off the car. “You don’t have to do this.”
