“Listen carefully to what’s going to happen next. If you do everything right, everything I say, you can get out of this mess. You can start over.”
ChapterThirty-Four
the kill room
Laurel Hayes’s friend—Kendra—is scared now, thinking that the man stalking Laurel hacked into her phone account and was tracing her calls and texts. Maybe even her location. She leaves the meeting with the woman on the team and doesn’t notice that a young man follows her.
She goes back to her apartment. An hour passes. Then another woman comes out, wearing a hoodie and sunglasses and carrying a duffel bag. She’s on the move, this woman.
The man follows her on foot. The woman investigator is close behind in an unmarked car. The woman they follow walks to a parking garage four blocks away and enters. She stops at a car and opens the trunk, tosses the duffel inside, closes the trunk, and proceeds to the driver’s side.
“Do we have confirmation?” the man asks, watching her from two rows away.
The car is a dark gray Toyota with plates 275 TFG.
The woman in the unmarked car responds, “Yes—confirmed. The car is registered to Laurel Hayes.”
“Should I pick her up?”
He walks and listens at the same time. She’s about to close the door.
“Yes—confirmed. Pick her up.”
He approaches with caution, badge in hand. He knocks on the window, presses the badge against the glass.
Laurel Hayes puts her hands in the air. It’s a common reflex. She follows the instructions to exit the vehicle. She is trusting and compliant, not wanting to cause any trouble, and the woman who now watches from the unmarked car thinks that this is exactly the behavior that attracted her stalker—the man with the red jacket who sat across from her work at a bus station.
Laurel Hayes has been hiding at Kendra’s. She told her parents as soon as she found out the police had called them, scared them half to death. That’s when they flew back to Portland. When they learned about the man stalking her, they stopped helping with the effort to get her dental records. She’d left town because of her connection to Clay Lucas, but now she needed to stay gone. It was better if this psycho thought she was dead. They didn’t have a plan beyond keeping her safe. They had heard enough stories over the years—true stories—to know that the police were ineffective when it came to situations like this.
It isn’t until the investigators speak with me that they learn the identity of the stalker. When they show me their file and tell me the details of their investigation to this point, I see the photo of the man with the red jacket sitting on the bench across the street from Clear Horizons and recognize him in an instant. I do not tell them all that I know—how their investigation and ours have collidedhead-onor how deeply Elise is wrapped up in this case—but I assure them that Laurel Hayes is safe now because the man who’s been stalking her is dead.
ChapterThirty-Five
Brannicks and I wrap Wade in the plastic. We carry him down to the basement, put him in the oven. I turn it on and let it run.
I am a machine.Fight-or-flightchemicals surging through my veins. Unlike the day of the shooting, I don’t shake or tremble. What has to be done is crystal clear, and I feel no hesitation. Rowan would tell me these are the callouses.
I wipe down wherever our prints might be and leave the rest. I do the same with the rifle and return it to the mount under the counter. I retrieve the casing from the Kill Room. Brannicks watches and waits. I tell him the rest of the bullets in my gun are real, and he doesn’t know it’s a lie. I don’t trust him, and he doesn’t trust me. But we’re in this together now.
I forget about the red jacket that hangs on the hook on the back of the door after I’ve removed the drugs. I forget because the door is open while I do a final check. I step outside and pull it closed and never even see it hanging there. I haven’t slept for days, and I’m emotional as hell. I’m bound to make a mistake.
When I’m done with the shelter, I go out to the well. The dealers used to hide their stash here by connecting it to a rope and lowering it down. The rope is still attached, so I connect the Oxy balloons and let them fall. Now there will be something to find.
Next, I move around the side of the shelter to the truck where I told Brannicks to wait. Wade backed it up the hill, so it’s not hard to drive out, the pull rake dragging behind us. When it gets stuck, Brannicks gets out, clears the brush from the blades, then gets back in. The leaves have started to fall, so those get picked up as well. It takes half an hour, but we reach the end of the road and make our escape leaving no tire tracks.
From there we drive to the parking lot where I’d left my car. I park the truck behind a semi to block us from any security cameras.
“There’s money in the back,” I tell him. Wade brought everything with him, including a duffel with his savings and 401(k) proceeds. “It’s a lot of money. Enough for you to disappear, start a new life. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He nods. There’s been time to think. And for me to tell him about the situation he’s in. Maybe I’m in one too, but who would believe acrazy-assstory from a punk kid trying to escape a murder charge? I tell him he’s one phone call away from being wanted by the feds and another call away from being wanted by the guy known as Diesel, who sold his roommate the gun that was used in the Nichols shooting. The guy whose name he just gave up to me, a cop, making him a snitch.
“You are going to sink this truck in the river not far from here. Within twenty miles. You are going to wipe it down, every inch of it. Make sure the doors are open.”
I go to my car and grab the keys hidden under the wheel well. I get a tracker from the trunk—the one I bought and registered online under Wade’s real name, Brett Emory. I convince myself that the remains will not be found until next year when the hunters return. Maybe it’s just a prayer. The criminals who come and go in the off-season don’t have any use for the cremation oven.
Tomorrow, an anonymous tip will help them discover the tracker under Wade’s real name and then see the last place the truck was online. This will lead them to the location along the river where Brannicks sinks it. Divers will discover the truck. A towing unit will pull it from the water, and all they’ll find inside is a duffel bag with the clothes he brought with him from the Getaway Inn. He hadn’t planned to return to that place after kidnapping me and bringing me to the shelter. His wallet will be in the console, but there will be no prints. And no bag of money. Brannicks will take that to start his new life.
When his body isn’t found, they will assume he’s dead, carried down the river to the ocean. The current is strong. The case of the 404 will be closed. By the time his body is found next season in the shelter, it will be unidentifiable—an unrelated mystery to solve.
