Goddamn it. He’d come out of the closet as soon as he’d left the military, and even when he was serving he’d relied on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell rather than trying to be super-discrete. This fear of discovery, the awareness of how serious the repercussions could be if he got caught—he hadn’t had to deal with any of that crap since thelasttime he’d lived in Mosely. He’d been sneaking around with Wade when they were kids too, but back then the forbidden aspect of it had been part of the fun. Now?
It wasn’t fun. Now he had something to lose, and was old enough to know better, and didn’t need the damn complication in his life. Hockley had given him a warning, and he needed to take it. Whatever he’d been playing at with Wade had to be over.
Maybe he needed to take a trip back to LA to get laid. He’d looked into the offerings in Montana, and it seemed like things were a lot more open than they’d been years ago, but he wasn’t sure he was up to the headache of learning a whole new scene. Dancing made him feel like an idiot, and he didn’t want to join a men’s chorus or anything. He couldn’t bring himself to accept the too-anonymous world of Grindr. Not when he could go back to LA, hit his favorite bar, and be naked and sweaty with a man of his choice within the hour. Meaningless and shallow? Hell yeah. Compared to the mess with Wade, meaningless and shallow sounded just about perfect.
So he’d work himself to exhaustion getting this case tidied up, and then he’d take a weekend off and get rid of some tension. He’d forget about Wade, and if the man made another visit, they’d have a brief conversation at the door, in full sight of whoever was tailing Wade, and then Jericho would go inside, alone.
It felt wrong, of course. His brain was telling him one thing, but his instincts, his loyalty, his damn emotions were all telling him something totally different. His body was definitely sending a clear message. But his brain had to win this time.
He drove slowly to the forest where the men were searching, but didn’t want to disrupt their pattern by joining in. Instead, he ducked under the yellow police tape and made his way up the grassy gravel path that led from the alley to Lorraine’s house. It was a little yard, poorly maintained, with five good-sized evergreens blocking views from either side. Probably deliberate, or at least an advantage, given the need for privacy in her line of work. A john could park down the street, duck in through the alley or even cut through the forest, and be in her backyard and then into her house without being seen. Jericho had checked the records and hadn’t found a single arrest for anyone availing themselves of Lorraine’s services, so there was no one to question about her business practices.
He peered around the yard. There was no bench, nowhere that looked like a waiting area. So she didn’t seem to have been set up for drop-in clients, unless they’d dropped in so rarely there had been little chance of overlap. In LA, Jericho could have talked to someone in vice and gotten an idea of how things were usually done, but up here? Maybe Kayla would know. He’d ask her.
Someone called his name from the alley and he strode back in that direction.
“We’ve got something!” one of the deputies called to him, and Jericho jogged across the alley to the tree line. There was a smaller crowd today than the day before, but the reporter was there, standing near the deputy’s cruiser, and a few people who were likely neighbors. Keith Wooderson, the asshole father, was one of them, and Jericho deliberately avoided eye contact with him. He didn’t want to see the excitement on the man’s face if they came out of the forest with the murder weapons.
“About a hundred yards back, buried under some branches and dirt,” the deputy explained, hurrying along in front of Jericho. “We saw the disturbed soil first, and had to dig a little to be sure what we were finding. But once we saw a chunk of plastic, we left it.”
“The lab guys are coming?”
“There was one of them working with us. He’s taking pictures now.”
By the time Jericho reached the site, the tech was carefully extracting the items from the ground, taking pictures at every stage. The rest of the crew stood and watched quietly. A strip of plastic about a yard long, maybe a chunk of cheap tarp or a feed bag. And a damn two-by-four, just as the lab had predicted, the pale-yellow wood stained with more than dirt.
“God, I can see the prints already,” the tech muttered. He looked up and saw Jericho. “Really clear fingerprints, right in the blood. We’ll get the results to you as soon as possible.”
“By the end of the day?”
The tech nodded. “Sure, okay. I can take pictures here and see if they can match from that—honestly, I bet they can, they’re so clear. But I’ll have to drive it down to the lab for real confirmation. You won’t get that until tomorrow.”
“Give me what you can, as soon as you can.”
The tech nodded, and Jericho turned to the rest of the team. “Continue the sweep, okay? You’ve started, you may as well keep searching. Anything unusual, anything that isn’t part of a happy forest world, document it and let me know.”
“There’s a dead fox over by the ridge,” Meeks, one of the newest deputies, said.
Well, that seemed unlikely to be important, but Jericho said, “Recently dead?”
“No. I’d guess a few weeks, maybe. Not much left but fur.”
“I found a cat,” Metsom contributed. He was another new deputy, obviously torn between excitement and disgust over his discovery. “Black and white. It was nailed to a tree.”
Jericho turned to stare at him. “Nailed to a tree?”
Metsom nodded. “Kinda creepy.” He shrugged, as if trying to seem blasé about it all. “But, you know—probably just kids. Not related to this, right?”
Except serial killers usually started with animal victims. And Will’s picture had been a cat, before he’d slashed it all to hell with the red crayon. Shit. The MO was different—Lorraine hadn’t been nailed to anything, hadn’t been left in the woods. Still. “Take pictures, and then bag it up and send it to the crime lab. Tell them it came from near this crime scene, tell them to see if they can find a connection.” He turned to Meeks. “You’d better do the same with the damn fox. And everybody else, add that to your list of things to look out for as you finish the sweep. We’re looking for weird things,especiallydead animals. Okay?”
The deputies agreed without discussion. They either knew why Jericho was concerned or they trusted him enough to act just because he’d asked them to. He tried not to wonder how that trust would be affected if they knew who he’d been drinking with the night before.
He should go to the station and brief Kayla on the new developments: the weapons he hoped would be useful, and the dead animals he hoped would be incidental. Instead, he wandered back into Lorraine’s yard, and then into her house. The body had long been removed, of course, but the scene hadn’t been cleaned up otherwise, and he could smell the heavy tang of blood that was starting to go bad. It was a too-familiar smell, and he thought again about his captain in LA. She thought he was heading for a burnout? Jesus, whowouldn’tbe? Who could immerse themselves in all this, the gore and the pain and the loss and the sheer futility of it, without it taking a toll? At least in LA there hadn’t been the added intimacy of having known those involved; it would be ironic if the “vacation” in Mosely he’d joked about was actually what pushed him over the edge.
His years in the military had acquainted him with death, but it had been sudden, then: the bodies of his fallen comrades whisked away so quickly it was as if they’d never existed at all, and the bodies of his enemies even more remote. And he’d generally been able to fight back. If he’d done everything right, if he’d been tough enough and disciplined enough and paid close enough attention, he’d actually been able to protect people. He’d been able to prevent death, or at least prevent the death of the people on his side.
Working homicide? It was already too late by the time he’d been assigned to a case. Sure, there were some killers who needed to be stopped, men who needed to be taken off the streets before they killed again. But Jericho’s job was to make the killers responsible for what they’d already done, not what they might do some day in the future. He wasn’t helping anyone, because the person who needed help was already gone.
It was too late to help Lorraine. Maybe he’d had a chance, those times he’d dealt with her for being drunk or high in public, but he’d taken the easy way out. He’d written her a ticket, made sure she got home, and walked away. Shit, he’dwritten her tickets. He’d cost her money, money she’d had to earn by welcoming strange men into her home, into her body. He should have been part of the solution, and instead he’d been part of the problem.
He took a deep breath, trying to refocus, and picked up on something different in the air. Still not completely unfamiliar, and definitely nothing pleasant, but not gore, he didn’t think. Another sniff, and he followed his nose to the closet by the back entrance. The closet door was ajar, and Jericho opened it carefully, peered inside, and found a litterbox, its surface covered in little twigs of desiccated cat shit. It looked like the litter had clumped itself solid beneath the shit, with so much soaked-up urine the cat hadn’t been able to dig.
Jericho didn’t know much about cats, but he was pretty sure he was inspecting the production of days or even weeks. This box wasn’t a sign that there was a cat still living in the house for a day or two after its owner’s death; it was a sign that Lorraine Mackey hadn’t been good about cleaning her cat box.
Still, Jericho went to the kitchen and looked in the cupboards until he found a bag of cat treats, then pulled them out and shook them. It was his understanding that this sound was irresistible to any cats within hearing, but nothing in the house moved.
The cat wasn’t there. Maybe it was outside, enjoying its freedom. Or maybe it was nailed to a tree in the goddamn forest.
