Callie spoke up from the second row. "We've learned that another young woman has gone missing. Fiona Spence. She's eighteen. A friend reported it yesterday. Her car was found abandoned on Route 73. Could be linked."
Noah sat near the back of the room and felt the name hit him before the context did. Fiona. Ethan's Fiona. The girlfriend he'd only just learned about two days ago on the mountain, the girl his son had grinned about in the truck, the one who was supposed to have a modeling shoot. He glanced at Callie. She caught his eye briefly and then turned back to Ray.
Ray nodded. "So we'll look into it." He made a note on the whiteboard behind him.
A deputy near the window raised his hand. "How did we find these bodies?"
"A tip," Ray said. He glanced at Noah for a fraction of a second. "That's all you need to know for now." He capped his marker. "That's it. Assignments are posted. Let's get to work."
Chairs scraped. People stood. The room began to empty. Noah stayed seated until the crowd had thinned, then got up and followed Ray down the corridor to his office.
He closed the door behind them.
"A tip?" Noah said. "Why didn't you tell them about Seraphine?"
Ray dropped into the chair behind his desk and rubbed his eyes. "For the same reason Luke didn't back in the day."
"So you knew about that sketch."
"Of course I knew. She was sixteen when she came forward claiming to have had some kind of vision about Kara Ellison. All she had was that sketch. That's it." He leaned back. "You didn't know that place until you connected it to another image. It was vague. There are hundreds of bridges around here. And every time someone goes missing, every psychic and palm reader in the county comes out of the woodwork. We had one saying Kara was in Mexico. Another saying she'd made it to Europe. Others swearing she was buried in someone's basement. Rabbit holes, Noah. We would have been lost for days. We stayed focused on Carter Lyle and it paid off. Seraphine was nothing. Just an unstable kid from a cult."
"A cult?"
"Three Pillars Community." Ray groaned and leaned against the desk. "Look, I appreciate what you did. The lead. Following your instincts. But stay in your lane. You are not supposed to be involved in this case."
"So you're going to speak to her?"
"Why would I? She might have just gotten lucky. For all we know Kara Ellison might not be among the six."
"But she could be. They've been there a while."
"Until forensics tells us how long, we don't know what 'a while' means." Ray paused. "Besides, Carter Lyle is up for execution in under two weeks. The last thing the Ellison family needs is to think that the person who killed their daughter is going to get a stay of execution. This needs to end cleanly."
"Cleanly? But he might not be guilty."
"Are we back to that again? Didn't anything I told you about the knife, Kara's blood, the GPS, the jury, the judge stick?"
"People see what they want to see."
"Yeah, they do. And maybe you're wanting to bend the evidence to fit your narrative."
Noah stood by the window and stared out at the parking lot for a moment. Then he turned back.
"The coat and ID from the Brooke Danvers scene. If we test the DNA from the jacket and ID and match it against the blood from the knife, that would at least give us a clearer picture."
"Of what, Noah?"
"If it's a match, then whoever killed Brooke Danvers might have killed Kara. And since Brooke only went missing two weeks ago, that would mean Carter Lyle is not responsible."
"Unless he had someone working with him and they continued killing."
"Lyle's brother? The one who turned the knife in?"
"No. He's been dead for years. Cancer."
"So that leaves it possibly being someone else entirely."
Ray ran a hand around the back of his neck and turned to the window, then turned back. "Do you really want to open Pandora's box on this?"
