"Yeah."
"Son of a bitch must have been keeping the girls here. Tabitha said she was just bringing him supplies." A pause. Static followed. "We're checking the outbuildings for Hailey Benton and Fiona Spence. I'll keep you updated."
Noah looked at the college IDs through the bag. Seven faces. Seven girls who had gone through the pipeline and ended up in the ground. His mind went back to the Kara Ellison ID that had been found on Brooke Danvers. The jacket with the SUNY Plattsburgh card hidden in the lining. Trophies. The killer kept them. There was always something.
A bottle of chloroform was found in the cabin ten minutes later, tucked behind cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink. Consistent with the sweet chemical smell Hailey had described. The pieces were stacking up. The rags. The IDs. The chloroform. The location. The man in handcuffs in the back of a cruiser.
Then the commotion started.
"Get off me!" Callie's voice cut through the clearing. Noah looked up and saw her shoving an officer backward, hard, both hands on his chest. The officer stumbled and put his hands up. Callie was already past him, walking fast toward the cruiser where Hollis sat in the back seat.
Noah handed the evidence bag back and hurried over.
"Hey, hey, hey!" He got between Callie and the cruiser, his hands on her shoulders.
Her face was white beneath the cuts. Her eyes were wet but whatever was behind those eyes was not grief. Not yet. That would come later. This was something else.
"That son of a bitch." She tried to get past him. Noah held her. "She's in the root cellar."
"Who?"
"Ruby."
Noah's hands dropped from her shoulders.
"Ruby?" he asked.
Multiple officers moved in as Callie lunged for the cruiser door. McKenzie appeared from somewhere and got his arms around her midsection. Another deputy stepped between her and the vehicle. Through the cruiser window, Hollis was shouting, his face pressed against the glass, his cuffed hands banging on the partition.
"I didn't do it! I don't know what she's talking about! I never touched anyone!"
Noah left them. He walked across the clearing toward the far side of the property where a low mound of earth rose from the ground near the tree line. The root cellar. A partially underground structure with a heavy wooden door set at an angle into the hillside, built fifty years ago to store vegetables and preserve canned goods through the winter.
The door was open. An officer stood beside it, his face gray.
Noah went down the stone steps. The air changed immediately, cool and damp and carrying a smell that he recognized before his eyes adjusted to the dark. The space was small, maybe eight by ten feet, with shelves along both walls holding mason jars and rusted cans. The floor was packed earth.
Ruby lay in the far corner. Curled on her side, her knees drawn up, her arms pulled in close. She was wearing the same clothes she'd had on the last time he saw her. Her dark hair was spread across the dirt floor. Her face was turned toward the wall.
Noah crouched beside her. The stab wounds were visible through her shirt, multiple punctures in the torso and abdomen, a pattern consistent with what Adelaide Chambers had documented on Brooke Danvers. The same frenzied clustering. The same depth. The same blade.
He stayed there for a moment. The root cellar was silent except for the sounds filtering down from above, radios, voices, boots on gravel. The world above was doing what it always did after a discovery like this, organizing, processing, turning horror into procedure. Down here it was just a girl in the dirt who had been looking for her friend and found something else instead.
Noah stood and climbed the steps back into the daylight.
The interview roomat High Peaks Police Department was bare. A table. Two chairs. A metal ring bolted to the table surface. Derek Hollis sat with his wrists cuffed to the ring, his head down, a bruise forming along his jaw where it had met the ground. The fluorescent light above him buzzed.
Noah stood in the observation room with Ray and McKenzie. Through the one-way glass, Hollis sat motionless.
"Where's Callie?" Ray asked.
"Rivera is handling her," McKenzie said. "The way she lost it at the scene, Sheriff Rivera said it might jeopardize her chances of taking that detective exam. She struck one of your guys."
Noah turned from the glass. "Oh, please. You were there, Ray. There was a lot of pushing. She didn't strike anyone. We were both amped up after being dragged halfway down the road. Get your guy to calm the hell down."
"All right, I'll speak to him," Ray said. He looked through the glass at Hollis. “Has he asked for a lawyer yet?"
"Not yet," McKenzie said. "The ME is checking his DNA against the college IDs, Ruby, and the rags to see if we have a match with the other bodies. We've also been verifying the IDs themselves, making sure they're originals, not fakes."
