"I did come forward. I was sixteen. I drew a picture and I walked into a police station and I handed it to two officers who looked at me like I was a delusional child from a cult. They didn't search the bog. They didn't look into my mother. They filed the sketch and forgot about it." She paused. "After that, the community made sure I wouldn't try again. And by the time I got out and heard that Hollis might be connected, I didn't think anyone would believe me. Why would they? Nobody believed me the first time."
"Might be?"
"It's what I was told."
"So you can't be certain?"
"Of course not. I was a child when she went missing."
"But the person who told you. Who was that?"
"A friend of my mother's."
"In the community?"
"No. Outside."
“Do you have a name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Seraphine, think.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t…”
Dr. Whitfield leaned forward. "I think that's enough for today."
Noah gathered the photographs and slid them back into the folder. He looked at Seraphine for a moment. She sat on her stool with her hands in her lap and the afternoon light on herface and the painting of the bog on the wall behind her, the place her mother loved, the place that was supposed to have given up its secrets five years ago if anyone had bothered to look.
"Thank you, Seraphine," he said. "I mean that."
She nodded once. He left the studio and the bell above the door chimed behind him and then it was quiet again.
32
The briefing room at High Peaks Police Department had been rearranged to accommodate the press. Folding chairs in tight rows. Camera tripods lining the back wall. Microphones clustered on the podium like a bouquet nobody wanted. The room was full and the noise was the hum of a media pack that smelled blood and closure in equal measure.
Noah stood against the side wall with his arms folded, watching. McKenzie was beside him. Callie was absent, which was probably for the best. Across the room, Maddie Sutherland sat in the front row with her legal pad, her pen uncapped, ready to intervene if Ray said anything the DA's office would need to walk back.
Ray stepped to the podium. He'd put on a fresh shirt and his badge was polished and he looked, for the first time in days, like a man who believed the worst was behind him.
"Derek Hollis was identified early in this investigation as a person of interest. Through the dedicated efforts of our officers and investigators, he is now in custody. Evidence recovered at the scene has been processed and formal charges are being prepared." He paused and gripped both sides of the podium."What matters most is the threat to our community has been removed. The people of High Peaks can feel safe again."
The crowd applauded. Not all of them. The reporters didn't. But the civilians who had come, the parents, the neighbors, the people who had been locking their doors and checking their daughters' locations for the past two weeks, they clapped with the desperate relief of people who needed this to be true.
"Any questions?"
The hands went up. The questions came fast. Ray fielded them the way he fielded everything, steady, measured, giving enough without giving too much. Noah watched him and thought about how good his brother was at this, at standing behind a podium and making order out of chaos, at turning an investigation full of holes into a narrative that held together long enough for the cameras to get their footage and the town to exhale.
Noah was beginning to allow himself to think less about the bodies and more about Ethan. The evidence against Hollis was substantial. The college IDs. The rags. The chloroform. Ruby's body on the same property. Seraphine's identification. It stacked up. Maybe not perfectly, maybe not without questions, but it stacked up in the way that cases did when the right person was in the room. And after weeks of chasing suspects who turned out to be predators but not killers, the weight of wanting this to be over was pressing down on him harder than he wanted to admit.
Noah steppedout of the briefing room into the corridor and pulled out his phone. The noise from the press conference faded behind the closed door. He scrolled to Ethan's number and was about to dial when a voice stopped him.
"Mr. Sutherland."
He looked up. Mark Spence stood in the corridor, his hands in his jacket pockets, his face carrying a worn expression.
"Mr. Spence."
