Did you just use the word ‘sus’? Is your spellcheck broken, bro?
I think Lo is saying you’re old East.
Phiny
I just snorted out my milk.
East
I’m not old.
Maybe Hattie doesn’t want to stay in the town she’s investigating in.
Phiny
And she just HAPPENED to ask the right grumpy game warden about cabins?
Sage
What are the odds?
She was looking at the flyers. I offered. That's it. There is no mystery to solve.
Wade
Lucky.
Sage
We’re all laughing.
A-holes. Have I told you lately I hate you?
CHAPTER 13
Hattie
Mornings here in the woods were quiet. Almost too quiet if I were being honest with myself. It was harder to get used to than I thought, after all the hustle and bustle of the suburban areas I typically stayed in. My last assignment in Arizona, I’d been staying in a shitty motel right next to a highway where trucks buzzed through on the regular. There’d been a constant chatter of people next door, and the doors banged all the time. This was such a drastic change that it was almost jarring.
This morning, when Kipp started his truck, I’d woken up from a foggy dream, but had collapsed back on my pillow and fallen back to sleep. Last night was one of those nights where I stayed up editing the podcast before finalizing it and putting it up to stream. When I’d finally fallen into bed, it had been with utter exhaustion. I wasn’t sure who had picked out the furnishings here orthe bedding, but they’d done a top-notch job. No scratchy pillowcases here.
Now it was time to really dig into the case and learn what I could about the other key details. Given what looked like blood in the photos bothered me, and the fact that the car hadn’t been processed was strange. More than strange, even in a small town like Briar Falls. Evidence should have been collected and treated as if it were a major crime, even if they didn’t have the resources to do so themselves. They could have contacted another nearby department or even the state police.
My eyes shifted over to Kipp’s cabin while I poured myself the requisite bowl of Cocoa Puffs. The air in the clearing around the little horseshoe of cabins was warmer now, even with the windows open. Everything had settled into that quiet that was almost oppressive now that Kipp had gone off to his job. I wondered idly whether game wardens had offices or just roamed the wilderness in their trucks, communing with the squirrels.
Part of me wished that I didn’t care so much that he was so turned off by my work, but it bothered me. If he had given me a chance to explain myself, then we could have gotten past it. Of course, I hadn’t stuck around long enough at the coffee shop to figure out why he’d had such a reaction to it.
I made coffee strong enough to bite back, opened my laptop at the small table by the window, and let the familiar weight of research pull me under. Part of myprocess was making sure I had all the facts. A lot of the research was done by the little squad I’d assembled, but double-checking it was important. If you weren’t factual in what you were doing in my line of work, then you could get yourself in a lot of trouble, and the last thing I wanted to do was to be throwing around baseless accusations.
Opening the case file on the computer I’d been working on for the last week, I pulled up the folder I had been building for weeks and started again from the beginning, not because I thought I had missed something obvious, but because patterns hide in repetition. Allison Finch stared back at me from the screen. Her senior portrait showed a girl with undeniable natural beauty, a smile that looked practiced, as if she had done it in the mirror a thousand times. There was still an innocence in her eyes in her high school photos, and her hair was its natural brown, tucked behind her ears.
We’d dug deep on Allison, everything on her, all the way back to the time she’d been born. Twenty-seven years’ worth of records that now seemed to hold almost nothing at all.
There was a copy of her birth certificate and school records that showed Allison had been a less-than-stellar student. She’d struggled in school in every subject, but she also hadn’t always had a good track record when it came to attendance, and it didn’t seem like any of her schools had success doing much about it.
My hacker squad had also managed to dig up CPS reports that were careful with their language and brutal in their implications. Her father, Richard Finch, had a well-documented file of being a fucking drunk for lack of a better term that went back decades. There were DUIs and a handful of drunk and disorderly conduct charges. But of course, there was nothing that ever stuck long enough to keep him off the streets for more than a night or two.
What was more telling were the hospital records for his daughter. Each one that I scrolled past was a story of her abuse. I already knew them by heart, but they told a story of a father who beat her and probably her mother, too. There was a broken wrist that went unexplained, a concussion, and then a fractured rib—slowly, reading each admission summary even though I already knew them by heart. Sure, there were all the mandatory reports, and then the follow-ups, but the system did what it always did when men managed to stay just inside the lines.
