Kinsley eventually walked around the fire pit and took the seat next to him. She stared at the ashes in the center of the pit for a long while before she spoke again.
“Someone moved him, Noah. Someone took Gantz’s car and his body out of that lake.”
Noah didn’t respond right away. He sat with the information the way he always did, turning it over in his mind, examining it from every angle before letting himself react. When he finally spoke, his voice had shifted from shock to something moreanalytical, the way it did when he was working through a problem.
“Do you understand what that would actually take?” Noah asked, almost to himself. He rubbed the back of his neck and stared out at the tree line. “We rolled that car into Terrapin Lake at the deepest point we could find off the north embankment. That section drops off fast, Kin. Fifteen, maybe twenty feet of water, and the bottom is nothing but soft silt and muck. Once that car settled, it would have sunk into the lakebed like a stone pressed into wet clay.”
“I know where we put it,” Kinsley said quietly.
“Then you know that pulling it back out isn’t something a person does on a whim.” Noah shifted in his chair, leaning his elbows on his knees as the practical side of his brain took over. “You’d need a heavy-duty winch at minimum. Industrial grade, the kind rated for several tons. A standard tow truck winch wouldn’t cut it, not with the weight of a waterlogged sedan buried in silt. The suction alone from the lakebed would add hundreds of pounds of resistance. And you’d need something solid to anchor the winch to. A vehicle heavy enough to handle the load without sliding into the lake itself. We’re talking a commercial tow rig, maybe a flatbed wrecker with a boom, or a piece of heavy construction equipment.”
“So not exactly something you pick up at the hardware store,” Kinsley murmured.
“Not even close. And that’s just the extraction.” Noah held up a finger. “First, whoever did this had to locate the car. Terrapin Lake isn’t small. You’d need to know the general area where it went in, which means either they watched us that night, or they searched for it over time. If they searched, they’d need sonar equipment, a fish finder at the very least, something to scan the bottom without sending divers down. Even then, a car buriedunder a layer of silt doesn’t exactly show up like a target on a screen. It takes patience and the right equipment.”
A cold knot formed in Kinsley’s stomach. She’d understood on a surface level that moving the car was a significant undertaking, but hearing Noah lay out the logistics step by step made the scope of it feel enormous. Whoever had done this wasn’t some curious bystander who’d stumbled onto their secret. This was planned.
Deliberate.
Resourced.
“Once they found it and got it hooked up,” Noah continued, his voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry past the fire pit, “they’d have to drag it up that embankment. The north shore is steep, probably a thirty-degree grade, where we rolled it in. You’d need to clear a path or at least find a section of shoreline where the terrain is forgiving enough to haul a vehicle up without it getting hung up on rocks or stumps.”
Kinsley rubbed her eyes, still irritated from her earlier crying bout.
“I have no idea when they moved it, either. It could have been weeks or months ago. The notes started arriving twelve months after I killed Gantz, so whoever this is has known about the body for at least nine months. They could have pulled the car out at any point in that window.”
“Once they’ve got the car out of the water and up the embankment, then what? They’ve got a waterlogged vehicle with a decomposing body in the trunk, dripping lake water everywhere, probably smelling like something that would make a coroner flinch. They can’t exactly drive it down the road. The car has been submerged for over a year. The engine’s destroyed, the electronics are shot. It would need to be loaded onto a trailer or a flatbed.”
“And driven somewhere,” Kinsley added, following his logic. “Somewhere private enough to store a car with a body inside without anyone noticing the smell.”
“Exactly. A barn, a warehouse, an abandoned property with enough seclusion that nobody would come poking around.” Noah rubbed his jaw, the stubble rasping against his palm. “Kin, we’re not talking about one person with a grudge and a tow rope. This is someone with access to some serious equipment, knowledge of how to use it, and a private location to store the results. That narrows the field considerably.”
“Or it widens it in ways I don’t even want to think about,” Kinsley said. “Anyone with money could hire someone to do the extraction. They wouldn’t need to know how to operate the equipment themselves. They’d just need to know where the car was and have the resources to pay someone to keep their mouth shut.”
Noah was quiet for a moment, seemingly processing their conversation.
“Which brings us back to the fundamental question. How did they know? How did anyone know the car was there in the first place?”
The question settled between them. Kinsley had been turning it over in her mind all afternoon and hadn’t come any closer to an answer. She and Noah had been alone that night, or at least she’d believed they were. The road had been empty. The lake had been dark and still. They hadn’t told a soul.
“I don’t know,” Kinsley finally admitted. “But it has to be connected to the notes. The person who’s been sending me messages every month on the nineteenth, without fail, since the one-year anniversary of Gantz’s death. Whoever it is knows what happened, and now they’ve taken the evidence.”
“The notes only ever say they know what you did, Kin. There’s never been any demands, so it’s not blackmail in thetraditional sense. Just those cryptic little reminders.” Noah was still working through the logic, and she could practically see the gears turning behind his eyes. “And here’s the part that doesn’t add up. If they wanted to turn you in, they had the body. They had the car. They had everything they needed to walk into a police station and end your life. But they didn’t do that. Instead, they removed the evidence from the one place law enforcement might eventually look. Moving it only protects you.”
“I used my service weapon,” Kinsley whispered, closing her eyes at the mistake she’d made by not disposing of it properly. “The bullet would still be in him. That ties the body directly to me.”
“Which matters, yes. But evidence that’s been moved and tampered with, pulled from a lake by an unknown party, and then stored in some undisclosed location? Any halfway decent defense attorney would tear that chain of custody apart.” Noah waited until he had her full attention before finishing the thought. “It doesn’t make sense, Kin. Every piece of this, from the extraction to the storage to the timing, points to someone protecting you. But the notes say otherwise.”
“Unless they want to torment me.” The words hung in the air between them, heavy and unresolved. “Maybe this isn’t about money or justice. Maybe it’s about control, about holding it over my head and watching me squirm for as long as they can.”
Noah’s gaze slid past her to the patio door, and she could tell he was calculating how much time they had before Lily or one of the others came outside to join them. He’d apparently reached the same conclusion she had, because he quickly asked one more question.
“Shane?”
“No body, no crime,” Kinsley repeated, and the wry laugh that accompanied the words tasted bitter in her mouth. “He saidhe wouldn’t pursue it without evidence. That we should stay out of each other’s way.”
“You don’t think he could have?—”
