“Because of the F-150.”
“Yes, exactly. The truck was wiped down and abandoned on the other side of the county. There’s no way Paul Nadler did that. Somebody else did.”
“I feel like we’re back at square one.”
“Oh, no, we’re not. Thanks to you, we may well be a lot further along than we were before. However, our suspect pool just got bigger. Any alibis people had for Friday don’t hold up anymore. We’ve looked at this whole case through the lens of Jeremiah’s disappearance on Friday afternoon. But that may no longer be the relevant timeline. If Paul Nadler was the one who took Jeremiah to the resort, then the real question is, what happened between Friday afternoon and the discovery of Nadler’s body by the river in Stanton on Sunday morning?”
I thought about the people we’d considered suspects.
Will and Vince Gruder.
Keith Whalen.
I’d seen all three of them on Friday afternoon when there wasn’t enough time for them to have taken the boy to the resort and made their way back to Everywhere. But Reed was right. Things had changed. We didn’t know where they’d been for the next two days.
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “If somebody else got involved, how did they even find Jeremiah? Nobody knew he was at the resort, and I can’t believe they stumbled onto him by accident. It’s too much of a coincidence.”
“Well, everybody in Mittel County was looking for the boy,” Reed pointed out. “Maybe somebody saw or heard something that led them to search the resort. And there he was. We’ll need to talk to everyone who lives nearby to see what they remember.”
Somebody heard something.
Talk to everyone who lives nearby.
As he said that, I felt a ripple go through me.
“Somebody in Witch Tree did hear something.”
I leaped out of my chair and headed for the stairs that led down to the sheriff’s office. Reed followed on my heels. Downstairs, the lights were on, but there was only one deputy staffing the phones. I gave him a distracted greeting as I headed for the file cabinet. The Jeremiah file cabinet. I knew what I was looking for. My notes. My own personal diary of everything I’d seen and heard during the early days of the investigation.
I yanked the folder out of the drawer the way I’d done over and over at different points in the past ten years when I revisited the investigation. I flipped through the pages until I found my notes for Saturday morning.
“Breezy,” I said. “She heard something.”
“The waitress?”
“Yes. Belinda Brees. I went into the diner on Saturday morning the day after Jeremiah disappeared. Breezy made an off-handed comment that didn’t seem important, but I wrote it down anyway, because I was still suspicious about the Gruders.”
“What did she say?”
“She said I was right about Will and Vince being back in town. They’d been playing their music half the night, and it was keeping her awake. But the Mittel Pines Resort isn’t much farther from Breezy’s house than the Gruders’. What if the music she heard wasn’t coming from Will and Vince? What if it was really coming from the F-150 at the resort?”
Just as it had the previous night, light blazed from the darkness at Breezy’s trailer in Witch Tree. An inch of snow had already gathered over her dirt driveway, and more was falling like a slow, quiet avalanche. The virgin bed was undisturbed by tire tracks when we arrived.
I got out of the cruiser. So did Agent Reed. We made footprints in the snow and climbed the rusted metal steps of the trailer. I thumped on the door. “Breezy? It’s Shelby. Breezy, are you there?”
I put an ear to the door and heard nothing but the wind around me. The trees in the dark forest surrounding the lot stared at us.
“Not home?” Reed asked.
“Her car’s here.”
We descended into the snow and circled the trailer. The only footsteps I saw were a few rabbit tracks crisscrossing the yard between Dudley’s rusted carcass and the tree line. Breezy hadn’t been outside since the snow began. I got on tiptoes to peer through the windows, but the curtains were pulled shut on all sides. I banged on the wall and called again. “Breezy? You around? Open up!”
I went to her Dodge Durango and brushed away the snow and peered inside. It was empty. I checked the wooden shed where her yard equipment was stored and shined a flashlight on the interior. There was nothing inside but old spiderwebs and pools of ice on the concrete floor.
The two of us went back to the trailer. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed her number. When I listened, I could hear the muffled sound of Breezy’s ringtone inside. Her phone was there.
I climbed the trailer steps again and checked the door, but it was locked.
“Does she have a boyfriend?” Reed asked.
“Lots. But I don’t think this is about a boyfriend.”
“Well, what do you want to do, Deputy? This is your town.”
“I say we go in.”
Reed nodded his agreement. He climbed the steps and threw his shoulder heavily against the trailer door. He was a big man, and the lock only held through two more mighty shoves before it gave way. The door banged open. Reed went in first, and I followed him.
Immediately, I slapped my hand over my face. The smell erupting out of the warm, shut-up space was like a hothouse of rotting lilies. I had to swallow down the urge to vomit. My eyes shot to the floor, and I wanted to scream at what I saw. Blood was spattered across the kitchenette and had settled into a sticky lake on the linoleum floor. In the middle was Breezy. She lay sprawled on her side, eyes fixed and open as she stared at me, her skin gray. Her long hair spilled across her face and was stained red by her own blood.
My friend, my fellow Striker girl, was dead.
Chapter Forty
I called Adam, and it took him forty-five minutes to drive to Witch Tree through the snow. I met him outside. When he and I went back into the trailer together, I kept my arms wrapped so tightly around my chest that it felt like a boa constrictor was squeezing me to death. I held back my emotions as I stared at Breezy’s body. It’s not like violent death was a stranger around here. I’d seen grisly suicides by shotgun. I’d seen car accidents where people flew headfirst through the windshield. But this was different. I’d known Belinda Brees since I was a girl and talked to her at the diner practically every day of my adult life. I’d sat right here with her in this trailer two nights ago. And now she lay dead at my feet.
“What the hell happened here?” Adam asked. “Was this an accident? Did she slip?”
He examined a plastic bottle of canola oil tipped sideways on the counter. The lid was loose, and oil had oozed down the front of the cabinets and made a slippery puddle on the trailer floor. Some of the oil had comingled with the blood, and I could see a sheen of oil on the bottoms of Breezy’s bare feet. On the other side of the kitchenette was the sharp counter edge where her skull had struck as she fell backward. It was stained to a deep burgundy, and remnants of bone and tissue clung to the corner. Below, on the linoleum, tiny florets of brain matter were scattered around her head like spilled cereal.
Agent Reed knelt next to the body. “If she slipped, she had help. See these little sliver cuts on her shoulders? Those are from fingernails. There’s bruising, too.”
I bent over, reluctantly, and saw what he meant. There were four tiny crescent scratches on both of Breezy’s bare shoulders beside the spaghetti straps of her top. Little discolorations marked her skin. She’d had a violent confrontation with whoever killed her, and I didn’t think the timing of her murder was a coincidence.