Hunt took a right at the end of the hallway and then stopped in front of the first door they came to. He opened it, revealing a basic-looking interrogation room: a single table in the center of the room, tiled floors, unremarkable walls, and three chairs situated around the room.

  As Jack guided Murphy inside, Hunt nudged in next to Rachel. “I pulled his report. Seems like it would be a pretty good fit. I dare say it might come down to alibis. Any indication of woodwork at his house?”

  “No. No shed or shop that we could see, and no woodworking paraphernalia, either.”

  “I’ve sent a unit over to his house all the same, trailing forensics. If there’s anything that will nail him to this, they’ll get it.”

  Rachel nodded and then tilted her head toward the interrogation room. “Come on, Chief.” She usually didn’t like to invite local PD into their interrogations unless it was absolutely necessary. But she knew how this case had been tormenting Hunt and she figured he deserved a spot.

  “Mr. Murphy, this is Chief Hunt,” Rachel said. “I need you to tell him everything you told us. When we told you why were there to talk to you, what did you say?”

  “That it was insane,” he snapped as Jack helped him to a seat behind the table.

  “And why is that?”

  He looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “Because I’m not a killer! And quite frankly, it’s just lazy on your part. Hey, that guy was charged with killing his wife, so he must be our problem…even though I wasn’t convicted of it! A jury found me innocent!”

  “Yes, we understand that,” Rachel said. “But we’re really not here to talk about your wife and what may or may not have happened. We told you that—”

  “That bodies had been found buried at sites of future construction…sites that had recently been purchased by a company I no longer work with!”

  “But,” Jack said, “a company you’ve been actively trying to undercut. Tell Chief Hunt about that. Because if you really wanted to hurt a specific company, I think planting dead bodies on their worksites would be a great way to get it done.”

  Murphy wasted no time. He seemed almost happy to tell Hunt about the schemes he’d concocted against Williams and Meyers. She thought he might admit to just about anything if it meant the speculation of murder would be wiped away. And as he went through it all again, Rachel found herself crossing her arms over her chest and spinning down a funnel of thought she didn’t like at all.

  On the plain and polished surface, yes…Devon Murphy was absolutely a suspect. There were just too many marks against him. But at the same time, there were just as many that made him not so appealing to the case. First of all, even if he was guilty of murdering his wife, everything in the report indicated that it would have been an accident—an accident fueled by hatred and anger but an accident all the same. And making the jump from such an accident to the bizarre and very strategic murders they were currently investigating was a bit of a stretch. Secondly—and this thought was only now beginning to take shape in her mind— why would he bother burying bodies at those sites while also trying to steal them away from Williams and Meyers and give them to other competitors? Would a man trying to make money in such a way risk losing a payday and partnership with those competitors by placing dead bodies on the sites? If it was one or the other—undercutting by way of spying on them or tainting the scenes with bodies—it might make a bit more sense. But with both things taking place, one sort of contradicted the other.

  Then there were the victims themselves. How would Devon Murphy be connected to them? The governor’s daughter was the one that really tossed a monkey wrench into the whole thing. Unless…unless the killer was choosing at random. But even she knew that with such staging and presentation with the coffins, the chances were good that the killer had some sort of grudge against the victims. Even if the killer wasn’t linked to the victims in their personal lives, maybe just the victims had some sort of link between them…a link they’d overlooked or missed because they’d been so horrified and distracted by the makeshift coffins.

  She felt Jack nudge her from the right. She’d zoned out for a moment, not even listening intently to Hunt and Murphy go back and forth. Currently, Murphy was talking about how crazy it was that they thought he’d kill anyone—that he’d gone through the hassle of his wife’s trial and would really rather never relive the experience.

  “You okay?” Jack asked.

  She nodded but took a step toward the door. “Chief Hunt, would you excuse us, please?”

  Hunt nodded but gave her a confused glance as she and Jack made their way out of the room. Rachel saw that even Murphy looked confused.

  “What is it?” Jack asked when they were out in the hallway. “You’re about to do that thing you do, aren’t you?”

  “What thing?”

  “When you start to doubt the entire case now that we have what looks to be a real, potential suspect in custody.”

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling nervously. “I guess I am. Because the more I think about it, the less I think he fits.”

  Jack sighed, leaned against the wall, and smiled back at her. “Okay…explain.”

  She did her best to walk him through the deconstruction of what she’d been thinking in the interrogation room. She could see him start to agree with her in the form of something akin to disappointment in his eyes—disappointment in the fact that he, too, understood that though Devon Murphy checked a few boxes, he wasn’t the great fit they’d been hoping for.

  “So…a link between the victims,” Jack said. “Where do we even start?”

  “With the most recent. Emily Draven. Late thirties, divorced, a clean house. I think the chances are at least fifty-fifty that she was on a dating app of some kind. Or maybe a Facebook group for local singles. I say we start there and work our way backward.”

  Jack nodded and looked to the interrogation room door. “I’ll go in and tell Hunt. You go start doing your magic.”

  Their eyes met for just a moment and while it did stir up the romantic interest that continued to grow, it was briefly overshadowed by the urge to tell him about the faint headache that was lingering in her head. She had an excuse at the ready, though, more than happy to assume it was the result of a lack of sleep and not the tumor.

  So in the end, she simply turned and walked away, in search of a quiet place where she could start doing a social media dig on Emily Draven.

  ***

  Rachel was treated like royalty for about half an hour. Two officers and an assistant made sure she had an office space to herself, a laptop, access to the network, a cup of coffee, and a honeybun that had been left over from the morning’s pastry haul. She enjoyed the coffee and the snack as she used her phone and the provided laptop to run cross-checks on not only Emily Draven’s social media accounts, but Peter Weston’s and Wayne Dupree’s as well.

  The good part of this was that she felt that she was making progress while allowing herself a moment to rest. The bad part, though, was that her immobility was also causing her mind to wander a bit. And, as it tended to do these days, her mind instantly went to Alex Lynch when it had a moment to breathe.

  He was like her own personal Boogeyman; she knew he wasn’t actually always lurking at her shoulder, but that’s how it felt. She wondered where he was, how far away he was from her family, what his next move was. And as those thoughts crowded in, she couldn’t help but continue to feel that the next time she saw him, that would be the end of it. Whatever little endgame needed to go down between the two of them, she sensed that it was coming soon. Next time, she wouldn’t allow him to slip away so easily.

  Feeling confident in that, she forced her entire mind to focus on the case at hand. As it turned out, she’d been right in that Emily did have a dating profile. And based on the activity she saw on it, she had gotten quite a lot of attention. She had one of the helpful officers looking into the accounts of Madeline Young, mainly because she knew there wouldn’t be much there. She was a public figure, in a way, and those in political circles tended to be a bit tight-lipped online.

  Peter and Wayne didn’t have dating profiles from what she could tell, though she also knew there were about a million to choose from. In fact, Wayne’s only social media footprint came in the form of a Facebook account that he rarely used. The last post had been from seven months ago, an announcement for his mother’s funeral. Other than that, there were a few pictures of Wayne on a golf course with a group of friends. The pictures were over a year old.

  After half an hour and not yet making any connections, Jack opened the door and stepped inside.

  “How’s it going out there?” Rachel asked.

  “It’s okay. I think Hunt is starting to realize that Murphy isn’t our guy and he’s not taking it well. He and one of the deputies are currently working with him to figure out alibis and timelines. How about you?”

  “Nothing so far. It won’t be anything that’s resolved quickly, I don’t think. There are a lot of hits on Emily’s dating profile and if it comes down to it, we can just question everyone she’s interacted with on there over the past few weeks, I suppose.”

  “This is a mess, huh? I mean, even if Anderson sends in another few agents, the most we’re going to be able to do is just double up on questioning anyone that has been in contact with the victims recently or—”

  He stopped there, but Rachel knew where he was headed. The case was to the point where they were almost hoping they’d find another coffin. That might at least give them the opportunity to look for the faintest of clues or trace evidence the killer might have accidentally left behind.

  Rachel nearly commented on this, but a knock at the door stopped her. The officer helping with Madeline Young’s social media accounts poked her head in. Rachel could already read the look of defeat on her face.

  “Just so you know, I came to the end of her Instagram feed and didn’t find anything. She’s on LinkedIn, too, but I’m going to need to get someone else to get me in because the account is locked. It might take another twenty or thirty minutes.”

  “That’s fine. Thank you. And you’re sure there’s nothing noteworthy on her Instagram?”

  “Not unless you’re really interested in her dog. Or golf.”

  “Golf?” Rachel asked.

  “Yeah, there are several pictures of her on a golf course. Some are candid, with her playing, but most are cutesy poses with some her dad’s friends and political folks.”

  On her phone, Rachel closed out her current search on Peter Weston, getting rid of a Twitter feed that was mostly used to gripe about a variety of things he thought the federal government was getting wrong. She then pulled up Madeline Young’s Instagram feed and started scanning for pictures of gold courses.

  “What is it?” Jack asked.

  “There were lots of pictures on Wayne Dupree’s Facebook page…pictures of him playing golf.”

  Jack leaned in and, still standing, used the laptop to bring up some of the pictures she’d been talking about. Her eyes remained on her phone screen, though. She found that the officer hadn’t been kidding about the dog; there were countless pictures of some strange Yorkshire breed all over Madeline’s page. But buried in between all of those, there were indeed pictures of Madeline on golf courses. As a woman in her fifties, she really did rock the golf-skirt look, Rachel had to admit.

  She scanned through the golf-related posts, looking for pictures with other people. She saw a few where she was posed with her father and many others with just an assortment of random people and friends. In these pictures, she looked to see if Madeline was the sort that tagged others in her posts…and it turned out, she was. She read through the names, recognizing none of them. After four posts like this, she started jotting the names down with a pen, writing on the first thing she could find—the napkin her honeybun had been brought in on.

  She ended up with just five names, as a few had been repeated. She then looked up at the pictures that Jack was scanning through on Wayne’s account. “Start paying attention to the tags,” Rachel said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She let out a soft laugh, having almost forgotten Jack’s aversion to all things social media. “Like, if she tags the picture with someone else’s name. On Facebook, it’s near the top of the post…like Madeline Young is with so-and so.”

  “Oh, yeah. I knew that.”

  He stopped scrolling and they both checked the current picture. None of the names that were tagged in the picture were on the list she’d scribbled down from Madeline’s. He went to another picture of Wayne on the greens but again, there was no result.

  The third picture he came to, however, was a bit harder to decipher. It was a large group of people, maybe twenty in all. And while there were no tags in the picture, several people commented. The first thing Rachel saw beneath the photo was a notification that read: Avery Reed and 7 others commented.

  “Avery Reed,” she said, looking quickly back to her list on the napkin. Sure enough, the name Avery Reed was written there.

  With no way to tell which person in the picture was Avery Reed, she went back to Madeline’s posts. She found the two different posts where Reed was tagged and, after just a few seconds of looking back and forth between the pictures, she was able to pick him out.

  “Avery Reed,” she said, pointing to the screen. “Back row, third from the left.”

  Jack and the other officer both leaned in closer for a better look. “Okay,” Jack said. “So, he’s called out in social media posts by both Madeline Young and Wayne Dupree. But what about Emily Draven and Peter Weston?”

  But Rachel was already on it. She went back to Emily’s dating profile and scrolled through the other profiles that had liked or otherwise interacted with her. Sure enough, within ten seconds, she found the name there, too: Avery Reed.

  “Okay, now we’re on to something,” she said.

  “I’ll say,” Jack said excitedly from beside her. “Rachel…look at this.”

  He’d clicked on the photo on Wayne’s account, making it bigger. He then zoomed in on Avery Reed. Rachel saw what he meant right away, and a flare of satisfaction rocketed through her.

  Reed was wearing a thin windbreaker, zipped up to the neck. There was a logo for a business on his left breast. It was a logo Rachel and Jack had seen several times in the course of the past day.

  “Williams and Meyers,” Rachel said.

  With nervous energy suddenly flowing through her, Rachel minimized the Facebook window and pulled up the PD database. She typed in the name Avery Reed while calling out to the officer over her shoulder.

  “I need you to call Williams and Meyers. Ask for Amy, and then find out anything you can about what connection Avery Reed has with the company.”

  The officer nodded excitedly and then rushed out of the room. This left Rachel and Jack to sit in the excitement of their new revelation. They now had a man that was connected with three of the victims and the realty agency they’d been digging into. The only missing link was Peter Weston, but she felt certain that a bit more digging might turn up something there as well.

  “So we need to hit Peter Weston hard,” Jack said. “Find out how he’d be connected, too.”

  “Exactly,” she said, but she was already moving on to what she thought was the next logical step. She ran a quick search on Facebook for Avery Reed and found it easily enough. She went to the About page and when she read it, she felt almost stupid for not taking this route sooner. She blamed it on the coffins and the absurdity of the burial sites. It had all felt so surreal, so distracting. She couldn’t help but wonder if the killer—now presumably Avery Reed—had planned it this way.

  “Jack…his work history…”

  “What?”

  Rachel was already getting to her feet, ready to get moving, ready to go find Reed. “He’s an accountant. He could have easily been—”

  “He was,” came a voice from behind them. They both turned and found the female officer with a cellphone to her ear. “Amy’s on the line right now. She says Avery Reed is an accountant. And up until about five months ago, he had Williams and Meyers as a client.”

  “Any idea why he quit?”

  The officer shook her head. “She doesn’t know.”

  “Well, then,” Jack said. “Let’s go find out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  He’d nearly been caught when he’d dug the hole for Emily Draven’s box. The worksite was tucked away behind a derelict office building and a partial privacy wall to keep the construction mess away from the street, but the occasional glare of headlights would sweep by just a bit, keeping him on his toes. But then, there had been a pair of headlights that came by and turned into the bumpy entrance to the site.

  Once he’d seen the lights coming, he knew he could only hope. He’d dropped down into the hole, hugging his shovel to him, and waited. The idea of getting caught was wretched but it wasn’t something he feared. Not really. Still, he had much more left to do and would hate to have to put an end to the adventure earlier than he’d planned.

  While he lay in the hole—no more than three feet deep—he thought of his mother. She’d call him a coward for laying down in the hole. If the headlights belonged to some random person pulling over or turning around, then he could deal with them if they caused problems. And if it was the police, well, he may as well go ahead and confront them. Maybe take one or two out if he could. He did have a gun in his truck, and he’d use it if he had to.

  He’d been thinking of his mother a lot lately. She was dead and gone now, but she haunted his mind every day. Her last words to him and been painful—more painful than he cared to admit, and too painful to properly process.

 

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