“Stop,” Jake says sternly, tugging the rope again. “That's enough. Don't you think enough has happened in this town? We can't be turning against each other. We need to pull together right now and try to help each other through this, not lose control of ourselves.”
As Jake talks, I drop down to my knees beside the man on the ground and release the rope from around his neck. He rubs at the red, raw skin left behind, but at least he's still breathing and not dangling from the tree like an homage to the vigilante justice of the Old West.
“Thank you, Jake. I can take this from here.”
Chief LaRoche walks through the crowd and stares at the two men. Jake hands over the rope and comes over to me, wrapping his arm around my shoulders to guide me away. I'm shaking, my hands trembling so hard I can barely keep them down.
“I'm sorry you had to see that,” he sighs.
“I can't believe someone would go that far,” I mutter. “He was ready to kill that guy.”
Jake nods. “He was. The people around here are getting pushed too far. They want the police to find out who's been doing this and stop them before more people are lost.”
I shiver as we walk away from the park. In those few moments, everything got so much more intense. There's a darkness over this town. Secrets it’s holding onto. If I don't bring an end to them, it will only get worse.
An emergency in the kitchen meant Jake had to go in early. It leaves me with the afternoon to do something I've been planning since I arrived. Taking a bag of supplies and equipment with me, I pile into the car and start the long drive back in the direction I came. When I'm certain I'm close, I pull the car onto the gravel beside the train track and park. Climbing out of the car, I look around.
A few feet away, the end of a wooden post sticks out of the remaining traces of snow. Bright pink plastic tattered by the wind and rain marks where the body of the woman, Cristela Jordan, lay months ago. It's one of the realities of crime scenes that often shocks people. Most people hope scenes like this are cleaned up when the police are finished with the initial investigations, so no traces of the horror are left behind. They want not just the body gone, but anything that might remind passers-by of what happened there.
That doesn't always happen. In fact, it's rare for scenes to be totally broken down, even when cases are closed. It's too easy for investigators to just walk away and leave behind traces. Some linger for years after.
I'm glad for this one. The marker matches the pictures given to me by Creagan. It's as clear in my mind now as if I'm holding the image in my hand. The gravel looks clean, but I'm sure if I dug down past the first few layers of rocks, I'd find traces of the blood that was spread across the entire area when they found her. Standing beside the marker, I orient myself and look down the tracks. I can't see it, but in the distance, there is likely another marker where the body of the man was found weeks later.
In both cases, the bodies were badly damaged. The man was dissected, and several body parts were missing, while the woman appeared to have been hit by an oncoming train after death. Examining the body as much as they could showed she had marks on her like she was strangled and suffered various cuts and blunt force trauma, but the train mangled her, making it harder to determine what actually happened.
The initial investigation into Cristela Jordan's death considered the possibility that she and her killer had hopped one of the commercial trains that come down this line several times per week. They theorized she was murdered after an altercation and tossed onto the tracks. That doesn't make sense. If she was thrown from the train, she would land directly on the gravel, not on the track to be hit. Later there were examinations of the trains that passed this way for several days before the body was found. None of them were covered in blood. That didn't surprise me much when I heard it. The high-pressure water used to wash the trains would remove any signs of blood before they knew to preserve anything. There was really no way of knowing what train hit her or when.
It makes me wonder why she was dropped on the tracks to be ground up by a train, but the man was relieved of several of his limbs and then what was left was deposited by the tracks. One in Virginia; one in North Carolina. The line that separated the two states wasn't extremely obvious, but that made me even more curious if whoever did this realized what they were doing by disposing of the bodies where they did. The only thing that linked the two bodies to the rest of the disappearances was that all ten victims were from Feathered Nest or the next town over. It seems strange for ten people to go missing in small-town Virginia, only for one to be found brutally murdered a few yards over the state line.
But that's what brought in the Bureau. Whoever did this, made a serious mistake with those few feet. They brought me here.
“I just don't want to think too much of it,” I say into the phone later that night, after I finish examining the site and return to the cabin.
“Why not?” Bellamy asks. “He sounds just about perfect.”
I pull open the top drawer of the dresser and take out a pair of thick, fluffy socks.
“He's not perfect. He's good looking and has an amazing smile. He's sweet and attentive. He's funny. He wants to take care of the people around him…”
“You're not really making your case here, Emma.”
“He's a great guy, but it doesn't feel right.”
I go to shut the drawer, but something stops it. I jiggle the handle of the drawer and try to force it back, but it won't move.
“What's going on?” she asks, obviously hearing me fight with the drawer.
“There's something stuck in the drawer. I can't get it to close.” I reach into the drawer and to the very back so I can feel along it. My fingers hit something, and I pull it out. “Got it.”
“What was it?” she asks.
“A thimble,” I tell her, looking it over carefully before setting it on top of the dresser.
“That place is full of all kinds of surprises, isn't it?” she asks.
“I guess you could say that,” I tell her.
“Which is exactly why you need to be more open about Jake.”
“I'm not sure I see the connection between a thimble and Jake,” I say.
“Not the thimble,” she insists. “The surprise. Maybe he showed up in your life to help you through everything. He's a bright spot for you when you really need it. Now's the time for you to realize there are more hearts out there, more men. If there's anyone in this world who deserves to just stop thinking and start enjoying a connection with someone else, it's you.”
I hear someone knocking on the front door and head into the living room.
“Someone's at the door,” I tell her. I peer through the window and can't believe what I'm seeing. “Bellamy, I'm going to have to call you back. Jake is at my door with takeout.”
“Then open it!”
“This isn’t me, Bellamy. I don’t fall for people like this,” I say.
“No, it isn’t you! It’s Emma Monroe! This could be exactly what you need. You’re undercover, right? Let that version enjoy being in control for a little while.”
Chapter Seven
I am trying to shower off the foggy effects of another night with no more than two hours of sleep as I work on the case, but the sound of my phone ringing incessantly drives me out from under the water. After hearing about the near-hanging, and another woman going missing a few towns over that isn’t confirmed but might be linked to these cases, Bellamy and Eric have reached epic proportions of worry in the last few days.
But I'm not going to let it stop me. I'm going to figure this out. I can feel it. There are just a few pieces missing, and once I find them, this will all be over. But in order to do that, these two need to leave me alone and let me breathe for ten minutes.