What She Saw - 39
Sloane I left Susan’s house exhausted. I slid into Grant’s passenger seat and laid my head back against the headrest. “She admitted it all. She’s Tristan.” I recapped what she’d told me. “She convinced her father to report her missing.” “Colton was arrested two weeks later. Why keep the secret for t...
Sloane
I left Susan’s house exhausted. I slid into Grant’s passenger seat and laid my head back against the headrest. “She admitted it all. She’s Tristan.” I recapped what she’d told me. “She convinced her father to report her missing.”
“Colton was arrested two weeks later. Why keep the secret for thirty-one years?”
“She said there was someone else in the trailer. She didn’t see any faces. Colton strangled her until she passed out. When she woke, she was alone with the three other dead bodies. She feared Colton or this second person would come after her.”
“So she played dead until she could escape.”
“Yes.”
“She couldn’t be too worried about discovery. She’s living in plain sight.”
“She re-created herself thirty-one years ago. By the time she’d returned to the east, she was a blonde and people had forgotten about the Mountain Music Festival.”
He sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “Who is the second person?”
“She doesn’t know. There are many festivalgoers who are still alive and well. It could be anyone.”
“If she’d come forward, Taggart would’ve had a witness who’d seen the bodies. We wouldn’t be in this situation now if she’d been honest.”
“Maybe.”
“Who drove the bodies off-site?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“She called her father from a pay phone?”
“At the gas station at Tanner’s Run and Sherman Road.” This was all assuming she was telling the truth. And I wasn’t convinced.
“You think she’s lying?”
“Kind of takes one to know one.”
“This does support your accomplice theory. When Colton says he doesn’t know where the bodies are, I think he’s telling the truth. Whoever was helping him never told him.” He glared at the house. “She never saw the second person?”
“No.”
“But she’s certain she saw the bodies.”
“Yes.”
“She can still testify to the rape and seeing the dead bodies,” Grant said. “That’ll be enough for the parole board not to grant Colton a compassionate release.”
“She doesn’t want to go public.”
Grant shook his head. “She can be compelled to talk.”
“She’s been hiding for thirty-one years. She won’t be intimidated. She’ll run as soon as we leave the driveway.”
“Maybe not. She’s been here for twenty years. She has a history. She didn’t have a life to speak of in 1994. And we’re more flexible in our teen years.”
“I’ll bet she’s braced for this moment for thirty-one years.”
“The tracker is still on her car?”
“It is.”
“I’ll call local police. They can watch the house.” He dialed and raised the phone to his ear. Minutes later a patrol car pulled into the cul-de-sac.
“Don’t expose her. Not just yet. I think she knows more than she’s saying.”
“Like what?”
I shifted in my seat. “I don’t know. But there’s more.”
His jaw pulsed as he got out of the car and spoke to the officer. When he returned, he didn’t look any happier. “They can watch her for a day or two. But they can’t watch her forever.”
“Understood. My next visit will be her father. She’s handled this secret better than he has. He looks like a man eaten up with guilt and remorse.”
He drove out of the neighborhood to a small coffee shop in a generic strip mall. “What do you want?”
“I’ll take anything.”
“Easy enough.” Ten minutes later, Grant returned with a soda, a coffee, and two wraps.
Parchment paper crinkled as I lifted a rolled tortilla to my mouth. I took a big bite, amazed at how much I needed food. “Thank you.”
“I’ll buy you all the wraps after today’s break.”
“I still haven’t found the bodies.”
“You’re closer than anyone has ever gotten.”
“Close doesn’t count.”
“Close is better than a million miles away, which is where we were two weeks ago.”
I wanted to believe Susan was on Team Outcast, but I couldn’t make the jump. She wasn’t telling me everything. “Who else would keep Colton’s secret all this time?” I asked.
“Assuming they’re still alive?”
“Let’s pretend that this person is alive for now.” My thoughts drifted to Kevin Pascal, Sheriff Paxton, and Bailey Briggs Jones. All had been at the festival. All knew Colton. “Colton was a charmer and could convince anyone to do anything.”
“Hiding three bodies is a hell of an ask,” Grant said.
I understood manipulation. It wasn’t hard if you didn’t care about consequences. Colton and I were cut from the same cloth.
“You aren’t Colton.” Grant was watching me.
His ability to read me was unsettling. “I didn’t say I was.”
“But you’re thinking it.”
“Did I tell you my old man is in prison for life? He hacked three people to death two years after the festival. The prosecutor reported that Daddy showed no emotion or remorse at his trial. He laughed at sentencing. The media called him a psychopath.”
“None of us can pick our families, Sloane.”
That prompted a startled laugh. “We also can’t escape the genetics they dump in us, either.”
“How many violent crimes have you committed?”
“Define violent .”
“You know what I mean.”
“None.” I sighed. “I don’t feel emotions like real people, Grant. I’m not as violent as Larry, but I’m not even close to the angel Patty was.”
“Saints aren’t very interesting.”
“You don’t get it. I don’t feel at all.” Sensing his disappointment, I added, “I want to. But I don’t.”
“I think you do care. You care about this case.”
“It’s a puzzle. I love puzzles.”
“You put everything into the cases you report on. I’ve read your work. There’s real empathy in your writing for the victims and their families.”
“I’m a mimic. A good one. But a faker nonetheless.”
He shook his head. “Not buying it.”
A smile tugged at my lips. “I like you.”
“I find your brutal honesty refreshing,” he said.
“It grows tiring for most.”
“I make my living rooting out liars. Your honesty will never get tiring.”
I was doing my best to chase him away. Everyone who should have mattered to me was gone. “Okay.”
“What does that mean?”
“Did I tell you I broke into the Nelson farmhouse?”
A brow arched. “Did you? When?”
“After I saw you in town. I doubled back.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to see it.”
“The festival house?”
“Your house.” Maybe I’d been as curious about him as I was the house he’d inherited.
“And what did you learn?”
That he had a softness for lost causes. “It’s a teardown.”
“Maybe.” He grinned. “The work is going to take the rest of my life.”
“Good to have a purpose.”
“Do you break into houses often?”
“Beyond the farmhouse, the Fletcher house, and Kevin’s apartment, a few here and there.”
He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You broke into Kevin’s apartment?”
“He has a picture of Debra and himself on his mantel. It looks like it was taken at the Mountain Music Festival.” I opened the pictures on my phone and showed it to Grant. “A guy in a uniform is trustworthy, right?”
Grant shook his head. “Kevin still loves Debra?”
“Or the idea of her.” Sara had professed her grief and loss for Patty. But I sensed if Patty had walked into our house, Sara would have been so grateful that she wouldn’t have had to raise me anymore. “Or maybe he doesn’t want to forget what he did to her.”
Tension rippled through him, but he didn’t look away.
I felt the need to add, “My undocumented criminal history isn’t violent, but it is long.”
He was silent for a long moment. “How did you leave it with Susan?”
“I told her I wouldn’t say anything. I left it to her to reach out to the police.”
“She won’t, will she?”
“No. If she’s telling the truth, not until the second person in that trailer is found. She’s biding her time for that cop to leave the cul-de-sac.”
“And she saw the bodies?”
“That’s what she says.”
“What about sounds? Smells? Textures?”
“She heard breathing during her assault.” I reached back, recalling her words. “The second person was breathing fast.”
He turned his coffee cup handle from the left to the right. It was something he did when he was chewing on a problem. “Hyperventilating or excited?”
“I don’t know.” I used to think memories were concrete, but I realized now that time tended to attach to facts and alter the meaning. I didn’t doubt what Susan had heard, but her interpretation at the time could have been off if she had endured a sexual assault. “She has gaps in her memory, but some moments are very specific.”
“Trauma can blur or sharpen memory.”
“If she’s telling the truth,” I said.
“You don’t think she is?” he asked.
“Look for someone who is the opposite of Colton. Someone who is awkward or nervous. Who would have been too afraid to carry out a crime as the primary assailant. That would explain the breathing.”
“You just described Kevin Pascal, Sheriff Paxton, and Bailey Briggs Jones.”
“Maybe.”
The thought of someone watching Patty suffer in her final moments unsettled me. The glass cracked, allowing frigid anger to rush me. But Grant’s steadiness wrapped around me like a warm blanket.
“When do I see Colton?” I asked.
“Tomorrow.”