Chapter 23 #2
Mia closed her notepad and stood. "Well, thank you for your time. This has been very helpful."
"You should know something else," Connor said, remaining seated. "Even though the cops dismissed what I had to say, I never dismissed what they were investigating."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean the black truck. I know why they thought I might have gotten confused between the Honda and the truck. That truck had been coming around Rebecca's place for several years."
“Years?” Mia felt her pulse quicken. "You saw it too?"
"Sure did. Usually late at night, always driving slowly past her house. Sometimes it would park on the street like the Honda did."
"Did you ever see the driver?"
"A couple of times, but the guy always came at night and always wore a hood pulled up, so I never saw the face clearly."
"If you never saw the face, how do you know it was a man?"
"The way he walked when he got out of the truck. That was definitely a man's walk. I'm sure of that."
The sound of a truck pulling into the driveway outside interrupted their conversation. Connor's expression immediately shifted to alarm.
"Oh shit. You should go."
"Why? Who is it?"
"My old man. He'll go ballistic if he thinks you're here asking about the Hale case."
Mia quickly gathered her things and exited the building, Connor following close behind. She saw Danny Walsh climbing out of a pickup truck that had seen hard use, his expression already suspicious as he took in the scene.
"Well, I appreciate the consultation," Mia said loudly, playing along with Connor's attempt to provide cover. "It might cost too much right now, but I'll check back in."
Danny Walsh gave her a second glance, his eyes narrowing with recognition. She had taken only a few steps toward her car when he called out.
"Hey. Hold up," he yelled. "You're that cop's kid. Sutherland, right?"
"Um, yeah."
"What are you doing here?"
"Vehicle issues."
"Oh yeah? What kind?"
"She needed a second opinion on her transmission," Connor said quickly, moving to intercept his father. "It's fine, Dad."
"I'm just confused why you'd drive all the way up here when you could have gone to my shop in High Peaks or one of the others." Danny's suspicion was evident in both his tone and posture. "Hold on—weren't you at the town hall meeting with that podcaster?"
"No, I'm—"
Mia turned and headed quickly toward her car, fishing for her keys while trying to appear casual despite her growing anxiety. She could see Connor trying to pull his father back, their conversation becoming heated as Danny's voice rose.
She had just gotten inside her car when Danny broke away from Connor and approached her vehicle with determined strides. He tapped on her window as she started the engine, his expression dark with anger.
She lowered the window just an inch, enough to hear but not enough to feel vulnerable.
"You come back here asking about that case, and you're liable to end up like your podcaster pal, you hear me?"
Mia put the car in reverse, her hands shaking slightly as adrenaline flooded her system.
"You hear me?" Danny shouted again as she backed out of the parking space and accelerated toward the road.
She hadn't made it more than a few miles down Route 9 when her Apple Watch buzzed with an incoming text message. The notification appeared on the small screen just long enough for her to read the sender—Gideon—and the message: "Marcus has been arrested."
The news hit her hard, confirming her worries about the direction of the investigation. If Marcus was in custody, it meant the police had decided he was responsible for Pierce's murder.
She pulled into a rest area beside the road and sat in her car, trying to process everything she'd learned.
The dark blue Honda Civic that Connor had seen suggested someone else had been at Rebecca's house the night of the murders.
The fact that both the Honda and the black truck had been surveilling Rebecca's home for weeks or months indicated either coordination between multiple stalkers, two separate stalkers, or a single perpetrator using different vehicles.
More troubling was the systematic dismissal of Connor's eyewitness account by investigators who seemed determined to focus on the black truck while ignoring evidence that didn't fit their preferred narrative.
Whether that dismissal represented simple tunnel vision or deliberate misdirection remained unclear, but the result had been the same—crucial evidence ignored for a decade.
Danny Walsh's threat felt genuine rather than simply bluster. The reference to Pierce's fate carried unmistakable menace, a warning that asking the wrong questions about the wrong people could have fatal consequences.
As she sat in the fading afternoon light, watching traffic pass on the mountain highway, Mia realized that her amateur investigation had crossed into genuinely dangerous territory.
But Connor's account had provided the first new evidence in the case for years, indicating that the truth about the Hale murders remained hidden rather than lost.