Chapter 27
It took all of ten minutes for Logan Hayes to be placed under arrest.
The first thing Nico did upon arrival to the backward community was hit the first man who tried to stop him in the face. He dropped three more in his wake, ordering the rest of them, who’d heard the scuffle and poured out of their cabins to investigate, to stay well away while he and Seth searched door to door until they found Logan. Their presence was not well-received, but he was beyond caring. It was time these people learned their place, because if it was going to be on this island, then their time of disregarding the law—not to mention basic human decency—was over.
Frank and Zoe kept guard of the cruisers while all of this unfolded, armed to the teeth and ready to fire on anyone not wearing a uniform who dared approach them with even an ounce of aggression. Nico had debated bringing Zoe up here for the mere fact that if things turned bad, there wasn’t much he could do to protect her from these animals. In the end, though, he’d remained true to his word and treated her no differently than any other officer under his command. He hoped it hadn’t been a mistake.
It seemed his take-no-prisoners approach worked. The remainder of the camp held back with scowls on their faces as they dragged Logan out of his house in handcuffs. Gasoline-fueled lanterns hung on every porch, illuminating the clearing and everything in it with a dark, flickering orange. About twelve men, a handful of rough-looking women, and even a couple of children stood in silent protest while one of their own was stowed in the back of one of the vehicles.
“Let me make myself very clear,” Nico called out over the crowd. “Whether you like it or not, you are living on land that falls under the jurisdiction of the state of Maine. That means you are bound by the same laws as every other citizen on this island. Break those laws, and you will face the penalty.” A lot of angry faces looked back at him. “Now, I know you’re all used to doing whatever you please without consequence. Rest assured, I’m not here to evict you or disrupt your lives any more than necessary, but make no mistake, you will behave yourselves from this point forward.” He pointed to Logan, securely in custody. “Mister Hayes is being arrested on suspicion of murder. There is to be no retaliation for this arrest, no trouble of any kind, no exceptions. Do you understand me?”
Not a word.
Nico took a step forward. “Is. That. Clear?”
“Yes,” a feeble voice sounded from somewhere in the back. When the bodies parted, an old man with a homemade cane and frizzing white hair hobbled to the front of his people. “We understand.”
Nico nodded. “Good.”
Phew. Crisis averted.
It wasn’t until they were on their way back down the mountain that Nico felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He didn’t recognize the number.
“Lieutenant Dominici,” he answered, keeping his eyes on the taillights of the cruiser ahead of them, the one Frank was driving with Zoe riding shotgun. Seth glanced over at him from the driver’s seat. The poor guy looked wrung out. Suppose arresting your own brother will do that.
“It’s Wade,” a voice crackled through the bad connection.
“Not a great time, Wade. Can it wait?”
“No. You need to get back down here now.”
During the conversation they’d had a few hours ago, Wade had promised to see Lexie home safely when she finished her shift at eight. Being that it was now close to ten, Nico’s stomach responsively clenched as the question of why he was calling at all came hurtling into his mind.
“On our way,” he said. “Why? What happened?”
“I’m not sure, but . . .”
Seth revved up a particularly steep incline after a brief dip in the track, forcing Nico to stick a finger in his other ear. “Speak up. What’s going on?”
“She’s gone!” Wade’s words came through loud and clear. Nico’s jaw went slack. As reception faded in and out, the rest of the information came in a patchy string of distressing half-sentences. “. . . fire at my . . . left her alone . . . broke in and . . . car . . . even hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” Nico shouted.
“. . . something else . . .”
“What?”
More white noise sputtered down the line. When he heard Wade’s voice again, what he said pulled Nico’s soul right out of his body and dangled it in front of him in a vicious taunt.
“There’s blood.”
Cold. So cold.
Lexie knew she was somewhere dank and dark even before she opened her eyes. Her whole body vibrated with powerful convulsions. Her teeth ached, too frozen to chatter anymore. Her head pounded mercilessly as she began making tiny, timid movements.
It was too much. Her stomach roiled and she turned, violently spilling vomit across whatever hard, damp surface she was lying on.
She coughed and gagged, drawing in ragged breaths until the nausea passed.
“It’s the concussion,” a distorted voice said, barely breaking through the haze.
Lexie tried to open her eyes, but her lids were like lead.
“Wh—”
Words failed. She couldn’t think straight. Everything was so fuzzy.
What happened? Where was she?
She couldn’t remember.
From some faraway place, she acknowledged strong arms lifting her and placing her on something that felt like a chair. A moist cloth running over her mouth. Then the harsh rip of duct tape being secured around her wrists.
Her head lolled from side to side. The pain was so intense, like the back of her head had been hit with a hammer. Warm tears escaped, running down her face.
“Please,” she whispered.
“You go inside,” the voice said, further away this time. “I’ll deal with this.”
By the time they met up with Wade in the parking lot across the street from Rusty’s, Nico had worked himself into a sweaty, handwringing, panic-stricken—teetering on the edge of a—nervous breakdown.
Seth and Zoe had continued on to unload Logan at the station then they would decide between themselves which one would stay to keep an eye on him, and which would rendezvous with Nico and Frank afterward. West was MIA, though they all knew where he was and what he was doing; at home trying to avoid a messy divorce instead of leading his troops when they needed it most. Nico was bitter about that but had no time or energy to spare for it. At this point, he wasn’t sure anyone was bothering to keep the chief in the loop at all.
Lexie’s boss could have been a Viking in another life, and he looked just as savage as he stalked toward them. “What took you guys so fucking long?”
“We got here as fast as we could,” Frank said. “Show us.”
Wade appeared to be in similar mood as he led them to a dim corner of the lot. “Lexie’s car was somewhere around here,” he said, gesturing to the now empty parking spots. “I saw it when I left earlier.”
“While we’re on the subject,” Nico said, his voice coming out more like a snarl. “Why did you leave her?”
“Easy,” Frank cautioned.
“Look, man, I get it.” Wade’s wolf-blue eyes fixed on him. They looked tormented. “There’s nothing you can say to me that I haven’t already said to myself a million times. I know it was a huge mistake.”
Nico didn’t reply, just focused on trying to suppress the rage building inside that threatened to spill over at the nearest, most convenient target. Right now, that was Wade. Deep down, he knew he cared about Lexie and would never have knowingly put her in danger, but that knowledge did little to quell the urge to hit the man for doing the opposite of what he’d promised, which was to keep her safe.
Shifting his focus to the more significant matter at hand—finding her—Nico clicked on the flashlight he’d grabbed from the cruiser. He steeled himself for what came next. “You said there was blood.”
“Three feet to your left,” Wade replied dismally.
As Nico shone the beam in that direction, his stomach dropped a good few inches, hitting his lower abdomen like a stone. “Jesus,” he whispered.
“Lieutenant, that’s . . .” Frank let the rest of his sentence go unspoken, because they both knew what they were looking at. Someone had almost certainly died here. Whatever happened, whoever this blood belonged to, there was simply too much of it for it not to have been fatal.
Only one name came to Nico’s mind, and he could have kicked himself. He closed his eyes. In his haste to bring down a murderer, he’d carelessly pooled all their resources into one basket, leaving Lexie unprotected. Never mind that he’d asked Wade to step in. She was his. He should have taken care of her himself. “Where is Kyle Garrett?” he asked, every word acidic and dripping with threat.
Frank cleared his throat. “Well, the last report we did not receive, because we are definitely not doing illegal surveillance on him, said that he spent all day at home.”
”And then we all left to arrest Logan Hayes.” Nico clenched his teeth and took a moment to recalibrate. He turned to Wade. “I need you to tell me everything you know, from start to finish.”
Wade gave a quick, detailed recount of the events that transpired before he discovered Lexie’s absence, the three of them sweeping the scene for clues at the same time. When Zoe arrived—Seth lost via coin toss—Nico ordered her to do a full walk-through of the restaurant to do the same. He listened to the message Lexie had left on Wade’s voice mail moments prior to when it all went down, hating that she didn’t think to stay on the line, or call for help, or any number of other options other than hanging up and leaving her phone behind.
It wasn’t until he’d made it to the end of the night-blackened parking lot that Nico noticed a gray sedan, obscured by the low-hanging branches of an overgrown beech tree. It was the only vehicle in sight.
“Whose car is that?” Nico called.
Wade’s brows scrunched, and his chin drew inward. “It looks like Colin Rowe’s. Why would he be here?”
“He’s not.”
“Interesting,” Frank said, coming over to shine his flashlight through the opposite side of the car. Nothing seemed amiss inside; a folded-up newspaper on the passenger seat and an old to-go coffee cup in the holder. Nothing in the back.
“Suspect is what it is.” Nico tried the door. It was locked. “Frank, call Seth and have him pull up Mr. Rowe’s contact details from when we questioned him.”
“On it.” He whipped out his cell phone and walked away. Nico hunted around the brush edging the pavement, making a wide circle around the car, finding only what you’d expect: dirt, rocks, sticks, an old discarded gum wrapper. When he reappeared empty-handed on the other side, Frank was back. He shook his head. “No answer at Colin’s home, his shop, or on his cell.”
After a few more seconds deliberation, Nico gave him a curt nod. “Let’s search it.”
Nico used the back of his flashlight to break out a rear window while Wade watched from a few feet away, his face doused with guilt and worry. Nico recognized it. Understood it. Feared it.
“What the hell is this?” Frank exclaimed a minute later, his head buried in the trunk.
Nico launched out of the passenger seat, where he’d been rifling through paperwork in the glove compartment, to join him. Laid out before them was an open zippered case with a red suede interior. In it, sat a neat row of silver tools. Pincers, scalpels, tweezers, and pliers, plus a few Nico couldn’t name, gleamed threateningly under the harsh LED’s of their flashlights. Tucked securely behind their designated fabric loops, they almost seemed proud of their own menacing beauty. Nico felt bile rising to the back of his throat, but then his brain punched him with logic. “He’s a taxidermist. He’d need tools.”
“Okay.” Frank rooted around a paper bag where Nico assumed the case had come from. His gloved hand reemerged with a hunting knife. “How do you explain this, then?”
“Again, lots of people have hunting knives,” Nico said, though he knew his voice was losing some of its conviction.
Ever so slowly, the likelihood of Garrett being to blame for this was fading, and something far more insidious was taking its place. Nico felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up in response. Granted, the car and everything in it was circumstantial evidence, at best. It was entirely possible that Colin’s vehicle being here was merely a coincidence, nothing to do with the giant puddle of blood that Nico was doing his best not to look at. Or it was possible that the taxidermist was responsible for it, that he’d lain in wait and ambushed Lexie, hurt her, killed her. Nico gulped hard and let the thought pass by. It was also still possible—however faintly—that her disappearance was Garrett’s handy work, and they were wasting valuable time entertaining a random tangent with no link to the crime whatsoever, assuming Lexie had any time left at all.
Simply put, they couldn’t rule anything out.
As Frank carefully unfolded the knife, revealing a serrated edge on one side, Nico realized it was the same kind of blade that the medical examiner speculated had killed both Isabelle Moss and Darcy Walsh. Come to think of it, he had spotted Colin hanging around Darcy’s crime scene, and he was neighbors with Isabelle. The knife was clean, but that didn’t mean much. Blood could be washed away. Which meant they now had an additional suspect.
“This case is falling apart by the second,” Nico said, more to himself than anyone else. Scratching the back of his head in agitation, he asked, “What else is in there?”
“Not much.” Frank returned to rummaging. “Some wire, a pack of nails, Borax, duct tape . . . It’s an odd shopping list.”
“He’s an odd guy.”
“Judging by this, he might be a whole lot more than that.”
Before Nico could think it through, his phone rang. The name of the caller took him by surprise.
“Wilde?”
“He’s out,” his former partner said, not bothering with preamble. “Fowler. He’s out.”
“What do you mean ‘out’?”
“I mean out—of prison. Legally. A free man.”
Nico felt like the ground beneath him might give way. “How can that be? We had him dead to rights for murder two. His sentence was for a minimum of forty years—”
“I know,” Wilde said. “I’ve been trying to get information on him for days, but the warden kept giving me the run around. Now, I know why: the fucker cut a deal with the DEA to bring down his whole network of suppliers in exchange for a reduced sentence. They released him last week.”
“Last week?”
“I’m sorry, Nico. I tried, but they wouldn’t tell me anything until now. Guess they didn’t want to risk his crew finding out that he’d snitched until after they’d made their arrests. They’d been planning the sting for months, and it was all kept under wraps until now.”
Nico took precious seconds to absorb that. Stupidly focusing on the wrong thing, he mumbled, “He wasn’t that big a player.”
“No, but he knew who the big players were, and without protection inside, he wasn’t going to last long. He was a weak link, and they knew it.”
“What about witness protection? Someone must know where he is?”
Wilde made an insulted scoffing sound. “He refused witpro. Said he didn’t trust cops to keep him safe, or some such bullshit. Now he’s in the wind.”
“God dammit.” Nico rubbed his jaw, his eyes running over the gray sedan that could mean everything, or nothing.
“Look,” Wilde said. “Chances are, he’ll go to ground until the dust settles.”
“You believe that?”
Wilde went silent, which was answer enough. “You need to watch your back, Nico. Hear me? If he’s coming for you, he’s not gonna be quiet about it.”
“I think he might already be here.”
Nico disconnected. For a moment, he just stood, arms dangling at his sides. Two-thirds of his squad tentatively gathered around him with uncomfortable determination on their faces. They were looking for guidance. Orders. The next step. But he wasn’t ready. Nico walked away, stopping when he reached the middle of the deserted road. He closed his eyes and inhaled the calm night into his lungs, willing his head to clear enough to figure this out. The moon hung low, a thin crescent casting the barest of cool light over the world. Stars twinkled brightly through the broken gaps in the clouds. There was no breeze, no sounds of insects or other forms of life in the trees. Just cold silence, as if even the forest knew something was very wrong.
Nico heard footsteps behind him.
“You alright?” Frank asked.
He didn’t answer, just hung his heavy head. No, he was not alright. Lexie was gone. Taken. Maybe dead. Why and by whom were still question marks, and he couldn’t stand it. Where was she? What was happening to her? Did he even want to know?
“I should have been here,” he whispered.
“Don’t do that,” Frank said. “You’re no good to her if you give up now. Keep your head.”
“There’s too many trails. How am I supposed to find her if I don’t know where to start looking? And that blood—”
“It might not be hers.”
The strength of his tone was enough for Nico to lift his head and turn around. “I’m okay,” he assured Frank. It was an effort, but he forced himself to believe it was true, rallying everything he had to pull it together and concentrate.
“Lieutenant, we’re here, and we’re ready,” Frank said. “Just tell us what you want us to do.”
Nico breathed deeply and nodded. “Alright. Zoe?”
She trotted over. “Yes, sir?”
“Call Seth. Have him put a BOLO out for a man named Bryan Fowler, Massachusetts. Just released from Granite Ridge last week.”
“Okay.” She scribbled the information on a notepad.
“And call West again. We need him with us.”
“What if he doesn’t answer?”
Nico raked a hand through his hair. “Then go over there, lights and sirens blaring, and tell him that I ordered you to keep banging on his front door until he pulls his head out of his ass.”
Zoe tried to repress a smile. “Got it.”
“Wade?”
“Yeah?”
Nico gestured to Colin Rowe’s presumed car. “Was he in the bar tonight?”
Wade’s big shoulders shrugged. “Not sure. I was in the office most of the night cutting paychecks.”
“What about other staff who might have seen him?”
He gave a thoughtful tilt of his head. “Well, Tobias doesn’t pay attention to anything except what’s going on in his kitchen, but Annie finished at six. I’ll call her and ask.”
“Let me know what you find out,” Nico said. “Frank, you’re with me.”
“Where are we going, boss?” he asked after they’d set off toward the car.
“We’ve got too many suspects and too little time, so we’re going to do this by process of elimination. I want all of them—Colin Rowe, Bryan Fowler, Kyle Garrett—in custody, sitting right beside Logan Hayes. I want to have eyes on every single one of them until we figure out who the hell is slicing up innocent women. And who had the gall to take mine.”
“Great.” Frank clipped his seat belt on. “Who’s first?”
Nico thought about it. “West can take Garrett, that will cause the least problems. Fowler could be anywhere. Best we can hope for is a BOLO hit. Which just leaves Mr. Rowe. We’ll start at his taxidermy shop. West and Zoe can cover his house.”
Frank made a hissing sound by inhaling through his clenched teeth. “All of that without a warrant?”
Nico put the car in gear. “We’ll call a judge on the way.”