Chapter 11
ELEVEN
TWIGGY
Bran’s boots are too big for my apartment.
Not literally. Well—maybe literally. They’re planted in the middle of my tiny living room like he’s bracing for an earthquake, and the man himself looks like he barely fits inside the walls.
Broad shoulders, thick arms, that whole looming-Jack Reacher vibe.
Every time he shifts his weight, my floorboards give a tiny, protesting creak.
Cotton perches on my lone armchair, one hand on the swell of her belly, the other wrapped around a travel mug she brought from home. She didn’t want to leave after we finished the casserole, citing boredom.
I think she just wants to keep an eye on me, though.
I pretend not to notice the creaks. Or the way my pulse keeps stuttering any time I look directly at him. Cotton notices every-damn-thing, and I’ll never hear the end of it.
Focus, Tallulah.
I turn back to my laptop, to the chaos I understand—open case files on women who have gone missing in nearby states, scanned reports, half a dozen browser tabs, the digital version of my brain spread across two monitors and an ancient corkboard on the wall.
“This is everything we have that’s solid,” I say, mostly for my own benefit.
My voice sounds steady, which is a minor miracle.
“Jason Adams’ confession. The search reports from Claytor Mountain.
Employment records from Kendrick’s. Adoption paperwork from the Thurston estate, what we could pry loose.
Newspaper clippings. Witness statements, including Shiloh’s.
Gossip that turned out to be…not gossip. ”
Bran grunts behind me, arms folded. “And none of it includes him talking.”
I click open the scanned transcript of Jason’s confession, the one that makes my stomach knot every single time. “No. Jason wouldn’t shut up once he started. Henry, of course, never got the chance. By the time the cabin raid was over, Jason was in handcuffs and Henry was long gone. Ghosted.”
There’s a long silence behind me. I can feel Bran’s attention on the back of my neck, hot and heavy. Like standing too close to a bonfire.
“And you built a profile off of all that,” he says at last. “Secondhand scraps.”
“Secondhand scraps are still data,” I reply. “Especially when the source is a narcissistic psychopath who can’t resist bragging about how clever he and his brother were.”
A low, disapproving rumble. “You give that word out too easy.”
“Psychopath?”
“Clever.”
I glance over my shoulder at him. “You were there. You saw everything. The cabin. The mountain. The graves. The fact that they managed to operate in plain sight for years, one as a respected doctor, the other pouring drinks for half the town’s social circle. That’s not dumb luck.”
His jaw flexes. He doesn’t argue. Which is good, because I’ve argued this before—with detectives, with profilers, with one very stubborn chief of police who hates that a civilian consultant cracked parts of his case before his own people did.
I tab over to a police summary from the mountain search—the one that lists the locations of all five known graves. Victims we could name. Victims who still don’t have names. A neat little bullet point list of horror.
“Jason gave them enough to find these,” I say.
“His ‘practice runs.’ Henry’s. We still don’t know how they divided the work exactly.
But we know Jason liked to talk to them, foster contact with them in some way, shape, or form.
He built a fantasy around most of them, a fiction that they had an actual relationship.
And Henry…” My cursor hovers over the line about the girlfriend who vanished a decade earlier, the necklace found with her body.
“Jason has said that Henry did the hunting and the actual killing. The clean-up. The parts Jason wanted to outsource.”
I feel Bran move, see the shift of him at the edge of my vision as he steps closer to the monitors.
“Outsource,” he repeats, voice flat.
Cotton’s mouth pinches, the way it does when she hears one of Brodie’s old war stories. She doesn’t interrupt, but her fingers tighten around the mug, knuckles whitening.
“He literally used that word,” I say. “He thought it made him sound like a white-collar CEO instead of a monster. Henry was the one who liked getting his hands dirty, though. Jason called him ‘the finisher.’”
Bile burns the back of my throat. I swipe to the next tab, because if I linger on those graves too long, I’ll start seeing Shiloh in one of them instead of alive and safe in the little house she and Gunner share behind the big house at the vineyard.
“Okay,” Bran says slowly. “So you have the confession. The search results. The adoption records. Employment file. Anything else?”
“School records,” I say. “He was smart. Very above-average intelligence, but not flagged as gifted. Good attendance, no disciplinary action, average extracurriculars. Which is its own red flag, honestly. It’s very…
bland. Like someone reverse-engineered what a ‘normal boy’ is supposed to look like and aimed for the middle of the bell curve. ”
I pull up a yearbook photo. Henry at seventeen, standing stiffly in a row of other kids in matching blazers. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Forgettable face.
And yet.
“And then there’s this,” I continue, tapping the screen.
“Everyone I’ve talked to who knew him after high school—the bartender who trained him at Kendrick’s, his manager, a couple of regulars—they all say the same thing: decent guy, good listener, easy to talk to.
Not flashy. Not aggressive. Always remembered your drink order. Always remembered your bad day, too.”
“Everyone liked him,” Bran says, reading between the lines. “A good guy.”
“On the surface,” I agree. “But good guys don’t leave graves on mountains with their girlfriend in one of them.”
Bran is quiet. Too quiet. I can practically hear him thinking, some complicated, methodical calculus moving behind that frown.
“What about the adoption?” he asks. “You said you got some of those records.”
I click open another document, this one with Thurston letterhead.
“Both boys were adopted by Samuel and Beatrice Thurston. Jason first, then Henry a few years later. Different birth families. Same house. Same mother. Same ‘high society’ expectations, which is ridiculous if you spend any time in Lucy Falls. We’re just not…
high society.” I flick my fingers, irritated by the euphemism.
“Shiloh always said there was something off about Dr. Adams, even before all this. Knowing what we know now about Beatrice…yeah. That tracks.”
Bran leans a hand on the back of my desk chair, bringing his center of gravity closer. The room feels smaller, the air thicker.
“And after the raid,” he says. “After Jason was arrested, after Henry ran. You said there’s been quiet.”
“Relatively.” I flip to a spreadsheet I’ve been building, lines of text that make more sense to me than most people do.
“I cross-checked missing persons reports, unidentified bodies, and unsolved assaults in a three-hundred-mile radius from here, spanning the last year and change. I filtered for victims matching Henry and Jason’s previous pattern as much as I could extrapolate it—age range, physical type, last-seen circumstances, proximity to highways, rural drop sites, that kind of thing. ”
“And?” he prompts, eyebrows lifted when I pause for a beat too long. I have to look away from his gaze, from the mixture of respect and…heat…that brushes over me like a tangible graze.
“And there are a few that ping my radar,” I admit, mentally giving myself a shake.
“But nothing that screams him. Nothing that overlaps in enough specific ways to feel like a signature. If he’s been active, he’s either changed his hunting ground drastically…
” My mouth twists. “…or he’s changed his pattern. ”
“And you think the body at the Falls is him changing his pattern back,” Bran says. “Coming home. Picking up where they left off.”
I stare at the spreadsheet, at the empty column where I’ve been meaning to type something, anything, under “HENRY CONFIRMED?” and haven’t been able to.
“I think it’s pretty obvious,” I say finally.
“Jason is locked up. Henry isn’t. Jason always felt like the one who needed Shiloh more.
Henry could’ve walked away without attempting anything further with her.
He didn’t. He stayed. He escalated. He took the risk at the cabin.
You don’t just flip that switch off forever. ”
Bran exhales slowly, like he’s trying to blow out a fuse before it burns.
“Tally,” he says. My name in his mouth is a low warning. “You’ve done good work. I’m not disputing that. But my job is to protect you. Your job is to stay out of his sightline.”
I swivel my chair to face him fully. We’re close enough that if I stuck out my hand, I’d brush his chest. Which I will not do. Obviously.
“That’s not my job,” I say, keeping my voice level. “It’s what you want my job to be, to make your job easier. There’s a difference.”
His gaze drops briefly to my mouth, then back up. “You’re not trained for this kind of contact.”
“I have no intention of making contact. Contact is your lane. Data is mine.” I gesture to the laptop, the sticky notes on the wall, the organized chaos that is my entire personality.
“He thrives in the gaps between things. Between what people see and what they report. Between what they remember and what they admit. I live in those gaps. I map them. If you try to sideline me, you’re not protecting me, you’re just blinding yourself. ”
His jaw locks. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
“Absolutely not,” I say cheerfully, because if I don’t keep a little humor in my voice, the fear might leak through.
“Also, for the record, you don’t get to come into my town, drink my coffee, use my wi-fi, and tell me to go sit in a corner while the boys run off and hunt the monster who tried to turn my friends into cold cases. ”
Across the room, Cotton’s gaze flicks between us, sharp and assessing, and her lips purse. I can practically see the mental spreadsheet she’s building—risk factors, emotional damage, likelihood of her cousin-in-law setting herself on fire just to prove she’s not fragile.
Spoiler: the odds aren’t in Bran’s favor.
A muscle jumps in his cheek. “You’re five feet of trouble, you know that?”
“Almost five-two,” I correct automatically. “And I’m not trouble. I’m an asset.”
“Assets can get killed.”
I tilt my head. “At least this way, you’ll know exactly where I am. Otherwise, I’ll just do the work anyway and send you notes after the fact.”
His eyes narrow. “You’d do that?”
“Have you met me?”
He has, unfortunately for his blood pressure. We’ve known each other all of, what, a day? Less? Long enough for him to watch me argue with our chief of police, hack into a secure-ish database in front of him without blinking, and tell him his profile outline was “adequate but incomplete.”
Bran closes his eyes briefly, then opens them again, some internal decision made.
“Fine,” he says. “We do this my way, then. You work here, or at the station, or somewhere with people around. No solo trips anywhere. No following leads in person without me or Jack. If I tell you something is too hot, you listen.”
I fold my arms, mirroring his stance. “You really shouldn’t try to negotiate with me.”
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
My shoulders sag in relief I refuse to show him. “Fine. Great. Excellent. Bring me a dozen of Karla’s donuts, and we have a deal. Now, come look at this map.”
He moves around the desk, and the room shrinks again. His presence is a pressure system; my brain starts cataloguing sensory details automatically—soap and winter air and something darker underneath, like smoke that never quite washed out of his skin.
I drag my attention back to the monitors, to the digital map of Lucy Falls and the surrounding counties, dotted with colorful pins.
“These are our knowns,” I say, pointing.
“Confirmed Jason-and-Henry victims. These are our strong maybes, based on pattern overlap. And this—” I zoom in on Lucy Falls, on the pin at the top of the trail to the waterfall.
“—is tonight. Fresh. Local. An outlier, maybe. Or the first sign he’s circling back. ”
Bran studies the map, frowning. “If it is him, he’s sending a message.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “And I’d really like to read it before he writes the next one.”
Cotton shifts closer on the couch, her knee brushing mine.
It’s a small contact, but it pins me in place better than any seatbelt.
Somewhere in the back of my head, a tiny voice notes that Brodie Gallagher’s terrifying wife is here in my crappy apartment because of me.
Because of this. Because I matter to her enough to leave her warm, safe estate and sit on my lumpy cushions while we talk about graves.
As if it heard us speaking, my laptop pings from the couch, and I see a new message window pop up from across the room. My skin goes cold.
Bran is on his feet before I am. We cross the room at the same time, him faster because, well…stride length.
Nightjar is lit up with a private message. Not Minotaur this time.
It’s a new handle without an avatar.
SmartLittleBird.
My stomach drops through the floor.
“That’s cute,” I say, trying for flippant and missing. “Definitely not unnerving at all.”
“Step back,” Bran says quietly.
“It’s just a text,” I whisper. “Words on a screen.”
“He used text messages last time,” Cotton says quietly. She’s gone pale.
She’s right. Henry never laid a hand on Shiloh before everything went sideways. He used gifts and notes and attention, little bites out of her life.
Brain first. Body later.
The cursor blinks in the message box.
“I can block it,” Bran says. “Right now. Kill the connection, change your handles, walk you away from all of it.”
“And then he finds another way in,” I say. “Maybe one we don’t see coming. Or another girl. At least here, I know the terrain.”
“Tally—”
“You said help or hinder,” I cut in, looking up at him. “This is the moment. You going to stand in front of the screen or behind it?”
His jaw clenches hard enough I can see it from here.
“Fine,” he says at last. “But I read every word before you answer. He slips once, I pull the plug. No debate.”
“Deal,” I say, even though we both know I’ll fight him if it comes to that.
The cursor blinks again.
Then words appear, letter by letter.
you really are still watching
The room shrinks.
“Okay,” Bran says softly, eyes gone flat and dangerous. “Let’s see what our monster wants to say. And then we decide how much of you he’s allowed to see back.”