Chapter 13
The sign on the studio door still said By Appointment Only but the lights were on inside and Noah could see movement through the glass. He tried the handle and it opened.
The gallery was smaller than it had seemed through the window.
Paintings lined the walls in mismatched frames.
He could smell turpentine and linseed oil.
A young woman stood behind a counter near the back, wrapping a canvas in brown paper.
She was early twenties, with dark hair pulled into a loose knot and paint on her fingers that she hadn't bothered to wash off.
She wore a flannel shirt over a tank top and the expression that said she'd been working all day and was ready to stop.
"You're Seraphine Maddox, right?"
She glanced up. "Yes. We're closing up for the day, if you're..."
Noah held up his badge. "I'm State Investigator Noah Sutherland. Do you think we could talk?"
Her eyes went to the badge, then past him toward a doorway at the rear of the studio where someone was moving in the back room. She set the wrapped canvas down.
"I have a meeting. I really can't right now."
"Just a moment of your time."
She hesitated, then came around the counter and stepped outside with him onto the sidewalk. The late afternoon light was warm on the storefronts along Main Street and the traffic was thin. She stood with her arms crossed, not hostile but guarded.
Noah pulled the sketch from the file inside his jacket. "Five years ago you drew this and handed it in to the police. Why?"
Seraphine studied it. Her face didn't change but something behind her eyes shifted, a flicker of recognition that she smoothed over quickly. "I was sixteen at the time."
"But you came forward with information about Kara Ellison's disappearance."
"That was a long time ago. I was a different person then."
"I was able to connect this to another one of your paintings." He gestured through the gallery window toward the far wall where the larger piece hung, the bridge, the bog, the full landscape. “It’s a larger version. More detailed. It was enough to identify the location."
"I paint a lot of the Adirondacks."
"I can see that. But back when you were sixteen, why did you come forward?"
"Because..." She trailed off. From inside the studio, someone called her name. A woman's voice, muffled by the glass. Seraphine turned toward it, then back to Noah. “I just did. Look, I have to go."
“One last question. What's your connection to the Three Pillars Community?"
The question landed differently than the others. Her arms tightened across her chest and her gaze dropped for half a second before she recovered.
"I'm not a part of that place anymore. And I really can't talk about it." She paused. "I'm sorry."
She turned and went back through the door. The bell above it chimed once and then she was gone, disappearing into the rear of the gallery without looking back.
Noah stood on the sidewalk with the sketch in his hand and the fading daylight on his face. She knew something. That much was obvious. But whatever it was, it was buried under years of silence and a fear that went deeper than a stranger with a badge could reach in five minutes on a sidewalk.
He folded the sketch back into the file and walked to his vehicle.
Carter Lyle wrung out the mop and dragged it across the floor in long even strokes.
The washroom at FCI Ray Brook was a windowless box of white tile and stainless steel, four stalls, three sinks, a row of urinals, and a drain in the center that never quite worked fast enough.
The air smelled of bleach and the metallic tang of old pipes.
Across the room, the other inmate on cleaning detail, a thick-necked man named Briggs, worked the far end with his own mop, moving in silence.
They'd been at it for twenty minutes. The routine was the same every Saturday.
Two inmates, two mops, one guard posted in the corridor outside.
Carter had done this enough times that his body went through the motions without thought, leaving his mind free to wander.
Two weeks was all he had. Less now. It was five days until the transfer to Terre Haute.
Five days of mopping floors and eating meals and sleeping in a concrete room before they put him on a plane to Indiana for the final week and then stuck a needle in his arm for a crime he didn't commit.
He heard the crack before he understood what it was.
Briggs had snapped his mop handle across his knee, clean through, and was coming at Carter with the splintered end held low like a spear. His face was blank. Not angry. Not frenzied. Just purposeful.
The jagged wood caught Carter across the ribs on the first swing. A hard, raking blow that tore through his jumpsuit and opened a line of fire across his side. Carter stumbled backward, his boots sliding on the wet tile, as he grabbed his own mop handle with both hands.
Briggs drove forward, thrusting the broken end at Carter's midsection.
Carter twisted sideways and the point scraped across his hip instead of burying itself in his stomach.
He swung the mop handle in a wide arc and connected with Briggs' shoulder, but the wet floor betrayed him and his back foot went out from under him.
He hit the ground hard, the impact jarring through his spine.
Briggs was on him before he could get up.
A knee on his chest, the splintered wood pressing down toward his throat.
Carter got both hands on the shaft and pushed.
Briggs outweighed him by forty pounds and the leverage was wrong and the wood was inching closer.
Carter could see the grain of it, the pale inside where it had snapped, sharp enough to puncture.
"Guard!" Carter shouted. His voice bounced off the walls. "Guard!"
Nothing. No boots in the corridor. No response.
Carter bucked his hips and rolled, using the wet floor to his advantage this time, sliding out from under Briggs' weight.
They scrambled on the slick tile, both men on their knees, grappling.
Carter grabbed Briggs by the back of the head and drove his face into the edge of the nearest sink basin.
The porcelain connected with a sound that Carter felt more than heard, a deep solid thud that vibrated through his fingers.
Briggs went slack. Not unconscious but stunned, his hands dropping to his sides, blood running from a split above his eyebrow. Carter hit him again. Same basin, same angle. This time Briggs folded and slid to the floor, his cheek pressed against the wet tile, his eyes open but unfocused.
Carter sat back against the wall, breathing hard. His ribs burned where the wood had torn the skin. His hip was bleeding. His hands were shaking.
He looked at the washroom entrance. The corridor beyond it was empty. No guard. No one coming. The chair where the officer was supposed to sit was visible from where Carter was and it was vacant.
Someone had arranged this.
Carter pressed his hand against the wound on his side and listened to the sound of his own breathing in the quiet room. Briggs groaned beside the sinks. Blood swirled in the standing water, thinning as it spread.
Twelve days. Someone didn't want him to make it that far.
The Adirondack Medical Center was busier than Noah had ever seen it. Extra vehicles in the lot. Lights on in wings that were usually dark. He badged through the security entrance and followed the signs to the pathology wing, where the corridor smelled of formaldehyde and cold air conditioning.
Adelaide Chambers was in the examination room with another medical examiner, both of them bent over a stainless steel table under surgical lights.
The remains on the table weren't bodies in any recognizable sense.
They were bones, stained dark by the tannic acid in the bog water, laid out in an arrangement that was trying to become a skeleton but had gaps where the peat had claimed what it wanted.
"Busy place," Noah said from the doorway.
Adelaide straightened and pulled her mask down. She was in her fifties, auburn hair pinned back. "It'll get busier once this reaches the media. They want us working around the clock before this place is full of parents coming to see if any of these bones belong to their kids."
The second examiner nodded at him and continued working, using a small brush to clean soil from what appeared to be a femur.
"How long will it take to identify them?"
“There are dental records for a few. The newer remains, the ones with soft tissue preserved by the bog, we can work on faster.
The older ones, where the bones were separated and washed downstream, those will take longer.
It will come down to DNA comparison against the missing persons database. It's not quick."
Noah opened the file he'd brought and set it on the counter beside Adelaide. "The knife in the Carter Lyle case. The photos of the serrated blade. Do you think you could match it to any wound patterns on these victims?"
Adelaide picked up the photograph and held it under the light. "Not without the actual weapon. Do you have it?"
"Still searching for it. But the serrated edge. Could it match?"
She studied the image for a long moment, turning it slightly. "Possibly. Some of the remains show scoring on the bones that could be consistent with a serrated blade. But I'd need the knife in hand to say anything definitive. A photograph isn't enough to build a comparison on."
"How long do you think they were in that bog?"
"Anywhere from four to six years based on what we're seeing. The decomposition rates vary because of the acid, but the tight spread across all six suggests batches rather than singles—maybe two a year, every six months or so." She set the photo down. "A deliberate rhythm, not random."
Noah absorbed that. Two a year over four to six years. A pattern so steady it was almost a calendar. Whoever was doing this wasn't impulsive. They were patient, disciplined, and completely invisible until a sixteen-year-old girl drew a picture of a bridge.
He thanked Adelaide and left her to her work.
The office at High Peaks Police Department was mostly empty when Noah arrived.
The overhead lights had that buzzing quality they took on after hours, and the coffee in the pot on the break table had been sitting long enough to develop a film on the surface.
He poured some anyway and carried it to the back of the room where Callie stood in front of the case board.
She had photographs pinned in rows. Faces. Some from missing persons files, some from the Strutz Agency wall, some from Garrett's collection. Lines of string connected them to locations, dates, names. It was starting to look like something, though what it was hadn't come into focus yet.
"Get anything from Seraphine?" Callie asked without turning around.
"Not much. Other than confirming she was part of the Three Pillars Community. She shut down the moment I brought it up."
"Scared?"
"Or loyal. Hard to tell which."
"What are you looking at?" Noah asked, stepping closer to the board.
"Other than Brooke Danvers, we've identified four missing young women from the Adirondack region.
Around eighteen years of age. None were reported missing by family.
" She tapped each photo as she spoke. "All of them were college students.
Two from Saranac Lake, one from Keene, one from Tupper Lake.
They dropped off the map over the last four to five years and nobody filed a report. "
"Nobody noticed they were gone?"
"Some of these girls didn't have anyone to notice. Aged out of foster care, estranged from family, drifters. People who fall through the cracks because no one is standing at the edge watching for them."
"Any of them show up in Finch's photos?"
"So far, no. We've been going through his files all afternoon. Nothing connecting him to any of these four."
The door at the end of the room opened and McKenzie walked in carrying a cardboard evidence box. He set it on the nearest desk with a heaviness that had nothing to do with its weight.
"Like searching for a needle in a haystack," he said. "Looks like our Finch guy has been telling us lies."
He opened the box and pulled out a series of photographs, laying them on the desk in a row.
Noah moved closer. The images were dark, shot in low light.
They weren't meant for any portfolio. In the first, a young woman in lingerie reclined on a surface that Noah couldn't identify.
In the second, the same woman in a more explicit position.
In the third, a man beside her, his face visible despite the grain.
Garrett Finch.
And the woman was Fiona.
Noah felt the recognition land in his chest before his brain confirmed it. He'd only seen her in the photo Ethan kept on his phone, smiling in a restaurant, her hair down, her eyes bright. But it was her. The same face, caught in a context that made his stomach turn.
In the fourth photograph, the framing was different.
The photographer had shifted and the shot was wider.
Fiona was still in the frame but behind her, in the reflection of a full-length mirror propped against the wall, the photographer was partially visible.
An arm reaching to adjust the lens. The arm was bare from the elbow down and covered in tattoos, dense and dark, sleeve work that ran from wrist to where the fabric started.
It wasn't Finch. Finch's arms were clean.
Noah picked up the photograph and tilted it toward the overhead light. The timestamp in the bottom corner was the day Fiona disappeared.
"That's not Garrett," Callie said, stepping beside him. She was seeing it too. The tattooed arm. A second photographer in the room.
Noah set the photo down and stared at the row of images on the desk. Fiona had made it to a shoot. She'd been there, in some room, on that night. Garrett had lied about her being a no-show. And someone else had been with them.
Someone they hadn't identified yet.