Chapter 30
The clearing filled with vehicles within the hour. Three cruisers. An EMT van. A forensics unit. Officers strung yellow tape between the trees and began working the cabin and the surrounding property in a grid pattern.
They were checking for a second dump site.
Noah sat on the rear bumper of the EMT van while a paramedic cleaned the cuts on his hands and wrapped his left palm.
The bruise on his ribs ached when he breathed but he'd had worse.
Across the clearing, Callie was getting her arms treated, the glass cuts shallow but numerous, a butterfly bandage across the cut on her cheekbone.
Ray arrived in his SUV, climbed out, and made his way over. He looked at Noah, then at the wrapped hands, then at the scene.
"I told you he would eventually screw up. You okay?"
"I'll live," Noah said.
"What charges have you laid?"
"Beyond what he just did?" Noah asked.
Ray groaned. "We are..."
"Sergeant!" An officer called from the cabin. Ray looked over and crossed the clearing. The officer met him halfway and handed over a clear evidence bag. Ray looked inside.
"Found it in the house," the officer said.
"What is it?" Noah asked, standing.
Ray brought it over and held it up. Inside the bag was a bundle of plastic cards. College IDs. Ray counted seven. The names on the faces matched the names on the board back at the station. The six girls from the bog. And Brooke Danvers.
"That's not all," the officer said. "We found rags. A bag of them in the closet. Same material as those placed in the exhaust pipes of the vehicles."
The radio on Noah's belt crackled. Callie's voice came through, tight and focused. She was inside the cabin with the search team.
"Sutherland. You get those IDs?"
"Yeah."
"Son of a bitch must have been keeping the girls here. Tabitha said she was just bringing him supplies." A pause. Static followed. "We're checking the outbuildings for Hailey Benton and Fiona Spence. I'll keep you updated."
Noah looked at the college IDs through the bag.
Seven faces. Seven girls who had gone through the pipeline and ended up in the ground.
His mind went back to the Kara Ellison ID that had been found on Brooke Danvers.
The jacket with the SUNY Plattsburgh card hidden in the lining.
Trophies. The killer kept them. There was always something.
A bottle of chloroform was found in the cabin ten minutes later, tucked behind cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink.
Consistent with the sweet chemical smell Hailey had described.
The pieces were stacking up. The rags. The IDs.
The chloroform. The location. The man in handcuffs in the back of a cruiser.
Then the commotion started.
"Get off me!" Callie's voice cut through the clearing. Noah looked up and saw her shoving an officer backward, hard, both hands on his chest. The officer stumbled and put his hands up. Callie was already past him, walking fast toward the cruiser where Hollis sat in the back seat.
Noah handed the evidence bag back and hurried over.
"Hey, hey, hey!" He got between Callie and the cruiser, his hands on her shoulders.
Her face was white beneath the cuts. Her eyes were wet but whatever was behind those eyes was not grief. Not yet. That would come later. This was something else.
"That son of a bitch." She tried to get past him. Noah held her. "She's in the root cellar."
"Who?"
"Ruby."
Noah's hands dropped from her shoulders.
"Ruby?" he asked.
Multiple officers moved in as Callie lunged for the cruiser door.
McKenzie appeared from somewhere and got his arms around her midsection.
Another deputy stepped between her and the vehicle.
Through the cruiser window, Hollis was shouting, his face pressed against the glass, his cuffed hands banging on the partition.
"I didn't do it! I don't know what she's talking about! I never touched anyone!"
Noah left them. He walked across the clearing toward the far side of the property where a low mound of earth rose from the ground near the tree line.
The root cellar. A partially underground structure with a heavy wooden door set at an angle into the hillside, built fifty years ago to store vegetables and preserve canned goods through the winter.
The door was open. An officer stood beside it, his face gray.
Noah went down the stone steps. The air changed immediately, cool and damp and carrying a smell that he recognized before his eyes adjusted to the dark. The space was small, maybe eight by ten feet, with shelves along both walls holding mason jars and rusted cans. The floor was packed earth.
Ruby lay in the far corner. Curled on her side, her knees drawn up, her arms pulled in close. She was wearing the same clothes she'd had on the last time he saw her. Her dark hair was spread across the dirt floor. Her face was turned toward the wall.
Noah crouched beside her. The stab wounds were visible through her shirt, multiple punctures in the torso and abdomen, a pattern consistent with what Adelaide Chambers had documented on Brooke Danvers. The same frenzied clustering. The same depth. The same blade.
He stayed there for a moment. The root cellar was silent except for the sounds filtering down from above, radios, voices, boots on gravel.
The world above was doing what it always did after a discovery like this, organizing, processing, turning horror into procedure.
Down here it was just a girl in the dirt who had been looking for her friend and found something else instead.
Noah stood and climbed the steps back into the daylight.
The interview room at High Peaks Police Department was bare. A table. Two chairs. A metal ring bolted to the table surface. Derek Hollis sat with his wrists cuffed to the ring, his head down, a bruise forming along his jaw where it had met the ground. The fluorescent light above him buzzed.
Noah stood in the observation room with Ray and McKenzie. Through the one-way glass, Hollis sat motionless.
"Where's Callie?" Ray asked.
"Rivera is handling her," McKenzie said. "The way she lost it at the scene, Sheriff Rivera said it might jeopardize her chances of taking that detective exam. She struck one of your guys."
Noah turned from the glass. "Oh, please. You were there, Ray. There was a lot of pushing. She didn't strike anyone. We were both amped up after being dragged halfway down the road. Get your guy to calm the hell down."
"All right, I'll speak to him," Ray said. He looked through the glass at Hollis. “Has he asked for a lawyer yet?"
"Not yet," McKenzie said. "The ME is checking his DNA against the college IDs, Ruby, and the rags to see if we have a match with the other bodies. We've also been verifying the IDs themselves, making sure they're originals, not fakes."
"Any luck with Ellison's ID?" Noah asked. "The ME has had that long enough."
Ray shook his head. "Let's handle the other six first."
"Seven, laddie,” McKenzie said. "Danvers, remember?"
Ray nodded.
"By the way, Danvers' college ID was among the ones found at the cabin,” McKenzie said.
"Hailey Benton or Fiona Spence?"
"No," McKenzie said.
Noah moved toward the door. "I'll talk to him. See if he will tell us where Fiona and Hailey are."
"Nope." McKenzie stepped in front of him. "Not this time, Sutherland."
"You said he hasn't lawyered up yet."
"He hasn't. But the only person he wants to speak to is Mark Spence."
"Fiona's father?" Noah looked through the glass.
"Says they go way back. That he owes him answers."
Noah was quiet for a moment. He watched Hollis through the glass. The man hadn't moved. His head was still down, his cuffed hands resting on the table. Whatever was going through his mind, it wasn't frantic. He wasn’t building a defense. He looked closer to resignation.
"Whatever he says will be admissible," Noah said. "Let's do it. Maybe he plans on telling Spence where Fiona is."
Ten minutes later an officer escorted Mark Spence into the interview room.
He'd been brought up to speed in the corridor.
The situation. The evidence. The charges being prepared.
The discovery of Ruby's body. And despite every instinct that was surely telling him to tear Hollis apart with his hands, he had been informed in clear terms that he needed to remain calm.
They needed him. If Hollis knew where Fiona was, Spence was the only person he was willing to tell.
Two officers stood inside the room, one on each side of the table. Insurance.
Watching it through the glass was hard. Noah could see it in Spence's body, the rigid set of his shoulders, the way his hands balled into fists at his sides before he forced them open and placed them flat on his thighs. He sat down across from Hollis.
Hollis looked up. "Thank you for coming."
"Where is my daughter?"
"I don't know."
"Bullshit. You took explicit photos of my daughter the night she went missing."
"I know." Hollis shifted in his seat. The cuffs clinked against the ring.
"I know how it looks. And I know you don't want to think she would willingly do that.
But she wanted to. I tried to talk her out of it.
I didn't know it was going to be her until she showed up. I'm not lying. You can ask Finch."
Mark's jaw worked. "And so all those photos you took of passengers in your vehicle when you did the rideshare job. They wanted those taken too?"
Hollis dropped his head. "I admit it looks bad."
"What were those photos for? Did you offer them ways to make money? Maybe at the deli or through Strutz? Did you pick out the best-looking ones? The most gullible?"
"That's not it."
"So what was the arrangement you had with Bridger, Finch, and the Three Pillar Community? Were you part of some sick funnel?" Mark shook his head. "And here I was thinking you were my friend."
"I was. I am." Hollis said. "Mark, you know how hard it is to make money from rideshares? I was working a second job at the deli just to make ends meet. Living paycheck to paycheck."
"Right. And so whose idea was it that you'd start photographing girls? Tabitha's or Bridger's?"
Hollis said nothing.
"Why didn't Finch do it?"
"Because he..." Hollis trailed off.
"You know what? I don't care." Spence leaned forward. His hands were on the table now, pressing down as if the surface was the only thing keeping him from going over it. "All I want to know is where my daughter is. She was there that night. What did you do to her?"
"Nothing. I took photos. That was it. She left at the end of the shoot. I swear to God."
"And Tabitha?"
"She tried to help some of them. You know, give them a place away from bad family lives."
"Yeah? And what happened when they wanted to go back? Did you or someone else dump them in that bog?" His voice cracked. "Is that where my Fiona is?"
"I don't know where she is."
"Liar!"
Spence couldn't hold it any longer. He launched himself across the table.
His hands found Hollis's collar before the officers could move.
One of them grabbed Spence from behind and the other came around the side.
Hollis rocked backward in his chair, the cuffs snapping tight against the ring, his face twisted.
Noah and McKenzie were out of the observation room and through the interview door in seconds.
Noah got his arm around Spence's chest and pulled him back.
McKenzie shoved a chair out of the way. The two officers had Spence's arms pinned but he was still straining forward, his face red, the veins in his neck standing out.
"That's enough!" Noah said. "Mark. Enough."
Spence went slack. Not calm. Just empty. The fight left him all at once and what remained was a man standing in a room with the person who might have taken his daughter and no way to reach him.
The officers escorted Hollis toward the door. He was shouting over his shoulder as they marched him out.
"I was set up! I never touched those girls! I swear!"
The door closed behind him. The interview room was quiet. Mark Spence stood in the middle of it with Noah's hand still on his shoulder, breathing hard, staring at the empty chair where Hollis had been sitting.
Noah said nothing. There was nothing to say. The evidence was in the cabin. The IDs, the rags, the chloroform, the body. It was enough to charge Hollis and it was enough to hold him and it was probably enough to convict him.
And somewhere underneath all of it, Noah heard Samuel Bridger's voice on a bridge above a river.
Guilty of something isn't the same as guilty of everything.