Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
EVERETT
Juggling cases is one of the most difficult parts of being a deputy, but I can do it. When I pull up outside the Lamberts’ house, I set aside my very active caseload so I can be my very best for Marin’s family.
Zach pulls in just as I’m stepping out of my SUV. I adjust the brim of my Stetson against the drizzle and zip up my jacket while I wait for him. Then we walk up the pathway side by side.
Ashley Lambert opens the door dressed in jeans, scuffed blue flats, and a cardigan sweater over a faded turtleneck. Her already sad eyes seem to dim when she takes in both Zach and I standing in the rain.
“Come in,” she says, stepping back.
Ted Lambert is walking down the hall toward us, his shoulders tight. He works for the bank as a loan officer specializing in ranching and farming. A good guy who works hard to support those who work the land.
He and I share a brief glance before I follow Ashley into the entryway.
“Dreadful weather,” she says, but it sounds so fake I wince. I hang my hat and jacket on the rack so I don’t drip water all over their carpet, then follow Ashley into the living room.
The house hasn’t changed since my last visit, but there’s a stillness to it, like the rooms are holding their breath. Though waiting for what, I don’t know.
Marin is never coming home.
“Please have a seat,” Ashley says, indicating the overstuffed couch in the tidy room. She takes the easy chair opposite, perching on the edge like she might need to jump up in a hurry. Ted stands to her right and reaches for his wife’s hand.
I choose the left side of the couch so I can take notes without jabbing Zach with my elbow. My duty belt squeaks as I lower down.
“Thanks for talking with us today,” Zach says, settling in.
I flip my notebook open to a fresh page and add the details—date, time, subjects.
“Of course,” Ted says, his face a mask, placing his other hand over his wife’s.
That they’ve stayed together after the death of their child means they’ve beat some of the toughest odds. I hope they can continue to find solace and support from each other as we push their grief into the red zone yet again.
“Has something changed?” Ashley asks.
“We have new evidence that we’d like to share,” I say, looking both of them in the eye.
Ted pulls the other easy chair closer and sinks to the edge of it, taking his wife’s hand again. “How can we help?”
Gratitude for his strength and ability to focus on forwarding our investigation instead of unleashing his very justifiable anger on us for our failures softens the ache in my chest and renews my dedication to producing answers.
I pull out my phone and open the picture of the pendant we removed from Marin’s neck. It’s a shot taken of the necklace on a plain white paper background, when it entered evidence. “Do you remember this? ”
Ashley takes the phone and she and her husband stare at it. “She was wearing it, when we—” Ashley presses her lips together. She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. I know Marin was wearing the necklace when they identified their daughter.
“Do you remember when she started wearing it?” Zach asks.
“We never saw it before,” Ted says, shaking his head.
“Could it have been tucked below the neckline of a shirt?” Zach asks. “Hidden from view?”
Ashley glances at the phone screen again. “I suppose. That morning, she was wearing her Bear Mountain Hay & Feed hoody.”
“I know this is painful,” I say. “But if you’re willing, could you pull up your photos from that time, let us have a glance?”
“Sure,” Ashley says. From the rough edge in her tone and the way her gaze turns hollow, I know she’s starting to shut down.
“Let me,” Ted says, pulling out his phone.
We wait for him to scroll, the planes of his face tense in the reflection. “This is a week before…”
I offer to take the phone so he doesn’t have to finish that sentence.
He complies, his face turning pale.
Zach and I huddle over the screen, flicking through the snapshots one by one. There are only a few of Marin. In the first, she’s hunkered over a bowl of cereal and scowling at the camera, as if her dad has just said something she finds unimpressive. Or maybe he’s just teased her. It’s a look I’ve been seeing from my own son lately.
“Huh,” Zach says when we flip to the next one. I zoom in, focusing on the edge of Marin’s sweater and the part of her neck that’s visible. There’s no gold necklace there.
“That was the day before,” Ted says. “We had that snowstorm. She and Theo spent an hour making a snowman, even though it was supposed to warm up.”
I flip back to the previous picture of Marin. She’s wearing a loose, V-neck sweater, her brown hair cascading in long, dark waves. There’s no necklace in this one either. I check the dates of both photos.
The morning of her death, Marin was wearing a hoody. Nobody knows if she had on the necklace. But the day before, and three days before, it hadn’t been there.
It makes me wonder if the killer places the necklace on his victims after he kills them. Like a token of his appreciation. A parting gift.
Is this what Ballard needed more time to piece together?
Fuck.
I hand the phone back. I’m not sure this information will help us, but I jot it down anyway.
“We know Marin worked at the feed store,” Zach says. “Do you know if she took on any other part time jobs? Maybe something that offered flexible hours?”
Ashley frowns.
“How about something associated with the college?” I add. “Like a research study she was paid to participate in?”
A flicker passes through Ted’s eyes. “She applied for one of those. But it only lasted a month. She got paid and that was that.”
Ashley’s troubled gaze lifts to meet her husband’s. “I didn’t know this.”
“I didn’t even think of it until just now.”
That same slick flush of adrenaline spikes beneath my skin.
Finally, a lead.
But is it the kind of detail that will crack this case wide open, or just another false hope?
“Can you tell me more about it?” I ask.
Ted’s lips purse and his eyes tense, like he’s trying to remember. “Uh, she only mentioned it once. It was right around the beginning of the quarter. I saw the flyer, and I asked her about it. She said it was easy. Just answered a bunch of boring questions.”
“A flyer? Do you still have it?” I ask.
Ted grimaces. “No. She crumpled it up and threw it away. I remember now thinking sort of odd that she would put it in the trash and not the recycle bin like she usually did.”
“Did she mention who the project was for?” I ask.
“No,” Ted says. “They paid cash, though, I know that much.”
Next to me, Zach’s measured exhale tells me he’s thinking the same thing.
This could be our guy.
“Do you know how?” he asks. “Like in person, Venmo, etc?”
Guilt plays across his features, and I hate that he’s taken this small detail as some sort of failure. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I say, even though I know it’ll come across as empty. If it’s our killer, and he used something traceable like Venmo to pay Marin, we can find him. But we scoured Marin’s financial records. I don’t remember a large deposit. I’ll be looking again though.
“How is this tied to what happened?” Ted asks, his lips pressing together, like he’s barely holding his emotions inside.
“We’re not sure,” I say. “But it’s very helpful.”
Ted looks away. He doesn’t trust me. Which is 100% my fault—I’ve let them down too many times.
“Any chance we could get another look at her room?” Zach asks.
“Of course,” Ashley says, standing.
“Would you mind if we stayed down here?” Ted asks, pulling his wife into a soft embrace.
“Not at all,” I say, tucking my notebook and pen back into my breast pocket.
Zach leads up the carpeted stairs, the middle ones squeaking with our weight. I let my palm glide up the cool, smooth banister as I ascend, thinking through this new angle. If only Ted had thought to keep that flyer.
Why had Marin been so eager to throw it away? Maybe because the person who orchestrated the research study was courting her, and their budding relationship was taboo ?
That’s a stretch, but right now, my mind is humming a hundred miles an hour.
Marin’s room is the second one on the right. The white door with the fuzzy residue from stickers she likely decorated with when she was younger is another sad reminder of the carefree girl she once was. The sometimes-silly older sister who made a snowman with her little brother even though she knew it would soon melt.
The missing stickers reminds me that she was growing up, becoming an adult. Learning to make choices. Who to trust and who might not be worthy of it.
Zach stands in the middle of the room, his arms loose at his sides. “Nothing’s changed.”
I make sure my body cam is recording and step into the room. After I state our location, the date and time, I take in the bulletin board above the small desk, the queen bed no one has slept in since Marin failed to come home that night, the bookshelf packed with fantasy and graphic novels and a few textbooks, the highboy antique dresser Ashley stripped and painted white before Marin was born. The big picture window streaked with rain.
“You think she kept the box that the pendant came in?” I ask Zach while we glove up.
“Maybe.”
We’re quiet as we do another full search of Marin’s bedroom, being careful not to disturb the pristine order. I check the closet, running my gloved hands down all of the sweaters, feeling for bulges in the pockets, listening for the crinkle of paper. I check each shoe, shaking them before sliding my fingers into the toes. I use the flashlight on my phone to check every corner of the top shelf, running my hand into the corners, looking for voids that could conceal something.
While Zach takes the desk drawers, I go through all the books, flipping their pages, looking for anything Marin may have kept there, then the textbooks. I peek behind the bookshelf, but it’s just bare plywood. Zach checks under the mattress. I crawl underneath the bed, using my flashlight to check the slats in the frame.
Zach and I pull the dresser from the wall. He pulls each drawer out as I watch from the back. He gently sifts through the items in the drawers while I shine the flashlight underneath and along the sides. The bottom drawer is almost flush to the floor, but when Zach pulls it out, the depth doesn’t match the shape.
“Hold it.” I get down on my knees and slip one hand under the drawer. Zach’s paused it halfway out, giving me about eight inches of space between the wall and the back panel of the drawer. Underneath it, there’s a void, but it’s empty.
On his knees now too, Zach feels along the inside of the drawer, past pairs of jeans and sweatpants, shorts folded neatly.
My heart is thumping faster, louder, or maybe it’s just the echo in this tiny wedge of a space. “Can you tilt the drawer?” I ask Zach while curling as low to the floor as my inflexible spine will let me.
The drawer tilts maybe ten degrees. I shine my flashlight into the space. There’s a hollow there. And tucked against the front of the drawer are two items, both squarish in shape. A small journal? The box the pendant came in?
I pull out my phone and snap an image.
“Find something?” Zach asks, sounding breathless.
“Yeah. I can’t tell what they are yet. Can you pull the drawer out?” I set my phone to the side.
He wedges the dresser back, scooting on his knees as he goes. “No. It’s got those stoppers on it.”
“I’m gonna push the dresser out,” I say, and shift on my knees, rotating the dresser so it’s perpendicular to the wall. I scrunch down again, pressing my cheek to the floor and shining my light into the narrow space again. My big hand barely fits into it. I take another photo.
“Like a false bottom,” Zach says, knocking on the bottom of the drawer. “Only it gets accessed from the back, not from here. There’s no handle or anything. ”
My fingertips brush one of the objects deep into the space. I spin it sideways, then pinch the corner and drag it out.
“What the hell is that?” Zach asks in a low tone, bracing against the side of the dresser, his eyes locked on small Valentine’s candy box. “Why didn’t we find this before?”
I snap another picture as a cold flush slides down my back. “The important thing is we found it now.” I peek inside the box, but it’s empty.
I set aside the box then hand my phone to Zach so I can reach back into the void under the drawer. I think I know what else is in there.
I pinch it between my fingers and slide it into my gloved palm.
It’s a phone.