Chapter 19 #2
“Bingo,” West said. The house was small enough that we’d be able to see most of the first floor from there, assuming there weren’t curtains or something.
I turned to scan the woods behind the porch.
She had plenty of privacy. I guessed that an artist who liked to recreate nature in her work wouldn’t have blinds to block out the woods.
As we rounded the stairs and went up to the deck, I saw I’d been right.
It was too bright outside to see much until we got close. When the shadows gathered enough to block the reflection off the window, I wished I’d stayed in the car.
Two smeared red handprints marked the bottom of the sliding door. I wasn’t a cop or a doctor, but I knew blood when I saw it.
Fuck.
I took a step closer, peering into the house.
The living room was a disaster. Chairs were overturned, stuffing coming out of the couch, and blood splashed across the golden pine floors. So much blood.
“Avery, stop.” West’s arm shot out, catching me in the chest. “Off the deck. Now.”
“Why? What do you see?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I had to.
“Get off the deck now,” he repeated. I turned and jogged down the stairs, the fight draining out of me. There hadn’t just been blood splashed across the floors. There had been a puddle of it by what I guessed had been the kitchen table, now broken boards and splinters on the floor.
A puddle that looked big enough that it had to have come out of a body.
I watched, numb, as West pulled his phone out of his pocket, calling for backup.
He pulled a glove from inside his jacket, protected his hand, and carefully tugged at the handle of the sliding glass door.
It slid open. I didn’t know what that meant, except it left me with a hollow feeling in my stomach.
Something bad had happened in there. Whoever did it had probably left through that door.
“West,” I called out. “Be careful.”
His eyes landed on me as he nodded, then looked behind me at the empty clearing in the woods beyond. “Come back up on the deck,” he said. “I want you in sight. I won’t be more than a minute.”
He opened the door just wide enough to enter and disappeared inside. True to his word, he reappeared less than a minute later, his eyes grim, his phone to his ear. Carefully, he shut the door behind him.
“We’ve got a body.” That was all I heard clearly. The rest was a jumble of cop speak—something about calling the SBI and the ME. I didn’t know what the SBI was, but I’d watched enough TV to guess the ME was the Medical Examiner.
I didn’t want to see, but I had to know.
I inched around West as he paced and barked orders into his phone, moving closer to the sliding glass door.
When I saw her, I wished I’d listened to West. She was splayed face down, long strands of blonde hair streaked with red spread around her.
I thought she’d been wearing red until I realized her blood had stained everything: her hair, her dress, the floor.
“What happened?” I breathed.
Then West was there, pulling me back. “Hold on a sec,” he said into the phone. “Avery, don’t. Don’t look. You don’t need to see this.”
I barely heard him. “But how? How long?”
“We don’t know yet. We’ll wait here,” he said into the phone, then hung up, shoving it in his pocket. “I can’t take you back to Sawyers Bend yet. I’m sorry. I don’t want you to see any of this.”
“What happens now?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“Hold on.” He tapped a contact on his phone, putting it back to his ear.
A second later, he said, “I have a crime scene here in Wolf Mountain, and I need to get Avery back to Sawyers Bend. Can you send someone to pick her up?” A pause.
“Yeah. Yeah. Same address. Thanks.” He shoved his phone back in his pocket.
“Hawk is sending someone to get you. We have to process the scene.”
“I don’t want to go back,” I protested, not sure if I was telling the truth.
West shook his head, his dark eyes grave.
“Listen, honey, this is outside of my jurisdiction, but I’m going to stick around assuming Bill doesn’t have a problem with that.
” I didn’t know who Bill was, but I could guess he was law enforcement for Wolf Mountain.
It made sense they’d all know each other.
“You’re a civilian, and you don’t belong here. You’ve seen enough. You don’t need these pictures in your head. Trust me. On top of that, it’s going to be a long day. You get me? You don’t want to be stuck sitting in my car for hours.”
I wanted to protest. I wanted to stay by his side to know what was happening, but I could see the wisdom in getting the hell out of here.
I closed my eyes, envisioning a gurney with a black bag on it, the dark red of the puddle of blood.
No, I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t want to see.
This wasn’t a movie or my imagination. This was a real woman who was dead.
“How long?” I asked. West knew what I meant.
“My guess is she was killed sometime yesterday.”
“How do you know?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how he could have looked at the violent chaos in that house and known anything about what had happened inside.
“Rigor mortis has passed, but she doesn’t smell like she’s been there for days.
The blood is mostly dry,” he said. “We’ll know more after the scene is processed.
And if we’re lucky, whoever did this left something behind that will help us find them.
” He let out a short burst of air. “She fought, Avery. She fought hard. My guess is not all of that blood is hers. Maybe we’ll get lucky. ”
Lucky didn’t seem like the right word for anything about the scene in that house. A horrible thought occurred to me.
“Did we do this?” I asked. “Sterling and me trying to find her? Is this our fault?”
West put his hands on my shoulders and shook me, just a little. “No, Avery, no. This is not your fault. This is the fault of whoever killed her. Not you.”
“But if we led them here?—”
“No,” he said, his voice gruff. “Let go of that idea. You didn’t do anything wrong. But for now, I have to get you out of here.”
“Okay,” I agreed. I let West lead me back to his SUV.
“I know you’re going to talk to Sterling when you get back to Sawyers Bend,” he said. “You need to tell her to keep her mouth shut. Neither of you should talk to anyone else. I don’t want gossip to get in the way of the investigation. You understand?”
I wasn’t sure I did entirely, but I got that part of it. I could keep my mouth shut. “Got it,” I said.
Five minutes later, the first cop car pulled into the driveway.
Not long after that, the place was crawling with people—police in uniform, people not in uniform, I was pretty sure were also cops, people with boxes and kits, somebody in what looked like a hazmat suit, and then the medical examiner’s van.
I went from wishing I understood what was happening to wondering how long it would take for someone to show up to take me away.
West appeared here and there, always looking serious, talking in low tones, occasionally glancing over to me with concern. Normally, I liked watching him work, but not this. Not with the dead woman inside.
When my ride showed up, I was glad it wasn’t someone I knew well enough to chat with on the way back to Sawyers Bend.
I didn’t feel like talking. I wasn’t sure what I felt like.
Scared. Sad. And angry. So fucking angry.
Whoever killed my father hadn’t stopped with him.
And this woman, as far as I knew, had been innocent.
You don’t know this has to do with Prentice’s murder , I reminded myself.
Maybe she had an angry ex, or someone thought a jeweler had diamonds hidden away.
It could be anything. I tried to make myself believe it, but the picture wouldn’t gel.
This hadn’t been the first body we’d come across in the search for my father’s killer.
It felt like too much to hope it was the last.