Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Sheriff Debra Tooni had seen a lot of bad things in the course of her sixty-eight years. The first time she’d seen something bad, she’d been seven years old. She’d watched her best friend in the entire world get hit by a drunk driver.
It had been seven a.m. in the morning. Jimmy Benge had been running toward their stopped school bus. His backpack had been bouncing. Jimmy had been grinning and waving at her and when the station wagon hit him, she’d screamed so loud and hard that she’d lost her voice.
She’d joined the FBI after graduating college. Her plan had been to make the world a better place. And she had. Or, at least, she thought that she had. She’d locked away criminals. She’d promised victims that they were safe.
But…
She’d seen things. Things that wouldn’t let her sleep. That made her break out into a cold sweat even on the hottest night. So she’d started looking at people differently. Started wondering what secrets seemingly good people kept behind their closed doors.
Like the school teacher she’d arrested as an FBI agent. Teacher of the year. With a dead student’s body cut up and stored in his freezer.
There had been too many grieving families. Families who’d stared at her with their desolate eyes and didn’t understand why she couldn’t do more. Why she couldn’t always bring their loved ones back alive.
She’d wanted to escape that world. To find a wide-open space where there were no murders. Where the worst crimes tended to be some teenager shoplifting.
But no place was completely safe. No town could shut out the monsters entirely.
As she stood in the county morgue, her gaze on the zipped up remains in front of her, Debra knew the truth.
A monster hunted in her town. Her home. One of the very worst monsters out there.
The kind of monster that hid behind a smile.
Someone who seemed like a perfect neighbor.
Someone who could hide the evil inside, just as that long-ago school teacher had hidden his true self with a kind grin.
Bridget Russell was dead. She’d been alive when she was put in the ground. The broken, bloody fingernails on Bridget’s hands told that story. Bridget had fought to live.
But she had not escaped.
Her death is on me. It happened on my watch. In my town. Debra was supposed to protect the people in her town. She was supposed to do whatever it took to keep them safe.
So that’s what she would do. Her hand reached out toward the black body bag. No, to the woman in that bag.
A faint scuff sounded behind her. Like a shoe, rubbing over the tiled floor. Had the coroner come back already? She began to turn.
Something hard slammed into the side of her head.