Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Malerick Timberbridge leaned back in his chair, eyes locked on the map pinned to the corkboard across the second room of his apartment. Red lines crisscrossed the surface, marking connections no one else seemed to see—or refused to acknowledge.
The sheriff’s office wasn’t the place for this. Too many eyes. Too many ears. If even a whisper of suspicion got out, it could all fall apart before he had the chance to figure out the truth.
The fire at the Doherty mansion three weeks ago wasn’t an accident. And Malerick didn’t believe in coincidences.
His phone vibrated against the desk, slicing through the tense silence. He grabbed it on the second ring.
“Timberbridge.” His voice was clipped, his jaw already tight with the weight of what was coming.
“This is Gil.” The voice on the other end was all business, sharp and to the point. Finnegan Gil’s calls sometimes made him wonder if leaving the FBI had been a good idea. He had a good thing over there, but this, this promised a better salary and would let him be close to his mother. Not that it helped. By the time he was back, she was in hospice. Regret was something he tried to avoid, but there were days he couldn’t push it far into the dark corners of his heart.
“I’ve got Derek with me,” Gil continued. “We’re going through the Doherty fire report, cross-referencing it with what you sent about Nysa Calloway’s land. I think you’re right. The syndicate has been there longer than we initially thought. The bodies match their usual disposal method.”
Mal exhaled hard, pressing his fingers against the bridge of his nose. The patterns, the timing—it all aligned too well. He’d spent weeks staring at the evidence, each detail leading him back to the same unsettling conclusion.
It wasn’t negligence. And it sure as hell wasn’t a faulty gas line, no matter what they wanted the town to believe. Whoever set that fire wanted Ledger and Galeanna out before the second explosion. It was planned.
Derek’s voice came through next, low and grim. “Same M.O. we’ve seen in other cases—remote locations, bodies buried where no one’s likely to stumble across them. Fires, destruction, then the land gets repurposed. Systematic.”
“Systematic,” Mal echoed, the word settling in his gut like a bad omen.
Finnegan cut in. “Here’s the thing, Sheriff. We’ve been tracking cases like this across multiple states—small towns, isolated properties, people vanishing without a trace. In most of them, there’s evidence of fires or other forms of destruction nearby. It’s a pattern, and Maple Haven is next. Probably Old Birchwood Timber too. What’s the plan with your family’s company?”
Mal’s jaw ticced. Ledger had come back to town to deal with it, but that didn’t mean he intended to keep it. Most likely, he’d sell and be done with it—one less chain tying him to this place. Their mother’s legacy be damned.
“As you know, my brother is currently on his honeymoon,” he said, though he knew Gil had been the one flying them to Seattle. “An interim manager is overseeing things for now.”
Gil’s response was instant. “You can’t sell.” It wasn’t a suggestion. It was an order. “You hear me? That company needs to stay in the family until we wipe them out. Otherwise, we lose the upper hand.”
Malerick’s grip on the phone tightened, his knuckles paling.
“And Nysa?”
A pause. Then Finnegan sighed. “That’s where it gets complicated. From what you told us, she’s not just an innocent bystander. She saw them three years ago, didn’t she?”
Mal scraped a hand through his hair. “Yeah. She caught them burying a body. Heard them. She was damn lucky to get away.” His voice dropped, a raw edge creeping in. “But now she’s back. And she’s already getting threats.”
“We believed that the killers never left town,” Derek said. It wasn’t a question.
“No,” Mal confirmed. “And someone’s been using her land for years. That’s not coincidence. We’ll know how many when forensics come back with that information.”
Silence hummed over the line. Mal could almost hear the gears turning in their heads, the same way his had been since the first body surfaced. He’d spent years keeping his distance, staying out of things he had no business in, but this—this was personal.
The promise he made at his mother’s bedside when she was too weak to argue. Take care of your brothers, Mal. Love each other, be brothers, repeated in his head over and over.
The smart move would be getting them out of Birchwood Springs. But that wasn’t thinking with his head—it was thinking with his heart. And that could get all of them killed.
Finnegan broke the silence. “We’re sending another sweep team through both her property and your brother’s. We’ll assign agents to watch them closely, like we did with Ledger and his wife.”
Mal exhaled slowly, the tension coiling in his shoulders. “Nysa’s staying at her grandmother’s for now. Hopper’s moved into the family place. But if this runs deeper than we thought?—”
“It does.” Derek’s voice was firm. “And it’ll get worse before we get them.”
Malerick closed his eyes briefly, grounding himself.
“You can’t pull your family out now,” Derek continued. “If you do, they’ll know we’re onto them. You’re just the fucking sheriff, Timberbridge. Don’t forget that.”
Mal didn’t answer right away. His gaze drifted back to the map, the threads of red string connecting places, people, histories tangled in something dark and calculated.
He knew his job. He had agreed to it. But he wasn’t about to sit back and watch his brothers die. It’s only two of them. As long as Kier and Atlas stayed away, he’d be . . . fine, or as fine as he could be trying to solve this fucking case and protecting his brothers.
He wasn’t going to let anyone else get caught in the crossfire.