Chapter 44
Jackson County District Attorney’s Office
By the time the dogwood petals browned and fell and the Mystery Mountain banners came down off Main Street, Sylva had mostly stopped talking about the river festival. It had not stopped talking about Caroline Simms.
Reid Calloway flipped the lid closed on his takeout container and shoved it to the far edge of his desk. Cold lo mein glistened under the fluorescent lights, looking as unappealing as the pile of statements in front of him.
Mercer, David — State v.
The last three weeks flickered through his mind—Eleanor’s laugh by the river, her sharp, surgical texts about courthouse gossip. And now all of it sat beside these files.
A knock sounded at his door. “Come in.”
Sheriff Burke Scott stepped inside, a thick redwell folder in his hand. He dropped into the chair opposite the desk without being asked. The folder hit the wood with a soft thud.
“Well,” Burke said. “We’re out of easy answers.”
“Did we have any to start with?”
Burke’s mouth twitched. He flipped the redwell open. “Certified statement from Katie Martin. She dated Mercer a year after Caroline vanished. She claims during a fight, he told her: ‘You keep pushin’ me, I’ll do to you what I did to her. I buried her.’”
Reid exhaled through his nose. “He’ll say he was trying to scare her. Not confess.”
“Maybe,” Burke agreed. “But look at the site maps.” He slid a map across the desk. Reid leaned over it, his pen tracing the edge of the greenway.
“Burke, the defense is going to hammer us on the timeline,” Reid said. “They’ll ask why your dogs missed a body fifty yards from a paved street for eight years.”
“They didn't miss it, Reid. They were blocked.” Burke tapped a specific date on the grading logs. “The night she went missing, this area was the designated waste-dirt zone. David’s crew pushed all the excess topsoil from the upper lots into a ten-foot berm right along that tree line. If Caroline was there, they sealed her under a mountain of red clay before the sun even came up. It was a perfect lid.”
“So what changed?” Reid asked.
“The final grade,” Burke explained. “Three years ago, the HOA finished the landscaping. They brought in graders to shave five feet of dirt off the top of those berms to level the greenway. They brought the remains within inches of the surface without ever knowing it. A few years of rain did the rest. The minute that lid was thinned, the clock started ticking.”
Reid looked up. “You’re sure no one else had access?”
“Pulled the permits myself,” Burke said. “Back then, if you wanted to get to that part of Riverbend, you either worked for David Mercer or knew somebody who did. And we’ve got a confirmed ID. Dental and DNA. It’s Caroline.”
“Alternate suspects?”
“Boyfriend’s alibi is ironclad. Cell pings, gas station cameras, twenty witnesses at a party.” Burke leaned back. “Everything ugly points back to David Mercer—or to nobody.”
Reid looked down at the file.
“And if we’re wrong,” he said quietly, “we don’t just ruin him. We bury Caroline all over again.”
Reid stood and paced once behind the desk.
“What are they saying out there?”
“Half the county thinks the podcasts solved it. The other half thinks we’re crucifying a man for clicks.”
Reid sat down slowly. “How sure are you?”
Burke didn’t rush. “Sure enough he needs to answer in a courtroom. Not sure enough I can sleep if we never ask the question.”
Reid pulled a yellow pad toward him and capped his pen. The click sounded final in the quiet office. “I can’t not move on this because of who his lawyer is,” he said quietly.
He thought of Eleanor—how quickly she’d find every weak place in this case. How hard she’d fight for Mercer.
And God help him, Reid was starting to think she was wrong.
Burke nodded once. “And because of who you’re seeing,” he added.
Reid’s expression hardened. “No. I can’t let that matter. I’ll prepare it for the next grand jury panel.”
“That’s all I can ask,” Burke said. He paused at the door. “If we’re wrong, I’d rather know now than twenty years from now when some podcast makes a season out of how we failed her twice.”
The door clicked closed. Reid sat alone with the files. He picked up the phone.
“Hey, Marla,” he said when his assistant answered. “Check when the next grand jury meets and block time. Pull everything we have on State v. Mercer into a trial book.”
“Are we charging him?”
“We’re asking the grand jury to decide.”
He hung up and looked at Caroline’s name one more time.
The decision was made. The fallout hadn’t even started, but when it did, it was going to land squarely between him and Eleanor.