Chapter Eighteen
By the time the station quieted for the night, the whiteboard in the conference room looked like a crime scene of its own.
Names. Arrows. Years. Symbols scrawled and circled.
Vanessa Warren. Hardesty Farm. Troy Malbern—cleared for homicide.
Unsub. Island. Possible mainland connections.
Will capped the marker with more force than necessary.
“All right,” he said, his tone roughened by fatigue.
“We’ve attained what we set out to accomplish.
Troy’s messy, but he’s not our killer. Margaret confirmed what we suspected—Raymond hid a woman and a child at the farmhouse, and he knew exactly how high the stakes were.
Unfortunately, he didn’t tell anyone what those stakes were.
” He stood back and looked at the board.
Rachel rubbed her temples. “What’s our next move?”
“We need to find out what Raymond was working on that brought him to Vanessa. All the old files are gone,” Will said with a weary sigh.
“But my father’s notes on this case weren’t part of those case files. Otherwise, someone would have found them by now,” Asa concluded.
They’d be somewhere he trusted. Somewhere closer to home.
As if his brain had been waiting for permission, an image flashed in his mind—the narrow hallway of his childhood home, the door at the end that led to the crawl space under the eaves.
The way his father had once told him, half-joking, “If this old place ever catches fire, the firefighters are going to have a fun time with what I’ve stuffed in these walls. ”
Back then, Asa had assumed he meant old fishing gear. Tax receipts. Maybe his mother’s boxes of Christmas lights.
Now, the words landed differently.
“Asa?” Maya’s voice nudged him back. “Are you okay?”
He looked across the table at her.
She sat there ramrod straight with tired eyes, her fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee she’d barely touched. Since the interrogation with Troy, she’d moved like someone braced permanently for impact. Not broken. Just . . . braced.
“There’s somewhere we haven’t searched properly,” he said. “I completely forgot about it until now.”
Will looked up. “Where?”
“My father’s house,” Asa said. “He wouldn’t have left anything important where a break-in would expose it and the killer might come across it.”
“You think he hid something?” Rachel peered up. “It’s been searched before. First by law enforcement following the murder and more recently by our team.”
“I realize that,” Asa said. “But he was working on something bigger than anything on the island. Margaret’s call confirmed it.
Not a case that took place on Hope Island.
Much bigger than anything that happened here back then.
If he suspected a serial pattern on the mainland, and Vanessa was his key witness, he would have taken precautions. ”
Will flexed his jaw and considered the possibility. “Still, that house has been sitting vacant for years. Anything of value could have been stolen by now.”
“Not if it was hidden where no one would think to look,” Asa said.
Silence stretched.
“We should go there now. Tonight. Before the suspect finds out what we’re looking for,” Maya didn’t say the word killer, but everyone knew.
Will looked like he wanted to argue, but Asa beat him to it. “She’s right. If something’s hidden, I’d rather find it before anyone else gets the same idea.”
Will’s gaze darted between the two of them. “You’re both running hot,” he said. “Emotional. That’s not always a bad thing, but it can cloud judgment.”
“It can also clarify priorities,” Asa said, his tone even. “I’m not asking you to send us up there alone. We can make it a controlled search. You, me, Rachel, and JT. Maya can stay in the cruiser if that makes you feel better.”
Maya’s jaw tightened. “No thank you.”
He almost smiled. “Thought you’d say that.”
Will scrubbed a hand over his face. “Fine, but we do this right. Limited team. We move quietly. We assume whoever pulled that file knows this case isn’t as dead as it should be.
I don’t want to light this place up like a Christmas tree and announce to half the island that we think Raymond left us something. ”
Rachel nodded. “I’ll grab fresh flashlights and evidence bags.” She turned to her husband. “Meet you at the back lot in ten.”
While the others moved, Asa glanced at Maya. “You sure you’re up for this?”
“No, but I’m going anyway.”
He nodded once, a swell of something like pride tightening his throat.
The drive up the hill to his father’s old house felt different at night.
The last time Asa had made this climb, the sun had been out, kids on bikes weaved around the cruiser, and a dog barked somewhere down the block.
Today, the neighborhood lay under a wet, heavy quiet.
Porch lights glowed here and there, halos in the mist. Some Christmas decorations were still up in yards.
They blinked half-heartedly. Strings of lights, a leaning plastic snowman, and a wreath hanging a little crooked.
The house itself felt smaller in the headlights.
As a child, he had always thought it was so big.
White clapboard had gone a bit gray with age.
The narrow porch his mother had once filled with potted plants stood empty now.
The curtains were gone. A thin layer of condensation fogged the inside of the windows.
Will pulled his cruiser in behind them, headlights cutting briefly across the yard before he shut them off. JT killed the SUV’s engine, and he and Rachel got out, leaving them in a bubble of muffled quiet.
“You don’t have to go in,” Asa said to Maya, even as he opened his door.
“You’ve said that a lot today.” She unbuckled her seatbelt. “You should know it’s not working.”
“Stubbornness is going in your file,” he murmured.
“I’m counting on it.”
They stepped out into the cold. The air smelled of wet leaves and old wood. Asa’s boots crunched softly on the gravel walk as they approached the porch.
Will met them there. “Last chance to call this a bad idea,” he said.
“Last chance to admit it’s a necessary one,” Asa countered.
Will’s mouth twitched. “Fine, but if we find a nest of spiders in that crawl space, I’m making you deal with it.”
“Reasonable division of labor,” Asa said.
The door swung open with a creak that shot straight through Asa’s chest. For a moment, he just stood there. Even though he’d been here before, coming back after all these years brought home the magnitude of losing his father all over again.
The entryway smelled faintly of dust and something else he couldn’t place, other than time.
The echo of mornings when his father’s boots had thumped down this hall.
Before his mother’s death, her laughter had filled the house.
He remembered a particular night when he’d woken up and found them in the living room dancing to an old song.
His throat tightened unexpectedly at the image.
Maya’s hand brushed his sleeve. “You okay?” she whispered.
“I will be.” He hoped it was true.
They stepped inside.
Rachel clicked on her flashlight, the beam cutting clean paths through the dim. “Where to?” she asked.
“The crawl space,” Asa whispered. He led the way up the creaky stairs, his hand trailing along the banister.
The hallway at the top was even narrower than his memory, the doors on either side opening into empty rooms—his childhood bedroom, now stripped bare.
His parents’ room, the bed frame gone, but the indent on the carpet where it once sat still visible.
At the end of the hall, a small door stood half-hidden behind a bookcase. Asa moved it aside and crouched to tug at the knob. It resisted.
“Painted shut?” JT asked while Rachel shined her light over his shoulder.
“Maybe.” He braced his shoulder and pulled harder.
With a sudden crack, the seal gave way. The door swung open a few inches, a puff of cooler, dustier air brushing his face.
The crawl space yawned beyond—a low, cramped wedge of darkness under the eaves, smelling of insulation and dry wood.
“I’ll go,” Asa said.
Will handed him a small flashlight. “If you see anything that looks unstable, back out,” he said. “Last thing we need is for the floor to give way while you’re in there.”
“That would be on-brand for this week,” Asa muttered.
Maya knelt beside the door. “Be careful.”
He met her eyes. “Yes, ma’am.” Then he ducked inside.
The space forced him onto his hands and knees immediately. The beam of light cut across exposed beams, rolls of insulation, and the occasional spiderweb glinting like wire.
He inched slowly past a rusty toolbox, then later a box of Christmas ornaments. No notebooks. No folders. Nothing that looked like the kind of evidence hidden from a murderer.
“Anything?” JT’s voice floated in from behind.
“A lot of dust,” Asa said, resisting the urge to cough. “A few questionable spiders. That’s about it.” He pushed deeper. Just as he was about to reach the point where the roof dipped too low to continue, his light caught on something that didn’t match the rest of the space.
A strip of wood, nailed between two beams, looked slightly newer than the boards around it. The edge of it had a faint smear of a different paint along one side, as if it had been pulled from another part of the house and repurposed.
Asa shifted, his heart rate kicking up a notch. “There’s something here,” he called. He aimed the flashlight more carefully.
The board wasn’t just bridging beams. It covered a shallow recess in the wall, no bigger than a shoebox. A makeshift compartment. Hidden in a place nobody would check unless they were desperate or knew what to look for.
His chest tightened. “Of course, you would,” he whispered to the old boards. “That’s just like you.” Carefully, he wedged his fingers under one side of the board and pried. The nails resisted. Then one gave with a soft squeal. Then another. After a minute of steady work, the board came free.
Behind it, wrapped in a brittle, plastic grocery bag, lay a thin, battered notebook.