Chapter 21 #3
After two hours of interrogation, Wyatt is nowhere near leading them to Beth. He’s maddening, oscillating between slightly gleeful nonsense and melancholy vagaries. Leroux suspects a serious cocktail of drugs may be contributing to this, but it’s impossible to tell at this point.
“Tell us where Beth is, Wyatt,” Maya says, leaning forward and trying to connect with kind eyes. “There is still time to make this right. You don’t have to go down like Jeremy Rose. You can change the direction anytime you want.”
She’s good. She’s one of the best “good cop” interrogators Leroux has seen, and he discovered that skill by accident. She overstepped on one case. He left her in the room because he just needed an officer to babysit a suspect, and she ended up kindly getting a full confession out of a kidnapper.
“She’s probably still alive, you know,” he says, looking down with eyes that appear glazed and exhausted.
There isn’t remorse in his voice; instead, there is a measured excitement reaching in from the dark periphery. It’s as if he is running through carefully laid-out steps, hitting his marks and making sure to keep the clock ticking.
Makeup is streaked around his eyes and down his face; the trails of black remind Leroux of Melissa and the tears of blood painted beneath her hollowed-out eyes.
Leroux wonders why Wyatt felt compelled to do that to Melissa.
Was it for his own satisfaction? Whatever the reason, he’s a sick fuck for doing it.
“Where?” Maya asks, her voice steady and strong.
Wyatt shakes his head. His hair is a mess now, stuck up in various places, a snarl of curls, sweat, and product. It’s surreal to see him try to be vague and mysterious while wearing a priest’s frock and coming down from whatever high was carrying him up until this point.
“Wyatt, you aren’t this person. You help people. Your job gives people closure when their loved ones die.” She reaches forward, not touching him but resting her hand on the table in front of him, like she would comfort him if she could. “Give Beth’s family that closure. They didn’t ask for this.”
Wyatt shakes his head again, this time letting it fall back. He stares at the ceiling, jostling his leg up and down nervously but staying silent.
“Give it up! Where is she, Wyatt?” Leroux’s had enough. Maya may be able to tap into her inner Zen, but there’s nothing except laws to stop Leroux from breaking this guy into fifteen different pieces.
Wyatt just shrugs, moving his cuffed hands back and forth across the table, making a swishing noise over and over. After a moment he looks up at them and says, “‘For which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God’s word is not chained.’”
Will stands up and leaves; it’s a show of good judgment on his part. Leroux can feel an impending explosion building within himself. It radiates off him in waves.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Leroux asks. He’s completely exhausted and honestly through with speaking to men who talk in riddles.
“‘Bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great day,’” Wyatt says, not making eye contact with anyone in the room. He’s trying too hard to sound like a zealot, to sound like these Bible verses are sliding out of his mouth naturally.
Maya’s fingers move across her laptop at lightning speed, her long nails tapping the keys loudly. “I’m looking up these verses,” she says after a second.
“That first verse was in one of the letters Rose wrote to him. Rose was preparing him to play the pastor part, to keep the investigation going in the right direction,” Leroux says, not taking his gaze off Wyatt.
“Is Beth chained up? Is she alive somewhere but chained up?” Maya asks. Her voice has stayed measured but is beginning to exude more urgency.
Wyatt rubs his head. “Do you have Advil?”
There he is, the real Wyatt. He’s a loser, not a calculated supervillain.
Wyatt may have committed those Bible verses to memory, but Leroux doubts he believes in them.
Rose set him up to play Philip Trudeau, to make everyone believe the haunted house was his crime scene.
The only problem is that Wyatt couldn’t resist putting a little bit of himself in the tableau, using his signature technique to keep Melissa’s jaw closed.
He didn’t even have the common sense to evade capture, and by the look of him, he was too fucked up to even try.
Leroux stands up. “We have to make a move here.” He opens the door, scanning the hallway for a second. Spotting another detective, he waves him into the room with Maya. “I’m heading out with Will. We’ll round up some volunteers and get searching around the barn haunt. It’s all we have.”
Maya nods, glaring at Wyatt, who sheepishly looks off to the side.
“You keep working on him.”
She nods. “My pleasure.”
The search party fans out along the outskirts of the property, which stretches for acres and acres.
The barn is still cordoned off, looming dark and foreboding against the sky, an eerie reminder of what Beth’s up against, why time is of the essence now.
In the surrounding woods, past the marshland, is a cavernous kind of darkness that stretches on forever, a perfect place for predators, human or otherwise, to dwell undisturbed.
If Beth is in there, her nightmare might already be over.
It feels like there is a decent chance they are all going to die out here, if not from exposure, then maybe from a rogue alligator or a pissed-off cottonmouth.
Clusters of law enforcement personnel and a handful of volunteers organize into a grid search, covering every inch of land as a helicopter hovers above.
Its searchlight swoops across the dark landscape and adds a heavier sense of urgency to the scene.
There are the consistent sounds of determined feet shuffling through tall swamp grass and the helicopter blades whirring high above, but otherwise the only other sound is when someone yells, “Beth!” Every single person is moving in time with one another, and the farther into the woods and swamp they go, the more desperate they become to hear a call for help—anything to indicate they are on the right track and that the end result will be a young woman with a pulse.
Some searchers use long poles to prod at the vegetation under their feet, untamed and wild. Flashlight beams bounce in every direction. It’s almost as if one could pluck the anxiety out of the air, it’s so thick.
Leroux takes his place next to Will and Wren, sweeping his own light in front of him and trying to look in about a million places at once. The air is cool, almost crisp, but there is a heaviness that makes it feel like walking through honey.
He swears he can hear something in the distance, but each time he listens closer, the trees seem to swallow it up.
He wonders if Wren can detect it too, because she keeps perking up whenever he thinks he hears it.
Between calls for Beth, he hears it again: a muffled cry or a moan.
It’s barely there, and if it weren’t for Wren’s reactions, he might brush it off as a hopeful auditory hallucination.
“You hear something, Muller?” he asks, watching her head snap to her right again.
She nods, pointing her finger at the woods. “John, I swear I can hear something in there.” Immediately he hears it again too. It’s a low sound, but it carries on the wind and seems desperate to draw them to a part of the woods that isn’t being searched.
“I hear it too,” he says, breaking away from the path he’s walking and making his way toward the tree line. Wren follows silently while Will stays behind to continue the grid search.