Chapter 17
Hadley Dawkins
Nothing in Roland Mercer’s house was out of place.
The television remotes had been set parallel on the coffee table, squared to the edge.
The books on the hall shelves ran by height, then by color.
In the kitchen, the spices faced label-out, and the canned goods stood stacked two deep, the oldest dates pulled to the front.
The entire place could have passed for a real estate company’s model home, confirming the man’s obsessive nature.
Mercer’s private office told a somewhat different story.
Papers covered every surface, most of them flagged with sticky notes gone curled and pale with age.
Legal pads lay stacked on one another, a few off to the side and open.
A coffee mug had left a ring on a printout, but the printout had been left anyway, the information apparently too important to toss.
Yet Hadley had stood in the doorway long enough to get a sense of order underneath the clutter.
An organized mess was the only way she could describe it.
She worked her fingers into a pair of nitrile gloves before stepping into the room.
It had been a long day, and it wasn’t nearly done. She could still hear the impact of his body on the cold tile. It had carried through her mind all afternoon, surfacing again and again as she searched his campus office, where nothing had stood out as a reason someone might want him dead.
The maps that covered the corkboards at the college papered the wall behind his desk here, too.
County surveys, some of them decades old.
Topographic sheets with the contour lines crowded close together along with a few hand-drawn pieces that had to be his own.
He’d pinned them edge to edge until they made one ragged map of Cane County.
Hadley’s attention caught on the corner low and to the right, and she stepped closer to study the hand-drawn ones.
Three of them seemed to cover the same patch of ground.
The same stretch of county road, the same bend of creek, the same rectangle of field, drawn at different scales and from different years.
Roland had mapped that one piece of land over and over.
She didn’t need the labels to know what she was looking at, because she’d driven that rutted track herself more times than she could count.
Earl Vinton’s east field and beyond.
If Roland Mercer had given his life to the Threshing Man, he’d have had every reason to fix on the Cox property, where most of the county’s vanished girls had last been seen. That was the ground the legend was built on, as far as she was aware.
But it wasn’t the ground he’d cared about.
He’d built a shrine to the eastern land instead.
Why those particular acres?
She studied the rest of the documents pinned and taped to the wall as other possibilities materialized in her mind.
Maybe Roland had found something out there, something the legend had nothing to do with.
Maybe he hadn’t worked alone. A man this deep in something wanted someone else’s admiration, and a believer could turn.
Maybe Roland had known something about Reed, or Reed about him.
Or maybe a professor with a fragile reputation had simply gotten too close to something somebody needed kept quiet, and a broken railing had been a gift to whoever wanted him gone.
Too many maybes, and no thread yet long enough to pull.
She sensed Nick in the doorway before he spoke.
“Zanes called.” Nick had stopped just inside the room. “He’s ruling it a homicide.”
Hadley had expected nothing less.
“There’s a stretch of the upper landing the repair crew had torn up for the railing work.
Some subfloor was still exposed, a few tools left out.
” Nick crossed his arms, his jaw working the way it did when he’d rather the news were otherwise.
“Zanes found marks on the legs, as well as some scuffs in the exposed subfloor. A man fighting to keep his balance leaves a mark like that. A man stepping off on his own doesn’t. ”
“He was pushed.” Hadley stepped closer to the desk. “And the lobby cameras didn’t catch anyone who didn’t belong?”
“No, but there are a fair number of entrances no camera covers. If our perp knows the campus, we might not get an ID that way.” Nick shook his head. “I’ve got a deputy stitching the footage together as best he can so we don’t miss anything.”
Hadley bent over the spread of papers, easing the pages aside with two gloved fingers.
These weren’t maps. These were stories…accounts…
page after page of them, taken down in Roland’s cramped handwriting.
Some were typed up clean, dated across years she couldn’t begin to count.
A woman from the south end of the county who’d caught sight of a tall shape, standing at her fence line three nights running the autumn her sister went missing.
Names Hadley knew and some she didn’t, from every corner of Cane County, all of them circling around the same legend.
“People could’ve lived their entire lives happy, never knowing a word of this.” Nick had come around to the far side of the desk, peering down at the pages without touching them. “I about envy the ones who don’t.”
Hadley had been about to answer when one of the drawers on the right-hand side caught her eye.
It sat a quarter inch out, never pushed all the way home, and the lock was broken.
Not forced in a hurry, but worked, the brass face plate bent back and the wood around the keyhole splintered pale where a tool had gone in and levered.
“Nick.” Hadley straightened and stepped back from the desk, her hands coming up and away from the paper. “Don’t touch anything else in here.”
“What is it?” Nick slowly stepped around the desk.
“Somebody’s already been through this room.” Hadley nodded toward the drawer. “That lock’s been jimmied. Whoever it was got here before we did.”
“I’ll call the team now.” Nick was already moving for the door. “And I’ll put the deputies on the street while we wait. Half these houses out here have doorbell cameras. If somebody came up Sweetbriar in the last day or two who didn’t belong, one of these neighbors caught a plate.”
Hadley debated following him out of the office, but she decided to canvass the room.
Clasping her hands behind her back, she began to slowly maneuver around the furniture.
Nothing stood out on the shelves of the bookcases.
A two-tier table sat beside a recliner in the corner, with more legal pads stacked across it and a lamp on the upper surface.
The lower tier held a coil of charging cords, a sketch of some kind, and an open package of USB drives.
She crouched to study the drawing first. It had been sketched out in pencil, worked over so many times in places that the graphite had gone silver and slick.
The image clearly depicted the Threshing Man, but not the version most of the townsfolk described to their children.
In this illustration, there were still similarities, such as the tattered husks hanging in strips from his tall form.
The tips were curled up, as if something beneath were pushing them out.
The difference?
Where there should have been no face, Roland had drawn the hollow into a deep, layered blackness that suggested a wide mouth—too wide—parted around a row of something that wasn’t quite teeth.
The arms were wrong, too. Not hands, but long jointed lengths that started where fingers should have been and went a little too far, tapering to points that trailed down past the figure’s knees and curled into the dirt.
In the bottom right-hand corner, Roland had written a single word and underlined it twice.
Guardian.
Hadley stared at the sketch a while longer, until her attention shifted to the package beside it.
A four-pack, the cardboard torn open along the top, three drives still seated in their molded plastic slots.
The fourth slot was empty. Roland had peeled one out and put it to use, probably for research or for the book itself.
Only she hadn’t noticed any type of USB drive at his campus office.
Not on his desk, not inside it, not anywhere in plain view.
Hadley pushed off the floor and made her way back to the desk.
She moved her gaze gradually over every surface of it.
She then eased the top drawer open with two gloved fingers.
No drive. That didn’t mean he hadn’t had it on him when he fell to his death, though, and if he had, Zanes would have logged it.
Either the drive held something worth killing for, or she was allowing her imagination to run a little wild. Roland could have merely used the USB to transfer files from his laptop to his desktop and then thrown it away. The pack had been cheap enough.
Hadley started working her gloves off as she crossed to the office door.
She’d get Nick’s read on her theory before she left him to his side of it.
He had a murder investigation to run and a family to notify.
The parents in Holloway didn’t yet know their son was gone.
Her own focus needed to stay with Reed. And while Nick sat with Roland’s parents, there was someone else who should be notified of the man’s death.