Except then Eliza had told Lucy exactly where to find Noah.
“Were there any signs of a struggle?” Lucy had read the coroner’s short report, seen the photos, but she wanted Hicks’s impression. He’d been there when the techs had processed the scene.
Hicks shook his head but didn’t elaborate.
“COD was knife wound?” she prompted, not because she needed the confirmation but, again, because hearing someone’s take on it was better than reading the blunt, unemotional print against plain white paper.
“Yes, ma’am.” The brim of Hicks’s hat still shielded any expression. Lucy wished they were having this conversation elsewhere, out of the rain, where she could see the twitch and pull of his lips, his eyes. Even his inflection was flat, just the facts. “To the lower base of the skull, and then up.”
“Wait.” Lucy held up her hands, shook her head. The notes she’d seen had specified only neck. “What?”
Her surprise finally got Hicks to turn fully, and for the first time Lucy got a good look at him. If she had to guess, she’d say he was midforties—his skin weathered but more in a way that spoke of a life lived outdoors than from the ravages of age. His face was long and narrow, matching the rest of his lanky frame, his cheeks a bit sunken, his lips thin. In normal light, his eyes were probably blue, but in the storm-induced shadows they edged toward gray.
“To the lower base of the skull,” he repeated, slowly so that she knew his estimation of her had just dropped a notch. “And then up. It severed his brain stem immediately. It would have been nearly painless as far as deaths go.”
“A clean kill.” The words escaped without real intent to be heard. But Hicks’s brows inched up. It was his turn to study her. She wondered if he was taking in her sturdy boots, her jeans, the slicker she knew was the brand preferred more by ranch hands than by weekend hikers. Maybe he was putting it all together with the fact that she’d known the significance of ammonia-soaked rags. Yeah, not your average city slicker cop, my friend.
“You from here, then?” he asked, and she took “here” to mean frontier country more than Idaho specifically.
“Wyoming,” she said, unsure if she should really claim it as home given the fact that she hadn’t been back in more than a decade. It hadn’t been quite that long since she’d worked a case out in these parts, though Lucy wouldn’t be telling him that.
Hicks nodded once and let the subject drop as he shifted his attention again to the scene.
“You thought it was across the neck.” He said it like a statement rather than a question.
Lucy didn’t bother with the easy excuse of incomplete—or, rather, misleading—autopsy notes. “Yes, it would make more sense.”
“It would,” he agreed, and she was starting to like him. His hesitations, the way he weighed his words—if she had to guess, she’d say he didn’t think this was an open-and-shut case, either.
“Or to the chest even.” She floated the suggestion like a test balloon to check if that theory on his doubt held water.
He rocked back on his heels. “That’s certainly what you would expect from someone inexperienced with a knife. Going for the brain stem requires absolute precision.”
“Was Eliza skilled enough to make that kill?” Lucy asked. He hadn’t outright shut down the implication that this was all a bit off, but he hadn’t jumped at it, either.
“Most kids from here know their way around a knife.”
That wasn’t surprising. People who had grown up in places like this had often been hunting since they were just out of diapers. Still, there was a big difference between taking down a deer and taking down a person.
The efficiency of the kill, though—the pure bloodlessness of it—certainly matched Eliza’s strangely calm demeanor throughout her confession.
There had been only a few moments that had revealed any emotion beneath, and those had been fleeting, perhaps projections from Lucy’s own expectations rather than reality. They could very well be dealing with a budding sociopath here. A clean kill, an effort to preserve her work so that it could be admired by the police. That at least fit behavior Lucy had dealt with before.
“And you found it? The knife,” she asked.
“Where she said it would be.” Hicks paused, and there was something lurking there, something he wasn’t saying.
She didn’t pretend she couldn’t tell. “What is it?”
Hicks sighed, but he didn’t try to pretend, either. “It had been cleaned.”
“Before it was buried?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “There was dirt on it, sure, but beneath that layer . . . no fingerprints, no smudges, nothing.”
That persistent itch, it spread. Lucy could imagine wiping the blade down with a rag, maybe one of the ones Eliza had soaked in ammonia. But to be thorough enough so that there weren’t any fingerprints?
“Why?” she asked, before she could stop herself and despite the fact that she knew Hicks wouldn’t have an answer. Why take the time, why make the effort? Eliza had given the FBI the location of the weapon; there would be no reason to get rid of her own fingerprints.
Why would she make sure the knife didn’t reveal any secrets, if the ones it could tell were already spilled?
CHAPTER FIVE
MOLLY THOMAS
Four weeks earlier
The first time Molly Thomas had met Eliza Cook, Molly had wondered for one brief, terrifying heartbeat if the girl was a ghost.
It had been nighttime, was the thing. And Eliza was just so pale.
Service had just ended, and no one ever cleared out right away. Instead the congregation gathered in the parking lot, every single one of them—including, embarrassingly enough, her own parents—jockeying for a sliver of attention from Pastor Cook.
Even though Molly and her family had been new to the Knox Hollow Church at the time, the scene had been so familiar it almost felt like they were back in Oregon.
Molly had wandered over to the group of kids who’d looked about her age, but she’d hovered at a safe distance, her shyness flaring hot, edging toward mortification for no reason other than that she existed.
That was when she’d first seen Eliza. The girl stood apart from the rest of the crowd, beyond the reach of the parking lot’s bright gleam, her hair threaded with silver from the moon, her eyes sunken and cradling shadows, her limbs gossamer and porcelain white against the darkness.
In the space between Molly’s stuttered heartbeats, Eliza had shifted into the light and become a girl instead of a ghost, yet the fear that had washed through Molly when she’d first caught sight of the haunting figure remained—clinging hot and sticky to her throat, to her mouth, to the back of her teeth.
That had been when they were twelve and thirteen, and four years later the remnants of that fear were still there, dull and muted with time and experience, but there nonetheless. Sometimes Molly still looked at Eliza and thought she was a ghost.
Like now.
It was night again, but colder than that humid summer evening they’d first met. They snuck out like this sometimes, if they could get away with it. Their families’ properties butted up right next to each other, a rusty, tangled fence dividing the land. They met at one of the posts, each leaning her back against the wood so that if asked, they could say they hadn’t left and not actually be lying.