“About a twelve-hour window,” Jackson said. “Monday night into Tuesday early morning.”
With that simple answer the world tilted, rearranged itself, and then settled once more. Assumptions were dangerous, but Lucy had formed them anyway. She’d thought Eliza had come straight to Seattle after the murder. But this put it at four days ago, not two as Lucy had expected.
Which meant . . . Which meant the killing itself hadn’t been the catalyst for Eliza turning herself into the FBI.
At three in the morning. Five hours away from where the body was.
“How sure are you that the TOD is accurate?” Lucy asked, because it made no sense.
Jackson lifted one thick shoulder. “Like I said, it’s a window. But I wouldn’t put it much outside that time. Especially since we know when he disappeared. That helps.”
“Can you confidently say it wasn’t Wednesday? His death,” Lucy pressed. She had to be sure, because this blew her timeline straight to hell. This blew a lot of assumptions she’d been working from straight to hell actually.
Criminal behavior, while abnormal in relation to the rest of society, was predictable to an extent. There was a psychology involved, a logic and conformity to it that was never too deep beneath a thin veneer of chaos. This didn’t fit the admittedly spotty narrative Lucy had been building around the case, which included a possible accomplice that lingered in the shadows and offered itself as a solution to a lot of Lucy’s unanswered questions.
Like maybe the person had helped get Noah’s body out to the drop. And then once Eliza had been faced with the realities of killing a child, she’d balked and turned herself in. But she still wanted to protect her accomplice, which was why she hadn’t let herself say more than that initial confession.
Lucy hadn’t even realized it, but that little scenario had been starting to seep into all the holes in the case, filling them in nicely.
This, though? This changed the game before that theory could really take on shape.
Jackson shook his head. “TOD was at the very latest Tuesday night. But even that’s a stretch. Wednesday’s completely out of the question due to the decomp we’re seeing. Especially since it wasn’t a hot day.”
If the killing itself hadn’t been enough to get Eliza to break and turn herself in, what had? A fight with the potential accomplice? Was Lucy getting ahead of herself if she moved forward assuming there was one? Maybe Eliza had been able to persuade Noah to go out into the woods with her and the distance to the body drop was irrelevant to the case.
Lucy needed to talk to the families.
“All right,” she said with an easiness she didn’t feel to get this moving along. “Continue.”
With careful hands, Jackson lifted Noah’s shoulders, cradling his head when it dropped forward. “Here’s the wound.”
It was neat and precise at the base of his skull, no practice marks, no cuts that would signal a defensive struggle. A clean kill.
After studying it, Lucy nodded, and Jackson laid the body flat once more.
Jackson then shifted the sheet so that the boy’s chest was exposed, the ribs straining against tight skin. At the base of his throat were the jagged knife marks that were all the more savage in contrast to the sheer carefulness of the thrust that had killed him.
Here was the brutality that Lucy was used to in cases like this.
She blinked until she could see beyond the violence, beyond the obscenity of ripped flesh. She blinked until the knife marks started to make sense.
A letter. Then numbers.
“Say it,” Eliza had said. “There’s a verse cut into the skin. Say it.”
“R. 3:23,” Lucy murmured now, as if in response to the lingering echo of Eliza’s command.
Lucy desperately tried calling up long-forgotten Bible study classes. She’d spent more time sneaking off for cheap cigarettes in the parking lot before her mother picked her up than actually listening to any of those teachers.
“Romans,” Hicks said in that gruff voice of his. He paused, looked away from them. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Lucy stifled the instinctive Jesus that sat in her mouth ready to spill out in all its blasphemy. She wouldn’t have pegged Hicks for the religious type, but he’d recited the Bible verse with the familiarity of a loved one’s name, the words warm.
Jackson nodded along as if it was expected for the sheriff to whip out Bible knowledge on a whim. Perhaps it was.
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
It sounded dire. It sounded threatening. It sounded like a promise for more. Lucy thought about the woods, the silence, the isolation. Were there other bodies to be found? Others who had—what was it?—fallen short of the glory of God?
“There’s not much else I can tell you guys.” Jackson’s smile had dimmed somewhat. “There wasn’t any skin beneath his fingernails, no fresh bruising, either.”
The wording of that caught Lucy’s attention. “Were there old bruises?”
“Actually, yeah,” Jackson said, lifting the sheet once again, this time to uncover the boy’s legs. “But it seems the type you’d get from being an active kid.”
Jackson pointed to a smudge that she almost would have missed, right where a low coffee table would hit against a shin. “There.” He shifted the sheet to show a green-and-purple splotch just above the boy’s knee. “There.”
A few more littered his arms, a particularly deep one wrapped around his hip. Jackson pointed to each without inflection.
But he’d lost the rest of his smile.
“Seems like a lot,” Lucy commented when Jackson was finally done. “Even for a careless kid.”
Lucy had a friend who worked child-abuse cases. She came over sometimes, drank too much wine, and railed against the injustice of the world. The signs are always there, she’d say. Always.
Even without that in her head, Lucy would have known what this hinted at. And quite honestly so did both the men in the room, the men who remained silent, eyes downcast, staring at the body. Jackson’s lips had pursed into an unpleasant twist, and Hicks had crossed his arms over his chest.
Neither of them said anything in response to her observation.
“Is there a history here I should know about?” Lucy finally asked, in the most diplomatic manner she could manage. If they were protecting the kid’s parents, it wouldn’t do to tip her hand too much.
Jackson’s eyes flitted from Hicks to her and then back again as he shook his head. The shutters had come down completely, the welcoming body language closing off. “No, not even a suggestion. I swear it. The Dawsons are good folk. They were devastated about Noah.”
Hicks didn’t contradict any of it, but some instinct had her watching his face across the slab. When Jackson had mentioned the Dawsons, Hicks’s shoulders had twitched a little before he’d gone absolutely still, as if he could feel her eyes on him.
“No suspiciously high number of hospital visits, nothing like that?” Lucy pushed.
Jackson shifted beside her. “Uh, no.”
The stress level in the room at large said otherwise. She couldn’t tell, though, whether the hesitation came from Hicks or Jackson, couldn’t tell who was following whose lead when it came to whatever they weren’t saying. But Lucy was good enough that she recognized when the straightforward route wasn’t going to work.