CHAPTER THREE
1681 Words
CHAPTER THREE
Later that afternoon, after a ten-mile run around the streets of downtown Rapid City, Rylie grabbed her third beer from the fridge and went to the living area of her apartment.
She had some work to do. But first, she had to work up the courage to open the file. Usually, after a couple beers, she had no problem.
The FBI had certainly spared all expense while setting up their new digs in Rapid City. First, they had an office that was a former dog kennel, and still smelled like wet animal fur. Some of the offices were surrounded by chain-link fencing and actually looked more like cages. But the living quarters they set up for the agents? Primo. The place was the size of one of her closets, back in Seattle. It was a dark, one-room-studio with seventies paneling on the wall and chipped, dented furniture that might’ve been rejects from a college dorm room. It looked out onto the parking lot of an auto parts store. The mattress was the worst thing—it actually had an indentation in the middle of someone twice Rylie’s size, so if she wasn’t careful, she could slip in it and suffocate.
But despite the living conditions, it was a thousand times better than what she’d had to deal with in Seattle with her old boss. Her friend from the Seattle field office, Cooper Rich, was fond of texting her the horror stories about Bill Matthews’s incompetence. She relished every one of them.
As she looked at her phone, and saw no messages, she sighed. Take it easy?
Rylie never had liked taking it easy. Idleness made her itchy. Kit might as well have told her to go get dental work. It would’ve been something to do, at least.
Flopping down on her lumpy bed, she took a deep breath and opened her case file.
The first thing she saw was her sister’s pretty face. Beautiful Maren, that’s what all of her friends and family said about her. And she was. Maren had been twelve when she was kidn*pped, but she’d looked older, so to their surprise, grown men had begun to whistle at her on the street. She’d grown like a w**d that summer. At the beginning, they’d been relatively the same height, and people used to think they were twins. They had the same dark hair, the same spray of freckles over their noses.
Then Maren shot up three inches, almost overnight, and began developing curves. She started wearing make-up and painting her nails, too, and didn’t like walking in the dirt outside the RV unless she was wearing flip-flops. She hadn’t wanted to play stupid games with Rylie and Kiki, either; her mother had just said, “Maren is growing up.”
Rylie remembered thinking if that was growing up, wanting nothing to do with fun, she’d rather stay a kid.
But she’d had to grow up, almost overnight, when those men came to the RV park in Story Creek, and killed her mother and kidn*pped Maren.
After that, her father had been so distraught that he hadn’t cared much about her at all. She’d spent the next decade of her life, counting down the moments until she could escape—first to college, and then to the FBI.
She never thought she’d come back to the northern central part of the United States, on highway 86, the Devil’s Highway, the Highway Thru Hell.
She stared at the photograph of her sister. She could remember the exact time it was taken, when they were out riding horses at Hal’s ranch, which was the property bordering their place. Maren had always been better at riding horses. She’d been better at just about everything.
Rylie wiped at her eye and realized it was wet with unshed tears.
Stupid, she told herself. Why cry about that? She’s been gone forever. Wherever she is, do you really think she’s thinking about you?
Dead. She was probably dead.
It was the most logical answer. And yet for some reason, even after all these years, there was still that little shred of hope.
It would always exist, and a little voice inside her would always be asking, What if? if she didn’t attempt to find the answers.
She flipped through the pages and read the paragraph, once again, that she could’ve recited by heart:
Office received phone call at 10:26 am that shots had been fired at location believed to be Story Creek RV park. Arrived at the park at 10:46 am and found two female adults and one child in front of a lone RV in the park, each shot once in the head. Another child was suspected kidn*pped by the perpetrator, but there was no sign of struggle or evidence left behind.
She swallowed as she read it, then flipped through the photographs of the dead girl, Kiki, her mother, Rose, and finally, Rylie’s mom. They were all shot in the back of the head, execution-style, and were all lying face down in the dirt. There were photos of tire tracks and footprints, but many cars and people had been there in the previous days, so there was no telling which ones had been left by the murderers. They’d interviewed Rylie as the sole witness, but Rylie had been so young, and knew very little—all she remembered of the killers was their voices: “I thought there were three?” and “Naw. Just those two.”
She’d replayed those words over and over again in her head. Now, she felt like if she ever heard their voices again, she’d know them instantly.
As she was finishing her third beer of the afternoon, feeling buzzed and a little sleepy, her cell phone rang. She thought it might be Cooper, ready with the next story of Bill Matthews’s latest escapades, but it was Michael Brisbane.
“Robin,” she said when she answered.
“You’re not going to stop calling me that, are you?” he muttered. “Can’t you come up with any new material?”
She glanced at the file, then closed it. “Sorry, I’m not in the mood to be creative.”
“I wonder why.”
“Yeah. I’m driving myself crazy. I’ll be happy when I can finally come back to the office tomorrow.”
“Actually, you don’t have to wait that long. I think I have just the remedy.”
She sat up. “You do? What?”
“Kit just handed me a case. It’s a few murders that happened outside of Billings, that may or may not be related.”
Rylie gritted her teeth. “Kit? Won’t she be pissed that you’re calling me?”
“No. She knew you were chomping at the bit to get back into it. So she told me to call you. She wants us to head on over there, tonight, if possible.”
“To Billings?” She checked her phone. “That’s more toward your neck of the woods, isn’t it?”
“I’m Missoula,” he said. “Closer, but not exactly my neighborhood.”
She did the mental math in her head, “Still. Billings. That’s pretty far. We won’t get there until late tonight, when everything’s closed down.”
“You telling me you’re not interested?”
She snorted. She already felt her senses waking up. The mellow feeling the beer had given her had melted away, and now, every nerve ending in her body buzzed. “Of course I’m interested.”
“Yeah, but I know you were interested in your own case. I thought—”
“You might be right about that. It happened a long time ago. I’m not sure what I’ll be able to find, now. The best I can do is keep my eyes and ears open.” She sat up and grabbed her overnight duffel from the top of the closet. “This, though? At least we got some fresh evidence to go on.”
“This might be pretty hard, too, because there’s not much evidence to go on. With the first two murders, the local police tried to solve it but the trail went cold. This last one just happened, but it looks like whoever this killer is, he’s pretty clean. In fact, from what Kit told me, that’s the only thing really tying the murders together, other than the fact that the victims were all traveling I-86, and the crime scenes are pretty clean. So she thinks whoever is doing this is a pro, and that they’re moving pretty fast, which is why she wanted us on the case so bad to begin with.”
“All right, fine,” she said, packing a few rolls of socks and some underwear into her bag. “I’ll get my stuff together and we can meet up in a half hour. You want to drive?”
“Yep. Sounds good.”
“All right. Pick me up at my apartment and we’ll head out.”
“Got it. So . . . Batman . . . did you have a relaxing afternoon at home?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you spent way too long looking at that file, and now you’re feeling like s**t and probably a little drunk.”
Damn, she thought. No wonder he was part of his field office’s BAU. He knows me pretty well.
“Impressive.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . you know what tipped me off? I figured, since you wanted me to drive. You never do that. You like having all the control.”
It was true. Which was why she’d never liked having a partner, and why it felt awkward, having one now, especially one who knew her deepest, darkest secret. “I’ll see you in a bit,” she said, ending the call.
At least another murder to look into will take my mind off the fact that I’ll probably never see or hear from Maren again.
- Writer
