Chapter 2-1
2019 Words
The lump in Lynn’s throat as she walked back to her car and waited for Cindy to answer her call grew exponentially with each ear-splitting ringtone. When it was finally time for her to speak, she almost couldn’t.
“Did you find her?” Cindy asked in a ghost-like voice, devoid of color and any real inflection.
Her voice cracked and she couldn’t go on.
“Meet me at the Sheriff’s Office in Anchortown,” Lynn said. “You can’t miss it. It’s to the left of Main Street as you enter the town center. How far out are you?”
Cindy conferred with Roy. Lynn couldn’t hear the words, but the deep bass of his voice reverberated in her chest.
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Cindy said and Lynn let her go.
The news she had to impart couldn’t be told over the phone. And especially not while they were driving. But she still felt very small and cowardly as she hung up to get an ETA from her partner, TJ Leigh. She briefly explained what she already knew about the case, then asked him to arrange a forensics team and notify their medical examiner, then meet her at the campground.
He didn’t ask unnecessary questions, he never did, just told her it’d be done and hung up. They’d known each other since the academy days and worked undercover together. Now they had been partners for the last six months or so, ever since they were forced to stop working undercover and became just run-of-the-mill field agents. She was also technically a profiler, which had been her chosen career path when she first joined the Bureau. But that was before she fell into undercover work and finally found herself. Or lost herself, depending on how you looked at it.
She had felt more alive and more herself assuming different personas than she did as Lynn Rivers and as the years passed, it only became more apparent. Especially now that she was being forced to live as herself all the time. But that was a problem that she’d successfully buried in the deepest recesses of her mind where she never went willingly, and she certainly wouldn’t start today. Though a part of her mind craved the luxury of the sort of detachment she could get when she was playing a role, cried and screamed for it.
She parked in front of the squat, gray concrete single story Sheriff’s Office building. The parking lot was empty. Not surprising since all the deputies were at the camp. Across the street was a 24/7 diner and the scent of coffee rose strongly from it, accompanied by the rich aroma of deep-fried food every time someone opened the door to enter or leave.
Lynn had chugged a cup of coffee before leaving her Manhattan apartment this morning, but that was hours ago now. She’d had nothing to eat yet, but the rumbling in her stomach wasn’t due to hunger. Anything she ate today would forever be tied to the gruesome scene she had just left and she had no appetite. Coffee wasn’t a necessity either. Nothing was. Except going back out there and catching whoever hurt Shanna.
She started shivering again before she saw Roy and Cindy’s dark maroon Lexus approaching, the same color as the blood covering Shanna’s face and clothes. Thinking that didn’t help with the shivering caused by dark and immutable memories flooding her mind. She needed to be a hundred percent there for her friends now. And for finding Shanna’s killer. Later, once it was all done, she could fall apart. And she very likely would.
Burying herself first in schoolwork and then actual work had always been how she got through the most difficult situations. How she got through her life. And she longed now to just get to it.
Cindy’s face was ashen grey despite the tan she’d acquired during her Cabo vacation, and Roy’s eyes were more red than white. His hands were shaking so hard he dropped his keys while getting out of the car. They had always been the most vibrant people Lynn knew, but both looked every bit their sixty-two and sixty-four years, respectively, this morning.
“What is it?” Cindy asked shakily as she approached, a tear escaping out the side of her left eye.
Lynn’s eyes watered too, but she ignored it.
“Let’s go inside,” she said and led the way into the Sheriff’s office where Tara was already holding the door open for them.
They followed her into a brightly lit room with two plush grey sofas arranged in an L-pattern against the walls, a coffee table and a large Ficus in the corner, which Lynn assumed was plastic. This room was probably used as a soft interrogation room, and none of the furniture inside it looked like it was used much. It was the perfect choice for what was coming.
“Let’s sit,” Lynn said. “Please.”
Roy helped Cindy by holding onto her arm as she lowered herself onto the larger of the two sofas. Lynn took a seat on the other one. As she expected, the cushions still held all the firmness of being new and unused. This being a very small town in a very rural county, Lynn was fairly certain that this murder was the worst thing to have happened here in decades. Just like her best friend’s murder and then her parents’ deaths had been the worst thing to have happened in her hometown in over thirty years.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Roy said in his rich bass voice, the Harlem accent of his youth thick. “Just tell us.”
He had started from nothing and worked hard to get to where he was—a partner at one of New York City’s most prestigious law firms.
“This morning, Shanna’s body was found at the camp where she was staying,” Lynn said, her voice getting more and more choked up with each word she spoke until it was just a croak. But it was best to just say these things. There was no nice way of saying them. “I’m so sorry.”
Cindy wailed and hot tears filled Lynn’s eyes, but they didn’t spill and she ignored them.
She took Cindy’s hands and squeezed. “I’ll find who did this. I’ll find him and he will pay.”
As she stepped back out into the cool autumn morning, Lynn had only a very vague recollection of the rest of their conversation. She’d tried to ask them questions about Shanna’s life, but it was too painful for all of them.
So all she really knew was that her heart had been ripped out and not replaced. She also knew that she had a promise to keep. And she would keep it.
* * *
The thick light grey clouds ringed with dark blue had overpowered the sun again by the time Lynn returned to the camp. This time, she parked near the main entrance, which was only a short walk from the dining hall and reception area. A walk along a well-kept, wide gravel walkway lined with a fence made with a rope tied to wooden poles stuck into the ground. The canopy overhead wasn’t as thick as elsewhere in the camp, but it still wasn’t thin enough to keep the oppressive midday darkness at bay.
She used to love the woods, loved the eerie mists and greyness that came with approaching Halloween especially, along with every other form they took in the changing seasons, but now she hated them and there was nothing to be done about it. The last thing she needed now was to dwell on it.
The dining hall was a sprawling, one-story log cabin with a slanted roof and small windows dotting the sides, several of them open. The building had no porch, only a wooden awning over the entrance. She could hear people conversing inside as she approached, speaking in low, hurried tones, interspersed by louder, more screeching sounds as people periodically lost their cool and became aware of what was happening.
A single deputy was standing just to the side of the awning, smoking a cigarette, his black jacket zipped-up, his shoulders hunched. But he straightened his back as she approached and the vacant, lost look in his eyes turned to something harder. Lynn was used to men reacting to her in a certain way.
With her long, golden-brown hair, upturned blue eyes and lean hourglass figure she didn’t try to hide, men noticed her. She had used that to her advantage in undercover work.
Work with what you got. Use it. Everyone else will. One of her earliest mentors had told her that—a woman in her sixties who had been with the Bureau since the inception of the criminal profiling department.
Work with what you got. Use it. Everyone else will.Truth was, Lynn was only comfortable using her looks that way when she was someone other than Lynn Rivers. But she faked it well. She could fake anything well. It was something of a superpower. She introduced herself and showed him her badge.
“Are you Deputy Walsh?” she asked and he nodded.
She judged that he was in his early to mid-thirties, mainly because there were no crow"s feet lines around his eyes though his dark brown hair was peppered with grey.
“I’d like to speak to the victim’s friends,” she said. “Are they inside?”
He nodded again and tossed his cigarette on the ground, crushing it with his boot. Then thought better of just leaving it there, and picked it up.
“Sorry, it’s been a long morning,” he said in a gravelly voice, fixed his bloodshot eyes on her and grinned. That took years off his face.
She grinned too, but just barely. “No worries, I’m not the litter police. You did the initial interview with her friends, didn’t you? What did you make of them? Anything strike you as odd?”
Walsh pulled out a spiral bound reporter’s pad and flipped back a few pages. “I spoke to a Jake Hornby and Alicia West. He was the one who reported the victim missing and she’s his girlfriend. He’s the film director and she does the lights. At first, they were annoyed at being woken up early, then shock took over. From what I could gather, they didn’t know the victim very well.”
Hearing the name Alicia jolted Lynn and she barely heard the rest of what he said. That was her best friend’s name—the friend’s whose body she stumbled on in woods much like these on that cold autumn dawn. But that was another time. Another life. Not that this one was much better today.
“How many people were working on this film?” Lynn asked. “Three sounds like it’s not enough.”
Walsh consulted his pad again. “Eleven, all told. There was also a sound guy, a script supervisor who doubled as a second actor, a makeup artist, a couple of cameramen and an assistant. They didn’t know the victim at all before coming here.”
“Just eleven people to make a movie?” Lynn said, looking around at the trees, a strange sensation that she was being watched from the darkness under the canopy a prickling ball in the pit of her stomach. She likely was being watched. There was no shortage of curious people amid the trees.
“What were they filming? Some sort of horror flick?” she added as she turned back to Walsh.
He gave her a how did you know sort of look and cleared his throat. “Yes. That’s how understand it.”
how did you know“I’d like to speak to them,” she said. “Are they all inside?”
Walsh opened the door and leaned inside, scanning the interior. Then he stepped back and held the door for her.
- Writer
