Page 69 of Not This Night

"Reservation," she said, as Ethan buckled in. "We're missing something. The totems, they're a piece of this puzzle we can't ignore. We need to go to the reservation.”

Ethan's gaze locked onto hers, an unspoken agreement passing between them. "Cultural angle?" he asked, already reaching for the case files strewn across the backseat.

"Has to be." Rachel's eyes were on the road, but her mind sifted through the evidence: ritualistic murders, Native American totems tucked away like secrets. She didn’t know where Miguel was, but her instincts told her to go back to the reservation. She needed to find him. But how?

The car sped off, tires biting into the asphalt with urgency, heading back to the heart of the reservation where old beliefs and modern horrors were intertwined.

The speedometer needle crept higher, pushing the limits as Rachel's foot bore down on the accelerator. The landscape outside blurred into streaks of green and brown—a frenetic race against time.

"Sequence," she muttered, her thoughts vocalized for Ethan's benefit. "Victim one, throat slit. The knife wounds were postmortem."

“So…”

“Why did Miguel kill his wife all of a sudden?”

“Something Charlie said?”

“Why just the one wound before death on Lucy, though?”

A pause.

Ethan posited, “What if Charlie killed Lucy? And in revenge, Miguel killed Charlie?”

“Big Joe said Charlie went to speak with the Ortiz' to blackmail them. Why would he kill Lucy? There’s no cash in that.”

Ethan scowled, tapping his fingers against the glass of the window. “Something… that would make Lucy sad. Isn’t that what he said? The blackmail would upset her.”

“How sad?” Rachel murmured.

“What was that?”

“Exactly how sad do you think he made her?”

“I… I don’t know. What do you mean?”

“What if… what if he dug up something so horrible from her past… that she killed herself.”

“You think she slit her own neck?”

“It’s possible. Doable. Especially if she was on something at the time, trying to cope.”

Ethan went quiet. The chatter continued over the radio, but Rachel reached out, turning down the volume. She drove even faster.

"Then Miguel found her… in a rage, he stabbed her for leaving him. Or something like that."

“Then killed Charlie?” Ethan guessed.

“It’s possible.”

“But just conjecture. What about the other victims?”

“Miguel is getting revenge on his old childhood friends,” Rachel said. Because of something that caused his wife to kill herself...”

“Going with that theory… it leaves us with the question, what? What did he have on her?”

“Something he could prove,” Rachel said. “Something there was no hiding from. Something that really hurt.”

Before Ethan could respond, Rachel's phone was already pressed to her ear, the call connecting with a crackle of urgency as she connected with the halfway house.

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