Page 63 of Never Stay Gone
“I was first on the scene. One of the neighbors said she didn’t see Shelly head out for her morning run, and Shelly never misses her morning run. With everything else the neighbor said: the raised voices, Shane leaving like he did… Well, Shane and Shelly are—” He looked down. “Weremy friends. I wanted to swing by and check on them. And I found… this.”
“Door unlocked?”
“Mmm.” A nod.
“There’s a lot of ways this is different from the desert graves.”
“Just enough ways that it’s similar too.”
“I know. I don’t like it.” Dakota breathed out hard. Fuck, he’d kill for a cigarette. His hands were shaking and wouldn’t stop, like his thoughts wouldn’t stop ping-ponging.
Why Shelly? She was, by all appearances, a sweet girl who’d been in love with a sweet boy and was trying to make a life for the two of them. By that logic, why any of them? Why Libby, a mom who’d been trying her hardest to give her son a better life than she’d had? Why Amber, the tough girl born into a hard life who hadn’t known how to dream larger than violence? Why Jessica, another girl engaged to her high school boyfriend while she climbed the ladder of success? Why the two Jane Does, one mutilated, one not? Why the old bones?
Why did life have to rip Shane’s heart apart again?
Dakota’s mind was racing, a thousand thoughts scrambling to get through first. Shelly, Shane, the other women. Thirty-two days since Jessica Klein’s death.
Two days since Dakota had arrived in Rustler. Something teased at his thoughts, an inkling of an idea that he couldn’t yet form. He and Shane had spent the previous day digging, connecting dots between women who didn’t seem to have any connections at all. Today, they wake up to this? A murder that seemed toscream“The fiancé did it”? A murder, too, that held just enough similarities to raise Heath’s hackles, and Dakota’s.
Was this the work of their serial killer? Had Shelly been unlucky, the victim of the murderer’s rage and his lashing out at the loss of his burial ground? Was his shift in MO less purposeful and more a reaction to their digging up his graves?
Or was this something more?
A crime perfectly fitted to put Shane in the frame.
Was someone trying to get rid of Shane? Get rid of the investigation, even?
Dakota peered at the El Paso techs, at Deputy Fletcher working the far side of the living room. He even slid his gaze to Heath, still leaning against the wall next to Dakota. Heath was working his jaw like he was trying to chew through gristle.
If someone was trying to get rid of Shane and get rid of the investigation, then that someone had to know the directions they were heading. Had to know what kind of progress they’d made and what kinds of questions they were asking.
Which meant they had to beclose.
Khaki fibers beneath her nails. The aggressive way Heath and the deputies had come for Shane. A crime scene set perfectly to put Shane in the frame, if he hadn’t had an alibi.
Had he and Shane surprised Heath this morning? Hell, Dakota was still surprised. If he’d been told Shane was going to come to him last night, he wouldn’t have believed it. If someone wanted to frame Shane, would they have thought, for one moment, that Shane and Dakota were going to end up together in that motel room?
Was Shane supposed to be off the board right now, cooling his heels in a cell? And what about Dakota?
Well, how fucking in his right mind would he be if Shane had been arrested for Shelly’s murder? How capable, how competent could he possibly have been, trying to push forward on the desert graves case? How could he have focused on anything other than getting Shane cleared?
If he’d seen this evidence and Shanehadn’tspent the night in his arms, a small part of him would wonder if Shane had done it. Shane had been under stress. He and Shelly were fracturing. Dakota had seen it with his own eyes.
And he’d seen a hundred crime scenes just like this: husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend. One snapping, killing the other. Passion. Rage. Two sides of the same coin.
A perfect frame for someone who knew how to set it up.
Was that what this was? Shane being sidelined, Dakota following after him? If so, was Shelly only meant toappearto be the next in the line of victims? Similarities, dissimilarities. Purposeful? Staged, even?
Or was this all, from Shelly to Amber to those decade-old bones, connected?
No forensics, no trace evidence on the remains. No signs of a struggle, no defensive wounds. Women who’d looked into the eyes of the man who’d killed them and who disappeared without a peep, without a yell or a cry or a whimper. Who could abduct a woman silently? Who knew how to kill and leave nothing behind? Who knew that if bodies were dumped in the ground, the soil and the bugs would destroy any lingering remnants of evidence that might betray them?
Dakota pushed off the wall, putting distance between himself and Heath.I’ll make those calls for you, Dakota. Why don’t you fill me in on the investigation?
Jesus, he’d told Heatheverything.
As Dakota circled the living room, moving slowly with his back to the wall, he kept his eyes on Heath. Heath was looking down at his phone and frowning. He was, Dakota noticed, wearing long sleeves, buttoned all the way down to his wrists.
