Page 2 of Outlaw Ridge: Griff
“His fingerprints were on her car door. A small amount of her blood was found in his truck. They found a tire iron in a burnbarrel behind his house, fibers from her sweater were on the handle. And the wounds to her skull matched.”
Griff gave a small nod. “That’s more than just circumstantial evidence.”
“Yes,” Lily agreed. “It’s why the jury convicted him. Quickly.”
“But Bobby Ray said he was framed?”
She nodded. “Never changed his story. Said someone planted the tire iron and the blood. Claimed the last time he saw Hannah, she was alive.”
Griff tapped a finger on the folder. “You believe him?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But something’s always felt… off.”
She hesitated again, then added, “I sat in on the trial. I was eighteen. Couldn’t take my eyes off it. Everyone in town had already made up their minds, but I kept thinking, what if they were wrong?”
“Do you think they were wrong?” he came out and asked.
“Ah, that’s the million-dollar question.” She leaned back, arms crossed. “That trial was the reason I became a cop. I didn’t want to sit in a courtroom again, wondering if someone was getting railroaded. I wanted to be the one asking questions, finding the cracks, digging up the truth.”
Griff studied her for a long moment. “And now here you are.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Almost a decade in. First in San Antonio, now back here. Back where it started.”
Before he could respond, her phone buzzed with a text. She glanced down. And saw Unknown Number pop up. Then, she saw the message.
Leave it alone. The past is dead. Dig too deep, and you’ll be dead, too.
Her stomach clenched like she’d been punched in the gut. For a moment, the words didn’t fully register. They were just lines of text on a screen, cold and quiet. But as her mind caught up, her grip on the phone tightened, her pulse kicking hard in her throat.
She stared at the message, jaw locked.
Of course someone would send something like this. She was stirring up a case the town had long since buried, digging into the kind of history people didn’t want unearthed. Still, she drew in a breath and forced herself to dismiss the chill curling down her spine.
“What is it?” Griff asked. He must have caught the change in her expression.
She turned the screen toward him without a word, and his expression darkened as he read it.
“It’s probably just a hoax,” she muttered, more to herself than to Griff.
Griff’s eyes didn’t move from the screen. His voice came out low and flat. “That’s not a prank, Lily. That’s a threat.”
She glanced up, surprised by the sharp edge in his tone. His jaw was tight, his gaze like steel.
“A death threat isn’t how you protest a cop doing her job,” he added. “And you shouldn’t write this off as a hoax.”
Lily gave a small nod, grateful for the steel in his voice, even if she wasn’t ready to admit how much the message rattled her.
She looked back down at Bobby Ray’s letter, her fingers brushing the edge of the paper like it might ground her. The past wasn’t dead. It was restless.
And someone might be willing to kill to keep it buried.
“Were there any other suspects?” Griff asked. “Anyone besides Bobby Ray?”
Lily had to shift her mind from the text back to the investigation. “According to the official report, only one otherperson was questioned. Briefly.” She flipped to a page in the file and slid it toward him. “Everett Langston.”
Before she could go on and explain who that was, Griff cut in. “The guy who owns the car dealership, the diner, and the gas station?”
So, Griff heard of him. Not a surprise since the Langston name was on all of those businesses.
