Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

Andrea had to stop for a breath. She also had a new detail. “At the time, Ricky’s witness statement backed up Eric’s story, but just now at her house, she told me that Clay couldn’t be the killer because she saw him at the prom dancing with a cheerleader all night.”

“Sandwich the before and after.” Bible’s poker face had cracked. “Take yourself back to Ricky’s house. How was she acting when you first got there? What was she like by the time you left? Then drill down to the middle. Was she nervous? Was she looking you in the eye or—”

“She looked exhausted when she opened the door. Like she hadn’t slept all night. And then when she returned from the garage, she was manic, and she stayed that way the rest of the time.” Andrea had already guessed the probable explanation. “When I first got there, Ricky knocked back two pills from one of her prescription bottles. I think when she returned from the garage, the drugs had kicked in. She went off script. She accidentally put herself near the crime scene when she clearly wasn’t there. Worse, she exonerated Clay Morrow.”

“Why is that worse?”

“Well—” Andrea shrugged. For once, her personal relationship to Clay felt immaterial. “It’s not smart. Everyone in town assumes Clay killed Emily. Why volunteer an alibi for him? If you’re trying to pin a murder on somebody, pin it on the guy who’s already in prison.”

Bible didn’t respond. He stared out the window, scratching his chin in thought.

Andrea let out a long breath. The tightness in her chest had gone away. Giving herself permission to talk about Emily Vaughn had lifted an anvil off her back. Though the relief was small consolation considering she was no closer to finding out whether Clay Morrow was already a sadistic murderer before he met Laura or if that had come afterward.

“Partner, I’m gonna tell you something you won’t often hear,” Bible said. “I was wrong. We got us a two asses, one horse situation here.”

Andrea laughed. “I’ll agree to being one of the asses if you drop the horse metaphor.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “We’ve got Stilton, Nardo, Dean and Ricky. What do they have in common? They are all either directly or indirectly connected to both the activities at the farm and Emily Vaughn’s murder.”

Andrea nodded, because they were all somehow linked together.

He asked, “You ever hear of a SODDI defense?”

“Some Other Dude Did It,” Andrea said. Most criminals were gladly willing to turn on other criminals, especially if making a deal kept them out of prison. “But how does that help us? We don’t have leverage against any of them. You can’t pin the death threats on Ricky. We don’t have anyone inside the farm who will flip on Nardo or Wexler. Eric Blakely is dead. Clay Morrow will fuck around with us because he’s bored and he can fuck with anybody. Stilton can say he forgot about Ricky’s suicide attempts or that he was embarrassed to bring them up because she nearly died in his custody. Which is fair, because he should be embarrassed.”

Bible waited to make sure she was finished. “Ricky was so shaky that she had to pop some pills when you showed up at her door. Wexler tried to scare you off by assaulting a US Marshal. Nardo invoked his right to silence, then he chased you down for a chat. Stilton could be the worst cop in the world, or he could be trying to keep us away from the farm because he’s afraid we’ll find out something.”

The car turned silent again, but this time it was Andrea who was in thought.

“They’re all freaking out,” she realized. “Stilton didn’t call you about Alice Poulsen’s suicide. Ricky gave you the details in the diner, but only after she, Nardo and Wexler had time to get their stories straight.”

“We’ve got ’em right where we want ’em,” Bible said. “In my experience, people who freak out tend to make a lot of mistakes. That’s when you ramp up the pressure.”

Pressuresounded like something that happened very slowly.

Andrea felt like every second of time since she’d left Glynco had been spent trying to surf a wave that she couldn’t quite catch. As good as it felt to talk out the Emily Vaughn case with Bible, they still hadn’t reached a resolution. Meanwhile, Alice Poulsen was still dead and Star Bonaire was a walking corpse who for all intents and purposes was slowly digging her own grave.

The why of Andrea joining the Marshal Service didn’t have a definitive answer, but she sure as hell hadn’t gone through more than four months of absolute hell to end up sitting on her ass when a desperate young woman begged her for help.

She asked Bible, “What can we do?”

“It’s five fifteen, partner. What do you think we’re going to do?”

Andrea swallowed back her disappointment. What they had to do was relieve Mitt Harri and Bryan Krump. The two men had been patrolling the Vaughn estate since six this morning. Andrea and Bible were expected to report for duty in forty-five minutes.

“Marshal rule number three,” Bible said. “Always do your job.”

Andrea leaned against the wall as she waited for her order to be called at McDonald’s. Both she and Bible had agreed the diner wasn’t the best place for dinner tonight. He had driven to a fast-food joint just outside the town limits. And then he’d grinned at Andrea when they’d pulled into the parking lot, because the address put the restaurant in exactly the same spot that Skeeter’s Grill had occupied forty years ago when Emily Vaughn’s body was found inside their Dumpster.

She looked at her phone, mindlessly scrolling through Insta because there was literally nothing else she could do. The last twenty-four hours had finally hit her like twelve tons of bricks. Four hours of sleep was not enough for an adult woman. Every single nerve in her body felt raw. Every emotion felt drained. If she ran through the Emily Vaughn case again, her head would explode. If she thought about Alice Poulsen and Star Bonaire one more second, her heart would probably explode, too.

To punish herself, she opened her texts and reviewed Mike’s attempts to get her attention. The gnus, the dik-pic. He might honestly believe that he’d taken the first plane to Delaware in pursuit of his job, but he could’ve made a phone call. He had wanted to see Andrea in person. He had wanted to know that she was safe. And she had kicked him in the teeth for his troubles.

She stared at the blinking cursor in the message panel. Mike was probably on a plane back to Atlanta by now. She needed to apologize to him. She had to apologize to him. She had been so damn shitty.

Why had she been so shitty?

A notification banner dipped into the screen. Laura had sent a link to crime statistics in the metropolitan Portland area broken down by neighborhood. She’d added—