Murder at Sunrise Lake

“I wouldn’t ask you if it didn’t matter,” Raine said. “It isn’t idle curiosity. If I understand Denver’s state of mind, it’s possible I can figure out what his endgame is.”

Stella was well aware of how Raine’s mind worked. She fit pieces of puzzles together very fast. The others were all watching her closely. Even the dogs seemed to be on alert. She took another drink of water to steady herself.

“He said lawyers had called him with news a week or so earlier that his father and his uncle Vern had shot each other and bled out before anyone could get to them, and he was still processing. Denver said it was so stupid, but inevitable. He tried to act like it didn’t matter or affect him, but his hands were shaking pretty badly. His mother died while he was in the military so he said he inherited the entire estate. The implication was that his inheritance was large.”

“Give me a few minutes,” Raine said, and opened her computer, typing fast.

Vienna stood up, wrapping her arms around herself. “I don’t even know what to think. Denver is about the nicest human being on the face of the earth. I can’t imagine him flinging random strangers off Mount Whitney or drowning James Marley.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “No matter how hard I try to make myself believe he could have done those things, I just can’t.”

“I’m the same way,” Stella said. “With the exception of that one moment when I looked into his eyes. I saw someone else. He looked back at me and it wasn’t my Denver. Our Denver. It was someone else altogether. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“If Denver came from all that money, why would he need to be here?” Zahra asked.

Harlow raised an eyebrow. “Just because a person comes from money doesn’t mean bad things can’t happen in their families, Zahra, you know that. Didn’t you hear what Stella said? He didn’t want them to pay for his medical training. He joined the military in order to be able to become a doctor.”

“Denver had a horrific background,” Raine said. “I’m in his medical records. His father and uncle should have been prosecuted a million times over. Another interesting fact is the uncle was suspected of torturing and killing three young women on three separate occasions, but he ended up having an ironclad alibi in each case. The reason he was suspected was because his nephew reported he saw his uncle drag one of the women into his vehicle. The second time his nephew reported he saw his uncle with the missing woman in a warehouse and she was tied up. The third time he claimed the uncle had another missing woman in a basement of an abandoned building.”

“Did the cops begin to think Denver was the one killing the women?” Shabina asked.

“At the time he was too young. But they stopped believing him. Get this, Denver had his finger broken multiple times and reset when he was just a child, corresponding to when he told the police about the young women he saw with his uncle,” Raine reported.

“How many women were killed?” Stella asked.

“I’m doing a search,” Raine said. “If I were to come to a conclusion, I would say the father and uncle were both killing, trading off, to give each other alibis. They had Denver watch, maybe forced him to participate, from the time he was a little child. They were monsters.”

Stella turned away from the others and walked over to the window. She wanted to go home and just close herself in her house with Bailey and Sam and pretend none of this was happening. She thought her childhood had been monstrous. Denver had truly lived through a destructive, hideous childhood, and now there was no way out for him.

“He came here for peace, so they couldn’t get to him,” she whispered. “He didn’t ever want to be like them.”

“The police were suspicious of his father and uncle many times in various disappearances of women over the years,” Raine said, “but they never could get enough proof to build a case.” She closed her computer. “What else did Denver say about Sam being a ghost, Stella?”

Stella clenched her teeth for a moment, biting back a retort that Sam wasn’t a ghost. He was a flesh-and-blood man with feelings. Denver had been his friend as well.

“He said ghosts were used for other tasks outside the military and they usually didn’t last long, they died young. He said if they did break free, they were hunted down because they were too big of a security risk, they knew too much and the government wanted them dead.”

“Which would imply that Sam, because he’s alive, is too good to get caught even by any other ghost hunting him,” Raine said.