He just stood there. Watching the woman. Listening to her soft cries.
“Look at the camera,” Dani muttered. “Come on, bastard, look this way.”
But he didn’t. His back was to her. His whole focus was on the woman. The woman who whispered, “I don’t like the dark…”
Three suspects. Three men who were swearing their innocence.
There were two interrogation rooms at the Paradox police station. One room currently housed a tense and too quiet Aaron Peters. The second room contained a pissed Jason Marsh, a man who was currently being guarded by two fellow cops.
And their third suspect? James Anniston waited patiently in the conference room.
“He didn’t argue,” Ben said as he stood with Kyle and Cadence right outside of the rooms. “Just told me, ‘Get me cleared and back on the case.’”
Cadence glanced over at Kyle. She knew he thought Anniston was innocent.
At this point, Cadence wasn’t nearly as trusting. “Kyle, give Ben your gun before we start the interviews.”
His blue eyes narrowed on her.
Cadence lifted her chin. This was a deal breaker for her. Kyle was ready to kill, she got that, but it wasn’t happening in here. She wasn’t going to let him shoot an unarmed man, even if the bastard was a twisted SOB who belonged in a hole in the ground.
She loved Kyle too much to let him throw his life away.
Even as that thought raced through her mind, Cadence actually took a step back. Love? When had that happened?
Ben cleared his throat, bringing her back, even as his brows climbed. “Uh, something I should know here?”
Very, very slowly, Kyle pulled out his weapon. Then he gave it, grip first, to Ben.
Ben frowned at Kyle. “I can trust you, can’t I, Agent?”
Kyle had already turned away from him.
Cadence squared her shoulders.
Time to figure out if one of these three men was a killer.
We’ll start with Anniston.
Kyle opened the door to the conference room.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I wasn’t hurt in that accident.” Anniston’s voice was gruff, his gaze faraway as he seemed to revisit his past. “I don’t know what that little lady of yours found, but I barely had any scrapes. They kept me in the hospital just as a precaution.” He rubbed his jaw. “The other driver, now, she was hurt. I could hear her, calling out for help, but there wasn’t anything I could do.”
His fingers dropped to the table. Drummed. Stilled. “I was a seventeen-year-old kid. She’d hit me. Came right out from nowhere. I was scared as shit. She was dying, begging for help, and I was pinned in the car. I wasn’t strong enough to get the metal off me, and I couldn’t do anything but sit there and wait for her to stop calling out to me.”
His ragged breath filled the room.
“When my eyes opened the next day, the first person I saw was a cop. He was there, telling me everything was gonna be all right.” His lips twisted. “He was a damn liar, of course, but he was trying to help me. I knew then I wanted to save people, too. I didn’t want to ever hear anyone begging for help again.”
Cadence didn’t let her expression change at his words. The killer she was after seemed to crave silence, and Anniston had just confessed he didn’t want to hear victims begging for help. “What was it like for you, hearing her cries?”
He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “It was hell, Agent Hollow. As close to hell as I ever want to get. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do for that poor woman, no matter how much she pleaded with me.” The echo of pain flashed in his gaze.
Cadence kept her eyes on Anniston’s face. “When Maria McKenzie vanished fifteen years ago, why didn’t you initially believe she was the victim of foul play?”
His stare cut to Kyle. Kyle stood just to the left of the table, watching them both carefully. Guilt was etched across the captain’s face. “We’d never had something like that happen around here. She was an eighteen-year-old girl, supposed to be meeting up with friends on a beach trip. Hell, I figured they were following each other—that when her car stopped, she just hitched a ride with them or a boyfriend. I was sure she’d turn up after a few days.”
“She didn’t.” Cadence’s voice was flat.
“No, she didn’t.” He gave a sad shake of his head. “I kept looking for her.” His words were directed at Kyle. “You know I never gave up. I kept her picture up in my office.”
Cadence had seen the picture on the missing board.
“But the years slipped away, and there was never any news.” He ran a hand over his grizzled jaw. “When Lily went missing, I knew there was a link. The car, abandoned, just like hers. I called you. I knew.”
From the corner of her eye, Cadence glanced at Kyle. There was no expression on his face. Like her, he knew better than to give away his thoughts or emotions during an interrogation.
She glanced down at her notes, not that she needed them. She wanted to buy herself time to think a bit more. “You never married. Never had a wife. A family.” She glanced back up at the captain. “Why is that?”
“My job was—is—my life. I know you think it’s not much, being the captain in a Podunk little town, but what I do matters to the people here.” His shoulders straightened. Pride shone in his eyes. “It matters to me.”
Time to change tactics. “You lived here your whole life.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then why didn’t you ever think to search the caves for Maria? For Lily? You had to hear the stories about them, you had to know.”
“I did search them for Maria,” he gritted and those rumbling words had Cadence tensing. “I didn’t see anything. You know how they stretch—”
“Yes,” Cadence interrupted, locking gazes with him. “I do. I know just how far they stretch because I was there. I watched a woman die in front of me. A woman who only wanted to go home. A woman who’d been held in your ‘Podunk little town’ quite possibly for the last four years.”
He swallowed again, then his breath rasped out. “If I’d known…”
“You would have saved her? Because you want to save people?”
Kyle stalked closer to them.
“You fit most of our profile,” she told Anniston simply. “You know the area. You were here when the first disappearance happened. You’ve been involved in the investigation since day one.”