Page 65 of No Cap

“Body parts,” I confirmed.

“Why were her body parts not attached?” Addison asked innocently.

“She was a zombie,” Keene said, listening avidly.

“Oh, that’s cool. Zombies are bad.” Addison got up and headed for the kitchen, threw her stuff into the sink, then kept right on going until she was in the living room.

“She would’ve had to walk a fair way to where we found her shoes,” I said.

“Which was where?” Hollis asked.

“At the end of the property’s driveway,” he said. “Right on the side of the road. I was a rookie cop around the time that this case rolled through… and something just struck me as odd. She wouldn’t have walked all that way without her shoes. It’s seven miles away. Not to mention, the terrain down by the train tracks were downright treacherous. It’s a homeless playground. Needles. Trash. Glass. You name it, it’s all over the ground there. And other than the trauma to the feet from the train hitting her, her feet were perfectly smooth.”

“Indicating foul play,” Hollis guessed. “Why’d it take so long to solve?”

“Because for the first two years, everyone agreed with the railroad’s finding. They said it was a suicide,” I answered.

“But not you?” she guessed.

“Not me, and not the family,” I agreed. “They hired private investigators, and I never really stopped looking into it. I helped them where I could. They kept me up to date. And over the last ten years, we’ve just been in limbo. Then one day, we get this message from a dive team that they found a phone and a finger bone at the bottom of the creek that they were dragging with magnets.”

“And it was her phone and finger,” Hollis guessed correctly.

“It was,” I confirmed. “At the scene, Tessa was dismembered. But that doesn’t mean that the crime scene shouldn’t have found that a finger was missing.”

“No,” Mom agreed as she started gathering dishes. “You are right. They should have.”

“Who ran this investigation?” Hollis wondered. “Which crime scene?”

“The federal railroad administration was the one who investigated the accident,” I explained. “It was a ‘cut and dry’ case to them. They said it was a suicide. They had an eyewitness report, and that was that. But from the beginning, it struck me as hastily done. I didn’t like the way any of the investigation was done, mostly because, though I was a very green rookie cop, I had a cop for a dad. One who just so happened to be a detective. When we were younger, he pretty much explained his every single step to us through the years, why he did what he did… so I started looking into it.”

“Which probably helped steer him toward a career as a detective,” Mom said as she came back for more plates. “Like father, like son.”

No one got up to help her, but that was because she didn’t like anyone in her kitchen but her.

We’d tried before, multiple times.

Hollis didn’t know that, though, and got up to help.

Surprisingly, Mom allowed it.

Which shocked us all.

“Okay,” Hollis said as she started to scrape food off of plates into the trashcan. “Tell me the rest.”

“Well, like I said, the parents and I never really stopped looking into it. We had a few of her friends who were interviewed that night. None of them agree that she would’ve committed suicide. They say she was happy and healthy.” I shook my head, thinking that ten years ago, that testimony from the friends would’ve been a ‘well it couldn’t happen then’ kind of viewpoint. But now, after everything that happened to my sister, I didn’t quite have the same mindset.

“Well, we can take that with a grain of salt,” Hollis said as she viciously scraped food off of a plate. “What happened with the finger?”

“The finger gave us what we needed to start doing our own investigation,” Dad said as he leaned back into his chair. “We opened one, and the first thing we did was challenge the RRA—Rail Road Authority—and their policing on the matter. We got all reports, recalled the eyewitness, and went from there.”

“I heard the witness recanted his statement,” Auden said as he shifted his feet out from under the table, kicking Gable on the other side.

Gable flipped him off but didn’t otherwise react.

Dad got up and started gathering up dessert, a simple cobbler that was the easiest thing in the world to make but tasted like you’d spent eight hours slaving over it.

I got up to grab plates, making sure to brush the back of my hand over Hollis’s ample ass as I moved.