Page 44 of The Vanishing Wife
“Stay away from my investigation, Agent Brody.” Detective Moore ensured not to touch her on the way out of the conference room—most likely due to learning about Leigh’s surgery—but given different circumstances, she imagined a shoulder check would’ve driven the detective’s point home nicely. “If I find you anywhere near my case, I will have you arrested for obstruction and reported to your director. You will lose everything.”
“Noted.” She had no intention of taking a step back. She was in too deep. And Leigh sure as hell wasn’t going to let the FBI dictate which victims to help or ignore. That was how cases went cold. That was how victims were lost and forgotten. Relegating families to suffer without answers, and she couldn’t let Elyse slip between the cracks. She couldn’t put Ava through what she herself had barely survived.
The drive back to Samuel Thornton’s beach house took an aggravating twenty minutes due to limited backroad access and morning rush traffic, but a sense of relief released in Leigh’s chest as the ride-share parked at the back of the property. “Thanks.”
She stepped back into the heat, catching an odor of something that’d died at the back of her throat. Nothing seemed to have changed in the twenty-four hours since Leigh had recovered Elyse’s phone inside. But her entire perception of this case had. Her friend had gotten herself wrapped up in a murder investigation. And had mostly likely paid the ultimate price. Had that been why Elyse had left a voicemail asking for help? Had she gotten in over her head, and Leigh hadn’t been available to help because she’d been so focused on her own recovery?
She couldn’t think about that right now. Sand gritted under Leigh’s boots as she pulled her cell from her blazer. She tapped out a message to Ava, checking in on her newest charge at the hotel, but the message refused to go through. “No reception.”
Thankfully GPS didn’t rely on internet connection or cell service, but not surprising. Cell companies didn’t prioritize low-density communities. Not many customers. She supposed that was one of the key selling features of homes like this. The ability to escape. So Elyse hadn’t called and left the voicemail from here. Leigh wished for a sidearm as she surveyed the house, closing one eye against the onslaught of the sun. Not officially on duty, no official backup. She was on her own.
Leigh halted at the bottom of the stairs then searched for a neighboring home. Curiosity pulled her from ascending toward the deck and into the house. She’d noticed the same kind of shed beneath Elyse’s vacation home. A storage room? This one had a padlock. Broken from the look of it. No rust. Sawed straight through. Leigh hated padlocks. In her experience, they’d only hid secrets. So what had Samuel Thornton been trying to hide?
Tension radiated up her spine and into her shoulders as Leigh mentally sifted through the possible discoveries inside. Saige. A victim they hadn’t known about. Elyse. She shut down the panic as she slipped the padlock free of its cage and opened the door. Leigh buried her mouth in the crook of her arm. Choking on the odor escaping from inside the little dark room.
And took in the bloated corpse sitting upright against the far wall. Thick, black strangulation bruises striped across its throat. She stepped into the cramped sauna already too hot this early in the morning and swatted away the blowflies making a nest out of the remains. “I’ve been looking for you.”
THIRTY
Gulf Shores, Alabama
Monday, September 23
9:01 a.m.
Gulf Shores PD had taken their time getting to the scene. So Leigh had taken hers in searching the rest of the house. There wasn’t any rush when the victim was already dead.
Labeling Samuel Thornton a victim didn’t feel right, however.
Not when Leigh took in Elyse’s obsession and a deep suspicion the man dead in the storage closet beneath his own home might very well be the one who’d sent those messages to Katie Rose’s fictitious profile.
She’d put the pieces together with the posts on Katie Rose’s Instagram. The account hadn’t existed until four days ago. Then a tangle of comments and private messages all within hours. More since then. Most of the comments had been innocent. But the private conversations—particularly Elyse’s short-clipped, no-argument responses in all but one thread—told Leigh exactly who Elyse had been hunting. Perhaps to ascertain how a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old friends had come into contact with a middle-aged predator like Samuel Thornton. Maybe to uncover as much information about him as possible. Leigh wasn’t sure which. The phone recovered from Elyse’s home had been registered to Poppy Slater, paid for by John and Jill Slater, her parents. Elyse would’ve had to have visited the girl’s home, perhaps talked with the grieving parents. From there, she must’ve stolen Poppy’s phone and accessed the girl’s account with login information stored in the device’s password cache.
One thing was clear: Elyse had created an entire profile to hook Samuel Thornton into her web of underaged lies. She’d wanted evidence. Something she could use against him to prove he’d hurt those girls. But Elyse must’ve been attacked before she’d had the chance to go to the police. That was the only scenario that made sense.
Leigh had hoped Saige Fuentes or Elyse had been inside the storage closest, but she’d come out empty-handed. Leigh watched on from a branch of the Branyon Backcountry Trail, a mass of dunes between her and the crime scene. Officers had taped off the entire property, but there were no nosey neighbors or media that’d caught the report yet. Nothing that would’ve gone over the radio. Leigh had made sure of it. A single text. That was all it’d taken to get Detective Moore’s attention.
A crime scene photographer cut off her view of the body left inside that hot, claustrophobic room beneath the house, but she’d already gotten what she’d needed from the scene. Toiletries skewed across bathroom counters had told her Samuel Thornton hadn’t been planning on running, despite a woman he may have assaulted baiting him into exposing himself. Clothes hung straight in the main upstairs bedroom. No signs of panic or a struggle or evidence of another party. It was simply as though Samuel Thornton had walked himself downstairs into the storage room and died.
But that wasn’t how strangling worked. She’d caught slivers of fiber in the man’s wounds. Like twine. A rope? Her search hadn’t produced any, which meant whoever had strangled Samuel Thornton had most likely taken it with them. Using rope to kill someone was a risk. The twine liked to collect all kinds of things. Skin samples, blood, sweat, DNA. Even if the killer had worn gloves, there were any number of other identifiers that could’ve caught in the braids. The killer must’ve known that. Taken the murder weapon with them. But none of this answered her most pressing question: If the predator was dead, where was Saige?
Detective Moore hiked through the dunes as easily as she’d crossed that beach leading to her niece’s body. As if she’d done it a thousand times before. As a lifelong Gulf Shores resident, Leigh supposed she had. The detective squinted into the morning sun, apparently against sunglasses as a principle. “Got your message.”
“I can see that.” Leigh nodded toward the scene. “Your guys find anything to tell you who else might’ve been in that storage room?”
The detective slipped her hands into her uniform slacks and stared out over the water. She’d gotten thinner in the past few hours. It should’ve been impossible, but grief did terrible things. Turned you inside out while wringing you like a washcloth at the same time. “I told you if you came anywhere near my investigation, I’d have you arrested.”
There was a beat of silence. Of dominance. Detective Moore wanted her to know who was in control. That she had the power to ruin Leigh’s day, if she so chose.
“But considering we probably wouldn’t have found Samuel Thornton for a few more days without your help, losing evidence pertinent to this case in the process, I’ll let this one slide.” The detective centered that unreadable gaze on Leigh. Ensuring she understood this olive branch for what it was. Temporary. “As a courtesy for your contribution to this investigation.”
Leigh sucked in a lungful of humidity. “I know what it’s like. The not knowing, the doubt. It feels like it’s going to last forever, but you’re going to get through this. Just don’t give up. There are answers at the end.”
Detective Moore turned her attention back out to sea. “I have a feeling I already know the answer. What I’m worried about is who else might’ve suffered while I scrambled to figure it out. Saige Fuentes, particularly. Administration and teachers at the high school place her in class up until just before second period Friday morning. Then she just seemed to walk off campus. I’ve tried contacting other students in her class, but it seems Saige kept a pretty tight circle of friends. Most of whom are dead now. I’m waiting on security footage from the school district to tell me where she might’ve gone.”
“Taking responsibility for another person’s actions is a dead end. Feeling like we should’ve known the truth from the beginning. That we should’ve been smart enough to see the warning signs. I put my entire life on hold because of that belief, and all it managed to do was consume me until I didn’t feel anything at all. It doesn’t make us better investigators. It just prohibits us from seeing the good things we still have.” Like the brother and father waiting for her on the sidelines. Waiting for her to come back to them. Leigh wasn’t sure she’d ever admitted that before. Not even to Elyse. But if there was even a chance to help Detective Moore avoid years of self-flagellation and hatred for her niece’s death, Leigh would take it. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for what I said earlier. I would’ve done the same in your position, taking on more cases to distract me from the loss. Actually, I have done that. A lot.”
“You were right though.” Detective Moore glanced back at the crime scene. “I was so invested in finding Ruby—for a lot of reasons—that I didn’t put everything I had into helping Elyse. Now she’s out there. Possibly murdered by Samuel Thornton, and I could’ve been the one to prevent it from happening in the first place. Not sure I’ll ever forgive myself for that.”