Page 54 of Tangled Past
Chapter Eighteen
By the time the station quieted for the night, the whiteboard in the conference room looked like a crime scene of its own.
Names. Arrows. Years. Symbols scrawled and circled.
Vanessa Warren. Hardesty Farm. Troy Malbern—cleared for homicide.
Unsub. Island. Possible mainland connections.
Will capped the marker with more force than necessary. “All right,” he said, his tone roughened by fatigue. “We’ve attained what we set out to accomplish. Troy’s messy, but he’s not our killer. Margaret confirmed what we suspected—Raymond hid a woman and a child at the farmhouse, and he knew exactly how high the stakes were. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell anyone what those stakes were.” He stood back and looked at the board.
Rachel rubbed her temples. “What’s our next move?”
“We need to find out what Raymond was working on that brought him to Vanessa. All the old files are gone,” Will said with a weary sigh.
“But my father’s notes on this case weren’t part of those case files. Otherwise, someone would have found them by now,” Asa concluded.
They’d be somewhere he trusted. Somewhere closer to home.
As if his brain had been waiting for permission, an image flashed in his mind—the narrow hallway of his childhood home, the door at the end that led to the crawl space under the eaves. The way his father had once told him, half-joking, “If this old place ever catches fire, the firefighters are going to have a fun time with what I’ve stuffed in these walls.”
Back then, Asa had assumed he meant old fishing gear. Tax receipts. Maybe his mother’s boxes of Christmas lights.
Now, the words landed differently.
“Asa?” Maya’s voice nudged him back. “Are you okay?”
He looked across the table at her.
She sat there ramrod straight with tired eyes, her fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee she’d barely touched. Since the interrogation with Troy, she’d moved like someone braced permanently for impact. Not broken. Just . . . braced.
“There’s somewhere we haven’t searched properly,” he said. “I completely forgot about it until now.”
Will looked up. “Where?”
“My father’s house,” Asa said. “He wouldn’t have left anything important where a break-in would expose it and the killer might come across it.”
“You think he hid something?” Rachel peered up. “It’s been searched before. First by law enforcement following the murder and more recently by our team.”
“I realize that,” Asa said. “But he was working on something bigger than anything on the island. Margaret’s call confirmed it. Not a case that took place on Hope Island. Much bigger than anything that happened here back then. If hesuspected a serial pattern on the mainland, and Vanessa was his key witness, he would have taken precautions.”
Will flexed his jaw and considered the possibility. “Still, that house has been sitting vacant for years. Anything of value could have been stolen by now.”
“Not if it was hidden where no one would think to look,” Asa said.
Silence stretched.
“We should go there now. Tonight. Before the suspect finds out what we’re looking for,” Maya didn’t say the word killer, but everyone knew.
Will looked like he wanted to argue, but Asa beat him to it. “She’s right. If something’s hidden, I’d rather find it before anyone else gets the same idea.”
Will’s gaze darted between the two of them. “You’re both running hot,” he said. “Emotional. That’s not always a bad thing, but it can cloud judgment.”
“It can also clarify priorities,” Asa said, his tone even. “I’m not asking you to send us up there alone. We can make it a controlled search. You, me, Rachel, and JT. Maya can stay in the cruiser if that makes you feel better.”
Maya’s jaw tightened. “No thank you.”
He almost smiled. “Thought you’d say that.”
