Page 57 of Hide And Seek
“Same. I got a bunch of the shoeprints. That should help the cops later.” His gaze tracked slowly around the room again, jaw tight. “Before we go, we should take a closer look. See if there’s anything the killer left behind. Hair, fingerprints on the wall… anything.”
I nodded, swallowing hard as I shifted my focus from the bigger horrors to the smaller details. A moment later, something on Sloane’s head snagged my attention.
“I think there’s something in her hair,” I said, squinting. It was hard to make out through the blood, but there was a thin, dark shape tangled in the strands. “Maybe a thread? It could’ve dropped off the killer’s clothes.”
Rhys stepped closer, brows furrowing. “I can’t tell from here.” He hesitated for half a second, then crouched. “Hold on.”
He reached out and carefully plucked it free. Then he exhaled through his nose. “Just a pine needle.”
“Oh.” My stomach sank a little. “Damn.”
“Actually, it’s probably a good thing that it was nothing,” he said, lifting his hand to show me the smear of blood on his index finger. “I’m not wearing gloves. So if thathadbeen evidence, I would’ve contaminated it.”
“Good point.”
“If we spot anything else, we can look for plastic bags in the bathroom,” he added. “That way we can store it before everyone tramples all over everything.”
I made a faint sound of acknowledgement as I dragged my gaze away and scanned the room again, forcing myself to keep searching. There had to be something. Anything.
A faint glint suddenly caught my eye from beneath the bed.
“Hey, look,” I said, stepping carefully around the darker patches on the floor to avoid the killer’s bloody shoeprints. “There’s something under there.”
Rhys moved beside me and crouched, leaning down to get a better look. He was so close now that his shoulder was brushing mine.
“See?” I said, pointing. “It looks like some sort of glass vial. Or plastic. Maybe it’s something drug-related?”
“That could explain why the killer was so frenzied,” he muttered, nodding.
He leaned in even closer, almost sticking his head right under the bed. Then he let out a quiet, disappointed breath. “It’s just one of those perfume sample things you get from department stores,” he said. “Mabry must’ve dropped it when she was packing her stuff, and it rolled under here.”
I suddenly couldn’t speak. Not because I was so disappointed at the lack of evidence, but because I couldn’t stop staring at the nape of his neck. There was a small fleck there. Dark brownish-red.
Dried blood.
My mind whirled. I knew he’d gotten some blood on his hand when he pulled that pine needle from Sloane’s hair, and I’d seen him absentmindedly rub the back of his neck earlier, like he always did.
But…
He did thatbeforehe touched her hair. Didn’t he? Or was I misremembering?
I couldn’t quite line the moments up in my head, because everything suddenly felt blurred at the edges, details smearing together.
There was one thing I knew for sure, though. Earlier in the bathroom with Jasmine, I’d realized just how much the fear and paranoia was getting to me. How quick my brain was to jump to the worst possible conclusion. So I had to think about this logically instead of letting my imagination run wild.
If Rhys was a psychopathic murderer who’d made it his mission to pick off his fellow camp counselors, then he’d had every opportunity to kill me tonight. We’d been alone together this entire time, in an empty building.
But he hadn’t attacked me. All he’d done was stay steady. Talk me through things. Offer advice on hownotto get killed.
That wasn’t exactly the behavior of an unhinged murderer, was it?
My gaze dropped away from his neck, heat prickling faintly at the back of my own. Ihadto be remembering things wrong. He must’ve rubbed his neck just a couple of minutes ago, leaving behind some of the blood that had smeared on his fingertips.
“See anything else?” he asked, completely unaware of the dark direction my thoughts had just gone in.
I shook my head. “No.”
He exhaled, rubbing the back of his neck again, right over the spot. “Me neither.”
