Page 7 of Frozen Secrets

Adrial spread everything out across his desk, then scrubbed a hand down his face. Their resident detective Michal had done a hell of a job pulling Winnie’s life together, but any good investigator knew whatever paperwork that told the story of a life would only be a snapshot. “She’s not my girl.”

A muscle tugged behind his rib cage. He’d already burned that bridge, and the truth was, he wasn’t interested in building another one. His heart couldn’t take it.

“Try telling your face that.” Baxter set his elbows against his knees, edging closer to the desk. “From what I can tell, Winnie Hutton is exactly who she’s claiming to be.”

Adrial reviewed the rest of the documents that spelled out what Winnie had been up to for the past ten years. None of it explained her sudden interest in investigating the Lila Mercer case. Maybe she’d been telling the truth after all. Just wanting to close out her father’s life like the good daughter she’d always been. “No red flags?”

“None. If she’s here for anything more than selling off her father’s assets, Michal didn’t find it.” Baxter hiked one ankle over his knee. “Tell me about this old case she’s having you look into.”

“You read the file?” Adrial went straight for the evidence list. He’d managed to take a photo of the catalog he and Winnie had found stashed in that first box before her migraine had attacked. Old habits had kicked in instantly when he’d caught her squeezing her eyes tight, and surprisingly, she’d let him take care of her for those few minutes. And it’d… It’d felt good. To have a purpose. Someone to care for after all this time. That’d always been the plan. Make detective, settle down with the woman he loved, start a family. He’d had everything he’d wanted. Until he didn’t. But the need was still there. Slowly eating him alive from the inside, and now Winnie was back in town, and he… He didn’t know what to do with that.

“Most of it.” The forensic investigator tipped his head back and forth a few times. “I got…distracted.”

Pulling up the photo on his phone, Adrial set both lists side by side. The tarp the body had been wrapped in. The chains that’d failed to keep the remains under water. The victim’s clothing. They all lined up. But there were inconsistencies in BHPD’s file. There was only one person who would’ve had that kind of authority. The investigating detective. Arthur Hutton. But why? Why spend almost an entire career as the town’s chief of police—almost half of the man’s life—working a case with faulty information? Or leave out information altogether. “Let me guess. By the cat.”

“Something like that.” There was that smile again, the one Baxter used to convince everyone around him he didn’t have a care in the world. One of these days that smile wouldn’t be enough. “Twenty-year-old nurse found beaten up and chained down in the middle of Hollow Lake some twenty years ago. Took a ME coming in from Seattle to identify her. Her teeth had been pulled and the tips of her fingers cut off.”

Adrial nodded, setting himself back in the chair. He reached out and shifted one of the crime scene photos parallel with the edge of his desk. An image that had burned itself into his brain that first day he’d been partnered with Arthur. “Lila Mercer was a local who lived alone, never married, never had any kids. According to neighbors and coworkers, she’d kept to herself. Didn’t have any family, from what we could find. Her parents had died in that big car accident, and she was an only child. Her boss said she always arrived on time for her shift, never complained about her duties and got along with everyone she came into contact with.”

Baxter seemed to consider that. “No confrontations with patients or the people she worked with?”

“None. She went as far to cover for other nurses when they needed it, worked upward of sixty hours a week sometimes.” Adrial tapped four fingers on the surface of his desk, a habit he couldn’t seem to kick when coming at a case like this. Dead end after dead end. “She didn’t have time for confrontations or relationships.”

Baxter shifted, that telltale divot between his eyebrows. “So she was a loner. But obviously someone wanted her dead, and the way she was beaten makes me think it was personal. Most of the damage I’ve seen in the medical examiner’s report was focused on her face and head. Whoever killed her could’ve put their effort there to derail identification, but it feels more like anger. Like someone snapped.”

It was possible and had been one of Adrial’s more promising theories, but without evidence of a relationship or DNA left behind by the attacker, they had nothing new to go off of.

“At first, Arthur thought it might’ve been an act of random violence. Maybe she ran into someone on her way home from work or tried to stop some kind of altercation.” He forced himself to look at the victim’s face. “But a thorough search of the route she took from the clinic home never provided evidence of a struggle, and there were no reports of fights or hit-and-runs that night.”

Baxter set his face in one palm. “You look at the ex?”

“High school boyfriend moved back east for school, leaving her here. Phone records didn’t give any indication she’d started seeing someone else. Neither her fingertips nor her teeth were recovered, either, and the ME couldn’t get a good sample from her wounds to determine if the killer left behind DNA.” Adrial tapped the old records he’d reviewed a thousand times over the years, always pulling him back into the case despite his determination to let it go. “But we found something interesting in her financials. There was a charge on her credit card for two hundred dollars, well above her usual spending, at a doctor’s office a few towns over two months before Lila was murdered.”

A light blazed behind Baxter’s eyes. “That is interesting. I’m assuming BHPD talked to the doctor?”

“That was where the investigation stalled.” And the trail had run dry. Adrial tossed one of the crime scene photos back onto the pile, succumbing to the disappointment that talking this through had failed to reveal anything new. He was right back where he didn’t want to be—faced with an unsolvable case and the woman he’d tried to protect from discovering the truth. “The clinic burned down a couple weeks before Lila Mercer was killed. The doctor she saw—and their records—burned with it.”

Baxter’s low whistle filled the office. “So what’s the plan then?”

He leaned forward in his office chair. “The same place we always do when working a cold case. We start with exhuming the body.”

Chapter Seven

Okay. So officially reopening the case was harder than she thought it might be. Turned out, they needed new evidence in the case or a real-life police officer to petition the judge. Which meant she couldn’t put off compiling the file any longer.

It’d taken hours.

No matter how many times she’d showered, it felt as though a thin film of dust and smudged ink had burrowed beneath her skin in an effort to compile her father’s case files. Thirteen boxes of handwritten notes, photographs of the crime scene—some taken long after the body had been removed—multiple copies of the same initial incident report, recordings of interviews and transcripts, victimology reports, witness testimony and more. Some pieces were still missing—pieces like the original evidence that had been logged on that single sheet of paper she and Adrial had recovered—but she’d done her best to reconstruct the investigation file in chronological order according to the dates stamped on each section. Now, it was a matter of filling in the blanks. And checking the evidence list against the official BHPD file. If they had an idea of what had gone missing over the years, they might have a clearer picture of who’d wanted Lila Mercer dead. Which, based on the profile her father had put together, wasn’t a very long list.

From what she’d collected in reviewing the file from front to back a thousand times in the past two days, the victim centered her entire life around the clinic where she worked. Winnie didn’t know if it was a matter of finances or purpose that drove Lila Mercer to live for her job, but it was pretty obvious she didn’t have a whole lot of fulfilling relationships.

Something Winnie didn’t want to look too closely at right now, as she made the half-mile walk from her dad’s house to the offices of Cold Hollow Investigations.

According to the notes she’d found, the victim’s dad had divorced her mother early in their marriage and disappeared, then her mom followed around the time Lila was a young woman, running after a married man no one wanted to identify. No siblings or extended family from what detectives could find. No one to take in Lila Mercer when she’d needed them the most. There’d been mention of a boyfriend in high school, but he’d moved away years before Lila’s body had been found.

The sad truth was, Winnie and Lila Mercer had a lot in common, made more apparent by a near match in their hair color and the few freckles Winnie had noted dotted across Lila’s nose from her old yearbook photo. That was as far as the physical resemblance went, but she could relate to losing her mother at a critical age, being a lonely only child who might’ve been desperate to have something—someone—to hold on to and a father that didn’t want anything to do with her.

That hadn’t always been the case. Her earliest memories of Arthur Hutton still brought a smile to her face. When he’d surprised her with a very DIY mermaid birthday cake for her fifth birthday and accidentally gotten the trick candles that couldn’t be blown out. Or when he’d taught her how to shoot her first BB gun, later replacing it with her first nine millimeter, and the reverence of pride in his expression when she hit the target that first time at ten. There were nights she’d burst into her parents’ room because of a strange sound or a nightmare, and her dad had tucked her between them, promising she was safe. But those memories thinned out after her mom passed. And then suddenly, she was living with a ghost. A father who was physically there but emotionally untouchable. It’d only gotten worse after she’d left Black Hollow, her Happy Birthday and Happy Father’s Day texts going unanswered for days before her dad responded…when he even bothered.