“Who was it?” Sam asks.
“It was Dean,” I frown, concern immediately building in my chest. “He stayed at the hospital with Greg to try to get as much information as he could. Hope everything’s okay.”
Sam opens the box and starts taking the files out as I redial Dean’s number.
“Hey,” I say when he answers. “I’m sorry I missed your call. Is everything okay?”
“Martin put up a new video,” he tells me with no introduction.
“A new video?” I ask.
“Greg wanted to watch the videos again to see if he could pull out any information he missed the first time. When I opened the blog again, there was a new video posted. You might want to check it out.”
“Hold on; I’ll watch it right now. I just need to grab my computer.”
Sam and I sit side-by-side on the couch as I access the blog. Just like Dean said, a new video was posted just a couple of hours ago. Holding my phone to my ear with one hand, I use the other to start the video. Unlike in the other videos, Martin is outside. Wind whips around him as he walks.
“All will come to pass soon. Lotan knows I have failed him. I did all I could. But I will make atonement. I will make it right.”
The video jostles and then drops as if the camera fell or Martin put it down on the ground and then goes silent.
“What happened? I can’t hear anything,” I say.
“The audio got turned off,” Dean explains.
“On purpose?”
“I don’t think so. I think the intention was to turn the camera off. Keep watching,” he tells me.
There’s not much to see. The camera angle shows the ground at the bottom edge of the screen and the sky at the top. The side goes dark for a few moments, like Martin stepped in front of it, then brightened again. A few seconds later, something drops in front of the camera. At first, it doesn’t register what I’m looking at. Then it sinks in.
“That’s the blade of a scalpel,” I say.
“And it’s bloody,” Sam adds.
The camera moves again, and for just a second, the audio comes back, then the screen goes dark, and the video ends.
“We need to find him,” I say.
“How?” Dean asks. “He doesn’t say where he is.”
“Hold on,” I say. I scan back a few seconds and watch the end of the video again. It takes two more times going through it before I’m sure. “I know where he is.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Care to explain to me how you knew there was a body here?”
“Lovely to speak to you again, too, Detective Legends,” I say.
The screen of the video call is fairly dark, but there’s just enough illumination for me to see the scowl on the angry detective’s face.
“I’m not in the mood for your bullshit, Miss Griffin,” he says through gritted teeth.
“Agent Griffin,” I correct him. Again.
He somehow contorts his face even further and continues. “The last I heard from you and Sheriff Johnson, the two of you were leavin’ in the middle of our investigation. Then on the news, I saw you got yourself tangled up in another murder in Feathered Nest. I thought you were their problem, but now I get dragged away from my night off ‘cause of a tip about someone in trouble. And lo and behold, who is behind that call, but you? So, I wanna know again. How did you know there was going to be a body here?”
“I already explained it to the officers I spoke to,” I fire back.
“My jurisdiction, my case. So, explain it to me,” he snaps.
“Is that Emma?” I hear a much more pleasant voice ask from off-camera.
“Yes,” Legends growls. The screen shifts. Detective Mayfield’s face appears on my phone.
“Hi, Emma,” he smiles.
“Hi,” I nod. “I see you’re still yoked to the delightful Detective Legends. Haven’t figured out how to get out of that yet?”
The younger detective opts to remain diplomatic and doesn’t feed into my negativity toward his partner, opting instead to mutter a small laugh and smile.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?” he asks. “We just got your tip that we’d find somebody out here who needed help.”
He doesn’t need help. There’s nothing anyone can do for Martin now. The hospital sheet around his slashed neck assured that. But someone needed to find him sooner than the hours it would take to drive down there.
I give Detective Mayfield a brief recounting of the events. When I finish, he stares back at me with widened eyes that don’t seem to belong to a man who’s handled many murders in his career. But that’s what makes him good at what he does. Even after everything he’s seen and all the evil he’s witnessed, Mayfield still manages to have feelings and sympathy. It’s what keeps him caring and stops him from getting complacent.
“Well, at first glance, it looks like Martin was feeling guilty about failing the leader of his cult and killed himself to make up for it,” he says.
“Martin didn’t kill himself,” I say.
“And you know that so clearly why?” Detective Legends demands, snatching the phone back from his younger partner.
“It doesn’t fit,” I offer.
“Evidently, you didn’t watch the video close enough,” he says. “Martin here said he was gonna atone for what he did. For his failures.”
“Killing himself wouldn’t be an atonement,” I point out. “That wouldn’t do any good. The man he was referring to, Lotan, doesn’t care if his followers live or die. It would mean nothing to him to have someone kill themselves because of him. I wouldn’t put it past him to have a collection. But that’s not the point. The point is, I did watch the video close enough to notice the bits of sand splash up against the lens of the camera when the scalpel dropped. And in the last couple seconds of audio that came back on, I heard the train
