Those questions haunted him as he’d cruised around Silver Falls, until finally he’d driven back to Chance Creek, needing to be close to home even if he couldn’t return to Thorn Hill. He’d ended up at the Dancing Boot and decided to go in for one beer. Be around people. He figured he’d stick to himself, and most folks would let him be.
Then he’d seen Stella.
He should have left right then, but he couldn’t seem to make himself move from his seat at the bar. He’d watched Eric take one call, then another… and another until he built up a head of steam about the way the man was ignoring his date. Stella didn’t deserve to be treated like that. If something was blowing up at the Chance Creek’s sheriff’s department, Eric ought to apologize to Stella and go to work. If it was anything else, surely it could wait until he took her home.
When Stella had come his way, Steel had taken the opportunity to show the man how it was done.
It had felt good to draw Stella near. To breathe her in. Somehow Stella always smelled of sunshine. The ocean. He’d been to the ocean several times when he lived out west, and he’d once thought he’d give up undercover work and spend his time beach-bumming it up and down the west coast.
Maybe he should.
He wasn’t sure what good he was doing here. He wasn’t any closer to figuring out why the girls of Chance Creek were overdosing, and he wasn’t doing Stella any favors, either.
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel as the road curved through fields and began to rise beneath him. The rain was falling harder now, making it difficult to see the edge of the road in the dark. He didn’t think Silver Falls—or the dilapidated trailer he lived in—would ever feel like home. He wasn’t a mountain man. He was a rancher, no matter what direction his life had taken since he was eighteen. Someday he hoped he could get back to the work. Back to himself. Stop hiding in the shadows all the time. Be someone a woman like Stella could be proud of.
Steel navigated another turn, the road rising more sharply now. Scrub gave way to real forest around him as he neared Silver Falls. He passed a swaybacked barn sinking into the woods growing up around it. A house that hadn’t been painted in years, its clapboard siding a silvery gray in the darkness. Sometimes he thought the forest would swallow Silver Falls whole, reclaiming everything men had carved out of it a hundred years or so ago. It had never prospered to quite the same extent Chance Creek had in its heyday, but for a while, in the 1940s and 50s, it was a busy summer retreat for people from all around. While Runaway Lake was the biggest body of water in the region, several other small ponds and lakes had once hosted busy campgrounds and day trippers. There’d been excursions to nearby lookouts. A small but thriving artists’ community that held an annual show. People had picnicked at the falls.
Now they avoided the area.
He clicked the windshield wipers into a higher gear as the rain fell harder. This wasn’t a shower anymore—it was more like a deluge. As he peered through the wipers at the curving road ahead of him, he hoped Stella had gotten home all right. There would be accidents tonight. The creeks would rise fast, too. The ground was so dry it wouldn’t absorb much moisture, and the fast-flowing water could get dangerous.
Right on cue, his sheriff’s department radio sputtered to life. “Steel, you there?”
It was Bolton.
“What’s up?”
“We got another overdose,” the sheriff said.
“Who?” Damn it, another one?
“Sue Hill. Just in the last hour.”
Steel swore. Punched a fist against the steering wheel once. Twice.
“Pull it together!” Bolton called through the phone. “You driving?”
“Yeah,” Steel growled and pulled over even before being told, flipping on his hazard lights. Last thing he needed was to be hit.
“I take it you know the girl.”
“I know her,” Steel said. “I’ve talked to her before. She was upset.” He scowled. “The killer did this.”
“We don’t know that. If she was upset, maybe she did herself in,” Bolton said, but he sounded less certain than usual. Was he thinking the same thing as Steel—that they could have saved Sue, if only they’d been quicker to act?
“Where was she found?”
Bolton hesitated. “At the pit,” he admitted.
Steel cursed himself again. He should have stayed in Silver Falls.
He and Bolton both knew what it meant she was found there. If a girl like Sue had wanted to kill herself, she would have decked herself out and done it at home so as to be discovered in a way to drive the knife home through her parents’ hearts. If she was found at the pit, someone else had put her there.
“I need to talk to her friends. Lily and Lara. Sounded to me like they had some kind of falling out recently. Sue had some new friend she was going on about—a friend who hurt her feelings earlier today.” Steel had a new thought. “What’s on her phone?”
“No phone that we can find.”
“Any word from her parents?”
“Just that she’s been moody lately. Been depressed for several days. Locked herself in her room tonight after barely eating dinner. Parents didn’t even know she was gone until they got the call.”
“Hell, how’d she get past them?”
“I don’t have that yet. They’re in shock, Steel. They’re not ready to answer those kinds of questions.”
All the information they needed would be on Sue’s phone. Steel remembered the way her fingers had flown over the keys the other day. It was all in there—the name of the killer. His plans.
“You need to get those phone records.”
“I know.”
Steel doubted that was true, though. No phone records had turned up in the other cases. If the killer communicated with his victims, he did it some other way. Maybe he was wrong; maybe
