The Body Finder

There was no real plan once they got to the killer’s house, but Violet knew what was expected of her. She was there to search for echoes.

Violet had been comfortable with her ability ever since she was a little girl. She’d even been kind of okay with accidentally stumbling onto the two human bodies she had found in her life. Three, including Hailey McDonald’s. And she definitely hadn’t shied away from looking for the killer when she thought she could help.

But this…

This was different. This was gruesome.

She was purposely looking for a dead girl. This would not be chance…no random discovery.

There were only a few officers at the site, and they were all too busy doing other things, searching for clues and gathering evidence, to even notice she was there. Violet trailed behind her uncle, letting him lead her at first through the house, which was small and dark and dirty, and then leading him as they walked the extensive property, which was sectioned off into several pastures by low wooden fences. Her dad followed right behind them.

It was eerie being here…knowing that she was standing in the very places that a killer once had. Seeing where he ate, and rested, and lived.

She stopped several times, feeling old echoes that were faded and weak from the passage of time. Violet was sure they were nothing…at least nothing that the police were interested in. She could only assume that cats hunted rats, coyotes killed chickens, and men slaughtered livestock. At least those were some of the reasons she imagined for finding echoes on a farm.

But her uncle tagged each spot anyway, marking it with a small orange flag that he stuck into the ground. They wouldn’t start digging until after she’d gone. It was one of the many contingencies placed on this plan by her father. She was to get in and out as quickly as possible, with as few people, even her uncle’s own officers, aware that she’d ever been there.

She knew before they were even finished searching that Mackenzie Sherwin wasn’t here. Violet would have known, as clearly as she would have heard Brooke’s bells or seen the rainbow sheen of an oil slick; it would have been fresh and strong.

If Mackenzie was dead, she was dead somewhere else.

HUNTED

FROM WHERE HE STOOD HE COULD SEE THE weathered facade of the aging farmhouse. He had seen this house hundreds of times before. But this time-today-he studied it through different eyes.

He stayed out of sight, watching as the officers came and went, taking photographs, tagging evidence, and carrying corrugated boxes from inside the house out to their cars. This house, the one he’d visited so many times before, had become a crime scene. Or at least, part of a criminal investigation.

He still didn’t understand where they’d gone wrong or how they’d been caught. Well, maybe he hadn’t actually been caught, but the effect was just as catastrophic for him.

They’d been stopped…he and his partner.

Their perfect killing spree had ended.

So he watched and waited, to make sure that there was no way they could tie him to any of this mess.

He wasn’t entirely surprised to see the police chief pull up in his unmarked, city-issued vehicle. It might as well have had PIG emblazoned across the side of it, as conspicuous as it really was. But it wasn’t the chief’s presence that caught his attention; it was the ordinary-looking sedan that followed right behind it. Actually it was the passenger inside the sedan that had him on alert.

He had seen her before…the pretty girl from the search party yesterday.

He’d noticed her out there in the woods, admiring her even then… her youth…her innocence, while the entire community searched for a girl who would never be found. At least not alive, anyway.

Had they been out there alone, just him and the girl, without all of the rescue workers and volunteers, things might have ended very differently.

He froze in place while he watched her, a skill he had mastered after years of military training, surveying and analyzing the scene before him.

He’d learned later, after that chance encounter with the girl, that she was Chief Ambrose’s niece. And until this very moment, he hadn’t given a second thought to the fact that she happened to be there when they’d discovered his partner, while he’d been standing right where he’d been ordered to stand, making sure that no one searched that spot too closely.

And yet here she was again. Strange coincidence.

He watched as she led the police chief, and a man he assumed was her father, around, the three of them speaking quietly among themselves. He saw how Chief Ambrose marked the spots where she pointed.

This was wrong, something was wrong about her being here today. And was it really just a coincidence that she had been there yesterday too? She knew something, but how? How could she know anything…and still be alive to tell it?

He wasn’t sure, but he couldn’t take any chances. They’d already captured his partner; he couldn’t let them find him too. He knew what he had to do.

He was going to have to stop her. Silence her. Once and for all.

It was the only way he could stay safe. It was the only way he would be free to hunt again.

The chief’s niece would have to die.

CHAPTER 20

THE NEXT MORNING WAS STRANGE FOR VIOLET. She was nervous about going to school. She even got up and checked the school’s website, hoping that classes had been canceled due to both the discovery of Hailey McDonald’s body and the still-unexplained disappearance of Mackenzie Sherwin over the weekend.

No such luck, and Violet knew that the school would, instead, be overrun once again by the grief counselors, as they tried to soothe the raw nerves of a student body that mourned for not one but two of their own.

But that wasn’t why she was nervous.

She was anxious about seeing Jay again. At school. In front of their friends. And in front of their non-friends, among whom Lissie and Grady were definitely now included.

As it turned out, Violet hadn’t seen Jay since Saturday night. He’d called her on Sunday to tell her that he was going with his mom to his grandparents’ house, which was two hours away. So this morning Violet wasn’t sure what to expect. She kind of hoped to keep it a secret, this new relationship of theirs, at least for a little while…until she could sort it all out in her head. But she had no idea what Jay had in mind.

It was odd for her, pulling into Jay’s driveway that morning, the same way she had countless times before. She saw the door open, but instead of Jay, his mom poked her head out the door and waved enthusiastically at Violet. Jay pushed past his mom, who was smiling conspiratorially at Violet and