But he then saw Rachel at the last moment, out of the corner of his eye. Rachel continued to run, knowing that asking him to stop and drawing her gun would do no good; his race with Jack had proven that much. Instead, she dashed at him and was a bit surprised when she saw him take on a clumsy fighter’s stance.

  She didn’t bother with a warning. Rachel advanced on him and she could see his slow jab coming from a mile away. She sidestepped it easily, threw a single, stiff jab of her own into his ribs, and that did it. He crumpled right away, reaching for his opened truck door to keep from falling on the concrete driveway.

  Jack was there just as she reached down to pick Bentley up. They worked quickly and efficiently together, getting Bentley to his feet and in handcuffs in a matter of seconds.

  “Why’d you try sneaking out on us, Mr. Bentley?” Jack asked.

  But Bentley wasn’t answering, he was too busy trying to draw in a whole breath, still a bit woozy from Rachel’s punch. She wondered if she’d maybe put a bit too much power behind it.

  As they made their way back to their car, Jack guiding a still-quiet Bentley into the back seat, Rachel realized that she’d gone a bit tense. In the past, it had been running or other physical exertions that had caused the rumbling little headaches to escalate into something much larger and much more painful. But as she got into the passenger seat and buckled up, she was relieved to find that, if anything, the creeping pain had diminished.

  She felt that now familiar flicker of hope…which, in tandem with so easily capturing their first lead for the case, made her dare to hope everything else on her plate would be handled just as easily in the days to come.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The case had such a sense of urgency to it that Rachel barely even registered the interior of the local police station as she and Jack hauled Harry Bentley to an interrogation room. As they made their way through the building, though, Rachel couldn’t help but wonder if this case felt so urgent because she had placed her own issues into it somehow. She was no longer seeing this as just a case in which they needed to figure out who had drugged and buried a woman alive in a wooden box; no, she was also banking on this case to draw Alex Lynch out into some sort of final confrontation.

  This remained in the back of her head, a nagging voice constantly at the ready, as she closed the door to the interrogation room behind her.

  Jack gave Bentley a little nudge and then pointed to the single chair on the other side of the table. “Sit down and tell us why you thought it would be a good idea to try running.”

  Bentley sneered at both of them but did as he was asked. The slight haze of confusion Rachel had seen on him back at his house had lightened. If he had indeed been stoned, it had worn off over the course of the last half-hour or so.

  He cast his hateful gaze toward Rachel and said, “I think you broke one of my ribs.”

  She shrugged and said, “Wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t thrown the punch at me.”

  “Or run from us in the first place,” Jack said. “So what the hell is going on?”

  Bentley finally sat down, making a dramatic performance about the apparent pain in his side. “You weren’t there to talk about Hutchinson at all, were you?” he hissed.

  “Well, in a way,” Rachel said. “Here’s what we’ll do, just to make it a bit easier on you. We’re sort of crunched for time here, so we’ll get right to the point. We found something on that worksite…the one Hutchinson and his crew are putting up for condos. We know you were still working for him when the place was starting to be cleared out. So…if there’s anything you want to tell us, you tell us now. If you make it hard, we’ll send a police unit to your house. Maybe have them start searching in that shed out back.”

  He was still sneering at them, but it seemed like there was something else to his stare now Maybe caution…maybe worry. It was hard to tell. She also noted that he was sweating again, linking it back to the hint of body odor back at his house. After a few seconds, she saw his face soften and then he looked away from them. The look that came over his face as he stared at the table was one she’d seen lots of times in interrogation rooms: shame.

  “I’ve got this habit…this Oxy habit that I can’t kick. And I let it get the best of me. I couldn’t work, couldn’t function without it.”

  “Oxycodone?” Jack asked for clarification.

  “Yeah…but it didn’t always have to be just Oxy. Any opioid would do, really. I fractured my tailbone on a job last year…this was before working for Hutchinson…and the doc prescribed Vicodin. It didn’t take long…I got hooked. I was taking them even after the injury healed and it just…it got me.”

  “Okay,” Rachel said, careful not to dismiss what looked to be a very real problem. “But what does that have to do with you quitting your job with Hutchinson without giving any sort of warning?”

  When he looked back up to her, there was a baffled look on his face. It seemed that he was shocked that she couldn’t figure it out. “Because it’s gotten to the point where I can’t do a damned thing without being at least half stoned. And when you work construction, that’s not exactly safe. I got embarrassed and scared, and I quit.”

  The same look still prominent in his eyes told Rachel that he was being honest. But she also knew it didn’t immediately let him off the hook for the reason they were here in the first place.

  “So let’s go back to the main issue for right now,” Jack said as she thought this through. “You said you had to go to the bathroom and then you tried to run on us. People don’t usually run away from FBI agents just because they’re addicts.”

  “I was stoned and paranoid. And I…I’ve been selling. I can’t…”

  It was here that Harry Bentley broke. He started to sob, a loud and retching sound that came from deep within him. Maybe it was because he knew he’d messed up by just admitting to FBI agents that he was selling opioids. And maybe it was because having to speak these things out loud was making him realize just how bad things had gotten for him.

  Rachel saw that even Jack had softened up in seeing this. She did her best to carry on from that point, knowing that getting any concrete information out of him was going to be tricky now.

  “Mr. Bentley,” she said with as much compassion as she could, “we weren’t coming to you because of anything opioid related. We need to know some information about the time you spent working with Hutchinson.”

  He looked up, surprised, but he seemed willing to continue talking. “What the hell did he do?”

  “It’s not what he did,” Rachel said. “Mr. Bentley, a body was discovered buried on the worksite we’ve been asking you about. And that body just happens to be the daughter of someone in the public eye. We have—”

  “And you think I had something to do with it just because I quit?” Suddenly, he seemed almost clear-headed. He wiped some of his tears away and took a deep breath, trying to reorient himself to the situation.

  “That was the train of thought we were on, yes,” Jack said.

  “Well, I’ll do whatever I can to help…to show you I have absolutely nothing to do with it.” He placed his hands on the table, not quite slapping the table, but loud enough to express a point.

  Rachel figured this would be a smart play, but it might be something they could task the police with. Based on what Bentley was telling them, the likelihood that he’d have the stamina, focus, and wherewithal to drug someone and then bury them in a coffin of his own design was extremely low. The lifestyle of an addict would not allow for that sort of time and focus.

  “We appreciate that,” Jack said.

  “For now, though,” Rachel said, “we’ll hand you over to the local PD. There may be a few officers that will indeed take you up on that offer—to ask questions and get evidence as to your whereabouts over the past few weeks.”

  “And…what about the selling? The pills…?”

  “Yeah, that will be covered, too,” Rachel said, almost apologetically.

  She almost hated to leave the interrogation on this note, but she’d been around enough criminals (and addicts, for that matter) to know when the well of useful information had been exhausted. She was all but certain that Harry Bentley was not their killer and to spend any more time on him would be a waste.

  She gave him a small, sympathetic nod and then stepped out into the hallway. Jack followed and when he closed the door behind him, he placed his hands on his hips and let out a deep sigh.

  “Well, that was unexpected,” he said. “And if I’m being honest, a little anticlimactic.”

  “Yeah, but we should still have the police look his place over. Especially that shed in the back.”

  “And what about us? What do we do in the meantime?”

  She opened her mouth to answer before she realized she didn’t have one. She supposed they could collaborate with Governor Young’s aides to see if they could find any severe red flags—suspects that had caused the governor grievances and issues before. But even that seemed like a useless road to pursue for now.

  “I hate to say that I have no idea,” she admitted.

  “That’s a first.”

  “How about you?”

  “Well, the coroner said there were trace amounts of Rohypnol in Madeline Young. We could run a search in the criminal database for Rohypnol, I suppose. Maybe tag up with Young’s aides to see if we can help with their background checks, too.”

  “I’m good with any of that,” she said. “Let’s just…let’s get out of here and get to work.”

  Jack didn’t argue the point as they started toward the bullpen area to initiate the remainder of Harry Bentley’s part in all of this. She was glad…because honestly, she was starting to understand why she felt the need to close this case as soon as possible. The faster they moved and the more urgent it seemed, the less she thought of Alex Lynch; but even then, as they started out on their next step of the case, she could feel him lurking, always in the back of her mind like a ghost that just wouldn’t stop rattling its chains.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  He sipped from his lukewarm lavender tea while he studied. He had a modest little set-up—a basic laptop and an old iPad, angled slightly apart from one another. The laptop screen showed a Facebook page, while the iPad was currently showing the same TikTok clip on a loop. He’d been sitting there for about an hour, scanning the profiles, studying the faces and the bios.

  He supposed it was sort of like hunting, though he’d never been a fan of the sport—not that he even considered it a sport, really.

  He’d probably seen at least five hundred different faces…women between the ages of eighteen and sixty. Using dating apps would have made his selection process a bit easier but the way he saw it, there was something a little desperate about dating apps. If he were to choose his next victim from a dating app, he would be sort of cheating. They’d be people that were already looking for attention, people that were seeking out someone to notice them.

  But going about it this way, his victim would never suspect a thing.

  They never did.

  He was quite sure he had his next victim narrowed down among three people: two women and a man. The women were middle-aged and pretty in their own way. One had the look of a woman that was more accustomed to the finer things in life, which made her very appealing. The man was thirty-two years old and, according to his Facebook profile and several TikTok posts from a few weeks ago, had just come out as gay. So he’d clearly be looking for some sort of acknowledgement and affection.

  But the more he thought about it, the less attractive the gay man became. He had nothing against homosexuals at all. In fact, the reason he was close to ruling the gay man out was because he saw what the man had done as incredibly brave. It would be a shame to kill a man when he was on the threshold of discovering something new about himself.

  So that took him down to two—a brunette from D.C. and a redhead from just outside of the city. And, like the others, they were both linked in a way that only he knew. He’d weeded them out carefully, selecting ones he’d already had in mind.

  These weren’t random…though he thought the cops might see them as such.

  No, they were connected to him, whether they knew it or not.

  He was just about to start looking through their photos and profile information on all the social media platforms they had but he was distracted by a somber and faint voice from behind him.

  He was sitting in his little cubby between the kitchen and living room—the only place in his small house that could properly serve as an office of any kind. The voice was coming from the TV, a local male news anchor with a deep and polished voice.

  “…identified as Governor Young’s daughter, Madeline. We’ve just learned that the body was discovered three days ago but the governor’s family has understandably done their best to keep it out of the news.”

  He got up out of his chair and stormed into the living room. The little flat screen was showing aerial footage of a construction site. It looked slightly different than when he’d been there nineteen days ago, but he recognized it easily enough. He could see the area where the coffin had been uncovered, though it appeared as if it had already been filled back in. It stuck out pretty obviously in the overhead shot.

  “What we know for certain,” the reporter went on, “is that the body of Madeline Young was discovered by construction workers on the site you’re now seeing on your screens. Reports are flying in quickly, as this news just broke, but some are saying she was buried in a container of some kind, though we aren’t sure about that. We can only speculate as to—”

  He shut the TV off, using the remote on his armchair. He then threw the remote control across the room. The clatter and cracking noises it made as it struck the wall were delightful. One of the batteries rolled toward him, stopping just a few inches away from his feet.

  He was furious…devastated.

  He never wanted his work to be discovered. He never wanted his victims to be found. That wasn’t what this was all about. He didn’t want to be in the news. He didn’t give a damn about what it might do in terms of getting caught. No…it was just the publicity of it all that irritated him. He didn’t want people thinking he’d done something for attention or for the grandeur that national news provided these days.

  He’d been so careful. He’d not left a single clue, certain that the body would eventually be covered up by another ghastly condominium complex. And if that had happened, the body would never have been found.

  “The governor’s daughter…” he said. He mulled it over, shrugged, and then started to pick up the mess of his broken remote control. “The governor’s daughter.”

  He tossed the broken remote shards into the trash and reclaimed his seat behind the laptop and iPad. He sat quietly for a while, not speaking, not moving. Without the TV giving its nonsensical noise in the background anymore, the house was deadly quiet.

  He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, thinking. All he knew was that the blood-red colors of dusk had settled in just after he’d thrown away the remote, filtering in through his blinds. And when he started looking back through the profiles and pictures again, it was night.

  He scrolled with new purpose now. One of them had been found. He had more work to do, and now, because of the fluke discovery of the governor’s daughter, he needed to work faster.

  This body being found…it messed things up.

  But maybe that was for the best. Maybe he could learn something from it.

  And maybe he’d find ways to be even more careful with the next one…and the one after that and the one after that.

  And then, he stopped scrolling, smiling at the iPad screen.

  He’d made his decision. Chuckling softly, he eyed his next victim and started making plans.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Rachel had been surprised by just how eager Governor Young’s aides had been to share their information. But before she even had a chance to comment on this to Jack, she understood why. She heard murmurs of it in the station all around them and then, when she checked her phone, it was right there in the news.

  Someone had leaked the story about Madeline Young’s death. No one had all of the verified details, but it was more than enough to have Governor Young’s employees up in arms. In terms of the case, the breaking news really meant nothing. If anything, it might even help in terms of public outcry and a reliance on witnesses that they may never have thought of otherwise.

  The news broke right around seven in the evening, and Rachel had the files the governor’s aides had been looking at twenty minutes later. She started reading through them while Jack used the local PD’s servers to look for crimes within the past year involving the drugging and abduction of women.

  Because of her training at Quantico, Rachel wasn’t surprised to find that the list Governor Young’s people sent her was rather long. The trick was to weed through and eliminate entries that were a far cry from murder. For instance—the nineteen-year-old college student that had thrown two raw eggs at Governor Young’s car a few months ago was not going to be their killer. But the man that had been arrested for almost breaking into Young’s garage during Christmas would be worth a closer look.

  After just fifteen minutes of weeding out the more harmless candidates, she found herself looking at six potential people. This list of six was quickly knocked down to five when she realized that one of them was currently doing jailtime for the attempted murder of a policeman.

  She and Jack were sitting in a rather large office at the local police station—a room that was apparently in the middle of a very lazy and haphazard renovation. The desk was the only stable thing in the room, and there was a stack of boxes in the right corner that nearly touched the ceiling. They’d left the door open, and it was through this door that a familiar face entered. She recognized him as the chief they’d spoken to at the worksite. This time, now that they weren’t in such a frantic rush, she took the time to notice the last name pinned above his breast on a gold badge: Hunt.

 

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