Hannah typed the last word and hit Save on Chrissy Boyd’s file. The chatty little girl couldn’t be more different from Sheldon, but her chatter had revealed nothing about her mother’s killer.
She and her mom had shared burgers and fries from Gus’s Grill in town for dinner, and then Chrissy had fallen asleep on the couch in front of the TV. She thought she heard her mother talking with someone, a man, but she also told Hannah about an elaborate dream with a unicorn flying over Dead Falls.
Kids’ fertile imaginations and their inability to distinguish between reality and fiction made them difficult to treat in a therapeutic setting. A therapist had to be careful not to put words in a child’s mouth.
Hannah snapped her laptop closed, eased off the couch and stretched her arms above her head. She dropped to the floor and gathered the dolls and furniture Chrissy had used to demonstrate what had happened on the last night of her mother’s life.
As she cleaned up the rest of the toys, she cupped the little magnetic train she’d retrieved for Sheldon. He’d barely touched the toy he claimed he couldn’t live without two nights ago, but Hannah had unraveled the reason why he wanted to return home—and it wasn’t for the train cars.
He’d discussed a secret hiding place in his mom’s trailer with her. The poor thing thought his mom might be hiding there. Hannah wasn’t absolutely sure whether this hiding place existed or not, so she’d keep the police in the dark for now.
But that didn’t mean she and Jed couldn’t search for it tonight. Sheldon had mentioned his mother putting stuff in the wall. His imagination could be just as flighty as Chrissy’s, but at least his account didn’t include rainbow unicorns.
Jed had offered to pick her up tonight, so she wanted to get out of her schoolmarm outfit to make more of an impression. What kind of impression, she didn’t have a handle on yet. His initial anger toward her had softened because it hadn’t really been about anger. He’d wanted to push her away, pretend they didn’t have a connection. Did he think his imprisonment would damage her in some way?
She’d known the charges against him had been a farce all along. What she hadn’t discerned was that her father could’ve been behind the setup, but now she was determined to discover how that happened. She had to do it for the girl she’d been eight years ago.
She locked her office behind her and traipsed up to the main house, eyeing the new porch lights above her. What else could she do to make sure nobody trespassed on her property again to slink around? The person last night had to have been the killer. How else would he know about the dead birds? The police hadn’t released that information—they didn’t even know the birds held any significance until Jed told them.
Maybe there was some drug gang out there that used finches for some reason. She snorted as she pushed through her front door. A drug cartel with a finch for a mascot didn’t exactly inspire fear.
But the finch last night had terrified her.
An hour later, Hannah had showered and changed into a pair of light-colored jeans and a plain blue T-shirt. If they were going to be searching for secret compartments in Zoey’s mobile home, she realized she should look ready for work—not like a prima donna. She shoved her feet into some canvas slip-ons to complete her dressed-down, unsexy look.
She set down Siggy’s bowl with a fish dinner in it just as Jed’s truck pulled up to the house. She sniffed her fingers and growled at Siggy. “You and your fish.”
She opened the front door and waved at Jed, and then slipped back inside to wash her hands at the kitchen sink and squirt some lotion into her palm.
Patting the side pocket of her purse to make sure she had Zoey’s keys, she strode out of the house and toward Jed’s idling truck. She stepped onto the running board and slid into the passenger seat. “Hey.”
Why did she suddenly feel like a teenager being picked up for a date?
“Hey, you.” He maneuvered around her car in the circular drive, and the truck bounced as they headed for the road that ran in front of the property. “How’d the sessions go? And I don’t mean any particulars.”
“The sessions went as well as can be expected when dealing with two traumatized children.” She hugged her purse to her chest. “But I do have one detail to share with you, and I don’t think it’s out of line for me to do so.”
He raised his eyebrows. “If you say so.”
“Remember the other night when Sheldon ran back to his home?”
“How could I forget it?” He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. “He called me ‘the bad man.’”
She waved her hand in the air to brush away the unpleasantness. “Do you remember why he made his way back there?”
“No.” He lifted and dropped his shoulders quickly.
“He claimed it was because he left behind a favored toy, but I found out the real reason today.”
“Yeah?” He paused while she sat there thinking about the ethics of revealing this information. “Are you gonna make me guess?”
She puffed out a breath. It was ethical if it helped nab Zoey’s killer. “He said his mom had a secret compartment in the trailer.”
“Maybe the police already located it and didn’t find anything.” He wagged his finger between the two of them. “Neither one of us knows what Seattle Homicide is investigating. We haven’t seen their files. We don’t know what avenues they’re searching.”
“I do. They’re investigating the drug angle and that’s it.” She turned toward him, curling one leg beneath her. “I mean, that might be it, but they’re not thinking outside the box at all. I would expect that from the Dead Falls Sheriff’s Department, but you’d think Seattle PD would have more tools in their box.”
“Every department wants a quick solve rate. That’s why I got railroaded.” He turned down the road leading to the mobile home park.
The homes were spaced far enough apart to yield no witnesses to Zoey’s murder. Nobody had seen anyone unusual coming or going from her trailer, but they’d claimed noise from her neck of the park wasn’t unusual.
Jed’s lights blazed across the front of Zoey’s trailer and the bedraggled yellow tape that had sunk to the ground. He pulled up to where he’d parked the previous time they’d driven to this spot.
Hannah dragged the key chain from her purse and said, “Let’s get this show on the road. I’m going to leave my bag in your truck.”
Their shoes crunched the gravel up to the door, and Hannah shook out the key and unlocked it. “There’s a lamp here.”
A soft yellow glow spilled over the living room, and everything was as she’d left it last time.
Jed pulled on a pair of gloves. “I don’t need my prints to magically appear at this crime scene—or any other.”
“I get it. You have a look around. I’m going to search for the secret hiding place.”
He said, “In the wall.”
“That’s what Sheldon said.” In the center of the room, she turned in a circle, eyeing the walls of the mobile home. They consisted of some kind of vinyl paneling. Zoey hadn’t bothered decorating with any art or even school pictures.
A few large pieces of furniture hugged the walls—a brown velvet couch, its cushions still tossed, was on one side of the room facing a flat-screen TV. Next to the TV, a metal shelf that looked as if it belonged in a garage contained stacks of papers and napkins and ketchup packets from take-out joints around the island—including Gus’s Grill. But Zoey and Sheldon had eaten pizza her last night instead of burgers.
A heavy, dark end table squatted next to the couch, the shade on the lamp perched upon it askew. A bong sat on the other end table, brown residue clouding the glass. The cops hadn’t even bothered to take it, but they wouldn’t have left any drugs.
The mismatched bits of furniture didn’t leave a lot of empty wall space, so Hannah started with the wall next to the kitchen. She swept a long-handled wooden spoon from the kitchen counter that separated the living room from the kitchen and began tapping the handle against the wall.
It gave off the deep bass sound of an empty space, which indicated a gap of some sort between the paneling and the wall of the trailer. She tapped the wall from just above her head down to her feet. She and Zoey had been about the same height, and she doubted Zoey would’ve chosen a hiding place she couldn’t reach without a step stool.
She continued her search to the end table with the drug paraphernalia and knelt on the table to tap the wall above it. She skipped over the couch, which had a window above it, and bypassed the crooked lamp. She started again on the other side of the lamp. The noises she got in return didn’t indicate anything different or unusual from any of the spaces.
As she crossed from the other side of the room, Jed emerged from the back of the home and asked, “Anything yet, Sherlock Holmes?”
“Nothing. You?” She turned toward him, clutching the spoon in her hand.
“What happened to her?” He swept his arm across the disheveled room. “Zoey did well in school, had normal parents—at least as normal as anyone else’s—had hopes and dreams. How did it all end here in this mess?”
“She fell apart after the trial. Most people around here thought the rape changed her—as it would have if it had actually happened. She started using drugs, and it was all downhill from there.” Hannah twirled the spoon in her fingers like a mini baton. “We stopped speaking after the trial. By the time I came back to the island, she had already had Sheldon and was on a downward slide.”
Jed’s jaw tightened into a hard line. “Maybe she turned to drugs to assuage her guilt—if she ever felt any. Sounds like she didn’t if she were still pointing me out to her son as the bad guy.”
“I can’t tell you what was going on in her head.” She waved the spoon in the air. “I’m going to check the other wall, though.”
“I’ll have a look in the kitchen.” He swung open the first cupboard he got to and swore. “How did she feed her kid?”
Hannah turned her back on Jed’s frustration and started tapping again. She’d covered a few feet toward the TV when the tenor of the noise changed. “Jed? I think I found something.”
She struck the spoon against the panel on the left, the right and then the middle. “This middle panel sounds different—and it looks loose. It moved when I tapped it.”
Jed came up behind her. “Which one?”
“This one.” She pounded her fist against it, and the panel definitely moved.
“It’s missing nails on the bottom portion.” He dug his fingernails into the gaps between the panels and shifted the middle one to the side, revealing a dark crevasse. “Bingo.”
Hannah dug her cell phone from her back pocket and turned on the flashlight. “How far does it go down?”
Peering inside the gap, Jed said, “There’s a box in there, but you’re going to have to retrieve it. My arm is too big to fit.”
Jed scooted over and drew Hannah in front of him.
She’d been right about the height of the hiding place. It met her at eye-level. She stood on tiptoe and plunged her hand into the space. Her fingers brushed a cushioned lid and then crawled down the side to wedge beneath the bottom of the box.
She grasped the box and pulled it up, but it got stuck. “Zoey must’ve had more panels out when she placed the box in there because it won’t fit through this hole.”
Jed curled his fingers around the edge of the next panel, then yanked, and the panel cracked. He did the same thing to the other side, creating a gaping gash in the wall. “There you go.”
She lifted the upholstered brown box from the hole. Gold-embossed curlicues decorated the sides. “Looks like a cigar box or something.”
Holding the box in both hands as if it were a sacred offering, Hannah carried it to the sagging couch and sank onto the edge. With Jed hovering over her shoulder, she flipped up the lid with her thumbs.
Jed drew in a breath next to her. “That’s a lot of cash. Maybe this was a drug deal gone bad.”
Hannah could barely hear him over the roaring in her ears as she hooked a finger around the metal band of a watch and lifted it from the box, where it dangled and glittered in front of her eyes.
Jed whistled. “Expensive watch.”
Hannah cranked her head to the side and blinked. “It was my father’s.”