Beneath Blackwater River Leslie Wolfe (me reader txt) 📖

them under the bed, her feet bare and chilly from the contact with the cold floor. She wondered where her socks had landed. Then she looked up and saw Elliot’s blue eyes looking straight at her with concern.

“What’s up?” she asked, patting him on the arm. “Thanks for being here for me,” she added, before he could answer.

“Anytime,” he replied with a quick smile and a nod. “Scott’s still in the wind. Logan came by this morning. He’s dispatching a K9 unit; they’ll bring a dog from Redding.”

She groaned, accepting his arm for support while she slipped on her shoes without undoing their laces. “Totally pointless. He won’t stay on foot for long. I think, by now, he’s long gone. How about the money?”

“It was exactly where Nicole said it would be, at the lockbox in the Greyhound terminal. Almost half a million dollars.”

“For one kidnapping?” Kay asked, heading toward the exit. “Nah… That’s too much for a single cover-up. Whoever does this once will do it again. Being a dirty cop is a state of mind, not a one-time accident. We should look at all the open cases he worked, and all his collars.”

“He’s been busy as a hound in flea season, that’s for sure,” Elliot said, his Texas drawl more prevalent when he used phrases that reminded him of home. In his voice, the disgust for Scott was unmistakable. “I need to run a quick search in the system for a vehicle. A witness saw Kirsten, the missing kid from Oregon, climb into a Lincoln the day she disappeared.”

“I have to check these messages,” Kay said, remembering the harmony of chimes that had woken her up. One was informing her of the K9 unit dispatch for Scott. Another was an update on Nicole’s status, all good news. “Oh,” she reacted, after opening up a text message from Dr. Whitmore that sent her pulse racing. “DNA results are back. The girl beneath Blackwater River was Shelley Harrelson’s daughter… but also Bill Caldwell’s.”

“She was Rose Harrelson after all?”

“Yup. And through some weird twist of fate and criminal wrongdoing, she was also Alyssa Caldwell.”

He took off his hat for a moment, long enough to run his fingers through his unruly hair. “I’ve only been gone a day, for crying out loud. Seems like I missed a truckload of action. How the heck can that happen? And what does it mean? It changes everything.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Kay replied, still thinking of all the implications, what that meant for their case. The two cases, the Harrelson kidnapping from fourteen years ago and the Alyssa Caldwell murder had been joined into one multifaceted mystery that was far from being unraveled. There had to be a connection between the two crimes; there always was. “We’ll sort it out, partner. I believe I know where to start.”

One quick glance at Elliot’s confused face brought a silent chuckle on her lips as they exited the hospital, and he led the way to his SUV. Her arm was in a sling, worn on top of a disposable hospital gown she’d tucked in her jeans. The bright sunlight, warming her face despite the chilly, northerly wind, made her painfully self-conscious. She cringed, realizing how she must’ve looked. “It’s been a busy day,” she admitted, “and I’ve been in the same clothes for more than one rumba. Could you please drop me off at my house?”

“Sure,” he said, leaving the parking lot and turning onto the street. “Then what did you have in mind?”

“I think Bill Caldwell needs to answer two questions,” she replied, staring out the window at the peaks of Mount Chester contoured in black rock and white snow against the azure sky. That view never got old. “He should tell us the story behind his relationship with Shelley. A witness—Martha, you remember her, right? She said Shelley might’ve been raped and that Rose was the child that came from that ordeal.”

“Okay, that’s a new development,” Elliot said, shooting her a quick glance. “You’ve really been busy.”

“Second question is, how did Rose Harrelson become Alyssa? What happened to Alyssa? Does that make Bill Rose’s kidnapper?” She asked the questions as they came to her mind with the clarity of a new day and the new evidence brought by the DNA results. The Lego pieces were falling into place again. This time, the structure they built was more solid and led to one conclusion: Bill Caldwell was at the center of the entire case, and he had questions he needed to answer.

“That’s more like five questions,” Elliot replied, pulling into her driveway and stopping behind her SUV. “Anything else?”

“I’m starving,” she said, feeling optimistic for the first time since she’d set foot beneath Blackwater River Falls.

Climbing out of Elliot’s car, she headed for the door. He must have watched her struggle to open the door, because he killed the engine, then came to lend her a hand. A few minutes later, they emerged out of the house, Kay’s appetite suppressed by having seen the pool of blood dried up on the kitchen floor, stirring up unwanted memories, old and new. The room bore testimony of the struggle it had hosted the night before. Blood smears on the walls and the table, shattered furniture, the side door hanging on one hinge, and scattered dishes were telling a story of a terrifying night she could never forget.

Leaving it behind while she struggled to draw breath and keep her eyes dry, she climbed into Elliot’s SUV, trying to wash down the knot in her throat with a few gulps of water from a bottle she found in the cup holder between the seats.

He drove toward Caldwell Farms, while Kay jumped into the passenger seat and ran the search for the gray Lincoln Continental on the laptop, typing with one hand and feeling shots of pain whenever she moved or twisted her back even a fraction of an inch.

There were no Lincoln Continentals registered in their area. There were plenty