Her Grave Secrets (Rogue River #3)(3)

“My mother was hurt too,” added Stevie. “Roy, her, and my dad had been friends for decades. When I went so long without hearing from him, and one of the last things he’d told me was that he wanted to retire, I finally accepted that meant he’d packed up and left for a beach in Mexico.”

“Not in Mexico,” Zane muttered. He parked the Solitude police car and the two of them sat quietly, studying the one-level home.

Zane had been right about the weeds. Even with the county’s long dry spell, the weeds had taken over, stretching up to over two feet in height. They got out of the car and approached the front door. Stevie tried the handle. Still locked. Zane stepped to the side and cupped his hands around his eyes to peek through a front window. “Can’t see much. Pretty dark inside.” He looked at Stevie. “Ready?” He nodded at the heavy battering ram in her hand.

“Give me a hand,” she said. “I wish there were a different way.”

“I’ve tried to find keys. I’ve asked everyone, and he doesn’t have any family who might have a set. We’ve got no choice.”

Zane grabbed the two handles on the opposite side of the ram and braced his legs. “Wait,” he said. “Can you swing your side with just your right hand?”

Stevie took her left hand out of the handle and used it to simply balance the back half of the ram. “Good idea.” She mentally kicked herself for nearly abusing the hand that’d been pierced by a bullet two months ago. The truth was, it’d healed so well she often forgot about the injury until she lifted or pushed with heavy force. Then she paid for her negligence with three days of pain.

They swung the ram back and slammed it into the front door next to the knob. The door flew open. The jolt shot up her right arm and into her shoulder, making her thankful she’d not used her left hand.

Stale air blew out of the home. It smelled dry and dusty and rotten.

“He didn’t have pets, right?” Zane asked, setting the ram down outside the door.

“Oh, God. No. Can you imagine?”

“Hello?” Zane shouted into the house.

Silence.

They gloved up and slipped on booties, and Stevie followed Zane into the dark. On the left was an entrance to a kitchen and to the right was a long hallway she knew led to a few bedrooms and bathrooms. They moved straight back into the living area, which was lined with big windows and a slider that gave a nice view of a forested backyard and small deck. She’d been in Roy’s house dozens of times, and his absence was palpable. He’d been one of her father’s closest friends, earning the title of uncle from Stevie and her three siblings. He’d married once, long ago, but it hadn’t lasted, and he had looked out for Stevie’s family as if they were his own.

“That you guys?” Zane pointed at a photo collage on the wall.

“Yes,” she said simply, biting her cheek to keep back the tears. The pictures in the collage were old and had paled from exposure to light. She looked about six, which made her brother James about ten, and her sister, Carly, about four. Bruce hadn’t been born yet. Roy had accompanied her family on a camping trip to Crater Lake and though the intense blue of the water had faded in the photos, the essence of family still leaped out. Stevie looked away and moved into the kitchen, where the rotting smell was stronger.

She opened a door under the sink. “Ugh. The garbage needs to go out.”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll let you have that particular job.”

“Do we need to get Rogue County’s forensics team in here?” Zane asked. “Or ask for a state team?”

“I don’t know.” Stevie looked around the kitchen. It was clean and neat, but seriously out of date. Nothing had been changed in at least twenty years. “We’ll send what we need to their labs, but I think you and I can handle the evidence collection, right?”

“Depends what we find,” answered Zane. “One look at Roy’s scene on the riverbank this morning, and I knew we needed help to process it. Part of the curse of a small-town department.”

“But that’s also the good part. The fact that we rarely need a forensics team shows that our crime is manageable. Trust me. Daily multiple murders aren’t glamorous.” Her five years with the LAPD had left many mental scars, images she could never forget but could only hope would fade over time.

Zane glanced around the neat kitchen. “I don’t see anything odd in here.”

Stevie opened the refrigerator with one gloved finger. “The utility bills must be piling up. I bet they’re about ready to cut the power.” She checked the date on the milk carton: June 3. “This matches up with when he vanished.” A pile of dark brownish-green slime greeted her when she slid open the produce bin. “Yuck. Let’s check the other rooms.”

The bedrooms were sparse and neat. In the master bedroom, the bed was unmade and a single toothbrush stood in a cup near the sink. Zane peeked in the drawers of the dresser and pronounced them relatively full. The closet held six pairs of shoes, from boots to flip-flops. “Hard to tell, but I don’t see signs that he’d packed for a trip. All I see are indicators that he intended to stick around.”

“So someone grabbed him from here or met up with him somewhere else,” Stevie stated.

“But where’s his truck? It hasn’t turned up abandoned anywhere.”