What Lies in the Woods(43)

I tapped through the menus until I found missing women in Washington state. It loaded slowly—dozens and then hundreds of missing women reduced to tiny thumbnails of smiling faces. I made a noise in the back of my throat, guttural.

“It’s kind of overwhelming,” Ethan said.

There were numbers under each photograph. 1292DFWA. 2546DFVA. “What do these mean?” I asked, my heart pounding. I’d seen those numbers before.

“Case numbers,” Ethan said. “The DF means ‘disappeared female’ and then there’s a state code, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure about the numbering system.”

There had been three numbers on the sticky note in Liv’s room. She’d been looking at these same photographs. Persephone was one of these faces.

“You know,” Ethan said carefully, “there’s another piece to the missing-summer theory.”

I looked up from the sea of photographs. He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, gaze fixed on my face.

“Stahl dumped the first couple bodies in places where they were found quickly, but after that he started hiding them,” he said. “That’s part of why the six-victim number is almost certainly incomplete. Part of the evidence against him was that he was seen in the woods half a mile from the third victim’s body, a few days before she was found. Months after her death. Which suggests that he was going back to visit the bodies. Probably a way of reliving the kills.”

I shuddered. “As if he wasn’t awful enough already.”

“The thing is, nothing about your attack makes sense as part of his pattern. Unless—”

My skin prickled as I realized what he was talking about. “Unless I wasn’t a target,” I said. “I was a witness. He wasn’t there for me at all.”

“He was there to visit a body,” Ethan said.

Not just a body.

Persephone.





From the moment I saw the numbers on Ethan’s screen, I knew I had to go back to Liv’s room. And from that moment, I constructed reasons I couldn’t. The police were there. Marcus and Kimiko wouldn’t want to be disturbed. The cops had probably cleared out everything anyway.

Liv had found her. I could do the same. I didn’t need to go back to that place—go back to where Liv wasn’t anymore. Face her parents.

Lie to them.

Keeping secrets from the police was one thing. But the idea of looking Kimiko in the eye and keeping silent about the thing that might explain what had happened to Liv …

I couldn’t hurt them like that, I told myself, and what I really meant was that I couldn’t bear the guilt.

For the next several days, I dug through missing-persons reports, checking for anything that might connect them to Chester or Stahl. I watched endless hours of TV as I skimmed the surface of a hundred tragedies, surfacing only to steal a few minutes of restless sleep, to shower.

And to eat, which I only remembered to do because Ethan kept turning up at my door. Sometimes I shut the door on him. A few times I let him in, and we sat together while we ate. We didn’t really talk—he managed to restrain himself from asking questions, somehow, and when he did speak it was to update me about what he knew. They’d searched the lake but not turned up the gun. The Barneses’ revolver was indeed missing, though, and probably lost in the silt among the abandoned bike wheels and random bits of junk that made metal detectors useless. Liv’s body had been shipped off so that a proper autopsy could be conducted, but no one was expecting to find anything but the obvious.

Even when we sat in silence, those few minutes that punctuated the day were easier than the hours that stretched on alone. I found myself listening to Aftershocks, scrubbing past the descriptions of the crimes—which were mercifully brief—and listening to Ethan unfold the stories of what came after. It was his sincerity that sold it, I thought. During the interviews I could imagine those sincere eyes of his, inviting everyone from grieving mothers to remorseful killers to bare their souls for him.

He was good at his job. It was almost disappointing.

By the end of the week I was forced to admit that Ethan had been right. The task was too immense for me to figure out on my own with only the Doe Network profiles to go on. But Liv had known. Liv had found her.

I knew what I had to do, but I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I got myself cleaned up most of the way to respectable, even remembering to dab concealer over the dark circles under my eyes. My hair was getting shaggy at the back, but I finger-combed it into something resembling order and headed outside, my gait stiff.

As I unlocked the car I glanced across the street and paused, faint unease scratching at the back of my mind. There was a black Toyota Camry parked across the street. It had been there yesterday, too. And the day before.

It was just a car. Nothing weird.

I started up my engine. In the rearview mirror, I watched as a man crossed the parking lot from the small park near the Corner Store, where there were a few benches and picnic tables. All of which had a clear view of the motel.

I couldn’t make out much in the mirror. He was white, midthirties, with medium-brown hair cut a bit long and mirrored sunglasses. I’d seen him before, hadn’t I? The last few days, at the diner and the gas station. He’d been hanging around.

The image of the boy in the striped shirt popped into my mind again. AJ Stahl.