Pretty Little Wife(68)

“There’s nothing around here for miles.” The kind of place where a person could scream and not be heard. Run and not get away.

A chilling thought that refused to leave her mind. Truth was nothing about the area said fun and camping. This looked like miles of untamed trees and wilderness.

“It’s creepy as hell.” Pete shook his head. “Like a setting out of a horror movie. Without evidence, all we can guess is he used it for hunting.”

“I don’t think so.” In her gut, she knew this location was a much bigger piece of the puzzle than that. “Who owns the property?”

“We’re checking. Apparently, the records are a bit tangled. There’s a corporation that leads to another one. It will take some time to trace the paperwork and tax records.”

In other words, a place someone wanted to keep as a secret.

The local police chief joined them, along with some of his people. All men. Ginny didn’t have time for a jurisdictional discussion or a debate about who was in charge. She plunged right in.

She nodded in the direction of the double doors, with their chipping paint, and the shiny chain keeping them shut. “What’s in the barn?”

The chief shrugged. “We were waiting for you to go in.”

“Open it up.”

An officer appeared with a bolt cutter. He and Pete worked on the lock—one that looked much newer than the rest of the place. They had it off and bagged up for prints a second later. The doors creaked as they pulled them open. Then everyone froze.

Officers looked at one another. One took photos.

Ginny broke the silence. “Aaron’s SUV.”

“The license matches,” Pete said.

Ginny could hear the police chief talking about forensics and cordoning off the area. She listened while she walked around the car, using her flashlight to cut through the darkness of the interior of the barn and look in the SUV’s windows.

“See if we can get any tracks coming in or out,” she said to the chief in an effort to reestablish jurisdictional boundaries. “Set a perimeter, then I need to know what’s in every direction. Gather video from any business anywhere around here. We need to see cars coming in and around, going back as far as we can get it.” She glanced at Pete. “Open the back of the SUV.”

“Maybe there’s another cabin nearby,” Pete said.

Owen shook his head as he opened the back of the SUV. “Doubt it.”

The smell hit her. The unmistakable scent of decomposing flesh. She didn’t need to look inside to know what they’d found. “We have a body.”

The blanket covered the person’s face. Pete used the long end of his small flashlight to peel back the corner of the material. She spied a hand and a thin gold wedding band.

She needed to wait for the official identification, but she knew. Aaron. It had to be. The body was strangely in good condition.

Sadness hit her first. The loss of life. The utter waste. Then she thought about the girls and the breach of trust, and a range of different sensations slammed into her. Anger. Disappointment. Relief that he was gone.

“Ma’am? Sir?” An unfamiliar voice called out to her from the cabin’s front porch and the police chief walked toward the house in response.

Ginny lost track of everyone then. Her thoughts scattered. She couldn’t take death in stride. It demanded at least a second of quiet contemplation, and the crowd made that tough. “Not now.”

“Ginny.” Coming out of the cabin, the chief jogged toward her. “You need to come in the cabin.”

“Why?” She glanced up and saw the chief’s pale face and the stress pulling at the corners of his mouth. An alarm flashed in her head. “What is it?”

“You need to see for yourself.”





Chapter Forty-Four


SHERIFF DEPUTIES USHERED LILA AND JARED BACK INTO THE office through a gauntlet of reporters. No one seemed to know what had happened, but they guessed something had. Clearly the word had gone out that the story was here in the sheriff’s office and not at Lila’s house.

Samantha. The podcast. Ryan’s involvement. Aaron’s phone. Lila had a million questions. They slammed into her head, and she fought to categorize them. To sort them out so she could handle them. And that was before half the office went rushing out of there in search of . . . something.

Hours later they were all back in the same place—Ginny’s turf. Lila and Jared sat in a small conference room. Not the place where they’d been questioned. This one had comfortable chairs and a round table. Coffee and water on one side of the room and a wall of windows across the back. The glass walls gave them a view of the main room where the investigators and others sat. Rows of desks and computers. Personal photos and a wall that looked like a call sheet of some sort. Aaron’s name was right there, under Ginny’s.

Tobias stepped out for his usual round of recon. He could sweet-talk most people into getting the information he needed. This trip took longer, but she finally saw him around a corner, coming out of the big office at the end of the hall that belonged to the sheriff.

She sat on her hands, forcing her body to still and not jump on him when he walked into the room. “What did you find out?”

He closed the door behind him and took a seat at the table next to Lila. “Ginny is on the way back.”