The Devil's Daughter (Hidden Sins #1)(73)
A man’s voice murmured in the background—Vic—and she said, “Why don’t we meet you here? We can compare notes and get on the same page.”
“Sounds good.” He craved the sight of her, even in the midst of their current storm. Maybe because of their current storm. “I’ll see you soon.” And hopefully tomorrow they’d be one step closer to bringing Elouise and Neveah’s killer to justice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“That key is the, well, the key.” Eden followed Zach into the courthouse. She tapped her chest another time. “Martha didn’t want to talk about it, and it’s the one thing that sets the girls apart from your average cult member. And she dodged the subject every time I brought it up.” She’d been given it after the Persephone ritual, but Eden had left Elysia before she’d been introduced to the so-called mysteries. She’d her doubts that she would have been even if she’d stayed, though. Beth and Jon hadn’t known anything about the key, and if every girl who was buried alive got one, Beth herself would have one already.
“It’s the one thing that sets you apart, too.”
She didn’t look back to where Vic brought up their merry band of law enforcement. “It’s linked up with Persephone, though hell if I could tell you how.” Maybe it’s the key to the underworld? But if that’s the case, why would they glorify it with a tattoo? Martha preaches that the underworld is dirty and wrong and something to escape. She shook her head. “We don’t have enough information.” For all her goals of sliding back into Elysian life and mining the people there for everything they knew, it hadn’t worked out like that at all. Too much had changed. She wasn’t one of them any more than she was a citizen of Clear Springs. She didn’t have a place.
Zach led the way down a hallway to a door with the plaque declaring it Judge Tanner’s office. He glanced over his shoulder. “Let me do the talking.”
He hadn’t said much since he’d shown up, but she could see how the stress was getting to him. She didn’t blame him. It was making her tweaky, too. When they opened the door, the man behind the desk looked up. “Zach Owens.”
“Judge.”
The judge seemed more bear than man. She suspected when he stood, he’d be at Vic’s height, nearly six and a half feet tall, but where her partner was on the leaner side, this man was wide enough that he might have to turn to walk through doors. Combine that with a full head of silver hair that blended in with a beard that hit the middle of his chest, and the flannel that would do any lumberjack proud, and he was a little overwhelming. He eyed them. “You brought me the feds as a present. And I thought we were friends.”
“I’m here on business.”
“I figured.” He huffed out a breath and looked at his watch. “I’m off the clock in exactly thirty minutes, and I have an appointment with my butternut squash. Make it quick.”
Eden blinked. She should know better by now than to take people on their surface looks, but the judge seemed more like a man who’d go out and take down a deer with his bare hands than someone who’d make appointments with butternut squash.
Zach didn’t sit down. He braced his legs shoulder-width apart and laced his hands behind his back. She doubted he realized he’d just taken an at-ease position, but once a Marine, always a Marine. He cleared his throat. “I need a warrant for DNA samples from Martha Collins and her three lieutenants—Abram, Joseph Edwards, and Lee Whitby.”
Judge Tanner didn’t seem surprised, which made her wonder if he’d known they were coming. The gossip network in small towns was intricate enough to do the CIA proud. “You have legitimate evidence to point to that commune, I’m assuming, since poking that damn hornet’s nest is going to make all our lives a damn nightmare. Martha’s rage is legendary, and she holds a grudge like nobody’s business. She might be too snooty to bring her business into Clear Springs, let alone Augusta, but she knows the law almost better than I do. You make her angry, you can be damn sure she’ll be reporting every violation she can to make life harder for your people.”
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have sufficient belief that one or all of them are connected.” He shifted his stance as if bracing for a blow. “There are marks on the bodies that could be done only by someone with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Elysia, and both girls had romantic—or at least physical—relationships with two of the suspects.” He took a deep breath. “And now there’s a third girl missing who has those same connections. If we don’t move on this, in roughly seven days she’s going to be found the same way as the first two.”
Judge Tanner looked at each of them in turn and then sat back in his chair. “Give me the file.”
Eden found herself holding her breath as he read through the evidence they’d compiled. When all was said and done, it wasn’t much. There was a lot in the way of circumstantial and not much that could conclusively point any fingers. The findings beneath Neveah’s fingernails were their first break, but they wouldn’t do a single thing if there wasn’t something to match them to. Vic could run them against the ViCAP database, as was standard with this kind of investigation, but this wasn’t some garden-variety serial killer—if there could even be said to be such a thing.