Don't Make a Sound (Sawyer Brooks #1)(57)

Malice watched Bug climb into the car and drive away, gravel popping beneath the tires.

Bug was right. She needed to calm down and get her head on straight, remember why she’d gotten involved with The Crew in the first place.

Every sexual predator out there needed to pay for what they had done, including her father.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

After leaving her uncle’s house, Sawyer drove to the area of the woods where Isabella Estrada had been found. She turned off the engine and stared straight ahead. Yellow crime scene tape still encircled the area around the tree.

She stayed seated in the car and thought about Uncle Theo, wondered if he could have been responsible for Isabella’s murder. She despised the man, and yet she didn’t think he was capable of murder. It was an instinctive feeling based on her past knowledge and experience of her uncle. Although she’d gone to his house with fire and conviction, she hadn’t expected to find anything. The pictures had been a surprise. And yet they shouldn’t have been. Maybe she was in the wrong line of work, after all. Or maybe she was blind to his faults because he was a family member. Her therapist had once told her that abuse and betrayal by someone you once trusted was often too much for the soul to bear, and so you tended to ignore it or pretend it didn’t happen. Just because she didn’t think he murdered Isabella, didn’t mean she didn’t think he should be locked up.

Sawyer pulled out her notebook and pen and wrote at the top of the first page: Who killed Isabella? She jotted down names: Uncle Theo, Jonathan Lane, a member of the Estrada family, a stranger. She put a star next to Jonathan Lane. He seemed like the obvious suspect. And he was definitely violent.

If the same person who had killed Peggy Myers and Avery James killed Isabella Estrada, it had to be someone who had lived in River Rock all these years. Or maybe they had moved away and come back.

She snorted. Everyone in River Rock could be a potential killer. For now, she would concentrate on people who lived here in town.

Many murderers, especially serial killers, had mental challenges. They had been wrongly treated by their parents or bullied in school. For that reason alone, she added Aspen Burke and Melanie Quinn to the list. As she stared at the names, her chest tightened.

Tapping her pen to her mouth, she continued to stare at the names, repeating them in her head as she thought about each person. She drew a line across Uncle Theo’s name. He was a shell of the man he used to be. He didn’t have the physical or the mental strength to commit murder. She crossed off Aspen’s name, and Melanie’s too. If she was going to keep them on the list, she might as well add Old Lady McGrady, Erika, and her husband, Bob, to the list too.

Frustrated, she ripped the list of suspects out of her notepad, crumpled it, and tossed it to the floor.

She needed to be smart. And patient. She needed to interview more people, talk to everyone in the whole damn town if she had to. Bob came to mind. She definitely wanted to have a chat with him. Maybe she would see if Melanie wanted to come along for the ride.

Tomorrow she hoped to have a chat with Chief Schneider, see if he could give her any details about the case. She also planned to fill out a report against Jonathan Lane. She was about to climb out of her car to have a look around when her cell phone buzzed. It was Aria. “Hey there,” Sawyer said.

“Oh, my God! You’re okay!”

It took Sawyer a second to remember leaving Aria a text message before she knocked on Uncle Theo’s door.

“Why didn’t you pick up my call or at least text me after you left Uncle Theo’s house?”

“I got distracted. I’m sorry.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m sitting in my car, staring at the tree where Isabella Estrada was found.”

“Oh, shit. I never asked you who was killed. I didn’t realize it was Caden’s sister.”

“Did you know her?”

“No, but I knew Caden. My friend liked him, and we hung out at his house a few times. He was a momma’s boy back then, and he wasn’t happy to learn his mom was going to have another baby.”

“When I talked to him, he came across as genuinely upset about her death.”

“I’m sure he was. I mean, that was sixteen years ago,” Aria said.

“He was in my class,” Sawyer said. “I just remember him being shy.”

“I think he was a sophomore when I was a senior in high school,” Aria told her. “I never told my friend, but he used to follow me from class to class. I have no idea how he got to his own classes on time.”

“Hmm. He’s living in Oregon. He’s engaged, and he wasn’t in town when his sister was killed.”

“Did Isabella have a boyfriend?”

“Yeah, a forty-year-old married man with two kids.”

“Dang.”

“I went to his house to talk to him,” Sawyer said. “He refused to talk to me in private and didn’t like me telling the truth in front of his wife, so he lunged at me and tried to strangle me.”

“What the fuck? Are you okay? Has he been arrested?”

“I’ll be fine, but no, he wasn’t arrested.” Sawyer took a look in the rearview mirror and brushed her fingers across the purplish dots around her throat. “Even Mom blames me for bothering him and his wife and intruding on their lives.”