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“He’s not.”
“Interesting,” Frank said, coming over to shine his flashlight through the opposite side of the car. Nothing seemed amiss inside; a folded-up newspaper on the passenger seat and an old to-go coffee cup in the holder. Nothing in the back.
“Suspect is what it is.” Nico tried the door. It was locked. “Frank, call Seth and have him pull up Mr. Rowe’s contact details from when we questioned him.”
“On it.” He whipped out his cell phone and walked away. Nico hunted around the brush edging the pavement, making a wide circle around the car, finding only what you’d expect: dirt, rocks, sticks, an old discarded gum wrapper. When he reappeared empty-handed on the other side, Frank was back. He shook his head. “No answer at Colin’s home, his shop, or on his cell.”
After a few more seconds deliberation, Nico gave him a curt nod. “Let’s search it.”
Nico used the back of his flashlight to break out a rear window while Wade watched from a few feet away, his face doused with guilt and worry. Nico recognized it. Understood it. Feared it.
“What the hell is this?” Frank exclaimed a minute later, his head buried in the trunk.
Nico launched out of the passenger seat, where he’d been rifling through paperwork in the glove compartment, to join him. Laid out before them was an open zippered case with a red suede interior. In it, sat a neat row of silver tools. Pincers, scalpels, tweezers, and pliers, plus a few Nico couldn’t name, gleamed threateningly under the harsh LED’s of their flashlights. Tucked securely behind their designated fabric loops, they almost seemed proud of their own menacing beauty. Nico felt bile rising to the back of his throat, but then his brain punched him with logic. “He’s a taxidermist. He’d need tools.”
“Okay.” Frank rooted around a paper bag where Nico assumed the case had come from. His gloved hand reemerged with a hunting knife. “How do you explain this, then?”
“Again, lots of people have hunting knives,” Nico said, though he knew his voice was losing some of its conviction.
Ever so slowly, the likelihood of Garrett being to blame for this was fading, and something far more insidious was taking its place. Nico felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up in response. Granted, the car and everything in it was circumstantial evidence, at best. It was entirely possible that Colin’s vehicle being here was merely a coincidence, nothing to do with the giant puddle of blood that Nico was doing his best not to look at. Or it was possible that the taxidermist was responsible for it, that he’d lain in wait and ambushed Lexie, hurt her, killed her. Nico gulped hard and let the thought pass by. It was also still possible—however faintly—that her disappearance was Garrett’s handy work, and they were wasting valuable time entertaining a random tangent with no link to the crime whatsoever, assuming Lexie had any time left at all.
Simply put, they couldn’t rule anything out.
As Frank carefully unfolded the knife, revealing a serrated edge on one side, Nico realized it was the same kind of blade that the medical examiner speculated had killed both Isabelle Moss and Darcy Walsh. Come to think of it, he had spotted Colin hanging around Darcy’s crime scene, and he was neighbors with Isabelle. The knife was clean, but that didn’t mean much. Blood could be washed away. Which meant they now had an additional suspect.
“This case is falling apart by the second,” Nico said, more to himself than anyone else. Scratching the back of his head in agitation, he asked, “What else is in there?”
“Not much.” Frank returned to rummaging. “Some wire, a pack of nails, Borax, duct tape . . . It’s an odd shopping list.”
“He’s an odd guy.”
“Judging by this, he might be a whole lot more than that.”
Before Nico could think it through, his phone rang. The name of the caller took him by surprise.
“Wilde?”
“He’s out,” his former partner said, not bothering with preamble. “Fowler. He’s out.”
“What do you mean ‘out’?”
“I mean out—of prison. Legally. A free man.”
Nico felt like the ground beneath him might give way. “How can that be? We had him dead to rights for murder two. His sentence was for a minimum of forty years—”
“I know,” Wilde said. “I’ve been trying to get information on him for days, but the warden kept giving me the run around. Now, I know why: the fucker cut a deal with the DEA to bring down his whole network of suppliers in exchange for a reduced sentence. They released him last week.”
“Last week?”
“I’m sorry, Nico. I tried, but they wouldn’t tell me anything until now. Guess they didn’t want to risk his crew finding out that he’d snitched until after they’d made their arrests. They’d been planning the sting for months, and it was all kept under wraps until now.”
Nico took precious seconds to absorb that. Stupidly focusing on the wrong thing, he mumbled, “He wasn’t that big a player.”
“No, but he knew who the big players were, and without protection inside, he wasn’t going to last long. He was a weak link, and they knew it.”
“What about witness protection? Someone must know where he is?”
Wilde made an insulted scoffing sound. “He refused witpro. Said he didn’t trust cops to keep him safe, or some such bullshit. Now he’s in the wind.”
