She did not want to touch Roger Hartman to find out if he’d murdered Serena Russo.
Violet pocketed her keys as she made her way down the wooded driveway.
She kept close to the tree line, hoping to remain hidden by the cover of foliage as the evening dusk worked its way toward night. The light from the moon couldn’t penetrate the branches overhead, and there weren’t any street lamps to illuminate her path.
She navigated cautiously through the oppressive darkness, stumbling several times over rocks and dips in the ground. She moved slowly, carefully, listening for anything that would indicate she wasn’t alone. But all she could hear were the sounds of her own footsteps and the forest around her.
Ahead, a dim glow signaled the end of her journey, a small trailer set haphazardly amid the jumble of trees and overgrown blackberry bushes. The pale light coming from inside told her that someone definitely lived there.
Violet stopped, her mind racing, trying to decide what she should do next. It wasn’t the ideal plan, she supposed, only now considering the realities of being here . . . on his property, all alone as night fell.
At best, he didn’t carry an imprint at all, and he wasn’t a killer.
At worst, he was. And Violet had very possibly made a fatal error in coming here.
Her pulse thrummed nervously within her throat, and she tried to swallow around it. She waited for something to happen.
There was no movement from inside the trailer. No sounds. No nothing. Just the light, lone and unwavering. There was no car in the driveway, and Violet began to wonder if Roger Hartman was even home, or if she’d come while he was away.
Suddenly she hoped that was the case.
She listened to the night, paying extra attention to sounds that might come from the direction of the trailer.
And then she heard it. Softly at first. A delicate rhythmic pattering.
Raindrops.
She glanced up, holding out her palm, waiting for the first wet drops to find her. But she knew they weren’t coming.
There was no rain.
It was an echo. And it was calling for her.
She looked around at the daunting blackness, wondering what she should do as she gathered the neck of her jacket closed in both hands, clutching it as if it could shield her from the sound, from the darkness, from the danger.
But it wasn’t the echo she feared, not this echo. She knew it was a body by the draw that beckoned her, reaching into her and gently tugging. Yet it was different somehow.
And then she realized why.
This body had been buried. This body was settled, already at peace. Like the ones in Violet’s graveyard, or those at the cemetery she’d visited while looking for clues to catch a serial killer. Violet could sense the echo, but it didn’t demand to be found.
She stepped forward again, away from the trees and the cover they provided as she followed the noise.
The sputtering of the raindrops—the echo—came not from above, as rain would have done, but from ahead of Violet. It was the sound of so many fat drops plunking against broad autumn leaves. Violet had to keep reminding herself that it was illusory, an imaginary downpour that only she could sense, as she ducked her head, instinctively drawing away from the shower.
She glanced cautiously in the direction of the trailer as she passed it, worried that at any moment Roger Hartman would come crashing through the door.
But the entrance remained still, the home silent.
She knew when she was close, because the sound swelled, becoming increasingly steady, even if only in her own ears. A damp chill settled over her, creeping beneath her skin and into her bones, making her joints ache.
It was more difficult with these types of echoes, the ones that weren’t distinctly visual, to pinpoint an exact location. So as Violet approached, she had to gauge the intensity of the acoustics, had to judge the drop in temperature that caused her to shiver.
She circled a spot out back, behind the trailer, near the base of a knotty-looking pine tree. In the shadows of the night, the old pine stood guard over the grave that Violet believed lay beneath its spiny branches.
She glanced again toward the light filtering from the ramshackle structure before she fell to her knees. The sound of rain was all around her, and the cool chill of the downpour was inside her.
It was here.
The ground was black, and Violet brushed her hand over its surface, trying to decide where she should dig. There was a part of her that wanted to stop, that told her this was enough, that she should call Sara Priest and let her handle it from here. But she knew she wouldn’t. She wasn’t even sure what she’d tracked to this location. It could simply be a squirrel or a field mouse left for dead.
She wanted to investigate further, to be certain before calling for help.
The moment her fingers sank into the loose layer of soil, so different from the compacted dirt that surrounded it, Violet knew that she’d found the burial site she’d been searching for.
She scooped a handful of the soft ground, still shivering against the echo that showered around her. She used her fingers to locate an edge and followed it with her hands, crawling through the gloom on all fours. When she realized how large the grave was, she trembled.
A body could fit in there. A human body.
She wasn’t sure why she reached in again, why she kept working to shovel the earth with her fingers, clawing at it. She should stop, she told herself more than once, and yet she didn’t. And all the while, the haunting rain continued to fill the night’s air with its poignant storm. The chill it carried was more than real to Violet.