Page 73 of The Hanging Dolls
Her nose turned red, flaring as she took quick breaths. Then her eyes looked past Zoe into the bedroom, widening at Scottsnoring away on her bed. A mirthless chuckle left her. “You’re such a slut. God knows whose husband you’re banging now. You’ll burn in hell one day.”
FORTY
Rain hammered against the windows as Regina slipped into the darkened office, the wind howling through the narrow gaps in the old building’s frame. The lights had gone out minutes earlier, leaving her in near-total darkness, but she couldn’t wait. There was too much at stake.
There was a low rumble of thunder, like a warning, as she fumbled through the desk drawers with shaking hands. Her flashlight cast an eerie, narrow beam, illuminating papers strewn across the desk, files haphazardly stacked, and the occasional coffee-stained document.
She pulled out a manila folder, its label barely legible in the dim light: Financial Projections—Q4. Flipping it open, she found spreadsheets, profit and loss statements, and funding forecasts. Her breath caught in her throat as she scanned the figures. Red ink everywhere. The numbers were dire. The campaign was hemorrhaging money—way more than she had been led to believe.
Guilt flooded her. She was their leader, the boss. She should have known about this instead of trusting Connor with everything.
Next, she found a stack of loan applications, each neatly bound with rejection letters stapled to them. One after another, banks and private lenders had turned them down. “Insufficient collateral,” “high risk,” “no credit history”—the reasons varied, but the result was the same. The campaign was on the brink of financial collapse, and no one had bothered to tell her.
A flash of lightning lit up the room, the sudden brightness throwing the papers into sharp relief. For a moment, she stood still, the realization of their impending doom sinking in. They were out of time, out of options.
But then, just as quickly, darkness swallowed the room again, and in the afterglow of the lightning, her eyes caught something else. Something hidden under the desk, barely visible beneath a pile of old newspapers—a duffel bag.
Regina’s heart galloped as she knelt down, pulling the bag out into the open. It was heavy, the zipper straining against whatever was inside. With a trembling hand, she slowly unzipped it.
Another burst of lightning flashed through the window, just as she peeled the bag open. Inside were neat stacks of cash, tightly bound with rubber bands, the sight of which left her confused if anything. Was Connor stealing money from the campaign and building his own nest? But there was no time to be angry about that. There was something else that made her blood run cold.
Nestled beside the cash were several unmarked black envelopes and, most terrifying of all, a gun—its cold, metallic surface glinting in the brief light.
FORTY-ONE
Zoe was never the villain in anyone’s life. She was fairly well-liked. That skip in her step, that endless positivity, the chirpy tilt of her voice and always armed with something sweet, she was nobody’s idea of what an FBI agent looked like. She wasn’t jaded and weary like most of her coworkers. It was an ardent effort to not have a chip on her shoulder.
But last night she had been the villain. To Nancy, her ex-boyfriend’s wife who he met years after their breakup. How was Zoe still a shadow looming over their marriage? She swiveled on her chair, capping and uncapping her pen, her mind ticking over Nancy’s spiteful words.
It gave birth to a nub of shame inside her. Did she still have feelings for Simon? Was Nancy picking up on something neither of them was brave nor astute enough to admit?
Lucy’s picture stared back at her, a haunting reminder. The weight of the investigation was pressing down on her, and she could feel the tension building in her shoulders. No other girl had gone missing. She was inclined to believe that Lucy had been taken by the killer they were hunting.
The news that Lucy Robinson was missing broke in the wee hours of the morning. The news cycle was thrilled to findanother enthralling story other than just the elections. They not only regurgitated the fears of Harborwood and Zoe but also inflated them, painting a gruesome picture that made Zoe queasy.
Is Lucy hanging in the woods waiting to be discovered?
None of the victims had been foundinghangingin the woods. But there had been nooses, and the press found it shockingly easy to mold them into a lie.
Zoe clicked her pen incessantly; the repetitive sound tethered her. On the big television screen at the station, Mayor Hicks was being interviewed. But the volume had been muted. Lucy had disappeared without a trace. Despite the number of emails and phone calls from the sheriff’s office and WSP, they had no news. The rangers had been tracking the woods but hadn’t discovered anything.
The hope of finding Lucy had been dwindling and so was that plucky positivity she carried through cases like this.
Zoe had barricaded herself at the station away from the chaos, swimming in thoughts of worst-case scenarios. Her eyes searched the office for Scott—she hadn’t heard from him since last night.
“Chief!” she called when Travis appeared around the corner, his phone pressed to his ear. She approached him hurriedly but he raised a finger, gesturing her to keep quiet. She rocked on her heels, waiting for his conversation to finish. “Yes, yes, I’ll be there. Maybe tomorrow. Okay.” He hung up. “Sorry, that was Hicks.”
“Where’s Detective Cohen? I haven’t heard from him.”
He winced. “You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” Her heartbeat slowed.
“My buddy saw Scott drinking at the bar. Said he got shit-faced drunk. I don’t know if you know about his past…” he added warily.
“I do.” Zoe looked down at her feet.
“He is too closely connected to the case and with him relapsing, I’m keeping him away. It’s an unofficial suspension. Excuse me, I got a few fires to put out.”
