Page 34 of Outlaw Ridge: Jesse
“I covered it up as best I could,” Belinda murmured, hugging her arms around herself. “Rocks, branches… anything to make sure no one would find him.”
Hallie nodded and pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pocket. Lauren and Jesse did the same. One by one, they started clearing the debris—lifting old, crumbling tree limbs and rolling away stones that had settled over time. The deeper they went, the scent of damp earth got stronger.
“This should be it,” Belinda muttered, shifting closer to look down into the hole. Her voice was tight now with an edge of panic to it. “It wasn’t deep. Just a couple of feet.”
Lauren’s fingers scraped against the rough edges of stone as she helped Jesse move a larger rock aside. Hallie swept away loose dirt with her boot, and finally, after several minutes, they reached the bottom of the crevice.
Lauren’s heart slammed against her ribs. Her breath vanished. Because the space where a body should have been was empty.
Oh, God.
It was empty.
Jesse cursed. Hallie’s expression went sharp, and even Reardon looked shaken.
Belinda took a step back, eyes wide with disbelief. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “No, I—I buried him right here. He should be here.”
Lauren swallowed hard, her pulse pounding in her ears. The ground was undisturbed beyond what they had just cleared. No bones. No scraps of clothing.
Nothing.
She turned to Jesse, meeting his gaze, and knew they were both thinking the same thing.
If Reggie Lincoln had been buried here, someone had maybe already dug him up. Or he hadn’t been dead after all. That Belinda had been wrong when she believed she had killed him.
And if so, that meant Reggie was still alive.
Chapter Thirteen
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Jesse kept one hand on the wheel, the other resting on his console as he drove the cruiser down the winding road back toward town. The tension in the cruiser was thick, pressing in on him, but he figured what he was feeling was a drop in the bucket compared to what Lauren was feeling.
She sat in the passenger’s seat, staring out the window, her fingers absently running over the edge of her phone. The muscles in her jaw were tight, and when she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a murmur.
“Reggie could still be out there,” she said. “He could be alive.”
Jesse exhaled slowly. He had already considered that possibility. And more.
“Or Belinda could’ve lied,” he countered. “Or she was just wrong about where she buried him. It’s been sixteen years. The woods change. Land shifts. Even if she did put him in that crevice, animals could’ve dragged away the bones.”
Lauren turned to look at him then, her green eyes sharp with frustration. “Bones, maybe. But where’s the clothing? And what about the tattoo gun? If animals had gotten to the body, we still should have found something.”
Jesse tightened his grip on the wheel. She wasn’t wrong. The absence of anything—bones, fabric, metal—brought intoquestion what Belinda had told them. But there were other options besides the sonofabitch crawling out of that grave alive.
“Someone cleaned that site up,” he suggested. “Someone who didn’t want us finding Reggie’s remains.”
Jesse kept his gaze on the road, but the tension curled in his gut. If Reggie’s remains had been dug up, it meant someone had been out there. Someone who knew exactly where to look. That pointed to Reardon, who might have wanted the remains to disappear so that Reggie’s death couldn’t come back on Belinda.
But when they’d found the grave empty, Jesse had seen Reardon’s expression, and the man had been shocked. Jesse didn’t think Reardon had been faking that. Ditto for Belinda. She had been just as horrified as Lauren when her brother’s remains hadn’t been there.
So, if Reggie wasn’t there, where the hell was he? Maybe soon, they’d have some answers about that.
“Hallie has already arranged for a CSI team to check the grave itself and the area,” Jesse reminded Lauren.
She made a sound that could have meant anything. Or nothing.
Jesse didn’t get a chance to say anything else before his phone buzzed with a text, and he saw Griff’s name on the dash screen. And Jesse cursed when he saw Griff’s message.
