Page 74 of Dark Roads
Emily held her gaze for a few beats. Now Beth saw the toughside of her. There wasn’t fear in her face, or any sort of embarrassment. She was weighing her decision.
“My grandparents need me. I’m the only one who can help on the farm.”
“Okay.…” Beth waited. This was going somewhere.
“I don’t make much money. I get it other ways.” Emily paused, one eyebrow raised, but Beth still wasn’t fitting the pieces together.
“You mean selling marijuana? I know about that.”
“I sell a lot of things.” Emily held her hand out. “Pay up.”
“You’re blackmailing me?”
Emily rolled her eyes. “If you want to know about Vaughn, it will cost you.”
“I don’t have a lot.…” Beth pulled out all her tips, dropped them on the counter. Emily counted the bills and tucked them into her pocket. Then she looked at Beth’s bracelet.
“What about that?”
“No. That’s special.” Beth hesitated, then tugged off her ring, an emerald surrounded by diamonds. “The diamonds are small, but real.” Her parents would be upset. The ring was a graduation gift. But if Beth could use it to solve her sister’s murder? They’dhaveto understand.
Emily took the ring and slid it on her finger, held her hand up to the sun coming through the window, then turned back to Beth. “If you tell anyone we spoke, I’ll deny everything and say that you’re lying. I won’t make any official reports against Vaughn. Understand?”
That wasn’t good news. Beth wouldn’t be able to back up her evidence if she went to the police, but maybe they would have other ways to get Emily to share what she knew.
“A couple of years ago, he caught me being friendly with one of the truck drivers in his rig.…” She gave Beth a look. Right. Emily hadn’t been playing Scrabble. “I figured it was Masonwho told him I was working the area. He’d seen me around when he was delivering takeout.”
Beth nodded, thinking about all the times she’d seen Mason leave with a brown paper bag full of food for a hungry driver who had to hit the road again. Mason never sent any of the girls to the truck stop because of the highway killer. “Did Vaughn arrest you?”
“No. It was weird. He let me go with a warning. Then he picked me up walking one day and said he wanted to talk to me. He drove me out to a place across from the lake and told me that he had a better way for me to make money—if I stopped hanging out at the truck stop.”
“Photos?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t a big deal. The photos never showed my face. I just had to lie on the ground and pose like I was sleeping.” Beth felt a sick wave of fear. Didn’t Emily understand? Vaughn had wanted her to lie still. Like a body.
“Did he ever do anything…?”
“He never touched me. Honestly, I didn’t get why he wanted the photos, because he didn’t seem turned on. Maybe he used them later.” She shrugged. “Then I guess he got bored of that, so he started paying me for other stuff. Like information on who was partying where and with who.”
“Are you still doing that?”
Emily shrugged again and reached for the sanitizer and rubbed it over her hands and in between her fingers. It was like she was literally trying to cleanse herself of guilt.
“Sometimes. Once he wanted me to put a hidden camera in the women’s change room at the pool.” Beth had been working really hard not to pass judgment, but she couldn’t keep her mouth shut about that one.
“Youhelpedhim?”
“None of my business what he did with that camera.” Shereturned Beth’s look with a hostile one of her own. “He gave me a lot of money—it helped pay for a new well on the farm.”
“Does he know that you sell drugs?”
“He likes that I can tell him who’s buying. But he doesn’t want me at the truck stop. He caught me once last fall and he told me he’d arrest me if he saw me there again.”
Beth felt anger coating her throat like she’d eaten something vile, but she couldn’t spit it out. If everything Emily had said was true, then Vaughn was more than capable of being a killer.
Beth wondered when he’d set his sights on Amber. Had he offered her money in exchange for photos too? Would Amber have done it? Beth didn’t know what was worse—the idea of Amber posing for him, or that she thought it was a possibility.
“You really won’t make a report? Thompson seems like a good cop.”
