Meg Gardiner is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of sixteen novels. Her thrillers have won the Edgar Award and been summer reading picks by The Today Show and O, the Oprah magazine. In August 2022 Heat 2, co-authored with Michael Mann, debuted at #1 on the New York Times best seller list. A former lawyer, two-time president of Mystery Writers of America, and three-time Jeopardy! champion, Gardiner lives in Austin.
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1
May 2018
Spring River, Tennessee
Deputy Marius Hayes was standing behind the front desk at the sheriff ’s station, blowing on the night’s sixth cup of coffee, when he heard it. Four forty-two a.m., a Wednesday sunrise heading his way, less than two hours left in his shift.
The night had been dead quiet. That didn’t spook Hayes, because this was rural Tennessee, not Khost Province, Afghanistan. In Spring River, quiet wasn’t eerie. Most nights were so still he could hear his hair grow. But Marius Hayes believed in watching out for the people in this town, and even on peaceful nights, malice didn’t sleep. Trouble breathed in the dark. Violent abusers, meth traffickers. Ghosts, even—or so he thought when he’d had too much coffee and the fluorescent lights flickered. He wished he were on patrol tonight instead of staffing the station. The scanner squawked irregularly, the two other deputies on duty periodically reporting in as they drove Jessup County’s back roads. Beyond the windows, the drone of crickets and katydids filled the dark.
The blare of a car horn shattered the calm.
Outside, the station’s motion-sensing floodlights lit up. Headlights crawled across the front windows. Hayes put down his mug and stepped from behind the desk.
An old sedan was wallowing across the empty parking lot at walking speed. The floodlights revealed it as a rusting Chevy Impala, early eighties, faded blue. Listing to one side on soggy shocks, it veered toward the bollards that kept vehicles from ramming the station entrance.
“No, you don’t,” Hayes said.
He holstered his duty weapon. The Chevy nosed into the bollards with a metallic crunch. That stopped it dead, horn raging, headlights blasting the station doors. Hayes saw a man slumped over the wheel. Dark hair. White. Head turned to the side, chest pressing against the horn. Possibly a drunk, maybe someone having a heart attack. But you never know.
Hayes picked up the radio handset. “All units.”
He alerted the deputies on patrol that he was responding to an incident at the station. Then he headed for the doors.
The horn went silent.
Hayes ducked away from the glass. Putting the station’s brick wall between himself and the doors, he raised his hand to block the glare of the headlights and peered out. The Chevy’s door was open.
The engine was still running. The driver was staggering across the parking lot.
Hayes pushed through the doors. “Wait.”
The man didn’t acknowledge him, just kept lurching toward the road. The sheriff ’s station sat on what passed for a main street in Spring River—a state highway along the railroad tracks, dotted with stores, an auto wrecking yard, the Baptist church, and a Dairy Queen. The cool night was lit by the station’s floods and the Chevy’s headlights and, across the tracks, the red neon sign for the Flying T Motor Court.
That was where the man was aiming himself. He looked to be in his forties, six three, built like a heavyweight, shoulders thick beneath his dirty white T-shirt. He faltered ahead with a bull’s momentum.
“Sir,” Hayes called out. “Stop.”
The man merely waved, raising a hand overhead, and kept walking. “It’s all yours.”
Not on my watch, Hayes thought. I’m not the parking valet. And this guy doesn’t get out of a DUI by dropping off his car and heaving himself across the highway.
Hayes raised his voice. “Sir, halt.”
The man stumbled into the street. “I don’t have anything to do with it.”
The hairs on the back of Hayes’s neck prickled. It?
He turned toward the Chevy. He shined a flashlight through the car’s windows.
He spun toward the man. “Stop.”
The guy continued shambling toward the motel, nearly tripping over the railroad tracks. Hayes ran toward him.
“On the ground. Hands behind your head.”
The night felt creepy-crawly, full of flying bugs, a supernatural shrieking, their clicky buzz a fuse, ready to set off an explosion.
On the back seat of the Chevy lay a woman. Small enough that she was stretched out full length. She wore a peasant top and low-cut jeans and had tattoos that were growing indistinct against her skin, because she was—she’d been—white but now was bloody, blue, and long past dead. Her eyes had clouded.
Her hands, feet, and mouth were wrapped with duct tape.
The driver zigzagged into the parking lot of the motel, a congregation of whitewashed 1950s cabins with red roofs. VACANCY on the sign by the road, the office dark. All the cabins dark.
Hayes ran toward him. Under the beam of his flashlight, he saw that the man was sweating profusely. Breathing heavily.
Hayes drew his Taser. “Now.”
The man walked a few more unsteady steps toward cabin 3. Then, swaying, he sank calmly to his knees. He raised his hands, his boxer’s shoulders rising, and laced his fingers haphazardly behind his head.
Hayes approached and cuffed him. He got a look at the man’s face. The guy was glassy-eyed, reeking of whiskey.
“You’re under arrest,” Hayes said.
The man looked up at him from beneath greasy hair. He struggled to focus. Then his eyes sharpened. His gaze swept up and down.
Hayes tensed, thinking the guy might fight, or trash-talk, that a white man was reacting to the sight of a Black deputy standing over him. But something swam in the man’s eyes, slippery and sharp. Hayes thought this man knew why he was being arrested, and that it wasn’t for drunk driving. This man was closely reading Hayes’s distress.
Spring River, Tennessee, didn’t get duct-taped bodies in the back of big old Chevys. Not ever. The man seemed to find that . . . amusing.
His words came slowly. “She ain’t nothing to do with me.”
Hayes’s eyebrows rose as far as they could go. He grabbed the man by the biceps to pull him to his feet.
The man nodded at cabin 3. “Them, neither.”
Deputy Marius Hayes froze.
The room key was in the man’s hip pocket. Hayes locked him in the station’s holding cell and called one of his patrol units to return to the station ASAP. He set his shoulders square and headed for the doors.
From the cell, the man shouted, “Not mine!”
Hayes crossed the tracks to the Flying T. The air felt cloying. Dawn seemed a million years away. The locusts, a dark presence in the trees, buzzed like a downed live wire.
Hayes drew his gun and put the key in the lock of cabin 3. Old-fashioned metal key on a plastic tag. A flimsy plywood door. It creaked open. He stood back, using the door frame as cover. His blood rushed in his ears. He thought of his wife at home and his baby boy. He raised his flashlight and swept the beam across the interior of the cabin.
His flashlight caught a dull silver glint.
“Jesus wept.”
On the bed, three more bodies lay side by side. They were wrapped head to toe, like duct tape mummies.
The insect hum abruptly died. The silence seemed to settle in Hayes’s chest.
He knew that it would be a long time before Spring River got another quiet moment.
(C) Meg Gardiner, 2024