Page 40 of Hide And Seek

Garrett made a sound of absolute disbelief and stepped back, dragging both hands through his hair. Meanwhile, Maren had reached a different register entirely.

“Who the fuck did this?” She was turning in a slow circle, phone flashlight swinging. “Who left the fire earlier? Who wasn't there?” Her voice was climbing with every word, raw and increasingly unhinged. “Logan, you went to the bathroom fifteen minutes ago, didn’t you? Andyou—” Her light landed on Cole. “You went to get more beers, and you were gone for like, twenty minutes. And Sloane, you left for a while too, didn’t you? Where the fuck were you?Huh?”

“Maren,” Rhys said.

“Don't!” She whipped toward him. “Don't you fuckingdaretell me to calm down! Someone here slaughtered Delia, and it was obviously someone who was gone from the fire! And they—”

“Maren,” I cut in. “Look at the ground near her feet. Justlook.”

Maren stopped abruptly, the beam from her phone dipping toward the ground.

Several other lights followed, converging on the same spot near Delia’s feet before tracing outward through the darkness. A thin wire glinted faintly in the glow, strung low across the forest floor and connected to a rope and pulley system rigged to the nearest tree.

The mechanism was crude but effective. Someone had built a trigger, set it in place, and left it there to wait.

Delia had walked straight into it. She’d probably heard the wire snap and turned instinctively toward the sound, just in time to see the harpoon hurtling at her.

“She triggered a trap that could’ve been set at any time,” Rhys said, for the benefit of anyone who hadn't yet processed what they were seeing. He crouched down, examining the wire without touching it, then straightened. “That means it wasn't one of the people Maren saw leaving the fire over the last twenty minutes. Wasn't one of us.”

Well… it still could’ve been one of us,I thought, but I didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem wise to stir up drama in a group full of people who were already terrified, hysterical, or both.

“See?” Logan snapped, throwing his hands up as he glared at Maren. “Get your fucking facts straight before you start hurling accusations at people!”

Maren was standing very still now, flashlight at her side. She barely seemed to have registered Logan’s angry words, and her own anger had gone out of her like a light switching off, replaced by stunned disbelief.

“We need to decide what to do now,” Caitlin said in a low voice. “We can't just stand here.”

Nobody disagreed, but nobody moved either.

Rhys spoke up again. “We can't leave Delia here like this,” he said. “We should get her down.”

“But it’s a crime scene,” Jasmine said, shaking her head. “We shouldn’t touch anything.”

“Are you serious?” Sutton said hotly. “We have no idea when the cops will arrive. It could be two days away. Do you honestly think we should just leave her hanging here until then? So birds can peck out her eyeballs and insects can bite off all her skin?”

Rhys raised a hand. “You’re both right,” he said. “It’s a crime scene, so we should do whatever we can to preserve evidence. But we also can’t leave her like this. She deserves some dignity.” He paused, looking around the gathered group, before going on. “So here’s what we’ll do. We’ll take photos of everything so it’s all documented for the cops when they finally show up. And then we’ll get her down, put her somewhere safe, and cover her up.”

Jasmine and Sutton both nodded, satisfied with the compromise.

Rhys glanced at a few of the guys. “Go and look for an empty storage shed,” he said. Then he looked back at the rest of us. “In the meantime, who’s good at taking photos?”

I weakly raised my hand. “I’ll do it.”

I pulled out my phone and took a steadying breath. Then I opened the camera app and turned on the flash.

I started wide.

The overall scene first. The exterior of the shed. Delia's body pinned against the wall. The surrounding ground. I moved in a slow semicircle, taking overlapping shots the way one of my journalism professors had taught us during a seminar on crime scene reporting and evidence documentation.

Overlap everything,he'd said.Courts reconstruct from photographs. Gaps are permanent.

After that, I moved closer than I wanted to, photographing the things that would matter to forensic investigators. The pattern of blood spread across Delia's shirt. The dark streaks running down the shed wall. The pool gathering at her feet, already beginning to dry around the edges.

Then I focused on the trap.

The tripwire was still intact, and I documented it section by section. The wire itself, thin enough to disappear completely in the dark. The anchor points at either end. The pulley mechanismattached to the nearest tree, completing the arrangement that had transformed a single misstep into something fatal.

I crouched beside it and leaned closer.