In a Lonely Grave by Amy Cross

Author:Amy Cross [Cross, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Today...

“So Lisa's apartment was completely trashed,” John said as he continued to skim through the notes in one of the folders. “This seems like a standard case of breaking and entering, and then perhaps she disturbed the intruder and things escalated.”

“Look at the next page,” Carolyn replied, with tears still in her eyes as she watched him from the chair on the other side of the desk. “I think I know where he kept the key to the place, if that's of any interest.”

He turned the sheet and looked at some notes that had been added to one of the sections.

“So blood was found at the scene,” he continued. “Some of it was Lisa's, and some was...”

He paused.

“Something's been scribbled out here.”

“That would have been Joe's doing.”

“Why?”

“Beats me, but it seems to me like he originally intended to keep that report in the files, so he crossed out some bits he didn't want anyone to read. Then something changed, he panicked maybe and decided to junk the whole lot. I don't know why but over the years he came to trust me, I guess he thought that if he told me to burn some papers, I'd just blindly do it. Instead I kept them, but it's only now he's dead that I dared to...”

Her voice trailed off for a moment.

“I guess I was scared of him, in a way,” she added. “I never quite knew how far he'd go if he was pushed.”

“He doesn't seem to have made much of an effort to find Ms. Sondnes,” John pointed out. “The bare minimum, in fact.”

“Right, which is especially odd when you consider that he was good friends with Lisa's late father Rod.”

“So why wouldn't he do everything in his power to find out what had happened to her. He doesn't seem to have been very interested in where she went, or who took her, or even whether she was still alive.” He paused again as he began to understand what might have happened. “Unless he already knew the answers to those questions, and he just didn't want them to come to light.”

“Lisa's boyfriend Wade was found dead not long before, and he pretty much covered that up to.”

“You mentioned Wade before.”

“Anything to do with Lisa, toward the end, Joe went to great lengths to shut down,” she explained. “He had her apartment kind of frozen in time. And here's the really odd thing about it all. As far as I'm aware, he took over the lease of the place and just kept it sitting there without a tenant. He didn't rent it out, he didn't use it for anything himself. He just let it sit there.”

“For twenty years?”

She nodded.

“I'm starting to wonder whether this whole Lisa Sondnes case is key to understanding what Joe Hicks was really up to,” John replied. “I'm also interested in the report she made about wolves, the one she delivered to this office shortly before she disappeared. Call it a hunch if you like, but I can't shake the feeling that a lot more of this is connected than I ever realized.

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