This is gospel for the fallen ones

Locked away in permanent slumber

Assembling their philosophies

From pieces of broken memories

This is Gospel, Panic! At the Disco

Z

Hayley Daniels was a mother of three and a waitress when she went missing. Her body wasn't found for two years, and when it was, there was nothing but skeletal remains left in the shallow desert grave outside LA. They'd managed to pull a carpet fiber out of her shallow grave that had been wrapped up in the shower curtain they'd buried her in. The new DNA evidence was a blood smear that came back to her found under a baseboard in a Napa Valley bed and breakfast.

That was as far as Brian got into his explanation before we were pulling up at a swanky LA mansion. He had pushed the buzzer at the gate a half dozen times without getting an answer. I could fit my face through the bars in the fence and could tell that no lights were on inside the house and there was no sign of any movement in the curtains, which was the usual dead giveaway that someone was home.

We waited for about half an hour before we got a call from another agent saying the owners of the house were staying at their bed and breakfast in Napa. Brian looked more frustrated than I'd ever seen him as he got back in the driver's seat. As I got in beside him, I realized this was the first time I'd ever seen someone get away from him.

He sighed as he stared into space out the windshield. I expected him to start driving ninety miles an hour back to the office to work out his frustration, but instead he grabbed the file and dropped it in my lap.

"The bed and breakfast is owned by a senator's son. She was talking to her girlfriends about meeting someone new and rich and this was her chance to provide for her kids, but she had to keep it a secret from his family for the moment. She went on a date to meet him at a restaurant but was never seen again. No one ever showed up for the reservation she made. We have the phone records, but nothing ties back to him, except a few short calls from an office building where he worked at the time."

"Does he have a history of violence towards women?" I asked as I flipped through his thick file. Sure enough, I found a police report from the neighbors that heard a woman screaming for help. He was a college frat boy then. The woman refused to make a report and I was pretty sure if I pulled her financials from way back then I would find a payment.

"If there was a complaint it's gone away quickly." Brian sighed. "I've been looking over her case all morning. I feel it in my gut that I need to talk to this guy. They've escalated it to us because the locals keep not finding anything. There's a huge suspicion they're burying evidence."

"Then our next stop is Napa Valley," I said with finality as I gave him a small smile. He grinned back, breaking his serious expression for the first time.

"They won't talk to us if we go in as cops." He hinted.

"Wait, are you suggesting an undercover assignment?" His grin was contagious.

"Might as well. We'll have to call Penning to get approval for the road trip anyway."

Z

The Napa Valley was more beautiful than I was expecting. I felt like I could finally breathe outside the concrete, smog, and stacked on top of each other houses of LA. Brian seemed to feel the same way because he went from being strung tight and on edge about this case to relaxed and laid back.

We'd taken turns driving all day, reading the file out loud the entire way until we'd gone through it three times. Bennett Ross was never a suspect in the first place, because why would he be? They'd interviewed several other attorneys in the office where he'd been interning and not one of them said anything about knowing Hayley until a law clerk came forward after they'd interviewed Bennett. His timing had always been considered odd, and the clerk had been investigated thoroughly, but of course, they hadn't found anything connecting him to the missing woman.

The bed and breakfast in the middle of a vineyard never been searched because it was so far away from where she was last seen and where she was found, but it wasn't impossible. Bring her there for a surprise away weekend, kill her, and then drive her body back out and dump it. No one would ever look at where she was actually killed. It wasn't a normal way to hide a murder, but I'd seen more complicated cover-ups.

The only reason the bed and breakfast was on the radar was because a guest had dropped a heavy suitcase that popped the baseboard off the wall. He was trying to fix it himself so he didn't have to pay for damages when he saw the blood on the floor previously covered by the board. Thank God he called the police instead of the front desk. I was sure they'd scrubbed the place down since the crime scene was discovered, but at least they'd gotten the DNA from the blood. There was no carpet to compare the fiber to because they'd torn it all out and replaced it.

"You ready?" Brian asked as he turned off the winding main road onto the driveway.

"Of course, sweetheart." I laid my hand across his forearm, batting my fake eyelashes at him.

He made a face at me and laughed.

"I'm so glad, Mrs. O'Conner." His voice dripped with sarcasm.

"Don't you mean, Mrs. Spilner." I couldn't even say the name Spilner without it sounding nasal. The fake name was so horrible I wasn't even able to pronounce it correctly.

"They used to tell me that was a serial killer name," Brian told me as he pulled into a parking spot next to a shiny new BMW SUV which was owned by the Rosses.

"That's because it is." I reminded him as I stepped out.

I glowed like a beacon in the moonlight in my short, white wedding dress and sparkly wedding shoes that Brian kept making fun of. I was ignoring him because I knew I looked fabulous. He looked like he did every day in his best black suit.

"Get the bags, darling," I told him sassily as I started walking towards the door to the giant house. I barely made it three steps when the door was opened by a man in his late fifties.

He offered a warm greeting before shooing Brian away from the trunk of the car and grabbing the bags himself. He reminded me of Brian on his happy days because he was all warm smiles. He ushered us into the lobby of the bed and breakfast. It was furnished with plush, expensive-looking couches.

A woman who I knew from the file to be Mrs. Ross stood up from an armchair where she was enjoying a glass of wine when we stepped in. The man with our bags left us with her and carried out things upstairs.

"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Walker!" She greeted warmly. "I'm so glad you chose to stay with us after your elopement."

She wrapped Brian in a hug that was entirely too long to be appropriate before she let go and wrapped her arms around me. She complimented my dress and shoes and I shot Brian a triumphant look over her shoulder. He rolled his eyes. Once she finally let us go, she walked up the stairs, gesturing for us to follow.

"Your dad already took care of the bill." She told me conversationally over her shoulder. "He didn't want you to have to worry about a thing while you're here."

"He's always been so generous." I gushed without missing a beat. Penning also didn't have time to give us a debit card that had a fake name on it. "Aren't you so glad your father in law treats us so well? Especially after all of those horror stories your friends told you."

"I think more girls have problems from their in-laws," Brian suggested.

"Maybe." I looked away from him to Mrs. Ross. "What do you think?"

"Mine were okay." Her lips pressed together in a way where I got the feeling it was quite the opposite. I'd have to ask her about that tomorrow. "Distance makes the love grow stronger! How did you meet?"

"We met at the gym," I answered quickly.

"I couldn't take my eyes off of her. I thought I was about to be thrown out for staring!" Brian added charmingly.

We had originally had a story about me working in a restaurant he frequented when it suddenly dawned on me that that was how he started worming his way into Toretto's group. It hadn't seemed to bother him, but I decided to leave those memories buried for him. If he cared I switched the story without talking to him, he didn't let on at all.

"That's so sweet." She said as we reached the third floor. She walked us to the room on the end and unlocked it for us. "I had them set some champagne out for you." She winked and I felt a little uncomfortable.

"That's very kind of you," Brian answered when I didn't say anything. I could feel the flaming blush settling in my cheeks.

"Have fun! We'll see you at breakfast." She dropped the keys in Brian's hand and walked away with a flip of her perfectly cut and highlighted blonde hair.

Z

"So I know wedding night sex is an obvious no, but I feel like not opening the champagne is rude." I teased Brian as I stepped out of the bathroom in my pajamas.

The room had a fireplace open on both sides with a giant bathtub standing in the middle of the open bathroom directly across from the bed. You had a perfect view of the bathroom from the bed or the bed from the bathroom. I had had to change in the tiny closet that kept the toilet out of view. There was going to be no privacy when we had to bathe. It was already awkward with only one bed, but we were at least expecting that with this being the honeymoon suite. The fully visible tub was a shock.

"We can open the champagne." He assured as he waved the corkscrew at me. "We just can't get drunk."

He was sprawled on the bed with the content of the file spread all around him. I brushed the papers off my side of the bed and cleared myself a place to sit down. The second I was settled, Brian was handing me crime scene photos.

"We need to find this carpet." He pointed at a picture of the fiber found on the body.

"Can we pop a baseboard off and put it back down without it being obvious? Maybe there's some left against the wall from when they redid the floors." Brian shook his head.

"No. I'm afraid they'd notice it and there's only a slim chance we'd find anything." He chewed his lips as he thought. "We need in the room where the blood was found. Room 203."

"We'd have better chances of finding things in other rooms. Did you smell the paint on the second floor?" I asked.

He nodded. "They've had time to cover evidence. We need to investigate Ross himself."

"I don't know that the room is the place where she was killed either." I handed Brian the crime scene photos again. There was a tiny spot of blood under where the baseboard was. It was so small I questioned it being enough to be fatal.

The poor woman had suffered severe beating before she was shot point blank in the back of the head. There was blood evidence here that would have soaked through the carpet into the subflooring. They wouldn't have been able to bleach all of that completely clean. There was evidence somewhere. The crime scene techs did a terrible job of looking for it according to the pictures.

"We need our forensics people in, not these locals that can be bought."

Brian was right. Maybe we could get enough to get them a warrant. This woman's story deserved to be told. That was why I loved being a homicide detective. These people were gone, but their killer remained and that wasn't fair. I could never stand that they were forgotten and whoever took them off this earth could keep going like nothing ever happened. I wanted to drag whoever did this face first through a pile of glass to the nearest police station.

I looked at Brian as he poured over the information in front of him. When he felt me staring at him, he looked up and met my eyes. An understanding passed between us; tomorrow we were going to meet the senator's son and we were going to search this place until not one secret remained. We'd never let him get away with this.