“And he keeps it in a storage unit in some Podunk town in West Virginia?”
“Sure.” I swallowed.
“Then you can check it.” She pushed me toward the freezer.
Steeling myself, I crossed the dusty concrete in three quick strides. The chest looked perfectly normal. Shiny and white, all except for a long scratch and a dent on one side, and a bright orange clearance sticker from a used appliance shop that no one had bothered to remove.
Vero peeked over my shoulder as I lifted the lid.
“See?” I exhaled pure relief at the parcels wrapped in butcher paper inside. “Venison.” Grabbing the package closest to the top, I held it aloft for Vero to see. The tape peeled away from the ice-crusted brown paper, and the contents fell back into the freezer with a muffled thud.
Vero and I lurched, our chests rising and falling fast.
“That’s not venison, Finlay!” Vero wrung her hands, wiping them up and down the leg of her jeans as if she’d been the one to touch it. “That’s a head. And it didn’t belong to a deer!”
“I can see that!” I was pretty sure I was going to puke.
“Whose is it?”
The features were blue, discolored by frost and distorted by rigor mortis. And yet, I had the horrible feeling I’d seen the same face before. I leaned closer, my head angled away, sneaking another reluctant glance out of the corner of my eye. The man’s frozen salt-and-pepper bangs had parted, revealing wide, sightless eyes, and a dark mole stared back at me from his frost-dulled cheek.
“I recognize him,” I said into the back of my hand. Because vomiting on the dead guy was probably a bad idea. “He was in the photo I took from Bree’s desk.”
“Why is he in pieces in your ex-husband’s storage unit?”
“I don’t know!”
“You don’t think…” Vero and I locked eyes. I thought back to the day I returned the photo to Bree. How she had hardly looked at it before turning it facedown beside her. Had Steven rented this storage unit, or had Bree rented it for herself and billed it to the farm?
“What are you doing?” Vero asked in a strangled voice as I reached for my phone.
“I’m calling Steven.”
“You can’t do that! We can’t tell anybody! They’ll want to know how we knew it was here!”
“We can’t just leave it!” A wave of panic washed over me. My finger hovered over Steven’s number. Vero was right. There had to be a way to figure out for certain who this man was, and more importantly, who’d put him here.
Vero’s shoulders relaxed as I shoved the phone back in my pocket. She swatted at my hands as I reached for hers instead. “Stay here,” I said, taking her phone as I left the garage.
“Finlay! Where are you going?” she hissed as I followed the signs for the rental office. I paused in front of the office door, rubbing my hands on my pant legs, the ghost of a chill still seeping through my fingers where they’d touched the dead man’s head. Drawing in a deep breath, I pushed the door open.
A daytime soap opera played on the TV behind the counter. The air inside smelled like cigarettes and burned coffee. A woman—presumably Phyllis—held a cigarette between two hot pink fingernails, the long thread of ash dangling precariously over the open mouth of a soda can. She glanced up at me over the rims of her glasses, her eyes moving back and forth between me and the TV.
“Help you?” she asked.
“I hope so,” I said, pulling up a photo of the invoice Vero had taken on her phone. “I’m an accountant with…” My mind whirled, grasping onto the name of the only accounting agency I knew. “Mickler and Associates.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I could take them back. Phyllis didn’t glance up from her soap opera. With any luck, she wouldn’t even remember. “I’m conducting an audit for a client at the Rolling Green Sod and Tree Farm. I have a copy of an invoice for a storage unit, and my employer would like to know who authorized the charges. I was wondering if you could tell me the name of the person who opened the account?”
Phyllis took a long drag, huffing out smoke. “If you got an invoice, you got all the info we do. Billing address and credit card is the only info we keep on file.”
“Maybe you remember talking with the person who opened the account? It’s unit seventy-three.”
“Do I look like Google? I got a hundred units out there,” she said, pointing her cigarette toward the window. “People open and close accounts all the time. And we got a privacy policy. I don’t ask, and I don’t—”