ART 3 — THE BROTHERS, THE SECRET, AND A MOTHER’S FINAL GOODBYE
“We weren’t supposed to kill him.”
The words hung in the interrogation room.
Detective Miles Rivers had spent nearly six months
waiting to hear something like them.
Now that they had finally been spoken, he felt no triumph.
Only dread. Across the table,
twenty-seven-year-old Mark Garrett sat with his shoulders hunched,
both hands pressed against his forehead. His breathing was ragged.
His eyes were red.
For months, he and his older brother Liam had lived behind a wall of silence.
But that wall had finally begun to crack. Rivers moved his chair closer.
“Mark,” he said evenly, “I need you to tell me exactly what happened.”
Mark shook his head. “He’ll kill me.” “Who?” “My brother.”
Rivers didn’t interrupt.
Mark stared at the photograph of Jaden Glenn lying on the table.
It was a picture Alice had supplied.
Jaden was smiling beside a tree, holding a notebook against his chest.
He looked younger than twenty-four. Mark turned the photograph over.
“I can’t look at him.” “Then tell me about him.”
A long silence followed.
Finally, Mark whispered: “He was just watching deer.”
The Day Everything Changed June 23, 2010.
While Jaden Glenn was beginning his research expedition,
Liam and Mark Garrett were already deep inside Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
The brothers had been hunting illegally for years.
They knew the forgotten roads. The abandoned quarry. The narrow ravines.
And the hidden places where a person could operate for
days without encountering another human being.
