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My hand trembles as I open my wallet and produce the card.
I look around the waiting room as she enters my information. The room is empty, thank God.
Finally, “Please have a seat, Mrs. Bailey. I forwarded your concern to our on-call officer. He’ll will be with you in just a second.”
I don’t sit. I can’t, I feel like I am about to jump out of my skin.
I check my phone again. Shepherd still hasn’t texted back. It both infuriates and worries me. We have a pact to never message each other’s personal cell phones, and to only communicate through burner phones, but this was too important. I don’t care if our affair comes to light.
Especially not now.
I begin pacing back and forth, wondering how I could have been so stupid. It was right there in front of me the entire time. Right there in the notebook. Three women are dead because of me. Three women.
The thought rattles me to my core and a sudden panic grips me. Not for the women—for myself. What will be the consequences of what I am about to do?
I haven’t thought this through.
What am I doing?
What am I doing?
I am just about to make a run for it when the door opens and Detective Kellan Palmer steps into the waiting room with a startling sense of urgency on his face. Apparently, they’d bypassed the on-call officer and went straight to a detective. I instantly recognize him from the few times I’ve seen him around town. For a split second, I am taken aback by how attractive the man is this close up. Though I’ve never officially met him, I’ve heard plenty about the former marine. Kellan Palmer is the most eligible and desired bachelor in town. Now I can understand why. As he strides across the waiting room, there is an air of confidence and intimidation about him. Very alpha-hero, very sexy.
“Mrs. Bailey.” We shake hands and I’m acutely aware of how clammy mine must feel. “Come in; right this way.”
I follow Detective Palmer through a heavy steel door. A row of offices line the left side of the hall; to the right, a large space is divided into a dozen cubicles. I feel as though everyone is staring at me.
We step into an interview room and for a second I worry that I am on the verge of an actual panic attack. I remind myself of what I tell my clients: focus on the now, to what is immediately in front of you, in this moment. Sight, smell, taste, touch, sound.
The detective gestures to a blue plastic chair tucked under a white folding table and I sit before my knees give out. He rounds the table and sits facing me.
“Thanks for meeting me,” I blurt, my nerves getting the better of me. I can’t take this stress another minute.
My words tumble out in one long sentence. “I’ve got to be honest with you, I feel like I should’ve called a lawyer. I don’t want be associated with any of this. I want to remain anonymous. You have to understand that I didn’t know… I promise. I have a son, he’s special needs, I can’t get in trouble. I have to be here for him, I have to—” The last word is cut off by a sob that explodes out of me. Tears run down my face. I am absolutely humiliated. I’m a therapist, for God’s sake. My entire job is to teach people how to control their emotions.
Detective Palmer plucks a handful of tissues from a box sitting in the windowsill and sets them in front of me.
“Just start at the beginning. Take your time. There’s no rush,” he says, though his words don’t match his demeanor. He is stiff as an iron rod, staring at me with a tight, tense expression on his face. If anything, Detective Palmer seems as uptight as I am.
I swallow the knot in my throat. “I recently changed jobs. Well, technically, I kept the same job, but moved to a different clinic.”
“You’re a therapist, correct? At Oak Tree Counseling?”
“Yes, and before that I owned Bailey Counseling. Anyway, we—my husband and I—are going to sell all the furniture from my old office. While cleaning out the couch, I found a notebook tucked underneath one of the cushions: small, like the size of a paperback. One of my old clients must’ve accidentally left it behind and it slipped behind the cushions. Anyway, it appeared to be a food diary of sorts—like an accountability tracker people keep when trying to lose weight.”
I begin shredding the tissue between my fingertips. “About midway through the notebook, the entries stopped being about food and instead, talked about how the woman thought someone was following her, and watching her from outside her home. She said she was scared. To be clear, I thought at this point that the woman could be delusional, because of all the Xanax and wine references, so I wasn’t sure if what she was writing was real.”
My voice begins to shake. “Last night, I was reading it again and one of the entries mentioned a trip to Spain. I remembered a client from my old clinic talking about an upcoming vacation to Spain and how nervous she was because she hadn’t lost the weight she’d wanted to beforehand—she suffered from body dysmorphic disorder and anorexia. That’s when it hit me. The client’s name was Cora Granger—the woman who was found murdered last night. It was then that I realized that all three of the women who have been murdered recently were clients of mine at one point or another. Alyssa Kaing, Macy Swift, and Cora. And all three of these women had either confessed to, or greatly implied, being involved in some sort of child neglect.”
“Explain,” he says, his expression remaining hard and incredibly intense.
“Alyssa Kaing was battling PTSD from a traumatic experience she had with an ex-boyfriend who abused her and his daughter. Alyssa, who was into drugs at the time, never told anyone that he abused his daughter, and years later, his daughter died from mysterious circumstances. She’d turned a blind eye and felt terrible guilt from it. This is why she sought therapy.
“And Macy Swift, the second woman who was murdered, ran a charity for sick kids. During one of our sessions, she told me that she thought her husband was stealing from the charity. I didn’t believe her, instead, I believed she was stealing from her own charity because after every fundraiser she had, she’d walk in with a new shiny handbag and brag about how she’d gotten an influx of cash. I couldn’t stand the woman.
“And then, Cora Granger—she was a social worker. She hated her job and admitted to me that with several cases, she’d sign off on an investigation without due diligence. She would constantly gripe to me about the paperwork and red tape involved in the process. In one case, the child ended up in ICU the next month—a terrible thing that, honestly, was her fault for not investigating properly.”
My heart is beating so hard that it almost hurts. Tears well up again, and there is nothing I can do to stop them. “If it’s true the women were killed for what I just told you, there is only one person I told these details to. Only one. And that person is Detective Rowan Velky.”
