And when I do, my body goes blazing hot. My heart beats relentlessly against my skull. In my neck. In each of my fingertips. I can’t lift my eyes from the photos as I tell Micah to pull up footage of the same location around the time of the first and second murder.
His fingers tap against the keyboard in the background, and my head is swirling so dangerously fast that I feel like I’m hallucinating the tapping in sync with my heartbeat. The printer grumbles to life again, the mechanical sound of the machine sucking paper in and then slowly spitting it out covered in ink. It’s all happening in slow motion.
“These are about a week before each of the first two murders.”
Micah slides a new set of photos onto the desk right in my line of sight, and suddenly I’m transported back to the night I broke into Chloe’s house and planted the cameras. I’m studying the photos on her nightstand. Musing over the fact that her and her mother look so similar and trying to grab onto a thought that passes through my mind in a blur. But it just sped by, like it was on its way somewhere else. Like it was traveling through time and landing in the future to this moment right now, as I realize none of these pictures are Chloe.
They are Caroline Stark.
27
Colin
By the time I left the station, most everyone had been long gone.
Alex and Lucy never returned after the pointless expedition I sent them on.
The busy, regular buzzing of the department floor had died down to the hum of sleeping computers and a single glow of blue light coming from Micah’s office. I’d been staring at the photo of Lily for so long, unmoving, that the conference room lights clicked off automatically, and I didn’t do anything to revive them.
After the realization hit me like a freight train, I slowly, shakily shuffled the photos of Caroline Stark into a neat pile and handed them to Micah. “Lose these,” I told him, and he agreed with a single nod of his head, taking the photos from me and letting the shredder devour them in an angry grind.
I left the station at midnight. Stopped by the twenty-four-hour gym to hit the heavy bag. Took a cold shower there.
I hadn’t intended to sleep, but I didn’t want to go home, either. After I redressed, I leaned back against the lockers, banging my head a couple oftimes against the thin, cold metal before sliding down to the hard floor, trying to decipher what it was exactly that I was feeling. It was a storm of feelings. A storm that scared me.
I felt rage. Rage over the fact that I have been right this whole damn time, and I feel like I got fucking played. Well, I guess technically I was wrong. Chloe didn’t “have something to do” with her stepfather’s deaths—she’s entirely responsible for them. Caroline wasn’t protecting Chloe. Chloe was protecting her mother, and that knowledge roared to life something inside me. Something that felt a lot like empathy. Because I can’t truly say the lengths I wouldn’t go to protect my own mother. To protect myself. It broke my heart to wonder about what exactly happened inside those walls to lead Chloe to act so recklessly, so savagely.
The other feeling streaming through me, tearing me to shreds, was uncertainty. I cared about Chloe. I was still worried about her being out in the world with those men unaccounted for, possibly hunting her. I had to laugh at myself as I sat on that hard locker room ground. The puzzle pieces fell from the ceiling and scattered on the ground around me, before rearranging themselves perfectly into a full picture of Chloe Stark. Capable, conniving Chloe Stark.
She killed her stepdads. She killed Richard. She killed Grayson. I was certain of it all.
Who else has she killed? Who elsewillshe kill?
I was also anxious about the fact that Chloe had gone to Sunset Peak last night, and by the time I checked her location history, it showed she’d been at my mother’s apartment complex for hours before the tracker seemed to have died. A quick phone call to the front desk affirmed for me that my mother was safe and sound, but why had Chloe gone there? And where the fuck was that surveillance team that was supposed to be watching her and her friends?
And the final feeling that wound through my body, the one that felt especially hard to come to terms with, was indifference.
I wasn’t just fucking the Baby Widow, I was falling for her, and that had me willing to turn a blind eye to all of this. Which is the exact opposite of what I said I’d do when I stood in front of that podium ten years ago and took my oath.
Turning a blind eye is the exact opposite of what I said I’d do again, when I was promoted to detective.
To serve and protect.That was the promise I made.
But suddenly, I don’t know who I’m supposed to serve and protect anymore. Because clearly, all this time, I’ve been trying to protect the wrong people. Victims who were never victims to begin with. Men who were various shades of monster.
Still, it wasn’t the uncertainty or indifference that pulled me into Chloe’s driveway.
It was the rage.
When I woke up on the floor of the locker room, I forced myself to rise. To put one foot in front of the other all the way to my truck. The sun had risen. People were moving about. The coffee shop next door was flipping their sign and turning the lights on. The man at the vending cart outside was rearranging today’s newspapers on his stand, drawing my attention to the headline that I already knew was written by Barry MacGregor.
Angel of Mercy Takes Last Life by Train.
It was a curious headline. Curious enough that I crossed toward the cart and pulled a five-dollar bill from my pocket on autopilot, shoving it in the direction of the vendor in exchange for the grey folds of thin paper. I gripped it in my hand as I turned back to my truck without more than a glance at the article, because I already knew.
Chloe’s garage is open, and her mother’s black Suburban is parked right next to her little blue Bug inside. I don’t know how long I stare at the two vehicles, finding another stark contrast between the two sides of her.
The bright, cheerful side. And the dark and deadly side.
