Page 53 of Nowhere Good

Dillon took the hint and screwed off into the kitchen. Claire let out a shaky breath. That was the closest they’d ever had to a breakup. It didn’t change much, but it was better than nothing.

That was the good news—but the whole Mr. Giggles thing was something too. Norman Stanfield was a creepy enough guy; a little too into the whole Barney act, as far as Claire had always been concerned. But if he was the killer, then Detective Winslow would leave Fairview soon. Within days.

That would be a good thing; it’d mean the case was solved. But for Claire, things truly would go back to the way they were. She wasn’t sure if she could go after her dad if she didn’t have someone here who she knew wasn’t in his pocket.

Biting her lip, she opened Google on her phone and searched Seth Winslow’s name. A bunch of articles and websites flooded the screen, some from official police websites. But as Claire scrolled, one headline in particular caught her eye.

INSIDE THE INVESTIGATION OF THE ‘BROOKLYN BUTCHER.’

Yikes, that was a name.

Claire clicked on the article. It was only from last year. The photo showed Winslow, tense-looking but sharp in a suit, along with another man, probably in his mid-thirties, as they hauled a prisoner in cuffs away from a courthouse. The prisoner appeared startlingly ordinary—the type of face you’d see at the grocery store and say hi to. Walrus-like, rough, but not unkind. If Claire hadn’t already been made aware of his crimes, she’d never think anything of him. But according to this article, this man murdered six women and hacked off their limbs, leaving them in freezer bags around Brooklyn, New York. Winslow had been the one to find a break in the case, which led him to a meat locker where the killer stored the body parts.

God, the horrors this man had seen.

It was strange to think he was barely older than her—twenty-eight, the same age as her sister. But his life experience blew hers out of the water. While he’d been living in New York City, risking his life to get criminals off the streets, she’d been here. Serving Fairview’s drunks. Doing the same crap she’d been doing for years now.

Her world always had been small.

But if he had to leave, and she was left on her own to deal with this, then maybe Claire needed to learn how to think like Winslow did. He wouldn’t give up on a hunch—he’d follow it till the bitter end, even if it led him nowhere good.

Once more, her mind traveled to that necklace in her father’s bedroom.

He’d never so much as glanced at another woman since her mom died, but he also wasn’t the sentimental type. He left some of her mom’s stuff around, sure, but Claire had never seen a necklace before.

A quick glance over her shoulder told her she was safe, so she opened a new window on her phone’s browser. On Google, she searched “Celine Dyer,” and the screen filled with old articles about her mom’s death. Claire had some spotty memories of that time. Before she’d been told her mom was dead, she remembered a woman—one of her mom’s friends—assuring her they’d find her. She’d been a missing person for a few days, maybe even a week, before the police found her blood.

Following that feeling—that “hunch” in her gut—Claire altered her search to “Celine Dyer, missing person,” and went into the images tab.

The photos made her heart stall. She really did look like her mom. Clementine would too, if it weren’t for the dyed orange hair and fake freckles she was obsessed with. Claire skimmed the page till something caught her eye. It showed her mom, smiling at the camera, along with bold text: MISSING PERSON.

The link led to an article posted twenty years ago. She skimmed the text. The last line made her cold.

Celine Dyer was last seen wearing white sneakers, denim overalls, a blue knitted sweater, and a silver necklace with a butterfly pendant on it.

Seth braced himself on each side of the porcelain sink. He’d managed to keep it together at the station, but now, alone in his motel room bathroom, his thoughts had nowhere to run.

Even the short glimpses he’d seen on those tapes—enough to ID the victims—had burned into his memory and cauterized into scars.

He’d suspected the letters written on the tapes were initials, so he’d checked the only one labelled KC and a few others starting with E, just in case. None of the women were Kelsey or Eliza. But they were people who Norman Stanfield had tied to that bracket in his basement and hung like cattle by their wrists. And one of them, in the tape EH, was Ellen Harrison. Blindfolded. Cut into.

Nausea flipped his stomach, and he gripped the edges of the sink harder. He’d shaken that man’s hand. The same hand used to torture all those women. It was like Norman’s crimes were all over his palms, an oily substance rubbed into his skin. He needed a shower, but he didn’t want to be naked—he just wanted to cleanse those images from his mind.

When the nausea passed, he pulled himself from the sink and went back into the living room—to do what, he had no idea, but he needed to move. He passed by his dresser. As always, when he took this walk, the dime bag he’d thrown into the trash caught his eye. He hadn’t been eating in the motel room, so he hadn’t added any more garbage. It was still there. Staring at him.

It’d be so easy to break from this reality.

It was like standing at a cliff’s edge, toes over gravel. He hadn’t broken his sobriety in three years now, but his body remembered. The tight snap of clarity before the plunge, the warmth blooming behind his eyes, drowning in velvet forgetfulness.

He crouched. Not reaching—looking. Every part of him felt wired and raw.

That’s not who you are anymore.

He was supposed to be stronger than this. What Eliza and Kelsey went through—what those other women went through—was true hell. They were the victims. Not him. It was his responsibility to be stronger than this for them. He’d accepted that role, taken an oath.

Yet the desire to forget everything—even them—consumed him.

He tried to remember something, anything from Narcotics Anonymous, but he couldn’t picture the faces of the people in his support groups, his counsellors, their words. It all paled compared to this one thing. This one thing he couldn’t have.