Page 33 of Keeping Collette

He’d spent the remaining hours of the night, after they’d found Courtney, slumped against the door outside Collette’s apartment. He’d asked if she wanted him to stay with her, but she’d said she’d needed to be alone. At the time, he hadn’t thought it was a good idea considering everything she’d gone through, but he also acknowledged that she needed space to herself to grieve for her sister, freely.

He could give her that, and had. He’d walked her to her door where she’d thanked him for everything he’d done, kissed his cheek, and had gone inside.

The sobs he’d heard had been heartbreaking, and he’d wanted to pound on the door to let him in so that he could give her the support she needed. He hadn’t though, because he’d known this was what she wanted.

He’d left before she had any idea that he hadn’t gone home.

“Right, we’ve got the coroner’s report on Courtney’s death,” Ox started, and Deal turned his focus on the meeting at hand. He wanted to be able to give Collette an accurate summation of what they’d discussed. “Cass has sent you all a copy.”

Everyone at the table reached for the tablets that sat in front of them. He accessed the file and gave it a quick scan.

“As you can see, Courtney’s cause of death was from having her throat slashed, after being beaten and injected with heroin. Given the discoloration of the various bruises on her body, it appears she’d been beaten more than once. She was also sexually assaulted. This matches the other victims that Cass discovered, which means, as we suspected, she was the victim of the serial killer, and not missing because she’d been trafficked. Which wouldn’t have been an ideal scenario, either.”

“Will this make the police sit up and notice that they’ve got a problem on their hands?” Deal queried.

They couldn’t ignore the facts. Not anymore.

“We’ve been in contact with them,” Julian said. “The detective I spoke to agreed with our determinations, but⁠—”

“There should be no fucking ‘buts’ about it,” interjected Deal. “Why aren’t they doing anything? Warning people?”

“I agree. I also looked at the other information Cass provided me with, and through some chatter and our digging, it appears there’s more happening at that location,” Julian stated, without emotion.

“So, we were right, it is a trafficking spot,” Hound muttered, his hands clenched tight together. Considering his brother and cousin were in the video that he and Collette had gotten, Deal could understand his friend’s tension.

No one wanted to think of their family being involved in the trafficking of humans, but considering they were into drugs, it wasn’t a far stretch to think they knew the people involved and turned a blind eye, considering it happened in the vicinity of Hound’s cousin’s store.

“We need to do a little more investigating before we can confirm it,” Rowan spoke up.

“In other words, you’re throwing darts at the board and hoping they hit the bullseye?” Fox fired back.

Rowan leaned forward. “If you were into darts, you’d know that the triple twenty is what everyone wants to hit, not the bullseye.”

Fox glared at the FBI Agent and she glared right back. If the situation wasn’t so serious, Deal might have busted out laughing, but their antics weren’t helping. And it was so out of character for Fox to be openly hostile with someone they worked with.

What had gone on when Fox had provided protection for Rowan’s sister?

Now wasn’t the time to ask, or delve into it. Whatever the problem was between Fox and Rowan, wasn’t his business. He had other things to think about, and he wanted this meeting over with so he could go see Collette.

“Okay, let’s get back on the subject at hand, shall we?” Ox said with quiet authority.

The next half an hour passed in a blur of discussions and various reports, comparisons to the previous victims, and what happened to Courtney.

“Wait a second,” Deal interrupted Julian as he detailed what the FBI were going to be doing. “What if the serial killer’s victims were supposed to be taken by the traffickers, but there was something common between them all that appealed to the killer, so he took them instead?”

“That’s a possibility we’re considering,” Julian said. “The only issue is, because some of the victims have been dead a couple of years, it’s going to be hard to go through their phone records or emails to find out if they were talking with someone who tricked them into going to that location. We do have pictures prior to their deaths, so we could do a comparison to see if there was something common about them all.”

“What about Courtney? We have her phone number, and I’m sure Collette won’t mind giving us access to her emails. Or her laptop if she could get it from her parents’ place.” A rush of adrenaline spiked his bloodstream at the idea that they could get the answers that Collette wanted.

“There were no numbers that stood out to me when I looked at who Courtney called or spoke to. The majority of the calls she made were to Collette.” Cass looked over the top of her laptop at him. “Do you think Collette will be okay with me hacking into Courtney’s phone to check her text messages? Normally I would’ve done that, but I held back.”

It was so unlike Cass to do something like that, and something he didn’t understand because she normally looked into everything. “Why didn’t you?”

She shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. I just didn’t.”

Was it because Collette was a friend of Astrid’s? Or was it because there was something about this case that struck her unlike any other?

None of those reasons made sense to Deal, Cass always did what she could to get all the information possible. And she usually had no qualms doing things that weren’t entirely legal to achieve it.