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Clearing my throat, I nod. “Yeah,” I say hoarsely, hearing the strain in my tone. “Who’s that?”
I point to the frozen screen with my mother’s smiling face.
“Jasmine Evans. I’m trying to see anyone in the audience who might have been more enamored than anyone else, since the unsub is using this night to terrorize the town.”
He looks back at the screen, presses play, and I watch my mother sing to the young, innocent child I used to be. I’m smiling up at her on the screen now, no longer aware of all the eyes from the audience. She could do that—soothe me with just her eyes.
A tear trickles down my cheek when she bends, kissing my forehead in the old film. She was the best at this role. It was the same play every year, and my mother spent three of those years on that stage because people were entranced by her voice and emotion.
She should have been an actress and spread the same love and joy throughout the world with just her smile.
I used to want to be just like her.
Until them.
Until they ruined me and turned me into this.
The mirror still shows the same eyes, but all else is different. It’s like seeing a different person. A person who has devoted her life to real justice.
“The film just stays focused on her. I can’t seem to get a view of the audience,” Logan says, interrupting my thoughts as he fast-forwards through the footage of my better memories.
“No one could look away from her,” I say to myself, wiping a tear from my eye.
He doesn’t hear me, and I hold back the inner plea for him to watch the entire thing, to see how incredible my mother was. To get a glimpse of who I might have been.
But I simply bite my tongue when he ejects the DVD and puts in a new one. My stomach roils when I see the footage of my father’s trial replacing the sweet memories of my mother on the screen.
As he watches, I return to the bedroom. It’s like I told Hadley—the mind is just too fragile for some visual stimulants, and I know my limits.
Chapter 8
The secret to being a bore…is to tell everything.
—Voltaire
LOGAN
“Where’s Craig?” Leonard asks, breaking the silence in the car.
“Conveniently, the director called him to aid in a media thing upstate. Johnson is currently handling all media for this case.”
He mutters something under his breath before adding, “It’s pissing me off how obvious it is what they’re doing, yet no one is helping us stop it.”
“We just need evidence. We also need the entire story.”
“It’d be a lot easier to piece together this puzzle if our killer w
ould just spell it all out for us. It’s obvious he wants us to know the truth,” Leonard grumbles.
He’s been lost in thought for most of this trip.
“He wants us to figure out the truth for ourselves. He thinks we’ll be on his side, considering he’s been saving us.”
Leonard turns to face me. “Are you conflicted?”
I shake my head. “No. I understand what happened ten years ago was beyond fucked up, and I have no sympathy to the victims we’ve found so far, but playing judge, jury, and executioner is not excusable. I also know how these cases go. It starts off as revenge, individuals getting targeted. But it turns into a massacre when the unsub devolves rapidly, and anything at all that’s perceived as a threat is killed as collateral damage.”
He looks back out the window. He’s seen these cases too.
