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I ground my teeth. “Mom, stop making a big deal out of this.” She’d harped on and on about it throughout the entire journey to the prison, convinced wedding bells were on the horizon. “Blake invited me to stay with him until whoever’s targeting me has been caught and stopped.”
Michael pursed his lips. “Sounds like your mom’s right and he cares for you. Good. You should bring him to meet me.”
Like that would ever happen. “On another note … a PI looked into Ricky Tate and Noah Linton. Did you know that Linton’s biological mother was Courtney Royal?”
His eyes flashed. “No, I didn’t. Hmm. When your mother told me that you suspected Linton, I was surprised. As I saw it, he had no motive. But this changes things. He’s hurting you to punish me.”
“If it is Linton, yes, I’d say that’s what he’s doing.”
Clear looked at me. “You’re not convinced it’s him?”
“No. And I can’t help but find it suspicious that he was knifed in a parking garage a few weeks ago.”
“Knifed?” Michael’s gaze turned inward. “I knew Courtney Royal had put a child up for adoption when she was thirteen, but I wasn’t able to track the child to see how he’d fared. It would seem that Linton fared much better than the children she later birthed.”
Yeah, I’d have to agree with that. “Which is why I’m a little doubtful that he’d be so eager to hurt you in revenge.”
Michael tapped his fingers on the table. “What did the PI discover about Ricky Tate?”
“Did you know he was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was twenty?”
“No, but the news doesn’t surprise me.”
“He held a steady job up until a few months ago. It seems like he had some sort of relapse. Apparently, he then disappeared.”
“That makes me think that he’s guilty of this,” said Clear. “Why else would he hide?”
“It may not be that’s hiding,” Michael told her. “Back when he used to write to me, he was deeply paranoid; he’d hunker down for long periods of time and keep a very low profile. He could be doing that very same thing now. I wonder what triggered the relapse.”
I tilted my head. “Have you ever been contacted by relatives of other victims?”
“One,” he said. “The older sister of Joanna Torrance. It was … strange.”
“Strange how?” I asked.
“It was filled with hatred and venom. But that hatred wasn’t directed at me, it was directed at Joanna. April Torrance resented her sister and, though not glad to hear she was dead, felt that Joanna deserved to be punished for what she’d done.”
“Really?”
“You may know the story of Joanna Torrance. She had her son, Thad, when she was fifteen. The father didn’t stay in the picture. She eventually found herself a new boyfriend, Erik Shephard. Thad was eighteen-months-old when Shephard tortured and then beat him to death with a baseball bat.”
It amazed me that Michael could say that with such a lack of emotion. I’d had tears in my eyes when I read the story. The little boy had been covered in bruises, lacerations, and bite marks, and the evidence had showed that he’d suffered neglect and long-term physical abuse.
“April loved the boy and wanted him to live with her,” Michael went on. “She even contacted social services about the abuse, not buying any of Joanna’s excuses about where Thad’s bruises came from. Thad was removed from his mother’s care, but he was given back to her a short while later. And the abuse began all over again, and it ultimately killed him. Joanna claimed it was all Shephard. I don’t know if the police bought her story or just didn’t have enough evidence to convict her of anything more serious than unlawful neglect of a child.”
“But you didn’t buy her story.”
“No, I didn’t. Six years. She served six years in prison. That wasn’t good enough. She deserved to suffer as her son had suffered. And when I promised her I’d free her if she just told me the truth, she admitted to her part in it all. Felt no real remorse. She said the boy always ‘disrespected’ her and looked at her ‘funny’ like he thought he was better than her. Blamed an eighteen-month-old for his own suffering.” He shook his head, baffled. “Courtney Royal was just as remorseless. I’d be surprised to hear that Linton would seek justice for her death. If we can’t make either Ricky or Linton fit the profile, perhaps we should be looking at someone else.”
That echoed what Blake and I had already theorized. I hated that I didn’t know who to be on the lookout for. I was scared to smile at someone or be friendly in case I was looking at the very person targeting me. I’d find myself studying people, looking for ‘signs’ that I should be suspicious of them. The whole thing was fucking with my head, making me paranoid and jumpy. If I had to live like this much longer, I’d go insane.
As I knew that Blake was attending a business dinner and wouldn’t be home until late, I invited Sarah to his apartment for dinner. While waiting for her to arrive, I spent some time on my book, finishing the proofing process—fucking yay! —and choosing excerpts to post online as teasers. I’d already finished and posted the cover on my website, blog, and social media accounts. It was a pretty cool cover, even if I did say so myself.
I was halfway through writing a draft of a newsletter that promoted the upcoming release when Sarah arrived. We ordered some Thai food and settled on the balcony, where I relayed my conversation with Michael as we ate.
Like me, she agreed that just maybe Ricky and Linton were only guilty of being dickheads. As my only other real enemy was Joshua, who didn’t ‘fit’ the profile, we were stumped by the whole thing. So, we did the only sensible thing a girl could do when her head was minced—we got drunk. Not falling-down drunk. Just buzzed. That awesome place where you felt light, warm, and fuzzy; where your skin tingled, your head was super heavy, and you felt like you just hopped off a spinning chair but—amazingly—you didn’t feel sick.
“I’m not even tired,” mumbled Sarah, sprawled beside me on the wicker pod sofa like she’d been dealt a blow to the jaw.
Setting my glass of wine between my thighs, I closed my eyes. “I want a unicorn.”
“I see the appeal. I’d prefer a dragon. Then we could have it set fire to the ass of whoever’s stalking you.”
My eyes popped open. “Oh, I like that idea. But they’re not a stalker—just sayin’.”
She slurped some of her wine. “I’d sic the dragon on Bastien too.”
I frowned. “Why? I thought everything was going great with you guys.”
“It was until last night,” she said, digging out her cell phone. “I wasn’t gonna mention it, because you have enough shit on your plate—you don’t need to be dealing with mine, too—but, yeah, I’d like to hurt him in a big way.”
“You can always offload your shit on me, you dumb heifer.” I swiped out my hand to swat her arm and almost knocked over her wine. “Mother-fucking-trucker.”
Sarah giggled, her body shaking. “It didn’t spill.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Wait.” Her thumbs rapidly tapped on the screen of her cell. “Just updating my Facebook status to … Bastien Novell, you need to go suck a bag of dicks. Do you think he will?”
