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He was lazy and mishandled everything, so the distance Caroline’s death placed between us grew further and further with each passing day.
I lose everything I know about myself when Leroy says, “I’m no-not surprised you went for a closed casket. She was messed up.” His bite backs a bloodstained grin. “I fucked her over good.”
“You fucking son of a bitch.” I’m grabbed at the feet when I lurch into Leroy’s car, so I can only get in a handful of hits before I’m pulled back out. “You were my partner, the godfather of my daughter. Why would you kill my wife?”
“She wanted you to leave, to be on da-daddy duty.” I don’t think he means to spit, but the amount of blood in his mouth leaves him no choice. “That’s not how things work. We were partners before you met her. We’d been through thick and thin—”
“She was my fucking wife!”
“Who made you soft,” Leroy roars back, his voice shockingly firm. I fight like hell to get out of the agent’s hold when he says with a snarl, “Just like she would have. You ha-hardly knew her, but you were fawning over her at the barbecue because you didn’t want anyone seeing her skin but you.”
I’ve hardly seen him over the past five and a bit years, but it makes sense he’d attend the Ashburn Fourth of July barbecue. He is Lucy’s godfather, and Stella invites everyone associated with her to major family events.
“But I had no clue how snowed under yo-you were until your heroic act of machoism at Aeros.” Leroy sucks in a wheezy breath. “Your interest in her could ha-have seen you going down for murder, but you still defended her when the bureau paid you a visit.” Blood splatter flies in the air when he pffts at me. “You’re a fucking fool.”
He’s never understood the depths to which a man will go to protect someone he cares about. He’s always been the single one of the pack, the loner with no true friends, hence Caroline suggesting him as one of Lucy’s godfathers. She thought the role would mature him a bit.
We couldn’t have picked worse.
“I trusted you.”
His reply is barely audible. “But not as much as you trusted her.” He licks his lips, glossing them up with more blood. “You told Caroline more about the Night Killer case than you shared with me, I had to improvise so she wouldn’t know what was coming next.” More blood splatters on his lips when he coughs out a laugh. “Kinda like now…”
Everything freezes when he removes his hands from the steering wheel. Grayson warns him to keep them in view, but he has no choice but to fire when he drops them to the gun in his lap.
“No,” I scream before finally breaking free from the agent’s hold.
My race to Leroy is in slow motion, but in less than a minute, I drag him out of the car, lay him on the asphalt, then push down on the new bullet wound in his chest.
“Tell me why you killed them. Give their families closure.”
“I… I… I…” His eyes close during his final stumbled word.
“Leroy….” I shake him so hard that his hands flop to his sides.
He’s dead, but even more shocking than that is the lack of a tattoo on his left wrist.
As the EMTs load Leroy into the back of a coroner’s van, Grayson sits beside me. I’m sitting in the trunk of Leroy’s car, trying to wrap my head around what the fuck just happened. My mind is reeling, overloaded with information. I had enough guilt knowing the lengths to which Henley went to protect a little girl who doesn’t share an ounce of her blood, but to learn her injuries had nothing to do with her ability to identify her mother’s killer makes it ten times worse.
Leroy wasn’t the Night Killer. He was a copycat. He took what was unearthed during the investigation of earlier murders and used it to kill my wife. And for what? A troublesome duo that I would have outgrown not long after leaving the academy.
Leroy and I met during the recruitment process. He was a freshman, and I was a sophomore. Caroline didn’t enter the picture until a month before Leroy graduated from the academy. He was always jealous of her and the attention I gave her, but I never thought it would come to this.
Not in a million years.
I shake my head when Grayson thrusts a water bottle under my chin.
He’s about to lecture me about staying hydrated during long raids, but Macy arrives out of nowhere before he can. “We’ve found something.” As we follow her into a van that smells like burning plastic, she explains. “Leroy might not have been the Night Killer, but he knew the real killers’ identities.”
