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Griffin looks up sharply. “Who? When?”
“Just now in the corridor.”
She reaches out and places something on the bed. He picks it up: barely a scrap of paper, folded in four. He opens it. Three letters, scrawled in black scratchy ballpoint.
IOU.
“She said you’d know what it means,” the nurse finishes.
Griffin carefully folds it back into its small square, holds it tightly in the palm of his hand, and smiles.
CHAPTER
84
CARA STOPS IN the hospital corridor. Her body can’t go any further, and she leans against the wall, putting her head in her hands. She’s spent two days holding it together for everyone else—the team back at the station, the kids, Roo, Griffin—but now there’s nothing left.
Her mind flickers constantly, unable to settle on one emotion before moving to another. The guilt, the feeling of absolute betrayal, the full-on scalding rage. She doesn’t sleep. He haunts her dreams, waking her with a jolt, sheets soaked with sweat, heart racing.
Tilly and Joshua are okay. They woke up in the hospital, groggy and confused, with no memory of what happened. Roo has a headache that will keep him grumpy for days, but physically he’ll be fine. It’s the mental side that Cara worries about.
They’ve spent the last few days circling each other at home. Wary, defensive cats, silently defending their territory with their claws out. And the argument, when it came yesterday, was spectacular.
She was dressed and ready for work. He was in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, signed off sick, looking after the kids.
“You can’t possibly be going in?” he snapped.
“I have to—”
“Why? So you can see him? That sick bastard? He doesn’t deserve to live—”
“Don’t, Roo …”
“He should be hung and quartered, same as he did to …” Cara noticed he couldn’t bring himself to say her name. “Tortured and left to rot—”
“Roo, stop, please …”
“Jail’s too good for him,” he spat. “That perverted, fucked-up—”
“Roo! Stop!” Her husband broke off in shock as her mug had hit the tiled floor, smashing into tiny pieces around them. She stood, her hands balled into fists, coffee drips soaking into her trousers. “Shut up!” she shouted. “I need to finish this. I need to see this through.”
“Your family is here. Your kids—the children that you put at risk—need you!”
It was a low blow, and she felt the guilt tighten in her stomach. “Fucking great you remember that now, Roo. Your family wasn’t quite so important to you when you were banging the nanny.”
The room hushed. Cara turned and left, out of the house and away from her husband. He’d told her about the women on Tinder. Random, unknown fucks. No more than him looking for a bit of excitement.
But she still hasn’t asked him about Lauren. Was it a casual affair? Was it love? Would he have left Cara? The questions that will remain unanswered forever.
Cara had escorted Lauren’s poor parents to the mortuary that morning. She had watched them cry over the battered remains of their daughter, face so badly beaten it was impossible to formally identify her that way. They hadn’t asked about the details, and Cara hopes they never will.
No parent needs to know that their daughter was attacked so aggressively that her jaw was broken and her cheekbones destroyed. She had a fractured skull, massive internal bleeding. Raped repeatedly, sodomized, extensive damage to her vagina and anus. Cara knows she was alive when she was tortured: her ribs broken, body disemboweled, hung from a tree, suffocating slowly, lungs outside her body. All in the name of some sick fantasy.
She’ll forgive Roo. She knows that. She has to. He’s not a killer. A shitty, philandering husband, yes, but not a serial killer.
The kids need stability now. And so does she. More than anything she yearns for familiarity, for reassurance that the whole world hasn’t changed, despite the feeling that she’s standing on the top of a precipice and that at any second she’ll get blown from the top.
Despite now knowing that her best friend was a serial killer.
