AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Steven, he thinks. Perfect.
Perfect.
CHAPTER
12
Day 3
Wednesday
JESS WAKES AS daylight pushes its way into the room. For few minutes she’s disorientated, but then she realizes where she is and turns toward him.
Griffin’s still lying on his front, facing away from her. The duvet has been pushed off in the night, and she looks at him in the dim glow, taking in the muscles of his shoulders, the dips in his back. She can just see a collection of silvery-pinkish lines running across the bottom of his spine, disappearing into his jeans. They seem to be newish scars, and she wonders how he got them.
She thinks of her own arms and legs. Of the white puckered lines, crisscrossing her skin. Some parallel to each other, some old, some new. They’re a mess. She knows Griffin must have seen them by now, but he hasn’t commented.
And what on earth is this place? She frowns and gets out of bed. It’s colder this morning, and she grabs the first thing close to her and puts on Griffin’s sweatshirt. It smells of cigarettes and his skin. It conjures up a memory of last night, and something stirs in her. But she knows what happened—or rather, what didn’t happen—wasn’t an act of romance. Just a release of stress and anger, no more than that. She pushes it out of her mind.
There’s a long wooden table in the center of the room, and she wraps her arms around herself and walks over. Papers litter the surface, and she reads a few of the newspaper articles. They all report homicides. Some have lines highlighted, others with comments scribbled in the margins. Some of the documentation seems to be printouts from a computer system or some sort of database. Dates, names, descriptions.
But it’s the wall to the left of the door that demands her attention the most. It’s huge, every inch of it covered in photographs and articles, seemingly pinned up randomly. A whiteboard is in the center, with a scrawl in almost illegible black marker pen. She stands in front of it.
Jess looks more closely at the photos. Some of them are of places and people—smiling faces—but the others are photos of the dead. Some she saw last night, some new. Broken bodies, distorted and gray. Parts missing, eyes open, staring blindly into nothing. Blood, torn flesh, ripped skin. Jess’s stomach turns over, but she can’t look away, gripped by the horror on display.
Then she remembers. The bodies. The pregnant belly. The child now motionless inside. The blood.
Before she can stop herself, images flicker through her mind. So much blood. Everywhere, splattering the floor, the walls. She remembers the writing by the front door, crudely daubed in red: PIG. She stops. It’s strangely specific. Was it a message to the police or a note to someone else? An estranged lover maybe?
She frowns and stares at the whiteboard. Something about the nature of the recent murders niggles in her brain. Something she’s seen before. Five people dead, one of them heavily pregnant. And PIG daubed next to the wall in blood.
She takes a quick breath in.
“Griffin,” she shouts without looking away from the board. He stirs in the bed, squinting at her with bleary eyes.
She starts moving the photos about on the wall, pulling some off and dropping them to the floor. Her destruction moves him out of bed, and he stands up, putting a T-shirt on and joining her.
He watches as she continues, her movements quick.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
She gestures to a photo on the table. “Pass me that one and those two there.”
He does, and she sticks them back on the wall, together.
After a moment she stops and takes a pace backward, looking at it from afar.
She points at the wall, then turns to Griffin. His face is still wrinkled from sleep, and she notices that every time he moves, he winces.
“What are you seeing?” he asks.
She points to the group at the top, their names scrawled in black marker. “Lisa Kershaw, Daria Capshaw, and Sarah Jackman. All strangled, tortured, and raped.”
Griffin nods. He pulls a pack of capsules from his bag and pushes one out of the foil, then stops and takes out a second. She watches as he throws the pills into his mouth and swallows them dry, then points to the next group of photographs.
“Hit over the head with a hammer, then stabbed.”
“What are you saying?” Griffin asks slowly.
