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He’d barely scraped through the written exams, but he made it to DC and then to detective sergeant. He forged alliances with both the good guys and the bad, traded favors, commanded respect.
And then it all went wrong.
He walks back to the bed and sits down, the mattress moving with his weight. Jess shifts slightly in her sleep, and he looks at her. He’s glad she’s back. He doesn’t like to think about why, but when he heard her voice at the end of the phone, he didn’t hesitate. Just got in the car and drove her back here.
He feels protective toward her, a connection, especially after what she had just done to herself. Her husband, his wife—both killed by the same man, but it’s not only that. He knows how Jess is feeling. The propensity to self-destruction, the constant sense of failure.
He knows how it is to be different, to not live in the same world as everyone else.
Even before it all happened, he’d looked at people going about their normal lives. Men in the supermarket, with their kids, driving to work. And the majority of them looked happy. How was that even possible? Were they just not aware of the shit in the world? The injustices, the problems, the worries? Griffin came to accept that maybe they weren’t the ones with something wrong with them. Maybe it was him.
But it means that he can look at these crime scene photographs, these dead bodies, and not blink. It doesn’t keep him awake at night—not that anyway. He accepts that death and destruction are what he’s there for.
He lies back down next to Jess and pulls the duvet across. He gets a waft of warm body, slightly stale, slightly sticky, but somehow reassuring. He’s still not sure why she came back. In his darker periods, he used to question Mia’s love, ask why she was with him despite everything he did wrong. “I am safe with you,” she’d say, curling up like a cat next to him. “I’m yours, you’re mine. I know you’ll always look after me.”
But he hadn’t, had he? Not when it mattered.
He stares at the ceiling in the darkness, waiting for the edges of dawn to start to take hold; for the day to properly begin, all vestiges of sleep gone. With what they have discovered, his resolution burns brighter than ever.
He sees what this psychopath is doing. He knows he will catch him. And he knows he will make him pay.
Whatever it takes.
CHAPTER
25
Day 4
Thursday
“JEFFREY DAHMER, CONVICTED of killing seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991. Particularly fond of dismembering bodies, with a little bit of rape and necrophilia on the side.”
Griffin is standing in front of a screen, images projected onto the white, a group of nearly twenty detectives listening to him. This is the side of him Cara knows so well—confident, unflinching.
“Known for drilling holes in people’s skulls while they were drugged and pouring acid or boiling water inside, supposedly to create walking zombies.” He points to the crime scene photos as they flash across the screen. “We believe we have found eleven bodies in various states of decay. All echoing Dahmer.”
Noah whispers next to her, “How did that many people go missing unnoticed?”
“Probably the same way that the victims of Dahmer did,” Cara replies. “People on the edge of society. The homeless, the unemployed. Men estranged from their families.” Cara silently resolves to find out their names. Every last one.
Griffin moves along the whiteboard.
“Peter William Sutcliffe, otherwise known as the Yorkshire Ripper. Convicted of murdering thirteen women. Our killer managed two.” He clicks the button in his hand, and a gory image is displayed on the screen. Cara has seen it before in the crime scene photos, but projected up in front of them, so huge, it is guaranteed to make even the hardest detective flinch.
She rubs her eyes. She’s hungover, exhausted, and the day has only just begun. Damn Libby and her tequila.
She barely remembers being asleep last night, knowing she saw three AM roll around on the digital clock, still awake. But she must have drifted off, as her husband woke her, his alarm bursting into life, ready to do the breakfast service at the restaurant where he is head chef.
He’d kissed her on the cheek as he got out of bed. “Back for dinner tonight?”
“I hope so,” she’d mumbled back.
After trying to catch a few more hours of sleep, she’d heard the front door go as their nanny arrived. Lauren, a woman barely into her twenties, seemed to have her life together in a way Cara could only watch and envy. Cara could hear her laughing with the kids as she got them ready for school. Perhaps if she had a different job, she’d be like that too. Endless patience, boundless energy. A lithe body that hummed with vitality and warmth, rather than feeling worn out at the age of thirty-nine.
Cara had crawled out of bed into the shower, roughly drying her hair and tying it back from her face in a scruffy bun. Her daughter had leapt into the room and bounced on the bed, watching her.
“Lauren says do you want porridge?”
