AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When I’d decided to be a cop, I’d been more than a little shocked to join the NBPD and learn just how many of the cops and detectives were in the pockets of those same organizations, getting paid to look the other way from their shady dealings.
I’d been cross about it for a while. Until I started to understand the power dynamics in this town. How the bikers and the mafia had codes that not only didn’t harm women or children in the area, but actively protected them.
And as far as I could tell, their business—as illegal and dangerous as it might be—never involved hurting innocents.
That was why so many otherwise good men were willing to look the other way. And why the rest of us, who didn’t take their dirty money, didn’t exactly go out of our way to try to pin crimes on those guys either.
We had enough of a workload to deal with anyway.
I wasn’t surprised that a true crime junkie would find the bikers and mafia guys around here fascinating. Especially with their “luck” about never getting caught.
“I get that,” I said, nodding, not wanting her to feel weird about the admission.
“It didn’t take long to find the names of Madison and Ashley, though,” Mari went on, eyes going dark. “Who weren’t as lucky as I was.”
I was sure she managed to dig up the basics of the case. But she didn’t know the details. The shit that kept me awake at night. The brutal, sadistic way this man carved up the women. The horrific ways he’d assaulted them, with his body, but also with objects he found in their rooms.
My stomach rolled each time I let my mind go there.
I didn’t know if the guy had a Bundy fetish, or if his ideas were uniquely his own. One thing was sure, though. Bundy had been impulsive and a fuckuva lot dumber than the media had made him out to be at the time.
This guy?
This one was controlled and methodical.
Which was even worse.
And meant our chances for finding him were a lot slimmer.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Madison and Ashley,” I admitted.
“We all look similar,” Mari said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Petite and dark-haired is the victim profile we are working off of. Though I’d like to know more about you and your schedule to see if there is any sort of link you might have to the other women that we haven’t thought of yet.”
I’d obviously never been able to ask Madison or Ashley about their daily routines. And while their families and friends had been able to give me some highlights—where they went to work or got their hair done—there are tiny, minute details of our daily lives that only we know.
Where we get coffee or lunch. Which grocery store we go to the most often. Certain routes home or gas stations we stick to.
People, as a whole, were creatures of habit. But it was impossible to tell what habits the other women had being that they were both single and lived alone.
“Yes, of course. I work at Fulton Rehabilitation Center,” she told me, and I jotted it down even though I already knew that.
“What’s your schedule like there?”
“It varies,” she told me. “I work full-time but because I was the most recent hire, I kind of get stuck with the weird shifts. Go in for a few hours in the morning, leave, then come back at night. Weekends. All the hours no one else wants to do.”
So no real routine there.
“On the days when you have a split shift like that, do you go home, or go out anywhere in particular?”
“It varies. It’s never the same place every time. You’re looking for patterns, right? Work and where I go in between shifts, that’s not a good one. I don’t have a clear-cut pattern. But I do prefer the gas station off of Mason,” I told him. “It’s better lit, and they don’t hold onto your credit card the whole time you’re filling up. It’s not just murders and assaults that I pay attention to,” she added.
And, yeah, card info was stolen at gas stations all the time, unfortunately.
“I don’t have a gym or a regular place I go out to eat. I usually get takeout, honestly. I spent most of my free time at home.”
“Do you have a lawn service?” I asked, running through the potentials of who might have been in and out of her sphere.
