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“One is me playing, Detective. It’s a game since we both know you’re kind of obsessed with me. The other is work.”
“My work! This is my job.”
“And it’s the weekend,” she counters, saccharine sweet. “I’m not at the George Stanley today. I don’t want to be home with Cato. And Aubree and Mia have gone shopping.” She flicks my hand off but looks at Fletch with a smile. “I love your little girl, Fletch. But I’m not going shopping.”
“So you decided to come play good cop, bad cop?” He draws his foot up to rest against the door. “You get a criminology degree recently?”
“Well, first of all, I minored in criminology in college.” Smug, she grabs the file from the top of our pile, which just so happens to be Karla’s, and flicks it open. “But I was thinking about what we talked about last night.”
Fletch lifts an accusatory brow and glares my way. “Discussing our case with the wifey again, Arch?”
“Shut up.” I roll my eyes and grab Minka’s elbow again. “What about what we were talking about?”
“There seem to be a few moving parts on this one.” She leafs through the pages of Karla’s life. Her parents. Her school. Relationships. High school. Work. “Brenda Magellan, first.”
“Happened more than two decades ago,” I argue. “It’s not connected to this case.”
“But it is. Love it or hate it, Brenda Magellan has a direct connection to the Alves murder.”
“Indirect,” Fletch inserts. “Could have no connection at all.”
“It’s still a connection. And I was reading up on Brenda’s case this morning.”
“Of course you were.” I give up on even the slightest thought of ushering my wife out of the room, and instead, I pull out a chair for her and ignore the small, smug grin rolling across her lips. “What is it about Brenda’s case that has you inserting yourself into ours?”
“Cassius Magellan was an abuser too.” She settles into her chair, places Karla’s file on the table, and crosses her legs like she’s at her desk and we’re discussing a current dead body. “He beat her, arguably significantly worse than Adrianna ever got it. Though,” she adds, glancing across as I pace to the end of the table, “I’m not here to nitpick over who had it worse. Neither should have experienced abuse at all.”
“Alright. Cassius Magellan was a prick. What about it?”
“He was also Brenda’s stalker.” She reclines back and folds her arms. “Have you researched the Magellan case, Detective?”
“Well…” Fuck. “Not in depth.”
“Then I suppose it’s handy to know that I have. Cassius and Brenda were high school sweethearts. Like Adrianna and William, they married extremely young, had children young, and found themselves in a very unhappy situation. By the time she was twenty-five, Brenda had five children under the age of seven. She was busy, she was done breeding, and unfortunately for her, she had no way to escape. No work outside the home. No car. No license. Her small town had no public transport, so anywhere she wanted to go, she and the kids walked or rode bicycles. Her life was exceptionally limited.”
“Like Adrianna’s,” Fletch accepts. “Alright. I’ll play. Cassius was Brenda’s stalker, too? Even though they were together?”
“He controlled every cent that came into that home. And if she spent a single dollar on anything he didn’t first agree to, he was on her about it. Demanding answers. Verbally abusing her. The newspapers spoke of how he would accuse her of having affairs if even a penny was unaccounted for.”
“Meanwhile, he was fucking around on the side?” I guess, my tone flat and unimpressed. “Projection?”
“That’s always the way it goes. Brenda attempted to leave her marriage three times over the years. Three.” Minka purses her lips. “But a woman with no education, no income, and no way out tends to fall back into her abuser’s clutches before long. Especially women who have children with their abuser. But,” she brings her hands up, only to drop them again with a sigh. “She tried. She did her best to escape and take her kids to safety. Of those three attempts to flee, each time, she and the kids would unfortunately end up in unstable accommodations. Refuges. Temporary housing funded by local charities. Things like that.”
“Unstable,” I ponder. “Meaning, it ended eventually, and she had nowhere else to go but home?”
“Yes. But during each of those stints she was out, she was being stalked. Cassius stopped turning up to work for days, even weeks on end, and when everything shook out during the investigation, it was found he was watching his wife and kids. Stalking them day and night. He essentially lived in his car, slept in it, ate in it, even peed in it, all because he was terrified of missing a single second of his wife’s existence outside of his control.”
“So he was obsessed with her,” I conclude. “You’re telling me he was obsessed.”
“Yes! A different kind of obsession than the one I joke about you having. One is love,” she explains, “the other, control. But you and I share a commonality with Cassius and Brenda that Adrianna and William don’t.”
My stomach twists, the thought of Minka comparing us to any of these other players, enough to make my gut churn. “A similarity?”
“Mmm. Besides obsession,” she murmurs. She casts a look at Fletch. “Cassius was a cop.”
“Fuck.” I drop my head back and exhale. “Brenda wasn’t just a husband killer. She was a cop killer, too?”
“She was an extremely unlucky woman,” Minka clarifies. “Because the people she should have been able to count on for safety were entirely on the side of protecting their brother in blue. The way William’s boss is on William’s side, no matter the crimes that asshole committed. Brenda could go nowhere without being watched. She could do nothing. And she could not seek help, because no one on the force was going to admit their colleague was the issue.”
