Chapter Twenty-Five
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I can’t stay asleep, and for once, it isn’t the baby. During all this turmoil—landing in a snowstorm plus the stress over our change in plans—the pregnancy has been fine, the baby occasionally moving and kicking or punching with no cramping or other danger signs.
What keeps me from staying asleep is the case. I drift off easily enough, and I sleep soundly until nearly four. Then I have a nightmare where I know the culprit is Marlon, but I don’t mention it to Anders, and Marlon goes on a killing spree, murdering Anders and April.
I startle awake and swear under my breath. None of that happened. I don’t strongly suspect that Marlon killed Lynn, but I still did warn Anders. Everything is fine. It’s my damn subconscious poking at me, my generalized fear that I’ve abandoned Haven’s Rock to a killer.
But when I try to sleep again, it’s not general anxiety that has me tossing and turning. It’s Marlon. Have I dismissed him too quickly? Dismissed him because I don’t want to consider him? His military service doesn’t remove him from the profile. If anything, it places him more firmly in it. Serial killers often aspire to military or paramilitary service, and while they don’t necessarily get in, they may find adjacent careers.
The fact that Marlon joined security in Haven’s Rock is a red flag, as is the fact that he socializes primarily with local law enforcement. That strengthens the paramilitary-interest aspect, but it also means he has a direct pipeline to any investigative efforts. And his military job gave him the ability to move around, which as I said could help him hide assaults or murders.
What about the situation that brought him here? It would seem, logically, that a violent person would retaliate with violence if they were being threatened. But is that faulty logic? If you were a serial killer being hunted by your girlfriend’s violent ex, would you end the threat? Or would you duck and weave to avoid drawing too much interest from the police?
Marlon matches the size of the person Carson saw. By telling us he saw Lynn with Sebastian, Marlon could be redirecting us to the false suspect he’d chosen… and also removing himself from the suspect pool. He’d even solidified his “alibi” by hailing Grant and saying he’d seen Lynn.
Am I really considering Marlon as a suspect? Or is it just that middle-of-the-night phenomenon where even ridiculous fears seem reasonable?
I catch sight of my laptop on the desk. Then I slide out of bed, patting Storm when she rouses and whispering for her to go back to sleep.
I ease into the desk chair and turn my screen brightness down to the lowest setting before I flip on the browser.
émilie gave me enough to look up Marlon’s case, and she said it made the local news. If I find it, I find him —his real name—which goes against every assurance of privacy we give residents.
I should just ask émilie to…
To do what? Keep digging? She said she would. But she clearly thinks I’m wrong. I need to do this myself, and I know I’ll regret it later, but this is a breach of confidence I need to make.
I barely start before stress sweat trickles down my back. I move the chair so if Dalton wakes and I’m deep in my work, he won’t see what I’m doing before I have the chance to Alt-Tab away. That launches a wave of guilt so overwhelming that nausea overtakes me, and I crawl back into bed and tell myself I am not doing this.
As I lie there, all I can see is Lynn dead on the ice, her eyes open.
They wouldn’t have been open when she died, right? While she’d have screamed at first, eventually hypothermia would have set in. That’s why we hadn’t seen as much struggling as we might have expected—by the time she realized she was going to die, her mind would have already been wandering. She would—I expect and sincerely hope—have drifted off in a fog, overwhelmed by the need to sleep.
Her killer opened her eyelids. Opened them and looked into her eyes and left her like that.
I push up from bed. I need to find Lynn’s killer. I need to make sure they don’t do that to anyone else, and I need to make sure they don’t get away with what they did to Lynn. If that means violating a resident’s right to privacy, then I need to remember what émilie said.
We are in charge here. We are not beholden to some faceless council and even more faceless investors. Our duty is to resident safety, which trumps privacy.
Back in Rockton, we’d thought nothing of researching a resident online if we needed to. Dalton had been doing that before I arrived. But that was because we couldn’t easily ask the council for their backstory, and even if we got it, we couldn’t be sure it was real.
I trust that émilie gave me Marlon’s real backstory. But if I don’t dig myself then I feel as if I’ve half-assed this. I’m the detective, the investigator.
What’s really holding me back isn’t guilt over betraying Marlon’s trust. It’s guilt over betraying someone else’s trust.
I tap Dalton’s shoulder. “Eric?”
His eyelids flutter. Then they spring open, and he vaults up, blurting, “The baby?”
I squeeze his arm. “No, sorry. The baby’s fine. I’m fine.”
He blinks and looks around. His gaze goes to the window, where it’s pitch-black outside. “Okay. So what’s…” He glances over. “The case.”
I nod. “I have a suspect that I haven’t shared with you, and I believe I need to research them. I got their backstory from émilie but… I need more. I was going to start digging online, and then realized I was going behind your back.”
He arches a brow. “Going behind your boss’s back or your husband’s?”
“My husband’s. I’d have no problem sneaking behind my boss’s back.”
He lets out a low laugh.
“And not even my husband’s as much as my partner’s,” I say. “I didn’t want to tell you that I suspect this person, because it’s awkward. Then émilie gave me his story, which she thinks means he couldn’t have done it, and I agreed at the time but…”
“Then you went to sleep and woke up second-guessing.”
I nod.
He pushes up onto his elbows and looks over at me. “Are we talking about Marlon?”
I exhale. “Yes.”
Dalton nods. “I started wondering about that myself last night. We’re resting a lot of the investigation on what he said because it’s an eyewitness report from a reliable source. But if Carson saw something different, then the answer is either that Carson saw someone else or…”
“Or Marlon lied.”
“What did émilie tell you?”
I relay the whole story, along with my doubts.
“We need to confirm all that,” Dalton says. “No question about it. We’ve already worried about relying on émilie too much. This is one situation where that’s a problem. She’s confident in her recruitment methods, and no one likes being questioned on their work.”
He pulls on his sweatpants and stretches as he stands. “I’m not saying she’d hold anything back, but she thinks her methods are foolproof and if Marlon’s background suggests he can’t be our killer, she’s not going to dig as deep as we need her to.”
“Agreed.”
He picks up his watch and checks it. “Still too early to grab coffee, but let me take Storm for a walk while you start digging. I’ll make coffee when I get back.”
I’m on my second cup of decaf. Dalton is stretched out in bed, wearing only his boxers again, and it’s proof of how engrossed I am in my work that I barely notice. Barely. I’d need to be wearing blinders to not notice at all.
I tried working in bed, but with a basketball for a belly, there’s no lap for a laptop. So I’m at the desk, searching while he half dozes, ready for questions but not interrupting.
I’m halfway through that second cup when I find Marlon. Or I find his case, at least. émilie might have given me his story, but I soon realize how few details she provided. Correctly, I might add, but that makes searching for his case tricky.
What helps in the end is, well, Marlon himself. Or Martin, as it turns out. That’s his real name. I know he served in the military, and I know he’s not white, which helps narrow it down. Any article on him is likely to mention the military service—that this idiot of an ex was foolish enough to go after a serviceman. As for “not white,” that comes into play because, as it turns out, the ex isn’t just some random guy with a propensity for violence. He’s a card-carrying member of a white nationalist group. Okay, maybe they don’t have cards, but they should—preferably stapled to their foreheads. In any event, the guy who went after Marlon had clear ties to some Aryan group I’ve never heard of, and one paper speculated that’s why he went after Marlon so hard. No shit.
From there, the story is as émilie described it, though I now get the details filled in. Marlon was working at a software firm when he started a relationship with a coworker. The coworker’s ex confronted him in a local bar and there was an altercation. Two more altercations followed, with the reports making it clear that Marlon was being targeted and only defended himself in the fights. The relationship ended, but the persecution did not.
One thing that émilie skipped in her account? That Marlon’s stalker started posting garbage online about Marlon’s behavior as an employee, accusing him of sexual harassment and theft and everything else he could come up with. It was laughable really, how obviously the ex was behind it, with his ridiculous scattershot accusations. The not-so-laughable part was that the negative publicity must have made the software firm uneasy. Marlon and his firm “parted ways” with a severance package. All this information comes in articles written after the fact, because the incident that got it in the paper was the attempted kidnapping, with the rest as backstory.
The kidnapping attempt hadn’t been something as simple as grabbing Marlon in a parking lot and trying—but failing—to get him into a panel van. No, he’d been Tasered and stuffed into a car trunk, driven into the wilderness and told to dig his own grave. That’s when he finally leaned into his military training. He slammed his shovel into the back of one guy’s knees, taking him down, and then smacked the other guy in the head hard enough to daze him. But the dazed guy managed to get into the car and take off, leaving Marlon with a wounded—but armed—assailant… miles from civilization.
He’d fled the guy with the gun, and he’d been shot at before making it to safety. That’s what got the story in the local papers—the kick-ass escape.
As I read those articles, I find it impossible to keep seeing Marlon as a guy who’d stake a woman on the ice and watch her die. I read them rooting for Marlon and being impressed as hell by how he handled it. In the same situation, would I have been able to run after disabling my attackers? Or would I have used that shovel to beat them until they couldn’t fight back?
I glance over at Dalton. He only arches his brows.
“I found him,” I say. “There’s nothing in his story that gives me any cause for concern, but now I’m going to dig into him personally. Okay?”
“Of course. Do whatever you need to do.” He sits up. “Can I go grab you breakfast? The bistro must be open by now.”
“Please.”
He pulls on his clothing as I begin my search. I’ve just found Marlon’s social media when Dalton picks up the leash and heads for the door.
“Not going to ask what I want?” I say.
“You’re my wife. I know what you want.”
I arch my brows. “Do you?”
“Sure. One of everything.”
I grin. “Good man.”
He calls Storm over, and I return to the screen. Marlon doesn’t have a lot of social media, but like many people of his generation—a little ahead of mine—he has a Facebook account for keeping up with family and former colleagues and old school chums.
When the page pops up, the profile picture is of a guy in fatigues, chilling with his feet up. It’s one of those shots that probably looks great at full size, but as a profile pic, it’s a blob of camo green. I click it, hoping to get a full picture, but he’s uploaded a low-res file, and it’s still blurry.
I move to his last update, which was made a few days before he left for Haven’s Rock. It’s a personalized variation on the one we give all residents to post. The trick to disappearing successfully, as I’d been told, is not to disappear at all. Tie everything up and walk away.
It helps that our residents are already in difficult situations. When they say they’re going traveling and will be offline, no one questions that. Marlon’s post says he needs a break from “everything that’s been happening” and his new job allows him to work remotely, so he’s going to travel. While he’ll be taking a social media hiatus, expect lots of photos when he gets back.
I flip through a few more entries. He’s a sporadic poster, and once the trouble started, the endless advice became more than he cared to deal with.
Hire a lawyer!
Why aren’t the police arresting the guy?
Show that asshole who he’s messing with.
He’d stopped posting—probably went offline so he didn’t need to see that.
I’m going to need to go back farther if I hope to find…
I stop. All the updates have been text only, but I reach a photo of a guy at a party. He’s hoisting a beer and grinning at the camera. I wouldn’t have paused at it except for the caption.
Finally got my hair cut. Now that’s a cause for celebration, right?
I frown at the photo. Is that Marlon? The answer should be obvious. I’ve spent four months with the guy in Haven’s Rock, and this photo is less than a year old. The haircut matches the short hair he has now, as does the meticulously trimmed short beard. In the photo, his skin tone is a tad darker, but this photo was taken in the summer, which means it’s probably from the sun. The eyes are brown, like Marlon’s. The facial shape and the eye shape are the same. So why am I hesitating?
Because it’s not Marlon.
It looks like Marlon… but it’s not.
The guy in the photo has a different smile. He’s also leaner, without Marlon’s bulky muscles.
Still, we all have different smiles for different circumstances and audiences. And the photo was taken six months before he came to Haven’s Rock. With all the stress of the stalking, he could have been hitting the gym hard and bulked up. Also, it’s just one photo. I’ve seen photos of myself where I do a double take because of the angle or the lighting.
All of that could explain it. But none of that stops my brain from screaming that this is not Marlon.
And maybe it’s not supposed to be him. I might be misinterpreting the caption.
I open the images tab and breathe a sigh of relief. My gaze goes straight to Marlon, in a photograph taken on what looks like a hike. The other guy has his arm thrown around Marlon’s shoulders.
I click and read the attached post.
A rare visit from my favorite cousin (sorry to all the others… you’ll be my favorites when you come to visit, ha!) Out for a hike with Jerome, whom I can’t tag because the guy’s a Luddite without an FB profile.
Okay, so that explains it. The guy in the other photo was Marlon’s cousin Jerome. I click the back button to read more posts, but instead it returns me to that page of images. I’m about to get out when I stop as my gaze slides over the gallery of photos.
I see more now of Marlon’s “cousin.” And none of the person I know as Marlon.