Tellings of the Time: Complete series

3. 2

We’re not allowed to come along to the marked places on the maps. We’re ordered to stay at home. I don’t know about regular people, but telling Chester and me we’re not allowed to do something? It’s a bad move. A fucking bad move. We’re sitting in the office, behind Chester’s desk, watching various hacked camera feeds of the FBI. Agents are searching the premises that were marked after Beckett came over and took away the map. He didn’t seem too happy about having to leave Remy, but he couldn’t deny this looked like a big deal.

Chester wasn’t able to hack any of the FBI agents’ phones. He needed a physical way in before he’d be able to do that. But he did manage to find some home security cameras that he could point in the general direction of the marked houses. We’ve seen teams pull up to all of them. Ever since we got a live feed, I’ve been sitting on Chester’s desk.

Currently, I’m sitting crossed legged on top of a stack of papers, not even bothering to put them away. My eyes are focused on the screen showing a house I saw Beckett enter. It’s been a while since he went in, a long while. The inside of my cheek is harshly gnawed.

Alex and Scott are sitting on the couch by Chester’s desk, patiently waiting for some news. Even Miranda is hovering around us like a mother hen, constantly refreshing our beverages.

“You really think there’s bodies in these houses?” Alex asks. He’s been quiet for most of the time waiting, but the waiting is getting to all of us.

“Chances are high,” Chester answers, looking up from his phone. “The houses have been vacant for a number of years, but rent keeps being paid. I can’t trace any of the subletters. So it seems to follow the same pattern as the house we found before.”

I really can’t wrap my mind around how enormous this case has become. People go missing all the time. There are enough unsolved missing persons cases that having this many murders on our hands is a possibility. Even if all these marked houses each have several bodies inside of them, we still won’t make a dent in the list of all who’ve gone missing. But I’m really worried about nobody noticing all these women getting murdered right beneath our noses. When I think about what would have happened if I had not walked into that basement, my heart starts to thunder in my chest. We’d have absolutely no clue that this was going on, and it’d just keep on happening.

“Ches,” Zoey yells from behind her own desk from the other side of the floor, “the tracing of the traffickers from the compound keeps going black. The program is throwing some sort of error.”

Chester’s eyes never leave his screens. “Not the time, Zoey. Try rebooting.” With everything that’s going on with the arrest and now the possibility of a whole bunch of new bodies, it’s easy to forget what we’re doing. It’s a good example of why it’s so important for us to not get tangled in this serial killer case. We miss chances to save kids and waste time.

“Seriously?” the petite hacker with the pink pixie cut says as she stands up behind her desk. It doesn’t make that much of a difference seeing as she’s truly tiny, but it’s the gesture that matters. “You’re the genius here, and you tell me to reboot?”

“There’s a reason it’s usually step one,” he yells back.

Zoey starts swearing in a language I don’t understand and Chester starts laughing. “My Mandarin is just as good as yours. Just reboot and start the program again. It’s not like we had a hot trail anyway.”

Scott, not so subtly, gets off of the couch and walks to the other side of the floor. “I’ll go check on her.”

“Check her out is more like it,” Alex mumbles.

I chuckle. “They’re cute together, right?”

“Don’t know anything about them being together, but I do know that Scott is a lot more pleasant to work with now that he’s getting some on the regular,” the ex-soldier says as he watches his buddy take off.

“Is that how it works for you, Alex?” Chester asks. “Does the fact that you enjoy killing everyone during the workouts mean you’re not getting any at home?”

Miranda, who walks by right at that moment, widens her eyes. “You’re either very stupid or very brave, Chester.”

“Well, it’s not the stupid option. I’ve got the test results to back that up, so I must be brave.”

“Oh no, I’m sure you’re pretty stupid,” Alex says. “As for my sex life, I don’t have to yell at my wife in the bedroom because she, unlike you, is able to keep up with me. It’s all about regular training.”

“Ooh, burn,” I half whisper as I grin. In that moment I see something moving out of the corner of my eye on one of the screens. Beckett is walking out of the house he’d disappeared in a while ago. I don’t even give him the chance to do whatever he’s going to do. I grab my phone and call him.

It’s weird to see him get my call on the screen. We don’t have any audio, so I put my phone on speaker. The corners of Beckett’s mouth pull up, and he answers after the phone has only rang twice.

“Special Agent Beckett Sanders,” he says.

“What did you find? It’s more women, right?” My heart is racing like crazy. Part of me is certain it’s bodies, but another part of me really doesn’t want to hear it. I’m just the type of person to rip the bandage off at once.

“I just got out. I’ve got people to talk to,” he says. God, why does Mister Doing-It-By-The-Law have to be so stand-offish?

“I know you just got out. I can see you’ve just come out. Just tell me. Come on, Beckett, I need to know.”

“What do you mean you can see? Are you here?”

“No, I’m at the office. I can see you on my screen.”

“See you on… Hackerboy has some sort of feed on us?”

“Yeah, get over it,” Chester says.

“You realize this is official FBI business, right? This could be considered espionage.”

“Cut the crap, just tell me,” I snap.

I can see him rub his eyebrows as I hear him sigh. “It’s bad. There’s bodies here. That’s all I’m telling you.”

Fuck. FUCK.

If that means there are also bodies in the other houses, that means there are an additional seventy-two bodies there. A whiff of lime reaches me, and my stomach instantly churns. Chester puts a hand on my calf, and I meet his baby blues, only to see him giving me a worried look. He’s spinning his thumb ring, so at least I”m not the only one freaking out. Alex looks unnaturally pale as well.

“I gotta go,” Beckett says. “I’ve got some phone calls to make. I’ll keep you updated. I promise.”

When the call ended I jump off the desk. There isn’t a cell in my body that’s able to keep sitting still right now. Keeping the contents of my stomach down, I start walking to the dressing room.

“Where are you going?” Chester asks.

“Changing room, running gear. I… I need to get out. I’ll see you back home.”

“That’s fifteen miles.”

“Yeah, don’t care. This,” I say, motioning down up and down my body, “this needs an outlet. I’m going stir fry.”

“I can’t run fifteen miles!” Chester argues.

“Drive the car home!” I snap, even though I know he doesn’t deserve it.

“I don’t have a driver’s license!” Chester yells as he stands up. This news is getting to him as much as it is to me because he’d never admit this otherwise. And normally, I’d make full use of the situation to rub it in that I’m right, but I can’t. I need to get out, need to run.

“You do have a driver”s license. And I hereby promote you from student driver to regular driver. Don’t scratch my car, and I’ll see you at home.”

Before he can argue any further with me, I turn around and barge into the dressing room, putting on some workout clothes and running shoes. I force myself to keep my mind blank until I’m standing outside of the building, feeling a breeze of fresh air play with my hair as I start to run. I try to start off at an easy pace, but before I reach the first corner, I’m running so hard that my lungs are already burning. My feet are pounding on the ground and the world around me disappears. All the while, I focus on the pain in my legs and my lungs, and I force myself not to think about the victims, the numbers, and the possibility that Remy is the one who hurt them. The entire run home, my pain is physical instead of mental, and by the time I come home, I crash down, body, mind and soul.

Ryan’s office is weird. It looks nothing like Robin’s office. Her’s is all light colors and happy frolicky things. Ryan’s office is like a dark library. There are book cabinets all around, filled to the brim with scientific books. He has a print of several Rorschachs hanging behind his desk, and for some reason one of them looks like a monkey showing its butt to me, so I try not to look at it. Instead, I’m staring at the ceiling, counting the tiles. By the time I came home from my run, Chester had set up an emergency appointment with Ryan and Robin. So I took a shower, and now here I am.

“This office is bigger,” I suddenly say, doing what I do best; deflecting from what I’m feeling.

“How do you figure?” Robin asks over her half-moon shaped glasses. She looks out of place here.

“Your office has sixty-four ceiling tiles,” I tell her, “while this one…”

“Has seventy-two,” Chester finishes my sentence. He gives me a crooked grin.

“Fucking hell, there’s two of you,” Ryan says as he lets his head fall down in his hands. He seems to match his interior perfectly, mad scientist style. “Come on, you asked for an emergency meeting. it’s bound to be about something between the two of you, right?”

“Jesus,” I hiss wide-eyed, “is he always so impatient? I can understand why you get along so well.”

“I’d love for us all to at least be civil,” Robin adds. I guess it’s not normal for therapists to say fucking hell, but it works for Chester and I definitely don’t mind.

“We’re fine. We can handle the harsh words,” I say as I start plucking the hem of my shirt. Words I can handle, but feelings? Feelings, not so much. I guess we came here for a reason, so we’d better start talking. Knowing Robin, if I don’t say anything, nothing will be said.

“It’s not about us,” Chester says.

“Then what the hell is so important?” Ryan grunts.

“Well, the FBI arrested someone for the serial killings that have been going on,” I start.

“We’ve read about that, yeah. I fail to understand why that would be a problem for the two of you. Happened several days ago, so it’s not really an emergency,” Ryan interrupts me.

“Is he always like this?” I ask Chester. “Because I don’t think he’s a good match for you if he always interrupts you.”

“Well, to be fair, I kind of need the interruptions, because I’m known for rambling.”

“Funny,” Robin chimes in, “because Abby is usually quiet for most of the therapy time.”

I roll my eyes. “If you would let me fucking finish, I would be able to tell you that on top of the fourteen known victims of The Time, they found an additional seventy-two bodies today.”

That shuts them up. I eye the monkey-butt-Rorschach and it seems to mock me.

Chester, to my delight, adds fuel to the fire. “The man they took into custody? It’s the dancer I told you about.”

“Your ex-hookup?” Ryan asks, eyes wide.

“Your current date?” Robin asks, letting her professional guard down for once.

I let myself fall back on the couch and grunt. Chester nods. And then it’s quiet. This is unusual, because normally after I’ve finally opened my mouth, Robin has all kinds of things to say.

“I think we broke them,” I fake-whisper to Chester as I nudge him with my elbow.

Robin clears her throat. “Well, excuse me. Having almost a hundred murder victims and then having the man you’re dating be the one responsible for it is not exactly in the basic psychologist’s training. I don’t really know how to deal with this.”

“Presumably did this,” I rectify her. I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that Remy would do this and I refuse to fully believe it. Even if whatever there was between us has been destroyed.

“Why aren’t you freaking out?” Ryan asks Chester, eyeing him suspiciously.

He shrugs. “Things seemed too good to be true, they were too good to be true. This? Everything being fucked up? It feels a lot more like my comfort zone.”

“And what have we discussed about comfort zones?”

“That it’s, the place where adventures and happiness go to die?”

“Exactly,” Ryan says, combing a hand through his hair in an attempt to regain some of his posture.

“Well, outside of my comfort zone, women die. Eighty-six of them. So I’ll stay right here, thank you very much,” Chester deadpans. He sits so wide-legged that his knee touches mine, and for a moment it’s the only thing that’s on my mind.

“You’re impossible to work with,” Ryan concludes.

“Try living with him,” I add, earning me a foul look from my friend.

“How are you holding up?” Robin asks, her eyes on where my knee touches Chester’s. She cocks her head in curiosity.

“I’m fine.” As long as I don’t have to feel anything. Maybe we can go shoot stuff after this session. That’d probably help.

“She’s not,” Chester says.

“Traitor.”

“She ran fifteen miles just now.”

“Don’t tattle on me!”

Robin gives me her signature silent treatment. Ryan seems to have gotten this part of the psychologist training, because he seamlessly follows her lead. Do they have classes on this? Where they just all sit in silence, mastering the art of making your client feel uncomfortable enough for them to start talking?

“I’m fine if I don’t feel anything,” I mumble after a while.

“What have we said about not feeling anything? Robin asks.

“That it’ll come to bite me in the butt once all the feelings start seeping in.”

“So, what do we do with feelings?” she asks me like she’s directing the question at the kids on Sesame Street.

“We feel them,” I grunt. “But just so you know, I let feelings for Remy in, and now everything has gone to hell.”

“There really are two of them,” Ryan says, as he gets up and walks over to his desk. He opens his desk drawer, takes out a flask, and takes a sip.

“Ryan!” Robin gasps. “We don’t drink during work hours.”

“Well, switch clients with me. I’ll take Abby, you take Chester, and we’ll re-evaluate on the day drinking in a few consults.”

Chester looks fucking smug, and I can’t help but grin.

“What do you need from us?” Robin asks, ignoring Ryan. Somehow, they remind me of Chester and myself, but then in a weird alternate psychologist universe.

“A magical solution?” I suggest.

Ryan laughs.

“What do you think the solution is, Abby?” Robin asks me, writing something on her notepad.

“Well, if it was up to me, I’d do a Forrest Gump, go running from the West Coast to the East Coast and back again, grow a beard out and hope that everything will have solved itself by the time I get back.”

She’s using the silent treatment again. I scowl at her. I’m not above being childish right now. They just told me that there’s no standard reaction to mass murder, so everything I choose to do should be okay.

“Okay, okay, feel all the shit, work through it, journal, don’t push stuff down.”

“You,” Ryan says to Chester as he points to me, “follow her lead.”

“Really, that’s all I’m getting? We’re paying you guys way too much,” Chester says with a hint of disbelief.

“Well, we could talk about the attraction between you two, if you’d like?” Ryan asks. There’s an evil gleam in his look.

“Not a chance, asshole,” Chester says at the exact moment I say, “Nope”.

“But you can really make me work for my money on that subject. I feel like there’s layers upon layers to uncover there.”

“Yeah, stop peeling layers off. If I ever need relationship advice, you’re the last person I’m asking.”

Robin and I give Chester and Ryan both the same look. They’re more like old friends who bicker, and that seems to be exactly what Chester needs. Perhaps, going off on all the scientific books in Ryan’s office, he’s the same kind of smart Chester is, only on a different subject.

My phone pings, and despite the judging looks I’m getting, I look at the text I’m getting.

Beckett: Could you and Chester come to the police station?

I stare at my screen. My immediate reaction is to tell him no. But after this morning, I got the feeling he wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.

Me: On our way.

“We need to go, have to go to the police station.” Chester raises his brow, and I just sigh. It already feels like the longest day of my life, and it’s about to get even longer.

We make our way to the interrogation rooms for the second time that day. It’s late now, dark outside, and this day feels like it’s lasted several days. I’m so beyond exhausted, and I’m pretty sure I might sleep for twenty-four hours straight once I get home. Winny is out in the hallway, waiting on us.

“Hey again,” she says, sounding about as tired as I feel. “Let’s go in.”

We walk into the room, where Remy is sitting alone in the same spot at the table. He looks like he’s about to collapse at any moment. When he sees us coming in, he lifts his head and scowls.

“Now what?”

“You’re free to go,” Winny says.

I take a step back out of surprise, bumping into Chester, who’s standing right behind me.

“So you can follow me and gather more evidence?” Remy asks suspiciously. “Because you’re not going to get it. I didn’t do it.”

“We know,” Winny says calmly, and she seems to genuinely feel for the man sitting in front of her.

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve had some recent developments that make it impossible for you to be who we thought you were. Meaning you’re free to go.”

Remy looks at her in disbelief. He still seems to think this is some kind of trap. I’m mostly curious about what news has come up.

“Why are they here?” he asks Winny while looking at us.

“Because, they’ve been put in a bad position, just like you, and they deserve to see that we’re doing everything to make this right. And they were promised to be informed. So that’s what we’re going to do next. Inform them.”

All it’s doing is making me feel like a piece of shit, if I’m being honest. Remy gets up quicker than I thought possible. Winny holds out a plastic bag with his phone and his keys which he grabs out of her hands before he storms out of the room. He doesn’t even look at Chester and me, and that stings. It feels like he’s taking a piece of me with him as he stalks out the door.

Now that Remy is gone, the interrogation room feels like a regular room, and I make my way to the table and sit down on top of it. I cross my legs, too tired to care that I probably should be sitting down on a chair like a normal person.

“What was that?” I ask. My voice sounds as tired as I feel. There’s this emptiness inside of me that reminds me of The Nothing in TheNever Ending Story. It’s spreading like a disease inside of me until there’s nothing left. The little voice inside my head chastises me for everything that happened. Because I couldn’t convince Beckett that Remy was innocent, he got arrested. Because I didn’t fully back Remy up, I broke everything that was blooming between us.

I did that.

I broke that.

“That,” Winny says as she grabs a chair and sits down, “was the inevitable outcome of this whole situation.”

“Meaning?” Chester says. He doesn’t grab a chair. He just crosses his arms and stands with his back against the wall as he suspiciously eyes what’s going on.

Beckett takes a seat, looking like that grumpy cat from the internet. No, scrap that, that grumpy cat looks way more cheerful than Beckett. He doesn’t meet my eyes for some reason, but his thumbs are suddenly very interesting.

“First results from the excavations came back,” Winny continues. “We had a pathologist on site who called in an anthropologist. One of these burial sites dates back six years. Seems like each burial site has twelve women. One for each year. It’s like he’s literally on the clock to kill these women. It’s obsessive behavior. We’ve combined the dates we know he has taken women according to his M.O. and the dates women were reported missing. We narrowed the database of DNA profiles to compare based on that. This way, we had a smaller pool of DNA profiles to compare the DNA results from the excavations to, making it quicker to get results. We’ve rushed the techlab and used Rapid-DNA testing and we got a few hits back from the victims already. Remy wasn’t on the West Coast when those murders happened. He was tied up in performances in New York. He wouldn’t have had the time to abduct and kill these women and still be on time to perform. Having theaters full of people witness you on stage seems like a pretty solid alibi.”

Silence fills the rooms. It’s so thick I think you can actually hear my heart break. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Remy. It wasn’t him. He didn’t kill my Elaine. The man who did that is still out there. Fuck. FUCK. I’ve screwed everything up. The breaths I take don’t seem to reach my lungs. For the second time that day I want to get up and run away until there’s nothing left inside of me, but I’m too tired. I haven’t slept in days, I ran too hard that morning and I have no reserves left. But not being able to take these feelings down leaves me with a knot in my throat.

“You were certain,” I finally manage to stutter at Beckett, giving him an accusing glare. It was his reasoning I went along with. Without him pointing Remy out as the killer, I never would’ve suspected it. Never. Not in a million years. My gut was right, his was wrong. Why?

“What happened?” I suddenly roar, unsure where the anger is coming from.

Beckett looks at his shoes, the corners of his mouth pointing south.

Winny lays a warm hand on my shoulder. “Tunnel vision, darling. It happens to the best of us.”

Chester glares at Beckett. “Lost your tongue?”

“Nope.”

“Why are you moping then?”

“Because I thought we had the bastard, and no more girls would have to die, and now we’re on the fucking clock again, getting nowhere. How many more girls is it going to take for us to take this psycho down?”

He’s asking us? That’s his job. I’m too tired to be mad. I’m too tired for anything in life right now. Everything got turned upside down when Remy was arrested, but now everything is spinning again by turning it back up.

Winny sighs. “I can taste the tension in this room. It tastes like ash and ember.” I don’t know what the fuck that’s supposed to mean, but it feels right. “I’m just going to put this out there before everything goes up in flames. We fucked up, took in the wrong person. I’m not going to apologize for doing that, because he was a real option based on the evidence that we had. I will apologize for ruining whatever it was between you two, it seems like a hard place to come back from.”

She seems genuinely sad, just like she seemed before in the adjoining room before I joined Beckett in the interrogation room. But she still let him go on with it. Bottom line is that Winny isn’t my most favorite person in the world right now either.

“The burial sites we found show the same pattern as the one we found before. Twelve women, buried in a circle, forming a clocklike image. We hope to get more results soon, especially from the older sites. If those were his first, chances are he made mistakes back then. This killer is dangerous and knows what he’s doing. He’s been getting away with it for a long time, comfortable in the shadows, where nobody knew him. Now? Now everything is out in the open, and he doesn’t seem intent on stopping anytime soon. That makes him even more dangerous. Especially for you.”

Well, whoop-ti-fucking-do. Just what I need. I don’t respond to her, I’m just looking Beckett in the eye. His eyes have finally lifted from his shoes, and there’s a mixture of anger and something I can’t really place there. Is it shame? It’s barely noticeable beneath the anger.

“Got anything to add to that?” I ask him in an icy tone before I get off the table and make my way to Chester, who pushes himself away from the wall.

“Be careful out there,” is all he says.

I scoff.

Once I’m in the hallway, I grab my phone and bring up Remy’s number. I get directed straight to voicemail. Fuck. If there is anything left to salvage here at all, it’s not going to happen through voicemail. I send him a text instead.

Me: Please call me. We need to talk.

I don’t receive an answer.