Tellings of the Time: Complete series

2. 1

Sunlight shines into the room and my stomach drops. Not the reaction one would normally have to such a sunny start of the day. But it’s the fourth. It’s the fourth and I know we’re already too late. He’s taken someone again. Another woman who’s going to die because we couldn’t stop this bastard before it was too late.

I’m stuck between two bodies, and if I had anything to say about it, I’d try to fall back asleep again. But with the way my insides are churning I know that that’s not an option.

I climb out of bed as best as I can, leaving Remy and Chester in Chester’s bed. We all fell asleep last night, naked as the day we were born. And I slept like the dead. Both of them seem to still be doing just that right now, and they can use it. So I let them be.

I grab one of Chester’s band tees, it’s from a Tool concert, and sneak to my room to grab some panties and fucking ugly wool socks that reach my knees. They might be hideous, but they are keeping my feet warm and happy. The floors of this old house are cold, especially in the mornings.

Once I’m somewhat dressed I head to the kitchen, waking the coffee machine so I can make myself a cup before I start looking in the fridge. I feel like making a large breakfast. Anything to keep my mind off of the date and what that implies. I gather all the ingredients I think I can use, raid the pantry for some additional stuff, actually make myself that cup of coffee and then start baking and cooking.

I’m halfway through making the dough for my brioche when Remy walks into the kitchen wearing only sweats. I can’t help but smile when I see he’s got socks on as well. He’s been here enough mornings to have learned to put them on. He yawns, stretching his arms over his head, showing off his body as he does so.

He walks towards me, gives me a kiss and grabs a mug to make himself some coffee.

“There’s flour on your nose,” he says, his voice still gruff with sleep. I automatically reach up to wipe it off, but there’s dough on my hands, making a bigger mess of my nose. Remy smiles and grabs a paper towel, wets it, and comes over to clean my nose.

“Now you’re all good to go again,” he says, holding my head in his hands and pressing a kiss to my now clean nose. “Who are we feeding? The army or an orphanage?”

The kitchen is a bit of a mess. I’ve got at least seven different breakfast dishes ready to go. I’m positive that I’m forgetting one. Once Chester is awake I can start on the eggs and the bacon, and whip up some pancakes. I might have overdone it a little, but I didn’t think about the date, so I count that as a win.

“An orphanage. Definitely an orphanage,” I answer while I start putting the brioche in a baking tin, trying to give it some aesthetic shape.

“Yes? You’d rather have a bunch of kids here than some pretty men in uniform?” he asks me, leaning against the counter while he sips from his coffee.

“I thought you’d know by now that I have a weakness for kids.”

“I do,” he answers before falling silent, his eyebrows wrinkled while he seems deep in thought. I make a quick round through the kitchen, grabbing all the finished dishes I left in various places on the countertop and let Remy think.

“Do you want your own kids, ma luciole?” he asks.

The question takes me by surprise. While I know the answer to the question, it takes me a little while to find my tongue before I can speak. “No. No, I know what can happen to kids. I would never willingly take a child I n this world and put them in harm”s way. With the job I do there’s bound to be one lunatic that tries to get back at me by taking my kid.”

I sigh.

“So if that puts you off,” I continue, “I understand. But that’s the way I think about it and I don’t believe that will change anytime soon.”

Remy stares at me, not answering right away. He takes another sip, mulling over my words, before he finally answers.

“I can understand that.”

I bite a little loose skin on my lip, gathering my courage to say what I have to say. “Does that change anything for you?”

He downs the last of his coffee and puts the mug on the counter. “No,” he finally says. “I hadn’t really thought about kids, but the possibility that I might one day want them was nice. You not wanting them is shutting a door. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but it is something I need to come to terms with.”

Which is fair. I couldn’t ask for anything more than that. Not sure how to handle the situation, I put my brioche in the oven and when I come back up from bending down, Chester walks into the kitchen. His hair is standing in every direction and he’s rubbing his eyes. Remy automatically walks to the coffee machine to make him his fix while I blatantly ogle Chester in his sweats and band tee.

“Good morning,” Remy greets him.

“Yeah, it’s morning,” Chester says like the grump he is before his caffeine, making me chuckle. “What are we talking about?”

“Not having kids,” Remy answers, handing him his coffee.

“Damn right, we’re not having kids.”

“Why don’t you tell us how you really feel about that, Ches?” I ask teasingly.

“There’s a lunatic out there that would just try to get to us through our kid,” he says without missing a beat, chugging his espresso and shivering before his eyes seem a little more awake.

Remy starts laughing. “You two even use the same terminology for it.”

Chester cocks his head and observes me. You’d think it’s something we’ve spoken about before, but we haven’t. Our brains seem to function on the same wavelength.

“Isn’t there some saying about people starting to act alike when they’ve spent enough time together?” I mock.

Chester flips me the bird before he turns back to Remy. “Besides, what the hell would a kid do with three fathers?”

And just those few little words make my heart skip a beat. He seems serious. It’s not something he just came up with, he seems to have put some thought in and he must believe we’re in it for the long haul. But he’s saying three, as if he expects Beckett to be there as well.

“Other than being the most lucky kid in the world? I don’t know. But I was just telling Abby that I never had the urge to reproduce and both of you made a very compelling argument that it wouldn’t be the most safe place for a kid.”

I turn my back to them, because right now all I can think about is whether Beckett will be gone soon, because hopefully we’ll have caught this serial killer. That leads me to thinking that it’s the fucking fourth and that another innocent girl has been taken. There’s a teeny chance that Alson is the killer after all, but my heart is just not in it.

My gut clenches, making me feel down and depressed, which I want to ignore and then leads me back to cooking. I can deal with that. I start heating up some frying pans for the pancakes, eggs and bacon, ignoring the sinking feeling I have.

“Why are you back to stress cooking?” Chester asks when I put pancake batter in the pan.

“Because it’s better than going crazy.”

He snorts. “I get that. But what set it off?”

When I don’t turn around to face him and keep quiet, I suddenly hear footsteps and before I know it Chester is giving me a back hug, pressing his lips against my hair.

“Talk to me, babe.”

I sigh. “It’s the fourth. And I hate feeling this useless. The waiting and not knowing sucks so hard. And…” I take a deep breath before I add the last cause of my distress. “And Beckett is going to be gone soon. You realize that, right? Here you are coming to terms with a whole future that he’s a part of, and it’ll only be temporary.”

I start cracking eggs and frying them up because breaking stuff feels really good right about now. Meanwhile, I chew the inside of my lip.

Suddenly, Chester’s hands aren’t the only ones I feel on my hips when Remy’s join them.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asks me.

“I never understood that question,” I mumble. “If I’m forgetting something, I won’t just suddenly remember when someone asks.”

“Not the point,” Chester answers, but I can hear the laughter in his voice.

“You’re forgetting that Beckett told you to just ask him to stay and he would,” Remy says matter-of-factly. And yes, I did forget that. Mainly because when he told me so I could never see that being an option. But we’ve come miles and miles since then and now it seems that this weird relationship we’ve got going on suddenly is a possibility.

Fuck.

It’s like the elephant sitting on my chest raised his left buttock, and now I can somewhat breathe again.

“I did forget that,” I say with a small voice. “How do you know that?”

“I heard you guys talk when you were dancing,” Remy says, letting me go and putting on oven mitts to grab the brioche out of the oven. “So do us all a favor and ask him.”

“How’s that doing you all a favor?” I ask, not understanding where he’s coming from.

“Don’t you know by now?” Chester answers. “We’re happy when you’re happy. And for some reason, Beckett makes you happy. I don’t understand why. I mean, come on, the guy’s an ass. You even said so yourself.”

“Yeah, but it’s a pretty ass,” Remy adds

“That it certainly is,” my lover confirms.

I chuckle while I listen to both of them gossiping about Beckett and finish making the biggest breakfast in the history of breakfasts. For a moment, I can forget my problems and everything seems alright again.

“Good morning,” Winny greets us when we enter the precinct. Chester and I join her in a room where she can look into the interrogation room through a two-way mirror. There are bags under her eyes.

“Morning,” I answer, handing a plate loaded with the various things I made for breakfast in her direction. Her face lights up when she sees it.

“What’s this?”

“Emotional support,” I answer. I’ve got a plate for Beckett as well. Who said that being a highly trained private investigator means I also can’t have a domestic side?

“Thanks,” she says when she grabs the glazed carrot cake and starts eating it. “He’s in there,” she says, pointing towards the room where Alson was being questioned.

I walk towards the window, feeling Chester standing closely behind me, when I see the dark haired agent inside. He’s wearing a white button-down with rolled-up sleeves that gloriously show off his muscular forearms, and even in the midst of all this shit, I take a moment to appreciate it.

“Pretty,” Chester whispers with his mouth right next to my ear and I can’t fight the laugh that leaves me.

I grab a set of headphones and quickly put them on so I don’t have to answer any questions about why I’m laughing right now and focus on Beckett’s voice.

“...what the hell is the harm in telling us where you were?” His voice is deep and demanding and leaves no room for negotiation.

Alson is sitting with his head on his arms that are crossed and lie flat on the table. His face is hidden and his body language screams tired. The lawyer in the room with him is stoic and equally tired going by the way he’s rubbing his eyes.

“Can I..” Alson starts.

“Don’t answer him,” the lawyer says.

“Why is it exactly that you don’t want him to answer me?” Beckett asks the lawyer.

“Is there any reason why you should know that?”

“General curiosity,” Beckett answers. He has his ankle on the knee of the other leg and I get distracted by that for a second. Just ask him to stay. I swallow, letting that thought settle in. It sounds so easy, but feels like a giant hurdle.

“Around one hundred and fifty people get exonerated each year because of wrongful convictions. You’re asking my client to pinpoint where he was at a certain point each night on dates going back months ago. Can you tell me where you were three months ago? Without looking at a calendar or going through your emails? My client is bound to get something wrong, and you’ll convict him for it, whether he’s truly the killer or not.”

Alson raises his head, looking at his lawyer as if it’s the first time he truly sees him.

“So no, no thank you. We’ll not be answering questions. You’ll either have to let us go in,” he looks at his watch, “twenty-seven hours, or sooner if another victim is taken. I read the newspaper, Special Agent Sanders. I know it’s the fourth. If another girl was taken while Alson was right here in interrogation with you he has an ironclad alibi. So we’ll take our chances and shut the hell up until then.”

Alson smirks and the evil that’s behind that smirk lets me know there is something wrong with him. I’m still sure he isn’t the serial killer, but that doesn’t mean he is not a killer. He lies his head back on his arms, and goes back to his catatonic state.

“Fucking Beckett,” Winny curses.

“Huh?” Chester asks.

“He just had to go and ask questions. The lawyer knew why they weren’t giving alibis. Alson didn’t. Now he does and he knows it’s a waiting game until our time is up or there’s another victim. He won’t be saying anything anymore.”

My stomach sinks and I sigh, taking the headphones off of my head and flattening my hair.

Winny gets up off her chair, throws her hands in the air and makes her way to the exit. “I’m going to do some research. This is useless.”

“Can I join you?” Chester says while he picks up his laptop bag even before she nods and he follows her out of the room. I move my back against a wall and let myself glide down to the ground, certain Beckett will soon join me. He knows just as well as Winny did that Alson isn’t talking anymore.

And indeed, about a minute later, Beckett walks in, throwing the door closed behind him. Without speaking, he sits beside me, huffing and staring irritably at his shoes.

I bump my shoulder into his, not looking him in the eye. “Crappy day?”

“Crappy day.”

“I brought you food.”

“Less crappy day already,” he grunts, but he doesn’t get up to go grab it.

We just sit there. All the things I could say are racing through my head. But it’s not the important stuff that I keep focussing on.

“I cook when I feel bad,” I confess without understanding why I’m telling him this. Chester and Remy know these things about me, and I want him to know too.

“What made you feel bad?” he asks, grabbing my hand and holding it while he lays it on the floor between us.

“It’s the fourth.”

“Yeah.”

It’s astounding how we have to use so few words to perfectly understand each other. Silence fills the room and both of us are lost in thought. A minute passes. Then one more, and before I know it, five minutes have gone by without either of us saying or doing anything. Something churns in my stomach, trying to get out. I suppose it’s bottled up emotion, but what the hell do I know about it?

“Stay,” I whisper. The word is out of my mouth before I realize it and there’s no taking it back now.

Using our intertwined hands he cups my face, his free hand cupping the other side of it and he kisses me. It’s soft and understanding, nothing like the raw and passionate kisses we shared before.

“Okay,” he says with his lips still against mine as if that’s all there is to say. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s not as complicated as I make it out to be. He told me to ask, I asked and now he’s staying.

Leaning forward, I resume the kiss. My mind wants to think about how this is all going to work, all the particulars, but I’m not giving in. If he says he’s staying, he’s staying. I just have to have a little faith in it.

My tongue finds his, and we’re softly caressing each other with it. A satisfied sigh leaves my mouth, and Beckett produces a sound that’s somewhere between a grunt and a purr.

Never would’ve thought that this day would turn around like this.

The door opens, and we quickly pull our heads back. Chester almost runs inside, drops his laptop on the table, eyes us and says, “don’t stop kissing on my account, I only found probable cause for Alson killing Mila.” We both get up in the time it takes to blink, so when Winny enters the room, we’re all decent again and ready to go. Still Beckett’s partner eyes us curiously, as if she knows exactly what we’ve been up to.

“What’d you find?” Beckett asks, standing behind Chester and eyeing the laptop over his shoulder.

“I went over everything, trying to find a connection between Alson and Mila. But I found nothing, just like all the investigators. It’s so squeaky clean, it almost feels intentional.”

He taps on his keyboard, making screens appear that I can’t place for the life of me.

“So I thought, what if someone made it look that clean? There’s nothing to be found on Alson or Mila, but what about the people around them? When they first investigated her death, they checked Mila’s emails, trying to find a connection to Alson. They found nothing, either in her private email or her student email.”

He shows us an inbox that I recognize as that of Portland University. I fucking hated that email system and was glad to get rid of it when I finally could. College wasn’t my thing anyway. Too much sitting still and listening. Give me a day out in the field over a day studying anytime.

“I was thinking about how you took Alson in. How his dad was acting sketchy. Why the hell would you willingly hand your kid over to the feds? No offense to you, Winny and Becky.”

“Don’t call me Becky,” Beckett says automatically.

“So I checked his father’s bank accounts and there was a large deposit right after Mila got murdered to one H. Kaldrough. Now, the chancellor of Portland University is Hank Kaldrough. Which is a little coincidental if you ask me, right? So I hacked into his private email, but that’s pretty clean. Couldn’t find anything dating back so far. But Mister Kaldrough isn’t as tidy on his university email.”

Chester pulls up another email screen, tapping away and searching for Montgomery and finds some emails dating back twelve years. He opens one of them.

“This one shows Montgomery Senior buying off Mister Kaldrough. He asks him to delete all emails between Mila and Alson, as well as every other email that might possibly name Alson. Kaldrough then sent the payment details to Montgomery senior, and that, ladies and gentleman, is how you get away with murder.”

“Fuck,” Winny says, nothing left from her usual cool and collected state. And fuck indeed. Alson did it and covered it up with Daddy’s help.

“That’s…” Beckett starts, staring at the screen with an open mouth. “That’s amazing.”

“So what do we do now?” I ask, looking through the two-way mirror to where Alson is still sitting bent over his arms. Does he know we’ve got him? That his life is about to change? The life he took all those years back finally catching up to him? I bet he doesn’t.

“Now we call in the local cold case team and have them arrest him for that,” Winny answers. It’s not really the answer I was looking for, but I guess it’ll do. “It doesn’t prove that he’s guilty of murder, but it proves he’s involved. Once they reopen the case, they can look into it more closely. And I think Alson’s father is in trouble too.”

“Print those out for me, please?” Beckett asks Chester, who smirks at the agent.

“Taking a tablet is a little too tech savvy for you?” he mocks.

“No, but if someone catches wind of this evidence and deletes it, we’ll still have the paper ones,” Beckett deadpans.

Chester slowly nods his head. I think it’s as close to admitting Beckett has a point as he’ll ever get and starts tapping away at his laptop again.

“Wanna go in and tell them?” Beckett asks me with a mischievous grin.

“Can we?” I say, unsure whether it’s wise to show our cards. Chester’s methods are often questioned, and not everything holds up in court.

“Let’s go fuck with his head, tell him what we found and see if we can get him to talk. If he starts talking and confesses we’ll have him anyway.”

I can’t fight the grin that covers my face. Beckett walks out of the room, but before I follow him I wrap my arms around Chester and give him a back hug. “Thank you. Awesome job.”

He grunts. “Yeah, yeah, go annoy the suspect.” He waves his hand dismissively. It’s funny how he can be his own biggest fan at times yet be completely humble in others. I cherish the times he can’t take a compliment, as they’re far outweighed by his more arrogant moments.

I get out into the hallway, where Beckett is holding some prints in his hands and is waiting for me to enter the interrogation room. Once he sees me, he holds open the door for me and lets me enter. I cock my head to try and figure out where this behavior is coming from. I ask him to stay and he suddenly starts holding open doors for me. There’s not a lot of time to think about it since we’re going to talk to Alson.

Alson is still sitting with his head on his folded arms. It’s almost as if he’s sleeping, his lawyer is not any better. Being held up in interrogation for days at a time is exhausting. Good thing that we’re about to make their hearts beat a little faster.

“Good afternoon,” Beckett greets them with a shit-eating grin. Even if I didn’t know the man, I would know he means trouble.

The lawyer opens his eyes, looks at me, scrunches his nose and sighs. “We’re not going to fall for womanly wiles. If that’d be the case we would’ve started talking when your partner was here.”

That comment could annoy me. I could let it get to me. But knowing what’s about to go down, I let it go. I make an effort to make as much noise as I can when I pull one of the chairs back and sit down on it.

“No womanly wiles. Just some old-fashioned proof,” Beckett says when he sits down and taps the papers on the table, making them into a neat little stack. Then he lays the papers flat on the table, spins them around and pushes them in front of Alson.

“What’s that?” Alson asks.

“Don’t say anything,” the lawyer demands. I’m starting to feel like it’s his catchphrase.

“This is proof that your father paid off the chancellor of Portland University to destroy emails that prove that you were indeed dating Mila. There’s email correspondence and his bank statement. Now, why would your father do that?”

“Don’t answer that,” the lawyer says again.

“If you killed Mila, what’s to keep us from thinking you killed the other women too? Was Mila your first? Did the others even come close to that first kill? Or did they get better over time?” I taunt him.

“I didn’t kill those women!” Alson snaps.

“Shut up, Alson,” the lawyer hisses through his teeth when he stands up with wrinkles between his eyebrows, and grabs the papers from the table.

“But you did kill Mila, didn’t you?” Beckett asks in a voice that’s so sweet I don’t recognize it as his.

Alson is grinding his teeth while the lawyer pales when he reads the emails. He sighs, sits back down and starts rubbing his eyebrows.

“Don’t answer that question Alson, but tell them where you were when the other women got taken.”

Alson looks over his shoulder, studying his lawyer. I guess he feels like he’s in trouble. He scrapes his teeth before he starts speaking again. “I don’t know about all of the dates, but I host a poker party every first of the month at my place. We play every month, but it always gets late and there are at least five people who can verify that I was there all night.”

Beckett nods. Yeah. That’s actually a good alibi. But we didn’t think that Alson was the serial killer and this just proves it. I hope that the cold case team can pin this murder on him for real and the poor girl and her family can finally get some justice. All this does is strengthen the knowledge that the real killer is still out there, and he took another woman off the streets today. Now all we can do is wait until we know who it is.

Beckett follows Chester and me back home. Something changed, and while I can’t pinpoint it exactly, it is suddenly perfectly normal for him to come to our little castle. When I open the door, I get a whiff of something delicious. I didn’t expect there to be any cooking smells, but here we are.

“Remy?” I yell from the hallway while I start taking off my shoes, expecting my dancer to have some role in whatever I’m smelling.

“Kitchen!” he yells back.

“Since when does he take over our kitchen without our knowledge?” I ask Chester, my brows furrowed.

Chester pulls off his shoes, dropping them right where he’s standing in the hallway. “Gave him the keys last week. Thought it would come in handy.”

That surprises me. For someone who’s all against commitment, he’s taking pretty big steps. And he’s not even freaking out about it. It’s like little boys are growing up.

“I’d say if he comes over unexpectedly and starts cooking you dinner, that’s a great move,” Beckett butts in, also taking off his shoes and putting them away on the shoe rack. He looks a little out of place, as if he’s not sure if he should be here. It could just be my interpretation of him though. He’ll get used to it.

He follows me into the kitchen, where I find a certain Mister Ashburn swaying his hips to the music he’s playing while he’s cooking. It smells like coconut and coriander.

“Curry?” I ask by way of greeting.

“Yes,” he tells me, grabbing my waist and pulling me flush against him. “It’s about the only dish I know how to make. And it’s both comforting and spicy. Just the way you like it.”

I steal his wooden spoon to grab a taste. My tastebuds explode with rich and exotic flavors, and it’s awesome. And hot.

“That’s really good,” I mumble while trying to hide the fact that I’ve burned my tongue.

“I should hope so. It’s the only dish I know how to make. But there are at least three hundred million varieties on it, so I don’t have to grow bored with it.”

“Well,” Becket interrupts, “better to be able to make the one dish you’re good at than to suck at that one dish.”

“That would suck,” Chester agrees, walking to the fridge and making everyone a drink. “Imagine only being able to make a curry, but it’d be really sucky curry.”

“Can you even screw up a curry?” Remy asks, eyeing his pan suspiciously.

“Yeah,” Chester and I answer at the same time.

“You speak from experience?” Beckett asks, accepting the can of coke Chester holds out to him.

“Definitely,” I answer, scrunching my nose.

“Abby has tried to teach me to cook exactly once,” Chester starts saying, pulling himself up on the counter and sitting back with his knees pressed against his chest, cradling a can of energy drink. “She thought curry would be a safe option, because there are so many varieties. She also thought it’d be a good idea to start with that one because she was still convinced I’d fall in love and we’d no longer be living together, so when that happened and we only ever got around to me learning how to make a curry, I’d at least have a lot of different kinds to pick from. It was an idea I hated even then, but couldn’t pinpoint why exactly. Anyway, she left me to chop all the basics up, had to take a phone call and told me to use a couple of peppers. We had several kinds of peppers in the fridge, and instead of asking which she meant, I winged it, thinking how bad could it really be? So I grabbed one of each, chopped them up and dumped them in the curry paste.”

I chuckle, remembering the day. “Let’s suffice to say that, yes, you can fuck up a curry, and yes, it felt just as hot going out as going in.”

Beckett snorts, showing me that dimple in his cheek and the corners of my mouth pull up. It might still be a little strange having him here, but we’re getting there. He’s staying because I asked - and he wants to. And that makes the whole day bearable.