4. 3
I’m sitting on the couch by Chester’s desk the next day, knees tucked beneath my chin and my arms firmly wrapped around them. My head isn’t in a very good place right now, mostly being numb and my thoughts going in circles. Coraline keeps floating to the front of my mind and how our failure to get this killer off the streets got her killed.
Chester is doing God-knows-what on his computer screens, going so fast I can’t follow him. He’s listening to his music on his headphones, but I can hear Malevolence grunting to Self Supremacy all the way over here. I doubt he even knows I’m here.
Remy walks back out of the kitchen with a coffee I won’t drink but take from him anyway. Today, somehow caffeine doesn’t seem like the answer to all of my questions in life. I thank him with a small smile that doesn’t completely cover my worries. Remy came along to the office without question or any room for debate and has just been hanging with me all day. His presence is a comfort, even if I don’t show it.
Dylan makes his way over, hair wet from a post-workout shower. A workout I didn’t join, I might add. For someone who can’t sit still I’m moving very little today. I’m stuck inside the hell that’s my head. He has a little ball in his hand, throwing it up and catching it again.
“You look like hell. You okay?” he asks me flat out, concern in his eyes. He might be the most quiet member of my tac team, but he’ll say it like it is when he wants to.
“Today fucking sucks,” I tell him.
“I figured that much when you skipped working out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you willingly sit one out.” He throws the ball to Remy, who holds up his hand in a clear invitation for it. They start throwing it back and forth, the ball making a tapping sound anytime either of them catches it.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I promise. The idea of feeling so bad that I’m passing up two workouts doesn’t sit too well with me.
Remy and Dylan start an animated conversation about everything and nothing, and soon are laughing about the difference between doing splits and lunges. Their chatter is a welcome distraction for a while.
“Okay, just shut the fuck up,” Chester suddenly demands. I raise my brow because he’s being incredibly rude and I don’t tolerate that.
He meets my glare, glaring right back.
“I might have a break in the case, and you are all making a lot of noise.”
“You’re the one making a lot of noise, with your grunting music,” I tell him.
He rolls his eyes at me. “Want to hear what I found? Or shall we just let Wayne roam the streets of Portland and keep letting him kill women?”
This time, I roll my eyes at him.
“Please tell us,” Remy asks, being the bigger man.
“I did the same thing I did with Alson. I couldn’t find anything on Wayne during his stint in prison, so I looked into the people close to him. During Wayne’s incarceration, the prison warden received some pretty large payments, each of them right around the time those women were taken. The payments were made by a company, a company that’s in Wayne’s father’s name. Now that still doesn’t tell us a lot.”
He pushes the hair that hangs in his face away. He scrunches his nose and I know what he’s thinking. He’s spoken the thoughts out loud so much I can hear them. Fucking money. It makes people think they can get away with anything like they own the world, and after all the evidence I’ve seen, I can’t even say he’s wrong.
“I don’t think asking the warden questions will get us very far. Wayne’s too slimy for that. The bastard tends to get away with anything. But I did find some write-ups by another officer. The dates of those reprimands are suspicious as well, each of them is a day after the women were supposedly taken. From what I can tell, he really doesn’t like Wayne. So I think you need to call him and ask him some questions. He seems like a good source of information.”
“Me? Why am I calling him?” I ask, my eyes going wide.
“Because I tend to piss people off,” he shrugs.
Which is true.
“Shouldn’t we let Beckett call him?” I ask, the hesitance audible in my voice. At least they can’t hear how loud my head is pounding.
Remy huffs. “Since when are you afraid to make a phone call?”
“Since I’d rather shoot people than call them,” I mumble. Dylan, who overhears me, starts laughing. I give him a crooked smile before I reach for my phone and start dialing the number Chester is showing me on one of his screens.
My heart is pounding in my throat the second the phone starts ringing. Could this man really have any of the answers we’re looking for?
“Hello?” a dark voice answers after the fourth ring.
“Is this Leo Banks?” I ask, looking at the name on the file on Chester’s screen.
“This is him. Who’s this?”
I take a deep breath. “This is Abigail Wilder. I’m with the FIX Foundation, but I’m currently working alongside the FBI in the pursuit of the serial killer The Time. I wondered if I could ask you some questions.”
It stays silent, and long seconds go by before he says the liberating word ‘Shoot’.
“We’d like to know about one of your inmates from a few years back. His name is Wayne Daniel Ridgefield. You wrote him up quite a few times.”
The line goes quiet again.
“The motherfucker did it, didn’t he?” Leo grunts.
“He’s a person of interest. What can you tell us about his time in prison? Why did he get so many reports?”
“I didn’t like that the bastard got to go on furlough every month. He was only in for six months. What the hell was so important that he had to go away six times? I don’t like it when inmates get to leave before their time.”
“Furlough?” I repeat, my head spinning, because there’s nothing to be found about furlough.
“Yeah,” Leo says. “He was very smug about it too.”
“It isn’t in his file,” I answer.
“He did leave. Multiple times,” Leo stands his ground.
The pieces of the puzzle start falling into place. “Would the warden be able to grant him furlough and then scrap it from his file?”
The silence returns again.
“That motherfucker!” Leo barks. “He did it, didn’t he? And the warden helped him? I never liked that son of a bitch!”
“I can’t confirm that,” I tell him. But he’s right. He’s so freaking right. “Thank you so much for your help Mister Banks. We might contact you again for an official statement.”
I end the call before I can overthink it. My head is spinning and my heart is racing. He wasn’t in prison at the times of the murders. He was out, and he was capable of killing them. Did the asshole get arrested on purpose, just so he could have an alibi? All the men are looking at me with wide eyes. I reckon they understood enough from that one-sided conversation.
“Call Beckett,” I say.
Things went into overdrive after calling Beckett. He questioned Leo himself and the warden, who said he had no idea what this was about, but after being presented with evidence of his the payments he caved and talked. He said he let Wayne go on furlough and then deleted all evidence of it. There’ll be consequences for what he did, but they’re still figuring out what will happen to him.
Knowing Wayne was out at the time of the murders, Beckett managed to get a warrant for his arrest and a search warrant for all his belongings.
And so we ended up here. At his house.
The whole place is swarming with agents. Beckett and Winny are at the front door, knocking and ringing the bell, waiting for Wayne to come out.
But he never does.
I had a sinking feeling it was going to be like this. He isn’t going to go down easily. He’s going to make us hunt him. It’s the only way he can get what he really wants – my attention.
I rub my eyes, breathe for four, hold for four, breathe out for four and hold for four again.
Agents are now breaking down the door, giving us entry to the house, because it’s clear that Wayne is not there. Once the door is opened, I gather all my courage and follow the FBI in.
It’s not what I expected.
It’s a regular house. With a coat rack with too many coats, a side table with a little bowl for keys. It’s empty, only furthering my suspicions that Wayne is gone and he won’t be coming back any time soon.
We found him and he’s still as uncatchable as he has been all these months. It’s infuriating. We had him. We had him in custody. But he managed to get out of there with a plan he set up years earlier.
I hate that he outsmarted us.
The swarm of agents is going through all the rooms, searching for evidence, while I stand there being useless and stunned. Winny finds me in this state. She lays a hand on the small of my back and gives me a quick hug, surprising the hell out of me. I’m not big on PDA, certainly not while I’m working, and I’ve never hugged Winny.
But it sure makes me feel a little better.
“Is the crazy getting to you?” she asks, her eyes focused on me, zoning out everything else around her.
“He’s gone,” I say by way of answer.
“Seems like it,” she answers with a sigh.
I swallow, saying a silent prayer to a deity I don’t believe in. We have to catch him before the 5th of the next month. He’s taken away too many lives, all for his sick beliefs, and it has to stop. We couldn”t stop the hands of his clock from ticking past number four, but we have until the fifth of next month to make sure it goes no further.
There can’t be any more faces that haunt me at night.
“Abby,” Beckett calls from somewhere down the hall. I don’t like the tone of his voice. Fuck.
Winny takes me to where Beckett is, who’s staring at a closed door, a note stuck on it.
And I know I don’t want to know what this is about.
Beckett’s face shows nothing of his usual calm. He seems distressed, his jaw firmly locked and the vein in his neck protruding. There’s a fire in his eyes, a slight tremble in his forearms. I’ve never seen him like this before.
I take a deep breath before I read the note on the door.
Dear Abigail,
You’re here. I knew you would be.
Leaving this house pains me,
but I know you’ll take good care of it.
You’re family after all.
Love,
Wayne
I smell limes and feel my empty stomach churn. What the hell are we going to walk in on? I refrain from saying anything, but I grab a rubber glove out of my breast pocket, put it on and open the door.
He wants me here? He can have me.
But he isn’t going to get me. I’m going to get through this.
Dark steps lead down directly after the stairs. I flip the light switch before I start walking down, Beckett right on my heels, his silence creeping me the fuck out. It doesn’t escape me how much this situation is like the first time I accidentally walked into one of his burial sites.
When I reach the bottom of the stairs, I end up in a small hallway with several doors. I inwardly laugh when I imagine the voice of a gameshow host saying ‘Let’s see what’s behind door number one’. Let’s get this the fuck over with.
At least the door doesn’t creak when I open it. That would’ve completed the creepy factor.
There’s a stone slab in the middle of the room. It almost looks like an altar, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. Shackles hang from the slab, and it’s becoming increasingly clear this is where he takes all the women. This is where he performs his sick little ritual, whatever the hell it may be.
“Marble,” Beckett mutters behind me. “If he doesn’t cover the table with something when he keeps his victims here, there might be evidence in the marble. It’s porous. This might be the physical evidence we need.”
“He probably slathers it with chlorine,” I answer, my voice broken. It’s what I would do if I wanted to get away with murder anyway.
Is this where Elaine took her last breath?
How many souls have left their bodies here?
I force myself to stop thinking along those lines. It’s not helping me right now. Instead, I walk to a little desk in the corner of the room. It’s empty except for a carved wooden box, and the lid is already open. In it is one necklace with the Celtic nod. His symbol for family.
If I never see another one of those things it’d still be too soon.
“Ready for the next room?” I ask him, but I’m already going to the adjoining room. I just need to get this over with. My legs are screaming for a run, and I think I can only start breathing again once I’m out of this house. He follows me without a word.
We get back into the hallway, and the moment I turn my back to that marble slab, a chill runs down my spine. Everything about that room feels so wrong.
Beckett uses a gloved hand to open the next door. It doesn’t creak and somehow doesn’t give me the same ick factor as the one before. Is it really possible to feel the vibe of a room through a door?
Once I step inside, it’s a whole different experience. Inside is one of the cleanest supply rooms I’ve ever seen. Shelves filled with all kinds of cleaning supplies line the walls. I see boxes with rubber gloves, cans of chlorine, paper suits, and plastic sheets. Basically the wet dream of someone working at the CDC. Happens to be the stuff that also comes in handy for a serial killer. How convenient.
While the previous room showed us what Wayne did to all those women, this room tells us how. This room might be the cleanest room I’ve ever seen, but it doesn’t make me any less sick.
“There are police stations that are stocked worse than this,” Beckett says through his teeth, his green eyes silently inventorying everything in there.
“We never would’ve caught on to him if I didn’t walk into that gravesite,” I mumble.
My mouth is so dry my tongue is sticking to the top of it. Fucking hell, I really don’t want to be here anymore.
“Let’s get this over with,” I say, leaving the room again.
And again, Beckett follows me without an answer, closing the door behind him again. He only cocks his head in question to me, looking for confirmation that I want him to open the next door.
Which I do.
And immediately wish I hadn’t done it.
Behind door number three is a room filled to the brim with pictures. It’s all his victims. An endless sea of dead eyes stares back at me. The photos seem candid, as if they were taken without the women knowing they were being taken. Some of them are grocery shopping or getting in their cars. It’s just a little glimpse into the normalcy of their lives, before Wayne yanked them out of it and murdered them.
My heart skips a beat when I recognize Elaine in one of the pictures, and my insides clench. She’s not supposed to be on that wall. She’s supposed to be at home, with her family, living her life and being sickeningly happy. Instead, she’s dead.
I stalk past Beckett, trying to get to the photo, but when I’m within his reach, he grabs my arm, making me stop.
“Abby,” he says, his body facing the wall with the door in it.
“What?” I snap. I need to get to Elaine, even if it’s just a picture. Fuck, I don’t even want the memory of her to be in his possession.
When I spin around, my anger towards Beckett is abruptly forgotten.
On the other wall is an inexhaustible amount of pictures of me. At the office building, at the coffee shop, during a workout on the streets of Portland, in the car with Chester, in front of Beckett’s fucking motel. He’s had eyes on me everywhere this whole time.
I suppose most people would feel afraid or angry. Maybe I should feel extra motivated to catch this asshole. But instead of all those feelings, my head keeps going over endless questions. The one coming to the forefront the most being:
Why hasn’t he come for me yet?
I breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four and hold for four again. Repeating the pattern several times makes me feel like myself a little again. Then I make a decision.
When I turn back around, Beckett is staring at me, his forehead creased with worry. While his mouth doesn’t give anything away, his eyes seem ready to set the world on fire. I walk past him, feeling him follow my every move. The moment I reach the wall at the opposite end of the room, I rip Elaine’s picture off of it, holding onto it so tightly I wrinkle it.
With the look in my eyes I dare Beckett to scold me about the rules, saying that this is an ongoing investigation and evidence. I double dare him.
But he doesn’t. He just dips his chin in recognition.
“Let’s catch this creep,” he says, and we both get out of the room and make our way up to leave the house.
“How about we skip the first fifteen minutes of sitting in silence and go straight to the reason why you called an emergency meeting?” Robin says. She probably has every right to ask me why I needed to see her today, because she cleared her schedule for me, but I just can’t.
The picture of Elaine is still firmly pressed into my hand. Since I ripped it off the wall earlier that afternoon, I haven’t let it go. I wanted to go for a run, a really long run, but I couldn’t tie my running shoes using just one hand. When I asked Chester to tie them for me, still clutching Elaine to me as if she was my last lifeline, he called Robin instead and drove me here.
For all I know, he’s waiting in the hallway.
Am I finally having a mental breakdown?
“I’m sorry you had to be called for an emergency meeting,” I say, staring down at my shoes. Simple boots with a zipper I could zip using one hand.
“I’m not sorry. I’m glad you called. If you’re feeling bad and I don’t know about it, I can’t help you. Instead you called, and I get to do my job, which makes me happy. So thank you, for giving me the opportunity to see if I can help.”
We fall silent for a moment, her patient eyes looking at me through her half moon glasses.
“Does this emergency have anything to do with what you are holding in your hand?”
I stare at a crumpled Elaine.
“Yeah,” I whisper. It feels like someone is sitting on my chest, squatting down and living there rent free.
“Do you want to share anything about that? See if we can carry this burden together?”
My knee jerk reaction is to say no. No, I don’t want to share this. Elaine is mine. The guilt is all mine. Wayne should be my catch, but instead, the failure is all mine.
But what Robin has been trying to teach me, that while I can do hard things on my own, I don’t always have to. Sometimes, I need to let people help me.
I sigh, my shoulders slumped, and I let myself glide off the side of the couch and sit on the floor. Might as well try to get as comfortable as possible for this.
“We found out who killed all those women,” I start. Robin’s face isn’t the blank canvas it usually is. There’s a glint of relief there. “But he’s on the run, so we’re not exactly in the clear yet. We went to his house today, and it was… disturbing.”
She gives me a reassuring smile. I can practically feel the warmth ooze out of her. “And does that have anything to do with what you’re holding onto right now?”
I shut her out again, stop talking altogether.
Elaine is mine.
“I can see that whatever it is, it means a lot to you. I can understand you wanting to hold the things that are dear to you close. I protect that which is mine fiercely too.”
She just lets me sit there.
And I wonder what Wayne’s doing right now. Is he laughing his ass off for fooling us when we had him? Or is he mad that we finally figured it out?
Fuck, I need to get my shit together, I need to get out there, and we need to find him.
Finally, I hold out my newfound most prized possession.
Robin reaches out and takes the picture from me as if she’s handling a newborn baby. Her face softens when she smooths the picture and takes in Elaine.
“Who’s this, Abby?”
“Elaine.”
“And she’s dear to you.”
Not a question, just a statement.
“She’s one of the two sisters we saved during our very first rescue mission.”
Robin nods understandingly. We’ve never talked about that mission. It was work, and it never caused me any problems. All it did was give me strength.
“She was taken by the serial killer. He murdered her. He picked her specifically to get to me.” My voice is devoid of any emotion, and if I just try hard enough, I can pretend nothing is going on. “Today we found…” I swallow, thinking about those rooms. Those horrible, nightmarish rooms. Robin lets me find a way to gather my thoughts, not rushing me or asking any additional questions.
“There was a wall. Like… a trophy wall. With pictures of all the women he took. Well, there was a wall full of pictures of me as well. But this picture, my Elaine, it just made me see red.”
Robin inhales sharply, not rushing herself into a response either.
“I’ll be frank, Abby. I don’t really know what the proper response is in this situation. What do you need from me? What can I do to help?”
For some reason my eyes start to burn. How the hell should I know? Her question makes me take a deeper look at what exactly I’m feeling. Beneath smoldering layers of fire is a pretty thick fear.
“I need some reassurance that there’s nothing wrong with me. Because I’m about to go to war over a picture of a dead girl, but the fact that he had a wall full of pictures of me leaves me cold.”
Robin stands up, even going so far as to turn her back to me, staring out of her office window.
“You know, there isn’t just one kind of person who is right or wrong. It’s not like there’s a checklist of what makes you a good person or not. Everyone has good and bad qualities. Would I react the same way as you are reacting now in this situation? Probably not. I’d be scared shitless for myself. But I haven’t lived your life, and you haven’t lived mine.”
She falls quiet for a while again.
“There’s nothing wrong with you. I wish for you to see yourself for who you are someday and give yourself some kindness for who you are and what you do.”
I try to take a relaxed breath again, but it’s taking some effort.
“But I can’t save them all.”
“No. And that doesn’t make you a bad person.”
It’s like I see myself in a different light somehow. There might be sides of me that aren’t considered purely good, but there are sides of me that aren’t purely evil either. I’m a little bit of everything, and the scale ends up somewhere in the middle. Robin saying that out loud makes me see that it does not make me a bad person. I’m a good fucking person, but I can’t carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. Sometimes, I just need someone to point it out to me.
I breathe a sigh of relief, the change in my demeanor clearly visible to Robin because she relaxes as well. Then, with the kindest smile known to mankind, she asks me to tell her all about Elaine.
So I do.