7. 6
Miranda calls me the next morning when I’m getting some work done. There’s bills to be approved before they can get paid and then I can get to the fun part of the day, meaning that I get to get my ass kicked by Alex in a workout. Remy is joining us for shits and giggles and I can’t wait.
“What’s up, darling?” I answer the phone.
“There’s a call for you, from someone who won’t state his name.” She sounds off, as if she”s distraught. Which is very unlike Miranda. She’s a goddamn pro at making phone calls and will not be intimidated by you in the slightest. She’ll just hang up. “What do I do?”
“Put him through and let me see what’s going on,” I tell her, knowing deep down inside that something is off and I have an inkling of where that feeling is coming from.
“Sure thing, hun,” Miranda says, and then the tone of the backdrop of the phone call changes.
“Hello?” I say, knowing damn well by the chill running down my spine which it is that’s calling.
“Abigail,” Wayne says, the sound of his greasy voice making me alert all at once.
“Ah, feeling good about yourself? Killing women and running away?” While I start talking I fire up the office chat, sending Chester a quick message to trace the phone call to my office line. I’m not expecting anything to come from it, but not trying isn’t even an option.
“You left me no other option,” he answers calmly. My hands are sweaty and my muscles tense. Why the hell is he calling? It’s not like we’re suddenly all buddy-buddy.
“You could just confess and turn yourself in.”
“Now where would be the fun in that?”
“Seeing you pay for your crimes would be tremendously satisfying,” I say.
My computer shows Chester typing.
Chester: Got an address.
Me: Can we get there in time?
Chester: Doubtful.
Inwardly, I curse. Maybe I can keep him talking long enough for someone to get there? Anyone really.
Me: Send local police anyway.
Chester: On it.
“I can hear you’re trying to find me even now. That wizkid’s probably already found me. Good thing I’m not here to stay. I got what I came for.”
My heart starts racing. What is it exactly he came for? I need to take a deep breath before I can get my voice under control enough to be sure it won’t hitch when I talk.
“What did you come for, Wayne?”
“Does your FBI friend’s little profile mention I never kill women in their home? There’s an element of kidnapping that gives me a thrill.”
I smell limes, I see Elaine and I see red. I get so fucking angry I no longer think logically and just start attacking him through the phone.
“No Wayne, I think you’ve got that a little backwards. It’s not about the kidnapping. It’s about your mother, and her being murdered in your home, right in front of your innocent little face. You take these women away from their homes because you don’t want to be the monster that killed your mother. And you succeeded, to an extent. You did become that monster, but you’re another kind of monster, the worst I’ve ever encountered.”
Wayne groans.
“Fuck, I love it when you talk dirty to me,” he says before he ends the call. My heart races in my chest while I stare at the phone in my hand. What did I just do?
The door to my office opens, and Chester storms in. His eyes look frantic and he gives me a quick once over, ensuring I’m okay. Physically? I’m fine. Mentally? I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.
“Who did he take?” I ask Chester.
Before he answers me, he pulls me out of my chair and cradles me in his arms. “The house was registered to one Whitney Blake and her husband Roger Blake. If he’s following pattern, I’d say that he took Whitney.”
“Does she look like me?” Knowing Chester, he’s done half a background check in my time talking to Wayne. I can just feel him nod, no words leaving my mouth. The door opens and Remy rushes through, his face panicked.
“That’s quick,” Chester says.
“Was right outside, got dance practice in five around the corner,” he summarizes. “Are you okay?” he asks me next, taking my chin in his hand and making me face him. His eyes look like a stormy ocean, and I can practically feel the energy crackling.
Am I okay?
I shrug.
Chester’s phone rings and he lets me go to answer, handing me over to Remy, who holds me as if I’m a newborn kitten, and I crawl beneath his arm like it’s the only place I want to be.
“Let me put you on speaker,” I hear Chester say. “Right, go ahead.”
“We reached the address you gave us. Nobody answered and everything seemed quiet. Went around the house and found a broken door. We’ve done a quick search of the house, but there’s no one here,” a male voice I don’t know says.
“Thank you, officer. I’m pretty sure you’ll hear from us, or the FBI, I don’t know, someone again. Won’t be me though.”
Despite the situation, I manage to smile at Chester’s social awkwardness. Some skills can’t be taught; talking to strangers will never be one of Chester’s strong suits. He drops the call, and looks up when another person enters my room.
He’s the last missing piece of my puzzle, and the thought alone makes me gag a little. I’m not that girl.
Beckett moves as quickly as Remy does, coming over and checking on me. While he seems to inspect how I’m doing, never taking those intense green eyes off of me, he leaves me in Remy’s skillful hands, not trying to take me for himself.
“He took another one?” he asks.
“Police just called back. There seemed to have been a break-in, but there was nobody in the house. I’ll give you their number so you can talk to them.”
I inhale deeply, filling my lungs with as much air as I can, before I slowly let the air escape again.
“It’s nowhere near the fifth,” I say.
Beckett nods. “He’s deviating, hich will lead to spiraling. No matter what happens, this only stops once we catch him, and he knows it. We’ve cut him off of everything he needs for his usual ritual, so he’s skipping it all together.”
“Including the calendar?” Remy asks.
“So it seems.”
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck it all to hell.
The only thing that made Wayne semi-manageable was the fact that we know when he’s going to strike, but now everything has gone out of the window and we know nothing anymore. He took another woman. How long before she is dead? How long before we even find her?
How fucking long until we take Wayne down?
Chester and Beckett talk over my head, but I don’t hear a word they say. Let them figure it out. It seems like I’ve mentally checked out, and that’s all Wayne’s fault.
That little voice inside my head starts reciting the same old story: He took her because I wasn’t fast enough. He took her because she looks like me. He took her because I didn’t catch him.
The mantra goes on and on, on repeat, until I feel like I might explode.
He could be anywhere with her now. He normally takes his time with the victims, right? Or has that all gone overboard now that we know who he is. He doesn’t have to take forensic countermeasures anymore. He doesn’t have his usual tools.
Remy seems to notice my anxiety, hugs me harder and even goes as far as to pick me up off the floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” I ask. I’m not some little girl who wants to be picked up at will. “Put me down!”
He gives me a crooked smile. “No.”
“What? No! Put me down!”
“I pick women up professionally,” he answers, ignoring me and holding me close to him.
“Well, that sounds more than a little wrong,” Chester intervenes.
“I mean, I lift women when I dance.”
“But you’re no longer a professional dancer,” Beckett says. He looks hesitant but also as if he’s trying to convey something I don’t fully understand.
“Well,” he says quietly, “then you better go do your job and find this Wayne guy so that I don’t have to pick her up.”
They share a look, seeming to find some sort of agreement, until Beckett nods and starts talking to Chester again.
Me? Well, I just keep getting hauled around by Remy, who refuses to let me go and keeps talking about everything he can think of until he finally makes me stop worrying and feeling guilty.
“So you do know how a phone works?” Aunt Viv says after picking up on the second ring. I’m sitting on the floor in one of the shower stalls at the office after I put myself through a gruesome workout. I blasted music until I couldn’t hear my own head anymore. I tried to grab a shower but sunk down and called my aunt instead.
“I’m sorry,” I start, sitting cross-legged and letting my head fall back against the cold yet still dry tiles of the shower wall.
“Don’t be sorry, I’m glad you called. You should do it more often.”
It almost manages to make me smile, but I’m so drained it doesn’t take. The tone of Viv’s voice changes. “What’s up, kid?”
“I’m just… tired.”
“Well, aren’t you collecting boyfriends like they’re Pokémon? That’s bound to wear you out.”
This time, I actually manage to laugh. “I’m not catching them all.”
“No, just a gourmet selection. You sound echoey. Where are you?”
Pressing my tailbone deeper into the hard floor, I shift, taking in the sadness of my surroundings. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. “Feeling very sorry for myself and, in the tradition of a thousand women before me, I am on the cold floor of a shower. And it stinks. I stink. It’s me.”
“Are you talking about stinking from all the sweating you did while having sex?” Aunt Viv asks, focussing on the important stuff.
My laugh echoes off the bathroom walls, and I’m surprised that letting the sound out of my body makes me feel lighter. “No, not from sex, from stress cardio because of work.”
“Would be better if it was from passionate lovemaking,” she sighs.
“We’re going to make passionate love?” I hear Peter say in the background.
“Always, my love,” she says.
“Ew, gross,” I tease.
“You don’t get a say in what’s gross and not,” Viv scolds me. “You’ve lost that right the moment you took three boyfriends and just told me you stink.”
“We’re going to make passionate love until we stink?” I hear Peter say, his voice now closer and louder.
“Ain’t nobody got time for that,” Viv says.
“That’s sad,” I tell her.
“Well, just wait until you have three young kids running around and see how fast you become the mistress of quickies.”
“Ha, fast and quickies, I see what you did there,” Peter jokes.
“Please enjoy long and sweaty while you can, Abby,” Aunt Viv tells me.
“I’ll make the most of it,” I promise, the smile not leaving my face now. “What are your little pride and joys up to anyway? I really need to come visit you guys ASAP.”
I hear some humming. “You’ll come over as soon as you can, until then, you keep everyone safe. The three little rascals are all playing somewhere in the house.”
We both fall silent.
“Isn’t it a little too quiet?” I ask her hesitantly.
“Fudge,” Peter swears, not able to use the grown-up lingo and I bet he’s taken off to go find out what his loin fruits are up to. Viv giggles and shifts her attention back to me.
“Talk to me,” Viv says when I hear her pouring a drink into something.
Suddenly I’m very aware of the cold tiles against my skin, and I’m transported back to the here and now again. That’s the here and now where Wayne is on the loose and is murdering innocent girls and then calling me about it to brag. I can feel life draining out of me when the thoughts progress.
“You think Mom would ever blame me for all the girls that get taken?” I whisper.
“No.”
“You didn’t even have to think about that?”
“Abby! Of course not! You are not responsible for the actions of others.” The phone cracks and I hear her mumbling something about getting in the car and coming to talk some sense into me because all that sex has probably made me dumb.
I start laughing, and she comes back to the phone again.
“Now you listen to me, Abby, and you listen carefully. Whatever is happening is under no circumstance your fault unless you killed those girls yourself. That goddamn guilt of yours is going to kill you someday.”
I sigh because I hear the words, but I don’t feel them – no matter who says them to me.
“Your mother would be scared to death that you like playing with guns, but she’d be your biggest fan for making this world a better place. I bet she’lltell everyone she knows how proud of you she is if she’d still be alive. And that woman was a social butterfly, so a lot of people would know about your utter amazingness.”
Somehow hearing about my mother makes me feel better, lighter. A little more connected to my past. Wayne lost his mother in a traumatic way, and it made him turn into a monster. Or maybe he was one all along and it just made the monster come out to play. I lost both my parents in a similar traumatic event, but I didn’t turn into a monster. Damaged and emotionally distant? Yeah. But not a monster.
Viv must take my silence for approval because she keeps talking without waiting for me to answer.
“I remember standing at your crib, only a kid myself, and she showed you to me with such pride. I remember looking at you and thinking ‘what’s so special about this tiny human? All she managed to do was get out of my sister’s belly’. But that was not how she thought about it. She told me you would conquer the world one day, and we were lucky to be there and experience it with you.”
That’s the thing that makes me tear up. She believed in me when I didn’t even realize I was alive.
“Is that how all mothers feel?” I ask her.
“Eh,” she says dismissively. “Most of the time. Other days, I wonder how they’ve managed to stay alive so long. Just the other week, I caught Bran convincing Charlie to drink dishwater because that would cleanse him. Charlie listened, drank it, and Bran started reciting some scary Latin-sounding shit. I have no idea where he got it from, but I’m half convinced he performed some kind of exorcism.”
I snort. “And you let that happen?”
“Hell yes.”
There are loud noises in the background, and I hear three tiny kid’s voices and Peter’s booming voice.
“What happened?” Aunt Viv asks. Her tone is somewhere between amused and alert.
“These three were building a rocket with some of the spare wood in the shed. Good plan, right? Creative thinking, working with their hands, awesome plan. Then they remembered they’d need fuel for a rocket, so they went to the pool and cut one of the pipes for the filter system – with one of the kiddy scissors nonetheless! And then they were halfway into sucking the gas from the tank of your car!”
“How the hell do they know how to do that?”
“Guess this!” Peter shouts. “YouTube! They got it from YouTube!”
“I don’t know whether to be shocked or impressed,” Viv whispers.
“Impressed, definitely impressed,” I answer for her.
“Shoot, I gotta go handle this, Abby. Can I let you go?” She sounds guilty, but that’s a mother’s prerogative, and she’s always been my mother.
“Yeah. Just call back when you can sometime this week, okay? I think I might need it.”
“You bet, darling. You’re doing some serious shining and I want to be there to experience it.”
“What is everyone up to?” I ask when I walk into the office with bags of takeout. There are all kinds of curries in there since we’re all working overtime and I like all of my employees more when they’re not hangry. Myself included.
“Narrowing down the search on some pervs,” Jake says, coming out of nowhere and grabbing the bags of food before he starts unloading them. He’s the newest member on Chester’s team and just as tiny as Zoey. I thought Chester brought in a minor at first, but what he’s lacking body-wise, he makes up for with the size of his brain. “I’ve got a lead on someone binging on underage girls, and I’m going to nail him.”
“You might be his type,” Alex jokes, “seeing how tiny you are and all.”
“Not that kind of nailing,” Jake answers, giving him the stink-eye. “I just need to finish some stuff up before I can send it to the police so they can take him in.”
“Good,” I mutter, giving everyone a fork. We forgo niceties on evenings like this, all of us eating from the styrofoam packaging and taking bites from all the dishes we’d like to try.
“Following up on some of the last kids from Farid’s data,” Frank, another one of Chester’s hackers, says. He gets a plate, scoops it full of food and then goes back to his station. He’s good at what he does, but I don’t know much about him besides being a hard worker. He mostly likes to do stuff on his own, and as long as he’s getting results, I let him.
“I’m trying to write an algorithm to sift through cam feeds in combination with facial recognition quicker,” Chester says, stuffing his mouth. Good thing we’ve never pretended to be anyone other than our truest selves because he’s eating like an animal.
“Did that program also speed up your ability to inhale food like air?”
“Might be a bug in the program,” he jokes.
Zoey is uncharacteristically quiet, shoving her food in her mouth as quickly as she can. Normally, she’s the last one to finish because she’ll talk enough for us and forget to eat.
“What are you working on?” I ask her directly, making eye contact. She immediately averts her eyes, suddenly very interested in her plate of food. The shade of her cheeks matches the shade of her hair. Then she mumbles something I can’t hear.
“What was that?”
Scott begins laughing. “She’s very busy reading gay porn,” he says, looking smug as all hell.
“Scott!” she yells, punching him in the arm. It’s like a bunny fighting a tiger, and it’s cute as all hell.
“Reading porn?” Alex asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh my god,” Zoey says, covering her eyes with her hands.
“It gets worse,” Scott says with a shit-eating smile. I’m betting he’s going to pay for this later. “It’s not even a real book she’s reading; it’s something some stranger on the internet wrote using characters from a book.”
Chester looks up with a smile that reaches his eyes. “You’re reading fanfic?”
“Fanfic about two gay boys who play a made-up sport,” Scott continues.
“My wife likes reading those kinds of books,” Alex says. “I’m pretty sure that’s how Beau was conceived. She read one of those books and we’re having another baby before I know it.”
“I’m pretty sure that women don’t get pregnant from reading books,” Dylan jokes.
“Yeah, but come on,” Chester says. “Fanfic? Really?”
Zoey stands up, her fists balled at the side of her body, her eyes fuming. Feisty. “Well, just so you know, it’s not just regular fanfic. It’s giving them the ending they deserve. And it’s written wonderfully, thank you very much. Now, I will go find out if the answer is always ‘yes’ with him.” She picks up one of the styrofoam containers and storms off toward her desk, turning around mid-trot and flipping Scott off, who answers with a booming laugh.
The laugh gets cut off by a knock at the door, followed by the door opening and some guy sticking his head in.
“Hello?” he says. He seems to be in his early twenties and is wearing a bicycle helmet.
“Yeah?” I say.
“I’ve got express mail for one Abigail Wilder.”
My stomach sinks.
“That’s me,” I say, pushing my chair back and walking towards him as if there’s lead in my shoes. I just know this is Wayne, no doubt about it. The courier gives me a toothpaste commercial-worthy smile and then hands me an envelope.
“Thanks,” I say, my eyes glued to what’s in my hand, not even bothering to look at the courier while he leaves again. I rip the envelope open, finding an old-fashioned postcard, showing tiny pictures of all the large parks in Portland. My heart is hammering in my chest when I flip the postcard around, finding one short message.
‘Wish you were here. Love, Wayne.’
I see red. Why the hell doesn’t this asshole leave me the fuck alone? Or have the decency to get caught? And what the hell goes through his mind? Let’s grab a girl first thing in the morning, kill her, and then send a postcard through an express courier in the afternoon.
Chester storms over, rips the postcard out of my hands and reads it. His face contorts. “Jesus, that guy has some balls on him.”
He walks to his desk, taking the card with him, leaving me standing still like a statue, feeling all kinds of confusion. He enters his password and starts working on whatever he’s about to do. I don’t know how to go about this.
The rest of my team quietly observe me until they start eating again one by one. That’s just how it is nowadays, I guess. Sometimes I get mail from a serial killer and that’s just our reality.
“Pink Floyd or Incubus?” Chester says, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“What are you talking about?”
“Wish you were here. It might be the song from Pink Floyd or Incubus.”
“It’s just a figure of speech. Not even that. It’s just a common phrase, telling me he wishes I was there.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. We’ve been communicating in riddles all along. He’s sent us clues on how to get to missing kids. Everything he says means more than he’s willing to lead on.”
Thinking about it, that seems true. Even sending the Polaroid pictures of all the women was a way to share his life with me and get to know him. In his eyes, those pictures were a gift to me.
“Pink Floyd,” I finally answer.
“Why?”
“‘We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, running over the same old grounds. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.’ That’s just way too fitting for it not to be it. That’s how he sees us. As connected spirits.”
“You’re spending too much time with Beckett,” he grunts, then gets back to his screens and starts working.
I stare at him in silence, watching as he is pulled from this reality into another one, the world around him all forgotten. It’s such a familiar sight it soothes me. I don’t know how long I stand there, lost in thought, but eventually Chester lifts his head and finds me still standing in the place he left me.
“I don’t know what this all means yet, but I’m going to figure it out, Abs.”
And while no one knows the future, I know with absolute certainty he’s right.