Chapter 5
FIVE
Liam
It’s three in the morning but sleep has eluded me. I’d fallen asleep pressed against Gabriel with that cursed cat trying to sleep on my body and Lucille trying to sleep between our faces, but something hit me in my dreams and I’m not quite sure what it was.
So now I’ve lain awake for the past thirty minutes with my mind racing as I question what stood out to me.
I keep thinking about the layout of the zoo and envisioning the easiest way to get Zach’s body to the hyena pen. But while at the zoo I’d been so fixated on moving his body… that I…
Pulling out my phone, I open the map of the zoo and look at it for a long moment. Then I zoom in on an empty area.
That’s right… didn’t there use to be an entrance on this side? My parents took me to this zoo once when I was younger, and I remember that as soon as we walked in, the African exhibit was to the right. But now the entrance…
I type into the search engine “zoo parking lot construction” and scroll through random articles on the zoo until I find one about the new parking lot being built on the west end. The east parking lot would be converted into a botanical garden open to the public.
They must have closed off the entrance entirely. The entrance to the botanical garden from the zoo is more up north.
But why does any of this matter?
“What’s wrong?” Gabriel mumbles, and I hesitate, feeling a bit guilty over having woken him.
“Sorry. Go back to sleep,” I say as I pull the covers up his shoulder a bit more.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks.
“No, it’s okay,” I murmur. “Sleep.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go back to sleep.”
“Okay,” he says, patting my bare chest for some reason before dozing off with his hand on me. I try to be careful not to bump it while I try to fall back to sleep, but I can’t. Now all I can think about is whether or not there’s an employee exit that no one uses, so no one brought it up.
Is that where Nadine exited the zoo?
I search where the bus stop is and find that it’s near the botanical garden.
But if she was involved in his death… why disappear? Did she help the killer, but then the killer became irrational and they killed her too?
I play the recording of Zach on the ladder, stopping only to speak to Nadine.
Nah. Those eyes. Those eyes… that fixation.
It’s like a dog watching a rabbit.
A lion watching a gazelle.
He’s starving.
And he’s found something to feast on.
I’ll check in the morning. Or shoot a text to someone who’s working third shift and send them out.
But what if they miss something? What if they mess up something? Really, it’s best if I just zip over there and quickly check myself. It’ll be such a quick check.
Slowly, I slide Gabriel’s hand off my chest, and it’s like a wake-up lever.
“Where are you going?” he mutters.
“I’m just going to check something real fast. Please go back to sleep.”
He pops up, wide awake as his eyes try to find me in the dark. “Liam… you told me you’d tell me before you did… those things.”
Those things?
Oh? Does he think I’m off to kill some unlucky person? “Not that, hon. I’m not. I have an idea where Zach’s car might be, and it’s just… bothering me. I have to look.”
“Send the information to someone who is working.”
“What if they do it wrong? What if they fuck up the scene?”
“Don’t be so obsessive. Others can do good jobs too,” he assures me, but he must get a look at my face in the dim light of the room because he sighs.
“Alright,” he says before throwing back the covers.
“What are you doing? I’m just driving; I’ll go alone.”
“I’m not letting you go alone,” Gabriel insists as he gets up and starts getting dressed. “If it was anyone else, I’d have sent them off. But if you’re this certain about it, I’m sure we’ll find something.”
“But I can do it alone.”
“I can do shit alone too, but you’re always there to help me,” he says while he gets dressed in the first clothes he comes across: a long-sleeved shirt and a hoodie with jeans instead of the slacks and button-up he usually wears to work.
I do the same, dressing for warmth, having learned from our experience earlier today.
With coats, gloves, and scarves—which I would normally never wear since they offer such an easy way for someone to choke me, but Gabriel wrapped it around my throat and smiled at me so I vow to never remove it—we go out the door.
Gabriel is half asleep the entire drive as I head toward the zoo.
“The Christmas lights are so pretty at night. We should decorate our house.”
“I’ll have someone over to do it tomorrow,” I promise.
“We can do it ourselves.”
“Any free time should involve you naked, and it’s too cold for you to put up lights naked… but now I’m envisioning you on the ladder with your ass on display. And then I’m fucking you on the ladder. Yes, we will do it together tomorrow.”
“What are our neighbors doing in all of this?” he asks.
“If the ninety-year-old great-grandma wants to watch, then let her watch. There are so few places left to rent porn on VHS that she’s probably watched them all and grown bored.”
Gabriel oddly seems less than interested in giving the granny a show, but I have no reservations. I’ll just blackmail any officer who would consider writing us up.
I drive past the zoo and reach the botanical garden where I stop on the road to look. “That right there is the old entrance.”
“Yeah? Why would Zach come through there or even be able to come through there?”
“If he had keys he could leave through there,” I say.
“Man, my brain is tired and struggling to keep up. Okay, so you’re saying that Zach planned to leave through that gate but was killed inside before he could?”
“Possibly.”
“So you think his car is in this area.”
“Yes, I’m just not sure where. Somewhere dark.”
“And he was hiding his car over here because…”
“Because of Nadine.” I point to the bus stop. “Bus stop is right there. Nadine leaves through that gate. Whether or not she’s supposed to, I’m not sure. He waits for her out here.”
“Why did he end up back inside?”
“I don’t know why. Maybe he was watching her? Trying to talk to her… I’m not certain yet.”
Gabriel sets his hand on my arm. “Okay, let’s pause for a second. Are you in the realm of ‘He has a crush on Nadine so he’s waiting outside with the hope of bumping into her to ask her out to coffee’ or ‘He was waiting for Nadine to take her’?”
“She’s missing, isn’t she?”
“I’m just… so he takes her and then goes back inside and someone kills him? Or someone sees him take her and kills him? I’m confused how we suddenly have two crimes intersecting.”
“I don’t know. Let’s find his car.”
“Alright. The way the door is, she’d likely cut this direction through the garden and come out here,” Gabriel says.
“Can you turn the car around? I want to look at this alley. No matter what, he has to cross the road, right? But at the time of night she’d be leaving, most of this area would be dark.
If he waited until the bus picked up and left, he’d be pretty alone.
That late, the bus probably only stops here maybe once an hour, you think? ”
“Possibly, I’ll have to look,” I respond as I turn the car around and head down the alley.
Gabriel “hmms” when he doesn’t see the vehicle in the alley, but Zach probably wouldn’t want to leave it someplace that it could block traffic and call attention.
When I reach the other end, I find myself in a small public parking area that’s completely empty besides one lone car matching the description of Zach’s vehicle.
“Huh,” Gabriel says.
“Huh is right. I’ll inform the department that we’ve found the vehicle. I’m getting the trunk open in case Nadine is inside.”
Gabriel nods and grabs some gloves before hurrying over to the car as I get the equipment needed to open the car and call it in.
They’re surprised to hear that we’re out at this time of night, but I’ll deal with explaining it later.
I head over to the car where Gabriel is walking around it.
“No response from the trunk. Are you going in through the window?”
“Yeah. It’s an older car, should be easy enough to get into,” I say as I slide the wedges between the window and the frame, popping it open just enough that I can snake a flat piece of metal fitted with a thin string down between the gap created by the wedges.
I loop the string around the knob that unlocks the door once it’s pulled up.
Then I tighten the string, causing it to snare the latch before I pull string and metal up, unlocking the door with ease.
Drawing the wedges out, I pull the car door open before leaning down to pop the trunk. Gabriel beats me back there, and the look on his face already tells me what I’m going to find.
“She’s dead?” I ask.
“I don’t know yet,” he says as he reaches in while I call for an ambulance just in case. There’s blood pooled beneath her head and even as Gabriel touches her, she doesn’t flinch or move. If she’s dead, she died recently, telling me that if I’d thought of this hours sooner, she’d still be alive.
“If you’re not finding a pulse—” I start, but Gabriel shakes his head and slides his fingers over.
Has he realized the same thing? That if we’d kept on this and hadn’t gone home, we could have saved Nadine’s life?
Is he blaming himself? How could he? It wasn’t like we swept this under the rug.
We worked until we were told to go home and then we passed what we’d done to others who would continue to work on it.
Her arms and legs are bound and tape is placed over her mouth, telling me that he planned on taking her alive somewhere. I wonder if she struggled or almost got away and her head was hit at that point, causing the excessive bleeding.
“Fuck, Liam… FUCK. We should have kept looking. We should have…”
She’s cold to the touch, but rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet.
Gabriel is determined to find a pulse and I find myself feeling upset that Gabriel is distressed.
It’s rare that I feel anything when I come across a body like this.
I know I should feel upset about the woman.
I know that the death of a young woman like this who is almost certainly innocent and is the victim of a monster should make me feel things, but generally, the only thing I end up feeling is a desire to kill those who killed them.
But seeing Gabriel upset makes me feel things.
He’s desperate to find that the woman is alive.
I gently pull him back and tip her head up. I press one hand hard against her neck, my other under her nose. I feel nothing, but I’m determined, though how can determination bring a woman back from the dead?
That’s when I feel the lightest pulse. At first, I assume I’m mistaken and don’t say anything while I wait to see what I’ll find. When I feel it again, I look over at Gabriel.
“She has a pulse. We need to get her warm,” I say, not wanting to move her from where she is since we don’t know the extent of her injuries. I pull my coat off and drape it over her, and Gabriel begins shedding his outerwear too.
While Gabriel attends to her, I check the tire wells for a hidden key as I debate force-starting the car so we can get some warmth back to her.
Just when I’m about to bust the car apart to get it started, I see a spare key on a magnet hidden in the tire well.
I didn’t even have to break into the car, but at least now I won’t have to explain how I got into it.
Honestly, most wouldn’t even bat an eye at me carrying equipment to get into a locked vehicle with my job, but I don’t need anyone to be nosy when they see how easily I can hotwire a car.
I pull the key out and quickly start the car.
We close the trunk lid and drop the back seats before I direct all of the hot air back toward the trunk.
I stay outside of the vehicle, not wanting to fuck with it more than we already have.
I know that Gabriel would trample all of the evidence if it meant saving her life, so he’s in the back with her.
It’s cold out here without my coat or hoodie.
With how cold it’s been, and with her having been in the trunk for a day and a half with a head wound that severe, it’s a wonder she’s lived this long.
I can see Gabriel sitting inside, rubbing Nadine’s arms and trying to get warmth back into her as he talks to her. He’s such a sweet man.
When the sound of sirens creeps into the hidden parking lot, I rush out to the street to help them find us.
They have to go around the block to get in since they don’t fit down the narrow alley we took.
When they reach the location, I hurry them over to the car and pop the trunk open that I’d closed to keep out the cold air.
“Her body temperature is extremely low. Looks like blunt force trauma to the head. She hasn’t been coherent at any point that we’ve been here,” I explain. “She has no reactions and slow heartbeat and breathing.”
They get the stretcher out and rush it over to the trunk as Gabriel moves out and gives them space to work. He comes over next to me while more sirens sound in the distance.
“I’m worried she’s not going to make it,” he says. “I wish we’d found her sooner.”
“Last I checked, you can’t change the past.”
“I know. In this line of work, we don’t usually come across people who are alive… so it’s nice finding one every now and then… gives me hope we can find more before it’s too late. But… what exactly do we have now? Our victim is now the killer? Did the killer take both Nadine and him? What is this?”
“That’s a very good question,” I say. “And it’s not one I currently have the answer to, but I will.”