Colin
“Welcome back, Mills.” Detective Alex Graves claps me on the shoulder as he continues past me at my desk to his own, settling down and staring at me across the small space. I grunt in way of thanks.
“Your mom doing okay?” he continues. I nod absently, trying my password for the second time. Fail. “Sunset Peak, right?”
I let out a frustrated breath at my password failure and type in the same exact thing I’ve been typing this whole time. I know that’s what my password was when I left. “Yeah. Sunset Peak.”
Settling my mother in the independent living community a town away from Devil’s Peak was the last thing I wanted to do, but that’s what she wanted. And since I’m trying to support her independence, I didn’t argue.
The screen jostles itself with my third and apparently final password attempt, telling me it’s locked for good and I need to call IT to get back in. “Fuck.”
Alex nods at my laptop over our desks, stating the obvious when he says, “You need to call IT to get you set back up. You’ve been gone long enough they probably deactivated your credentials.
” I push the laptop away from me, rubbing my hands down my face.
“No big deal, Mills. There’s nothing on that computer I can’t tell you about myself.
” Alex smiles knowingly, leaning back in his chair and placing his hands behind his head.
He’s being cocky. He knows what I want, and he’s going to make me say it out loud. Dick.
Instead, I call up Micah, setting the phone on speaker and watching him remote into my laptop to reactivate my credentials. He’s not IT, but he might as well be.
“Okay, go ahead and reset your password.”
I type in my password for the fourth time, only to get another fail, this time because my new password can’t be my last password. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Relax, Mills. Just pick something else.” Micah’s no stranger to my sour moods, which is why most of the time I’d rather have him help me with my tech issues than call up the actual IT desk.
He makes up the entire digital forensics unit at the Devil’s Peak Police Department, and we’re lucky to have his skill on the team.
He’s a jack of all trades, and a master of pretty much all of them.
Alex eyes me over the edge of his own laptop, his gaze twinkling with amusement, and I look away from him to make up a new password.
“It has to be a passphrase,” Micah reminds me. I clench my fist, my impatience growing by the second. I want to see what she’s been up to.
AlexGravessucksdonkeydick69#
The laptop screen spins, thinking for a moment, until opening to a blank home screen. “Thanks, Micah.”
“You got it, Mills. Let’s get together soon.” I grunt in agreement. That’s about the extent of the conversation I’m willing to have right now. Grunts.
At first, leaving Devil’s Peak stressed me the fuck out, though it shouldn’t have. I’d put the husband killer behind bars. The husband killer the media had dubbed The Black Widow. She could no longer take the lives of innocent men, thanks to me. That should have given me relief.
But I was always suspicious of Caroline Stark’s daughter, and apparently, I was the only one in the department who was.
When the medical examiner performed the autopsy on Caroline’s third dead husband, realizing he’d done the autopsy on the last two of her deceased husbands as well, he reported the death as a suspicious overdose, and I led the short investigation that ultimately put Caroline in prison.
Caroline made it too easy by confessing, but that’s not all that goes into a murder investigation. My captain told me to let it go, but I wanted solid evidence, not just circumstantial.
There were three people living under the Stark roof when each husband died, and I wasn’t convinced that either of the two who survived were innocent in the slightest. But the team found evidence that Caroline Stark was the only one home at the time of his death, and even though that should have eased my suspicions about her daughter, it didn’t.
Caroline may have been the one to kill her husbands, but Chloe was up to no good, too. I could sense it.
I could see it in her fake tears and her out of place smiles. I saw it in the way she carried on with her life without a care in the world for the men who’d died in her home, the men who’d been in her life as pseudo-fathers.
So I stalked her, desperate for proof she was just as dangerous on the streets as her mother was. I cornered her more than once, kept her trapped between me and a couple of brick walls. I acted so far outside the professional boundary of a detective that I’m lucky I even still have my badge at all.
My obsession with bringing Chloe Stark down bled into the media, and soon, they were putting out headlines that caused the community to develop their own suspicions.
I’d turned the town on her. So even though leaving Devil’s Peak stressed me out because I felt like I was leaving a case wide open without a crack in sight, she had about twenty thousand eyes on her now. Maybe that would prevent anyone else from dying while her partner-in-crime sat in prison.
Of course, there’s no evidence that Chloe is anything like her mother. Besides my gut feeling, which isn’t exactly witness-stand-worthy, unfortunately. I left before I’d ever actually found anything that would stick on the stand. And maybe that meant I should have just given up, but I couldn’t.
The next thing high on my list of stressors was the fact that I’d become someone I didn’t recognize in the year after Caroline Stark’s arrest. Obsessive. Impulsive. Possessed by the desire to ruin the Baby Widow.
And of course, during all of this, my mother was sick. And she needed me.
At the time, it was a stressor. In the year since I’ve been gone, I came to recognize it as an opportunity. To take a break. Get some space. Find myself again. Focus on something besides Caroline Stark and her infuriatingly elusive daughter.
Mostly, focus on something else besides the thought of what Chloe’s lips might feel like on mine.
How every time I pressed my hand to her chest and felt the buzz of her skin against mine, she looked at me like she knew something I didn’t, and it almost made me forget that she was supposed to be the enemy.
I didn’t think I’d be comfortable leaving, but the further I got from the county lines, the easier it felt like my breaths were coming.
The weight of the frustration that’d been settled on my chest for months slowly lifted, and when I made it to Sunset Peak, I felt true relief in my bones.
It was like the universe intervened in my path, giving me something it knew I couldn’t turn my back on: my sick mother.
I took family medical leave from the department. I moved into her place to care for her until her care became too much, and she needed more. More nurses. More medications. More empathy that I felt sucked dry of.
Had my father not left us in his dust all those years ago, maybe he’d be the one carrying the brunt of this responsibility.
My piece-of-shit brother refused to show up and help, too busy living his successful life with his facade of a perfect family across the country.
My sister hasn’t put down the pipe since she picked it up five years ago, and definitely wasn’t going to leave her meth connection to care for the woman who raised her, when what my mother really should have done was disown my sister after all the shit she put us through.
Every memory of the three of them was just a constant reminder that people never let you see their true colors. Even the people you’re supposed to love.
It was me who was left with the weight to carry, and I was close to hitting failure.
Mom is now settled in a very comfortable home, only an hour’s drive away.
Sunset Peak is bigger, has better facilities, and that’s where she said she wanted to be.
As much as it pained me to leave her behind, she urged me to return to work.
Said I needed it. To have purpose again.
Purpose besides meal prep and nightly med deliveries.
When Alex called and said men had been going missing, I knew exactly what that purpose was.
Alex leans over my shoulder, staring at the screen with me. The screen that tells me there’s more than one open missing person’s case in the last month.
“Before you say anything, I’ve done a tiny bit of digging, and I can’t find any connection to Chloe Stark.
” A tiny bit of digging. You need a fucking excavator to dig up whatever Chloe’s hiding.
He nods toward my laptop. “No real similarities,” Alex says over my shoulder.
“Varying stages of life, varying stages of hair loss,” he jokes, crossing his arms and leaning against the desk next to me.
There might not appear to be similarities on the surface, but they’re there, and I am going to find them. I will find the connection to Chloe Stark if it’s the last thing I do.
“Conference room, now.” Captain Barrett’s booming voice splits the air, interrupting the beginning of Alex’s rundown of the case.
I rise from my chair too eagerly, desperate to know what they’re doing with the case.
Alex pushes off the desk and heads for the conference room, beckoning me to follow with a nod.
When I find myself in the conference room with the rest of the team, our boss stands in front of a whiteboard with the pictures of the missing men taped to it.
“Mills, welcome back,” my captain says, inviting my peers in the room to nod and wave in greeting. “You are here for observation purposes only. You are not active on this case.”
“Captain—”
“If you can’t handle that, you can kiss these case huddles goodbye.” His voice is stern, leaving no room for argument. As much as I do want to argue, I decide to hold off.
For now.
His parting words when I left to care for my mother ring through my head.
Tunnel vision. Not thinking clearly. Worried about me.
That was the worst one.