26. Colin
Colin
Made you something. Left it on your desk on my way out of town. See ya tomorrow, panda bear.
Ire-read the text for the umpteenth time, and then I put my phone away and study the possum skull I’d found sitting on top of my laptop when I made it into the office. I’d gone home for a quick shower after leaving Chloe’s, and every moment I’ve been away from her has been painful.
Even though the distance between us makes my skin crawl, makes it feel way too tight for my body, she is right. Her and her friends were taking care of themselves long before I came along. Hell, half the time they were protecting themselves from me.
The possum skull is a dull, yellowish-white color, sharp canines extending down its jaw, gaping holes where its eyes used to be.
From a distance, it looked like it’d been wrapped in wallpaper, a tiny, repeating, unrecognizable pattern stretched and fitted across every inch of it.
Up close, the painted pattern becomes clear.
Dandelions. I couldn’t help the smile from tugging at my lips—the warmth from tugging at my heart—when I’d first realized it.
Can’t help it now, either, as I shift my attention from the little skull to the potential locations Chase is holed up in, the addresses that are crossed off the list because the team has already excluded them some way or another.
I sit in the conference room alone, holding down the fort while the others take coffee and cigarette breaks.
Since Logan’s death, Alex, Daniel, Lucy, and I—and sometimes Captain Barrett and Micah—have turned this space into our primary workstations.
The whiteboard is still up, pictures, threads, and scribbles of different handwriting scrawled across it when one of us had an idea or a thought.
Manilla folders lay strewn across the long tables, some closed and some open with their insides spread out.
One of the open folders displays pictures of Grayson’s severed body parts and close ups of the ligature marks and teeth punctures from the animal that attacked him.
Perhaps that folder should be closed. It’s sad that we’re all so desensitized to the violence of his death that it doesn’t seem to bother us anymore; though Lucy did wince when she walked by it on her way to her break, so that’s a good thing.
Glancing over at the open folder, I think back to what Alex had said outside Grayson’s widow’s house after we interviewed her.
“Do you think he deserved it?”
At the time, we didn’t know how deep his involvement in the trafficking ring went. Didn’t know he kidnapped women and children, shuffling them into the pits of hell to be drugged, raped, and murdered.
He was just a family man. No, not just a family man, I remind myself. Even without knowing his involvement in the ring, we’d discovered that night he was abusing his wife and children. Maybe planning to kill them. And that cougar…
“Maybe that cougar saved her life.”
The sound of heavy, urgent footsteps begins at the end of the hall outside the conference room. I tear myself from my thoughts after a fleeting acknowledgment that yeah, Grayson Tyler did deserve it.
The photos of Lily Tyler shuffling her children onto the bus are spread out on another table. I’ve been drawn to them ever since I first saw them. There’s been a distant thread of instinct worming its way into my brain, but I’ve failed to find its rightful path.
Regardless, Grayson deserved to die, and that cougar saved Lily Tyler’s life.
Alex storms through the door in my direction, a single piece of paper pinched between his fingers. “You’re not going to believe this.”
Whatever it is, it’s a welcome distraction.
I can’t bring myself to feel regret about this new revelation of thinking that someone deserved to die—it’s Chloe being gone that I need a distraction from.
She’s been gone for six hours. And the only thing that brings me relief is the fact that I can track where she goes.
Though I haven’t done that yet, because I’m trying to give her a bit of privacy.
Maybe I shouldn’t be doing it at all anymore, or maybe I should at least tell her, but I can’t bring myself to feel regret over that, either. Especially not with Max out on bail and Chase still in the wind.
Alex slaps the piece of paper onto the desk in front of me, and I recognize it as a DNA report. The report is a series of black blotches indicating there’s an overlap of DNA profiles—or not. This one appears to be the latter.
“Max’s DNA,” he says, out of breath, “it’s not a match.”
My vision swims as I stare down at the columns of dark little tick marks.
Logically, I know what he’s saying. I’ve been working with Alex long enough to know what his voice sounds like when he’s uncovered something big.
To know the exact movement of his facial features when he finds a break in a case: the simultaneous pinch and rise of his brows, the pull of his lips in a satisfied smile.
But if Max’s DNA isn’t a match to the DNA found at the crime scenes, that means something bigger is at play.
Something my heart and mind doesn’t feel ready to accept.
So even though I know what he’s insinuating, I still ask, “To what?”
He stabs a finger at the paper and speaks slowly to make sure I grasp what he’s saying. “Max’s DNA is not a match to the crime scenes. Someone planted it there, Mills.”
I try to swallow, but the lump in my throat is growing so large it feels impossible to pass.
It feels like I might lose all air if I can’t figure out a way to get it down.
“Mills?” Alex’s voice echoes in the room around me, my body swirling.
I can distantly feel the movement of my fingers spreading on the table, but all I can actually feel is Chloe’s body against the tree in the woods.
The way her hair feels wrapped around my fingers.
And all I can hear is Chloe’s voice as she moves around that art room and tends to the children and their paintings.
All I can see are her honey eyes and her full lips spread into a smile that looks sweet as pie and…venomous.
Max’s DNA match ruled Chloe out as a suspect. With it being staged…that knowledge heats my blood to scalding and revives a slew of suspicions, and then some.
At the same time, Lily’s photos filter through my mind again. Something about them begging me to piece it together. Something about the suspicions I had all that time ago.
Alex’s hand squeezes my shoulder, and the touch instantly steadies me.
“Who planted it?” I ask. My voice doesn’t sound like my own. Alex studies me, probably wondering where I went for that hot second.
“I don’t know. Lucy’s the one who discovered it wasn’t a match. She’s been over at the lab hounding the tech to re-run it all day.”
“She finally got her break,” I mutter absently, staring at the report.
“What?” Alex’s gaze shifts between me and the report under my fingertips. He’s trying to decode something I’m not saying when I’m really just trying to prolong the period until I need to truly accept this.
Shaking my head, I clear my throat, attempting to force myself to focus.
I stand from the desk and move to the manilla folders, eyes moving over the crime scene photos of Richard, Grayson, and Logan.
My gaze snags on the photo of Lily Tyler again, her hands pressed to the backs of her children, urging them onto the bus.
The bag hanging from her shoulder, her long-sleeved shirt almost covering her entire hands, as well.
Her hair is down around her shoulders and back, but when I squint and lift the picture closer to my face for inspection, I can see it—the faint outline of bruising on her neck, the splotch of purple spreading across her cheekbone.
And then it hits me so fucking hard, I almost lose my balance.
“Go interview Lily again,” I tell Alex, forcing my voice to remain steady.
“What? Why?”
“Just do it,” I all but scream at him. There’s no need to interview her again, but I have to get him out of here.
I need to follow up on something I might have missed years ago, and I need to do it without anyone breathing down my neck.
“Take Lucy with you. She needs the experience.” I manage to find some conviction when I tell him, “Lily might know something that will help us close this. She’s the only good witness we have.
” That part isn’t untrue. Richard Soffett doesn’t have any family nearby, Chase is missing, and Max’s lawyer won’t let us come within a thousand feet of him.
Lily is the only one with a connection we can try and follow.
“Ask her again about the days leading up to her husband’s disappearance.
” We’ve already been through it, and though dredging it up again might put Alex on a path I don’t want him anywhere near, it’s the only thing I can think to say to get him to leave.
He pulls out his phone and rings Lucy, telling her he’ll pick her up from the lab down the street on his way to Lily’s.
When his suspicious glare fades and he finally leaves the conference room, I feel like I can finally fucking breathe.
I snatch the photo of Lily off the table and exit into the hallway, striding in the direction of Micah’s office.
He glances over at me when I appear in his doorway. “How’s it going, detective?”
Continuing into his space, I set the photo down on his desk and watch his gaze lower to it and then rise back up to me.
“How far back can we access street cam footage?” I ask him.
Micah smiles, so wide and cheesy it makes me want to slap him because can’t he tell how urgent this is? “We or me?”
“Micah. How far back?”
His smile disappears, sensing my patience is so thin it’s practically non-existent.
“I can go as far back as you need me to go.” He turns from me and faces his computer, typing a couple of things before turning to me again. “What do you want to see?”
“First, I want to see the photos of Chloe that cleared her. The stills of the video footage from town.”
That’s something I have access to in the case files, but I’m already here and I don’t think I could steady my hands enough to manage a mouse and keyboard.
Micah eyes me for a beat that goes on just a tad too long to be comfortable. He finally faces his computer screen and clicks a couple of times until the printer on the desk beside him kicks to life and spits out a couple of pictures the size of a full sheet of paper.
Spinning in his chair, he grabs them from the tray and extends them in my direction.
These stills of the video footage are supposed to be Chloe Stark. It’s supposed to be what kept her out of prison and put her mother away, proof that Chloe was not at home during the time of her third stepdad’s murder. I stared at these stills for months, before, during, and after the trial.
I squinted, held them under different types of lights to get better views and angles. Brought them close to my face and held them at arm’s length. I’m not doing any of those things now. These shots are practically burned into my brain.
Micah sits silently in his chair, watching me as I arrange the pictures on his desk and then put the photo of Lily next to them.
They are similar in their backgrounds. In Chloe’s photos, there are hedges that match the ones in Lily’s photo.
The stills show Chloe’s movement, her legs in various degrees of stride as she moves forward.
And the photos are the same in that Chloe is moving toward the same bus Lily was getting on that would take her and her children to Hope House.
There is faint bruising on her chest that I never noticed before. A bloom of purple and red that starts at that sweet collarbone of hers and spreads toward her neck.
I run a finger down the photo of Chloe, remembering what she said in the hotel room when we went to Sunset Peak.
“They were bad men, Colin. And if you would have continued your investigation into them instead of taking an easy arrest, you would have known that.”
She was running from her abuser. Her stepdad was hurting her, and her mother…killed him to protect her? That’s why Caroline confessed. She protected Chloe by killing her husbands and protected her again by making the arrest easy. By making sure Chloe was never under any suspicion.
“What are you thinking?” Micah asks, like he can see into my mind and he wants to join in the conversation.
I lift my gaze from the desk, keeping my hands planted on the surface on either side of the sloppy pile of photos. “Chloe’s stepdads were abusing her. That’s why Caroline Stark killed them.”
Micah doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t react much at all, just leans his body back in his chair and sets his elbows on the arms, interlacing his fingers over his stomach. “Hmm.”
“Doesn’t that make sense?” My words remind me of the drive to Sunset Peak, when it sounded like Chloe was trying to convince me why Max and his friends might be after her and hers.
Micah lifts his shoulders in a lazy shrug. “Sort of.”
Turning my gaze back toward the photos, I keep trying to pull at a thread that feels like it’s shriveling between my fingertips the further I yank it.
I study the photos, trying to see them differently. Trying to see something else I’ve never seen in them before.
And when I do, my body goes blazing hot. My heart beats relentlessly against my skull. In my neck. In each of my fingertips. I can’t lift my eyes from the photos as I tell Micah to pull up footage of the same location around the time of the first and second murder.
His fingers tap against the keyboard in the background, and my head is swirling so dangerously fast that I feel like I’m hallucinating the tapping in sync with my heartbeat.
The printer grumbles to life again, the mechanical sound of the machine sucking paper in and then slowly spitting it out covered in ink. It’s all happening in slow motion.
“These are about a week before each of the first two murders.”
Micah slides a new set of photos onto the desk right in my line of sight, and suddenly I’m transported back to the night I broke into Chloe’s house and planted the cameras.
I’m studying the photos on her nightstand.
Musing over the fact that her and her mother look so similar and trying to grab onto a thought that passes through my mind in a blur.
But it just sped by, like it was on its way somewhere else.
Like it was traveling through time and landing in the future to this moment right now, as I realize none of these pictures are Chloe.
They are Caroline Stark.