Chapter 19 Salem
CHAPTER 19
SALEM
The threads were weaving together, tangling, knotting, making a picture.
Salem looked at her murder board, for the first time focusing on the one case she had always considered the anomaly, the exception, the one that broke the pattern.
Maybe it was the key.
She stared at the photo of the boy postmortem. The only male to have died in the last decade of recorded female deaths.
She didn’t know his name. The column on his file had simply said unidentified, which meant he hadn’t been in the records or they hadn’t been found, the only photo on file the one after his postmortem along with the report.
She glanced over the report with more scrutiny this time.
Extensive injuries to his body from falling on the rocks beneath the lighthouse. Cause of death was broken neck. Contusions and bruises matching the fall impact and pattern. No foul play indicated, no other marks on the body, none except one.
A tiny, almost unnoticeable tattoo behind his ear. Some kind of symbol.
She squinted.
She’d seen that somewhere.
Where?
Where had she seen it?
Salem looked frantically around the massive board, trying to pinpoint exactly when and where she had seen it, when suddenly her eyes fell on her printed notes, the ones she’d jotted on her phone at the beach.
The girl on the beach, Tanya.
She had seen the same mark in the same place on Tanya’s body.
How the hell could she have missed this? It had been right in front of her eyes.
She picked up a string and joined Tanya’s photo to the unidentified male. Then she gazed at the full board, the photos, the notes, the data, the strings, with new eyes, and suddenly, some of it was making sense.
If the boy was the same one the policewoman had told her about—and it seemed like he was since they both had died falling from the lighthouse, and there had been only one death on record from there in the last few years—that meant he’d been interviewing people and asking questions too.
But had he really been a journalism student? A scholarship student? Had he genuinely been working on a project similar to what she’d made up or had he made it up too to get close to answers? But answers about what? And had he gotten them? His death definitely seemed to suggest that.
He had asked the right questions and gotten too close to the truth, and he’d been removed. That was why he was the only male death in the whole picture. The pattern, the focus, had to be the female deaths.
The vibration of her phone broke her concentration. She looked down to see a text from Aditi.
Aditi: Got it! Access code is 1003#1031.
She stared at the first half of the numeric code, her hand tightening around her phone.
October 3rd.
Olivia’s birthday.
That fucking monster.
Was he mocking her or gloating to himself? Was it sadism or hubris?
The other half of the code was unknown. Why October 31st? Halloween? Samhain? Someone’s birthday? Anniversary? Why was that date significant?
Gritting her teeth, she typed a quick reply.
Salem: Thanks! I owe you one.
Aditi: No problem. Just be careful. If you get caught, you could get in a heap of trouble.
Salem: Don’t worry, I will.
Message sent, she quickly changed out of the clothes she’d been wearing and put on her best camouflage outfit—black leggings, black turtleneck, black boots, black gloves, and, most importantly, a black beanie to cover her entire head and control all her hair so she didn’t leave any accidental DNA behind. She switched out her glasses for contacts. She hated putting them in and taking them out, but they were more practical for her mission. And then she put her phone on silent and slipped it into her pocket.
Ready, she left her room, making sure it locked behind her, and went out of the building, thankfully not bumping into anyone. It was eleven o’clock on a Saturday night and there was a huge party at one of the seniors’ mansions off campus. Most of the students had gone there and those who hadn’t must be in their rooms sleeping or studying.
It was the perfect time to sneak around, with the least chance of anyone even seeing her. Still, she was extra careful and vigilant as she exited the residential block and turned to the lone building at the end of the campus that housed the psychology lecture hall and Merlin’s office. In her head, she had dropped the title of doctor after learning that he had used her deceased sister’s birthday as his access code.
That truly, truly enraged her blood and chilled it at the same time.
The wind was cold against her face, the ground slightly wet with the moisture in the air. The campus that night somehow seemed creepier than it ever had before. Maybe it was listening to the policewoman talk about legends and folktales, but seeing the vast castle and ancient towers looming against the night, seeing the wrought iron lamps and the cobblestone streets, she felt transported back in time a few hundred years, realizing it all would have looked exactly the same.
Mortimer was frozen in time.
She felt a shiver go down her spine.
Tugging her turtleneck over the lower half of her face, she hunched and walked into the shadows, hurrying and heading straight to her target. Bypassing the path that led up to the auditorium/lecture hall gates, she stepped onto the grass and went around the round building toward where she remembered seeing the entrance to his office.
The further she rounded the building, the closer the woods got. And though she had never given it much thought before, tonight, for some reason, she was a little shaken. The woods were dark and creepy, shadows disappearing into the umbra, silhouettes of trees and branches moving in the wind suddenly seeming like dark hooded figures moving through the thicket.
Dear lord, she was truly losing her mind.
It was the lack of sleep and her dreams and the conversation combining together, nothing else. There was nothing in the woods, nothing to be scared of. She had been all over this campus at all times of the day and night and never had any reason to feel creeped out.
Crickets chirped. A night creature called somewhere. And she breathed through her nose, forcing her mind to stay on task.
She would never get an opportunity like this again. She couldn’t let anything screw it up.
Finally, she found the small door tucked into a corner where the round shape ended, a keypad mounted on top of the wall.
She typed in the access code and heard the satisfying click of the locks.
Pulling the knob down, she quickly slipped in and closed the door behind her, hearing the locks engage again.
Utter darkness.
Everything was completely, utterly dark inside.
Just a small sliver of moonlight came in through the window she recognized. She didn’t dare turn on any light or even her phone flashlight. The window to the office was visible from the cliff, the beach, and the lighthouse. Just in case anyone was roaming around and happened to look, she couldn’t risk anyone knowing she was there at all.
Letting her eyes adjust to the darkness, she took in the office space, checking to see if anything had changed. It appeared to be the same.
Determined to find something, she walked straight to the mantel, to see the catch-all bowl still there. Only this time, it wasn’t just her sister’s pendant she noticed, shining like crystalline blood in the moonlight. There were other pieces there too. Pieces she didn’t recognize. A dainty gold bracelet. A pair of pink flower earrings. A star-shaped metal pendant. A diamond ring in white gold. Small pieces, and she knew exactly what they were.
Trophies.
Just there, out in the open, right where he could see them, where anyone would walk past them without knowing what they were and he would revel in the power of it. The power of getting away with it.
Just by looking at the assortment of jewelry—jewelry that had once belonged to girls like her sister, jewelry that their families never got back and just assumed had been stolen—just by looking at them she could tell what he was.
Sick. Sadistic. Sociopathic, possibly psychopathic. The idea of having the trophies in the open where he could see them day in and day out, where anyone could see them, reeked of his narcissism.
Even though every part of her wanted to snatch the pieces away, keep her sister’s and send the rest to the families after finding them, she didn’t touch the bowl, fisting her hand and gritting her teeth and moving on to find something else.
She headed to his desk, not moving his chair or sitting down, but silently opening one of the two drawers. There was nothing of note there, just some random stationery and some academic papers. She left them alone and tried the other drawer.
Locked.
Damn it.
Just as she began to look around for a key, a large hand suddenly covered her mouth, pulling her forcibly back into a solid body and dragging her back to the bookshelf. She began to struggle against the hand, but he was too big, too strong, his grip on her too secure.
“Calm the fuck down, little asp, or we’re both fucked.”
The voice pouring into her ear and right into her brain made her body comply. The relief she felt knowing it was him muffling her mouth and dragging her back was paramount, something she would have to reevaluate at a later time, especially since she had decided he was dangerous. He still might be. And yet she let him drag her back into his huge body, calming her pounding heart down.
He opened the door next to the bookshelf, the one that led to the lecture hall, and pulled her out, closing it softly behind them, tucking them into a shadowed corner.
“Don’t fucking move, you got that?” His tone brooked no debate.
She nodded, or at least tried to with his large hand covering half her face over her turtleneck.
Muffled voices from the other side of the office door reached her.
There was someone on the other side, and she’d almost gotten caught. In fact, had this infuriating man not pulled her out, she would have been found and lord knows what else. She jerked in his hold in surprise, and he held her tighter, pulling her deeper into his body, his front solid against her back, chest to hip, his face above hers, tilted, listening as well.
“No one’s here,” a man said, a voice she couldn’t remember hearing before.
“I got the notification that the locks were disengaged,” Merlin’s voice came, and she could hear the anger in it.
“It could have been a tech or a wiring issue,” the other man said. “The only one who’s got the code is that TA of yours and you vouched for him.”
Salem tensed in his hold.
Merlin had vouched for him. Sadistic, psycho Merlin had vouched for Caz, his TA, the only one he seemingly trusted. Was Caz some kind of a protégé?
A sick thought entered her mind—he couldn’t have had anything to do with her sister.… No. She discarded it immediately. He hadn’t even been in the university when her sister died.
But even as she stood against him, her muscles began to lock, freezing, tensing, stress filling them one by one. She didn’t want to be standing so close to him, not after hearing that, but she didn’t have any other option. Swallow the bile in her throat or risk being found out.
She swallowed.
“I don’t like this,” Merlin complained, and the other man sighed loudly.
“Just look around, for fuck’s sake. If nothing’s taken, then let’s go. It’s getting late and we need to be there on time.”
Where? A social event?
Footsteps came toward the door, and she stepped back, deeper into his arms and completely in the shadows, holding her breath. He seemed to be holding his too.
Footsteps stopped. “Everything is the same.”
From the direction of his voice, she knew he was close to the mantel, most probably looking at his trophies to make sure they were undisturbed. Salem was never as glad as she was then to have listened to the logical side of her brain. Thank goodness she hadn’t touched a piece. Monsters like Merlin, the ones who collected trophies, were obsessive about them to the point that they knew if one had been moved a fraction of an inch.
Slowly, the footsteps receded. Sound of the door opening, door closing, locks reengaging.
Silence descended.
Heartbeats passed.
It dawned on her they couldn’t leave, not without opening the main door and disengaging the locks, and possibly alerting Merlin again. They had to wait until someone came, the cleaning crew, or maybe Merlin himself, and then leave.
The silence became too loud.
She became too aware, of Caz’s size, his nearness, his unpredictability.
She was here for the night with a man she did not know, a man who could be a monster’s protégé, a man she had seen threaten to gouge someone with a pencil, a man who could easily apply a little more pressure to her face and suffocate her and make her another statistic.
She was locked in for the night with Caz van der Waal.
“My whole life is a dark room. One. Big. Dark. Room.”
— Beetlejuice