9. seven
seven
. . .
ASPEN
Footsteps echoed in the hall outside my room and paused in the doorway. I didn’t bother to open my eyes. Maybe Sonya would leave the soup and go. I could eat it cold, right?
But the tentative shuffle on the floor of my room had them flying open anyway, and I was confronted with the looming presence of a large tattooed man in a sheriff’s uniform.
“Miss McKay?” Sheriff Lawless asked gently. “I’m sorry, I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No,” I assured him. “I was only resting my eyes.”
He nodded. “You must be exhausted,” he said. “But if you’re up for it, I’d like to get your statement about what happened to you?”
The man standing before me now was a far cry from the burly, take-no-bullshit man who’d sat across from me in his office three days before. The rough edges of the tone he’d used with me before were smoothed and softened, as though I was as delicate as glass, liable to shatter under his previous harshness.
He wasn’t treating me like a common citizen or a pest he wanted to be rid of anymore.
Now…I was a fucking victim .
I hated that. Hated the pity in his eyes and his tentative movements. I squeezed my eyes shut, face heating with embarrassment as tears leaked out and trailed down my face.
Had I mentioned yet that I was exhausted?
Was I up for an interview? I knew as well as anyone that law enforcement wanted to strike while the iron was hot with these sorts of things before time warped my memory and tainted my recollection. But the simple truth was, at the moment, I didn’t remember much of anything.
“I-I’m not sure,” I stuttered.
“I can come back,” he said, almost as if he wanted to leave. And I couldn’t blame him. No one liked hospitals.
My mouth opened to ask him to come back later, but I stopped myself, deciding it was better to rip off that metaphoric bandage and get it the hell over with.
“Okay,” I whispered.
The sheriff withdrew a phone from his pocket. “Do you mind if I record this?”
“No.”
After tapping on the screen a few times, he held the device to his mouth and said, “Sheriff Lane Lawless interviewing Aspen McKay on April twenty-third at approximately nineteen hundred hours.” He moved around to my right side and pulled up a chair, setting the phone on the table between us. “Start from the beginning.”
“Like the day I was born, or…”
One corner of his mouth hitched up, but he didn’t admonish me. Like he understood I needed to mask my pain and fear with sarcasm. The knowledge had me relaxing slightly.
“How about when you arrived in town?” he prompted.
Okay, that I could do.
“Have you done any background on me?”
Lane shook his head. “Not yet. I prefer to get a feel for a person before I go rifling through their history. ”
Another point in the sheriff’s favor.
“I’m a licensed private investigator, based primarily out of Denver,” I started. “About three weeks ago, I got an email about this place, and the Prom Night Arsonist—” I stopped, shivering at the name. Knowing this sick, twisted human had put his hands on me. Had tried to kill me.
The beeping of the heart rate monitor increased speed, and the sheriff laid a hand over mine.
“It’s okay, Miss McKay. Take your time.”
“I’m staying at that little motel on the edge of town. You know the one?”
The sheriff nodded. “Out by the highway. Yeah, I’m familiar with it.”
The way he said it told me the place had a reputation about as good as its accommodations, which was to say…not very.
“I got to town about a week ago and set up shop there. I have a list of people I wanted to interview, but those first few days, I wandered. I got a lay of the land, took the temperature of the townsfolk, got a feel for how easy or difficult they’d make this on me.”
“And?”
I shrugged, then winced as the movement tugged on my bandages.
“I was genuinely surprised by their friendliness.”
“Dusk Valley is a friendly place.”
I snorted. “Maybe to you. But I haven’t always been welcomed with open arms. And of course, once word about who I was and what I was doing in town started to get around, they became…chilly.”
My throat caught on the final word, and I coughed, pausing a moment to sip some more water. Damn, where was Sonya when I needed her? I could’ve really used that soup.
“Chilly, how?”
“There was a bartender at the Swallow. Pretty rude guy. ”
The sheriff chuckled. “Benny. He’s always been a bit of an asshat to women who don’t want to sleep with him.”
That made a lot of sense actually, and I nodded.
“What happened on Friday?”
“Well, first, we need to back up to Wednesday, when I went to the fire station. I spoke with the chief about taking a look at their old incident reports from those fires, and he was more than happy to help me out. Even set me up with the captain to go over them. I believe you know him?”
The sheriff blinked slowly, then cursed under his breath, and I grinned. I was deeply pleased to have caught him off guard—to know Crew hadn’t told him about this.
“For the record, you’re talking about Crew Lawless?” he gritted out. “My little brother?”
There was nothing little about that man, but I was glad I’d guessed correctly that Lane was older.
“The very same. He was on shift on Wednesday, but Thursday morning, we met for breakfast at the diner and spent a few hours going over the incident reports. Then I went back to my motel room and pored over them myself.”
“Fucking Crew,” he whispered, then blanched when he realized he’d said it on the record. “Sorry. Then what happened?”
“I had lunch, then came to see you.”
Succinctly, the sheriff relayed for the record the details of our meeting, giving me a moment to sip some water and attempt to conjure up more of what exactly had happened to me.
Unfortunately for him, I still had nothing for memories beyond leaving the Swallow but a smoking pile of ash.
“On Friday night, Black Betty and I took a ride around town, checking out a few of the crime scenes, and then went to the Swallow.”
“Black Betty?” the sheriff interrupted.
“My Suburban.”
“Black? ”
“What gave it away?”
He shot me a warning look. “We found one with Colorado plates abandoned in the lot at the Swallow,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s mine. Where did it end up?”
“Towed it to the impound lot at the auto body shop, but you can get it back with no charge once the doctors let you out of here.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. The last thing I could afford right now was having to pay a monumental towing bill and impound on top of all the medical bills that would likely wipe out my entire savings.
“Oh fuck,” I breathed as another thought occurred to me.
“You remembering something?”
“I had a bag,” I explained. “Had my wallet, keys, taser, and other necessities in it. Is it…do you see it around here anywhere? Or maybe my phone?”
God, my head hurt too fucking bad to be worried about this shit right now, yet I couldn’t stop.
The sheriff stood and walked around. “No,” he said. “Maybe the staff is keeping that stuff elsewhere? Or maybe it perished in the fire?”
“Maybe,” I conceded, though there was no conviction in the word. Likely, my attempted murderer had disposed of my things prior to leaving me in that building to die, making it more difficult to identify me in the event I didn’t survive, which was exactly what they’d been banking on.
“So anyway,” I pressed on, rubbing my fingers over my forehead in an attempt to ease the ache, “I ordered a beer, chatted up the bartender—Benny, you said?” He nodded. “Obviously, he wasn’t very forthcoming, and told me to give it up and leave. I wasn’t about to do that, but after an unfortunate collision that ended with me wearing my beer, all I wanted was to take a shower and crawl into bed.”
“Did someone do that on purpose?” he asked .
“Nah,” I assured him. “I accidentally bumped into a woman and wound up dumping my beer on myself.”
“Were those the only two interactions you had at the bar?” I nodded, bracing for what I knew came next. “So you left?”
“I tried,” I corrected. “Almost made it back to my SUV before someone attacked me.”
“Did you see anything?”
“No. They came at me from behind and hit me over the head.”
My fingers found the burns on my neck, and I shivered as I tried to remember the assault. How the dark figure had come out of seemingly nowhere. Laying on the dirt, gasping for air, blood from my nose coating my teeth and tongue.
The altercation beyond that was such a blur, and the time between my abduction and waking up in that garage building was completely absent, likely my brain’s way of protecting me from the trauma. The harder I tried to bring things from that night into focus, the more other memories appeared.
A different town halfway across the country.
City lights beyond the windows of a white-washed apartment.
A different attacker, more than one, a different set of injuries.
A different hospital, but the same smells, sounds. Same parents crying over the near loss of another daughter.
Pain. Pain. Pain.
Like a morbid, fucked up slideshow, memories from then and now layered over each other.
Barely making it to the phone to call for help.
Calls for help echoing back at me from the concrete warehouse, unanswered.
Around and around they went until I no longer knew where, when, or who I was. My breaths sawed in and out of me, and though I could hear voices calling, repeating a name that seemed vaguely familiar, I struggled to find my way toward it .
My temples pounded, my brain a messy, tangled web of sounds and sensations.
“Sheriff!” someone shouted, cracking through my delirium. “What are you doing to her?”
“Nothing!” came the reply.
“Aspen,” a female voice said, closer now. Distantly, I registered her grabbing my hand. “Look at me.”
I had no memory of even closing my eyes, but I did as she asked. It felt like my lungs were being squeezed by a fist, tighter and tighter. My pulse throbbed in my head.
“I need you to take deep breaths,” she, who I recognized as my nurse, Sonya, commanded, showing me what to do. “In for four, out for six. Let’s do it together.”
In tandem, Sonya and I counted, the numbers leaving me in gasps, until the obnoxious beeping—which I belatedly realized was my heart rate monitor—stopped, until I could fully inhale once again.
Too embarrassed to look at him, I rubbed my temples and kept my gaze on the wall ahead as I said to Lane, “I’m sorry, Sheriff. Can we do this another day?”
Finally daring to meet his gaze, I scanned the room, finding him standing by the door.
But he was no longer alone.
It’s okay, honey.
We’ll get you fixed up.
Don’t worry, Aspen. I’ve got you.
“Crew.”