Chapter 50. Grey, the Detective
Grey, the Detective
PRESENT DAY
Grey stood up from the shrunken couch. She needed to be at eye level with Daisy for the rest of this conversation.
“I want to know why you felt you needed to kill them, why you blamed Scout, why you worked with a horrible person like Emmy Banks. You had the moral high ground, Daisy. You were a victim.”
Across from her, Daisy remained stone-faced, straight-backed and regal in her makeup chair.
The woman was impossible to read. In another lifetime, Grey would’ve found her fascinating, admirable, even.
A woman who’d been shattered and welded herself back together so strongly, so thoroughly, that she now had superhuman control. Grey might’ve looked up to her.
“There are moments in life,” said Daisy carefully, sounding every bit the older sister, “when you come to a fork in the road, and you have to make a choice about which path you’re going to take. And that choice will define your life, so you’d better choose right.”
“We’re standing here because you made the wrong choice.” Grey couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice. “When you decided you wouldn’t wait for the justice system and handed out punishments yourself.”
Daisy laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound. “Wait for the justice system? Honey, where’s the justice in this story? Because it’s sure as hell not coming from your friends at the LAPD. Besides your dad, the cops barely looked for us. Did you ever wonder why?”
“You’re talking conspiracies.” But Grey shifted on her feet. She didn’t want to think about her dad and Daisy standing on the same side, making the same accusations about her colleagues. Because then where did that leave Grey?
“I found out Simon Markham used to work for Gabriel long before he became his documentarian,” Daisy said. “Once upon a time, Simon was a crime scene photographer for the LAPD.”
Grey’s eyebrows rose involuntarily, both at the unnerving intimacy with which Daisy spoke Gabriel’s name, and at the memory of that detail from Markham’s Wikipedia page.
“I uncovered evidence that Markham helped Gabriel shut down the LAPD’s investigation into our disappearance in exchange for payouts.”
Grey barely had time for the weight of her father’s redemption to sink in—he’d been right—before Daisy continued.
“Gabriel Knox is a monster.” The woman’s eyes burned with a holy fire, the fire of conviction.
She stared at Grey like she would will her to believe.
“But there are a plenty of those out there, as I’m sure you know, in your line of work.
The problem with Gabriel is he’s a monster the justice system won’t touch.
Not with his billions, or his donors, or his political career serving as a bulletproof vest. Every accusation against him becomes a smear campaign, something to dismiss. ”
“Why do you say his name like that?” Grey blurted, unable to stop herself. “You call him Gabriel like a … lover.”
Daisy cocked her head. “There’s no greater intimacy you can have with a man than when he kills you and buries you in the desert.
Gabriel doesn’t recognize me, but he recognizes that intimacy in my voice.
On my face. It drives him crazy.” The cold humor drained from her voice.
“Listen to me, Grey: There is no path to nailing him that runs through the justice system.”
“You’re wrong,” Grey murmured, but she couldn’t look away from Daisy’s eyes. They were hypnotizing.
Daisy gripped Grey’s shoulders. It was bold, but Grey allowed it.
“He needs to be stopped.” Feverish—that was how she sounded.
“It’s more important than anything. The instinct for dominance is inside them, Grey.
It’s an cient and animal. That hunger to subjugate, it’s from the days when surviving meant murder, and ruthlessness was power.
These kinds of men, they’re genetically obsolete, but they won’t leave us.
We have to cull them, take them out of the human race, or there will be no end to the Gabriels and Reeses and Eastons.
Think about dogs, how we breed the wrong traits out of them.
If we allow these men to linger … they’re an existential threat to progress.
To the future of women. That’s what I realized, Grey: It’s bigger than one man.
Gabriel is a vestigial symbol of old humanity.
Nothing we do is too severe to rid ourselves of the threat. ”
Grey stood in Daisy’s embrace, entranced. She couldn’t have moved if she tried.
“I need you to find the desert house,” Daisy said. “He’s too well-guarded since his campaign began. You can’t get to him to torture the information out of him.”
Grey tried to pull away. “I would never—”
“You have to be the one now.” Daisy raised a hand to Grey’s cheek. Her fingers were soft. Her dark eyes searched Grey’s. “Promise me, Grey. Find her.”
With Daisy’s hand on her cheek, Grey could sense it: Elizabeth Drake might have looked like her, but Daisy was her true twin.
They were two women burdened by the same loss.
Looking at Daisy was like looking at a version of herself walking a darker, lonelier road where she shouldered all the responsibility for Alice’s death, trusting no one else.
Grey did not want to walk down that road. She wanted to believe in other people. Trust the organization she’d spent her adult life working for. She didn’t want to turn into Daisy, who would do anything, cross any line.
So she took a step back and opened the dressing room door. The officers stepped inside.
“Daisy Clearwater,” she said, emptying her voice of feeling, “you are under arrest for the murders of Elizabeth Drake, Simon Markham, and Rosie Wright, and obstruction of justice in the disappearance of Alice Holloway.”
Daisy slid out of her chair and bent over at the waist, like Grey had stabbed her between the ribs, Caesar falling from Brutus’s embrace. “Grey, please—we should be fighting him together.”
“There’s a right way and a wrong way to fight.
” Grey watched as the officers turned Daisy by force and handcuffed her.
“You did it the wrong way. You killed”—she couldn’t bring herself to say innocent—“people. You preyed on Emerson Banks’s delusions and jealousy, told her that if she killed her husband, you’d frame Scout, the woman she hated, for murders you committed. ”
“I did it the only way,” Daisy cried. But Grey nodded at the officers and they shoved her out of the dressing room.
The hallway was already crowded with staff in headsets, pressing clipboards to their chests, staring at them with a wide-eyed mix of fear and curiosity.
Grey had tried to keep this visit low-profile, but she could already tell it was going to blow up.
She kept her expression blank as she led Daisy through the building, reciting her Miranda rights.
She should feel elated. She’d caught a killer, unraveled decades’ worth of crimes, uncovered the truth about Alice, for god’s sake.
But all Grey felt looking at Daisy in cuffs was a sick, shameful wrongness.
The spectators followed them, spilling outside the studio as the officers dragged Daisy to their car and tried to fold her inside. But she gripped the door and dug in her heels, turning to Grey. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”
There was nothing funny about what was happening. Grey wanted to throw up. “What are you talking about?”
Daisy’s eyes were luminous, seeing something beyond the here and now.
“Knox and the others have no remorse. You and I have spent our whole lives trying to make up for what they did to Alice. We’re the ones repenting.
They might as well have killed us alongside her. We’ve given them our lives either way.”
One of the officers placed a hand on Daisy’s head and pushed her into the back seat. The crack of the door was final.
This was wrong. Grey felt it in her gut, in that place her father had instructed her not to trust. But she could no longer ignore her instincts.
She bent to the window, eye level with Daisy on the other side of the glass. “I’ll prove they killed her,” she said through the glass. The engine roared to life. “I’ll find her, I promise. None of what you’ve done will be in vain.”