Chapter 36 Kobe
Kobe
I had too much shit inside my head and needed to sit down and think.
Could I have held Jolie at the station for suspicion of murder? Yes, probably.
Should I have updated Golding and taken instructions from her? Also yes.
I did neither of those things.
Returning inside, I hit the vending machine in the lobby, bought a bag of salt and vinegar chips and a can of root beer. The breakfast Dominique had fed me—Apple Cinnamon Cheerios because Cosette had insisted we have the same—was long gone from my stomach.
I waved at Jim as I headed into the bowels of the building and landed back at my desk.
The bullpen was empty. It had been for a while.
In fact, no one had witnessed the encounter between Jolie and Yates.
Technically, I should write up the incident and email it to his superior along with the signed statement from Jolie detailing Yates’s part in this whole affair.
But I didn’t do that either. Not yet. I had to think about a few things first. Three rapists and a negligent doctor were all dead.
At the hands of a teenage girl?
At the hands of her brother?
Were they working as a team?
I ate salty chips and drank sugary pop as I typed Bastian Aubert’s name into a search bar, pulling up what I could find on the boy whose presence that fateful night three years ago was no longer a mystery.
Sebastian Aubert. Son of Jean and Brigitte Aubert from Gatineau, Quebec.
Date of birth: May 19th, 2006.
Nineteen years old.
Sebastian rented a one-bedroom apartment in the three-hundred-block of Somerset in Ottawa.
I checked a map, confirming what I already knew.
The location was walking distance from the university and the quad where Ford Carrigan had been found, a stone’s throw from the river, where we’d discovered Navid’s body, and two blocks from Sandy Hill Outdoor Rink, where Jesse had been displayed naked on a park bench.
The only outlier was Malik, but that meant little in the grand scheme of things.
Geographical patterning was common with serial killers.
They developed what we called comfort zones, but there could be any number of reasons why they suddenly diverged, and Malik’s murder had been a mess.
He always had a crush on her, Jolie had said.
He was this awful shade of green, Yates had mentioned the first time he’d approached me about the unfiled report.
Sebastian Aubert. No criminal record. No driving infractions.
I dug deeper, exploring what I could of his social media.
He wasn’t active on Facebook. His Instagram was hit or miss.
I couldn’t find him on the old T turned X, but I scored on TikTok.
It took no time to learn Sebastian’s personality.
He posted videos once a day and had been for years, mostly random teenage shit that made no sense to my thirty-two-year-old brain.
I scrolled back in his feed to September of 2022, when the incident had occurred, and watched a vibrant high school kid, who wore trendy clothes and laughed and smiled all the time, evolve into a much more subdued version of himself.
The dampening didn’t happen all at once, but watching three years pass in a matter of minutes made the transition far more obvious.
His good nature vanished. Dark circles bloomed to life under his dull eyes.
His content shifted to a collection of reviews on morbid poetry and literature, no longer featuring friends and girls.
I moved forward and backward in time, watching videos at random.
In August 2022, I stopped on a video featuring a much younger version of Jolie.
It depicted her with another girl, dark wavy hair and a special smile for the boy filming.
I paused the clip and stared at her soft features and the innocent sparkle in her heavenly blue eyes.
I knew in my gut it was her. Gigi Sauvage.
One month before her life changed forever.
In a twisted way I couldn’t explain, I felt like I knew her, and I grieved the young stranger and all she’d been through.
It was a newer video that stopped me. Sebastian had recorded it on Halloween 2025, two months ago.
It wasn’t the goth-style costume he wore nor his rambling analysis about Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” It was the background, the towering construction of a familiar building.
A recognizable quad, only this time without a blanket of snow.
I switched to a new tab and flew through another search, and there it was. Sebastian Aubert was a first-year English student at the University of Ottawa. I wasn’t shocked. It all made sense.
“What are the chances you’re my culprit, Sebastian?” I said under my breath.
It all fit. Whether Jolie helped her brother or not didn’t matter.
He was the key player. Jolie and Gigi were best friends.
Jolie’s brother had a crush, and teenagers did not crush halfheartedly.
Sebastian had an older friend who invited him to a university party.
Wanting to look cool, he stole his father’s car and took his younger sister and the girl he loved to the party.
“Everything went wrong from there, didn’t it, bud?”
Alcohol and drugs were only part of the problem. Jesse and his gang homed in on weakness. Who was more susceptible than two high school freshmen trying desperately to act older? Where Sebastian had ended up was anyone’s guess, but he wasn’t there when Jesse got his hands on Gigi.
“And you’ve never forgiven yourself.”
The aftermath was self-explanatory. Sebastian wouldn’t have known how to handle a traumatized and terrified girl who said she was raped.
He had tried to do the right thing. He drove her to a hospital, where Navid’s bedside manner was the last thing Gigi needed.
In desperation, Sebastian took her to the police, where—
My cellphone rang. Dominique’s name flashed on the screen.
I scooped it up, pinching the bridge of my nose as I answered. A headache bloomed behind my eyes. “Hey. I’m having a fuck of a day. How are you?”
“Uh-oh. Here I was wondering if you were getting off anytime soon. Sounds like a big fat no.”
I stared at the open tab on my laptop, where a paused image of a nineteen-year-old boy stared back at me. He had been explaining about love cut short by tragedy, a story he was all too familiar with. I stared into his marbled blue-green eyes as the pieces slotted together.
Did it all come back when you started university? I wondered. Was Jesse’s name on the lips of all the girls? Did you hunt him down?
“Kobe?”
“I’m not sure when I’ll be done. Something big landed on my desk.”
“Big? A new case?”
“No.”
“Do you need to talk about it?”
“I…” Shouldn’t. Couldn’t. I didn’t know which direction I would take, and the more Dominique knew, the more complicit he became, so I shared a variation of the truth.
“I have to file a report against Yates. Someone showed up this afternoon, and he acted inappropriately. It got physical. I was the only one to witness it, so… The girl made a statement, but I have to deal with the paperwork and make some phone calls.”
“A girl?”
I hesitated. Dominique knew I was on the hunt for the two girls from three years ago. Was I willing to lie? Had he not indirectly shown his support? He may not agree with my dark thoughts, but he didn’t seem ready to crucify me for them either.
Fuck it.
“One of the girls from before. She showed up. Her name is Jolie. It’s… Christ, Dom. The less you know, the better.”
Dominique was quiet for a long time, and I could imagine what he was thinking. Was being a parent and picturing entitled boys taking advantage of his daughter enough to justify my desire? Would he leave me in the end? We’d done well at talking around the subject. Would he want to know more?
He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t pry or demand I elaborate, and I loved him more for that, but I also loved myself less for not being the man he likely hoped I would be.
“Come by when you’re done?” His voice was small. Quiet.
“I might head home tonight.” I might need space to come to terms with things, I didn’t say. “I have a headache. I doubt I’ll get out of here before eight. Yates took off. I have to… figure stuff out.”
“Okay. Call me later?”
“I will.” I was about to say goodbye but stalled. “Hey, Dom?”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
“Criss que j’t’aime.” He paused and added, “No matter what you decide to do.”
With a sigh of relief, I closed my eyes. “Talk later.”
I wanted to collapse after getting off the phone. Dominique knew, and for whatever reason, he supported my decision.
I stared at the face of a nineteen-year-old boy whose sorrow and grief and love had driven him on a quest for revenge.
I glanced at the official report from Jolie still spread on the desk, its sheer existence a taunt.
A sworn statement against Constable Ari Yates.
It alone would trigger Rue and Golding. The answers would soon follow.
Fucking Yates. Why had he come in today?
You killed her. Jolie’s broken cries still echoed around the cavern inside my brain. I replayed her attack on Yates. Her pain and grief gave her superhuman strength. You killed her.
I know, he’d said. Over and over. I know. But how did he know when he’d claimed repeatedly that he didn’t know who the girls were?
Suicide, Jolie had explained. Gigi had killed herself.
Curious—or stalling, I couldn’t decide—I opened a new tab and performed a search for Gigi Sauvage.
When the results filled the screen, I read them with a lump in my throat.
Then I read them again, wishing they were a lie.
And again, as a new reality settled around me. Every brushstroke of her existence was sharp and clear and painfully colorful. Until it wasn’t.
I knew Gigi’s story would be horrific, but I had no idea how badly it would impact me.
Finished, I sat back and stared into the middle distance as the slots of a puzzle I didn’t know I was building clicked into place. I wanted to unsee it. Unread it. I wanted to go back in time to Apple Cinnamon Cheerios and cartoons on the couch. It was a holiday, for fuck’s sake. Why was I at work?
My attention drifted to Jolie’s statement against Yates. The blood on his cheek. The anger in her eyes. The way he pulled her hair and brought her to her knees.
“You motherfucker.” I snatched the paper off the desk and balled it in my hands, bellowing, “You goddamn motherfucker.”
I wiped my search history, shut down the computer, and took all incriminating information with me. Then I raced from the office, determined to get ahead of this mess before someone else figured out the painful truth.