Chapter Twenty-Two
“WE FOUND SARAH Dombrowski,” I told Jacob. He looked up from the fridge, visibly shedding the fog of sleep as his investigator brain clicked into gear. I scanned the report. “Says here she’s working at some exterminator called Pest Rid…and she’s on her way to a job site right now.”
Jacob knocked back the half-cup of coffee he’d just poured himself. “I’ll get dressed, you call Evelyn and tell her to get ready.”
Evelyn? “But the site is up Belmont. By the time we head all the way downtown and back, who knows where Sarah will be?”
“True. Have HQ call her a cab.”
“Since when do we need a scientist to interview a witness?”
“It’s not her science I’m interested in,” Jacob said. “It’s her empath ability. Think how useful she was when we questioned Sledge.”
“I can hear every word you’re saying,” Crash called from the basement. “Kindly refrain from blurting out anything that’ll get me whisked away in a government humvee with a bag over my head.” Great. Now he was worrying about it, too?
Jacob and I closed the distance between us and met in the middle beside the dining room table. Softly, he said, “Something’s not adding up here. I just think we should use all the resources at our disposal.”
Part of me agreed. But part of me suspected he was biding his time until he could get his hands on the SPECs. Sure, I had told Evelyn not to humor him. But there’s only so much Jacob a person can take before caving in and giving him what he wants.
But at least I’d be there to run interference. “Fine.” I texted Evelyn a brief message with the address and she responded with a thumbs-up. “But only because everyone’s being so hinky about that damn apartment.”
Jacob and I headed right over to the address Records gave us, hoping to catch Sarah.
A few more items rounded out the dossier I’d been given, though our team said the apartment on her driver’s license was currently rented by someone else and her social media was closed down months ago—not that shutting down those platforms permanently deletes anything. Not if you’ve got F-Pimp’s clearance.
We pulled up to the address, a preschool with a yard full of colorfully tacky plastic playground toys with a Pest Rid van parked in the loading zone out front.
Sledge had claimed he dated high-maintenance women, but what did that mean, exactly?
Sarah worked as an exterminator. That hardly sounded like diva behavior to me.
As we waited for Evelyn, we paged through the current info. “Shouldn’t there be more?” I asked Jacob.
“Like what?”
“I dunno. Records has been working on her for a while now, and all we’ve got are few photos and a bad address?”
“And a current location.”
I supposed that was all that really mattered.
A sleek black town car let Evelyn off just behind us. As she climbed out of the car, she treated me to a warm smile…which immediately drained from her face as she turned toward the preschool. “Someone’s terrified.”
“You get that from all the way out here?” Jacob asked.
Evelyn nodded. “It’s a lot of someones.”
As she said that, the wind shifted, bringing a thready cry to my ears.
And once I heard it, the others soon followed.
We headed in, flashed I.D., and made our way out to the fenced playground.
The workers were too busy herding cats—or, in this case, toddlers—to even ask why a group of federal agents might need access.
Outside…pandemonium.
Some kids huddled in horrified clusters, others darted gleefully away from a very winded, red-faced minder.
A kid in purple overalls was being tended by EMS. And the sound of crying came from everywhere…
including one of the staff. (Although the kid in purple was so intrigued by the paramedics that she’d forgotten she was supposed to be in tears.)
And among all of this, a slim figure in a khaki uniform with a Pest Rid logo stood beneath a swing set, shielding her eyes from the sun as she gazed up at a small, organic bump about the size of my fist. We waded through a crowd that was too chaotic to even notice, and approached the swing set.
“Sarah Dombrowski?” I asked tentatively. I didn’t like the buzzing sound I heard in the gaps between the wails.
She gave a curt nod. “They’re lucky these are common paper wasps. So many pollinators are protected these days.”
Sarah was a no-nonsense woman with shoulder-length hair in plain ponytail, no makeup, and a formidable pair of steel-toed boots.
I glanced at the kid by the paramedics. “Doesn’t look like the one in purple feels so lucky.”
Sarah shrugged. “If she was allergic, her throat would have closed by now.”
I’m no kid-person…but Sarah seemed awfully blase about the prospect.
The aids managed to funnel some of the toddlers inside, but the ones who were more interested in all the spectacle broke free from the pack, squealing, and circled the lot like the wasps buzzing around the hive.
“Victor Bayne with the FPMP.” I held up my ID, but Sarah hardly spared it a glance as she kept her eyes on the hive.
Not like it worried her. More like it was the next task to cross off her list. “I’m looking into the apartment on George Street and wondered if you could help me clarify a few things. How was it living there?”
She shrugged. “It was an apartment.”
“And the bedroom? Anything strange about it?”
“Strange, like what?”
“Oh, you know.” I gestured vaguely, so as not to plant any ideas in her head. “Strange.”
She thought for maybe half a second. “No. Not really.”
Which didn’t mean the repeater wasn’t there yet. Only that Sarah couldn’t sense it. Just like the majority of the population.
Since I was getting nowhere fast, Jacob gave it a shot. “What about your boyfriend—Zachary Sledge? Did he mention anything unusual?”
“Ex-boyfriend.” Sarah said it the same way she might’ve said “paper wasps.” A simple statement of fact. “And no. Zach didn’t notice much of anything unless it involved protein powder or his own reflection.”
Jacob consulted his untouched notepad as if there was something on it. “When did you two break up?”
“February.”
“And how did Zach feel about that?”
Sarah finally looked away from the hive, her gaze sliding past Jacob to fix on some middle distance. “He moved in with his new girlfriend. I assume he felt fine about it.”
The way she said it—so flat, so matter-of-fact—made me wonder if she’d felt anything at all. Not about Zach, not about the breakup, not about the apartment. Just...nothing.
A wasp drifted lazily past her face. She didn’t flinch.
“A paper wasp won’t go out of its way to sting you, but it will defend its nest.” Sarah opened her kit and unpacked a gallon sprayer, which she pressurized with an efficient series of pumps. “You might wanna take a step back.”
Jacob, Evelyn and I backpedaled.
Sarah slid on protective goggles, lined up the nest, and hit it with a blast of fluid: clear, odorless, and profoundly noxious. Lifeless wasps pattered out like petals falling from a dead rose. She paused, listened for buzzing, then hit it with another long blast.
“That kid’s lucky these aren’t bald-faced hornets,” she said. “Once those assholes fixate on you, forget it. Screw the nest. If their sights are on you, they’ll chase you down and make you pay. And they don’t lose their stinger, not like a bee. They’ll sting and sting and sting.”
I clenched away the urge to chafe my arms.
“So you haven’t been in contact with Sledge lately?” I asked.
The stream of poison sputtered to a halt as Sarah swung her full attention to me. “Why do you care?” Her eyes narrowed. “Did Zach send you?”
“I’m investigating the apartment,” I reminded her.
“No. I have no contact. I want no contact. I’m done with Zach. That’s why I left.” Her tone had no inflection. But I had no doubt she meant every word.
Evelyn fell back another step, one hand rising to her temple. “I’m sorry, I just need—” She turned away slightly, breathing shallow. “The chemicals must be getting to me. I’ll meet you in the car.”
As Evelyn retreated, Sarah watched her go, expressionless.
“Most folks are like paper wasps,” she said philosophically.
“By and large, they’ll leave you be, at least until you cross their boundaries.
But then there are the bald-faced hornets who just wanna see how much they can make you hurt.
” She gave the hive one more blast for good measure. “Zach was a hornet.”
When Sarah mounted a ladder with a scraper and a biohazard bag, Jacob and I took that as our cue to leave. The kids were all inside now, sticky hands and snotty noses pressed against windows as they watched Sarah chip away the source of all the morning’s drama.
Jacob and I turned and headed back across the playground, speaking softly. “Something’s not right about all this,” I said.
“Sledge doesn’t just sound like an asshole,” Jacob said. “He sounds abusive. Sarah could be compartmentalizing, or shut down. Or even on the spectrum.”
Or she could have been so victimized by Sledge that she participated in a murder and a coverup. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but the luminol disco ball could’ve been pointing to one hell of a bloody nose.
But the fact that there was a repeater in the bedroom changed everything.
“I’m guessing Evelyn wasn’t just inhaling insecticide,” I said. “Let’s see what was bugging her.”
We found Evelyn pacing at the far end of the parking lot, tapping on her own wrist like she was trying to reboot her brain. “It really says something that Chicago is so riddled with psychopaths that I can’t wait to get back to DC.”
“Sarah was a little flat,” I allowed.
“She verified that Sledge was abusive,” Jacob said. “Are you sure this isn’t some kind of coping mechanism?”
“Coping implies there are emotions being managed.” Evelyn shook her head.
“This isn’t just flat affect—I’m not picking up repression or dissociation.
I’m picking up nothing. Complete absence.
It’s like trying to read a mannequin. No fear when she talked about him chasing people down.
No relief when she said she left. Nothing. ”
As a I pondered what could hollow someone out that completely, another report from Records came through. They’d cracked Sarah’s shut-down Instagram account and plumbed the servers. But on first glance, the photos they sent me looked nothing at all like her.
An array of snapshots showed a thirtyish woman with long golden blonde hair and a ready smile.
One pic had her with a group of similar young ladies in sparkly dresses on a girls’ night out, and another was of her petting a llama at some rinky dink county fair.
But the one I was most interested in showed her making a cringe duck-face while beside her, Zachary Sledge was flexing his heart out in a sleeveless T-shirt.
Going by her features, yes, it was the same person. But the woman back there snuffing out wasps looked more like this one’s evil twin. Or maybe the good twin, depending how you felt about obnoxious poses.
“She was happy once,” Jacob said.
Evelyn shook her head. “Don’t mistake performance for feeling.
People project what they think they’re supposed to be.
And psychopaths are especially adept at…
masking.” She winced as she said that last bit, and it was nearly lost to a self-conscious mumble.
She resumed the tapping on her wrist. “If we’re done here, please take me back to headquarters. I’ve had enough field work for today.”