7. Oz
7
OZ
I wake up to Freya screaming. Dread seizes my veins and I grab my gun off the bedside table, flicking on the light. A quick scan of the room assures me no one is here but Freya thrashes in her sleep. I put the gun back down and pull her into my arms.
“Shh, shh, it’s okay.”
She keeps screaming, bucking against me. I dodge a fist to the face and cup her cheek firmly. “Freya, wake up,” I say, panic fizzing against my skin.
I know Freya has a haunted past, but I’ve never seen her this way. Her face pale, her skin clammy. This is worse than the flashback she had when we first met. “Freya!”
Her eyes open on a gasp. She arches into me and blinks rapidly. Her hands settle around my neck, shaking fingers gripping onto my hair. “Oz?”
“I’m here, Mo Leannan. You’re alright.”
She wets her lips. Her skin glistens with sweat and the sheets beneath her are soaked. “What happened?” she asks, breathing like she’s just run a marathon.
I press my forehead to hers. “You tell me, sweetheart.”
She blinks and her hands drop to my shoulders. She pushes me back and I let her, even though all I want to do is wrap her up in my arms so nothing can ever hurt her again.
She drags herself up and leans back against the headboard, brushing her fingers through her tangled curls. “A nightmare, I guess.”
I place a hand on her thigh, trying to give her space but still needing contact. “What happened in it?”
She drops her gaze. “I don’t remember.”
I pinch her chin between my thumb and fingers and lift her head up so she has to look at me. “Freya,” I warn. I don’t do dark and dominating as well as River or Eli, but I can be stern if I need to be. And I know when I’m being lied to. “Was it your father?”
She bites her lip.
I lift my thumb and tug the soft pink flesh free from her teeth.
She relents. “Sort of. I think—” She glances away for a moment and I squeeze her thigh, drawing her attention back to me. “I think my mom was there.”
“Oh.” Despite knowing Maxwell had a daughter, we never managed to find any trace of a girlfriend or a wife. Maybe she’s dead but her body has never been found. It’s something I dread to think about—the number of women he might have killed that we don’t know about. “Do you remember her?” I ask.
Freya shakes her head. “No. Not at all.”
I open my mouth to ask what happened in the nightmare, but she pulls away again, speaking before I can.
“What time is it?” she asks.
I let it go for now, not wanting to press her when she’s still shaken. I reach for my phone and the screen lights up. “Five thirty. You want to try go back to sleep for a bit or get up now?
“I’ll get up. I don’t think I could sleep right now, not without…” She trails off, her gaze going distant as she relives whatever had her screaming.
I climb off the bed and reach a hand out for her. “Come on, let’s go shower.”
Everyone else is still asleep as we pad on bare feet down to the bathroom.
I turn the water on hot and ease the tension in Freya’s body by kneading her shoulders. She melts into me, her back, slick with water, like silk against my chest.
Her breathing picks up and she turns around in my arms, curling her hands around the back of my neck. She draws me down for a kiss, gentle at first and then more desperate.
I hold her back, my hands on her hips. “Freya,” I say, not wanting to take advantage when she’s feeling vulnerable.
“Please, Oz. I need you.” The water falls like raindrops over our heads. Little beads run down Freya’s face, catching on her lips.
I give up on being a gentleman and lift her against the tiles, sliding into her slick heat.
“Oz,” she moans, her hands trailing over me.
“Shh, I’ve got you.” I rock into her with a slow and steady rhythm, bottoming out with each thrust.
She buries her face in my shoulder, her sighs vibrating through me. Tension coils at the base of my spine as my buttocks tighten. I resist the urge to speed up, keeping my movements slow but deep and circling her clit with my thumb until Freya spasms around me.
Her tight pussy strangles my cock, milking every last drop of my cum as she climaxes.
Her head falls back against the tiles and I wish I could take a photo of the look on her face. She seems so peaceful, like the angel Jude calls her. I want her to stay like this, to take away all her worries. This woman is quickly becoming everything to me. I could stay buried inside her forever.
With more than a little reluctance I pull out of her, watching my release drip down her thighs. I use two fingers to push it back inside her cunt while she’s too spaced out to notice. I’ve never really had a breeding kink before and Freya’s on the pill, but I find myself borderline obsessive about filling her up. Knowing my cum is inside of her. Marking her. The visual alone is enough to get me hard again but I force myself to behave.
Freya’s sweaty for an entirely different reason now and I take my time lathering up her body and massaging the knots out of her shoulders again. She’s little more than a pile of goo once we’ve finished showering but by the time we get to the local precinct a couple of hours later, she’s fully alert again.
The Danville police station is housed in what used to be the town hall. I know the captain because he’s the same man who used to visit the local middle school each year for a safety talk.
Grant is a decent man, but he moved out here in his forties for a quieter life. He’s in his sixties now and he’d be the first to admit he’s out of his league.
He welcomes our team at the reception desk, his loose, jowly face grim. He leads us through to a conference room that’s already been set up with what Freya and Jude call a murder board.
“Feel free to move things around and we can get hold of more charging doo-das for all your tech if you need them.” Grant turns to face me. “I want this bastard out of my town, Oscar.”
I dip my head. “Yes, Sir.”
We go over the evidence Grant’s team has collected and analyze the crime scene photos but it’s much the same as before. It seems with Angelica out of the picture Maxwell has reverted back to his original M.O. Young, blonde mothers. Sliced throats and crosses on the chest. The only difference is he didn’t kidnap Adelaide before he killed her.
Until Camilla and Posy, Maxwell’s last two victims, he hadn’t killed for six years. Not since Freya faked her death and anonymously revealed her father’s identity to the FBI.
Maxwell went on the run and despite finally having a name to put to the Cross-Cut Killer, we were unable to find him. A dormant serial killer is nigh on impossible to catch. Now, he’s active again and we have his daughter on our side. This is our chance to finally catch him but we’re sitting around the oval conference table at a complete loss.
I’ve got my laptop and a second screen set up in front of me and I’ve spent the last hour trawling through footage from various security cameras and smart doorbells the neighbors sent in. Maxwell came on foot so there’s no number plate to track. He was wearing a cap and kept his back to the cameras the whole time, which means we still only have the character sketch Freya created last month to know what he looks like now.
Maxwell had just enough plastic surgery to keep facial recognition software from identifying him.
Jude shuffles through the photos of the crime scene. Unlike Maxwell’s previous victims, Adelaide was killed in her own home. The signs of a struggle in the hall suggest he overpowered her at the front door and dragged her upstairs to the master bedroom. We’re yet to receive results from the autopsy but chances are he tied her to the bed and carved the crosses into her chest while she was still alive before slitting her throat. That’s his usual style.
“He doesn’t have a home base anymore,” Jude says. “If he did, he’d have taken her back there like before.”
“And kept her alive for longer,” Freya adds. It’s the first thing she’s said in a while. Ever since we arrived three hours ago, she’s alternated between scouring the evidence, staring into space, and checking her phone. She’s edgier than usual too. Anytime one of Grant’s officers come to the door she jolts like she’s back to that hypervigilant state she used to be in all the time when we first met.
I wonder whether she remembers more of the nightmare than she’s letting on. Doing the job we do, none of us are strangers to bad dreams and they can mess with your head.
“We need to look at this afresh,” River states, standing up. He clears the board of everything except for the photo of Adelaide. She’s smiling in it, her blonde hair falling in waves down past her shoulders. Blue eyes. Dimpled cheeks. She was thirty-three. Still so young.
We dug deep into her history but there doesn’t appear to be any further connection between her and me other than where she lived.
“If this isn’t about us, then Maxwell chose her because of her looks. She fits his profile to a T,” I say.
“Precisely.” River points the tip of his pen at me. “So, what do we do when a killer has a type?”
“We figure out who that person represents,” Eli answers. “Serial killers usually fall into one of two categories; either they’re recreating their first kill, murdering the object of their obsession over and over; or the victims are replacements for the person they truly want to kill.”
Jude rocks back on his chair, clicking his pen. “If it’s the latter, eventually the replacements will stop being enough to satiate their desire and they’ll go after the holy grail.”
“Working out who Maxwell’s holy grail is could help us track his movements,” Eli says.
River shares a look with each of us. We’ve had our theories about who that person might be.
I shift in my seat and adjust my glasses.
Jude’s pen clicking picks up speed and Eli just stares at the photo of Adelaide. His jaw hard.
“Freya?” River cuts his eyes to her.
She jumps, fumbling with her phone. She turns off the screen and looks up at River. “Yes? Sorry.”
“What do you remember about your mother?”
Freya goes pale. Her already light skin whitens to a worrying degree. “What? Nothing.” She slides her phone into her pocket. “As far as I’m concerned, I never had a mother. It was just the three of us.”
I frown, my mind drifting back to what she said about her nightmare.
“Always?” River asks.
Freya’s hand trembles on the table but her voice comes out hard. “Yes. Always.”
“Maxwell is a psychopath. He doesn’t connect to others in a normal way. If he cared about your mother enough to have a child with her, enough to keep those children, then she could well be where his obsession started.”
Freya looks at each of us in turn. “So, he killed her,” she says. “And then went on to kill anyone that reminds him of her.”
“Maybe.” River dips his head.
Jude’s fidgeting stills. “Or maybe he’s leading up to killing her.”
Freya doesn’t say anything for a moment. Her nostrils flare a little with each intake of breath, like the emotions she’s suppressing are fighting to get out, but her eyes stay blank, unblinking. “My mother is dead. She has to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“What about when you were younger?” Eli presses.
Freya snaps her gaze to him. “I said I don’t remember.”
Her words are sharp, vicious, but Eli is too single minded to notice, or maybe even to care. “There are memory techniques we can use to access the subconscious.”
“No.” Freya shoots up to standing, her chair crashing to the floor behind her.
Jude leans forward, resting his arms on the table and keeping his movements slow. “Freya,” he says, his voice soft. “It’s okay. I know this is difficult but it’s not unusual for trauma survivors to have buried memories.”
River crosses his arms. “Unlocking them could help us catch your father.”
Freya’s hands curl into fists. “There is nothing to unlock. I don’t remember my mother because she was never there. Knowing my father he probably killed her the second she gave birth so he could have sole control over us. I remember everything, in terrifying detail. I do not have buried memories.”
Except her mother was in her nightmare. I look to my screen but there’s nothing to be found there. We’re at a dead end and if we don’t do something soon, another woman is going to die. I shake my head and close my laptop. Freya’s not going to like what I’m about to do but I don’t have a choice.
I look up and catch River’s eyes. “She had another nightmare last night.”
Freya’s eyebrows lift. “Well fuck you too, Oz.” She snarls at me and storms out of the room.
The door reverberates as she slams it shut behind her. The plastic privacy blind swings against it. Freya can deny it all she wants but from her reaction I’d say she knows as well as we do that night terrors are a common symptom of suppressed memories.