Chapter 18
Shaw
Selene. Not in the office, not on the clock, but here and waiting. Not a surprise, but not something I’d ever let myself predict, either.
She didn’t look up as I killed the engine.
Just sat there, helmet off, spine like a steel cable, arms folded across her chest. There were a dozen open spaces between us, a football field of asphalt and whatever had been done to make it necessary.
I got out and locked the door behind me.
The keys swung on their ring, the weight of them heavier than I’d remembered.
I walked, hands loose, nothing in them. No gesture to the badge, not the suggestion of a weapon.
Selene watched my approach the way you’d watch a car in the rearview—peripheral, cautious, never with the full of her attention unless you swerved. I didn’t.
“Good morning,” I said, because someone had to break the surface.
Her eyes flicked over me. “Not really.”
I stopped a car length from her. Close enough that a lunge could clear the gap. Far enough that if she started the engine, I’d have to run. All her calls.
She let me wait in the silence. I didn’t fill it.
“I saw you,” she said, tone level and flat. “Out on Northshore. Rolling the blue tarp.”
I felt something run through my teeth, cold and electric. I didn’t let it reach my face.
She shifted, finally. One boot scuffed the pavement, a slow, deliberate gesture. “Didn’t expect it to be you. Not like that. Not for her.”
“You followed me?”
“Watched,” she corrected. “From the service road.” She finally gave me the full of her eyes, black and sharp. “Don’t flatter yourself. I was there for Spade.”
“She asked you to—”
“She didn’t ask,” Selene said. She straightened up on the bike, still not getting off. “She’s handling her part of this, whatever this is. I watched to make sure you did, too. For the record, you did. Tidy work, no mistakes.”
I exhaled through my nose. The air was thick with the aftertaste of burned fuel, the ozone funk of the busted light. “This a warning?”
Selene’s mouth didn’t move, but I caught a trace of a smile, a curdled thing. “This is professional courtesy. I’m telling you I saw. No one else needs to.”
I nodded, slow. “And if I get a sudden urge to do paperwork on Spade?”
She tilted her head, the way a snake will before it checks if the thing in front of it is dying. “Then the club goes full transparency. The footage goes to the DA. The department. The mayor, if you want headlines. Nobody comes out of it clean.”
I let the keys dangle at my side. They rattled, louder than they should have in the open lot. “So that’s it. I keep my mouth shut, we’re good.”
“That’s it,” Selene said. “Unless you get creative.”
“I’m not creative,” I said. “Never have been.”
She considered me for a second, maybe two. “That’s what I told the club. You do understand that I will do what I have to do to protect my club. Even if it means killing a fucking detective.”
“You’re threatening me,” I said. “That’s not the way this needs to go.”
“You killed a woman in sexual rage, Shaw. You know how well that’s going to go over in court these days? The public outrage.”
“I’m not like Spade,” I said.
“Yet you’re in love with her, at least the killer part of her.”
I shook my head. “All of her. The good and the fucked up.”
“The two of you have a lot in common now, Shaw.” She climbed on her bike. “You fucked a serial killer detective, knowing she was a monster.”
“She’s not a monster.”
“She is, but she’s a Royal Harlot monster.”
I nodded. She was a parent protecting a child. “We’re on the same team, Selene. I get Spade, and your club gets to both stay out of the news and get fed some important intel.”
Selene nodded. “I knew we could come to an understanding, Shaw.”
She started the engine with a single kick. The headlight cut a white arc across my shins. She didn’t look back as she rolled out, and the sound of the pipes faded fast, chewed up by the city noise rising beyond the block.
I stood there for a minute, maybe more. The wind off the interstate carried the faint reek of diesel and last night’s rain, mixing with the tang of oil and something else—brackish and faintly metallic, like blood wiped off steel hours ago but not quite gone.
I was fucking in love with a Harley-riding serial killer who belonged to a club of killers. I’d put that on my resume right before murderer.
Above the precinct doors, the fluorescent flickered a stuttered Morse code, illuminating nothing except the stains on the cement. I looked at my hand. The keys were still there, teeth biting my palm, half-mooned and white. My face felt blank, but my jaw was wired tight.
I turned and walked in, leaving the lot just as empty as I’d found it.
The inside of the precinct smelled like cheap coffee and old cleaning chemicals, the kind that never quite covered the rot in the pipes. I made it ten feet past the entrance before the morning desk caught me in his crosshairs.
“Shaw,” he said, and just that.
I kept my face set to neutral, like a mirror with nothing behind it. “Yeah.”
He angled his head toward the duty office, where the sergeant was already looming in the doorway. “You’re wanted.”
I walked. Each step felt like it echoed—rubber soles squeaking against scuffed tile, the sound of too many years in a place that sanded you down to bone.
Sergeant Carter was a silhouette in the doorway, not much taller than the jamb itself but built like a sack of cement. She didn’t step aside until I was nearly on top of her.
“In,” she said. I went.
She closed the door behind us, cutting off the hum of the squad room.
“Got a call from NLVPD at 0500,” she said. “Lake Mead, east shore. A woman’s body. No ID, no priors, no missing persons match yet.”
She watched me. I didn’t blink.
“Strangulation, at first look. Ligature marks on the neck. Dumped out past Hemenway,” Carter continued. “Forensics says it’s recent. Less than forty-eight hours. I’m giving it to you.”
The words thudded in my chest like an arrhythmic drumbeat. “I’ll take it,” I said.
Carter arched an eyebrow. “You already have?”
It was a joke, technically. I let the corners of my mouth move a millimeter. “Not my usual fishing spot.”
She didn’t laugh. “Let’s keep it that way.” She handed me a manila folder. I already knew it would be thin, nothing in it that would make the blood slow down in my ears.
“Drive safe,” she said, turning back to her laptop. I took the file, shut the door behind me, and went straight for my desk. My coffee mug had dust on the rim. I didn’t touch it.
The only thing I needed was the car keys, hanging from the hook beside the whiteboard. I took them and walked. No one called after me.
***
The highway out past Henderson was glass-smooth and nearly empty. The sun hadn’t broken over the peaks, but there was enough light to see the contours of the land, all hard angles and scrub brush and sudden, violent drops. I drove with both hands on the wheel, grip so tight my knuckles gleamed.
Every tenth of a mile, the panic would try to surface, and every time I pushed it down: the tarp, the weight of the body, the sick logic of what I’d done.
I’d made it look random. I’d put her in a place that devoured secrets.
I’d been careful. But then there was Selene, watching from the margins, and the certainty that nothing stayed buried in this town for long.
My phone vibrated—dispatch, ETA request. I thumbed back a single word: enroute.
The turnoff was gravel, two ruts carved through caliche and loose stone.
A half mile down, I saw the black Suburban with county plates, idling by the water.
The lake was a dark green mirror, too still for this hour.
On the shore, three people in jackets, one pacing, one squatting by the marker cone, one standing and writing in a field notebook.
I parked with the hood aimed at the waterline. The engine ticked as I killed it. I stepped out, the ground soft and unsteady.
The lead tech looked up as I approached. She was small and neat, hair in a severe bun, gloves already pulled on. “Detective Shaw?”
I nodded.
She pointed with a capped pen. “Victim’s there. Solo dump. No vehicle tracks we can find—tire prints are probably at the roadhead, if they exist. Found by a birdwatcher at first light.” She offered the kind of smile you give to a stranger you don’t want to remember later. “Lucky for her.”
I looked at the scene. The body was half in, half out of the water, tangled in a snarl of reeds. Face up. Even from a distance, I could see the bruising, the marks circling her throat.
“Preliminary says time of death less than two days,” the tech continued. “Water temp’s slow to give up, but she’s not bloated. No ID on her, nothing in the system. Clean hands, no tattoos, no obvious punctures. Her teeth are good.”
I walked the perimeter, staying out of the footprints. There was a yellow evidence marker stabbed into the mud by her wrist. The arm was twisted at a wrong angle, the fingers stiff and splayed, reaching for something the rest of her would never find.
“Manual strangulation,” I said. Not a question.
“Looks like,” the tech confirmed. She snapped her gloves and crouched by the head. “Blunt force postmortem, maybe to mask the ligature. Or just insurance.”
“Anything in her pockets?”
“She’s in a skirt,” the tech said, straightening.
I didn’t say anything. The air was colder by the water, and the reek of decay rode just below the surface, sweet and heavy.
“You want to do the canvas, or wait for the divers?”
“Canvas,” I said. I looked out over the lake—no boats, just a raft of cormorants skimming the edge.
“You have a guess on who she is?” the tech asked.
“I’ll know soon enough,” I said, and heard my own voice from far away.
She nodded, satisfied or maybe just checked out. “We’ll bag her. Report will be on your desk by EOD.”
I let her go back to her work. Walked down to the waterline, careful not to slip on the silted rocks. The lake lapped gently at the corpse, the smallest movement animating the face for a moment, as if she might cough up the truth before sinking again.
I crouched, careful not to touch. The face was already fading, the features softening at the edges. Whoever she’d been, it was nearly gone. What was left was a warning, one I should’ve paid attention to.
I stood, turned from the lake, and made it back to my car with the sun just starting to break over the ridge. I didn’t drive right away. Just sat with the engine off, feeling the weight settle into my chest.
The phone buzzed again, but I ignored it. There was no message that would change what waited at the end of the day. I just watched the road unspool in front of me, the line between me and the city as straight as a confession.
I turned the key, let the engine idle, and let the silence stretch. The lake was behind me. The road was ahead. I was the only thing still undecided.