Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
Seth watched Norm through the double-sided glass as he sat alone inside the interrogation room. He’d asked for a lawyer right away, so they couldn’t speak to him yet, which left Seth in a frustrating state of limbo. But patience was a good eighty-percent of this job.
After calling for backup earlier, an officer had shown up to take Norm into holding.
Seth had gone back inside the house, where he’d found Chief Wells in the basement, sitting on the loveseat across from the tube TV.
She hadn’t brought herself to watch what was on the tape, and Seth had encouraged her not to.
They already had enough to hold Norm, since he tried to run from questioning.
They just needed to figure out what they actually had him for.
No one had looked at the tapes yet; they were still being processed through evidence.
Maybe it was a sex thing—“legal,” as Norm said—but if that were true, he wouldn’t have fled like that.
He wouldn’t have asked for a lawyer right away.
He wouldn’t have dropped the whole sickening happy-go-lucky act because he knew he was fucked.
Whatever sick shit was on there, Seth had to be ready for it.
Finally, Pereira came in. “We got some equipment to view all the tapes. They’re bagged up in evidence, no one’s touched ’em since.”
“Good. We need to know if Eliza or Kelsey are on any of them. I don’t suppose anyone around here is trained to view this kind of thing.”
Pereira was pale. “They don’t exactly cover that in basic training…”
Seth tensed, though he tried not to show it. He’d expected this, but it still didn’t make the task any less daunting.
Back in the city, Sex Crimes handled material like this and passed on what was relevant—only what the detectives needed to see.
He’d been trained to handle sensitive evidence of all natures; he’d seen horrific videos recorded on cell phones, murders captured on street cameras.
Many—most—cases he’d worked had a sexually violent nature, but he’d primarily dealt with the homicide aspect of it.
This, whatever Norman had recorded, might be more than what he could bargain for.
But it had to be done. The sooner they knew they had the right guy, the sooner the town could be safe.
“We can’t afford to wait,” Seth said. “I’ll do it.”
His lead, his victims, his responsibility.
It was strange how things could blow up so massively, yet fall right back into normalcy, like a familiar song on a poorly tuned guitar.
Claire found herself at work that evening, like she did almost every other evening; another boring Wednesday night.
Her dad was in the back, doing whatever it was he did back there.
His biker friends hadn’t been back for any poker games since Sunday.
Clementine must not have told him about Claire sneaking into his room—if she had, this night would look a lot different.
She swapped between leaning against the bar on her phone, looking for new books to read, listening to the soft rock on the juke, serving customers, wiping up spills that weren’t even there, and staring at the damn wall.
Anything to pass the time easier. Winslow crept into her mind a few times.
The way he’d looked at her last night was probably all in her head, but she liked the way it made her feel all the same.
She hadn’t felt the touch of a man in months.
Even then, she hadn’t liked the way Dillon had touched her in a long time.
Years. Like she was something to be used and tossed aside.
Hell no, she didn’t miss that.
But she still had needs.
And call it presumptuous, but Winslow seemed like the giving type.
Stop that. Claire grumbled, flustered with herself. She tried to busy her hands by reorganizing some glasses. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a crime to think of him that way, but not at work. The last thing she needed was one of these old guys picking up on her daydreams.
And daydreams, they were. Nothing more.
Around dinnertime, Dillon came out from his hiding hole in the kitchen, where he worked as the “cook”—AKA a glorified deep-fryer. He came right up to her with his phone.
“You see this?”
On the screen was an article published minutes ago.
SUSPECT ID’D IN LOCAL ARREST.
Claire peeled herself from the article. “The Mr. Giggles guy?”
“Guess so,” Dillon replied.
“Wow. We all used to have birthday parties there.”
“Yeah, everyone with parents,” he grumbled. “But this is him, right? This is the guy who killed Eliza and Kelsey.”
Dillon’s eyes were strangely pleading, the left side of his face still bruised from the punch her dad gave him. Claire almost felt like he was looking to her for some sort of companionship.
“How would I know?” she asked, turning away. How dare he?
“Can you at least act like you care?” Dillon muttered, and Claire shot him a glare that could freeze lava.
“Really, Dillon? You want me to comfort you about your damn affair partners?” She lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “I’m the one who actually saw Kelsey’s body—you think I don’t care about what happened to her? You never even asked how I felt.”
That shut him up. She expected him to screw off, but he lingered, glancing at the back room. When he rested his elbows on the counter beside her, she had no idea what to expect. Dillon didn’t hang out with her at work.
“What are we gonna do, Claire? You were right before. We hate each other.”
“Like you said, we can’t break up.” She paused, an idea blooming in her. “But how about this. You can go off and screw whoever you want, and I won’t say a word to my dad, long as you don’t tell him what I get up to either.”
“What, do you have someone now?”
Claire laughed pathetically. “Sure don’t, but I don’t wanna feel like I’m being monitored either.”
Dillon went quiet, considering it. “But he expects things of us. He wants us to have a kid.”
“Then we’ll say we’re trying. I don’t think he’s at the point of installing a camera in our bedroom yet. You have a better idea?” She glanced at the back room too, then leaned in close and whispered, “’Cause you and me having sex is absolutely not an option.”
Dillon nodded. For the first time in a long time, they were on the same page. “Okay. If you won’t say anything, I won’t either.”
“Good. Then we don’t gotta act like we’re friends in the meantime.”
Dillon took the hint and screwed off into the kitchen. Claire let out a shaky breath. That was the closest they’d ever had to a breakup. It didn’t change much, but it was better than nothing.
That was the good news—but the whole Mr. Giggles thing was something too. Norman Stanfield was a creepy enough guy; a little too into the whole Barney act, as far as Claire had always been concerned. But if he was the killer, then Detective Winslow would leave Fairview soon. Within days.
That would be a good thing; it’d mean the case was solved. But for Claire, things truly would go back to the way they were. She wasn’t sure if she could go after her dad if she didn’t have someone here who she knew wasn’t in his pocket.
Biting her lip, she opened Google on her phone and searched Seth Winslow’s name. A bunch of articles and websites flooded the screen, some from official police websites. But as Claire scrolled, one headline in particular caught her eye.
INSIDE THE INVESTIGATION OF THE ‘brOOKLYN BUTCHER.’
Yikes, that was a name.
Claire clicked on the article. It was only from last year.
The photo showed Winslow, tense-looking but sharp in a suit, along with another man, probably in his mid-thirties, as they hauled a prisoner in cuffs away from a courthouse.
The prisoner appeared startlingly ordinary—the type of face you’d see at the grocery store and say hi to.
Walrus-like, rough, but not unkind. If Claire hadn’t already been made aware of his crimes, she’d never think anything of him.
But according to this article, this man murdered six women and hacked off their limbs, leaving them in freezer bags around Brooklyn, New York.
Winslow had been the one to find a break in the case, which led him to a meat locker where the killer stored the body parts.
God, the horrors this man had seen.
It was strange to think he was barely older than her—twenty-eight, the same age as her sister.
But his life experience blew hers out of the water.
While he’d been living in New York City, risking his life to get criminals off the streets, she’d been here.
Serving Fairview’s drunks. Doing the same crap she’d been doing for years now.
Her world always had been small.
But if he had to leave, and she was left on her own to deal with this, then maybe Claire needed to learn how to think like Winslow did. He wouldn’t give up on a hunch—he’d follow it till the bitter end, even if it led him nowhere good.
Once more, her mind traveled to that necklace in her father’s bedroom.
He’d never so much as glanced at another woman since her mom died, but he also wasn’t the sentimental type. He left some of her mom’s stuff around, sure, but Claire had never seen a necklace before.
A quick glance over her shoulder told her she was safe, so she opened a new window on her phone’s browser.
On Google, she searched “Celine Dyer,” and the screen filled with old articles about her mom’s death.
Claire had some spotty memories of that time.
Before she’d been told her mom was dead, she remembered a woman—one of her mom’s friends—assuring her they’d find her.
She’d been a missing person for a few days, maybe even a week, before the police found her blood.
Following that feeling—that “hunch” in her gut—Claire altered her search to “Celine Dyer, missing person,” and went into the images tab.
The photos made her heart stall. She really did look like her mom.
Clementine would too, if it weren’t for the dyed orange hair and fake freckles she was obsessed with.
Claire skimmed the page till something caught her eye.
It showed her mom, smiling at the camera, along with bold text: MISSING PERSON.
The link led to an article posted twenty years ago. She skimmed the text. The last line made her cold.
Celine Dyer was last seen wearing white sneakers, denim overalls, a blue knitted sweater, and a silver necklace with a butterfly pendant on it.
Seth braced himself on each side of the porcelain sink. He’d managed to keep it together at the station, but now, alone in his motel room bathroom, his thoughts had nowhere to run.
Even the short glimpses he’d seen on those tapes—enough to ID the victims—had burned into his memory and cauterized into scars.
He’d suspected the letters written on the tapes were initials, so he’d checked the only one labelled KC and a few others starting with E, just in case.
None of the women were Kelsey or Eliza. But they were people who Norman Stanfield had tied to that bracket in his basement and hung like cattle by their wrists.
And one of them, in the tape EH, was Ellen Harrison. Blindfolded. Cut into.
Nausea flipped his stomach, and he gripped the edges of the sink harder.
He’d shaken that man’s hand. The same hand used to torture all those women.
It was like Norman’s crimes were all over his palms, an oily substance rubbed into his skin.
He needed a shower, but he didn’t want to be naked—he just wanted to cleanse those images from his mind.
When the nausea passed, he pulled himself from the sink and went back into the living room—to do what, he had no idea, but he needed to move.
He passed by his dresser. As always, when he took this walk, the dime bag he’d thrown into the trash caught his eye.
He hadn’t been eating in the motel room, so he hadn’t added any more garbage. It was still there. Staring at him.
It’d be so easy to break from this reality.
It was like standing at a cliff’s edge, toes over gravel. He hadn’t broken his sobriety in three years now, but his body remembered. The tight snap of clarity before the plunge, the warmth blooming behind his eyes, drowning in velvet forgetfulness.
He crouched. Not reaching—looking. Every part of him felt wired and raw.
That’s not who you are anymore.
He was supposed to be stronger than this. What Eliza and Kelsey went through—what those other women went through—was true hell. They were the victims. Not him. It was his responsibility to be stronger than this for them. He’d accepted that role, taken an oath.
Yet the desire to forget everything—even them—consumed him.
He tried to remember something, anything from Narcotics Anonymous, but he couldn’t picture the faces of the people in his support groups, his counsellors, their words. It all paled compared to this one thing. This one thing he couldn’t have.
He needed to get rid of it. Not throw it out, destroy it. Flush it.
With a burst of energy, he snatched the bag, clamping it tight in his fist, and rushed into the bathroom. Standing over the toilet, he held it above the water. He braced himself. Drop it. Let it go. Flush it. Never look back.
But his hand wouldn’t do what his brain was telling it to do.
Slowly, he pulled his hand away from above the water. He unfurled his palm.
The bag stared back at him.