Chapter 42
forty-two
. . .
SUTTON
I hated myself for my cowardice. I should’ve looked at Lane, should’ve demanded he tell me to my face that he’d only been toying with me all these months. That he’d been fucking both me and Addie—a new kind of violation I’d hoped never to experience.
His betrayal gutted me, the overwhelming pain and disgust with myself far worse than what I’d endured after being raped.
Once Lane was gone, thankfully, Johns led me out of the interview room and toward the holding cells at the back of the building, but before he locked me away, he paused at the phone on the wall and nodded at the slip of paper in my hand.
“Call your attorney.”
Oh, right.
With my hands cradled awkwardly around the receiver thanks to the cuffs, I dialed the number and brought it up to my ear, waiting while it rang.
“Hello?” a woman answered.
“Is this Berkley?”
“Yes.” A beat, then, “Oh, is this Sutton?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been expecting you,” she said warmly, which actually went a long way toward calming me down. “First, I need you to hire me.”
“What, like, pay a retainer or something? I’m sorry, but I’m in jail. I don’t exactly have access to my bank at the moment.”
“Okay, there is no need to snap at me. I just mean I need you to verbally secure my representation.”
“Oh,” I said, cheeks heating in shame. “Well, in that case, I’m officially retaining you as my attorney.”
“Great,” Berkley replied, sounding like she was smiling. “Now, have you been formally charged?”
“No.” Johns had informed me I’m being held on suspicion, which was bullshit because he and everyone else seemed convinced I’d done this.
“Do you know when you will be?”
“Hold on.” I moved the phone away from my ear and covered the mouthpiece with my hand. “Hey, Johns. Do you know when I’ll be formally charged?”
“Monday,” he replied flatly. “Addie is filing the official complaint in Boise since that’s where the incident occurred. It’ll take the weekend to get that squared away.”
I relayed that information to Berkley.
“Okay,” she said, and I could hear the clacking of laptop keys in the background. “I’ll visit you on Monday in Boise. I know spending the weekend in a holding cell isn’t ideal, but try to remain calm. I promise, we’ll get this whole mess sorted out.”
“You’re not going to ask me if I did it?”
“The first rule of criminal defense is you never ask your client that question and give them the opportunity to lie to you. But I don’t think you did it, so I don’t need to ask.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because your boyfriend is adamant you didn’t, and I’m inclined to believe him.”
Your boyfriend.
I almost snorted but bit it back. Berkley didn’t need to be dragged into my relationship drama. That was a problem for me to deal with once I was freed.
“Well, I appreciate you taking on my case.”
“No problem. You’re basically family, right?”
“Right.”
“So sit tight, and we’ll get this squared away next week.”
“I’ll be here.”
Berkley chuckled and disconnected.
With that task completed, Johns led me to the desk, where we went through an uncomfortable series of removing anything from my body that could be considered a weapon—namely my bra, shoes, and jewelry.
I was issued a sports bra that had probably been white once but was now greyed with age, and thick socks, then directed into the holding cell.
It was tucked in the corner, two walls made up of the cinderblocks of the building, two thick sheets of plexiglass held together with steel supports and a complicated-looking locking mechanism.
Positioned perpendicular to each other and bolted the exterior walls were two cots, each with a single flat pillow and scratchy wool blanket atop them.
I’d expected it to be cold, but it was surprisingly warm.
Once he removed the handcuffs and the door was secured behind me, Johns walked away, and with nothing else to do but wait, I crawled onto one of the bunks, drew my knees to my chest, and settled in for a long weekend.
Jail was a lonely place, even with having spent the entire weekend locked up with Missy fucking Plano, who had yet again been arrested for solicitation and public indecency.
No matter how hard I ignored her, no matter how many times I glared at her when she tried speaking to me, she refused to shut up, carrying on an endless conversation with herself.
“What’d you do to get in here?”
“Little miss high and mighty got knocked down a few pegs, eh?”
“These charges are bullshit. I wasn’t soliciting anyone, least of all Tony Walter. Everyone in this town knows that man would fuck an alligator if it felt good.”
Okay, she had a point with that last one.
For two days and three nights, I hardly ate, my stomach clenching and roiling every time I thought about putting food in it. I survived on water and spite.
Finally, Monday morning arrived, and with it, my transfer papers to Boise.
For all the time I spent around Lane and law enforcement in general thanks to my job, I realized I was woefully ignorant when it came to the minutiae of police procedures.
Through the little door I’d only seen used to transfer food and water to me and Missy, Johns passed me my boots—minus the laces. Wordlessly, I slipped them on, then stepped back as Johns opened the cell, slapped the cuffs back on me, and led me out.
“Bye bye, Sutton!” Missy called, a maniacal grin on her face.
“Fucking crazy,” I muttered.
Johns shocked me when he chuckled. “Drugs will do that to you.”
It took everything in me not to respond. We weren’t pals, and any fondness I’d felt toward him previously had disappeared the moment he’d told me I was under arrest.
The bullpen likely still buzzed with news of my arrest, and I was genuinely shocked Lane’s deputies hadn’t made excuses to stare at me in the holding cell like some sort of zoo attraction.
Thankfully, instead of bringing me out the front like when he’d brought me in, Johns brought me out back.
An ancient panel van, painted an ugly beige and brown with the Dusk Valley Sheriff’s Department crest on the side, idled.
He loaded me into the back, climbed behind the wheel, and took off for Boise.
Once we were clear of town, however, he surprised me again by pulling down a deserted side road. Parked up ahead in a little turnaround was a blacked-out SUV.
Unease prickled the back of my neck and sluiced down my spine.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He ignored me, got out, and walked around to the driver’s side of the other car. From this angle, with the passenger side facing me and its heavily tinted windows, I couldn’t see who was at the wheel, but I had a bad feeling I already knew.
After a brief conversation, Johns reappeared, pulled me out, and walked me over to the SUV. He shoved me unceremoniously in the backseat then disappeared without another word.
Slowly, I lifted my head, afraid to confront the woman behind the wheel.
When our eyes met, Addie grinned.
“Hello, Sutton.”
I was in so much trouble.
“What is going on?” I demanded.
Before responding, she faced forward, put the car into gear, and pulled away.
Catching my eye in the rearview, she finally said, “I’m taking you to Boise.”
“As my accuser, I feel like this isn’t exactly above board.”
“Of course it’s not,” she said with a derisive laugh, like that was the dumbest thing I could’ve said. “I said I’m taking you to Boise, but you won’t actually make it there.”
“How do you figure?”
“Don’t worry your pretty little head,” she said, tone dripping with condescension. “Let me worry about the details. All you need to concern yourself with is the fact that, sometime before we reach the city, you will die.”
Die.
The single syllable tattooed a rhythm on my brain like my heart against my sternum.
She was going to kill me?
Shit, this was even worse than I thought.
Okay, I had to remain calm. I wasn’t of any use to myself if I let my emotions get the best of me. Closing my eyes, I ran through an abbreviated version of the breathing exercise I used when a panic attack loomed. When I opened them, I found Addie watching me in the mirror again.
“Aren’t you going to ask why?”
“I know why. You’re obsessed with Lane.”
“I don’t like that word. It implies something…unhealthy. Like I have an illness.”
I snorted. “And you think falsely accusing me of attacking you then driving me somewhere to kill me all so you can have him isn’t a sign of a mental illness?”
“Of course not. Lane is mine, Sutton. He’s been mine for ten years. I love him, and he loves me.”
I didn’t bother to correct her, to remind her he’d been mine for a hell of a lot longer than that. To tell her he loved me. This wasn’t a tit-for-tat situation, and it wouldn’t do any good. Fighting with crazy people never yielded the desired result.
And there were the texts to consider. Maybe Addie wasn’t entirely off base in thinking he wanted her. As badly as I tried to convince myself there was no way Lane would carry on a relationship with this woman behind my back, those messages were damning.
“If that was the case, he’d be with you and not me,” I said.
“He feels bad for you,” she replied pityingly.
“You came to him with your damsel in distress bullshit, and you know he’s never been able to resist helping a woman down on her luck.
I told him it was a bad idea. That you’d grow too attached, especially given your history, but he didn’t listen.
So I had to resort to drastic measures.”
“So you beat yourself up and accused me of assault in hopes that, what, you’d have him all to yourself once I was out of the picture?”
What must it be like to live in that level of delusion? She couldn’t possibly think this would go the way she wanted.
“Exactly,” she said, “but it started long before your arrest.”
I knew it. Still, I needed to keep her talking. She seemed at ease, and the longer she spoke with me, the more it prolonged my death.
“How long before?”
“You don’t get to my place in life and within the Bureau without being very good at reading people.
I saw you in the hospital after he got shot.
Hell, I was there when he got shot, witnessing your reaction in real time.
And I hate to break it to you, honey, but how you felt about him was glaringly obvious.
Call it woman’s intuition, or a sixth sense about people I’d cultivated over the course of my career, but I just knew, after watching him almost die, you’d make a move on him.
Plus, when Lane woke up from his coma, I could sense a shift in him.
Like somehow, while he’d been unconscious, things had changed for him.
” The coma dream, I thought, but kept my mouth shut.
“It was a damn good thing I’d had the foresight to clone his phone before he tossed me to the side in favor of this shiny new toy. ”
She caught my eye in the mirror, and I realized I was the toy.
But wait…cloned his phone?
Oh, shit.
The texts are fake.
My stomach lurched. I had only a vague idea of what “cloning” meant, but I could guess it had given her access to a lot—if not all—of Lane’s cell phone data. Meaning she’d been privy to every conversation we’d had over the last several months.
Had she been listening in on our phone calls?
We’d had phone sex a few times while I’d been staying in Boise, and the idea that she’d been eavesdropping unbeknownst to us made me want to claw my skin off.
I mentally slapped myself in the face. How could I have been so stupid to believe Lane would ever do that to me?
Not that it made much difference now, but he was probably so confused.
I’d go to my death with him thinking I was mad at him for something he didn’t understand. Something he hadn’t even done.
“And I couldn’t have that,” she continued, dragging me out of my thoughts.
“So what did you do?”
“Well first, I plotted. I’ve spent years studying and interacting with criminals. I know how they operate. So I called on my knowledge to devise a plan.
“You surprised me by staying away at first, especially considering he was rehabbing, and you’ve got somewhat of a medical background. But I needed to put a few failsafes in place, so I orchestrated those break-ins.”