14. Colin
Colin
“Wait up, panda bear.”
I hustle ahead of Chloe to my truck, hearing the click of the security gate latch behind us and then her footsteps hitting the asphalt as she catches up to me. I reach for the passenger door and pull it open, turning back to her as I stand next to the door and wait for her to climb in.
She leans in with a smile stuck on her face and props the dried paintings on the bench seat, standing straight again and staring at me.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, her smile melting away and head tilting as she studies me. Trying to understand how I could possibly not be smiling, too, after an afternoon with the cutest, sweetest kids in Four Peaks County.
Blonde curls fall out of the messy bun she put her hair into after the painting class and before we had lunch with the kids.
Most of the mothers had their own class to attend during the lunch hour, so Chloe wrangled all nine kids into the courtyard and set them up with sandwiches and snacks.
They all left the courtyard with red juice mustaches, full bellies, and not a fear in the world.
I left lunch with the image of Chloe’s cherry-red lips in my mind and a heavy stone in my gut.
“Nothing.” I nod impatiently toward the vehicle for her to get in. She doesn’t.
She crosses her arms and cocks her hip, narrowing her eyes like she’s using x-ray vision to read my mind.
I reach for her arm to tug her into the vehicle, but I stop short, the loud voice in my mind that tells me to touch her, touch her however you want because she’s not human, she’s evil, disturbingly quiet.
In its place, an almost imperceptible voice, saying she doesn’t deserve to be touched like that, echoes from the pit of my brain like it’s whispering from the depths of a well that’s been dried up for ages.
Her eyes track my halted movement, my hand dropping to my side again as I hold the door open. “Get in the car.”
“No,” she says defiantly. “You didn’t have fun?”
I scoff, my gaze trailing through the blue sky and the white clouds dotting the mountain in the distance. “Get in the car, Chloe.”
She turns away from me and walks determinedly toward the highway, hitting the bike lane and continuing down the road on a mission.
I cinch my jaw tight, pushing the door closed and hurrying after her.
“Where are you going?” I quicken my pace to keep up with her, but her long legs are moving fast, continuing away from me.
Her shoes crunch over the loose gravel with every step, and I glance back as an eighteen-wheeler comes into view in the distance, traveling in our direction.
“Home.”
“I was going to drive you.”
“Don’t bother,” she calls in a huff, the words drowning in the sound of the nearing semi.
I jog ahead and wrap my hand around her arm, pulling her from the shoulder and further off the highway as the truck barrels past us, the air forcing her loose curls into a whirlwind.
“Jesus, Chloe,” I mutter, releasing her. “Would you be careful?”
“Would you be honest?” she spits, crossing her arms again.
I spread my arms into the air. “I had fun. Is that what you want to hear? Will you get in the car now?”
Her gaze lingers on me, her body loosening a fraction. “How did it make you feel?”
I shake my head at what is beginning to feel like an impromptu therapy session on the side of the highway. How did it make me feel?
Like an asshole, that’s how it made me feel.
Each stroke of my brush against that canvas, each glance at Chloe as she painted or tended to the kids, it was another nail in the coffin I had unwittingly built for myself.
A tight, itchy, dark space of doubt that was closing in around me as everything I thought I knew about her started melting away, and everything I thought I knew about myself came into painfully sharp focus.
Her demand that I be honest echoes in my brain as I run a hand through my hair.
“Confused,” I tell her.
“Why?” she volleys back without missing a single beat.
I blow out a frustrated breath, because I know she knows why I feel confused. She can’t just let it be. She wants to hear me say it.
She waits with a frustrating amount of hope and patience in her eyes as another vehicle appears in the distance behind her. Her proximity to the lane boundary causes a storm of anxiety to erupt in my chest.
“I thought I had you figured out,” I say in defeat, and panic, hoping that the quicker I get this out, the quicker I can get her off the side of the road. I lift a hand in the direction of Hope House at her back. “And that was…” Not it.
Her lips part, that damn hope glittering in her eyes. “Different,” I finally say. “The way you were with them, it was…”
The car behind her slows and turns off the highway, allowing the tension in my chest to release.
Her gaze bounces between my eyes as she waits for the word to fall from my lips. Her focus drops to my mouth like she can already see it forming. The word. The crack in my armor.
At one point during lunch, one of the mothers ran from the room they were all huddled in, her hair disheveled and her eyes wet with tears.
Chloe was at her side in an instant; arm wrapped around her shoulders and guiding her to a quieter space away from the chatter of children and laughter that felt out of place.
I think that was the moment the hammer inside my body slammed the final nail into place, confirming for me that I am indeed an asshole.
Chloe Stark might be a good person, and all I’ve done is drag her name through the mud.
Throw fistfuls of dirt against her already tainted image, instead of attempting to see what lies beneath the surface of her mother’s notorious maiden name.
“It was just different, okay?” I swallow the lump lodged in my throat, the cavity around it painfully dry and scratchy.
She stares at me for a beat, the unsaid words hanging in the cool air between us.
“Okay,” she says quietly, turning from me and heading back in the direction of the parking lot and my truck.
“Okay?” I stand dazed on the shoulder of the highway before I jog after her, catching up to her at my truck and pulling the door open again.
She climbs inside quietly, settling herself in the passenger seat as I close her in and circle my truck, irrationally upset about the canvases that separate us.
***
“Where’ve you been?” Alex raises his eyes to mine as I cross the office in his direction.
“Hope House,” I grumble, sitting at my desk and pulling my laptop open for a distraction.
“Doing interviews?”
“Something like that.”
I pull up the missing persons’—now dead persons’—case files, hoping for something new that will link Chloe to the men and remind me why I can’t trust her. Why I hate her.
There’s nothing, and all it does is make me feel like a piece of shit.
I slam the laptop shut and push it away from me at the same time Captain Barrett exits his office with a look on his face that suggests he knows exactly what I’ve been doing all morning.
I did let him know I’d be going to Hope House.
Chloe was right that simply being there could be chalked up to professional necessity.
But I can’t help the flicker of fear from sparking to life in my bones that he knows I was there finger painting a fucking panda bear with my number one prime suspect.
Or at least, that’s what she was.
The captain tosses another slip of paper in my direction, and I watch it flutter to my desk instead of trying to wrestle it from the air.
“Why?” is all he asks, questioning the reason Chloe’s Bug is still accruing parking tickets outside our office.
It didn’t even occur to me to drive her here to pick it up instead of taking her back to her house.
She didn’t mention it, either, but it’s not like she’s stranded.
She does have another vehicle there she could use if she needed to—her mother’s vehicle that now has a matching tracker in it.
“I’ll take care of it,” I mumble, pinching the thin yellow paper between my fingers.
“You better,” he says gruffly, disappearing in the direction of his office again. It’s the first time since I’ve been back—since ever, actually—that he hasn’t demanded I stay away from her.
Alex raises his eyebrows at the interaction, staying silent across from me.
Daniel pokes his head out of the conference room down the hall, calling to us that we ‘have to see this.’ I share a glance with Alex before I follow him toward the conference room, and my eyes immediately snap to the board at the front of the room with Richard’s and Grayson’s faces on it.
There’s a thin red strand of string between their pictures, implying a connection, and I let out a laugh at the sight.
Lucy is hunched over an open folder, finger tracking a single sentence in a wall of words.
We don’t actually own red string. I’m pretty sure that’s something you only see on TV. I mean, that’s what the dry erase markers are for: drawing lines. I’m assuming Lucy went out and purchased it, excited to be following a thread on her first real case.
“We found it,” Daniel says, looking breathless and slightly manic. His shirt is untucked from his waistband, his hair a bit mussed as he crosses to the whiteboard and stabs a finger at Richard’s picture.
“He found it,” Lucy corrects, looking dejected.
“You’ll get your break,” I assure her, giving her a smile and turning my attention to the whiteboard.
“I think they were both involved in a trafficking ring,” Daniel explains, looking between the pictures and back to me and Alex.
“Women, children. Stretching from here to Mt. Lance.” His finger traces another red thread that leads to a crude drawing of a snowcapped mountain off to the side representing the biggest city in the state, almost three-hundred miles away.
“How do you know that?” Alex asks him, leaning against a desk with his arms crossed. Daniel crosses to the folder in front of Lucy, pulling it away from her as she falls into her seat with a frustrated huff.
“The teacher’s family lives there.” He flips through the folder, pulling a paper out and holding it in our direction.
I take it from him. It’s the statements of Richard’s children; statements that he finally got around to taking.
“They said he visited every summer, but didn’t spend a lot of time with them.
He’d be gone before they woke, and back in the evening after dinner most nights.
They said he was irritable, and one of his kids said his grandson found multiple business cards in his bag. ”
Alex takes the next paper that Daniel extends in our direction, and I peer over his shoulder at it. Multiple business cards are scanned onto the single page, the names of all of them some variation of women’s shelter or group home.
“So, I called them,” Daniel says, waving a hand in the direction of the paper Alex is holding. “They all reported women and children going missing from their facilities over the past five years.”
Alex shrugs, treading carefully. “That’s not that uncommon,” he hedges.
He points to one of the scanned images of a business card.
“This shelter is temporary housing for women in recovery. Sometimes they leave treatment early. Fall back into old habits and disappear for another few months.” Or forever.
Alex moves his finger to another image on the paper. “And this is a group home for runaway youth. They age out. Turn to the streets—”
“No.” Daniel shakes his head vehemently.
“These shelters are different. The people who work there report never losing contact with the people who come through their doors. They have a robust case management system in place. They maintain contact with their clients for years, even if they choose to leave the facility. These shelters double as research locations. Some socioeconomic study that’s been going on for decades. ”
I take the new stack of papers Daniel forces in my direction. The sheet of paper on top of the stack has a raised emblem in the top left corner. Cursive letters spelling St. Michael’s Homes surround a sketch of hands pressed together in prayer.
“Like Alex said,” Lucy interjects, “addicts and runaways, they’re flighty. Is it so strange some of them flew the coop?”
I nod in agreement, thinking of my sister. She’s come and gone through countless treatment centers and halfway houses over the years. I can’t even say I know for sure where she’s at right now.
Daniel lets a closed manilla folder drop to the table in front of him with a loud slap, his posture confident even in the face of all our rebuttals.
“The only time they ever went missing was during the summers when Richard was in town.”
I fold my arms over my chest, intrigued by this rabbit hole Daniel has disappeared down.
I don’t bother asking him how long he’s been up, because sometimes that’s just how this detective game goes. Long nights with more coffee and questions than sleep.
“And Grayson?” I ask, wondering how the fake family man plays into this whole scenario.
Daniel returns to the whiteboard, turning his back to us and staring at the picture of Grayson Tyler.
“He was reported in the area as well, also only during the summers.” He faces us with his hands on his hips.
“There are no witnesses that put them together, but it’s quite the coincidence, don’t you think? ”
“I’m still following that lead,” Lucy tells us.
Alex and I both nod like bobbleheads, absorbing everything.
“This is a great start,” he says to them. “Now find out who would want them dead.”