Chapter 14 #3
Jack nodded. “I’m not saying we leave it.
I’m saying we need to be careful. What we can do is ensure that the trial is pushed out.
She…” He gestured to the woman over his shoulder.
“…confessed. Though she may be innocent, she had her reasons for confessing, and we can’t on good conscience let her free. Not yet.”
“You have to be kidding me.” The looks offered from the obscenely large agents crowding my space told me otherwise. “I won’t let someone else fall victim to process.”
Like I did with Lawrence’s death.
Fuck, all this was hitting too close to home.
I needed the agents to understand the implications of ‘seeing it out’.
“If this somehow goes through, she will be in prison for life. Whatever the hell is going through her mind now, won’t matter when she’s been looking at the inside of her cell for ten years, and realizes they’re the only four walls she’ll see for the rest of her life.
Even if her false confession is going to screw things up, royally, she should…
” Wait. “Couldn’t she be charged with obstruction of justice? ”
“For that, we’d first need to prove she is not guilty.”
I was backed against a wall. Literally and figuratively. The elfish woman’s confession wreaked all sorts of havoc on the vamp case, providing a distraction which kept attention away from finding the real killers.
Standing in the observation room wasn’t going to achieve anything. Not for the investigation. Not for myself. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask ‘what do we do now?’ I needed to think. I needed action. And being stuck on the vamp case made me… okay, fine, it made me want to act out. Again.
Sitting around twiddling my thumbs while the intricacies of justice were figured out behind closed doors was not my style. And with the place my mind was in, I was in a headspace where I’d do something I’d regret.
“There are enough inconsistencies to bring the validity of her confession into question. We won’t let her go to prison for a crime she didn’t commit.” Jack’s words should have reassured me, they really should’ve, but they had the opposite effect.
In part due to the fact that Jack and his team had been following my case prior to my arrest.
If the FBI, allegedly, vouching for me prior to my sentence didn’t work, how was I supposed to trust this process?
Yes, I was out on the FBI’s good graces, but that was only because I was serving a sentence I didn’t deserve, and because I was seen as useful.
And my freedom, however temporary, didn’t come without a leash.
A leash that with my current passenger-carrying status was gnawed through and thread-bare.
“Are we done here?”
“Delilah.”
“I’m asking if there is more to do here, Jack. Are you requiring my presence?”
Eyes normally filled with warmth and mischief, showed a momentary lapse. His pupils wide, chest tight, I knew he was hurt.
My urge to apologize was dimmed by the whirling waves of anger that bracketed against my insides. I needed to maintain my hold, and for that I needed to leave. I could apologize later. After I had time to clear my head.
Todd put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. The firm touch triggering Jack to replace whatever was going on in his mind with his on-the-job demeanor. A forced neutrality.
“You’re free to go, Delilah.” Jack stepped back, though not by much. “Rooms will be ready in an hour.”
“Wonderful.” I slipped past both him and Todd, my body grazing the agents’ firm forms as I left. Without looking back, I brandished my phone over my shoulder. “You know where to find me.”
?
Storming out of a police station, after my disagreement with the agents, was not a good idea.
The uniformed police officers I had the displeasure of crossing paths with gave me plenty of disconcerted looks as I exited the building.
At this point it was hard to tell whether it was my reputation, my scars, marks, or the fact that I was very obviously in a state of distress, causing all of the attention.
Perhaps it was all of the above.
As soon as the hot July air hit my face, and my sneakers hit pavement, I regretted my actions, but most of all my words. Not only what I said, but how I said them.
The elfish woman’s confession had been a tipping point.
I felt the mechanisms of process and procedure grinding into place.
The rigid walls of establishment, my prison cell, the world was closing in on all sides.
Everything felt temporary, fleeting, which meant nothing was permanent. There was nothing to hold onto.
The agents wouldn’t understand. Not fully.
They were a part of the system, and there wasn’t anyone else I could call.
I didn’t have Botan or Salma’s numbers in my FBI-given phone, for obvious reasons, and my personal device was off, tucked in some drawer back at my apartment in Alexandria.
Mads had all but confirmed my personal phone had been used to track my location, and while it helped explain the attack at the cabins in Monongahela, it didn’t give any insight into who was following me, or how he knew about it.
I took a deep breath. Then another.
“You alright, little lady?” A uniformed officer with a thick moustache approached from the parking lot. His thumbs tucked into his belt loops, like he was trying to act the part.
I surveyed my surroundings to see who the officer was addressing, hoping he was talking to someone, anyone, other than me.
“Yes, you. Dress and sneakers.”
Crap. I hadn’t managed ten seconds to myself before I was interrupted. It must have been a record. “Fine, just needed some air.”
He sized me up and he continued his approach, eyes raking over me from the ground up. “Oh, you’re with that Special Agent and the big fellow.”
I didn’t respond since he seemed so keen on making his own assumptions.
“Which one of them gave you the love bite?” He chuckled to himself. “You know you should—Oh hell, you’re not into that vampire-shit, are you?”
“Into is not how I’d describe it.” I didn’t miss how he sidled closer, despite his disgust at my hickey. But he was awfully chatty, which could come in handy depending on how much I could get him to divulge. “What do you know about the vampires?”
“Besides the fact that there are vamps in this town?” He lowered his sunglasses. “They’ve got a headquarters here. Make big bucks. But they’re troublemakers the lot of them. Deviants. That’s what I know.”
“Troublemakers? What do you mean?”
“It’s all sex and vice. No virtue. But the fact-of-the-matter is people started believing that crap.
They think that vamps exist. Like suck-your-blood-in-the-night-and-leave-you-for-dead type of vamps.
And that has made things ten times worse.
Which is exactly why that love bite of yours should be covered. ”
I felt the pulse point in my neck throb under the scrutiny, but like hell was I going to cover it. I had decided I wasn’t going to be ashamed and I wasn’t going to let some police officer whose presence made my skin crawl tell me otherwise.
“Are you saying that the sight of my hickey,” because it was in no way shape or form a love bite, “makes people uncomfortable?”
“I’m saying that people who have a love bite like yours tend to get mugged.”
“Mugged?” I couldn’t quite tell if it was a warning or a threat.
“It’s like flashing cash in Times Square. It makes you a target. And you look like the kind of lady who can handle her own, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to draw attention to myself if I could help it.”
“Has anyone been arrested in relation to these muggings, Officer…”
“…Ellis. And no, we get all sorts of descriptions from the victims, none are consistent.”
So, there were enough people who were anti-vamp that would take on violence in order to…
what was it? Beat someone up with a hickey because they were, what?
Uncomfortable? It wasn’t like the vampire exorcisms in Cincinnati or Lexington.
A mugging wouldn’t stop anyone from changing into a vamp. If anything, it was a social deterrent.
You get a hickey from a vamp. You get beat up. But why?
Maybe it was about shutting down deviance.
Difference. Encouraging sameness. Or encouraging people to stay away from vamp culture altogether.
That would be effective. Since the price to enter was a mark—a bite, or as it appeared more commonplace, a hickey—anyone who’d ventured into the inner sanctum, would have a tell-tale sign of their involvement with the vamps on their skin.
“Is this well-known? The muggings?”
“Fairly. We haven’t started a campaign about it or anything, but there have been too many consistencies to not indicate a pattern.
Most civilians around here don’t get those love bites.
But if they do, they don’t go parading it around like you, little lady.
Only the vamp-lovers do that. Like they’re proud. ”
“Has this been shared with the agents in there?”
His eyes flickered over me again, before responding, “Should’ve, but I don’t know. I’m not the dedicated liaison. It’s outside my role.”
For fuck’s sake. People were really hung up about what was and what was not their role. Like the staff at Spring Grove who didn’t think it was their place to inform the police the hidey-key was missing.
But then it occurred to me, maybe this officer, Officer…
Ellis, knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe this was his way of making sure information got to us, without breaking the chain of command.
“Does your role often include waiting around to ‘coincidentally’ cross paths with people in parking lots, Officer Ellis?”
He flashed a dazzling white smile, which told me all I needed to know. Bumping into me had been planned. As was his change of subject. “So, the agent in there. Is he all they say he is? The Jack Hess monster?”