Chapter 15 #2
He looks up when I enter, his eyes red. His jaw is set with the particular tightness of a man holding himself together through sheer force of will.
It's the best performance I've ever seen.
"Eddie." His voice cracks on my name. "I just heard the news. Evelyn. Was it Red Hands?"
"We're still processing the scene." My voice is level, neutral, the professional tone I've used for years, now serving a purpose I never anticipated. "I'm sorry for your loss, Sheriff."
He nods, and actual tears streak down his face.
The deputies shift uncomfortably, a wall of blue sympathy.
"I’ll keep you posted," I tell him.
"Red Hands," he says, looking up. “It has to be him. You have to find him.”
His eyes meet mine, and for one fraction of a second—so brief I might have imagined it if I weren't looking for exactly this—something moves behind the grief. Something cold. Something calculating. A predator checking to see if the trap has been believed.
Then it's gone, replaced by the broken husband, the grieving widower, the tragic sheriff who demands sympathy.
I leave the station and sit in my car to process.
The atmosphere is shifting, the tightening of sympathy around Vincent like a protective membrane.
By noon tomorrow, the story will be set: the suspended sheriff's wife, murdered by the serial killer terrorizing their city while the department was too busy investigating “baseless” accusations to protect her.
People will soften their opinions about him.
Look how much he grieves for his wife! He can’t be all that bad. Maybe the law should go easy on him even though he’s been accused of all sorts of terrible things.
Vincent will be the tragic hero. The vigils will start. The donations will pour in. The outcry over him will evaporate in the heat of public sympathy.
He killed his wife and turned her death into armor.
And I can't prove it. Not yet. Not with what I have. The staging inconsistencies are compelling to an expert but circumstantial to a jury. The lack of anatomical precision in the cuts suggests a non-expert, but "suggests" isn't "proves."
I need more. I need him to slip. I need him to say something, do something, reveal something that can't be explained away by grief or coincidence or the plausible deniability he's spent his entire career perfecting.
I need to call Sera. I need to see her too, but I stop at Burger King first and order enough for three since devils don’t eat.
When I call her on my burner, she answers on the second ring.
"Evelyn Harrow is dead. Murdered. Staged to look like Red Hands."
"What the fuck, Eddie,” she hisses. “Staged how?”
"The handprint was too big. Wrong cuts. Right nail polish, but wrong application. Wrong victim profile. It was someone with access to the case files and a very good reason to want his wife dead before she could talk to a divorce attorney about what she knows."
Silence, but I can practically hear the gears turning, the connections being drawn, the architecture of her revenge plan reconfiguring around this new variable.
I turn onto my street. My apartment building is a three-story walk-up on the end of Birch Street, the kind of place that attracts single professionals and divorced men who never cared about aesthetics.
The parking lot is full at this hour. I pull into my usual spot, cut the engine, and sit for a moment.
Someone inside the building has their bass thudding too loudly for this time of night.
"He's wearing her like a shield," she says finally.
"Or like a crown. The department's already closing ranks around him. I have a funny feeling the town will too. By tomorrow, he might be untouchable."
"He was always untouchable." Her voice hardens. "That's the whole point of him. That's what he does. He makes himself the thing you can't question, can't accuse, can't touch."
"I know. We just need the evidence to point in his direction. He has a motive, the means, the opportunity, and a wife who filed for divorce and knew things a man like Vincent couldn't afford to have said under oath."
"Come home," she says.
"I will, but I need to stop—”
A shadow moves at the edge of my vision.
Not the living, sentient dark that breathes and watches and knows my name, but another kind. The human kind. The kind that means someone is standing in the narrow alley between my building and the adjacent laundromat, partially concealed by the dumpster, and they just shifted their weight.
I grab for my service weapon.
The sound reaches me before the pain does—a silenced crack, muffled but distinct, the particular flat bark of a round punching through a suppressor.
The driver's side window explodes inward.
Glass peppers my face, my neck, my hands.
Something punches through my left shoulder with a force that slams me sideways against the center console, the impact so sudden and so total that for one surreal moment I think I've been hit by a car.
My mind disconnects, but I’m also aware of everything: the smell of copper, the way the shattered glass catches the streetlight, the wet heat spreading down my arm and across my chest, the burner phone sliding out of my hand, and Sera’s voice calling my name.
The second shot hits the headrest where my skull was a half second ago.
I'm already falling sideways, not by choice but by gravity and the sudden inability to hold myself upright.
I find the door handle and pull. The door swings open, and I spill out onto the asphalt, landing hard on my side, the impact driving the air from my lungs in a grunt that tastes like blood.
The parking lot is very bright. The asphalt is cold and wet under my cheek and smells like motor oil and rain.
I try to reach for my gun again, but my arm doesn't respond.
My shoulder is a white-hot void where sensation should be, radiating wrongness in every direction.
I reach across my body with my right hand instead, fingers scrabbling at the holster, but my fine motor control is dissolving, the adrenaline flooding my system making everything clumsy and loud and too fast.
Footsteps. Unhurried. The sound of someone who has all the time in the world walking across a parking lot toward a man bleeding on the ground.
A pair of boots stops three feet from my head.
I look up. The streetlight halos him from behind, turning his face into shadow, but I don't need to see his face. I know the silhouette. I know the posture. It’s the stance of a man who's spent most of his life wearing a badge and a gun and has never once doubted his right to use either.
"You should have left it alone, Eddie." Vincent's voice. "You should have just let it be Red Hands, but I can tell by the look in your eyes that you can’t."
I try to speak. What comes out is a wet gurgling sound.
He levels his gun at my chest, a silencer attached to the tip. He fires a third shot.
Pain ignites and turns the night sky white.
The boots turn and walk away. An engine starts somewhere behind me and pulls out of the lot. The sound of it fades down Birch Street.
“Eddie!” Sera shouts from my phone, which is inside my car. “EDDIE!”
Distantly, I wonder if my phone is capturing the sound of my breathing as it slows, and slows, and—