CHAPTER 28
“Kill me. Kill me as if it were the last time.”
—Not Casablanca
“You’re a cop?”
The look of pissed-off confusion is the only expression I’ve seen on Stu’s smug face that seems appropriate for the situation. I think this may be the first and only time tonight we are on the same page.
“Detective,” Wes says. “I’m investigating a string of recent homicides. That’s why I came here tonight.”
For the first time, I look at Wes and see a different man from the one who sat across from me during our speed date.
For the first time, the things he’s said and the things he’s done appear in a different light.
This whole time I thought he was just one of those people who perform well under pressure.
But the way he was able to quickly create a plan, the way he assessed a space for danger, the way he’s been holding his weapons all night and holding his shit together…
He patched up my arm like he’d just completed his first aid training refresher.
That’s why I came here tonight.
The admission makes my throat feel thick and scratchy. He’s been working. Everything tonight has been part of his job. He She’s All That’d me. But instead of being a fucking bet, I was a fucking beard.
What was the point of all those weighted looks and lingering touches and intimate assurances if he was just playing out some undercover role to catch the killer? The humiliating realization makes heat flare up in my cheeks.
What if what I’ve been feeling since our eyes locked was one-sided?
That thought feeds into a particular flavor of fear.
The kind I feel when I’m struggling with my dissertation or getting ready for a date or, recently, trying to think and act like a Final Girl.
It’s a slippery slope that will lead to hurtful thoughts about self-worth…
and I don’t have the emotional capacity to deal with it.
I’m investigating a string of recent homicides.
“The girls. The five women,” I say, and he nods solemnly, his eyes meeting mine, just for a second. Then he turns his stare back to Stu and the knife still aimed at his chest.
There was a reason he brought up the murders.
A reason he knew the last name of the most recent victim, Casey.
He probably knows all of that “getting to know you” information about her we never got to cover in our ten-minute meet-cute.
Things like how many siblings she has, where she works, her likes and dislikes…
things he doesn’t know about me. Things I don’t know about him.
Wes doesn’t just know the information that would’ve made up her dating profile. He’d also know what the killer did to her, how the fear of her last moments was etched into her face and captured in the crime scene photos when her body was discovered. And he knew all of that before coming tonight.
“Where’s your gun?” Jennifer asks, her eyes darting across his body as if he’s going to pull out a Glock and say, “Oh, this old thing?” When he doesn’t, she asks about the other items I know aren’t hidden in his pockets. “Your badge? A phone?”
“I don’t have them.”
At least he sounds like he really, really regrets that.
“Then you must have backup.”
Dani’s optimistic, expectant expression when she says it just makes my stomach tie itself into knots, because this far into the slasher that sense of hope is just an illusion.
You might be able to flag down the only car on a remote highway, but no sooner does that happen than the driver takes you right back into the fray.
It’s that glimmer, the promise of a savior getting ripped away that makes the final act so important.
“Wes?” I ask when he doesn’t reply, and the way he won’t meet anyone’s eye, I know what it means.
On our date—if we can still call it that; maybe it was an interrogation—he said he had time off from work. He said it had only happened recently, and if Casey was the fifth woman to die in such a short period of time, there’s only one reason he’d be taking a “break.”
Dani still looks like she’s waiting for the silver lining to Wes’s revelation, so I voice the conclusion I’ve already come to.
“You’re not on the case, are you?”
I watch his jaw clench, his eyes dart to mine. They look apologetic, embarrassed, and then he admits, “Not anymore.”
I glance across to Stu, Jennifer, and Dani, and watch as one by one they come to the same conclusion: nobody knows he’s here. Nobody is coming.
That glimmer? Extinguished.
That hope? Gone.
We’ve been running around this building for god knows how long and for a moment, after all the carnage, the thought there may have been something happening on the outside, that the cavalry was coming, was something we all wanted to grasp on to.
Now, though? I know if Laurie doesn’t manage to get out of those vents we’re done for.
“What the fuck, Wes?” Stu hisses, and again I concur.
“All the victims attended singles events around the city before they went missing,” Wes says.
“I figured the perp was meeting these women at these events, and when I was discussing the theory with my partner in the bullpen, this asshole that works in another unit was listening in, and he—our squads work together sometimes, and we’ve butted heads before,” he explains, and even in the darkness of the room I see color rising in his cheeks.
“But this time, he said some things—about the victims—that I felt were inappropriate given the circumstances.”
He doesn’t elaborate, and that makes me think whatever he’s about to say next is going to make him look like either the killer or an idiot. Maybe both.
“And?” I ask.
“I didn’t like what he was saying.”
My quirked eyebrow is a silent “So?” One that makes him pinch the bridge of his nose and say, “So, I punched him in the face.”
Idiot it is.
“I was taken off the case and put on suspension, but when Casey’s body was found, I knew the killer would be searching for a new girl already, and I couldn’t just do nothing whi—”
“So you set up a fucking sting,” Stu says, interrupting. “Let it fall to shit, and then sat back as a bunch of people die?”
It sucks that he’s saying things that sit and burn on the tip of my tongue.
“It was never a goddamn sting,” Wes snaps reactively before taking a breath.
I can tell he’s doing that three-count thing in his head to calm down.
I thought the counting thing was cute, but now it might just be a sign he can’t control his impulsivity.
The kind of impulsivity that has led to him being put on leave, going undercover, trying to go head-to-head with a cold-blooded killer…
“It wasn’t a sting,” he stresses. “This was one of countless events on tonight. I didn’t even know the killer would be here.
I thought if I could go to the kind of event he would go to, I could understand how he’s been able to do what he’s done.
I was talking to the guys at cocktail hour to see if there was anything that could inform the perp profile.
I was going to talk to the host after the dates, too.
I just—I just wanted to get in his head.
Figure out his MO. And now I just want to get us all out. Alive.”
“Did you know this could happen?” I grit out.
The string that was woven into place inside my chest when we first met feels like it’s being sawn through with a blunt knife, but I push away the hurt and ask what everyone has avoided saying outright. “Did you know we were all in danger?”
I need to know for sure. Wes has proven so far that he’s not stupid.
Hotheaded and impulsive, yes, but he’s shown how capable he is with the bare minimum.
If he started the night with suspicions that this could happen, that whoever is doing this is the same person responsible for the murders he’s investigating, there’s no way he’d come in unarmed.
His face turns ashen, and that’s answer enough until he adds an emphatic “No.”
He shifts toward me, and it takes everything in me not to flinch.
Still, he stops short. “Jamie… No. None of the women attended speed dates. They met at Italian cooking classes and painting nights and fucking lock-and-key events. This isn’t his MO.
He finds someone and takes them home. One person—one woman.
He doesn’t slaughter a bunch of people while wearing a mask.
He’s escalated. And the fact I’m here—the fact he’s here—any of us are… All of this is just by chance.”
Chance. A twist of fate. That kind of thing should be reserved for meeting the love of your life, not… this.
I think back to when we were down in the basement bar.
When I crawled out from under the table and saw Wes across the room he was scared, angry, but most of all he was shocked.
We all were. But now I think his shock was for a different reason.
It was because his role-play materialized and then multiplied in horrifying, unimaginable ways like some critter from an eighties creature feature.
“You have to believe that I—”
“We don’t have to believe shit,” Stu spits before Wes can start a new appeal, emphasizing his final word with a thrust of his knife into the space between us. The air is so thick with tension I’m surprised it doesn’t bleed.
“I’m pretty sure being a cop in this scenario doesn’t make you trustworthy, Wes. It doesn’t automatically make you the good guy. If anything, it puts you at the top of the fucking list of suspects.”
There’s a moment where Wes seems like he’s going to argue, where he seems like he’s going to shoot Stu down like he has before, but then I witness the moment he realizes he can’t.
Stu is right yet again. I hate to admit it, but he is.