Chapter Fifteen #5
The ride in the elevator was silent, and that was because he wasn’t sure how to do this. How exactly did you tell your person that you had their father’s skull on a tray, the father you buried years ago? Or that he’d been defiled by a psycho?
Oh, this was going to be a wild one.
He.
Could.
Tell.
At her door, he saw that the caution tape was gone, and his wife likely was in there thinking about Vivian, too. She’d died in there, and none of them could help her.
It was one more punch his wife had to take now as she used her office.
This dude was a douchebag for defiling their work spaced too.
For.
Sure.
To get this over with, Chris knocked and held his breath. Honestly, he hoped she wasn’t sleeping. The last thing he wanted to do was interrupt her few precious moments of downtime.
Then, he heard her.
Oh, and she was right to the point.
And pissed.
“I don’t want to be bothered,” she stated. “I think I made that perfectly clear.”
Well, it was showtime.
Chris spoke up.
“Sweetness, it’s me with evidence. I’m sorry to bother…,” he began, and then heard the door unlock.
Well, clearly, he wasn’t on her shitlist at the moment, and that was a good thing for both of them. His wife was going to need someone to help her hold this together.
“Sorry,” she said. “I thought it was either Ivan, or Ethan, coming to talk ‘rationally’ with me,” she said, making the air quotes around that one particular word. “Come in. You’re not interrupting anything.”
Well, he did.
A part of him wished that she sent him away.
Well, that boat had sailed. It appeared he was about to do maximum damage to his wife.
Going in, he closed the door behind him. As he did, Elizabeth headed back to her desk and dropped her boots onto the edge as she stared out at the sky.
The moon was bright, and the stars were flickering.
“Did you get any sleep?” he asked, taking a seat with the skull on the tray.
She laughed.
And laughed.
And laughed.
Oh, she wished but that wasn’t happening.
“No. My brain is going a million miles a minute. I don’t think an elephant sedative will slow it down. Is the job done?” she asked, knowing he’d know what she meant.
He nodded.
“No autopsy, as per Native religion, and I stitched her back up. She’s still a mess, but she’s not as bad as she was. He did a number on her. We’ll pay the best person to clean her up so she looks presentable for her funeral.”
She didn’t look over.
“Yeah, well, fuck him and the horse he rode into town on,” she stated. “God knows he fucks everything else.”
Oh, boy.
Elizabeth was three days past angry. He could feel that rage surrounding her like a very bitter aura.
The only way to save her from this was to help her navigate all of the clues, and now, he had to hope by bringing her Charlie’s skull, it would help.
Not hurt.
Chris knew it was time.
“Like I said, Bethe, we have ID on the skulls. It just came in,” he offered.
She didn’t say anything at first.
Then, she did.
“It’s my parents. He dug up Charlie and Catherine to try and devastate me.”
Holy shit!
Chris actually blinked when she said the words. Oh, none of them saw that coming. Here, they were debating on telling her, when she already knew.
But how did she know?
What?
Was?
This?
“You knew?” he asked. “You aren’t the least bit surprised by this because I have to say that the rest of us were blindsided by this?”
She shrugged and said one thing.
“Monsters think alike,” she stated, leaving that hang there because she’d meant herself, too.
Yeah, he didn’t like that.
Not.
At.
All.
She wasn’t a monster. If anything, Elizabeth was the person who kept the monsters at bay, but he understood that when you played with monsters, you sometimes felt like one.
God knew he felt icky a lot of the times when he was working on autopsies.
Just seeing what monsters did…
It tainted you.
Now, he had to know.
“When did you figure it out?” Chris inquired, not sure why she made them do the legwork when she could have pointed them at the end goal quicker.
Maybe she wanted to be sure.
Maybe she was hoping she was wrong.
Elizabeth kept looking out at the stars, and finally, she spoke.
“When I called Tony from the scene, and he told me the ages of the victims. Then, when I saw the report of the mass trauma on her left side, I knew who it would be. Since I was with my mother when she died, I saw the drunk driver cross the lane and hit the driver’s side door.”
Chris put the skull down.
“I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t done.
“When we were discussing the sacrament, and I saw a male victim…I knew. From the hymnals tied to fathers to the bones left on the minister’s altar, I knew he was telling me I put them on a pedestal.”
Chris stood there helplessly as the woman he loved had to live through that trauma.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, Christopher. It’s VERY difficult for a killer to get something past me. I’ve seen it all, and when those bones showed up there, I knew what he wanted me to feel.”
His heart hurt for her. He couldn’t imagine the gut punch it would be to come face-to-face with his deceased father’s bones, and he didn’t even ever remember meeting him.
Elizabeth loved Charlie as much as a person could, and she idolized him. To have someone pull him from the ground and defile him…
God.
He was so afraid that she might not survive this.
Turning her head, she stared at him.
“That’s why I wanted to return the favor.
I loved my mother, but I was so young. The attachment to her was never the same as it was to Charlie and Sam.
He believes that digging them up will kill a piece of me, but that piece died a long time ago, Christopher.
I said my goodbyes, and over the last sixteen years, I’ve had time to mourn losing Charlie. ”
Chris let her talk as she stood and moved toward the tray on the desk.
When she pulled off the cloth covering his skull, she picked it up with her hands and held it reverently in her palms.
In that moment, he saw exactly how strong she was.
She stared into the two open cavities that had once held his eyes.
The eyes that matched her own.
“That’s why he picked two hookers with icy blue eyes. He told me when he put them in the skulls who they were. He wanted to break me, but also test me to see if I was smart enough to adjust mid-shock.”
Chris knew she was.
No one pivoted as quickly as she did.
No.
One.
Elizabeth kissed the skull on the forehead, and in that moment, she knew she had him. She had Devon dead to rights because he wasn’t smarter than her.
He only had a head start.
Where she’d doubted if she could pull this off, she knew she absolutely could stay in step with the most twisted, sick, and perverse the world had to offer.
“He miscalculated twice. First, I don’t feel the same about seeing my parents’ bones that he will.
That wound is fresh for him, but it’s healed for me.
While doing his research on me and my daddy, he misjudged my reaction.
He believed it would make me crumble, but Charlie…
he’s not this,” she said, holding his head.
“He’s the memories or the little girl that carries his name.
Charlie is alive in me, and in my children.
I see him each day when one of them does something so ridiculous it makes me laugh. ”
Chris listened.
He was watching Elizabeth readjust to get her feet back underneath her. His attempt to destroy her only gave her more strength back.
He’d made a huge mistake.