Chapter 22
They'd called ahead to Jade Garden from the car.
Marcus had the phone out before they’d cleared the parking garage and ordered without asking her because he already knew her order.
They swung through on the way to her apartment.
The bag sat warm on her lap. The smell of beef broccoli and sesame chicken filled the car.
For approximately ten minutes on the way home, she was just a person going home after a long day with takeout and someone she wanted to be with.
The world felt completely normal. She was in a budding relationship with a man she truly desired, understood, and cared about.
The possibilities of their relationship was thrilling and only tamped down by the pressure of the work they were doing.
Most relationships couldn’t withstand the type of pressure they worked in.
Most would fracture, and the stress of the life and death decisions they made would force people apart.
But it wasn’t that way with them. The times that were normal were brilliant, colorful, and freeing.
They both needed those moments of respite.
She was good at finding ten minutes of normal when she could get them, and she was learning that so was Marcus.
They parked and headed into her building. Marcus grabbed an eggroll from the bag at the bottom of the stairs. He shared it with her on the way up. She protected the bag from him when he moved to grab another one and dashed up the stairs, calling over her shoulder, “Wait until we get inside.”
She saw it when she reached the top of the stairs. Her smile fell from her face instantly. Marcus was one step behind her, and when she stopped, he stopped with her.
The ten minutes of normalcy ended the way good things ended, which was without warning and all at once.
There was a package at her door. It was small and brown with her name in block letters on the label. It also listed her address.
There was no return address and no postmarks.
She stood very still.
The food bag was still in her hands. She was aware of that. The ordinary weight of takeout. Dinner. A normal thing. The kind of thing normal people carried upstairs to normal apartments on normal evenings. Suddenly, tonight wasn’t normal anymore.
“Haven.” Marcus's voice was low and close.
“Yeah … I see it,” she said.
She handed him the food bag, which he took without a word.
“I’m getting some gloves,” she said as she stepped over the box.
She opened the door using the key to turn the knob so she didn’t smudge any prints and stepped over the box into the apartment to reach into a drawer in the kitchen that was close to the door.
She pulled a set of blue latex gloves from a box and got another for Marcus.
She kept them there because cops kept gloves everywhere because you never knew when or where you’d need them.
She handed him his gloves and crouched in the doorway.
She examined the package without touching it.
Marcus had his phone out and was taking pictures of it.
As she looked at it, a thought stabbed through her.
He knows where I live.
No, nope. Not going there. She refused to do that. She refused to get ahead of herself. This was going to happen by the numbers. Her attacker wasn’t going to cause her to make a mistake.
“Did you get everything you need?” She looked up from the box to Marcus.
“Yeah, enough pictures. I don’t see any stains.”
She nodded. “I don’t think it’s an explosive. Too small, no visible triggers, and it’s flat to the ground.”
“I concur. Just … be careful.” She looked up at him. “I’m not losing you. I just found you.” She nodded and used two fingers to pick it up.
* * *
Once they were both inside and the door was shut, she put the box down on her table. Marcus took photos as she carefully opened the box. Inside was a smaller box. A white velvet box with a single, long, gold hinge at the back. The kind that held jewelry.
She looked at Marcus. He nodded, and she carefully pushed the top up.
She swallowed hard.
Inside, on a bed of white cotton, were two acrylic nails.
They were short and rounded. The polish was a deep coral.
A vivid, happy color. The human tissue attached to the nails had discolored the cotton.
She put the box down and stared at the nails.
Someone had chosen that specific color. Someone she didn't know.
Someone who was out there right now, wherever he'd left her, waiting to be found.
Her stomach dropped, and a chill ran down her spine.
She glanced up at Marcus. His eyes were dark and turbulent with emotion.
She wanted to hand everything over to him.
To have him take over, to step back and not have to deal with any of this, but that wasn’t how this was going to play out.
Instead, she stared at the coral fingernails.
“There’s something else in the box.”
She glanced back at the cardboard box. Lying underneath where the box had been was a folded piece of paper. Plain white paper.
Haven studied it. “There doesn’t look like any residue. There are sealable plastic bags in the kitchen. Second drawer down on the left.”
“Good call,” Marcus said and retrieved a bag. She carefully lifted the paper and unfolded it. She noticed the same block letter, but she didn’t read it. Instead, she slipped it into the plastic bag, and Marcus sealed it. He turned it over, holding it by the edges so they both could read it.
I am not random. Did you think I wouldn't see through that media stunt?
These are for you. They are from one of my subjects.
It won't take long for you to find her. She fought, but not as well as you.
I had to reevaluate after you. Adaptation was required.
I will see you again, and I will be prepared.
She read it once as her body seemed to squeeze the breath out of her and then fill that empty space with ice. She read it again. The same coldness that leached into her after the assault on the trail was back. She clamped her teeth together to keep from shivering.
The kitchen was absolutely quiet, but her mind was screaming thoughts at her.
There was a woman out there right now. Somewhere.
Already gone. Already positioned. Already waiting in whatever transitional edge land he'd selected and prepared in advance.
Three nails were missing from her hands because he'd kept his marker and sent her these.
But the other woman, the one they found in Nashville, was a message and not a subject.
She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m still one of his subjects. I’ve been unfinished business since that morning on the trail. I will be until one of us finishes it.”
She fought, but not as well as you.
The cold moved through her. Not fear. She knew the difference between fear and this.
This was older than fear. This was the knowledge that someone had studied you.
He had stood on her street and looked up at her windows and put a box with her name on it where she would find it, and then gone back to his life.
Her hands weren’t steady. She wasn’t okay. Not right now. “There's a woman out there,” she said. Her voice came out as close to level as she could make it. “He killed her to send me a message.”
Marcus didn't answer. She looked up at him.
His expression was one she hadn’t seen before.
Not the controlled professional neutral one he wore when working at the task force.
Nor was it the focused intensity of a man working a problem.
His expression held something different.
An emotion that had come up through the depths of him and was sitting in his jaw and his eyes.
What she saw was fury. Unadulterated fury.
“Marcus,” she said.
“Give me a second,” he said.
He looked at the note. At the velvet box. At the two coral nails on their square of cotton. He looked at them the way she'd seen him look at crime scene photographs, and then he looked at her. But what was in his expression when he looked at her was not professional, not at all.
“He's been on your street,” Marcus said. His voice was deeper than usual. “He knows this building. He knows where you live.”
She nodded. Admitting it out loud was too much for her right now, but yeah, a serial killer knew where she lived.
“He put this here today, which means he had these nails already. Which means he planned this message. Was it before he killed her?”
She shook her head. “He’s too meticulous not to have planned everything. He selected her, confirmed the marker, killed her, took the nails, packaged them, addressed them to me, and delivered them here.” Her voice was even, but only just.
Marcus shook his head. “No. He didn’t kill this woman just to send you her nails. He took his marker. She was a planned kill. This note, breaking his protocol and reaching out, is a deviation. All of this is a deviation from his usual MO.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
“Haven.” He said her name the way he said it when he kissed her. She glanced up at him, tearing her eyes away from the coral nails that kept pulling her attention toward them. “You cannot stay here.”
She rubbed her arms and nodded. “I know that, too.”
As he looked at her, something shifted in his expression, as if he'd been prepared for an argument. She could see it, the dissent he’d been ready for, and it didn't have anywhere to go now because she was agreeing with him.
“But where to go?” he said, more to himself than to her.
She looked at him. That was a no-brainer. “Wherever you go.” He took a deep breath, pulled her into his arms, and held her. She knew he could feel the shivers, the emotion her body was trying to process, and the ones she wouldn’t let out. The ones she couldn’t let overtake her. Not yet.
* * *