Chapter 43
forty-three
. . .
SUTTON
Holy shit. “Those were you?”
“Well yes and no. I knew I needed to slowly dismantle your life. To convince Lane and that entire town you weren’t as perfect as everyone seemed to think you were.
So I kept an eye on things. I had an inside man who fed me information about crimes being committed, and I waited for the perfect one to frame you with.
When the Lennars made that report about the break-in and theft, I saw that as my opportunity.
It didn’t hurt that you’d been there the week before, treating their daughter for, what was it? Oh yes, a dizzy spell.”
“Johns has been helping you.”
That actually made perfect sense. There was no way Addie could’ve known to target those specific houses without access to my call sheet from work.
As far as I remembered, police presence hadn’t been required on any of those incidents, but as the undersheriff, no one would bat an eye at him asking for those records.
He’d also be the perfect person to steer the investigation away from him and Addie and toward me.
Addie turned and flashed me a grin over her shoulder, but it was all teeth. “He really wants Lane’s job.”
“So he was the one committing the break-ins.”
“No, actually. We agreed that keeping our hands clean was the best course of action, but we found someone more than willing to help. To get revenge on you.”
My head was spinning. The layers to this, the lengths she’d gone to over a man. He was, admittedly, the best man I’d ever known, but to ruin someone’s life simply to get her hands on him? When she had no guarantee he’d even want her when the dust settled?
She wasn’t just crazy. She was certifiable, padded room and straight jacket levels of insane.
“Who?” I whispered.
“You remember Ryan Boyd, right?” I sucked in a gasp at the name of my rapist. “Turns out, he’s got a little brother.
And what do you know, Nick happens to be dating Sadie Lennar, which gave him more than enough excuses to be seen out and about Dusk Valley.
The kid’s got an impressive rap sheet for someone who is barely old enough to drink, and it was all too easy to convince him I could make his recent charges go away if he trashed some houses for us.
Especially when he learned you, the woman who destroyed his family, would take the fall for it all. ”
“So he was the one who broke into my house?”
My skin broke out in goosebumps, and my stomach roiled at the thought that I’d been trapped in my home alone with the little brother of the man responsible for ruining my life. That I so easily could’ve suffered a similar fate as I had the night Ryan had raped me.
“Oh, no,” Addie said, laughing lightly. “That one was personal, Sutton. That one, I handled myself.”
Weirdly enough, that made me feel a little better, even knowing this woman wouldn’t hesitate to kill me. Hell, she’d relish it. After all, she was about to do just that.
“He was, however, following you around town. I can’t believe you never caught him watching you when you’d go out on calls.”
Though I knew it kept spinning normally, the entire world seemed to shift beneath me.
While I thought a lot of the weird, freaking incidents that had happened since October could be explained by Addie—and it seemed as though I was right—I never anticipated everything, from the very beginning, could be tied to her.
My mind went back to the night of the break-in, to those tense moments before crawling out the window when the glass on my front door had broken. To footsteps creaked on my old hardwood floors.
The haunting call of my name—in a woman’s voice.
Addie had been in my home.
Addie was the cause of all that destruction, the violation of my personal space, my sanctuary.
But it went so much further and deeper than that.
Pieces rapidly began clicking into place, like the end of a digital solitaire game when you can auto complete to win. Moments from the past five months flashed through my mind, every bad, weird, creepy thing that had happened shifting further into focus, taking on a new meaning.
“I’d hoped that I could take you out that night and wipe my hands of the whole thing. Blame it on the break-in and have Johns drag his feet on the investigation, so the department never caught who was responsible. But you’re sneakier than I gave you credit for.”
I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t about sneakiness. I was a single woman living alone. I had plans in place, ways to protect myself if I ever found myself in such a situation, and it saved my life that night.
“You hate me that much?” I asked, quieter than I intended.
After all the shit she’d put me and Lane through recently, I hated Addie, without a doubt.
But I had a good reason for it. On the other hand, she had no legitimate reason for her seemingly deep-seated hatred of me.
It all boiled down to one thing: Lane. She hated me because I had something she thought she was entitled to.
Instead of acting like a normal person, accepting a relationship beyond professional would never be in the cards for them and moving on, she’d taken it personally.
She’d taken it out on me.
And now, I was being driven to my death because she thought I was standing in her way.
“Yes,” she said through clenched teeth. “I was willing to do whatever I could to get you away from him. I thought you were smarter than that, Sutton. I figured you’d realized the reason all of these bad things kept happening was because you were with him.”
“How do you explain the break-in then?”
“I wanted you to leave. I figured you’d go stay with your brother. The last thing I expected was for you to run right to Lane when, for as long as I’ve known him, you’ve always been persona non grata.”
To be fair, she wasn’t entirely off the mark.
Lane and I both had made it our mission over the years to avoid each other at all costs.
When we couldn’t, the animosity between us was high.
But I knew we’d always loved each other and had been lashing out only because we thought our feelings were unreciprocated.
All at once, a deep, overwhelming wave of sadness and pity consumed me.
I was headed for my death, and I felt bad for this woman.
“Lane was supposed to be my second chance, you know? He’s so much like my late husband, but…I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but he’s just better. And we work together seamlessly. We’re the perfect match.”
“If you were the perfect match, don’t you think he would’ve come to that same conclusion at least once over the last ten years? You shouldn’t have to force things, Addie.”
As if she didn’t want to confront that, couldn’t admit I was right and still live within the delusion she’d constructed around herself, she forged ahead.
“Showing up at that tailgate party wasn’t by accident either, you know. Thanks to my clone of Lane’s phone, I had access to all of his Find My Friends data. I noticed Birdie was in Boise and staged a run-in.”
“Why?”
“Because I guessed you’d be there, and I wanted to tell you to stay away from Lane in person.
I warned you, Sutton,” she said, her brown eyes colliding with mine in the rearview.
“I told you that you wouldn’t like what happened if you didn’t stay away from him.
You really fucked around and found out, didn’t you? ”
I wanted to laugh. Understatement of the century.
“I needed to give you enough rope to hang yourself with, so after showing up at the game, I made myself scarce.”
“Oh, you didn’t make yourself scarce because Lane told you to stay away from him and his family?”
She ignored me and forged ahead.
“Plus, I needed time to make sure everything was perfect. And to fabricate all of those text messages.”
“What exactly is Johns’ role in all of this?
” I asked, trying to tamp down on the despair clawing at my throat.
I was going to die, and I would do so without having any idea what the last thing I’d said to Lane was.
Did he know how much I loved him? How much he helped me heal?
How badly I wanted the future he’d dreamed about for us?
And now, we’d never have it.
“Simple: he wants Lane’s job.”
“Yeah, you said that. But what does he think is going to happen exactly? The sheriff is an elected position. And Lane isn’t going anywhere.”
“Lane will be joining the Bureau,” she said matter-of-factly, as though it was a foregone conclusion instead of a career move I knew Lane didn’t want.
This was the problem with people like Addie, people with an over-inflated sense of self-importance. I’d known Lane a long time, a hell of a lot longer than she had, and I knew there was no place he wanted to be more than Dusk Valley. No offer could ever be enticing enough to convince him to leave.
Addie had hinged her entire livelihood on the fact that Lane would ultimately fall for her and want to move to the FBI for her.
But I knew better.
When I was gone, Lane would dedicate his life to finding out what happened to me, and once that goal was achieved, he would never move on.
That wasn’t wishful thinking on my part, either.
We’d already lost each other once. If the roles were reversed, I wouldn’t survive without him, and I knew he felt the same.
“Plus, look at all the wonderful things Johns has done for Dusk Valley!” Addie crowed. “He was integral in getting a highly dangerous woman off the streets and putting her behind bars. After all, you’ve been terrorizing the town with all those break-ins, and you assaulted a decorated FBI agent.”
Another piece of the puzzle slotted into place. “The ‘anonymous’ tip about the break-ins,” I whispered, though the car was quiet enough that I knew she heard me. “That was you guys.”
Addie nodded, her brown hair swishing around her shoulders. “I made the call from a payphone in Boise. We needed to have an official record, you know? Couldn’t just have Johns walking around making that claim without evidence to back it.
“The lingerie was me too, in case you were wondering.”
I hadn’t been because I’d figured that out already. But there was one other thing she hadn’t touched on that I needed to bring up, if only to confirm how deep her psychosis truly ran.
“And you sent me and Lane those packages of articles about Ryan.”
“Sure did,” she said happily. “I told you, Sutton, I’m very good at my job. When I learned what had happened to you, I started digging. I wanted to see if your alleged abuser was still around, wanted to see if I could use him against you. That’s how I found his brother.”
“Then you also know Lane killed him.”
“Well, I didn’t for sure…until just now. But that’s okay. He was young and made a mistake. It doesn’t make me love him any less.”
“He killed him because he raped me, Addie. Because he loved me, and Ryan hurt me.”
“Allegedly.”
There was that fucking word again. God, I wanted to scream.
I’d never encountered anyone so callous with other people’s feelings.
The comment was made worse by the fact that, first, she was a woman and there was supposed to be an unwritten code where we stuck together.
Second, she’d no doubt had sexual assault cases come across her desk in her career.
To so harshly disregard my own experience because of her bias against me made me want to strangle her with my bare hands.
Wait.
That was it. That was how I got out of this.
I had no idea exactly what Addie’s plan for me was, but it didn’t matter. I had to act before she did.
I wasn’t buckled, and my hands were cuffed in front of me. Though I’d have limited use of my hands and arms, I could use my entire body.
What I was about to do was insane, but it was the only way I could think of to escape this mess.
Would I survive? Probably not.
But hopefully Addie wouldn’t either.
I love you, Lane. I’m so sorry.
I silently sent the thought out into the universe, hoping he felt it, that he’d understand. That he’d figure this all out and know I did it for him.
And then I moved.