Chapter Eight #3
“Mon amour, we all lose those we love,” I told her, giving her a quick kiss on her forehead before I moved away. I couldn’t let my love for her distract me.
I was still angry with Kane, but he could wait. For now, I wanted to enjoy some time with her. I knew with what I had planned, I wouldn’t see her for a while, if ever again.
“What are you cooking?” I asked her.
“Nothing, I forgot to get the shopping done. Pizza?”
“Oh, Cami, you are thirty years old,” I chided her, as I took my seat again, pouring another glass of wine. “You should have a family by now, a loving husband and children running around, but you insist on working over twenty hours a day and eating take out.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, pulling her phone over to her to order from the app. “But at least I’m not out there killing men.”
I glared at her briefly before we both laughed at the simplicity that was our relationship.
“At least get a veggie pizza if you are going to order out.”
“Oh, ugh,” she grunted. “It’s not pizza unless it’s dripping with oil and has pepperoni and loads of cheese.”
She laughed as I screwed up my face in disgust. How could she be my daughter?
How?
I waited for her to finish with her order and sat back in my chair, looking around the place she felt safe. I’d never felt safe, and there was a reason for that.
My life was forfeit, and it had been since the day I was born. This way, I can bring them down with me and save the innocent women they tortured daily.
Kane
I bent down over the body and looked at the simple stab wound in his side, and one wound where his heart would be. Tommy squatted beside me.
“Looks like the widow is back in town,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”
“It doesn’t look like her usual M.O.,” I replied, standing up and wishing I had been called to any crime scene other than this one. I didn’t think it was Maurelle’s work, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t. I still had a job to do.
“At least she didn’t play house with this one, just knocked him off, dead.”
It meant she was back in town, and I didn’t like that. Tommy knew I still had the case on the back burner and was investigating when we didn’t have active cases, but it annoyed me that he was burying his nose in deeper.
“She’s back,” Tommy said, coming to stand next to me. “It means we can focus on the case full time now.”
“She’s not back,” I replied quickly. “She would have stuck around. She left him out in the open this time, not at all like her M.O.”
“What are you saying?”
“She’s leaving a message,” I told him.
“What’s that?”
“Look what I can do,” I said. “She’s showing us that she can do whatever she wants and stay out there.”
“Like hell,” Tommy said. “We’ll get her. She’s getting sloppy.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him, heading toward the car.
“Sal lifted prints off him,” Tommy told me, and immediately my heart began to beat faster. Maurelle didn’t make mistakes like that. It wasn’t hers.
“Do we have an ID on him?” I asked, feeling the panic rise in my throat.
“Ah yeah,” Tommy said, looking down at his notebook. “Claude Delaponte.”
“Delaponte?” I questioned, alarm bells ringing in my ear. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
“Yeah, some real estate developer,” he replied. “He has an ex-wife and a daughter. No word on a current wife though. I guess we better alert the family.”
“I got it,” I told him, heading toward my car. “You get to the precinct and find out what Sal has.”
He nodded, thankful he didn’t have to tell a family their loved one was dead. It was the hardest part of the job, but I had no intention of telling his ex-wife, I was making a beeline straight for Camille.
That last name was too unique to be a coincidence, and for the first time in a long time, I had a bad taste in my mouth.
“Camille?”
She turned around, her smile disappearing when she saw me. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from the view of her colleagues, closing the door of a nearby office.
“How did you get in here?”
“You have a rather big conference going on today, reception is inundated with guests to deal with.”
She sighed, her hands fidgety as if she had a secret to tell.
“I have some rough news to give you, you may want to take a seat.”
“What is it?”
“We’ve discovered the body of Claude Delaponte in Fairview Cemetery this morning,” I said. “I understand he’s a relative.”
She scoffed, looking anywhere but at me. “Hardly. He was my father for a while until my mom divorced him.”
“You don’t seem sad he’s gone.”
“Why should I?”
“He wasn’t a good man, was he?” I asked her. She finally sat down at the desk, and let out the anguish she’d been holding in.
“No,” she sobbed. “He wasn’t.”
“I see,” I told her. “I’m just concerned. The death was violent, and careless. Maurelle left fingerprints at the scene. She’s never done that before.”
Camille’s eyes widened, and she looked down at the floor. Her breathing changed as she tried to stave off the panic.
“They won’t be hers, will they?” I queried, realizing the death felt off because it was. Maurelle hadn’t done it. Camille had.
“What happened?”
“You want me to confess?” she asked, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“There has to be a reason you did it,” I said, sitting down next to her. “This is not on the record.”
Her sobs were silent, but I could see her losing her shit. I wasn’t going to like what I was about to be told and I knew it, but I needed to know.
“Have you looked into him?” she asked. “His record, I mean.”
“No, I came right here.”
“He’s a registered sex offender now,” she told me. “Luckily, I didn’t have it as bad as my adoptive sister, but he tried.”
Jesus. I already knew it was going to be bad, but to hear it from her trembling lips was making me want to reach out and hold her as she sobbed.
“Why now?”
“He came back,” she replied, wiping her eyes. “He wasn’t meant to be here, not in this town, he promised us so we didn’t turn his ass in, but he came to my house last night.”
“I’m sorry, Camille, for what you went through.”
“But murder is wrong, right?” she replied quickly.
“Well, yes, it is,” I said. “But I have a feeling he got what was coming to him.”
“You aren’t really a cop, are you?” she chuckled.
“Why do you say that?”
“You want to help Maurelle and now you’re telling me he deserved it,” she replied.
She was right, I was breaking all sorts of laws and rules here.
I was a big believer in the justice system because it was there for a reason.
If I lost faith in it, I didn’t know who I was, but there had to be exceptions to the rule, right?
“I should go,” I told her, getting up. “Don’t worry, those fingerprints will somehow disappear in the lab.”
“It doesn’t matter, Detective,” she said. “I’ve never been fingerprinted before. They won’t find me, but I appreciate it.”
“Keep your mouth shut about it,” I told her. “That way it’ll go cold or we’ll add it to Maurelle’s tally.”
She smirked at me. “She won’t mind. She knew what he did to my sister.”
“But not to you?”
Shaking her head, I saw the fear in her eyes. “Please don’t tell her I did it. She’ll worry.”
“I don’t even know where she is, Camille,” I replied.
“She won’t be in town long,” she told me, confirming my fear that she was here. “I think she has something big planned, but not here, so it won’t be in your jurisdiction.”
I nodded. “I’ll keep an ear out for anything that sounds like her.”
My hand was on the handle of the door when I heard her call out my name. I turned back to her.
“She was mad when I told her that you came to speak to me,” she relayed. “She doesn’t like me to be pulled down into her world.”
“I’ll be okay,” I told her.
“No, Detective, you don’t understand. Maurelle is super protective of me.
When she is mad at someone, she hurts them.
There’s something about you that confuses her, because I can see she likes you.
She’s not killed you on purpose, and that confuses her too.
That means she feels like she can’t hurt you, so if she wanted to, she wouldn’t go after you, she’d go after someone you love. ”
“I don’t have anyone she can go after,” I told her. “It’ll be all good. I’m prepared for her to come after me.”
“Oh, Detective, we all have someone in our lives,” she said. “And she’ll find out who it is, whether they live with you, have lived with you or visit you randomly. She’ll find who the person is and she’ll use them to hurt you. She’s vindictive like that.”
My mind immediately went to Mimi. She was the only one who still spoke to me even though I didn’t want her to.
God.
“Thank you,” I said, leaving the office and heading to the precinct. I had evidence to lose and a woman to track before she got hold of Mimi.
Once I got in my car, I sat back and wondered how the hell I could get Mimi to stop visiting me. She didn’t want to give up on me, and she knew the only reason I divorced her was so she could have the life she deserved.
She was persistent too, but there was one way I could get her to stop. The one thing I’d been holding back because I didn’t want her to be upset. She had hurt me in a way she could never understand when she married Kemp. It was time I used my pain to my advantage so I could save their lives.
I pulled my phone out and pulled up Kemp’s number.
Look, I appreciate that you and Mimi want to check on me. But did it ever occur to you that it's painful to see my ex-wife married to my best friend? I don't want you to just drop around and check on me. I’m done with that part of my life. Just stop it.
I hit send, hoping like hell that it would piss him off enough that he would tell Mimi not to bother with me anymore. If this didn’t work, then I’d start ignoring them.
I had to.
It was the only way to protect them.