Chapter 11
Tristan
I’m asked to wait outside as Ashford barks orders at a tech dusting for prints near the staircase, playing the hero detective while Birdie is God knows where.
The forensics team swarms through Birdie’s house like ants over spilled sugar, their white suits ghosting through rooms that should be hers alone. Mine and hers. Not theirs. Not his.
Inside my car, I call Marcus.
“Don’t tell me you’re at her house,” he says.
“It’s real. She’s missing. Well, her car is, and she’s nowhere to be found. Ashford and his badges are tearing her place down for prints and shit.”
“Puta madre. If I ask you not to get involved, would you listen to me?”
How could I? It’s Birdie. My Birdie. My Reagan.
“Look, Ashford put a BOLO on her car, but off the books, he thinks I’m tracking the car GPS through our system to expedite things, which I already tried but found out it was disabled.
I told him there was an emergency backdoor I could use to locate the car. ”
“He bought that bullshit?”
“Yeah. What he doesn’t know is that we have a backup discrete tracker I can access.”
Marcus pauses. “Let me guess, you already found the car, didn’t you?”
“You won’t believe where. It’s at 462 Old South Road, Aquinnah.”
“Hold on a sec. Isn’t that the address for the decoy safehouse?”
“The one you told the detective she’d be at before shit hit the fan. Only the detective.”
“What the fuck? Tristan, if that motherfucker has anything to do with this—”
“I’m gonna kill him myself.”
“No. Tristan, you’re gonna get yourself out of that mess right now. Can’t you see? That place is tied to our firm,” his voice drops, “and it’s where you tried to frame him.”
Fabricating evidence that Ashford was Birdie’s stalker has been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. It’s what drove her away from me, and I’ll regret it for as long as I breathe.
“Brother, I got your back no matter what, but you gotta wake up,” Marcus says.
“What if this whole charade is payback? He disables the GPS, leaves the car at the safehouse, the police find it there after the BOLO, and you end up a fucking suspect like he threatened this morning.” He pauses again.
“Fuck, what if Birdie and Ashford are in this together?”
“What? No. She would never do that to me.”
“Are you shitting me? She broke up with you because of him, because of what you tried to do to him.”
I shake my head vigorously. “Because what I did was fucked up, but she didn’t tell him any of it.”
“How can you be so fucking sure?”
Because she loved me like I loved her. Because she protected me like I protected her.
Because we shared darkness and secrets that would bind us to the grave.
“She never said anything during the investigation. And if she told him the truth in private, he wouldn’t be using that safehouse to frame me.
That location implicates him more than anyone.
He’s the only one who knew about that place.
Birdie knew it, and she was in the loop about the backup tracker.
She’d know that disabling the GPS alone wasn’t enough. This is Ashford’s doing.”
“Jesus, Tristan. He must have found out what you were trying to do to him, and now he’s looking for revenge.”
“He took her but staged the whole thing to pin her disappearance on me. He’s trying to take me out of the picture so she’d be all his.
” I curse at the steering wheel. “Blake Abel said something I’ll never forget before he died.
He said he started the Butterfly Man game, but he didn’t finish it.
Someone else put that note on her pillow. ”
“Tristan, if this is true, that means you were right all along. Detective Douche is the real Butterfly Man.”